Verdict with Ted Cruz - June 02, 2023


The Inside Story on the Biden-McCarthy Debt Disaster and What It Will Cost You!


Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

160.56836

Word count

5,718

Sentence count

418

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ted Cruz and Ben Fergusons discuss the debt ceiling deal that was struck between Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy on Thursday night, and why Republicans voted against it. Ted Cruz: Why did they vote no?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.520 Guaranteed human.
00:00:05.360 Welcome. It is a verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:00:09.640 And the Senate has sent the debt ceiling package to Biden's desk with the default threat just days away.
00:00:17.240 In translation, the sausage has been made in Washington, D.C.
00:00:21.580 Senator, you just left that vote.
00:00:23.820 We are doing this after the vote took place.
00:00:26.140 And I want to start off with asking you this.
00:00:30.000 This couldn't get done without Republicans in the Senate.
00:00:34.200 If the Republicans all stayed together, they wouldn't have gotten the 60 votes needed.
00:00:38.000 So which Republicans went with the Democrats to get this deal done?
00:00:44.620 Well, Ben, that's exactly right.
00:00:46.020 You and I are sitting here.
00:00:47.180 It is 1152 p.m. on Thursday night.
00:00:49.680 I just came from the Senate floor about a half hour ago.
00:00:52.100 We were voting on the debt ceiling and we were voting on this deal, the Joe Biden deal that he negotiated with Kevin McCarthy.
00:00:58.960 It's a lousy deal.
00:01:00.340 We've talked about it quite a bit on the podcast.
00:01:02.420 And the interesting thing is in the Senate, Republicans had it entirely within our power to kill this.
00:01:10.020 In order for this to pass, the Democrats had to get 60 votes.
00:01:15.060 If they didn't get 60 votes, it wouldn't pass.
00:01:18.140 Which means if 41 Republicans stood together, we could have killed it.
00:01:24.400 Actually, five Democrats voted no tonight. 0.92
00:01:27.380 So if those five had held their ground, just 36 Republicans could have stood together and killed it.
00:01:34.900 But sadly, that didn't happen.
00:01:36.840 So who are the Republicans that voted for this deal?
00:01:40.460 Well, in alphabetical order, John Bozeman from Arkansas, Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia, Susan Collins from Maine, John Cornyn from Texas, Joni Ernst from Iowa, Chuck Grassley from Iowa, John Hoven from North Dakota,
00:02:01.080 Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, Jerry Moran from Kansas, Mark Wayne Mullen from Oklahoma, Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, Mitt Romney from Utah, Mike Rounds from South Dakota,
00:02:19.140 John Thune from South Dakota, Tom Tillis from North Carolina, and Todd Young from Indiana.
00:02:28.800 Those are the Republicans that joined with Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden in adding $4 trillion more in debt in exchange for ultimately what were very small spending cuts.
00:02:42.020 So the question I have to ask you, and I know each of them probably had different reasons, but what did they get out of it?
00:02:48.780 I mean, that's a long list.
00:02:51.040 What was the reasoning for some of them to just say, hey, screw it, we're going to go along with this?
00:02:57.120 What did they get in return for that vote?
00:03:00.240 Well, in my time in the Senate, Republican leadership always votes with the Democrats to increase debt, to raise the debt ceiling.
00:03:11.140 Usually they get nothing for it.
00:03:13.140 Usually this fight is Republican leadership in the Senate saying we must increase the debt ceiling and get absolutely zero for it.
00:03:20.760 So I guess, you know, we should pause and reflect that at least there were some modest concessions in this deal.
00:03:28.200 Joe Biden and the White House initially, Biden's position was he wouldn't negotiate.
00:03:33.340 He would make no concessions whatsoever.
00:03:34.940 That was so patently unreasonable that House conservatives forced House leadership to negotiate for something.
00:03:42.900 And so there were some concessions in this.
00:03:46.460 But look, in the Senate, Senate Republican leadership's view is every time there's a fight over a debt ceiling, every time there's a fight over a continuing resolution, every time there's a fight over an omnibus, 100 out of 100 times Republican leadership does what the Democrats want.
00:04:05.640 Look, in December, Mitch McConnell led the fight to pass a massive omnibus that funded Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi's priorities.
00:04:17.380 And I want you to think about how insane that was.
00:04:20.040 So December was one month after the November elections when Republicans had just won a majority in the House.
00:04:26.820 So we knew there was a House majority coming in in January.
00:04:32.280 And yet in December, it was Republican leadership of the Senate that said before those crazy Republicans show up and take a majority in the House, let's fund the entirety of the federal government through September 30th.
00:04:43.960 Let's take nine months out of 2023 off the table.
00:04:47.520 Now, mind you, this Republican majority of the House only gets two years.
00:04:51.360 So if you take nine months of the first year off the table, it means zero of the Republican spending priorities can get enacted in the law because Senate Republican leadership decided it was their job to ensure that Nancy Pelosi on her way out the door got another two trillion dollars in spending.
00:05:12.820 So that's a dynamic that has played out a long time.
00:05:15.880 And sadly, it's a dynamic that played out tonight.
00:05:17.600 I want to ask you about the Democrats, because you mentioned there were some Democrats that voted no.
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00:06:44.680 Senator, you mentioned, and it's really infuriating when you hear that Republicans voted for this, including the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, but there were some Democrats that voted no.
00:06:55.540 That may shock people.
00:06:56.840 And after there's a big vote like this, we always have a large number of new listeners that come in.
00:07:03.800 They say, hey, I just want to know what happened, right?
00:07:06.420 They may not do politics every day, but this is important.
00:07:09.320 They want to know how we got here.
00:07:10.460 So, explain in detail why these Democrats would actually vote no.
00:07:15.800 Well, the final vote was 63 to 36.
00:07:20.080 So, there were 36 no's.
00:07:21.880 Of the no's, five of them were Democrats and 31 of them were Republicans.
00:07:26.280 So, the five Democrats who voted no were Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Berkley, Ed Markey, and John Fetterman.
00:07:37.060 Uh, they're basically the far left wing of the Democrat caucus in the Senate.
00:07:44.400 Now, I don't know for sure why they voted no, other than I assume they didn't want to make any concessions.
00:07:51.440 The fact that there were even slight, modest concessions that Biden made for the unabashed socialist wing of the party.
00:08:00.840 Presumably, those concessions were too much.
00:08:02.960 So, for example, there are modest work requirements that are added to food stamps and welfare.
00:08:08.880 I am assuming, I don't know this, you'd have to ask Elizabeth Warren, you'd have to ask Bernie Sanders why they voted no.
00:08:14.840 But I'm assuming their view is that even the tiniest bit of work is unacceptable.
00:08:19.860 They want people not to have to work at all and able-bodied adults to be able to stay at home and receive welfare payments in perpetuity.
00:08:27.640 Um, I don't understand that reasoning.
00:08:30.020 I, I, I genuinely, my brain doesn't work that way.
00:08:33.520 Um, I, I was always raised in a house, if you don't work, you don't eat.
00:08:37.320 And, and that, uh, I think work is good for you.
00:08:40.560 I think work is good for the soul.
00:08:42.120 I think it, it, it builds responsibility.
00:08:44.700 I think it builds self-respect.
00:08:46.460 I, I, I, I, I think just being dependent saps your, your dignity and saps, saps your self-respect.
00:08:55.820 But for the far left, for them, if they see value in work, they never vote that way.
00:09:04.780 Um, it is possible that one of the reasons they voted no is there was a component of this bill
00:09:10.720 that green-lighted a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia.
00:09:14.700 That was a payoff to Joe Manchin.
00:09:16.840 Uh, it is possible that the left-wing Democrats, that was a reason they voted no.
00:09:21.220 This was a payoff.
00:09:22.540 Remember last year, Joe Manchin voted for the, the misnamed, the deceitfully named Inflation Reduction Act.
00:09:28.980 That was a massive bill, uh, that was trillions in spending and subsidies for Green New Deal policies and taxes on oil and gas.
00:09:39.480 And it hammered, by the way, coal miners in West Virginia. 0.95
00:09:43.100 It hammered oil and gas producers.
00:09:44.940 It hurt West Virginia.
00:09:46.900 But Joe Manchin voted yes nonetheless.
00:09:49.520 And part of the deal he cut with the White House and Schumer is that he would get this, this pipeline in West Virginia approved.
00:09:57.900 Well, this was the payoff, the payoff for his vote.
00:10:01.300 And so that, maybe that was part of the reason the Democrats voted no.
00:10:06.960 I don't know for sure.
00:10:08.360 What I know is five D's voted no, which means if we had 36 R's who voted no, this would have been defeated tonight in the Senate.
00:10:15.200 For people that don't listen all the time that may be tuning in to this episode because of this vote, um, there's a lot of people in the past that have heard what you've said about this moving forward as we were keeping updated last week and the week before.
00:10:27.840 But explain why specifically you said no and you voted no from your perspective, uh, as a Senator from Texas.
00:10:37.160 Well, it's very simple.
00:10:38.500 This does not solve the problem and it doesn't even make a very significant improvement in the problem.
00:10:44.300 Uh, let's step back for a minute.
00:10:46.520 Let's look at this with a broader perspective.
00:10:48.500 Let's go back to 2000.
00:10:49.860 2000 wasn't that long ago.
00:10:51.240 It was 23 years ago in the year 2000.
00:10:55.180 Do you know where our national debt was in 2000, Ben?
00:10:57.920 Nowhere near what it is now.
00:10:59.540 And it's scary to see how much the numbers gone up.
00:11:02.660 I don't know the exact number from 2000, but it was nothing remotely close to what we've accomplished now.
00:11:08.040 Well, that's accurate.
00:11:09.360 In 2000, the national debt was $5 trillion.
00:11:13.620 Five.
00:11:14.300 Wow.
00:11:15.140 Now in 2000, a president that you and I both worked for, George W. Bush, got elected.
00:11:21.280 Bush served for eight years.
00:11:23.720 At the end of his eight-year term, the national debt had grown from $5 trillion to $10 trillion.
00:11:32.280 In 2008, Barack Obama became president.
00:11:35.900 When he became president, the national debt was $10 trillion.
00:11:38.720 Eight years later, the national debt had grown to $20 trillion.
00:11:45.760 So pause and reflect on that for a moment.
00:11:49.540 It had taken 42 presidents over 200 years to build $5 trillion in debt.
00:11:58.060 Wow.
00:11:59.100 And then two presidents, one Republican and one Democrat, in 16 years, quadrupled the debt.
00:12:09.100 Increased it from $5 trillion to $20 trillion.
00:12:13.780 Now, what happened next?
00:12:15.320 2017, the national debt is $20 trillion.
00:12:20.860 Where are we today?
00:12:23.380 $32 trillion.
00:12:27.520 That's from 2017 to five and a half, less than six years.
00:12:34.500 We've gone, just go back to 2000.
00:12:37.780 From 2000 to today, we've gone from $5 trillion to $32 trillion.
00:12:44.240 What we're doing is wildly irresponsible.
00:12:48.640 It is bankrupting our country.
00:12:50.880 Now, let's go back to 2017 again.
00:12:52.740 Let's put this in perspective.
00:12:54.060 2017, total federal budget, $4 trillion.
00:12:59.280 That's what the federal government spent.
00:13:00.640 What was total federal tax revenue?
00:13:05.360 $3.3 trillion.
00:13:07.720 So we had, if you can do some quick math, we had a $700 billion deficit.
00:13:13.240 That was the amount that our expenditures exceeded revenues.
00:13:18.380 Now, fast forward to today.
00:13:21.600 Today, what we're looking at right now is a total federal budget of about $6.6 trillion.
00:13:28.620 Now, think about it.
00:13:29.760 In six years, we've gone from $4 trillion to $6.6 trillion.
00:13:36.280 Like, holy cow, that is massive.
00:13:39.020 Now, what's happened to tax revenues?
00:13:40.580 Now, remember, in 2017, we passed the historic tax cuts.
00:13:44.640 When we passed the tax cuts, all the Democrats, most of the lying corporate media, said this tax cut is going to cause federal tax revenues to plummet.
00:13:55.280 It's going to cause massive deficits, massive debt.
00:13:58.780 This is disastrous for the federal budget.
00:14:01.820 Well, the nice thing about making predictions is when time passes, you can see if those predictions are true or false. 1.00
00:14:08.580 We now know that every single Democrat who said that was full of crap. 0.97
00:14:12.940 We now know that every media outlet that said that was telling you something that is patently false. 0.97
00:14:20.320 Why?
00:14:20.940 Because every year since 2017, after the tax cuts, every single year, federal tax revenues went up and up and up.
00:14:31.480 And they're now just under $5 trillion from $3.3 trillion.
00:14:37.640 That's a massive increase in federal tax revenue, why the economy grew.
00:14:42.800 The tax cuts helped small businesses, helped job creators, created jobs, and that generated much more tax revenue than did the higher rates before the tax cuts.
00:14:53.880 Now, getting nearly $5 trillion in tax revenue is great until you realize that the total budget is $6.6 trillion.
00:15:05.160 So $5 doesn't get you there.
00:15:07.980 That's how we've gone from $20 trillion in debt to $32 trillion in debt.
00:15:13.000 And what does this thing do?
00:15:14.280 It greenlights another $4 trillion in debt.
00:15:19.240 And if you contrast it, look, the House, what it initially passed was a bill that would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion.
00:15:32.060 That's a lot of money.
00:15:33.360 But it had real and meaningful cuts.
00:15:35.840 It had cuts that would have saved a total of $4.8 trillion over 10 years.
00:15:40.900 So that was the tradeoff the House made is, okay, we're not going to solve all the problem, but let's have real and meaningful cuts, and we'll add $1.5 trillion in debt.
00:15:51.600 What this did is it adverted that ratio.
00:15:54.520 Instead of $1.5 trillion in debt, it's $4 trillion in debt.
00:15:59.080 So it's more than double.
00:16:00.160 It's almost triple the debt the initial deal was.
00:16:03.000 And what is the spending cut?
00:16:04.580 Well, on the face of it, they're claiming it's $2 trillion, which is less than half the $4.8 trillion the House had initially.
00:16:12.560 But in reality, it's much less than that because the bulk of that savings is from the out years where the spending cuts aren't mandatory, which means the Democrats are going to ignore them and waive them.
00:16:25.300 So at the end of the day, Republicans are celebrating, at least Republican leadership is celebrating, adding $4 trillion in debt for what will prove to be nominal spending reductions.
00:16:39.180 And I promise you, tonight, right now, in the White House, they are popping champagne.
00:16:47.340 That should scare the hell out of you.
00:17:17.340 I want to ask you about the greenlining of the $4 trillion in new debt because I think it's so important that people understand how do we just throw around $4 trillion in new debt and what time period is this going to happen over?
00:17:34.280 Before I get you to answer that, though, we're talking about the economy.
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00:19:03.820 Senator, you mentioned greenlighting of $4 trillion in new debt.
00:19:08.120 How quickly are we going to spend that $4 trillion?
00:19:12.660 What's it going to?
00:19:14.000 What was the reasoning behind it?
00:19:16.600 So that's in less than two years.
00:19:18.680 Wow.
00:19:18.960 So the initial bill, the, quote, limit, save, and grow bill that the House passed, increased the federal debt limit by $1.5 trillion.
00:19:28.360 It was a fixed dollar amount.
00:19:30.160 And once you hit the additional $1.5 trillion, you had to come back to Congress and get authorization to go up again.
00:19:37.280 The value of the debt ceiling is historically it's proven the only effective lever point to force any meaningful fiscal restraint.
00:19:45.100 Well, this deal, it doesn't have a fixed dollar amount.
00:19:50.420 There's actually not an amount of debt that's authorized.
00:19:53.200 What it did instead is it suspended the debt ceiling altogether until 2025, until after the election, until January 2025.
00:20:03.060 So based on current spending, that will be in excess of $4 trillion.
00:20:09.940 But the reason they did that is they did, is the politicians didn't actually want to vote for $4 trillion in debt.
00:20:15.140 They just said, oh, no, no, we just suspended the debt ceiling.
00:20:17.340 So we didn't vote for a dollar amount.
00:20:20.180 That's a way to avoid responsibility for what you're voting for.
00:20:24.760 It's also designed, by the way, we're going to hit the debt ceiling again in January of 2025.
00:20:30.800 Now, what will have just happened?
00:20:32.300 We will have just had an election in November of 2024.
00:20:35.340 We will be in a lame duck session with a bunch of retiring politicians going out of office.
00:20:41.020 And this is designed so that in December of 2024, they're going to go back and pass another massive spending bill,
00:20:49.060 just like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi did in December of last year.
00:20:53.260 They're going to do it again in December of 2024, trillions more.
00:20:57.380 And they're going to say, if we don't do that, we'll default on the debt.
00:21:01.240 This is designed to create another crisis.
00:21:04.860 And they picked that date.
00:21:07.160 It's not by accident.
00:21:08.560 By the way, we had an amendment to shorten that time period, to shorten it to November of this year.
00:21:13.800 Of course, the Democrats all voted against it.
00:21:15.800 We had a bunch of different amendments.
00:21:19.480 One amendment, so one of the things House leadership is pitching is they say, well,
00:21:23.640 there's some permitting reform here that's really important.
00:21:26.800 And the original version of the House bill had what's called the RAINS Act, which is a bill I strongly support,
00:21:33.700 that says any economic regulation that would impose $100 million of cost or more on the economy
00:21:39.580 has to get an up-down vote from Congress before it goes into effect.
00:21:43.580 It would be incredibly meaningful regulatory reform.
00:21:47.220 Well, of course, the White House objected, and so that got jettisoned from this.
00:21:51.100 Instead, there are some modest permitting reforms that are in this and regulatory reform of what's called pay-go
00:22:02.560 to off the set of costly regulations.
00:22:05.040 And guess what the bill provides after it says that?
00:22:07.240 It says, oh, well, the White House can waive them.
00:22:11.920 So in other words, it has a provision that seems really tough.
00:22:14.360 Oh, okay, this is actually, this will slow down massive job-killing regulations,
00:22:19.220 except for the fact that they wrote into the bill the White House can waive that reform.
00:22:25.480 Now, Mike Lee, my good friend, senator from Utah, had an amendment to strike the waiver,
00:22:31.520 to say, okay, if you actually have meaningful regulatory reform, don't give Joe Biden the ability to waive it.
00:22:36.780 And guess what? Every Democrat voted no.
00:22:38.580 So they said, nope, we want the waiver.
00:22:41.860 And every single amendment we considered was voted down.
00:22:46.220 That was by design.
00:22:47.320 They wanted to change nothing.
00:22:50.220 Because there was a lot of excitement about the amendments.
00:22:52.580 I mean, Mike Lee went on TV, several others saying, I'm going to do, Paul, et cetera,
00:22:56.480 you know, we're going to do these amendments and we're going to hold this thing and force their hand.
00:23:01.360 You're saying that basically none of that worked?
00:23:05.940 None of that worked.
00:23:07.040 And none of that worked because, number one, Schumer whipped the Democrats to make sure every amendment was defeated.
00:23:12.240 And McConnell whipped the Republicans to make sure every amendment was defeated. 0.56
00:23:16.400 Look, the final margin was 63 to 36.
00:23:20.820 And at some level, that's a little bit better than I had expected.
00:23:24.400 But it might have even been, we might have gotten a 39 or 40 no's.
00:23:29.880 What they were not going to let happen was 41 no's.
00:23:32.880 Because 41 no's kills this.
00:23:35.580 So, at some level, leadership in both sides was fine with people voting no.
00:23:41.520 If we'd gotten to 41 no's, Schumer would have gone to the five Democrats voting no
00:23:46.580 and twisted someone's arm to switch their vote. 0.69
00:23:48.580 Or McConnell would have gone.
00:23:49.620 In other words, you would have got a pipeline like in West Virginia to buy a vote, basically.
00:23:54.260 Well, and I have to say, really, the most amusing moment on the Senate floor was an amendment about the pipeline.
00:24:00.620 So, Joe Manchin, as part of the disastrous so-called Inflation Reduction Act that actually increased inflation
00:24:08.940 and had nearly $2 trillion in spending last year, he got an agreement from Biden and Schumer
00:24:15.160 to approve this natural gas pipeline in West Virginia.
00:24:20.080 And it didn't get done last year, but it's rolled into this deal now.
00:24:24.560 And Tim Kaine, liberal Democrat from Virginia, introduced an amendment to strip out Joe Manchin's pipeline in West Virginia.
00:24:38.240 And the vote was very interesting because the more liberal Democrats voted for Tim Kaine's amendment
00:24:47.060 because they hate energy, they hate natural gas, they hate oil, they hate any American energy produced here
00:24:53.860 unless it's windmills or solar.
00:24:55.220 And what was interesting is several Republicans ended up voting for it as well.
00:25:00.620 Mike Lee voted for it, Rand Paul voted for it, and a bunch of the left-wing Democrats stayed silent.
00:25:06.820 And they were scared how to vote because they didn't want to vote for a natural gas pipeline,
00:25:12.140 but they knew that this was the deal cut with Joe Manchin and they couldn't undercut that deal.
00:25:18.800 And in particular, they were terrified if any amendment got adopted, this bill would get sent back to the House.
00:25:25.300 If we amend it, it goes back to the House. The House has to come back and vote on it then.
00:25:30.120 And so as we went through the vote, the clerk is calling the senators, and the clerk calls the senators alphabetically.
00:25:37.540 And a whole bunch of the Democrat senators, Maisie Hirono, one of the most liberal Democrats there is, 0.96
00:25:43.560 when they called Ms. Hirono, she stayed silent.
00:25:46.660 And she was sitting right there. She just didn't vote. 0.96
00:25:49.740 And it went alphabetically through.
00:25:52.000 Now, Mike Lee was leaning on me hard saying, vote yes for Tim Kaine's amendment.
00:25:57.100 Let's, number one, deny Joe Manchin the benefit of the corrupt deal he cut with Schumer.
00:26:03.260 And he said, number two, if we actually adopt this amendment, this could tank the whole bill.
00:26:09.040 And I told him, I said, Mike, look, I'm from Texas.
00:26:12.300 We produce a lot of oil and gas in Texas.
00:26:14.300 I am very hard-pressed to vote against any oil pipeline or natural gas pipeline.
00:26:22.120 That's just there are millions of jobs that depend on oil and gas, and I believe in American energy.
00:26:28.160 But I did say, look, the point about denying Manchin the benefit of the corrupt deal, that's real.
00:26:32.760 And if this could take this entire deal down, I'd be enthusiastically yes.
00:26:39.020 So I told Mike, I said, I'll tell you what, I'll refrain from voting.
00:26:42.860 I'll just sit back and see what happens.
00:26:45.880 I won't vote early.
00:26:48.340 And so we went through alphabetically.
00:26:49.500 And for people that don't understand how it works, at first you vote, like when you're saying alphabetically, if you don't say anything, you don't lose the right to vote at the end, right?
00:26:58.100 You can kind of see how it plays out.
00:26:59.960 Right.
00:27:00.280 So typically a vote is 15 minutes, although they usually run much longer than that.
00:27:05.580 And there's a clerk who's sitting there reading from this long, skinny card.
00:27:10.060 The long, skinny card has the names of every senator on it.
00:27:13.940 And this is old school.
00:27:15.240 So the House has like electronic voting where you put in a card, you push a button and it lights up.
00:27:20.560 The Senate is still in the 1800s.
00:27:23.800 The Senate, we still vote with a clerk who calls your name and you either say out loud yay or nay, or more typically you just do thumbs up or thumbs down.
00:27:34.980 You look them in the eye and they will repeat.
00:27:37.240 So they'll be like Mr. Cruz and you'll look at them and you'll do a thumbs up and they'll go, Mr. Cruz, I.
00:27:43.620 And with a pencil, they will mark you as an eye.
00:27:49.660 And so each person they're marking with a pencil as the votes are cast.
00:27:54.020 But when they call your name, you don't have to vote.
00:27:56.240 So they call Mr. Cruz and you stay silent.
00:27:59.040 They go to the next name.
00:27:59.920 They go to the next name.
00:28:00.800 And so, you know, I decided, all right, I'm going to sit back and it was hysterical watching the Democrats squirm because they were like, oh, no, if this thing's about to pass, we're all going to have to vote against it.
00:28:15.660 And our crazy environmentalists will be mad at us if we vote against killing a natural gas pipeline. 0.72
00:28:22.740 Now, at the end of the day, very few Republicans were able to vote strategically.
00:28:27.740 So a whole bunch of Republicans voted no, no, no, no, no, including Mitch McConnell right at the outset.
00:28:32.320 No.
00:28:33.460 So like what Mike was trying to do, if we actually had effective leadership on our side, we might have whipped everyone to vote for Cain's amendment to strip out Manchin's deal.
00:28:43.780 But our leadership didn't want to do that because then the Democrats would have been.
00:28:47.820 See, they're going to ask you why, though.
00:28:48.800 Like, you would think that would be a no-brainer to say you're not going to get these, you're not going to get these deals, you're not going to get to hook people up this way.
00:28:57.540 And yet here the Republicans are and the leadership going, yeah, no, we kind of, we're going to let this happen.
00:29:02.360 In fact, we're going to protect it to make sure it happens.
00:29:05.000 This is what drives the American people's insane, as obviously you know this.
00:29:10.100 So, Ben, I genuinely don't know.
00:29:12.420 But what happened, so we got to the end of the voting alphabetically, and they read it out, and there were over 51 no's.
00:29:23.200 And so then two things happened.
00:29:25.060 All the Democrats who hadn't voted, they immediately rushed to vote yes.
00:29:29.720 So they, once it was clear that Cain was going to be defeated, that it was Republicans who were going to defeat it,
00:29:36.080 a whole bunch of Democrats rushed in and voted yes, see, yay, I'm a crazy environmentalist.
00:29:40.960 And secondly, actually, most of the R's, several of the D's who had voted no initially switched their vote to a yes once it was clear it was going to be defeated.
00:29:54.980 So, but there was a moment, so Democrat leadership was whipping against the Cain Amendment, was whipping in favor of the Joe Manchin pipeline.
00:30:12.900 So Schumer voted with Joe Manchin, Schumer's whips voted for Joe Manchin.
00:30:18.180 So one of the more liberal Democrats who's part of Schumer's whip team voted for it.
00:30:23.160 I walked up and said, all right, tell me, have you ever voted for a pipeline before in your life?
00:30:28.220 And he kind of laughed and said no.
00:30:30.580 And I'm like, well, you know, there are 49 other states.
00:30:32.700 We could use some pipelines too.
00:30:34.380 How about the rest of us?
00:30:35.340 Is there love for any other state?
00:30:37.560 And he just laughed.
00:30:38.740 And the answer, of course, is no.
00:30:41.040 But it was it was an amusing moment on the floor how nervous Democrats were that Republicans might actually support this amendment and strip out the deal with Manchin,
00:30:52.100 which would mean it would force all of them to vote for the pipeline.
00:30:56.260 Ultimately, they didn't have to do that.
00:30:57.600 But but we came there was a moment where it looked like it might.
00:31:00.700 You mentioned earlier there's going to be another showdown that's going to happen later this year.
00:31:04.980 And I want to ask you about that.
00:31:06.180 I also want to ask you about the debt, how big of an issue you think this is going to be and how big of an issue should it be in the 2024 presidential election.
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00:32:41.400 Senator, there's another showdown that's going to happen and people are going to roll their eyes and they're going to say, here we go again.
00:32:49.340 How big of an issue should that showdown become for the 2024 presidential?
00:32:54.740 And how big of an issue do you think this debt that we are in as a nation right now, should this be the top issue in the presidential election, in your opinion?
00:33:03.300 I'm talking about both sides.
00:33:04.120 I'm saying, in general, for all American voters, how concerning of an issue should this rank?
00:33:10.440 Well, look, every conceivable presidential candidate in the Senate voted no on this deal.
00:33:19.340 In the Senate, the only two Democrats who might conceivably run are Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.
00:33:26.480 They both voted no.
00:33:28.780 Tim Scott, who's the only senator currently running, he voted no.
00:33:32.600 Any others who had previously run, I voted no.
00:33:39.140 Rand Paul voted no.
00:33:40.420 Marco Rubio voted no.
00:33:43.400 Lindsey Graham voted no.
00:33:45.220 Other people who might conceivably run, Tom Cotton voted no.
00:33:49.320 Josh Hawley voted no.
00:33:51.420 Like, anyone thinking of running for president votes against this deal.
00:33:54.960 By the way, Barack Obama, when he was in the Senate, voted consistently against raising the debt ceiling when George W. Bush was president.
00:34:01.300 He gave speeches on the Senate floor about how the fact that we had to raise the debt ceiling back when the debt was down below $5 trillion, how it showed how irresponsible the Bush administration was.
00:34:12.020 So that dynamic is is a very real dynamic.
00:34:17.480 If you look at the current presidential contenders, obviously, Joe Biden supports this.
00:34:21.760 We'll sign this and we'll trumpet this as a big victory.
00:34:25.040 If Donald Trump said anything about this deal, I have not seen it.
00:34:30.840 I don't know if he's commented or not, but if he did, I wasn't aware of it.
00:34:37.120 So.
00:34:38.700 At the end of the day, we'll see how big an issue this is in the presidential debate.
00:34:44.080 The incumbent president supported it enthusiastically.
00:34:48.120 And, you know, we're headed towards $36 trillion in debt.
00:34:54.200 It's incredible.
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