Hour 1 - So, What Comes Next?

Buck Sexton (0:00)

Welcome, everybody, Thursday edition of Clay and Buck kicks off right now, and we have a lot to discuss with you today. Thank you for being here with us.

Obviously, we're still figuring out a bit of what comes next. I don't mean us, although that's true, too. I mean the whole country. What comes next after the midterms? And we are very much planning to focus our sights forward onto next steps and what you can expect and what's going to be happening.

But a part of that is, I think, also taking full stock of, so what exactly has Congress been doing up to this point over the last two years? How has all of that been going? And a name that certainly, well, all of you will be quite familiar with, but Floridians still remain very proud of, for being, as I think is quite clear, the most successful governor of this recent era, Ron DeSantis. He appeared last night and gave some tough medicine, which is what we need right now. We need medicine, which makes things better, but sometimes it's going to be tough medicine. Tough medicine for Congress thus far, with, hold on a second, Trump's gotten a lot of blame, you can argue how much of it deserved and how much of it not, but a lot of blame over what happened on Tuesday. Okay, fine. He was doing a virtual tour of the ballroom yesterday. Trump, he doesn't get phased one bit. He's not moving an inch off of being Trump. So he is still unflappable for sure, and he's going to push forward, and he's going to take the L and come back and try to make it a W on the next thing. Which is the right attitude. Ron DeSantis here, though, wanted to point out, hey, hold on a second, where has Congress been in all this? This is Cut 1 Listen to him on Fox last night.

Ron DeSantis (2:01)

If you're going to do huge conservative things that are going to reorient the country for a generation, fine. But I saw no indication that the current group of Republican senators were interested in doing that type of bold conservative change. I mean, why haven't we done immigration? Shut off H-1B visas. Why haven't we codified Trump's immigration executive orders? Why haven't we stripped jurisdiction from the federal courts over deportation cases? There's so many things that could have been done. They didn't even attempt it, Laura, to say, if only we needed 50 votes, we would have done it. You don't have 50 votes for doing conservative things. You've never shown that you'll do conservative things even with 50 votes.

Buck Sexton (2:47)

Now, Clay, this is coming on the heels of, and look, I pay attention to everything in the online sphere, the back and forth over Tuesday. A lot of people are saying, why is Majority Leader Thune escaping so much? Now, is he escaping it? We're talking about it right here. By the way, it won't come on this show. I just want to tell you that right now. Some of you might be saying, why haven't you? I know some of you say this because I read your emails in your texts or your tweets. Why hasn't Thune come on the show? Why hasn't Clay backed him into a corner like Mike Pence and made him suffer the code red or whatever?

It hasn't happened because he won't come on the show and he won't defend his record. He won't talk about his time. We've asked him, he won't come on. So just understand that. How many Republican senators have we asked that won't come on the show, Clay? I think he's the only one.

He's the only one that I can think of who's a Republican senator, at least in recent. We haven't asked Susan Collins. Some of them we kind of haven't been on the top.

Clay Travis (3:46)

I think we did even ask those people. But some of them are trying. Susan Collins is a great example, Buck. She's trying to run in a state where being in conservative media doesn't necessarily help her.

Buck Sexton (3:59)

That's also why we didn't want to bother Sununu during his candidacy. We offered to have him on, but they were obviously he lost big time, bigly.

But I just want to be clear that we've tried to have Senate Majority Leader Thune on the program. And of course, he's Senate Majority Leader. We would be completely respectful. We're Republicans. We agree with the guy on a whole lot of things. But really the attitude, I think Ron DeSantis gets at this, the attitude of the Republican-held Senate over the last two years has been, since we don't have a supermajority, we're just going to do budget stuff and leave it at that. And there's a lot of area on this where, Clay, I think that's completely unacceptable. And for one thing, the Democrats, I hate using the word now unprecedented because they always use it and it's never true, but it is, the obstruction and the slow rolling of nominees, of judges, of all of these things is just at full tilt from their side. The blue slip process is idiocy, self-imposed idiocy. For those of you don't know, there's a blue slip that if it's a Democrat in a Democrat Senate seat and we're going to have a US attorney or a federal judge appointed there, they have to basically OK it as some kind of a gentleman's agreement.