CLAY: I got asked this question yesterday when I was hanging out at the pool, Buck, and I thought it was a good one. I don’t know the answer, and I’m curious what you think. Are we safe from Joe Biden being able to pass any more awful bills before the end of the year? I know we’ve talked about the Republicans running out the clock, and we need to get maybe some senators on to talk about this. When is the drop-dead date, so to speak, when Congress will be out of session and we no longer have to worry about them making disastrous decisions that make, for instance, inflation worse?
I.e., are they going to pass any new bills that could increase taxes, that could lead to more money coming into the government’s coffers? And I didn’t know the answer. Do you have a good sense on that? My sense was if we can get to Labor Day — because, come Labor Day, everybody is gonna go back to campaign for the midterms. That really is kind of the start of campaign season aggressively. But I didn’t know when the drop-dead date of, “Hey, we’re safe,” actually is. ‘Cause if Republicans win the House and/or win the Senate, which we feel pretty good about, nothing would really get passed for two years after.
BUCK: This is actually, in my mind, the system showing you its brilliance, as in gridlock —
CLAY: Yes, yes.
BUCK: — protects us from the stupidity of the people who happen to get in positions of power by promising things they couldn’t deliver, lying about all the different usual underhanded political nonsense, right? So gridlock is good. I almost feel like I could give the Gordon Gekko speech, “Greed is good.”
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Gridlock is good when you have an administration as incompetent as this one. So I certainly hope that will be the case, and I guess a way to step back from it, Clay, ’cause we’d have to get into, “Well, what parliamentary tricks could be pulled to try to get something through here, try to push something the Senate the House?” What would they want to see to do at this point, really?
CLAY: Tax increase, I think.
BUCK: Right. Exactly right. So now we look, “Okay. They’re gonna pull a tax increase in the last month before a midterm election where they’re about to get crushed because they’re gonna go with a class warfare theme.” What exactly is the sales pitch to people that can’t afford — comfortably anymore — food, gas, rent? It’s gonna be, “We’re raising the corporate tax and in five years, this is going to…”
It doesn’t fly, right? So I can’t even think of what, short of some executive orders, but executive orders are immediately reversible which the libs always find out about and cry about. “Waah, they can be reversed?” By the way, that’s what Remain in Mexico is effectively about, right? They’re just saying, “We’re not gonna reimplement the policy,” and a court has already said, “What do you mean you’re not gonna reimplement the policy?”
CLAY: My concern — and this could potentially happen in a lame-duck session, which is even scarier.
BUCK: Yeah, give me your worst case, like war games.
CLAY: Any worst-case scenario is we get to September or late August, right before they’re gonna leave. They see all the polls. They know that they are going to lose the Senate and they know they’re going to lose the House, and they just say, “We’ve gotta pass whatever we want in terms of transformative legislation right now, because once we lose the Senate and the House — or even just the House — we’re not gonna be able to pass anything for two years.
“Then we’ve got a difficult election to potentially try and win in 2024. We may not control Congress and the White House again for another decade or more. Let’s try to change taxes,” for instance, “and get through another big spending bill just because we won’t be able to do it for a decade or more.” So my concern is they could be staring down the oncoming train, recognize that it’s gonna flatten them.
BUCK: So it’s basically, “Go for it. It’s ‘break the glass’ time. Who cares?”
CLAY: They’ve got nothing else, and the lame-duck session is even a little bit more scary in that respect ’cause I’m not sure what parliamentary rules apply. Once they lose the House and Senate, could they try and push something through before the new Congress is brought in?
BUCK: Why would Manchin, for example…? Just to play this out, right? Why would Manchin go along with that at this point? He’s essentially… He may have — and even some Democrats say it —
CLAY: He’s basically the president.
BUCK: — basically saved the Democrat Party from an implosion the likes of which we’ve never seen because as we all know, if inflation was 12% or 15%. The CPI index, never mind what the real inflation is for that people feel for the good that they actually need. That’s usually a higher number than the official number. You know, I don’t see it, but I also never underestimate how slimy and unfair and underhanded Democrat left is willing to be, Clay, so I don’t want to us to be caught unaware.
CLAY: That’s my concern, and I would just say, we gotta be vigilant in trying to keep that from happening because everything Biden touches makes everything worse. The Bidas touch is real, the opposite of the Midas touch. We gotta be very careful.