The Dispatch Podcast - Sitting Here on Capitol Hill

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

House Democrats are heading into next year with the slimmest majority either party has seen in two decades. How might this shape intra-party relations among Democrats moving forward? “The new dynamic will force Democratic leaders to change their tactics, both in drafting bills and in reining in the rank and file,” Haley Byrd Wilt writes in her debut piece for the website. Haley joined Sarah and Steve on today’s show to forecast these shifting dynamics as we approach the 117th Congress. Stick around for a breakdown of the latest drama in the House Republican conference, Donald Trump’s NDAA veto threat, and whether Congress can avert a government shutdown. Show Notes: -“Democrats Grapple With Slim House Majority” by Haley Byrd Wilt in The Dispatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast, our special Friday interview edition. I am joined, as always, by Steve Hayes. And this week, we are talking to Haley Birdwilt. She has joined the dispatch this month coming to us from CNN. She does a lot of reporting on the Hill for us. And in the new year, she will be launching a Hill-focused newsletter for the dispatch. You'll be able to sign up for that at the Dispatch.com. And of course, we encourage you to go check out all of her pieces on our website, the dispatch.com. And so today we're going to talk about Haley's latest piece on what the new, smaller Democratic majority will mean for legislation, for Democratic priorities, for the party itself, for Nancy Pelosi. We'll talk a little bit about that letter that the 126 members of the Republican caucus signed in favor of the Texas lawsuit that was dismissed by the Supreme Court. And, of course, we'll end with some veto threats, some veto override.

going on with the Defense Authorization Act that the president has said he will veto when it hits his desk and Christmas presents. Let's dive right in. We are so pumped, not only to have you with us at the dispatch now officially,

reporting being awesome, but also with us on the Dispatch podcast, being awesome, reporting, etc. So welcome. Thank you. It's good to be here. You have this piece on our website, and you're making some really interesting point. So fast forward to January 3rd, when the new Congress is sworn in, they're ready to go, they're hitting the road. And your point is the margin for success on partisan legislation will be only a few Democrats, and that means any handful of like-minded Democratic lawmakers will be able to ban together in a small faction and insist that their priorities be reflected. All right. So what does 2021 look like for the House? Right. So House Democrats basically are coming into, you know, the 117th Congress with the smallest House majority

either party has had in the past two decades. Democratic leaders are, you know, trying to plan how to do, how to keep their members in line and what kinds of legislation that they're going to bring forward because it really changes a lot of things when you have a margin of 30 votes versus, you know, you have five people who can disagree with you. That really does change the dynamic. So basically, if they're trying to bring forward anything that Republicans are opposed to, which, you know, in the past four years when Republicans had the House, they were bringing forward. You know, the tax, the tax bill was partisan legislation. Their attempt to repeal Obamacare was partisan legislation. Things like agenda items and messaging bills that

Republicans are not going to get on board with. Basically, Democratic leaders are going to have to keep their members almost completely unified in order to pass those things in the House. So, yeah, so I talked to Alexandria Cassio-Cortez last week, and she said, you know, it gives progressives more power in that way. It also gives moderates more power in that way as well if they want to use it. But she said, you know, it'll be important not to use that very frequently, but it gives them leverage to use when it's absolutely necessary. Do you believe her that she's not going to try to use it frequently? I mean, I do. Yeah. She is willing to, you know, criticize leadership, but in the past two years, she hasn't, you know, like tried to create her own freedom caucus or anything

like that. I feel like we've been at this stalemate in Congress where it's been, I don't know, if hijacked is the right word, but nothing's been getting done of late. And by of late, I might mean several decades. But regardless, you know, some of that has been blamed on the increasing partisanship of Congress as you, you know, there are these maps, these over time scales where the two sides move further and further towards the extremes and those folks in the middle are washing out. They're either not running again.

they're losing their re-elections, they're losing in primary bids, the endangered middle. Is this going to fuel the partisanship, or is this maybe how we get back to a middle, a compromise where Congress does things? Yeah, so I guess we're going to see that early on, because in the kinds of bills that they're drafting, we're going to see what the approach is. Because House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was saying, you know, I'm instructing committee chairman and leaders to try to bring forward, you know, bills with broad bipartisan support. things that we know we can pass. And, you know, that will be pretty clear early on. And I would say,

you know, Joe Biden's whole thing has been saying, oh, we can, you know, work together, come up with bipartisan legislation, things like infrastructure. But it's going to be, it's going to be difficult. I talked to the Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmouth. He said, you know, even within the Democratic Party, they aren't able to agree on a budget. Like they haven't passed one in the past two years. He said it's going to be even harder this year with such a slim majority. And it's going to be difficult to do things like infrastructure. It's a running joke at this point because Democrats have said, you know, even during the Trump administration, this is something we could agree on. But things like that are going to be difficult when you have a margin of only a few votes. So I think it's,

it could be, you know, the focus could be trying to bring forward things that they know Republicans will support because then you're not really bound to these bargaining conversations with, you know, random members of the Democratic Caucus. But it's just going to depend on how they want to approach it. Steve, the joke in Washington that has frankly gotten so old is every week is infrastructure week because it was this concept that, of course, both sides, maybe they can't come together on anything else. But, you know, of course they can come together on repaving some federal highways and fixing

some bridges because that's so nonpartisan. And the Trump administration announced it was infrastructure week. several times at the beginning of his term. And so, you know, you'll even see it mentioned on Sunday shows of like, well, maybe it's still Infrastructure Week. I hope that joke doesn't continue for another four years. I'm not sure it was funny in the first four years. We will see. I think for those of us who are worried about government spending, infrastructure week always causes me to shudder because it's bipartisanship, usually, but bipartisanship in the joys that our members in Washington feel when they get to spend a lot of taxpayer money. Obviously,

there are improvements that are not only needed but long overdue on infrastructure. You just worry that it's going to become this orgy of spending, which it typically is. Can I go off on a little tangent with you, actually, because I'm very curious whether, where you stand now on getting rid of earmarks. So initially, when the sort of conversation happened in DC about getting rid of earmarks, everyone was like, yeah, this is some pork barrel nonsense. It was a ton of money. There's, you know, all these things you can list that are just silly, silly spending projects. But at the same time, you probably now can at least, I think, agree that there's some unintended consequences of getting rid of earmarks, which is that, yeah, if there

were maybe more earmarks, more of these things could get done. And Infrastructure Week would have happened because someone or other would have wanted, you know, a post office named after them or the footbridge across a creek to nowhere. Where are you on earmarks now? I'm so curious. Well, should we even before, I'm happy to hear to answer that question, but maybe before we go there, Haley, can you give us a working definition of earmark? what it means? Sure. It's like a provision in legislation that a member of Congress say someone from like a

RAN, like Iowa's second district has asked for that helps their district. And sometimes these projects in the past have been not particularly productive and more of a like political waste of money. But they're actually, they're bringing them back this year. Democratic leaders, at least they've said that they're bringing them back. We'll see in the rules package. But Steny Hoyer and others have said, you know, this is actually like one of the few ways that members can, you know, actively include their constituents' needs and priorities

and legislation. And so we'll see how that goes in the new Congress. Yeah, that's the best possible gloss to put on it from Steny Hoyer can speak to their constituents' needs. theoretically any spending that Congress does is for the benefit of its constituents. Yeah. For its constituents. They say they're going to put more guardrails on it.

Like, they'll publicly disclose which projects members have asked for, which members have asked for. And, like, they'll make sure that everyone knows what those are for. But I don't know. I mean, I'm all for more transparency. And I don't mean to sound like a super cynic, but I'm pretty cynical about this kind of spending. That, you know, the citizens against government waste used to put out something called a pig book, which is all of the pork barrel spending, all of the earmark spending, and the long lists of things that members of Congress, this congressionally directed spending, members of Congress were able to obtain for, you know, either government agencies in their districts or, you know, favored friends was pretty disgusting. It was the kind of thing that I think actually went a long way to reducing the faith that people have that anything in Congress was working. So I'm pretty skeptical that bringing them back will do anything.

I think the argument in favor of doing it by the proponents of restoring earmarks is, look, these are the kinds of things that get people to agree. And you can actually get, you know, they grease the gears of Congress and Congress can. can move more easily. I think that's correct as a descriptive assessment. I think it's unfortunate as a normative. We don't necessarily, it shouldn't be the case that you have to be able to allow members of Congress to give out goodies, specifically targeted goodies, often to friends, politically connected individuals, in order for Congress to do its job.

And I think that's, I'm pretty frustrated by that. But we'll see. Maybe I'll revise that assessment in two years after we see that all of this wasteful spending did, in fact, grease the gears to allow more wasteful spending. When I saw, remember Matt Gates a few weeks ago, basically said, yeah, my whole job is to go on cable news and say crazy stuff. And that's what I consider my main role in Congress. I thought to myself, oh, yikes, that's not good. and then when I listened to him, I thought he actually had a point

in terms of his individual incentives. And I think that at least the earmarks coming back with guardrails and transparency and all of that could provide individual incentives to other members to do something else with their time. That's not to say Matt Gates

is suddenly going to not be on cable news all the time, but rather someone else is going to be able to say, ah, I can now, I have carrots and sticks in this system. And we can, I mean, that's why it's called log rolling, right? Like, you know, it's the old timey game where there's a bunch of logs on water and you stand on the logs trying to get them all to roll so you can walk to the other side type thing. It's a balancing act, literally. And hopefully someone will be able to master that skill

that I think has died. You know, I think we are touching on something I tried to get into in this piece a lot, which was basically individual members today have very little power to influence the legislative process. And so if they want to take advantage of the numbers in this Congress to sort of have some influence on policy, you know, that will be interesting to see. But it's also like I spoke to some experts and a couple of members who basically said, you know, this is going to be a very closed down chamber. Like how Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to even more so than in recent years, you know, have her say on what actually happens and what unfolds. And

Haley, along those lines, can you explain what a Christmas tree is? A Christmas. I'm sorry. What? When a bill comes before Congress and all members sort of have this equal power to say no, what happens is you end up with a Christmas tree where everyone hangs their little individual

ornament on the bill. It's a little amendment here to have this and I want this. And if I don't get this, I'm going to say no. And so in the end, you end up with a Christmas tree with a lot of homemade ornaments on it, lots of noodles. Honestly, I have not heard that phrase before. Really? I mean, I've only been here a few years, so. Maybe it's Senate side.

I'm more of a Senate side person. Yeah, I've heard stuff like that on the Senate side, but. Yeah, and it hasn't been as prevalent as it once was, I think. Yeah. In part because we haven't seen this congressionally directed spending that we're talking about. What's interesting to me, speaking of the dynamics between the House and the Senate, is that, you know, we still don't know who's going to control the Senate. I think the conventional wisdom is that Republicans will prevail in the two elections in Georgia,

which would mean that they will retain the control of the Senate. I guess I don't entirely buy that conventional wisdom, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that it's correct. It seems to me that that forces Nancy Pelosi's hand even more and puts somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in an even more difficult position because she can protest, she can sort of grind the House to a halt legislatively. But if what the House passes is, you know, an AOC wish list, the Green New Deal, none of that's ever going to make it through a Republican-controlled Senate. It's not even going to actually come up for votes. So it seems to me that if Republicans do win,

the Senate, you know, the dynamics that Haley describes in this piece and that she described here are certainly in play. It gives small numbers of people in the House more leverage to direct the course of the legislative calendar and the outcome of votes. But it gives them that additional control in a smaller window, right? Because it's just not going anywhere for Republicans. Right. This is an important point. So, like, this is, this story is mainly about the direction of the Democratic Party and the messages that they are going to bring, like, be bringing forward in the next couple years. It is not about actual legislating. Even over the past two years, many of the bills, the House Democrats have passed. The most, like, the things that get the most attention are not,

are not going to become law under this administration. We all know that. It's going to be the same way next Congress, especially if it's a report. Republican Senate. So it's really about that intra-party, you know, squabbling before they meant terms. And it's, it really has set up the house to be like a battlefield between people like Abigail Spanberger and Acacio-Cortez. Like, so it's, I mean, most of the legislation that actually becomes law is going to pass with bipartisan support. But Acacio-Cortez and even, even moderates who want to have a say in the process. Like, they're going to be able to have a say on legislation that we all know isn't going

to become law, but, you know, is important messaging-wise for the Democratic Party. And Abigail Spanberger, can you give us a sense of who she is? Right. So she was one of those frontline Democrats who was elected in 2018 from a, I believe, a Trump district. Either way, more of a vulnerable seat. Actually, yeah, it was Dave Brattsold's seat, I believe. So, yeah, she has got, you can look up the reporting,

but she recently after the election was, you know, blaming a lot of the seats that they lost on progressive messaging, basically saying, you know, I never want to hear the phrase defund the police again. Like, this really hurt us. We need to change the way that we're approaching the public on these issues. So there's a big divide there. She had some support. I mean, there was some vocal support when she spoke out, particularly after the results of the 2020 elections in the House, I think there were a lot of Democrats who maybe felt this way weren't as outspoken as AOC was on the other side. And when Abigail Spamberger came out and sort of articulated those concerns, she got some support that I think, you know, surprised some journalists who cover Washington, cover the Hill, who have focused. so much on the divisions among Republicans and focused far less on the divisions among Democrats.

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on to this brief that went to the Supreme Court in support of the lawsuit that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought. Frivolous claims frivolous suit pretty quickly dismissed by the Supreme Court, and yet some 60 percent of House Republicans signed on to it. Mike Johnson, Republican from Louisiana, who's in House leadership, the vice chair of the House Republican Conference, sort of took on this effort at the urging of President Trump and in communication with President Trump, circulated this letter of House Republicans in support of what Texas was doing, pretty flimsy constitutional arguments. They had been warned about that at the time, but Johnson, in effect, sent this letter to his colleagues and said, hey, Donald Trump

is watching carefully, and he'll be paying attention to who signs this and who doesn't. So originally it was 106, then I think 20 additional members signed on, 126. And basically... Steve, they say it was a clerical error. They just missed out on it. This is why I'm cynical. I'm trying so hard not to be cynical, and this is why I'm cynical. So it was 106, and then everybody reports on it. Everybody reports on it. Everybody's sharing that it's 1006.

Nobody corrects them until noon the next day when they say, oh, actually, there's 20 more members who accidentally were left off. Left off. Yeah. And notably, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, was one of those who was left off of the initial list. Let me just ask you, how likely is it that the House Republican leader would be accidentally left off of the list in support of the President of the United States that is made public? McCarthy was asked about this, asked whether he was supportive of the letter a couple

different times directly and refused to answer. But then the following day, after the letter got a bunch of attention and President Trump made clear that he was favorably disposed to the Republicans who signed it and frustrated with the Republicans who didn't. Kevin McCarthy's name was on it. Steve Scalise, the number two in the house, had his name on the original version of this. So all that by way of background, there was a call among Republicans yesterday in which it sounds like from the public reporting we've seen from some reporting that Haley and I have done on this, it sounds like the leaders of the effort to join that letter were somewhat contrite about what looks to have been a pretty embarrassed.

episode for House Republicans. You know, Mike Johnson tried to explain sort of the constitutional theory behind this, made the case that it was important to be supportive of the president, but there was some sentiment on the call, and I think Liz Cheney, the number three Republican in the House, led this, saying this was a big mistake, we shouldn't have done this. And I think Cheney was pretty direct and pretty blunt, about this, saying, in effect, that Johnson's description of what the brief was was wrong.

He was wrong sort of on the constitutional law, she was saying, in effect, that the campaign, that they were claiming that the president's campaign hadn't really had a chance to present its evidence, which was false, and it was court case after court case after court case that heard this evidence and, in many cases, summarily dismissed the evidence. And, you know, I think she warned in the call about what's happened since. I mean, this has given sort of additional encouragement to the kinds of people, including people in the president's orbit, who are making really, really dangerous arguments, you know, that the president should declare martial law, that the United States should secede.

These are the kind of things that seem that are so fringy, one is inclined not to take them very seriously, not to think that they'll matter. But when you have, you know, any kind of a movement that feels as passionately about President Trump as they do, having been lied to repeatedly and told that the election was stolen, and all of that against the backdrop of the country coming to an end if Joe Biden becomes president on January 20th, you can imagine that that could fuel some pretty irresponsible and bad behavior. The interesting dynamics in what I'm eager to hear about from Haley is, you know, Representative Cheney is on this call, basically, again, I didn't hear the call. These are, this is from reporting that we've seen and that we've done, basically chastising her, some of her colleagues for having supported something that was so foolish, including Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, her colleagues in leadership and Mike Johnson in leadership who, who ran the,

operation. Haley, what does that mean about the dynamics in the Republican leadership on the House side? I mean, it is a very good question. We actually, when I was at CNN, we did a piece a few months ago about how Cheney was sort of carving out this space for a post-Trump world where, you know, she would have supported him on most things, but was willing to not support him on everything. Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise definitely are not in the same vein on this and on many other issues. So Cheney has actually gotten a lot of criticism from like members of the House Freedom Caucus and others who have said like she's not supportive enough of the president. And so there are definitely like some arguments there and some riffs between members.

But I mean, it is pretty uncool of Kevin McCarthy not to answer questions of from reporters and apparently if he didn't speak on this call about the actual situation, it's just leaving members in the dark on why he supported it and, you know, what his reasoning was. I don't know. Yeah, pretty amazing that the reporting that we've done suggests that he didn't speak up, that he didn't talk about it. He didn't defend Mike Johnson. What he'd done, he didn't defend the letter that he, Kevin McCarthy had signed. He didn't push back on these arguments. Maybe that's a sign that it's become self-evident that this was an embarrassing episode. I mean, there was so much criticism of Johnson's effort, of the letter, of the court case,

even from, I'd say, people on the center right who have been, you know, have in many cases gone out of their way to be friendly to Donald Trump and to the Republicans who have supported Trump in Congress over the last four years, even from those places, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. National Review was very critical of this effort. It seems to me that maybe what we're seeing is that they have understood that this wasn't the best move, and McCarthy just doesn't want to answer for it. But as you say, it's odd that if the call, that the letter is being criticized on this call, that McCarthy wouldn't say anything at all. I think a lot of them just want us to forget that this ever happened. They signed on because it was like,

the thing to do. And now that it's over, like, they don't want us to remember that they wanted to throw out votes in four states. Like, here's, I will also say, yeah, go ahead. Oh, I've heard varying. I mean, it depends on the district. So for one, one office, I heard, you know, they almost exclusively received positive feedback from constituents. But another office I spoke to, those poor staff members, they said it was like when they were trying to repeal Obamacare, which was a crazy time on the hill. You know, they're working from home. Their phone systems don't work very well.

And they're receiving, like, calls every 10 minutes, every few minutes of people just absolutely furious with the decision. So some offices were just inundated with that kind of thing. And it was, I'm sure it did not contribute to a feeling of positivity about the decision. I found Chip Roy to be one of the most interesting characters in this episode. He is a congressman from Texas won his re-election this time relatively narrowly,

but in one of the hottest and most watched congressional races in the country. No enemy of Donald Trump's, right? Like, he has voted with him, supported him, and all of that, but also marches to the beat of his own drums, certainly.

And Chip Roy put out this five tweet, you know, things saying why he wasn't going to sign on to this letter. Respectfully, I will not join because I believe the case itself represents a dangerous violation of federalism and sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states. I cannot support an effort that will almost certainly fail on grounds of standing, which it did,

and is inconsistent with my beliefs about protecting Texas sovereignty from the meddling of other states. Sounds like a true Texan. Just want to highlight there that Chip Roy was Ted Cruz's chief of staff. And so you have him approaching it this way and Cruz was offering to make the oral arguments for the case. And by the way, I worked with Chip on my very first race in 2002. My husband worked for Chip as Ted Cruz's chief counsel when Chip was Ted's chief of staff.

So lots of connections to Chip Roy in this house that I should disclose. But, you know, Chip is fully vindicated in the end, right? The case is thrown out on standing. these other members then see sort of the not just the folly of their constitutional argument, but where it would lead, which is that California could then get involved in their elections. Or worse, California could tell them what omissions they could have out of their cars. But here's the problem with Congress right now, I think. One of many, perhaps.

Chip is pilloried by the right when this comes out. And then there's no like, oh, whoops, our bad, Chip. Thanks for being right. And the problem is, therefore, your individual incentives are always still to win the news cycle, whether it be 30 minutes or three hours, and not to win even the week, right? This was all resolved in days, fewer. And it didn't matter. And so it'll be interesting to see in two years when Chip is up for re-election again,

whether this is still a thing with his constituents, because I think it could be. despite the fact that we're less than two weeks later and the rest of the people who signed the letter for the most part have backed off of it. I mean, my guess would be that I don't think it'll be a big deal in two years. I think people will have long forgotten this because there will be so many things that happen over the next two years that will sort of take prominence over something like this.

But if it did matter in two years, I would think in a district that's as closely divided as his, it might be to his advantage. You know, he took a stand on, I mean, what he argued was clearly a principled argument, right? He made a principled case on the substance and said, this is not worth doing, knowing that he was going to take some grief for it. I think it's the kind of thing that if, you know, if he needs to go to his constituents in a general election in two years and say, look, there were times when I took a stand against my party, when I thought my party was doing something foolish, that he could use this. as an example. The question is, you know, is Donald Trump and are sort of the Trump forces still enough of a factor that this could get a primary challenge for him in, in two years, where they

can say, look, he was disloyal to Donald Trump. And, you know, at a time when Donald Trump needed Chip Roy, Chip backed off and, you know, undermined the president's effort to, to steal back or to take back a stolen election, possible, I guess. I'm less concerned about Chip. Chip's a big boy. He knew what he was doing. I'm concerned about the message it sends to a whole bunch of other members who don't have perhaps Chip's fortitude in general that what they saw happen there is not a positive roadmap, I think, for how to be a member of courage. Well, this is what's interesting.

And I'll ask, I'll ask Kaylee about this. I mean, again, we don't, we're looking at this. We've done some reporting. We have a pretty good sense of what happened on the call. It's interesting to me, if the leader of the effort is on the call showing contrition, sort of on defense, and the two Republican leaders who signed the letter said literally nothing, does that suggest that this backfires in a way that's evident to everybody, or at least everybody on the call, and that doing this kind of thing won't be smart in the future?

I mean, in that sense, and here's where I go from cynic to naive optimist, could this be a good moment, right? Where people say, yeah, that was incredibly stupid. I'm not going to sign this kind of thing if it comes up in the future. And I'm not going to take Donald Trump's advice if he makes these kinds of suggestions. I think they think that hopefully this is like the last time they'll have to do stuff like this. but I don't know it just sets the precedent

to be bullied into it in the future like if some sect of your party is just ingrained in like a fake news cycle where they have living in their own reality like do you go along with that or not so I mean several offices like a lot of staff members tried to convince their bosses

not to sign on to this in some offices though they just didn't even think about it they just signed on like there was no introspection, no considering the consequences of it. They were just like, yeah, we'll do it. It's fine. But I would note, they're sort of poised right now to, I think it will be the first veto override of Trump's presidency. If they follow through on this, where Trump is threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed overwhelmingly in the House and in the

Senate recently. So if he does veto it, I mean, we could actually see like one moment of resistance after these four years. So back up a little. Tell us why the president is vetoing the Defense Authorization Act. There's then some factions within the Republican Party who want it gone for different reasons. So tell us where all of the pieces are on the board right now. Sure. So So the president, unrelated to any of the actual legislation, because he has a feud with Twitter, wants members of Congress to repeal Section 230 of the community, I think it's the Communications Decency Act, which basically provides liability protections for social media and other website and platforms, stuff like that, from the content that their users are posting. He wants them to repeal that, which members of Congress are not going to do. He also takes issue with a provision that would, I think, in three years, eventually lead to the renaming of current Defense Department properties and bases that are named after Confederate soldiers. So he's complained about both of those things and said that he'll veto it on those grounds.

other members, like the Freedom Caucus, and they're almost always opposed to the NDAA just because of spending. They think it's too expensive. But these folks didn't object to other spending measures that Donald Trump supported. So this is also kind of them returning to their roots as Freedom Caucus and saying,

now we are once again against spending projects and for fiscal responsibility in a way that certainly has not been wholly consistent for the last four years? I mean, more so than the rest of the conference, I would say Freedom Caucus has been more consistent on that. I mean, they've voted against, like, spending bills and, you know, like, they've stayed pretty consistent.

But I would say, like, the overall Republican conference going into the Joe Biden administration is definitely going to be more into fiscal responsibility than they were over the past few years. Okay, so then the president's going to veto this. Bill, do a little schoolhouse rock for us. What happens from there? So it depends on the timing. Obviously, members are not going to be happy to have to come back in between Christmas and New Year's. But that might be what happens because the new Congress

is coming up. So I've seen senators are talking about, let me look at the calendar. I think it's January 3rd, that Sunday the old Congress is supposed to stop. Like, it's supposed to end. So they might come in like January 1st or something, like sometime that week. But of course, you know, any procedural hurdles like Rand Paul or someone like that

can make a vote happen later in the Senate than they would like it too. So we will see the logistics there going forward. But it depends on when Trump vetoes the bill. After that, they have to override it by a two-thirds majority in the House and the Senate. But I know some Republicans are not going to support overriding the veto.

But I would question the likelihood of them not being able to override because it just passed by, like, it passed way over the veto proof margin in the first place. It was like 330 or something votes have to check. So Trump's walking out the door, Steve, and they override his veto. Is this meaningful or not really? I mean, probably not. The question I have is I've been thinking about this is whether they would have done something like this if it happened in the second year of his presidency. And I suspect they probably wouldn't have. I suspect they would have been much, much more wary of taking on the president in this kind of a direct and confrontational way.

You have Republicans who have done this in a different manner. You have some who have spoken up and said absolutely the president doesn't understand what's going on here. His proposal is ridiculous and therefore I'm ignoring him and would vote to override his veto. You have others who are going along with the president, including people who have concerns about this section 230, I think often misunderstandings about what the president is saying or the president misunderstandings. and Section 230 and what it means, but are willing to follow his lead on that. And then there's this group in the middle that wants to kind of have it in both ways where they sort of understand that not passing the NDAA would be bad and have potentially significant, depending on how long it was held up, downstream consequences,

but they also don't want to be seen as bucking the president. And so you had Kevin McCarthy, Republican leader in the House. say, in effect, he was going to vote for the NDA itself when it came up for a vote. But if it came up again and he were asked to override a presidential veto, he would not vote to override a presidential veto, which... And this is why people love Congress. Right, right, exactly. Either it's either you're for the legislation or you're not, but he didn't want to be in a position.

Before it was against it, Steve. exactly what it would be. I mean, it is exactly what it would be. And, you know, look, I think, if you look back at what Kevin McCarthy has done over the past four years, this should surprise absolutely no one. You know, this is a guy who came in warning about Donald Trump in the way that many Republicans did and suggested in private meetings with other House Republican leaders that the president was on the take from by Russia was a managed asset by Russia. This is Kevin McCarthy saying this. And later became, you know, the president's most eager enabler, congressional enabler, or one of the president's most eager congressional

enablers, despite, I think, his own private misgivings about it. So this is sort of an apt way to end the Trump presidency and the relationship with Kevin McCarthy. All right, Haley. Last substantive question, at least, to you. Are we going to have a government shutdown again? So we might have like a very brief lapse in funding depending on when they actually bring forward a bill. Who do we blame this time? Oh, I would like to blame the four leaders who refused to actually negotiate for months on a stimulus package, just talking at each other, not actually, like they wouldn't, McConnell and Pelosi wouldn't meet to actually talk about any of the stimulus package. And then they waited until there was like some sort of deadline that they could, you know, run up against. So, I mean, I think the system where you only have four people trying to make all the shots and craft a $900 billion piece of legislation plus a spending bill is pretty ridiculous.

If you had rank and file members negotiating this and, you know, bringing forward amendments months ago, we would not be in this situation. Steve, this sounds a little like a seventh grade group project that I had where the teacher put me with a girl. She knew we didn't get along. We avoided each other for like two weeks. Then the deadline was upon us. It was too late by then to read all of Gone with the Wind. And my memory is that we both failed that project. And they had already kicked the can down. Like the government funding deadline was last week. They kicked it another week. And now they're like barely potentially maybe going to actually make the deadline, but probably not. So that's what I should. should have done. I should have asked for an extension. I didn't know what just were in seventh grade. Steve, any additional takes on the shutdown? I mean, you know, this is how Congress has functioned or not functioned, as the case may be, really, you know, not this is not unique to the Trump era. I mean, this is going back years and years. And at some point, we're going to need a

functioning Congress. The incentives are all there to have these kinds of fights. Many of them are meaningless, and I say that as somebody who is, you know, could probably accurately be labeled an alarmist on spending. I'm for spending fights, and I'm for spending fights in just about every area, but doing it this way and otherwise screwing up the way that government operates, I think, is irresponsible and isn't the proper way to handle this. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. slash Yannex. Okay, Haley. Now we're on to the most important question, which is, what is the best Christmas present you've ever gotten? Oh, I had no preparation for this. Oh, my goodness.

In 2005, well, I was a young child, but my parents got us a pug puppy for Christmas. It was, we didn't really, so they, it was like a cardboard, like, poster with a picture of him because we hadn't, like, actually picked him up yet. And so the moment of realization that we were going to be picking up a puppy dog was very exciting. Wow, you're actually bringing up some really raw memories for me where every Christmas, I kept looking at the boxes, hoping one of them was moving slightly or making a noise. And spoiler alert, it never was. Sad. Sad.

Best Christmas present you ever got. Yeah, gosh, I don't know. Or that you gave your kids that you were like really proud of like that, you know, you hit the nail on the head with one of your kids. Spoiler alert for those children listening to the podcast. So, yeah. Yeah, so a couple, so I'm, this is, I will not go way, way down this road, but I like to give experiences rather than material things when I, when I can.

And so we've done this a couple different times. The year that we spent in Spain was technically a Christmas gift to the, to the kids. They may or may not have accepted it with joy when we first told them. We're taking you away from your friends for a year, very Christmas. But they came to love it, thank goodness. Actually, they had a really good attitude pretty quickly, which was one of the many pleasant surprises we had. So we did a Disney Christmas once, and it was very fun because we loaded the kids up in the car and told them that we were taking them to a movie. We did not tell them that we were taking them.

And this was a couple days before Christmas. And so we went and we did take them to a movie. We, one of the kids, several of our kids have gluten sensitivity issues, celiac issues, and one of them had some gluten at the movie theater and was potentially not able to get on the plane, which we were going to directly from the movie theater. So going to the actual movie almost derailed our surprise, but she ended up feeling better. We drove to the airport and never told them as we were driving to the airport. we just sort of drove to the airport and they were you know one of them finally said where are we go why are we what are we doing at the airport and I said ah we thought we might you know go somewhere and they were like where are we going what do you mean oh my gosh we finally got got on the

bus from the economy parking and pulled up to the to the front and my oldest daughter saw the destination on our ticket and went to match it up with the board you know the board list and figured out that it was Orlando and then they all went nuts in the in the lobby of the of the airport so that was that I don't know that that was the best gift I've either gotten or given but it was a it was a fun memory for us what about you Sarah I grew up in very rural part of Texas I lived at the end of a mile long dirt road and my parents one year got me a go-kart, like an old school nice, like

real go-kart. My dad did put a governor on the speed, which was a bummer, but admittedly looking back, I can't believe they gave that to me in the first place, so the governor, like, was sort of the least of my problems. I felt like I had a car, you know?

And I was just riding around that dirt road in my go-kart. I did let my best friend drive at one time and she did put us into the ditch. And this wasn't like a little side ditch. This is like a full on, you know, four feet down ditch. But that's why you wear helmets. Good times were had by all. I was a huge tomboy as a kid. So that's important to know, like getting, you know, mud splashing up on me

and rainstorms and the go-car was the absolute highlight, perhaps, of my childhood. All right, dispatch listeners. That is our last episode. Until Christmas, we hope you have just the most wonderful holiday, and especially this year when perhaps we don't get to see our family or even our friends nearby that you find a way to make the holiday special and meaningful and full of gratitude, which we are for you. And so much this year has really focused for me what gratitude means. And I appreciate all of you who have been a part of that. So have a wonderful holiday season. Have a wonderful new year. And we're going to see you back in 2021.

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