CLAY: Buck, do you find all this debt ceiling talk to be as boring and uninteresting as me? The country is not going to default, right? Eventually, the debt ceiling is going to get raised.

BUCK: It’s brinkmanship.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s a game of chicken and it’s just about trying to get some kind of a change to what the spending will be. It won’t be a massive change. It be pretty minor at best, and the problem is this tends… Historically Democrats have tended to gain, at least based on the polling, from the debt ceiling fight.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Because while I think Republicans have a very sound case, the case the Democrats make is, “You’re destroying everything,” and that’s easy, right? (laughing) That’s a pretty straightforward thing to do.

CLAY: I think most people are like you and me, and they tune it out ’cause they know it’s going to get worked out. So getting involved in the nitty-gritty of what exactly can end up happening there doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it is an intriguing story to follow only in the context of what’s gonna happen with Joe Manchin?

What’s gonna happen with Kyrsten Sinema (I think I got it right that time), and what is the overall trajectory of the Democrats’ big spending plan, and how does that interplay with infrastructure while simultaneously the debt ceiling is going on? The new deadline, I believe, Buck, is Halloween, basically.