BUCK: We have with us now Senator Tuberville. Senator, thanks so much. We appreciate you joining us here on the show.

SEN. TUBERVILLE: Call me Coach. Thank you very much.

BUCK: Coach, whatever you say, sir. Whatever you say. Tell me this. The latest here on this one — and I’ve been told War Eagle is the preferred chant. Tell me. The latest on this one is that Democrat Senator Joe Manchin is objecting to Nancy Pelosi adding back into this bill — the Biden agenda bill, whatever people want to call it — paid family and medical leave. That’s now been put back in by Pelosi; Manchin’s saying “no.” What do you think your colleague on the Democrat side, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, is really holding out for here? What’s he going to do, and how is the election result Tuesday playing into all this?

SEN. TUBERVILLE: Well, that’s exactly right, and you brought up, number one, election results. It looked like they would learn from that. And then of course Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, they’ve been telling ’em all along what they will go with and what they won’t go with, and now Nancy Pelosi’s on the other side going, “Heck, we’re not gonna listen to all this!

“We’re not gonna listen to the American people. We’re gonna do what we want to do,” and so now they’re putting things back into this plan like the child tax credit. They’re basically weaponizing it, putting things in there that are gonna be hard for anybody to vote for. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to attack the American family. They’re just trying to take it away from us.

They don’t want married couples. They want single individuals. And as we speak already, half the kids in the country right now have one or no parent, and they want to continue that. They feel like that they can be the parents to all these people across the country as the federal government, and we don’t need that. Big Government needs to get the heck out of the way and let the American people live their own life, and it’s just absolutely amazing that Democrats feel like they’re the best option for ’em, and they’re definitely not.

CLAY: Senator, Buck got to go to his first college football game ever. He went to Ole Miss-Alabama. I know you have a little bit of experience in both those places — and we’ll talk about that in a moment, ’cause I want to get your read on what you think his experience was like. But when is this all gonna resolve itself? You came on with us a couple of months ago and you said, “Hey, I think Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema, they’re trying to be somewhat voices of sanity in an insane party at times right now.”

Is this something that resolves, in your mind, by Thanksgiving? Is it Christmas? Does it go into the new year? What does this budget bill that Biden’s trying to pass through actually have some sort of conclusion to this story, in your mind? How much longer will this go on?

SEN. TUBERVILLE: Well, they keep pushing the timetable back.

CLAY: Yeah.

SEN. TUBERVILLE: They can’t get anybody to agree. The problem they’re having is they’ve got three different factions in their party. These questions got the liberals, and they got a few moderates like Joe and Kyrsten — and then, of course, they got the very far left. They call themselves progressives. I call ’em Marxists, to be honest with you. That’s what they are, and they can’t agree on anything.

But they’re hypocrites. But we’ll work on it the next two weeks before we get back. Probably before Thanksgiving there might be some resolution. It would be on our side. We already know how we’re gonna vote but they’ll keep pushing it and try to tear down the country a little bit more, spend more money and put us more in debt. But we’re gonna fight it every day.

BUCK: We’re talking to Senator Tommy Tuberville from Alabama. Senator I had posed this earlier in the show to Jim Jordan on the House side. I’m just wondering what your take is. It seems like the Democrats are riding all their hopes on getting this bill through, right? So you’re sitting in the Senate; you’re having to deal with this and look at the different iterations of it.

Now Pelosi’s adding things in; Manchin’s saying it has to come out. But the whole Build Back Better Biden agenda is apparently hanging in the balance here. What is it that they think this is gotta go going to do? I think the Democrats, we would be making a mistake if we didn’t at least see that they have some kind of a strategy here to try to help them out in the midterms.

What is the top of their agenda item list that they think is actually going to help them win elections, the next election, that’s in this bill? Is it the paid family and medical leave? What are the goodies? What are the sweets that they are distributing, so to speak?

SEN. TUBERVILLE: Well, number one, they’re power hungry. And this is a wish list that we’ve been putting together for years and years and years. They’re just trying to get dependence on the government from more and more people. That’s the only way they can keep power. So they know they’re gonna get their tail handed to ’em next November, in one year, because of all the things that they’ve done.

They haven’t made a decision. From the Biden administration all the way through the House — the Democratic House, Democrat Senate — they haven’t made a decision for the American people in, what, 10 months. It’s been absolutely amazing. One after another, they’ve been trying to tear the country down. You know, they’re woke, they believe in warfare, they don’t believe in working for anything.

They just want power. It absolutely amazes me that we’ve only got two democracies that are fighting against this, Sinema and Manchin. There should be 10 or 15 more that should be fighting against this in the Senate. I understand you want to do some things, because they believe in causes. You know, we let people on the Republican side, be leaders.

They elect people because of causes, and they had that cause in mind, they’re gonna keep pushing that and so this country is in trouble because of the critical race theory. Our education is really bad and that’s one of the reasons I ran, and I think it all woke up because of this new goveror in Virginia. Youngkin brought it up luckily in the last three weeks and he won because of education because parents don’t care about Republicans, Democrats.

They care about educating their kids — and I’ve told you all this before, I went in hundreds of schools over the last few years. I’ve obviously been coaching, and it is our education system. We’re 37th in the world in math. Now, c’mon. It’s ridiculous. So we’ve gotta make some changes. We don’t… We’re going the wrong direction.

CLAY: Senator, a 490-page OSHA rule requiring many of the people listening to us right now or their employer to mandate the covid vaccine. How important is it for lawsuits to be filed, for people to stand up against what I believe is a collosal government overreach as to pertains to mandating the vaccine for tens of millions of people all over the country? Not giving them the choice but mandating it from the federal government?

SEN. TUBERVILLE: Yeah. Again, it’s a huge overreach by the federal government. We don’t need mandates. Our supply chains are just absolutely horrific. We can’t get truck drivers, and they don’t care. I mean, they just absolutely want to keep pushing the narrative. “We know better than anybody else. We’re gonna mandate.” And I just was in a hearing with Dr. Fauci and Walensky, the CDC director.

My question was number one, I said, “Listen. I just came from a business where you had to win or you got fired, and as of last week John Hopkins University said we lost, this year, 353,000 people to the pandemic. They had died. Well, at this point we’ve already hit that this year.”

So we’ve had a year with the other administration, Trump administration, and now we’re only 10 months into this administration and they’re getting ready to well surpass the death rate — and we’ve got two vaccines, we’ve got therapeutics, we’ve known what’s going on. Everybody’s wearing a mask. It’s out of control. We can’t get any straight answers.

Everybody wants to give you the run around. We really need a change in our team in terms of running this pandemic because we’re not making any progress at all. But what do they want to do? They want to make mandates. They want to control every move and we make, and it’s not because of mandate. It’s because Big Brother government wants to control you.

BUCK: Senator Tuberville, for a lot of people what they saw happen earlier this week was a bit of hope, at least in the political sense, that next year could be a whole lot better. It feels for a lot of, folks, like the bleeding was stopped, so to speak — or at least lessened — when it comes to our freedoms being under assault, when it comes to what felt like a year of just constant Democrat-enabled government overreach and authoritarianism.

Going into this now midterm election year, I’m just wondering, one: Hhow do you think…? Obviously, your biggest concern is your home state, Alabama. How do you think the Senate map looks for the GOP for this year based on what we’ve just seen, and also what do you think the national narrative should be about how we take back — as the GOP, take back power?

SEN. TUBERVILLE: Well, Tuesday was a referendum on the country, not just Virginia or New Jersey. It was a referendum on the entire country of not Democrat-Republicans but, “Quit screwing around with our country, you’re messing it up.” And as I said earlier, the Biden administration has done exactly opposite really what the American people need.

They don’t need more taxes. We need closed borders, we need a strong military, we need crime out of the streets. But the thing we’ve gotta remember out of this is we’ve got another year to go. You would think this week and after the election up here in the House and the Senate, the speaker and the leader, Schumer, would be pulling back a little bit.

Saying, “You know, let’s take what we can get. Let’s start communicating a little bit better, because the American people have spoken.” It’s just the opposite. They’re running as fast as they can to get their agenda through, but we’re gonna have to work hard to block it. We’ve gotta depend on… Thank God for Manchin and Sinema, because this stuff would have already been run through and it would be a disaster.

But we’ve got hope. Tuesday night gave us hope, gave us hope that the American people woke up. This is… The Republicans, we want education. I think that’s gonna be the hot button going into the next six-seven months. But there’s a lot of things that we can talk about to make better, and we’ve gotta do better as the Republican Party ourselves.

CLAY: Senator Tuberville, you just mentioned that you were in a hearing with Dr. Fauci, and I know Rand Paul demanded that he resign in that hearing. In your mind, should Dr. Fauci resign from his position?

SEN. TUBERVILLE: Well, as I just said, we’ve already hit the mark of deaths of how many people we had in 12 months under Trump. We’ve already had that in 10 months. I tell Dr. Fauci that if we don’t start making some improvements and get some straight answers… Everybody says, “Well, everybody take the vaccine.”

The vaccine is working a little bit. It’s not working a whole lot. I took the vaccine. I believe in doing as much as you can to stop it. But there’s a lot of people I know that have had the vaccine that’s gotten sick, gotten very sick, and some people have died. So we gotta… I think we’re gonna have to have another team put together. It’s not gonna happen.

But I wish we could get another team of different doctors, different scientists to make different moves because it’s like the first half we play here, Clay, and what’s happened? We’re behind, we’re losing, and it’s getting worse. And we gotta make sure… We gotta block the blitz. We go do better running the football. We gotta throw the ball down the field, and that’s what these people have to do! Make some decisions and make ’em work but just mandating the people take this vaccine is not what the American people want and need.

BUCK: Senator Tuberville of Alabama. Sir, thanks for being with us. We’re calling a blitz for freedom here.

SEN. TUBERVILLE: You got it. Thank you.

BUCK: See, Clay?

CLAY: What a sports reference from you there.

BUCK: I do the sports stuff.