Welcome to this episode of Making the Argument. This is Hamilton here with Nick, down in Richmond,

Lydia on the Upper East Coast, Christian and Tina here in the studio. We appreciate you joining us for

this episode. We want to make sure that you all have the opportunity to be a part of our show,

and you can do that by joining the community chat in the description of this podcast.

We've got an exciting topic for you and some folks like Thomas Massey doing some

interesting things that I think do a good job of making a point. So at this point, I am going

to hand it over to Lydia to start us off. Thank you so much, Hamilton. So today's topic is a little

more complex. So I'm really going to be leaning on Christian and Nick to give us some of their

own personal experience and background with this one. We're going to be leaning on Christian and Nick to give us some of their own personal experience and background with this one.

We're going to be talking about the debt ceiling.

And it's kind of off-putting.

It's a little black pilling if you're not careful.

So we're going to try to look at it in the most reasonable and responsible and uplifting way possible.

So I am actually excited to get into that. I do have a bunch

of questions for everybody. So let's go ahead and get rolling. So the first thing I wanted to talk

about was Joe Manchin kind of discussing what he saw as possible potential moving forward with this.

He was really hoping that Democrats would negotiate with the

GOP on the debt ceiling and use the opportunity to fix the budget process. So I have here,

an article from the Daily Wire. I don't know if you want to pull that up, Hamilton. But I think

we're all familiar with Joe Manchin at this point. He's one of the more moderate, saner voices of the

Democrat Party, even though he just was over in Davos for reasons fully unknown to me personally.

But here he is talking about how he wanted to call his fellow Democrats to negotiate with

...