The Bulwark Podcast - Liam Donovan and Brendan Boyle: The Great Grift

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Trump talked a lot more about Hannibal Lecter during the campaign than one of his actual top priorities: extending his 2017 tax cuts. With those $4.5 trillion in cuts set to expire by the end of the year, that's the first major item of business for congressional Republicans. But how they get paid for will affect people's lives. Tim takes a deep dive into the reconciliation process that would allow Republicans to make deep cuts to programs without having to work with Democrats. Plus, the billionaire plutocrats staffing the new administration and the potential for corruption.  Rep. Brendan Boyle and Liam Donovan join Tim Miller.

Everybody a couple of notes. First up, there was the Palisades fire in Los Angeles that started last night. There's now expanded the four or five fires around LA, Southern California. And so just want to send our thoughts out to the folks that are involved in that. At some level, people that have had to evacuate, I've had some friends who have had to evacuate. Producer Katie Cooper is out there and has been posting some pictures of some fires that look a little too close for comfort for me. We're hoping for the best for everybody on that front. I had the most minor experience with this. In Oakland, we had the apartment building right behind mine caught on fire and we had to evacuate one night, go to a hotel. And man, it's scary

stuff. Just kind of monitoring your phone, trying to look at the app and trying to see where the fire has expanded to, whether your house is in the, is in the target zone. So it is tough. I was already planning on doing a climate episode here in the next week or two. And so we'll be doing that and having a longer talk about this. As far as today's schedule, just a reminder on Wednesdays, I do the political fluffery with my buddies, Sarah and JVL over on the Next Level podcast. Every Wednesday, it's out Wednesday late afternoon usually. So make sure you subscribe to that feed or you go check it out on YouTube. We'll be doing the Gulf of America silliness, the Alene Cannon

horrors, Joe Biden's interview with Susan Page, all that kind of political stuff we'll be doing with Sarah and JVL on the next level. Today on Wednesday, sometimes we'll be doing fun longer form interviews about various topics. Today I wanted to do a double header and just get deep on the budget stuff because the actual substance of what is going to impact people's lives this year is the immigration bill, the tax bill, and potentially the government shutdown. It's all related to this congressional, whatever you want to call it, process called reconciliation.

And I've noticed I've been throwing around the word reconciliation a lot, and some of you might not even really quite get it. So I brought on my friend Liam Donovan to give us kind of a 101 of what is reconciliation and then the Democrats budget Ranking member Brendan Boyle in the house to talk about kind of the Democrats strategy and what sort of leverage they have on this So we're getting nerdy on budget stuff, but you know, I got some jokes in there for you We do some bro talk at the end. It's great. So stick around you'll enjoy it up next Liam Donovan and Congressman Brendan Boyle. Hello and welcome to the Bullock podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a budget doubleheader today. Uh, up first, a former aide to Senate Republicans. He's a political analyst, lobbyist and cohost of the Lobby Shop podcast. Also an active opiner on X and a buddy, Liam Donovan. How are you doing, man? Tim, it's good to see you. Thanks for having me. It's been a while. Long overdue. Long overdue. First inaugural visit to the pod. I've called you into service today as a Hill nerd expert, particularly on reconciliation. Cause what we've got coming down the pike,

in the non renaming the Gulf of Mexico category, in the seriousness category, we've got immigration, budget stuff, government shutdown, tax extenders, but it's all connected to this word reconciliation, which I've been like tossing around on the pod for the last month. And I realized we got to give people the basics, you know, we got to do how a bill becomes a law and then we can get into the strategy around it. But first, but

first, I feel like people deserve a palate cleanser, you know, if we're going to get really dorky on ways and means committee stuff, I feel like we deserve a brief palate cleanser first. So I want to play for you a take from one of the guest hosts on Fox News The Five yesterday. Let's take a listen. It actually is not the first time this has happened. They're calling the president, the president-elect bananas and crazy for coming up with this idea. But by the way, this is not the first time that America's tried to buy Greenland.

Back in 1867, Democratic President Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland for $100 million, which would be about a bill this, you know, in our day and age, $1 billion. Didn't happen, obviously, still very important. And as you mentioned, Jesse, has a lot of minerals, very important for our country. I think the president may be onto something. A lot of minerals. I know we're not fact checking anymore, according to Mark Zuckerberg, but I'm pretty, I'm pretty certain that Harry Truman was not president in 1867.

I don't know, Liam, what do you think about that? I'm kind of into this drunk history with Jojeane. Like this is, I could run with this because I'm genuinely curious. Like which elements of this has any, like, yeah, did something happen in 1867? Did something happen in, you know, the late 40s? Like I genuinely don't know and now I'm kind of curious. What I've learned here for you, because this isn't Facebook, so we can do a fact check, is Andrew Johnson's Secretary of State in 1867.

Andrew Johnson, America's worst president until Trump. His Secretary of State did, I think, flirt with, or mention or consider a Greenland purchase. Not Harry Truman, but close enough. Close enough. Before we do it, do you have any other hot takes? Gulf of America? What do you think about my take? I think that those of us in the Gulf States, Louisiana, we have real problems with the Gulf of Mexico with hurricanes, with coastal restoration, insurance rates. I think that Jeff Landry and Ron DeSantimonious should cut a deal with Trump and say,

Gulf of Trump, we'll call it Gulf of Trump, but you've got to give us $1 trillion for coastal restoration and insurance for climate change disasters. That's my- It's a big, beautiful Gulf. I like it. I mean, I heard somebody made a good point, and I think we're thinking too small. We need to go, somebody play out a gulfofcrypto.com. We got to think sponsorship. Sell it. I mean, I heard somebody made a good point. I think we're thinking too small We need to go somebody play out a gulf of crypto comm we got it. We got a thing sponsorship

We got a cell it I think that was sunny bunch. I guess I call it so much I think that's a source of revenue for a reconciliation conversation Gulf of crypto comm that's rename everything in the red states Like why are we calling it the great salt lake, you know, I mean that make it like NASCAR Yeah, the Citibank Salt Lake. All right, much to think about there. So, reconciliation. Just first off, fundamentally, what the fuck is this?

Like, why is reconciliation the only way the Republicans can pass things? And why can there be maybe one or maybe two? Let's just give us the basic fundamentals first. Working backwards, I think everybody understands from a schoolhouse rock's perspective, most people do when they think about it hard. It's nice to have control of the US Senate, like it gives you fancy titles and chairmanship and gavels and you can call yourself the majority leader and you can schedule the votes. But the way the Senate works, there's two fundamental

problems. Unless 100 senators agree on things, it takes a lot of time to do really anything. And even if you go through all the procedural steps, you still need 60 votes to do almost anything. That's because there's procedural steps to get to the final passage. Yes, maybe to pass that bill in the end, it only takes 50 plus one. The president, vice president can break the ties. It's really hard to do most things. And so what that means is when it comes time to fund the government, as we saw in December, the reason Republicans were very frustrated and the reason conservatives always get mad

at the end of the year at the end of the fiscal year is because, well, Democrats have a role in this process too, if you need to get 60 votes. The virtues of budget reconciliation, which is a process that was created about half a century ago and has sort of evolved over time, is that it's one of the few mechanisms by which Congress can do an end around, around the filibuster for a limited prescribed categories of issues specifically spending so appropriations revenue so tax and tariffs and the debt limit so there's sort of three flavors within reconciliation so you can't do a five-week abortion ban under reconciliation so the short answer is no but I want to get to that because there

there are interesting ways to come at things that you want to do, not facially, right? You can't just insert that in there. And there's a little grim to go through with that, but there are creative ways that you can get at policy issues through it. Like we're going to do a tax on any abortion after a certain number of weeks, you know? In all seriousness, and that's like sort of 301 stuff, but like at the 101 level. Back to 101. No, no, no. But the point is we've seen in the modern era, you know, like post 1990, whatever, let's

just say Bush era on reconciliation has become the preferred way, particularly in, you know, so-called trifacta when one party has unified control of Congress and the White House. This is the way things get done. And early on, particularly in the Bush era, we think back to the Bush tax cuts, the 0103 tax cuts, that was done through reconciliation, but it actually had democratic support in some cases, significant democratic support in some cases.

So it makes things easier. And as a sort of baseline case means that to the extent that one party has consensus, they can move things through within those parameters of tax, spending, and debt limit. Now, you can only do one reconciliation process per fiscal year. And this is where it gets confusing because we're talking about this year, next year, last year. We are currently in fiscal year 25, And we were even in calendar year 24.

We did not do a budget for fiscal year 2025. Typically that happens last year. Typically that happens in calendar year 2024 because in divided government. We being, it says we, the, the royal way, the government, the house Republicans, the government that by law, according to the budget act, Congress is obligated to, I mean that the white house produces its document, Congress passes its budget.

They did not do that. So the house Republicans did not do that. Republicans did not do that. I mean, Senate Democrats as well. Like, so the divided government did not do that. The precedent that we're looking at here is in 2017 where for the first time, because in 2016, calendar 2016, there was not a budget done in fiscal year 2017, Republicans, when they sort of caught the car, Trump won, they picked up both chambers or kept both chambers in Congress, they realized,

well, guess what? We can dust off that budget shell that didn't happen from the sort of ongoing fiscal year, we will use that to repeal Obamacare and we'll use the next one for next year to have a big beautiful tax bill. And part of that came true and actually if we think back eight years ago around this time they did the first step in the process. They passed a budget resolution. And I say shell because normally a budget is a big, huge document that has all kinds of details

and weighty issues. That's not what we're talking about here. I mean, it's just sort of numbers, but in order to get to the fun part where, or messy part where you're actually putting the package together, you have to quote unquote, instruct committees. You need to give sort of a number, a target number that tells the ways that whether it's the ways and means committee or any other authorizing committee that you need to raise or lower the deficit. You need to raise spending,

lower spending, raise revenue, lower revenue by X dollar amount. Only then, and once it's adopted mutually in both chambers, only then can you go down the road of actually putting together legislation. Okay. So, that's the first option. So, they could do a reconciliation using last year's budget, but they have to do it by the end of this fiscal year, which is what, April? It is September 30th. Oh, so they have until September.

And really, I mean, I don't think there's any real question. I think they will, to the extent that we're going to do one here and now, they will use that fiscal year 25 budget. I haven't heard anybody suggest otherwise. But to your point, that only is ripe until the end of September. Now here's the real issue. When we're talking about one bill or two, it's not whether you would use that second one when it ripens, because of course you would.

Why wouldn't you? You'd want to pursue that. The real question is whether you do tax upfront. Okay. So just, yeah. So let me just lay the land here. So that's the process. And just one more question on the 101.

It has to be budget neutral, a reconciliation bill? So that's the fun part. It does not have to be budget neutral, but you need to give yourself permission via these budget instructions for how much it can raise or lower the deficit. And the important thing here, and there's a really interesting sort of historical precedent here, if you think back to 2017, and this is remember, this is in the sort of the lowest of lows in the first year of the Trump presidency where it felt like the Republicans were never getting anything done.

Obamacare dreams fizzled. And you had on the budget committee, you had much more traditional Republican sort of spectrum here where you had the old school budget hawk in Bob Corker, who said, no, it's got to be, every dollar has to be paid for, we're going to do revenue neutral tax reform. And the other side, you had Pat Toomey, the supply side, or the art laugher disciple saying, no, no, no, it's going to pay for itself, it's fine. Where they ended up meeting in the middle was saying, okay, fine,

because the scorekeepers won't give credit for all these great macroeconomic effects, what we're going to do is say- Did those play out? The budget cuts? They did. They did not pay for themselves, indeed. Oh, they didn't pay for the- the drum tax cuts didn't pay for themselves?

Oh, okay. Look, I think that's going to be an interesting factor here is like Democrats pointing to those, you know, the old, but then there's going to be the same conversations again. But the upshot is where they met in the middle was 1.5 trillion and the reason we're even here back talking about this contextually is In order to fit six trillion dollars of tax cuts into a 1.5 trillion dollar bag They had to play with the dates such that most of it Particularly as it relates to the individual side you and I and anyone listening to this podcast our

Tax rates because it was not done in a permanent manner, because there were not long-term pay for it, it expires after seven years. So it expires at the end of this year. Now that goes to, I think, your underlying question, which is, it cannot raise the deficit in the out years. So in congressional budgetary scoring, we use a 10-year window. And so the short answer of this is, reconciliation can only do things for 10 years. Now, the reason why the corporate rate is permanent is that because some of the things

that the corporate community gave up, they sort of throw off revenue down the road. So that's permanent, but everything on the individual side was like temporary cuts, just pure candy. So you can give yourself permission within that 10 years to raise the deficit as much as you want. You could just say, forget it, like, these are good, tax cuts are good, they're gonna pay for themselves

and we're gonna put- Yeah, that's a king of debt. Yeah. Okay, got it. So all this is important because now we get to the next question, which is both the strategic political question about whether the Trump administration

and this Congress can get anything done and what exactly it would anything done and what exactly it would get done and what Democrats can fight. That's what we have Brendan Boyle up next to talk about. So their discussion right now for people who are not reading political huddle is there's a big debate about whether Stephen Miller and his gang, I was talking to Banner about this in my interview, the immigration hawks, the MAGA traditionalists, they want to use last year's budget to do a really fast bill that is immigration and drilling.

You know, and it's like, we are going to fucking deport people, we are going to, you know, fund a bunch of Sheriff Joe's, we're going to fund ICE and like, we're going to fund detention centers and camp, we're going to do all that. We're also going to drill and whatever, maybe they'll throw some other stuff in there. And it is just a funding bill to pay for that stuff. That's what they want to do. The more traditional Republican types, including Jason Smith, who runs the Ways and Means Committee, he's concerned that this herd of cats won't pass a tax bill. And then the second bill would be just this Trump tax cut extender, and then they'll deal with Trump tax cuts and

Doge and any stuff that's like pure fiscal. The Jason Smith Republicans who really only care about the tax cuts, don't care that much about all the Sheriff Joe's. They think that like the only way to keep all of the troublemakers in the house caucus in line is to put this all in one big thing. So they have to vote for it.

And if they don't vote for it, they will be betraying the Trump cult and they can use the power of Trump's bleats, you know, to pressure them into submission. So it's like, it's a strategic question, but I think the downside of that one big one from the mega perspective is well, a, they might get some shit they don't want in there and be forced to vote for it and B, who the hell knows, right? Like that's going to take a while. Like Trump might not get any actual wins for months and who the hell knows what happens

by then, you know? I mean, we might be invading Panama and like, you know, people might not be like, you know, might want to take the burden of the hand. So is that a good summary of like kind of the strategic debate happening between the sides? That's a good summary of the debate. And I think, and I think the the current debate, I mean the one or two bills is the MacGuffin, right? It's going to matter, but it's downstream from the real question, which is do you agree on tax? Can you agree on tax?

And how soon can you agree on tax? Because that's what it really boils down to is when are we going to do tax? And the Miller proposition is from a, you know, just from a tactical standpoint. Like that's, it's a tactical question really. If you want, as Republicans profess to want for, you know, the last several months, they want to do this out of the gate. They want to do first hundred days. That will not include a broader agreement on tax because they just don't, not only do they not agree, they don't even understand. If you this is this is I

Think puts in perspective. I did the math earlier this morning and of the members who were in the chamber in the house in 2017 So not that long ago eight years ago the people who were around to vote for the bill in 2017 that were sort of trying to extend theoretically of for the bill in 2017 that we're sort of trying to extend theoretically. Of 219 Republicans that are in the House right now, only 84 of them were around. Like a third of the conference. And of those, like several didn't vote for it. Like Stefanik didn't vote for it. Issa didn't vote for it.

You know, a handful of others didn't even vote for it. So most people don't have any idea what we're really talking about. Now if the ignorance were good and people didn't care about things like deficits, it would be easy. But the real issue is that when you have such a narrow majority and you do have people, you know, principled or otherwise, people that are like, no, we have to pay for this stuff, it's going to be really hard. And remember, as I said, whatever you do on the substantive side, we have to pay for this stuff. It's going to be really hard. And remember, as

I said, whatever you do on the substantive side, you have to agree on like the bottom line, the sort of macro picture first. So you can't even do the first part, that budget resolution that has the instructions until you agree on the bottom line. Now you got to get people to agree that like, okay, in this reconciliation bill with the taxes, we'll figure out the details later, but it's going to increase the deficit over 10 years by 2 trillion, whatever. I'm just taking a random number. But you gotta get like Chip Roy to agree on that upfront before you can even start doing

the details. Bingo. And that's the exact issue that's that Corker to me conversation. And here's the key. That's why Republicans got it done in 2017. And frankly, it's why Democrats almost almost lit themselves on fire with the Build Back Better bill, which was sort of resurrected as the IRA. But because they never had that conversation with Joe Manchin of what the bottom line is

going to be, what you had was Bernie Sanders and Mark Warner say, okay, well, maybe it'll be three trillion or something like that. Manchin was never on board with that. You have to hash that stuff out upfront, figure out how big your box is, and then you can put whatever you can in it and go with the trade-offs that lead to that. But that's the fundamental key. Now, you could always put an instruction of lower the deficit by $1 to the Ways and Means and Finance Committees, but that would be locking yourself into paying for everything. Well, the good news is we've got some lead negotiators, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy,

for the White House, who really deeply understand this process and want to do big cuts. And so I'm sure they'll just pop off on Twitter, like, guys, what's the big deal? We'll just pay for this. We'll find the Doge cut somewhere, the Department of Education, no biggie. And then they can just resolve that on X, right? Piece of cake. But I think to your point, like,

this really boils down to the strategic question such as it is, is do you need wins upfront? And if you do, you should, and this doesn't, this isn't exclusive of tax. If you can agree on tax things, do it. Like, find what you can agree on, you should, and this doesn't, this isn't exclusive of tax. If you can agree on tax things, do it. Like find what you can agree on, build consensus and make a move as quickly as possible because you just can't count on the future.

You don't know if and when things will go off the rails. Remember, because they kicked the can into this year, you still have to fund the government again, on a bipartisan basis with democratic help within the first hundred days, March 14th. Okay, so this is why we're getting to boil next. That's an interesting question, right?

Because that is, so this is the other context around all this, when you just sort of think about the timing, right? If they decide to go the route where they're going to negotiate through all this stuff, and they're going to go through ways and means, and it's going to take months, and you got to pay off the New York and California guys that want a salt reduction, and in the meantime, in March, you run up into a funding the government debate, which is separate but related, right? It's the same people. So it's the same troublemakers that you're dealing with, you know? And the Democrats, at least for now, are saying they're not going to bail them

out this time. I'm somewhat skeptical that they will have the fortitude to like sit through a government shutdown and watch March Madness, but we'll see. I don't know. Can these guys even fund the go and and doesn't don't those things relate? Like don't you need a win kind of because you have this you kind of know you have this failure coming in March. Here's where it gets interesting because it's not what Stephen Miller will tell you. It's not necessarily what you hear from Bannon, but like part of the virtue of doing a spending bill upfront is that remember you need 60 votes for the appropriations, the traditional appropriations process. And if you need 60 votes,

you're not gonna get money for the wall. You're not gonna get money for more defense without giving something up to Democrats. Like that bargaining that has to happen in the appropriations process, guess what? You have an easy button. You can do the things that you agree on. So like the reason we don't just CR in perpetuity, the reason we are CRs are like three months is because the defense hawks, typically there's enough members who care

about defense above all in both parties. You can't CR forever. So if you could plus up defense and plus up border or whatever, get your wall money before that, like come out of the gate. That's part of it. Like it's kind of unspoken, but that's a big factor here because if you could plus those things up, then who cares if you like Republicans, if they could agree on a CR and stick together and get it out of the house

That puts the Senate in the position where what are Democrats gonna filibuster that and and like shut down the government probably not Are they able to do that if you got a bill out of the gate? like if you if you went to bill strategy like I don't like that terminology because I think it misses the point but There are tax things that you agree on that you could put in there Like you could make Jason Smith happy at some level by taking, remember there was a Jason Smith tax bill last year that was meant to serve as a bridge between the expiring provisions and the end of this coming year. Remember the cliff that we're dealing with isn't until the end of this year.

This Congress is not prone to turn its homework in early and without the, the forcing of a deadline, that's why anybody who's realistic about tax, like you're probably going to need to be either up against the fiscal year deadline or up against the calendar year deadline to get it done. And if you've done nothing with the first six, nine, 12 months, what was the point of this two bill strategy? And I mean, and this is where let's just get into, you know, a little parlor game. That's like kind of what I see, right? Like, I don't know how they do anything before nine months, unless they try to jam through

some relatively inoffensive immigration and energy thing, or inoffensive to Republicans. There would be plenty of offensive immigration things in there to me. But but like, I don't know, what do you think about that? No, I think that has to be the rubric. It has to be and Trump has given them license to do this. He has certain instincts that are better than than the politicians and his instincts are right here. Like, he's not helping in that he's sort of like sounding off whoever talked to him last and made a persuasive case. He's like, yeah, let's do that. And then the

next day is like, like, these guys seem like they have a good idea to like, whatever, I don't really care. That's kind of where this has landed. Like one bill, two bill, I don't care. You shouldn't care. What you should care about is what can we agree on and let's get some wins. Johnson knows his conference. Jason Smith knows his conference. The politics of House Republicans are probably such that they need to say we're going to do one bill.

When they go down that road and realize, okay, we can only agree on so much, then you kind of call the audible as you go. But that instruction piece is the important part. And so, I think what you could imagine happening here that kind of solves the problem is, again, a nominal instruction to the Ways and Means and Finance Committee, like something that wouldn't be a big deficit number, but that would just mean that whatever they put into the tax piece has to sort of be offset. As I said, Smith has a bill, the Smith-Widen bill, which was sort of the trading of the extensions of corporate tax policy that had rolled off for some plus ups in the child tax credit. I don't think you can get

Republicans to agree on the child tax credit piece, because that's something for the broader discussion, but you could certainly take the tax piece of what they agreed on and pass through the House last year, put that in here, you've built that bridge to the end of the year. You have to get into this process. This risk for Republicans is you failed to launch.

I mean, isn't that the most likely thing? That you failed to launch? I think you have to get started to even establish where your trouble points are. And the more you sort of, we're literally like arguing how many angels are dancing on the head of a budget resolution. It doesn't matter. Just figure out what you can agree on and go for it.

All right, y'all, we're just through Christmas and I have been updating my podcast or my YouTube or wardrobe. All right? You know, some more comfy shirts, some more comfy pants. If I'm going to sit here and deal with the nonsense that is the next administration, my pants are at least going to be comfortable. And so I'm starting with the sponsor of today's episode, Public Rec.

Public Rec is about making sure you stay comfortable no matter what your day throws at you. They have so many great style options that are perfect for just hanging around the house, drinking beers on the golf course. I don't go on the golf course, so I'm just going to trust that that's true. But you know, that's more of a straight man activity. Or even when you need to impress the boss at the office. Whatever you choose you'll be blown away by how comfortable they are for a limited time Our listeners can get 20% off your entire order with code the bulwark at public rec.com That's 20% off when you use promo code the bulwark at public rec.com

You know, usually when you're ordering pants, they got the small medium large extra large You never know what the sizing is going to be like. But with public rec, you get to select the exact width and length you need. Public rec pants also come in unique colorways from navy, dark olive, stone gray. And the proprietary blend of performance materials provides the perfect combination of breathability and stretch. So make your New Year's resolution a comfortable one. No more pants that pinch, tug, or annoy. For a limited time you can get 20% off at Public Rec by using code THEBULLWORK at checkout. Just head to

publicrec.com, use code THEBULLWORK and you're all set. And when they ask how you found them, be sure to mention our show. It really helps us out. Find your perfect fit and never compromise on comfort again public rack where comfort rules The budget offsets besides, you know the random shit the doge finds To me, it's like there's gonna have to be health care cuts in here, right? I mean, what do you think it is? Here's the fundamental question and you're it's playing out quietly But it is how do they grade themselves? How do they agree? But it is how do they grade themselves? How do they agree? Mutually to score these things and if you listen to what chairman Mike Crapo from Idaho the the chairman of the Finance Committee is saying

He's selling the idea and he's not wrong typically we don't pay for Ongoing tax policy like the current policy baseline That is a nearly five trillion dollar question if you just say current like the current policy baseline. That is a nearly $5 trillion question. If you just say current policy is current policy, this is people's own money. We're not going to sort of like- So their plan is $5 trillion. King of debt, man.

$5 trillion tax cuts. We're just not going to pay for it. And as crazy as that sounds, Trump is- No, Trump's fine with that. Trump's fine with that. The question is, is Chip Roy fine with it? And that's the real question is, who out of the 219 where are your trouble spots there?

And how do you sell the politics of this? Because I think the revenue pressure and the appetite and desperation to find the loose change in the couch cushions of the federal government comes down to, OK, what are you obligated to pay for? And again, maybe they split the difference, but if they can agree, okay, we don't have to pay for current tax policy, then all of a sudden that takes a huge weight off of that pressure.

And then, you know, that's just to ensure that no one, that you and I don't pay more in taxes or any of our- I got low taxes here in Louisiana. I'm not that worried about it. Relatives or what have you. Everyone's taxes go up, which is another way of saying like, Tax Act and Jobs Act really did reduce almost everyone's taxes. Didn't necessarily get credit for that.

But the flip side is when it goes away, everybody's taxes go up. Politically, that's untenable. So part of the problem with the two bill argument or one bill argument is a tax bill is going to happen. The only question is, do you have to bargain with Democrats to get it? Well, and this goes to my next question. What do you think?

How much leverage are the Democrats going to have here? Like a boil up next? Because I think that they're going to have a lot. The margin is so small, but you know these guys better than me. Maybe they'll all get in line for Mr. Trump one time. Let me give you the model. This won't happen, but this is what they should do. This is, this is the ideal situation.

The model is don't do what you did in 2017, which is go in without a plan and spin your wheels for seven months before realizing you just wasted it. You take the model that Democrats said they gave them no political benefit, but from a substantive matter, if you think about what Democrats did in 2021, they came in, they immediately passed a budget resolution. Now they had a leg up and they had the urgency of the COVID moment and they had a plan that had been relatively socialized and sort of campaigned on, but they immediately moved on the American rescue plan.

Republicans didn't think they could do it. The idea that with a 50 seat Senate majority with people like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, people didn't think they could get that. Republicans thought they'd have a lot of leverage in there. They were trying to negotiate. Democrats passed it. That passing it set the tone and put Republicans on notice that if you don't bargain with us, if you don't help us,

we're gonna go back and do more by ourselves. So that was how you got the bipartisan infrastructure law. Democrats are way more agreeable though. No, they are. But this sets up the model for the theoretical virtues of the two bills is if you can demonstrate a baseline level of legislative competence of Trump getting the stragglers in line. You, you laugh. Well, shit. Well, shit, Liam. I mean, if I could bench for us 300, then you know, I'd be doing better at the gay bar

on the weekend. It should not be that difficult. If you can, if you can get out of your own way to pass. Yeah. It's pretty good for these boys. You pass something that, that opens up, you know, leasing, throws off revenue that way, it offsets some of the border and wall spending, you throw in some stuff for defense. It's not that difficult to find what Republicans could agree on.

You could even layer in some of the tax pieces that I mentioned from the Smith-Widen bill, but you have to do something that puts Democrats in a position where they are inclined to help because remember Trump has things he wants to do that actually Democrats aren't against taxes on tips, things like that. This to me is a big question actually, not what the Republicans can prove competence. They can't whether the Democrats have the fucking resolve to be like, nope, nope, not dealing with you, not dealing with you because I don't think that they do. I think you saw it with the Lake and Riley stuff that's going on right now.

I mean, even listening to like people like AOC, I think there's a recognition that they just can't be seen as reflexively against policies. Why though? The Republicans were seen as reflexively against everything that Obama and Biden did. They suffered no consequences for it. I think it's less about whether there be consequences suffered more that the repairing the party's image that Democrats need to do is just different than the needs and capacity of Republicans to prove their

image but I think there's a recognition that things are seen that are seen as populist and are seen as politically effective. Democrats have to change their tack on those things but the upshot is, I think the virtue of doing what you can now is that there are lots of things that Democrats can and probably would work with you on if you can put them in a position where there's pressure. And remember, whether it's Joe Biden and his budget or Kamala Harris and her campaign propositions, Democrats actually agreed with, they wanted to extend 60, like about $3 trillion of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act policies. They wanted to extend that.

So the way this would go at its best is work with Democrats on the things that are bipartisan overlapping with the leverage of being able to go back and do everything else on a partisan basis in that, in that second bill. But the problem is without the forcing mechanisms of the urgency of running up against a deadline, it's just really hard to, to stand something up right now and come up with these sorts of, if you say, oh, we're going to do it all at once, well, that's fine. But you're probably going to be waiting until the end of the year. Yeah. All right. Final thing. I like your Pollyanna version.

I don't think it's gonna happen. Liam Donovan, Crystal Ball, does the government shut down in March? Do these guys have either of these bills, one or two or anything passed by Memorial Day? They won't have, I don't think the government shuts down for any, I mean, you might see a partial, you know, you can do like the CR most of it and the parts we can't agree on you shut down.

But I don't think it'll be I don't think it'll be a significant shutdown. You never put it past him. But that's part of the problem is it like the last Trump shutdown was so pointless, like it just kind of like ran its course. At this rate, I wouldn't expect passage by Memorial day. They need to decide not one bill, two bill. When do you want to bill? Because if that's the goal, if the goal is to pass something by Memorial day,

that's fine, but you just need to decide then if we haven't agreed on things by March, we just got to go. I think they will. I think there will be a recognition at a certain point that the longer you wait, the harder things get. But I just think people need to understand that if you intend to move a tax bill in the first tranche, that it won't be a sort of universal deal that covers the $5 trillion in policy that we're talking about.

All right. I got my big box popcorn out. We're going to be keeping you around. You're always a little bit more, I don't know, a sun kissed about potential options than me. And sometimes my cynicism, I get surprised. So we'll see how it all shakes out. I think Mike Johnson had a better showing than I might've expected even hours before it played out.

And that should tell you that if you can narrow it down to a limited group of holdouts, I think Trump can turn the screws in ways that would be formidable. But the problem is, he can't help you at this stage. He's the closer at best. Yeah, I do think that eventually they get something. I don't know what it is because of this reason,

is that in the end, people are going to be loath to want to be seen as the turd in the Trump punch bowl. But I think it's going to be dicey on the way there. And I think once one thing is passed, it's going to be a shit show once one thing is passed. Anyway, Liam Donovan, thank you so much, my man. We'll be talking to you again soon. Up next, Congressman Brendan Boyle. All right. We're back with Democratic member of the House representing Pennsylvania's second

congressional district, which covers Northeast Philly. Go birds. He's the top Democrat on the Budget Committee and a member of the Ways and Means Committee. It's Brendan Boyle. How you doing, Congressman? Hey, great to be with you. Yeah. Welcome to the pod. Um, we just had Liam explain the basics of reconciliation, you know? That's exciting stuff. How it all becomes a lot of stuff.

So if people have stuck around or fast forwarded to you, I want to focus in this conversation from your vantage point on kind of how the Democrats are going to handle, uh, dealing with Republicans on these issues, countering them, maybe dealing with them. I don't know. And so I want to start with, as a ranking member on the Budget Committee, what tools are at your disposal in the minority? In particular, it's going to come to these one or two big budget bills.

Yeah. So one actual quick word on reconciliation before we mercifully move on to your question. A very easy way for people to just remember about reconciliation, it's a way to avoid the filibuster. Right. Simply put, that's it. It's a way to pass things in the Senate with simple majority because of their goofy antiquated rules.

So there are all these sorts of rules though that come with reconciliation that the majority party has to follow and that actually is the beginning of the answer of your question. Making sure that we attack the things that they are doing that don't qualify for reconciliation. Republicans successfully did that to us four years ago in a number of ways when it came to build back better. But if we take a step back from that, which is kind of processy, but important, on the larger picture messaging, we have to do this time exactly what we did eight years ago

when it came to Trump's tax cuts and his ultimately failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And that was simply point out to people, what they're trying to do is take away health care from tens of millions of half trillion dollars of tax cuts, promising one and a half trillion dollars of cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That was in the budget continuing resolution that the Republicans passed, the internal agreement. I always love this, by the way, the media will breathlessly report Republicans reach an agreement. They finally reach

an agreement amongst themselves. With themselves. So congratulations. And didn't actually even have to put their vote on the line for it. It was a private agreement. Yeah. But they did put it down on pen and paper, which is interesting. Four trillion dollars of cuts they commit themselves to.

Two and a half trillion discretionary, which is, again, annoying Capitol Hill speak for basically most of the things government does, and then one and a half trillion for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those will be deeply unpopular if they really actually follow through. You're also on the Ways and Means Committee. First hearing is coming up here next week on the Trump tax cut extension. But at some level, the political level, I find funny because throughout the campaign, it didn't feel like there was a huge focus on the Trump tax cut extension. But at some level, the political level, I find funny because

throughout the campaign, it didn't feel like there was a huge focus on the Trump tax cut extension as the prime issue. And, you know, that's the first thing these guys are leaning into. It's going to be part of whether they do one or two reconciliation bills, extending the tax cuts are going to be a part of that. But do your point is to do the, this offset, which is, you know, going to require a lot of cuts, I think, particularly to Medicaid. They're doing it just at the baseline to extend the tax cuts that already passed.

I mean, is that your assessment of what they've got planned and how do you plan to message against it? Yeah. So first, I would completely agree. I think it's fair to say the Trump campaign was not a policy heavy campaign, not exactly releasing a lot of policies and plans, a lot of talk about Hannibal Lecter, not as much talk about extending the Trump tax cuts. But it is funny, isn't it, that no matter what Trump or folks in the right wing talk

about, always the top priority is delivering those tax cuts for the people who have been financing and funding their campaigns. That was the top priority in 2017 in Trump 1.0, and it's the top priority again this time around. So I think for them, it's the single most important issue. When you look at the tech pros, when you look at people on Wall Street and others who held their nose and went along with Trump, this was always going to be the payoff. It was going to be deregulation combined with

extending the Trump tax cuts, 83% of which go to the richest 1% of Americans. It kind of reveals just the fraudulence of the mega populism at some level. You know, I mean, say what you want about the tenants of Steve Bannon. Like at least, you know, he's for increasing taxes on the top 1%. These guys, the populism a lot of times is rhetorical, and then the policies don't really match that. How do you guys get that to sink in? And it's both a messaging question, but also a process question over on the Hill. Like, how can you make the case, you know, to people that these guys are betraying their promise to working class Americans?

We obviously were not successful in doing that in 2024. One of the things I learned is that it's really hard to warn people about a hypothetical. Sometimes, unfortunately, maybe it's just human nature. They actually need to see it happening before they respond. I remember I was having one interaction with a voter in Philadelphia. A younger guy, a Latino, was talking about how he had, in his opinion, more money in his pocket and costs were less five years ago than they are today. And he didn't like Trump, he disagreed with Trump on immigration, and he was still gonna vote for him on that basis.

And I tried to tell him, like, you know, most of their agenda is actually about extending tax cuts for the richest 1%, possibly cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to help pay for it. Just didn't work, just wasn't interested. I think sometimes people actually have to see it happen. And you know, in 2017, I will take some hope in this regard.

In 2017, in the history of polling, the only tax cut that has ever been unpopular was the Trump 2017 tax cuts, the TCJA. You go back to the JFK tax cut in the early sixties, majority approval. This is all from Gallup, by the way. Reagan tax cut in 81, hugely popular. Bush tax cuts, both in 2001 and 2003, were also popular. The Trump tax cuts consistently polled around 40% approval, 55% disapproval in 2017. That coupled with the attempt to take away Obamacare, those were the two

twin reasons why we took back the house in 2018. I'll talk about some others inflection points. So they've got to pass this bill at some level with the tax cuts. There's going to be some immigration stuff and some doge stuff in there. I want to talk to you about that. But the other thing that's happening, you know, probably before they get that done is having to keep the government open. I was funding the government and they'd extended that yet through March.

I'm wondering how you, as kind of ranking member, are seeing that fight coming up. I know that there was some talk from Speaker Jeffries about how there's not gonna be any more bailouts on this sort of thing. Republicans needed Democratic votes to give the government open over Christmas. What do you think is the lay of the land on that?

And how much do you plan to hold the line to that promise to make the Republicans fund the government themselves? Yeah, look, any time the last couple of years, Republicans in the majority needed to pass anything, they needed Democratic votes to do it. I mean, anything of substance. They are not a functioning majority. They need democratic votes for each and every one of those major items. So that gives us leverage and I'm not a cheap date. I don't know why we as Democrats would give any yes

vote unless we're making sure that our priorities are also being met. So that's my approach. I know it's Hakeem Luthor-Jeffreys. What priorities? Deal with me. So first and foremost, I mean, the attacks that are being talked about on going, reopening the Inflation Reduction Act, like what we did on energy transition, those sorts of things, complete non-starters. I mean, I will not vote for one dime of cuts in those areas. We talked about the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was bipartisan. The Senate wasn't bipartisan in the House, largely.

Any attempt to claw back those dollars, complete non-starter. If you're talking about cutting Medicaid, which, by the way, most of that money in Medicaid nowadays goes to pay for nursing homes. A lot of people don't realize that, yeah, it's talking about health care for the working poor, but it's also paying for A lot of people don't realize that. Yeah, it's talking about healthcare for the working poor, but it's also paying for a lot of grandmas and grandpas who are at nursing homes as well.

So those would be some of the priorities. Certainly there are many other, but I don't see why we as Democrats would give an inch on any of this if they're gonna come to us and provide the votes necessary to pass unless we make sure that we're having our priorities met. You I think had expressed some openness to cutting a deal with them in exchange

for getting rid of the debt ceiling forever. Is that right? Yeah, so I've been pushing for many years now my bill the Debt Sealing Reform Act. You know the debt ceiling is crazy. It's an accident of history. There's this fairy tale that's told about it that the founding fathers in my district in Philadelphia conceived of the debt ceiling so that we would have the sober conversation on debt. It's a great story. It's total BS.

It came about in 1917 and it was by accident. We were going into World War I, about to enter it. Treasury didn't wanna come to Congress each time they had to pay a specific debt. So they created this concept of the debt ceiling to make it easier for them to meet the debt obligations that we had already incurred. And it's really only since the Tea Party Congress won

in 2010 that we have seen the debt ceiling weaponized as this unbelievably destructive threat against the American worldwide economy. So I want to end that dysfunction once and for all. Should we end the dysfunction though? Why they're in charge, I guess is my question. I mean, if the dysfunction is mostly being caused by Tea Party Republicans creating problems for the Trump administration. Should you be in the position of helping them resolve that dispute? I guess is my question.

So Tim, here's the problem though with that. There's an asymmetry here. When there's a Republican in the White House and Democrats control Congress, people know we're not irresponsible enough to actually threaten and follow through with blowing up the American economy by not raising the debt ceiling. And for the first time in American history, our nation would default. People get that, like, we're actually not going to do that. However, when the situation's reversed, and there is a Democratic president, as we saw with Obama and Biden, when there's a Democrat in the White House and there's a Republican Congress,

they really are crazy enough and have enough crazies on their side not to raise the debt ceiling. So my view is I'm not looking to do Donald Trump any favors. Don't get me wrong. If we look at our long-term interests, both as Democrats, but also as Americans, if Donald Trump wants something and wants us to raise the debt ceiling, then one of the things that we should negotiate

for is, all right, we'll raise the debt ceiling, but not just this time. We need to permanently take this off the table to make sure it's not used against a future Democratic president. Maybe this is my darker angels coming out here your congressman, but don't people need to see the consequences? Look, you're talking about that guy you talked to in Northeast Philly. Like, don't people need to see the consequences of what they elected though for a little bit? I just, I'm skeptical that Democrats are going to have the intestinal fortitude to let these guys wallow in their own failure.

And I do wonder what you think about that. I mean, how you balance letting them wallow in their own failure. Yeah. And I do wonder what you think about that. I mean, how you balance letting them wallow in their own failure versus the obligations that you mentioned that the Democrats seem to be the only ones who feel. Yeah, you're speaking to my Philly nature, which is- Throw some batteries at them. Listen, attitudinally, I agree with you. Debt ceiling is one because the consequences are so catastrophic. I mean, no economist has explained to me how we would actually come back from this. So I would put

that off to the side as kind of a special example. Okay. What about the government shutdown? Yeah, that's different. We know that we can weather government shutdowns. Unfortunately, in my decade here, we've suffered through a lot of them. You can recover from those. And I'm of the attitude, they're the majority, let them carry the votes. I was willing to go along with the government shutdown last time, especially when they went back on the very bipartisan agreement that they negotiated. And, you know, unfortunately, they didn't have to suffer the consequences of their actions back in December, but we may well see that actually happen in Mid-Barch.

In fact, as we sit here right now, I think there's a much greater than 50-50 shot of a government shutdown. Pete Slauson Maybe that first weekend of the March Madness. David Larkin Yeah. Pete Slauson You know, give you some time, Thursday and Friday, you know? David Larkin I have missed the two best days of the tournament. Finally, we've transitioned to what I really want to talk about sports

The best two days of the tournament are that Thursday and Friday? And I have not been able to see much of that because we're typically in session for whatever reason those days So, you know that if I'm sitting in my office not that you want them to shut the government down Then they're gonna if they're gonna do it There'd be worse days the other two issues that relate to this budget, these budget conversations are immigration for the possibility that they're going to throw immigration in with the tax cut bill, which I think seems very possible at this point. And DOGE, or whatever we want to call that.

On DOGE first, I'm all for cutting red tape. I'm still a Jeb Bush Republican somewhere inside of me. But there's so much corruption going on with these guys. Like the idea that you have one of the biggest government contractors as a point person on this and that they are going to be targeting certain companies from tariffs and targeting certain companies for cuts while his companies are still receiving government funding. I mean, this is the swampiest shit that I've ever seen. And I do wonder how you kind of navigate potentially

dealing with those guys on streamlining government things that make sense while also making sure the public knows the extent of the corruption that is coming down the pipe. They are great brifters. And and to me it's pretty obvious. So how other people can't see the fact that they're grifters is always kind of astounding to me. I said, look, if anyone in this administration is really sincere about actually identifying areas

where there's inefficiencies in government, where there's government waste. I mean, go back to the 1990s. That was a big part of Clinton Gore's first term, which a lot of people have forgotten about it. Vice President Gore headed that up. They made some real progress. It's been about three decades. I think that if they really want to work with us on a serious effort to find inefficiencies and eliminate them. That's great.

I would welcome that. Forgive me if I'm more than a little skeptical that that's what they're really about. And the idea that you can find trillions of dollars of government waste is nonsense. We all know that if you're really going to be talking about cutting trillions of dollars, there's only a few places where that money is.

Social Security, Medicare, and Defense Department. Defense Department is about $900 billion a year. Social Security and Medicare, a lot more than that. Three of them comprise the vast majority of our federal budget. In order to do the sort of things they want to do and tackle the deficit and debt problem, those are the areas they would have to cut. And that's just the simple reality. That's not a democratic talking point. It's math. And can Democrats get back the populist mantle a little bit by going after these guys? Going

after, I don't know, sometimes I feel like the oligarch class kind of feels like a high falutin word, but going after these rich assholes that are trying to get the Harris maybe is a better way to say it. It is amazing how almost everyone who's coming into the Trump administration is a billionaire. Forget top 1%. Top 1%, I think if you make $5, $6 million a year, you're in the top 1%. Someone making $5 million a year is like an impoverished case to this crowd. So I mean, these really are plutocrats and they unfortunately use the language of populism

to con enough people that Trump is really fighting for them. And yeah, I mean, sometimes people need to actually see that, what the results of that are as opposed to those of us attempting to warn about it preemptively. Last one on the dealing question is immigration. Ruben Gallego, I think that he spoke co-sponsoring the Lake and Riley Act and I think Fetterman too over in the Senate. This is kind of a complicated thing to navigate, right, as Democrats, right?

There's going to be certain immigration bills, you know, punishing undocumented immigrants that committed violent crimes, like, it seems like a no-brainer, right? And then some of that stuff is going to be all mixed up in a lot of the really pernicious attacks on sometimes even legal immigrants. Like we saw that with regards to, you know, Haitians and, you know, who the hell knows what dastardly stuff Stephen Miller has in mind. So, how do you navigate kind of that question, both politically and legislatively? Yeah, well, a couple of thoughts on this. First, you brought up immigration earlier in the context of reconciliation. Let's not forget that four years ago, Democrats attempted to address immigration in what was the Build Back Better Act and the Senate parliamentarian stripped it out. No one's bringing that up today. I actually

think Republicans are going to have a tough time dealing with, aside from just increasing money for enforcement, that they would be able to do. But any of the kind of policy changes they're talking about, they're really going to attempt to do it in this reconciliation bill. I think they're going to have real challenges. So that's the first thing. Second, speaking kind of more broadly on the issue, frankly, I've always thought that President Obama had it right when he talked about we're a nation of laws and we're a nation of immigrants. We can be true to both. I myself am the son of an immigrant. I mean, all four, my father and all four of my grandparents were born elsewhere. I revere that we are a nation of immigrants.

But yeah, if someone is here undocumented or illegally and they committed a serious offense on top of that, of course they should be deported. I think there's widespread agreement when it comes to that. But at the same time, we as Democrats should not ever go along with the gratuitous, really ugly sort of rhetoric and the stuff that we saw directed toward Haitians in Ohio during the campaign, which is pretty clearly racist. The irony is, by the way, and this is anecdotal, we have a Haitian-American community in my district.

Some of the hardest-working, most solid family people I know happen to actually be those Haitian immigrant families. Again, you don't want to generalize, but this is actually a pretty positive perception that I have of that community. But of course, it wasn't really about immigration. It was going against the immigrant group that's black. So I think that as Democrats, we can get this right. Ruben Gallego is one of my best friends

in Congress. We came in together and I know we're both pretty like-minded on this issue. I want to do a little bit of straight politics and some bro talk to close it out. The president, President Biden, who's still the president, you wouldn't even know with the president-elect changing the name of golfs and everything already before in there. But President Biden said in an interview this morning that he does think that he probably would have won if he had stayed in. I'm wondering your thoughts on that. And also, you know, being from PA, you know, being from Northeast Philly, everybody's got a theory on what Democrats could have done differently. I'm wondering what your theory is on what the party could have done differently to win that key state.

Yeah, I probably know person sat through more TV campaign ads than I did. I'm in the Philadelphia media market. We were inundated from May on literally every single commercial break. I'm also a white guy who watches a lot of sports. So I was subjected to more Trump ads. I mean, I saw the anti-trans ad. I must have seen that. No exaggeration. I might have seen it 500 times. So I consumed a lot of political information, also was sitting in on focus groups and looking at the data pretty much daily. And I'll say this, a couple thoughts.

First, I don't think it's an accident that at this point in history, every single party in power from Europe to North America to Asia to South America has suffered at the ballot box. You saw it, whether it was the conservatives in the UK in July, or the liberals in Canada right now, or American Democrats. The worldwide inflation crisis has turned the public worldwide, very sour on whoever was in power. Number two, I go back again, the conversation I talked about earlier, but also some focus groups that I happened to sit in on.

Boy, there were people who were just dead set against voting against Democrats, no matter what happened in the campaign. I came away from one focus group. This was a non-college educated young males. It was a pretty diverse group. So it was early mid-October in Philadelphia, was on the other side of a one-way window, and I came away from that conversation that night actually pretty pessimistic about our chances to win this election. When you look at that exit poll,

when they ask people, are we on the right track or wrong track as a country, it was three to one wrong track over right. Really hard for the incumbent party to win a presidential election with those kind of fundamentals. And in fact, I'm still of the belief that if Republicans had a candidate like a Jeb Bush, like a Mitt Romney, I don't think they would have won by one and a half percent in the popular vote. I actually think it would have been much larger than 1.5% in the popular vote and roughly 1.4 to 1.7% in the three battleground states that decided the election. So three to one on the wrong track. I'm going to take it that you disagree that maybe the incumbent

presidents would have done better. I think structurally speaking, this would have been, you know, as someone who, you know, I supported Joe Biden very early on in 2018, 2019. I thought he was our best candidate to win. I think that history has proven me right. I had real concerns with some of the positions Kamala Harris took in 2019. I think Kamala Harris as a candidate in 2024 was light years better than the race that she ran in 2019. But the reality is,

I think for any Democratic presidential nominee, it was going to be enormously tough to win this race. Yeah. And there was baggage from 2019. There's no doubt about that for her. I want to go back to the young men in that focus group, the working class men you're talking to. That is one answer that a lot of people turn to that the Democrats failed at either delivering for or communicating to a group of people that were in the core of the coalition, like working class men, particularly working class men of color. Some of that is, whatever, shorthanded as you need to go on Rogan. But I'm wondering what your thoughts are just

generally about outreach to younger men. First thing we do have to remember, the reason why the term it's the economy stupid has stayed in our lexicon for three decades is because it is right a lot of the time. And what I was hearing in those focus groups, the economic concerns really were in those focus groups, the economic concerns really were the primary driver. But the other thing was, and I go back to this one focus group in particular of non-college-educated younger males, none of them were watching cable TV. None of them, because they were asked, where do you get your information? None of them said broadcast news. None of them said cable TV.

None of them said radio. It was all YouTube ads, podcasts, so congrats, and TikTok. Oh, and then also text messages from friends. I mean, I think other peers have a lot of credibility and anyone who's run campaigns knows this as well, that some of the best surrogates are actually, if you're trying to reach a voter, it's someone in that person's family or their neighbor as opposed to some big celebrity So I think that yeah the critique that we as Democrats have to figure out and do a better job of showing up in What we still call alternative media

Spots, but maybe we shouldn't be calling it alternative media Spots anymore if it turns out, you know, roughly the majority of people are actually getting their information that way. You know, for someone, I think we're the same generation, same age, when we grew up, cable TV was in its infancy, but it was still the three major networks. Fox was just starting, let alone Fox News. Very different media landscape that my daughter is growing up in today. All right. Well, you've set me up for my final segment. news, very different media landscape that my daughter is growing up in today. All right.

Well, you've set me up for my final segment. And I'm sorry, you're the guinea pig for it because I just thought about it yesterday. We don't even have theme music for it yet. But if the Democrats are struggling to communicate to young men, to bros on bro podcasts, we're here. We're here. We're on a podcast. We're on YouTube.

And so my final segment is bro talk And I want to see how you can do it's a little you know Maybe test run in case you want to go on Theo von sometime in the future question number one What is in and should bros be able to get their coffee and citrus flavored sin without any BS from the government? Do you have thoughts on either those Jesus? I don't fucking know I The hell is that I I don't fucking know. I, I, I, what the hell is that? I, I, no, I, I. You don't know about zing.

Here's one thing. I am never, I think people can sniff a phony a mile away and I'm not going to BS someone if there's something that I don't know. So that is, you know, I consume a lot of sports, a lot of politics. That's good, that's good. This is fine. Not if a non phony answer is good. Look JD Vance went on Theo von He doesn't know any of this shit. So not be asking is cussing is yes. This is also an extremely strange guy

So that's not the that's not the kind of that I necessarily want No, it's not a company. This is my point to the Democrats of JD can do it. It was like a non-human I think that the Democrats can figure this out. Okay. Zin is like a smokeless tobacco. It's like a chewing tobacco thing. And some blue states are getting rid of the good yummy flavors. I don't fucking know about this either. But this is what my bros say. All right. Bro, question number two. Do you have any hot takes on the college football playoff? Well, you won't be surprised because you probably know this. I am predicting that Notre Dame will win the national championship, 12th national championship.

I'm a Notre Dame alum. I was a Subway alum well before I went there. I was on radio doing sportscasting in college for Notre Dame football. I'm a diehard fan. And it's been really exciting, by the way. I always wanted an eight team playoff. I thought 12, they went a little too many and I think some of the blowouts in the early round show that that said it's such a money grab, they're not going to go back to eight.

The college football playoff is a lot better. I mean think of how- You thought 12 is too many? Yeah. Well, you had a home playoff game. That is true. That's a good point. That was pretty cool.

That was very cool. Touchdown Jesus, home playoff game. That was awesome. That's a good point. That was pretty cool. That was very cool. Touchdown Jesus. Home playoff game. That was awesome. By the way, that reminds me, we need to, real quick on this, we need to move the quarterfinals also on campus. That was amazing that Friday night. I was watching it actually from my office wondering if we're going to have a government

shutdown because it was that same Friday. That was amazing, the Friday on campus at Notre Dame. That Tennessee-Ohio State game with all those Tennessee fans going into the shoe Those snow and those I mean that ended up being a blowout, but the vibe was so cool So if you do the the round of 12 the first round and the quarterfinals on Campus then the semis would be at the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl in New Year's Day And then you get the national championship a week later. I think that's actually the way they should do it All right, you're busy. Unfortunately as ranking member of the Budget Committee

I would volunteer you for for Charlie Baker's job as an NTA chair. I like I like those reforms Congressman I did have a list of other bro questions about the NELC boys and Bitcoin and the cracking app, but we're gonna we're gonna let you off the hook on that one. We're gonna save We're gonna save those for whoever my next victim is. Appreciate you coming on the Bulldog podcast. Let's keep in touch, particularly as we get deeper into the budget stuff as we head towards March. Sounds good. See you, Congressman. I guess when that carries me across the great divide From the wretched underworld to the place where fear resides Behind the line you hold, you can only hold so long When you see my forked tongue and you hear my twisted song

My sign is the fire line uncontrolled My bitter ruthlessness is a beacon to behold That cancer growing, someday to die Where the water is flowing I'm gonna drain the river's life I'll sit there for the sudden dream Keeps me running through the night I'll take it on in summer By the dawn in a sickly morning light The Boolorg Podcast is produced by Katy Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.