The NPR Politics Podcast - Congress Returns With A Long To-Do List

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Congress is returning to Washington this week for an end of year session that's likely going to bring a good bit of drama. The team discusses the impending leadership elections in the House and what Congress still needs to accomplish. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Scott Detrow and congressional reporter Kelsey Snell. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Madeline, and I'm just now running past kilometer 31 at the Athens Marathon, the original route from Marathon to Athens in Greece. This podcast is recorded at 2 o'clock on Monday, November 12th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, enjoy the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Congress is returning to Washington this week for an end of year session that's likely going to bring with it a good bit of drama.

Also, there's more drama when it comes to who might lead both the Democrats and the Republicans in the House. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover Congress. And it's good thing that we have the Congress people here. Yes. Because there is some Congress to talk about. It is a big week for Congress. When they come back in session after an election is one of the most interesting times in a Congress when they've left things undone. And there are some things undone. Is that right? There certainly are. To make a short list, they need to pass some spending bills. They funded about 70 percent of the government, but they left things like the Department of Homeland Security

on a short term spending bill. And they have until December 7th to pass that. And a part of that is that President Trump wants to include $25 billion for a wall on the border with Mexico. And the other thing that's happening that we're going to talk about in a little bit is they have to figure out who their leaders are. So there's a lot going on. Oh, and all the new members who just won their seats are showing up in Washington for the first time, not to vote, but to figure out where the doors and the light switches are. Oh, and they also have to pass a farm bill and a few other odds and ends that affect a lot of people. And like, find places to live. Just those. Just a few little things. Yeah. So we're sort of mixing up the new class and the old class.

Let's start with the old class. Still have stuff to do. Yes. They still have stuff to do. The big thing is this government funding bill. Yeah. The deadline is what, December 6th? December 7th.

Ah, OK. It is an area where this overlap is confusing because we are about to enter an era where Democrats are going to have a tremendous amount of leverage and will have a seat at the table in a way that they didn't before, where they can say, we want X, we want Y, we are the majority, we set what's in the bills, and we set the votes. But they don't have that yet. The Republicans still have the majority going into this vote, including a lot of Republicans who either decided to retire or lost their elections. And that will be really crucial in a way we don't know how it's going to play out yet on the question of a border wall. President Trump will likely make yet another push

for this funding. And the question is, do Republicans try to go along with it? Do enough of these Republicans who lost possibly because President Trump was very unpopular in their district say, yeah, no, I'm over this whole thing? I mean, that's a key question. Yeah. And some of those people, actually a large number of the people who either lost or decided to retire were a part of a group that if people rewind their brains in time back to the summer, signed on to a thing called a discharge petition. It was that thing that was supposed to force votes in the House on a bill to protect people who are in the country illegally after being brought here as children. We talk about it as a permanent DACA program.

Now, a lot of those people are leaving. They don't have to run for Congress again and they don't have a whole ton to lose. So it's entirely possible that they could decide to go to the mat for the thing that they believe in. You mentioned the farm bill. Can you tell us more about that? I think it's interesting that I know that we mentioned the farm bill as kind of an afterthought in all this, but it is really interesting that it's happening right now as a lot of farmers, particularly soybean farmers in the Midwest, are feeling incredibly anxious about the fact that their exports to China have dropped off precipitously, and they are having some pretty serious trouble

in the Midwest. They are looking to the farm bill for some sort of stability and comfort, and they're looking for Republicans to deliver that. And if that doesn't happen, that could fundamentally change the way they feel about the governing ability of that party. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will talk about that other drama that might be coming. The question of who will be Speaker of the House. If you're in the market to buy a home, Quicken Loans will lock your rate for up to 90 days while you shop. It's the kind of thinking you'd expect from America's largest mortgage lender. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash NPR politics.

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And we're back. And there's lots of talk about who will be speaker. Also, who will lead the Republicans? I think the Republican one is easier. So let's start there. Or is it? It is looking a little bit easier because when going into the election, there were a lot of people who had put their name into the ring saying they were going to run for leadership positions. But now that Republicans are going to be in the minority in the House, it's kind of fallen away. And it looks like the current majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, will be running for minority leader. And Steve Scalise, who is currently the whip, will run to be whip. And a lot of the people who were being talked

about for other leadership positions, like Kathy McMorris Rogers, who is the only woman in Republican leadership right now, has said she's not running for leadership anymore. And the number four person in leadership, Patrick McHenry, who was the chief deputy whip, also decided that he didn't want to be in leadership anymore. And he's running to be the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. But the one new name that you'll hear is Liz Cheney going to her second term in Congress. Of course, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney has announced she's going to run for one of those leadership posts, and she's likely going to be pretty much uncontested. Yeah. And I think that's something that we're going to be talking about over the next couple of weeks and months here,

is that the Republican Party in the House is just getting smaller and more conservative. And those changes will fundamentally make a difference in the way that the leaders interact with their members and the way they behave in the minority. A lot, if not most, of the people who were reelected back, you know, that whole election last week and from the Republican Party have never been in the minority or even in a small majority. So this is a completely different world for House Republicans. One question about that. A lot of the Republicans who are staying are the more Tea Party, Freedom Caucus type of Republicans. Are they the ones who were kind of a headache for

Paul Ryan? They were, but it isn't just them. It's a lot of very conservative Republicans who got to keep their seats because of redistricting. So when Republicans' states, you know, redrew their congressional lines in 2010, they made it so that there were a lot of really, really safe places. And a lot of the places that they left that, you know, that were more contested wound up turning blue in those suburbs and exurbs that we talked about so much last week. Scott, you have been covering the leadership fight, such as it is, on the Democratic side. Nancy Pelosi, the current minority leader, has said that she is running to be speaker. Currently, no one else has said that they are running to be speaker.

It's complicated. Short answer. Yes, absolutely. Nobody else is stepping forward to challenge Nancy Pelosi and run against her head to head. And yet there is a little bit of a coup effort underway in the House Democratic caucus. The question is whether it will be even remotely successful. Just to reset, we talked all year about how Republicans over and over again tried to use Nancy Pelosi as an attack on the Democrats running for Congress. A lot of Democratic candidates to respond to that by saying, well, you know what? I wouldn't vote for her. So it's a non-issue. Or I would support reconsidering leadership. Yeah, something like that. Some wiggle words. But Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives, and they're doing it with an increasingly widening

margin. And that matters because had Nancy Pelosi come back and had Democrats had like a five or a six or a seven seat majority, those confirmed no votes would have been enough to not keep her from getting a majority of votes in a closed doors caucus meeting, but getting her a majority of votes on the floor in January when there's the actual vote for House Speaker. The more seats Democrats pick up, the more wiggle room she has to work with. And the fact is Democrats have already picked up 32 House seats. They could end up with more than 40. There's a lot of races remaining uncalled out in California where the votes come in slower and are counted slower, and it remained too close to call. That being said, we do know there's this plot of sorts in the works. A group of House Democrats, about 10 or so, who want to see a change in leadership, met last week, the day after the election. They organized a call, including Tim Ryan of Ohio,

who ran against her before and lost by a wide margin. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Kathleen Rice of New York are some of the people putting this together. Here is their bank shot plan on defeating Nancy Pelosi. They are going to, one, sign a letter and release it sometime this week showing that enough Democrats are opposed to her that she doesn't have a majority of votes. Are there enough? Well, so I guess we should pause. Scott's going to get to that, but just so people know, it takes 218 votes on the floor of the House to confirm somebody is Speaker.

So one, confirm she doesn't have 218 votes, which again, it's the fluid total of how many Democrats will be returning. So we don't know yet. Work in progress. Part two of this plan. And I just held up number three have the votes, do they have a candidate to run against her? At the moment, no. But they insist, talking to people in these meetings, they insist that once it is clear that she can't win, the field, the scene will emerge where a contender will come forward and say, I will challenge Nancy Pelosi. Scott, in your reporting last week, how often did you hear the phrase, you can't beat somebody with nobody?

Hold on. Hold on. It's a great phrase. It's true. And how often did you hear from people who support Pelosi that Nancy Pelosi is an effective leader and that there are people who will come up with an entire stack of reasons why she's incredibly effective and particularly effective in situations where things are unpredictable. A lot. It's almost like Kelsey and I sat next to each other all last week and made these phone calls at the same time. And this has been the dynamic all along. We did a big story on this in August when we profiled Nancy Pelosi and interviewed her. The fact is that if you look at all the things she brings to the table, ability to raise a ton of money, good skills at doing the actual negotiating, plotting out the floor strategy. Who else could do that?

You can argue no other Democrats are out there who could do all of those things. That's also used as an argument against her and that she has not fostered a new generation behind her. She says that's something that she's going to work on going forward. And she's making this promise that her next speakership would be some sort of bridge to a future Democratic generation. the most diverse caucus ever with a ton of female voters driving the movement, a ton of female candidates driving it, and then not have a female speaker? Well, the flip side to that argument, which I've heard just as strongly, is are Democrats going to run and win on the messes of change and then have the exact same group of people that have been in place for more than a decade? We have also heard the response to that often is that maybe Pelosi isn't the person who changes,

but a lot of leadership positions behind her change. If there are very few people jumping into the leadership race on the Republican side in the House, it is the absolute opposite for Democrats in the House. On Friday, our inboxes were just pinging all day long with people declaring what things they were running for. Just about anybody. Committee chairmanships or leadership positions because Democrats just have more leadership positions than Republicans do. Pelosi created a lot of them to bring more people into the fold when she was criticized last time for not having enough people, enough new blood in leadership. So there are a lot of opportunities for people to move up. And I did point out the lack of an obvious successor as something that people criticize Pelosi for. That's true. But it's also true that Democrats had several cycles where so many of

these possible rising stars ended their congressional careers. Or just moved to different jobs. Yeah, that's right. Or just decided, you know what, I'm going to run for Senate. I'm going to run for mayor of Chicago. I'm going to become the attorney general of California. Exactly. I'm not, to be clear. But Javier Becerra will. But Javier Becerra did. So, OK, big picture question before I let you go.

Why does it matter who is the leader? It matters because they need somebody to unify them. We talked about how House Republicans are getting more conservative. Well, Democrats are becoming a party that is bigger and with a larger, how do you say that? Is it like a barbell in a way where you have more conservative Democrats and more liberal Democrats and not as many middle Democrats? That is a great way to describe it. Actually, a way that Heidi Heitkamp, the soon-to-be former senator from North Dakota, once described it to me is that her fear is that the party would become that way. That's something that, you know, moderates have worried about for some time is that you need somebody who can be that bridge between the two sides of the barbell.

And Pelosi is supposed to be pretty good at that. And you're going to have to need somebody who's going to sit there in meetings with President Trump and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and figure out, you know, how to fund the government every few months. A whole lot of other things. Oh, that sounds like fun. Even if they're not going to all get on the same page and fix health care, which seems very unlikely, there's lots of things the federal government and Congress has to do that it's hard enough, as we saw the last two years, when one party controls everything. It's even harder when two parties are splitting up control in Congress. It's also really important because what happens over the next two years establishes a legislative record for all of these people who were just elected. It's the job of the person who leads them to decide what they vote on and how they

establish that record. So if you have somebody coming in who's like, okay, we're going to vote on everything progressive that every progressive wants and doesn't let moderates vote on things, that's a problem for moderates. You have to have somebody who can negotiate the complex world of deciding what people vote on on the floor. All right. That's a wrap for today. We will be back in your feed soon. In the meantime, you can keep up with our coverage on your local radio station on NPR.org and on NPR One. And if you're curious about all things, recounts, ballots, all of that, check out the podcast that we recorded on Friday. It has a lot of answers and a lot of background. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover Congress. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.