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Oct. 7, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:27
Did McConnell Just Cave To Biden? | Ep. 1349
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agrees to a temporary debt ceiling increase, President Biden's approval rating plummets to shocking lows, and ESPN suspends Sage Steele for saying the unsayable.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty.
So, late last night, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, he essentially, quote-unquote, caved to the Democrats.
What he did is he agreed to a short-term debt ceiling increase.
The way this is being characterized by the Democrats is a win for the Democrats because instead of them having to cram everything in in the next couple of weeks and then ram through a debt ceiling increase via the use of reconciliation, now they will probably have more time to negotiate out this build back better regime, this terrifyingly large package that they are putting together.
So a lot of people on the right this morning are very angry with Mitch McConnell, I think in part justifiably so, but I think that there is a logic to what McConnell is doing and I think it has to do mainly with Joe Manchin.
It certainly does not have to do with Biden.
So one of the theories that is being trotted out there is that Mitch McConnell caved because Joe Biden's agenda is actually popular.
He didn't want to be seen holding it up.
That, of course, is absolute nonsense.
That's very silly.
is really, really unpopular.
The poll numbers for Joe Biden are just awful.
They are garbage.
Quinnipiac, which is a polling service that tends to favor Democrats, currently has Joe Biden's approval rating at 38%.
Remember that time we were told that Donald Trump was historically unpopular?
Well...
Here you have Joe Biden, who is basically at the same level as Trump was when Trump was at his lowest levels of approval rating.
So these are really bad numbers for Biden.
And unlike Donald Trump, who had a pretty solid ceiling and a pretty solid floor, Biden didn't really have a ceiling, but he also has no floor.
What that means is that when he starts to lose support, there is no load to which he cannot crater.
Maybe in the 20s, somewhere.
But Trump was never going to crater below about 35%.
Biden, theoretically, if things continue to get bad, he could be down in the low 30s before you know it.
On the issues, the only issue where Biden is performing even half-decently is on COVID.
Even there, he's slightly underwater at 48.50.
On the economy, he has 39% approval rating.
On being commander-in-chief, he has 37% approval rating.
On taxes, 37% approval rating.
On immigration, 25% approval rating.
27% approval rating on immigration 25% approval rating on the border 23% approval rating only 44% of Americans say that he is honest Only 41% of Americans say that he is a leader.
And only 42% say that he's competent.
That is just brutal.
I mean, those are viciously brutal numbers for Joe Biden.
And that means that he really has no coattails.
And one of the reasons that he has no coattails is, of course, because Joe Biden is not with us.
There is no world in which people think that he is capable of grabbing the bull by the horns anymore, because he is much more likely to grab the bull, and the bull is likely to buck him, and he is likely to fall down and break a hip.
This is why we are consistently on a day-to-day level seeing the White House attempting to guard Joe Biden the way you would a nursing home patient from a symptomatic five-year-old.
And so Joe Biden yesterday, he was doing a live stream and his staff just started ushering reporters out.
We see this almost every week where people are asking questions to Joe Biden.
All of a sudden, they're getting shoved out of the room.
They're using one of those old vaudeville canes and they're grabbing people and they're just yanking them out.
Here's what that sounded like.
So thank you, Mr. President, for the opportunity to speak to the impact of not raising the debt ceiling.
Bye, guys.
See you later.
And then nearly 65 million people across this country.
So they're having a business roundtable, and you can see the reporters just getting yanked out of there.
Wouldn't want anybody to ask any inconvenient questions.
They also built this very bizarre set for Joe Biden.
So he's no longer speaking, I guess, from the Oval Office.
Instead, they built a socially distanced set for him.
Which just looks as though he's playing at being president.
He's like underground in a bunker somewhere with a digital background that's projected to make it look like he's in the Oval Office, but he isn't actually in the Oval Office.
It's very, very weird kind of stuff.
Terry McAuliffe is running a very competitive race right now in Virginia.
McAuliffe, theoretically, should be running away with that race.
Right now, he's running basically dead even with Glenn Youngkin.
In Virginia, that race is slated to come to its terminus at the beginning of November.
If Youngkin wins, it's going to shake things up radically for the Democratic Party.
Because, again, McAuliffe was expected to be a shoe-in.
He's been governor of Virginia before.
Virginia has been trending blue because of all of the Democrats who've been moving to the Virginia suburbs.
They can work in Washington, D.C.
If McAuliffe were to lose that race, that would be a, I mean, red alarm, DEFCON 1 kind of stuff for the Democratic Party.
You're pushing too fast.
You're way too radical.
You really need to moderate it.
You need to hold it up.
Terry McAuliffe is openly now saying that Joe Biden is a drag on his ticket.
We got to get Democrats out to vote.
We are facing a lot of headwinds from Washington.
As you know, the president is unpopular today, unfortunately, here in Virginia.
So we have got to plow through.
Okay, when you have the guy who was the head of the DNC, Terry McAuliffe, saying that the president is unpopular in Virginia, which again is right outside Washington D.C., a lot of federal employees in Virginia, that is a real warning sign.
And so Joe Biden does not have virtually any momentum at this point, and his agenda is way too radical for the American people.
This is the part that's truly astonishing is that his original, again, I've said this a thousand times, the only reason that he was elected is because one, he was dead and two, he was supposed to be a dead moderate.
He has only kept one of those promises.
He is not an alive person, but he is not moderate in any way, shape or form.
He had Jen Psaki yesterday proclaiming that she doesn't mind if Americans pay higher gas prices in order to prevent climate change.
How's that going to go over in middle America, Jen?
What COP26 is about is to continue the conversation on the international stage at the leader level.
That has been going on below the leader level continuously, basically, about our need to work together to address the climate crisis, one of the greatest national security crises the president sees.
A number of other world leaders agree on that front.
Certainly, we all want to keep gasoline prices low, but the threat of the crisis, the climate crisis, certainly can't wait any longer.
Okay, so that sort of stuff is not going to go well for the Biden administration.
So the man has no coattails.
He really doesn't.
The one area where apparently the Democrats thought they could consolidate is on the debt ceiling stuff.
I'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so.
Joe Biden is pushing an unpopular agenda that is not likely to win him many plaudits.
The Build Back Better agenda that he is pushing right now is not, in fact, popular.
The American people do not feel it is necessary to blow out spending and taxes at this point in time, not when the economy is teetering on the brink of a serious slowdown, thanks to both supply bottlenecks and thanks to the fact that the federal government has been paying people to stay home.
The American people are not on board with this, and Joe Biden has no traction on any of this.
He's now been relegated to going back to the old Democratic standby.
If you buy it, if you disagree with me, it's because you want America to fail.
And so this was Joe Biden speaking yesterday.
He went to Michigan in an attempt to drum up support for Build Back Better.
And his suggestion was that if you don't agree with him, then it's because you are complicit in America's decline.
To support these investments is to create a rising America.
America is moving.
To oppose these investments is to be complicit in America's decline.
Okay, so in other words, if you don't want to spend $5 trillion, you want America to decline.
First of all, this is rooted in such an economic fallacy, it makes your head spin.
If Joe Biden's idea is that the way that you build a strong country, a stronger economic country, that the way that you build a stronger economy is to blow out the spending and the taxes, I would love to see one country where this has been true.
That blowing out spending and taxes is what makes the economy hum.
There's so little evidence of this, it makes your head swim.
And the fact is that in Europe, when they blew out the spending during the 1970s, 1980s, they got economic stagnation.
They had to cut it.
This is what's happened in places like Sweden and Denmark and Norway.
They actually had to cut social services and they had to scale back their tax and regulation regime in order so that their economy would start growing again.
Even Germany and France have had to do this in the recent past.
The United States is a great example of this.
In the 1960s, we had a booming economy.
We were growing year on year.
Our GDP was up like 5%, 6% a year.
And then, thanks to fat union contracts, particularly in places like the auto industry, making those industries less competitive, combined with LBJ deciding that it was time to blow out the spending and we were going to pay for both guns and butter, the Vietnam War and massive social spending, we saw economic stagnation from essentially 1969 all the way until the early 80s.
There is no evidence that these kinds of quote-unquote investments make the economy run.
Precisely the opposite.
When you suck money out of the private sector economy, where risk is either rewarded or punished, and instead you take that money and you put it in a place where there is no question about risk, you can simply hand the money to your favorite political constituencies and bear no burden for having done so.
See, this is the thing about governmental spending.
There's no feedback loop.
If you spend money in a stupid way and you are a government agent, nothing happens to you.
You retain your job.
If you spend money in a stupid way in the private sector, you go under.
It's always amazing to hear people jabber about profit rates.
And when you talk about the profitability of companies on average, you're ignoring all the companies that went under.
Every time you decide to start a company, you are taking the risk that the company goes under and that you lose the money that you invested in the company.
When people talk about the average profit, they're talking about the companies that succeed.
That is a small subset of companies, period.
Many, many companies do not succeed.
But we have to incentivize innovation and entrepreneurship and people taking those risks.
That's what the market does.
You reward successful risk takers and you punish people who take bad risks.
That is a feedback loop provided by all other Americans with regard to goods and services when you invest.
When Joe Biden talks about investment, he's not talking about an actual investment strategy.
He bears no risk for any of this.
He can blow trillions of dollars on random garbage, and as long as that money is going to people who are likely to vote for him, there's very little blowback.
The only way there's blowback, if somehow the American people realize that these massive investments, the size and scope of these investments, is actually hampering the economy.
And that's precisely, by the way, what these sorts of investments do.
The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial on this this morning.
They say the lesson from Europe's cradle-to-grave welfare state is that Mr. Biden's expanded entitlement is likely to be reduced incentive to work and invest, slower economic growth, lower living standards, less fiscal space for essential public goods like national defense.
Most of the European cradle-to-grave welfare states have older populations than the United States, says the Wall Street Journal.
This alone does not account for their lower labor participation rates and much higher structural unemployment.
European jobless rates tend to be much higher than in the United States, especially for the young.
In 2019, labor participation was 62.6% in the United States versus 49.7% in Italy.
Literally less than half of people eligible to work in Italy are working.
working. 55% in France, 57% in Spain, 59% in Portugal, 61% in Germany. While the United States' economy was slowed to recover from 2008-2009 because of Obama's policy uncertainty, says the Wall Street Journal.
GDP growth still averaged 2.3% from 2010-2019, surpassing Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany.
Democrats say that generous family leave will encourage more women to work and expand the workforce, but Italy offers 22 weeks of maternity leave at 80% of previous earnings.
France provides 16 weeks at 90%, Spain 16 weeks at 100%.
Why does that come along with higher payroll taxes?
What does that mean?
It means that people have stopped hiring pregnant women or women who are unlikely to be in the workforce, who are of childbearing age.
There are unfortunately economic disincentives to hiring people who are going to be out of the workforce for a significant period of time that you then have to pay for via payroll tax.
Europe's little-discussed secret, says the Wall Street Journal, is that its cradle-to-grave welfare states are financed by the middle class via value-added and payroll taxes.
The combined employer-employee social security tax is 36% in Spain, 40% in Italy, 65% in France.
Value-added taxes in most European economies are around 20%.
This isn't about the rich paying their fair share in Europe.
This is about everybody paying through the nose.
Which is why the Democrats are attempting to gimmick the system.
They're determined to gimmick the system.
In fact, a great example of a European state that has realized this is Sweden.
The left likes to cite Sweden as a great example of this giant welfare state.
Sweden has been curbing its benefits.
Sweden has been scaling back its taxes and regulation.
It's the only reason that they started to grow again, because from 1970 to 1993, they went from the fourth wealthiest economy on planet Earth, it's like the 13th wealthiest economy on planet Earth, and then they started to realize, we've done some really stupid crap here.
Joe Biden, however, seems to think that it strengthens the economy to spend all of this money.
And this is not a popular position, which is why Joe Manchin has been pushing back on it, right?
And so Joe Manchin openly said yesterday, we should not be turning our society into an entitlement society.
I don't believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society.
I think that we should still be a compassionate, rewarding society.
I think that fares best for all of us, but compassion means taking care of those who can't take care of themselves, whether they're young, whether they've had some type of a challenge in life, whether it be mental or physical.
Those are responsibilities that we have, and we can all meet those responsibilities.
Okay, so that is Manchin pushing back on the entire mentality that Joe Biden is pushing.
And that has some pretty serious consequences, including a huge firefight inside the Democratic Party right now.
All this is predicate to explaining what Mitch McConnell is actually kind of doing with the debt ceiling, which again is sort of, I would say, half justifiable.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so what does this materialize into?
This sort of firefight?
So Joe Manchin is now demanding that progressives quote unquote, prioritize their programs.
He's telling his colleagues, progressives need to pick just one of Biden's three signature policies and discard the other two, according to Axios.
By forcing progressives to choose among an expanded child tax credit, paid family medical leave or subsidies for childcare, Manchin is complicating any potential deal, but also signaling his willingness to negotiate, He's also aligning himself with Democratic centrists in the House, who want to trim the number of programs in any final package, but fund them for longer.
Meaning, Manchin is not going along with the budgetary gimmick that many of the progressives have been urging, which is, what if we fund all of the programs, but for like four years?
That is the gimmick.
Instead of making it a 10-year bill, we make it a 4-year bill, spend the exact same amount of money, and then pretend that we're not spending that much money.
Because we'll artificially sunset the bills, knowing that Congress is then going to come back in and refund all of the bills.
Like, put more money into the bills.
So Manchin's saying, no, we're not going to do that.
If you want to put together a program, that program is going to have to be budgeted over the course of 10 years, and that means you're actually going to have to pick and choose which programs you want.
Progressives are hopeful they can retain all of their cherished programs in a final bill by funding many of them for shorter durations and lowering the bill's ultimate price tag by essentially lying to you.
Manchin is saying no.
Manchin stressed today his price cap remains $1.5 trillion.
Sanders, a leading progressive, separately told reporters there are, quote, 48 senators who support $3.5 trillion.
We have two people who don't.
So Sanders has been going nuts on all of this.
He said, it is wrong.
It's really not playing fair.
Two people do not have a right to sabotage what 48 want.
Again, I don't understand why Bernie Sanders can't count.
I mean, I do.
He's a socialist.
That makes sense.
Numbers are very, very hard for socialists because socialism is rooted in a complete unwillingness to look at numbers.
So, you know, when you have Bernie Sanders saying, I don't understand how two senators can trump 48.
52 senators, 52 senators, senator, trumping 48.
Because when you add Manchin and Sinema to the people who don't want to vote for the bill, that's 52.
That's a majority in the Senate.
The president has proposed extending the expanded $3,600 per child tax credit Which he funded for one year in the American Rescue Plan for another four years.
That would cost $450 billion.
The costs for providing paid family medical leave vary wildly.
The White House proposed $225 billion over 10 years in April, but the House Ways and Means Committee is pricing it at $500 billion.
And whenever you start coming up with these government estimates, they're always low by a factor of probably a third.
For Biden's child and infant care proposals, which include subsidies for poor and middle-class families for daycare and two years of universal preschool, like Head Start, which has been a complete and utter federal failure, the House wants to spend $450 billion.
And Manchin is saying, no, you are going to have to cut a lot of this stuff.
Apparently, Manchin is pretty comfortable with federal funding for universal preschool, but he'd use child and infant care proposals as a separate program.
By the way, all the way back in the day, Elizabeth Warren, you know, the senator, she used to be a rather interesting law professor at Harvard Law School.
She wrote a book called The Two-Income Trap, in which she explicitly opposed Universal child and family care, because she said what this does is it essentially creates a disincentive for women to stay home and take care of their kids if they want to do so.
It forces family into what she called a two-income trap, driving up the price of goods and services by requiring that both parents work as opposed to one staying home.
This is when Elizabeth Warren was actually a much more interesting human being.
Okay, so the Biden versus Manchin battle is really a pitched one.
And not only that, it's pretty extraordinary to what level people are angry at each other.
How angry is Bernie Sanders at Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin?
Here's how angry he is, according to Axios.
He actually withheld support for a joint statement condemning last weekend's protests against Senator Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona, because it also wouldn't include a rebuke of her political views.
So there was an attempt to put together a joint statement from Republicans and Democrats saying, do not follow people into bathrooms and harass them.
And Bernie was like, no, I think it's OK to follow people into bathrooms and harass them.
The only way that I will sign that statement is if you also say that Kirsten Stenema is a jerk.
If you say that she's a jerk, then I will say it's bad to follow her into the bathroom.
If you say she's not a jerk, or if you don't say anything, then it's OK to follow her.
It's it's unreal.
I mean, this schmuck, You know, it was one of his supporters who literally shot members of Congress at a baseball game not all that long ago.
And now Bernie's like, I won't even condemn people following a woman into a bathroom.
It's fine.
I mean, she has bad views.
According to Axios, the move is emblematic of the hostility between the progressive and moderate members who have been sparring over the cost and scope of President Biden's agenda.
Sanders wanted the statement to urge Sinema to draw a proposition to prescription drug reform, as well as Biden's $3.5 trillion social safety net expansion.
So again, Sanders communications director, Mike Casca, he asked that the statement be edited to include a preface, quote, while we hope Senator Sinema will change her position on prescription drug reform and support a major budget reconciliation bill.
Cory Booker was like, no, we're not doing that.
So Sanders said, I'm not going to sign.
Please cut Senate Democratic leadership team from the headline.
Pretty amazing stuff, truly.
I mean, the email exchange is pretty insane.
The fact that Sanders' team was like, well, you know, we're only going to sign on to violence is bad so long as we condemn the person against whom the assault was done, right?
That's pretty wild stuff.
But this is one of the reasons why basically Mitch McConnell's saying, I don't want to get in the middle of this.
Let them fight.
He's doing the Godzilla, let them fight.
That really is the strategy here.
So in a second, we'll get to all of the debt ceiling related issues, because there are many.
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Okay, so.
The debt ceiling debate, right?
This brings us all to the debt ceiling debate, and these two are intertwined.
So basically, the Republicans had said to the Democrats, we are not going to bail you out of the debt ceiling problem that you have.
You need to pass the debt ceiling, and you need to do it via reconciliation.
The reason the Republicans wanted the Democrats to do it via reconciliation is twofold.
One, Democrats can only use reconciliation two times in a given year.
That is the bird rule.
They can only use reconciliation two times in a given year.
If they have to do it for just a debt relief bill, then this means that they cannot use it three times, right?
It means that that becomes one of the issues on which they've used reconciliation unless they bundle it with their broader build back better nonsense package or bipartisan infrastructure package.
right? Unless they partner with one of those two. And those things aren't passing right now.
So this put Democrats in a bind. They didn't want to use reconciliation.
And also, they didn't want to use reconciliation period for the debt ceiling increase. Because when you do a reconciliation bill for a debt ceiling increase because of parliamentary procedure, basically for a wide variety of reasons, you get what is called a vote-a-rama, in which any amount of amendments can be proposed to a debt ceiling relief package.
And Democrats then have to vote up or down on all of those things. So Republicans would propose a lot of popular stuff. Democrats would vote it down. And then they'd all be on record voting against that stuff, which is really bad for them.
Well, that's it.
Legislators always have an incentive not to vote on specific issues but to vote on giant broad Overarching packages.
Because that way they can say, yeah, you know, I didn't like this one provision, but I did like the overarching bill.
You know, better to vote for that crap sandwich than vote against the crap sandwich.
What senators and congresspeople fear more than anything is single issue bills where they are forced to actually give their opinions on single issues, right?
They don't want that.
Because then they can be held accountable for those opinions.
That's what the Votorama would have done.
So the basic Republican strategy here was We are going to tell you to do the debt ceiling yourself.
Okay, then the time on the debt ceiling grew rather close, right?
We were like two weeks away from the debt ceiling.
And the Democrats started to panic because the Voterama would take longer than a week, right?
The Voterama could take a week, 10 days.
It's not, it's possible they wouldn't even get it done.
And then they started to see that as maybe an opportunity.
Maybe they could browbeat Republicans.
So if there was some sort of economic fallout from the debt ceiling, that if they were playing chicken, maybe it would be better for Biden to simply let the car go over the cliff on the debt ceiling and then blame Republicans.
This is sort of the going theory.
We'll drag you down with us.
And maybe they were able to convince Joe Manchin, right?
This is unclear.
Whether they were able to convince Joe Manchin to kill the filibuster for the debt ceiling increase.
So Manchin, for his part, said that he was not going to do that.
But maybe the reason that he said he was not going to do that is because he'd already heard from McConnell that we were going to push off the debt ceiling.
Here was Joe Manchin on this yesterday.
I implore them to engage, start working, work this out.
This should not be a crisis.
I've been very, very clear where I stand, where I stand on the filibuster.
I don't have to repeat that.
I think I've been very clear.
Nothing changes.
But for his part, Joe Biden, supposed moderate, was saying yesterday maybe we'll change the filibuster rules in order to pass the debt ceiling increase.
Are Democrats considering using a meter option to raise the debt limit?
Using a carve-out with the filibuster to raise the debt limit?
Oh, I think that's a real possibility.
Okay, so they started talking about killing the filibuster, which would of course have made the Democratic 50 votes plus Kamala Harris majority a lot more credible in terms of the stuff that it could do.
The filibuster prevents them from doing very, very radical stuff.
Okay, so this had been Biden's pitch.
Biden's pitch was, it's Republicans' fault if we hit the debt ceiling.
Now, again, that's not true.
Democrats can, anytime they want, pass the debt ceiling through reconciliation.
But, this had become a major talking point for the Democrats.
They would much prefer to talk about the debt ceiling than to talk about, for example, the actual Build Back Better plan, because the Build Back Better plan, they're busy battling that one out.
Plus, I have a feeling that behind closed doors, Joe Manchin was basically saying, listen, You've counted on me so far to hold the line when it comes to the Build Back Better thing.
But if we hit the debt ceiling, there's gonna be a lot of pressure on me to basically strike back by helping to kill the filibuster here because we can't let the government go into complete shutdown mode.
So I really think that probably what happened here is that McConnell went to Manchin and the basic deal was we're going to sign a short-term debt ceiling extension.
And that's going to give us two months to let you guys fight it out.
McConnell's like, fine, I'll let Manchin fight it out and Sinema fight it out and let those guys fight it out with Biden and Sanders.
Maybe they come to an agreement, maybe they don't.
But whatever happens next is on them.
And then if we hit December and they still haven't come up with the debt ceiling increase, then it's totally on them.
Because we even went along with the short-term with the short-term extension, and they still couldn't get it together in time.
Right now, it's completely on them, just in time for election season.
I think that McConnell also has his eye on the election in Virginia, because if we hit November, and if Youngkin beats McAuliffe in Virginia, the Build Back Better agenda is dead.
It's DOA.
It's dead on arrival.
There's just not enough moderate Democrats who are willing to sacrifice their seats on behalf of an agenda that's so unpopular, dragged Terry McAuliffe to defeat in Virginia.
Once we hit next year, by the way, ain't nothing getting done.
We may be entering the end of the legislative phase of Joe Biden's presidency already.
Because nothing's getting done in an election year.
And then if Republicans win the House, which they are very likely to do in 2022, ain't nothing getting done for the final two years of Joe Biden's presidency.
So we're already down at crunch time for the Democrats.
McConnell knows that.
And every day that Democrats are arguing with each other is a day where Democrats, number one, aren't getting anything done.
And number two, is a day where Republicans aren't in the headlines.
And the best thing for Republicans is not to be in the headlines.
The media and Biden had successfully ginned up and out upset, apparently, about the debt ceiling.
The Republicans were like, it's just not worth it.
So Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda is not popular, but if he could throw mud on the Republican hem, then maybe he could distract from the fact that his agenda isn't popular.
This is why, for example, Biden has been going out there and saying it's wrong and dangerous not to raise the debt ceiling.
Democrats are willing to step up and stop this economic catastrophe if Senate Republicans will just get out of the way.
But our Senate Republican friends are planning to block the vote to raise the debt limit by using the procedural power called the filibuster.
To say that in plain English, it means you have to have 60 votes when there's a filibuster.
60 votes, a super majority, instead of 50 to get anything done.
It's not right, and it's dangerous.
For his own part, Senator McConnell said, quote, it's not clear whether the Democratic leaders have wasted two and a half months because they simply can't govern or whether they're intentionally playing Russian roulette with the economy to try and bully their own members into going back on their word and wrecking the Senate. Okay, and so it's theoretically possible that Democrats now think that they have the whip hand with regard to McConnell by threatening to kill the filibuster over the debt ceiling, but I think that this was the entire deal.
I think that the deal that McConnell made with Manchin and Sinema, again, this is speculative, but I think it's given the incentive structures in play, it's probably accurate, that basically Manchin and Sinema probably went to McConnell and they said, if it comes down to the debt ceiling and we are seen as obstructing the debt ceiling along with you, then it's going to be very hard for us to push back against the progressives, but give us a little bit more rope And then whatever happens comes December is on Joe Biden.
I think that is is quite possible at this point in time.
So should McConnell be blamed for that?
I mean, you could say that he caved to a certain extent, because if he had held the line and maybe Democrats would have blinked first, and maybe they would have used the reconciliation process.
Or maybe Joe Biden just would have done what he's typically done, try to use executive action by minting a trillion dollar coin or something like that.
Or maybe Manchin and Sinema were actually wavering.
If Manchin and Sinema were actually wavering, then that meant that McConnell had lost a lot of leverage.
And so he sort of had to do what he could do here, push it off for a couple months, let the Democrats fight one another for the next couple of months.
And really not for the next couple of months, really for the next month.
It is currently October 7th.
The election in Virginia is less than a month away.
Again, a lot rides on that particular election.
So the focus is now back, bottom line, focus is now back on the Democrats.
It's no longer on the Republicans.
Okay, no more talk about the debt ceiling.
Because if we hit December and Democrats still have not been able to get this together, it is entirely on them at this point.
And that should be the constant drumbeat from the right.
We gave you what you wanted.
You wanted the extension, you got the extension.
Now if you can't put it together, it is all on you.
It is all, and by the way, if they do put something together, it's gonna be unpopular.
So it's kind of a lose-lose for the Democrats.
Okay, meanwhile, the Biden administration has yet to see a political issue that they will not make into a legal one.
It is an astonishing thing what the DOJ is doing right now, the FBI.
So the National School Boards Association, a little bit earlier this week, sent a letter to Joe Biden, essentially calling on the FBI to investigate people who are critical of critical race theory.
Saying that people who are getting rowdy, maybe even involving themselves in low-level criminal activity at school board meetings, are akin to domestic terrorists.
Which is pretty insane, given the fact that half the country burned down last year.
According to the National School Boards Association, America's public schools and its education leaders are under immediate threat.
The National School Boards Association respectfully asks for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.
Local school board members want to hear from their communities on important issues, and that must be at the forefront of good school board governance and promotion of free speech.
However, there must be safeguards in place to protect public schools and dedicated education leaders as they do their jobs.
NSBA believes immediate assistance is required to protect students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to active violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.
So they're looking for a reason why the feds ought to get involved because, of course, criminal activity is criminal activity at the state and local level.
If somebody assaults a school board member, that's not a federal crime.
That's a local or state crime.
You're going to go to jail for that on the local or state level.
The feds have nothing to do with it.
So why exactly is the NSBA appealing to the Biden administration?
Because they do wish to chill many of these conversations.
It is their goal to chill conversations about critical race theory.
It is their goal to prevent the feedback loops that have been really bad for many Democrats on local school boards around the country.
They say, quote, as these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.
Domestic terrorism and hate crimes?
Truly?
Seriously?
And of course, because this administration is in hock to the unions, Merrick Garland immediately asked the FBI to address the, quote, recent disturbing spike in threats against educators.
So we've now got the FBI involving itself, saying that the Justice Department will hold strategy sessions with law enforcement in the next 30 days and is expected to announce measures in response to the quote, rising criminal conduct directed towards school personnel in the nation's public schools.
Jen Psaki was asked about this at the White House.
She was asked whether you are actually targeting parents, not just the ones who are violating the law, but you're actually using the federal government to chill speech by targeting one specific type of real local level crime.
Does the administration agree that parents upset about their kids' curriculums could be considered domestic terrorists?
What the Department of Justice said in a letter from the Attorney General is that, quote, threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation's core values.
That is true.
These were threats against public servants, threats against members of the school board.
Regardless of the reasoning, threats and violence against public servants is illegal.
Okay, but that does not answer the question as to why the federal government is involved in that.
Nobody's defending threats against public servants.
The question is whether the federal government ought to be involving itself in local crimes of this nature and whether that has anything to do with chilling the entire issue.
Doocy said, something the school board's association is asking is for the administration to consider using the Patriot Act to consider investigating some of these school board protesters.
So would the administration be okay with the FBI using the Patriot Act to surveil these parents?
And Saki said, I don't speak on behalf of the National School Board Association, I speak on behalf of this government.
Well, then, why don't you answer the question on behalf of the government, since you work for the government?
Okay, the fact that this is being elevated to the federal level is disturbing.
We're being told that critical race theory isn't being taught in public schools, and then the minute that people start talking about critical race theory, and then some of the people who are involved in those discussions do criminal things, it immediately gets elevated to the federal level?
Is there any rationale for that on a criminal law basis?
I mean, it's pretty obvious at this point the answer is no.
Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the politically correct cancellation of the day.
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Alrighty, this coming Tuesday, October 12th, we are making backstage extra super duper exciting.
Instead of our usual daily wire studio, We will be live streaming our conversation on stage at the famous Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, doing what we do best, talking sense to you.
This will be an event and a live stream unlike any other we've done.
We are thrilled to be able to share it with all of you.
Plus, we'll be making some extremely exciting and awesome announcements.
You're not going to want to miss those.
There will be some big surprises, so be sure to tune in.
Join me, Candace Owens, Jeremy Boring, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clavin, and our live audience for a backstage like never before.
Tuesday's live stream begins.
At 8.30 p.m.
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Central, head on over to dailywire.com or Daily Wire YouTube to catch the show.
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So meanwhile, political correctness continues to run amok in our institutions.
So, Sage Steele is a really, really talented broadcaster over at ESPN, and she does the Noon Sports Center.
She's been doing Sports Center at ESPN for years.
She happens to be a biracial woman, and she was doing a podcast with Jay Cutler.
And she made some controversial comments.
Now, in the past, she's been pretty openly somewhat conservative, Sage has.
So the notion that Sage Steele was ever really hiding the ball on her politics is untrue.
And she's gotten blowback pretty publicly from people at ESPN about it.
Now remember, ESPN has become MSNBC with footballs.
ESPN spent years broadcasting whatever idiotic political statements LeBron James wanted to make, and then treating them as though they were some sort of Moses on the mountain moment.
Anything, anything dumb and left that athletes say is projected into the stratosphere by ESPN.
Its anchors spent four years making overtly political comments about Donald Trump, for example, to very little blowback.
Unless they said something so extraordinarily outrageous that it drew like intense fire.
Pretty much every day was just dominated by lies about policing in the United States, or about systemic racism in the United States.
ESPN went woke a long time ago.
So did Sports Illustrated.
Like, the entire sort of institutional sports media is way to the left of virtually all media, maybe including political media.
Sage Steele is an exception to that, right?
She's tweeted some things that tend toward the conservative.
And while she was on with Jay Cutler, she made a couple of comments.
She made one comment about Barack Obama.
She was asked by Jay Cutler about Barack Obama On a census form, saying that he was black as opposed to biracial, which he is, right?
Barack Obama is biracial.
His mom was white and his dad was black.
Sage Steele is also biracial.
Her dad is black and her mom is white.
And here is what Sage Steele had to say.
And she's like, well, what happens when you fill out your census?
I'm like, well, I don't know when the last time I filled out my census was, but if they make you choose a race, she's like, where are you going to put it?
I go, well, both.
She's like, well, you can't.
Well, Barack Obama chose black and he's biracial.
I'm like, well, congratulations to the president.
That's his thing.
I think that's fascinating considering his black dad was nowhere to be found, but his white mom and grandma raised him.
But hey, you do you.
I'm going to do me.
Okay, so how dare she point out the reality, which is that Barack Obama, you know, characterizes himself as purely black as opposed to biracial, and she literally says in that clip, you can do what you want, right?
That's fine.
But it's interesting how he characterizes himself one way as opposed to another.
Okay, fine.
Like, that is a fairly inoffensive comment.
When I say fairly, I mean, like, completely.
There's nothing offensive about that.
For her to say that she, who has the same racial status as Barack Obama, chooses to write mixed race on her forms, and Barack Obama does not, is sort of culturally interesting.
That's true, that is kind of a culturally interesting thing.
And it demonstrates how our society tends to box people in to single race thinking, as opposed to the reality, which is that a huge number of Americans in the United States are mixed race, and that continues to grow year on year.
There's nothing particularly controversial about that.
And then she had this to say about vaccine mandates.
So ESPN, Disney, they put down these vaccine mandates.
Like a lot of other major companies in the United States, Sage Steel is very critical of that.
Here's what she had to say.
I respect everyone's decision.
I really do.
But to mandate it is sick.
And it's scary.
So I get it to an extent that I think the mandate is what I really have an issue with.
And I don't know what comes next.
Um, but I do know for me personally, I feel, I feel like defeated.
Okay, and ESPN decided that they were going to suspend her over this.
So they issued a statement on Tuesday saying that Steele would not return to the network for a week, foregoing her noon spot on SportsCenter, and has been removed as host of the 2021 ESPNW Women and Sports Summit, taking place October 18th through the 20th.
So, um, that's interesting.
They said, at ESPN we embrace different points of view, dialogue, and discussion that makes this place great.
That said, that said, always that said, but we expect that those points of view be expressed respectfully in a manner consistent with our values and in line with our internal policies.
I don't see anything disrespectful about what she said.
She was giving her opinion on vaccine mandates.
It seems much more disrespectful that you are forcing her to get a vaccine to continue working at ESPN and forcing people to continue like that.
What's more disrespectful?
A person saying you will be fired unless you take this vaccine that you have questions about.
Or the person saying, I think that's sick that you're doing that.
Which one is more disrespectful?
Seriously.
Now listen, ESPN is a private company, they can do what they want.
With that said, would they have done this?
Had the situation been reversed?
And had the person who was speaking been hypercritical of President Trump?
Or been hyper sycophantic toward Barack Obama, which ESPN was for literally all the years that Barack Obama was president?
I have serious doubts about that.
The reality is that the heads of ESPN are all to the left.
ESPN is attempting to cater to a particular crowd.
That crowd tends to be toward the left, demographically speaking.
And so Sage Steele has to pay the price for that.
She put out a statement saying, I know my recent comments created controversy for the company, and I apologize.
We're in the midst of an extremely challenging time that impacts all of us.
It's more critical than ever that we communicate constructively and thoughtfully.
So that is, um, you know, she's, I fail to see what she says here that is fireable.
Like, truly.
I don't understand what she says here that is fireable or suspendable.
That did not stop ESPN from suspending her until, apparently, further notice.
I think there's a pretty good shot that ESPN ends up canning her at the end of this.
And I think the reason for that is because, by the way, I think the real reason for that is ESPN is trying to cut salary because they've been losing viewers hand over fist.
And I'm sure that Sage Steele has been working there for quite a while, makes good money over there, and they're probably just going to find some excuse to can her.
Because this is what ESPN does.
But again, it is just indicative of how stupid our culture is that if you go on air and you're a biracial woman, you say something people don't like about Barack Obama, you might lose your job over it.
Or if you say that you don't like VAX mandates, you might lose your job over that.
Meanwhile, that's not the only politically correct attempted cancellation of the day.
So, Dave Chappelle has a brand new special on Netflix.
And he sort of alternates his specials.
He does ones that are kind of woke and then highly praised because they're not as funny, but they're woke by the Rotten Tomatoes crowd.
And then he does ones that are actually funny, but politically incorrect.
So, he makes some comments in his new Netflix special about the phenomenon of TERFs.
I agree.
I agree, man.
Gender is a fact.
You have to look at it from a woman's perspective.
Look at it like this.
that biological women exist. Here is Dave Chappelle defending JK Rowling.
I'm team turf. I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact. You have to look at it from a woman's perspective. Look at it like this. Caitlyn Jenner, whom I've met, wonderful person. Caitlyn Jenner was voted woman of the year, her first year as a woman. Ain't that something?
OK, for this sort of stuff, GLAAD is now lambasting Dave Chappelle and they're calling for Dave Chappelle to be removed from Netflix.
Glad said Dave Chappelle's brand has become synonymous with ridiculing trans people and other marginalized communities.
Negative reviews and viewers loudly condemning his latest special as a message to the industry.
Audiences don't support platforming anti-LGBTQ diatribes.
We agree.
Amazing how the people who are very much in favor of expanding every quote-unquote right to encompass pretty much every activity do not include among those rights speaking what you think about things.
Then you ought to be deplatformed.
So amazingly beautiful stuff here from our censorious left.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
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