The NPR Politics Podcast - Health Care/Listener Mail

Episode Date: June 19, 2017

Plus the latest on Tuesday's special election in Georgia. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. 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

This week, Invisibilia, NPR's show about the invisible forces that shape human behavior, is looking at the biased concepts in our heads and whether it's possible to change them. Meet members of a support group in Southern California called Racists Anonymous, and a young black police officer trying to train his fellow officers and himself to combat prejudice. You can listen to Invisibilia in the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, this is Ade Obatoimbo from Lagos, Nigeria. This podcast was recorded at 3.36 on Monday, June 19. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org on the N One app, and on your local public radio station.

All right, here's the show. It's the NPR Politics Podcast, here to talk about what exactly is happening with health care and what to expect in that special election tomorrow in Georgia. We'll also answer a few of your questions. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Happy Monday, guys. Same to you. Domenico, I'm sorry our softball team lost this weekend. But you know, I hope regardless of that, you had a good weekend. Just glad it wasn't Sunday that we played. Because I've had a date to get over it. Yeah. Well, it's Monday, and despite that crushing softball loss, Domenico and I and Danielle will do our best to answer some of your questions.

We do this on a lot of Mondays. We go through our listener mail. You can always email us at nprpolitics at npr.org or tweet at us at nprpolitics. But we are going to start with a couple items in the news. First is health care. We covered this last week, and we're still talking about it because it's still happening, even if what exactly is happening is pretty unclear. Senate Republicans are moving ahead, drafting their version of a bill to repeal Obamacare. And that's about all we know because a lot of this is happening behind closed doors.

Their goal, though, is to vote on a measure by the July 4th recess. And that is actually pretty close. So what else do we know right now? Because this is happening behind closed doors, from my point of view here, not on the Hill, it certainly appears that you have lots of congressional reporters running around trying to get details. And correct me if I'm wrong, but those details are not forthcoming. Am I right? I think the point is Scott has seen as much of this bill as we have. Right. Which is to say not, you know, and that's unusual. And I. Well, it is and it isn't.

Go on. I mean, the idea that like there is usually a much more public process to this involving hearings and things like that. But when big legislation is being pieced together, early drafts may come out, bills may be in committee. But when it comes down to it in the end, there's often critical meetings with party leaders, with the key members of the caucus, where the details are hammered out and then presented to the public. That being said, this is a little different. Right. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I would point to is Larry Levitt from the Kaiser Family Foundation. He is one of the health care policy gurus to watch and these sorts of things, sort of one of the very big ones to watch. You should all follow him on Twitter. had put up in 2009 when the Affordable Care Act was going through Congress, and it compared four

different versions of the Affordable Care Act, two from the House, two from the Senate, which is one illustration of the difference between then and now. This process does not have four different bills floating around out there. Yes, we do have the House version, but we do not have any Senate versions to look at yet. And we know basically for a fact that the Senate took the bill that the House passed and said, cool story. Thanks for that bill. We'll get back to you. Domenico, the thing that they're trying to do, and I think a big reason, well, there's a couple reasons why it's being so secretive, but one is just the really thin margin that Senate Republicans have to pass this.

Yeah. I mean, look, they've got 52 votes. They are going to be able to pass some versions of it through reconciliation, which means that they're only going to need 51 votes to do it instead of 60 votes. But that's still very thin. They not everyone is convinced to do it. Even the president reportedly said that the House version was, quote, mean. So we don't know what changes they would have made. So to have two weeks to go and not have any bit of a fact sheet out on what exactly is in this thing, I think is a lot of people scratching their heads. Now, Domenico, you mentioned reconciliation. We still get a lot of questions of why exactly do they only need 51 votes to pass this given Senate rules and

what we know about filibuster rules. Since we have talked about this before, I want to do a challenge here and see if either of you can give a concise explanation in 15 seconds. I've got a timer. You want to do this? Are you okay with 15 seconds? Do you want to go up or down? Do you want to try? You feel like you can do 10? Explaining reconciliation? Just why exactly they only need 51 votes instead of 60? The point is of reconciliation, why they only need 51 votes is because any of those items have to be tied to the budget. If they're not, they have to meet a 60 vote threshold. And one addendum there, they need 50 votes, right? Because they have Mike Pence in case there is a tie. There you go. Asterisk. Domenico got that in about eight seconds with Danielle's extra point. We are under 15 seconds. Good job, team. The goal is to get this done by July 4th.

And they're getting close to the deadline because they need a CBO team. The goal is to get this done by July 4th. And they're getting close to the deadline because they need a CBO score. It's going to take some time to get a CBO score beforehand. Why is it so important to Republicans to have this done by July 4th? Because Mitch McConnell wants it out of the way. The Senate Republican leader controls the agenda. He'd much rather move on to deal with tax reform, doesn't want health care to hijack the entire year. And part of why they're doing this in such a closed door fashion is because of how unpopular that House health care bill was. Some 23 percent of people said that they were in favor of the bill or liked the bill. So that's not exactly a bill, you know, can be winning with the American people, especially when there's a lot of details to hammer out.

And, you know, to add on to that, here's some more specific information. This is a poll from May 31st, so not terribly long ago, where most of the public, 55 percent of people told the Kaiser Family Foundation that they have an unfavorable view of the AHCA. Likewise, 55 percent said they want the Senate to either make major changes or just not pass this bill at all. And one more thing that really is kind of stunning is that a whole bunch of Americans were pessimistic about whether this bill would make their lives better. Forty five percent of Americans said that the cost of health care for them and their families would go up if the president and Congress passed the HCA.

So here's something I genuinely don't understand. And it's not like I'm asking the question to frame the conversation. Like I straight up don't understand this. So I understand the concept of trying to minimize the public window that the bill is out before you have the vote because you're concerned about the political fallout.

The polls for the last few versions of this bill have been incredibly unpopular. But if you're a politician who lives on winning your next election, which they all are, like you can't outrun that. If you get this bill passed and it remains unpopular and then it starts to go into effect, people will be even more aware of it because it affects their daily lives. Well, the question is, first of all, when do all of the provisions in the finished bill go into effect? If somehow, and I do not know this, if somehow you bumped out the effective date

of a lot of those provisions that might at the very least carry you past the midterms in 2018. That's purely speculative on my part, but that is one thing to consider here. Unless you think it won't pass and then you just bring it up and don't have to take any of the arrows that you would have to take and then you just shelve the bill. And then you move on to tax reform. It has been floated out there that maybe the goal of some Republican leader is kind of getting this done with saying we did the best we could. It passed the House, which is better politically than it didn't go anywhere. On to tax reform.

Right. The question then is, if you're a Republican, can you frame it as, yeah, we tried, but, you know, political realities, those obstructionist Democrats, man, they got in our way. Like, will that fly with people? I honestly don't know. This is certainly the tack that Donald Trump has been taking. And Danielle makes a very good point because that's exactly why the House came back to doing health care after it seemed to fail when it was pulled from the floor. And they realized that going back home to their constituents and saying, yeah, we tried, it just wasn't going to work. Obamacare is now the law of the land that didn't work for their

constituents. It's hard to see how it'll work for the same constituents as the Senate goes forward. Regardless, right now in the Capitol, there is a lot of questions for every Republican senator who goes by what is happening with this bill? Where is it? When will it be public? We imagine sometime in the next few days or next week or so, something will come forward. Otherwise, they're just not hitting that July 4th deadline. One other thing I would add, by the way, is the other question that Republicans would have to answer on this bill is what are the positives of it? What good will it do?

For example, you know, it does. The version that came out of the House does have some modest deficit reduction. It also, by the way, is not Obamacare, which in and of itself is a goal for some Republicans. But you have all of these people, many of them Democrats, admittedly, showing up to these town hall meetings saying, listen, this would hurt my child. This would hurt my family. And if you have enough Americans answering these polls as well, Democrats or Republicans saying this would hurt my life, that is something that they would have to answer for. And I feel like the three key areas where where that question is most pressing is what does this do for premium costs? What does this do for the number of people covered by insurance? And what does this do in terms of guarantees? And, you know, what's it for pre-existing conditions and also Medicaid. We can't leave Medicaid out of this because Medicaid is a big, more important politically than probably all of them. Medicaid is a huge part of the spending cuts that come in this bill. And

of course, the coverage cuts that come in, I should say, the House version of the AHCA. All right. Well, if Domenico's 8.5 seconds on budget reconciliation wasn't enough for you. You can go to NPR's YouTube channel. Ron Elving has an entire video explaining it. It is more than nine seconds. It's really good. Ron Elving doesn't do eight seconds. All right, let's shift to the other story this week.

There is an election tomorrow in Georgia. You've probably heard of it because it is now the most expensive house race ever. This is the special election to fill the suburban Atlanta seat of Tom Price. He's now Health and Human Services Secretary. Democrat John Ossoff running against Republican Karen Handel. Why does this matter? You know, for Democrats in particular, this is another one in a string of special elections where they're trying to channel their outrage with Donald Trump into a win at the ballot box. It would be their first win since Donald Trump won as president. And they want to be able

to say, we've done all this organizing, we've spent all this money and finally have something to put up on the chalkboard. Not only that, this is a typically Republican district. I mean, Tom Price, currently the HHS secretary, is a person who vacated this seat. This district also, albeit by only a small bit, went for Donald Trump in 2016 as well. So were Democrats to win this, they could point to something and say, see, we can flip a district and a pretty reliably Republican district. And that's different than the typically Republican Montana seat and the Kansas seat that the Republicans won by closer than usual margins, but they still won them. Democrats feel like their key to victory next year is through the suburbs. Well, and this is a much closer to the middle kind of district than either of those two places. Democrats overperformed in those places. And so far, according to polling, John Ossoff, the Democrat, is overperforming in this district. But let's keep in mind some of the numbers here. Tom Price won the seat by 23 points, won re-election.

That's the same margin that Mitt Romney won it by in 2012. Donald Trump only won it by one point in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. So that provides you with a little bit of a roadmap on just how Ossoff has to do in order to win and what Handel needs to do in order to pull it off. As for the race itself, Danielle, you spent some time reporting there. What jumped out to you? So the thing that I reported on, and really this struck me even harder than I was thinking going in, was just how much John Ossoff really has taken on the idea, the story of women being behind his campaign. The women that I spoke to in a group called Pave It Blue, who have been going out door knocking for him and so on, they talked very passionately

about the idea that, A, they think they are going to drive him to a win, and B, that he acknowledges them a lot. They also said things to me like, have you met his mother? His mom is on the trail for him. He talks about his fiance. He recently got engaged. So it's very much a district where the whole idea of the like hashtag resistance, the women's march, the sorts of feelings that that stirred up really come into play. And of course, add on to that, the controversy over Karen Handel when she was at the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the foundation that collects money to fight breast cancer. She also tried to cut that group's grants to Planned Parenthood. That adds one more dimension to this.

And it is one reason why many left leaning, especially women in that district, are very upset at her. It's crazy how much attention this race has gotten nationally. We talked about the money pouring in. That's actually become an attack point for the Republicans saying, look at all this money that Ossoff is getting from San Francisco. Oh, my God. There are some really entertaining ads on that. Yeah. There's a thank you, San Francisco, for giving us John Ossoff ad that runs in Georgia 6 right now.

And meanwhile, he doesn't campaign that way. He tries to campaign in a more moderate way to try to identify with the district. A couple other points, and the numbers back up what Danielle is talking about here. There was a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, for example, that had Ossoff for the first time over 50% in a poll. He was up 51-44. Most other polls show a closer race, but Ossoff slightly ahead. But in that, when you look at the gender gap, Ossoff led with women 60 to 34, Handel led with men 52, 41. So that's pretty clear. Another factor in that poll is something that I think we should think about when we're talking

about the national debate and whether or not what Republicans have been able to do or not do as it relates to health care and whether or not that's filtering down in these districts. Eighty one percent said that health care was very important and get this. Sixty two percent overall had an unfavorable opinion of that House health care bill. Last question on this. One of my favorite things about these special elections is that on the night when results are coming in, like Twitter, all of a sudden finds itself with all these Insta experts on the county by county and precinct by precinct results. Do either of you know what to look for as results come in to say this is going well for the Democrats or this is going well for the Republicans? Well, your Insta expert will pop up in this podcast then, because

yes, I do. In fact, there are three counties that comprise this district, Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties. Cobb, Trump won that area by 15 percent. So this is the biggest share of votes for Karen Handel likely to come from Cobb County, a big area for her. DeKalb is the largest share of African-Americans. It's a strong Ossoff area. Clinton actually won this area by 19 percentage points and was about slightly less than a quarter of the-Americans. It's a strong Ossoff area. Clinton actually won this area by 19 percentage points and was about slightly less than a quarter of the vote overall. Fulton has the largest percentage of the population, but Trump won Fulton by just three points. So Fulton could be a key swing area as long as the two hit their marks in Cobb and DeKalb. I'll be honest, my main

reference point for all these counties is where the various Atlanta Brave stadiums have been located over the years. That's true. All right. Well, now you know what to tweet on Tuesday night when you're waiting for results. We will probably talk about this more on Thursday when we actually know what happened. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, some Supreme Court news, and then we will answer some of your questions. And we're back. Before we get to some letters, one more item of news today. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear what could potentially be a significant case.

It's about gerrymandering. That's the practice of drawing legislative districts so that one party benefits from the boundaries and wins more seats. This is a case out of Wisconsin. Last November, a three-judge panel ruled that the Republican-drawn maps for Wisconsin's state assembly were unlawfully biased against Democrats. The state appealed, and the Supreme Court is now going to weigh in. And why don't we just start with the description of what exactly gerrymandering is. So gerrymandering is drawing the borders of districts, whether it's congressional, statehouse, whatever, in such a way as to significantly benefit one party or significantly hurt the other party, which ends up being the same thing in a two-party system. So for example, there's a thing called packing and cracking. This being the idea that you either pack a whole group of potentially Democratic-leaning people, for example, African-American voters, into one little district.

And then everywhere else ends up being Republican. Or cracking, which is, you know, busting them up into a bunch of different districts. Taking a city and breaking it up. Yeah. Right. And this is how you get some of those really funky looking congressional districts that, you know, run along a river. They're long and skinny or along an interstate or what have you that just aren't uniform sized blobs. And usually what happens is the party that controls the state legislature and the governor's mansion are the ones who are able to draw these districts. This has been talked a lot about the last few years as something that Republicans do.

It's a Republican practice. Democrats decry it pretty regularly. The fact is, it just happens once every 10 years. Republicans cleaned house in 2010. So they just happen to be the ones drawing the maps in a lot of states. And that's why it came up so much. Now, one thing I want to add that I find particularly fascinating about this case, this case, by the way, is called Gill versus Whitford, if you want to be following it. But it's that the side that is complaining has said, you know, the court is going to have to decide what exactly constitutes gerrymandered or not. And what one side has proposed here is a thing called the efficiency gap. I'm not going to go through the math here, but the idea is basically it revolves around counting up what they call wasted votes.

In essence, a vote for a losing candidate is a wasted vote. And any vote over, you know, 50.0001 percent is also a wasted vote for the winning candidate. Right. So the idea revolves around counting those up and seeing which party got disproportionately more seats than their votes would seem to suggest they should get. And so there's all sorts of fascinating kind of math behind this. And also behind, you know, when you look at, for example, the 2012 results in Wisconsin, and I got these numbers from The New York Times, Republicans won 48.6 of the statewide assembly votes, but they got 60 out of 99 seats. So not quite half of votes, but nearly two thirds of the seats in the assembly.

That's pretty fascinating. So, you know, we're using this term gerrymander, but gerrymander is kind of a jargony phrase that's actually not what the technical term is. The technical term is redistricting, how those districts are redrawn. So I'm going to give you just a quick background. I was able to do nine seconds for reconciliation. Let's see what I can do on the background. What do you want before you do it? Set a goal for yourself.

Give me 20 seconds to explain the background of gerrymandering. All right. Three, two, one. In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a redistricting overhaul that essentially favored Republicans. They were upset the Republican legislature because Federalists were critical of Madison's foreign policy. And they decided to pass this plan. The Boston Gazette decided to post the map. They looked at Jerry's district and said it looked like a salamander. And the editor of the Boston Gazette said, gerrymander, call it gerrymander. And that's why we have the gerrymander. And now, you know know how long was that 34 seconds 34 all right well close enough you know yeah all right let's shift to mail just a

reminder if you have a question the email address is nprpolitics at npr.org you can also always tweet at us at nprpolitics uh first question is from daniella on twitter she asked when does donald trump start to have to get congressional approval for military action in Syria? Or better, should he already be getting it technically? Essentially, right now, they've been using an authorization that was passed in 2001 after 9-11. Now, ISIS didn't even exist then. That was authorization of military force to go after al Qaeda. But, you know, it's sort of a wink, wink, nod, nod between a president and Congress, because often, even though Congress says it wants this authorization, it doesn't really want to authorize these strikes because it can be very difficult back with their constituents. It's a lot easier for them politically to say that they're against what the president is doing

without having to have made a decision one way or the other whether or not he should do it. But I mean, a lot of people have been arguing for a while, Tim Kaine among them, and he was making this point when President Obama was in office that the use of force that all this action is being guided under right now is totally out of date and needs to be updated. But Congress just isn't that interested, as Domenico was saying, in taking that tough political vote oftentimes. Right. And, you know, to go back to what Tim Kaine seems to be referring to here, the 2001 authorization of the use of military force was very broadly written. The phrase from it was that it allowed for the U.S. to attack places or groups that, quote, planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11th, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.

That is very loose. And what it did was it left things open enough to allow the U.S. to strike back at any sort of organization that it could say was connected in some way to those attacks. And that has been very broadly interpreted over the years. So Congress, after watching the prosecution of the Vietnam War, decided it needed to step in and limit some of what the president was able to do. So in 1973, it passed the War Powers Act. And it decided that under that act, the president would have 90 days after putting troops into hostile areas to the point where they needed to get congressional approval. But a lot of times presidents have simply ignored that and gone off and acted unilaterally on their own anyway for even longer periods. All right. Another question has to do with Congress. It's from Melissa.

She tweeted at us. Can you explain who all sat behind Comey and Sessions during their testimonies? This was my first time watching a hearing like this. A lot of the people sitting behind them were reporters. You saw like legs and arms sticking out behind them. They sit out these long tables. It kind of looks like a banquet hall of reporters who are in there filing stories. Lots of laptops and clacking. Yeah. But you can bring like a supporting group with you to these hearings when you're testifying.

A lot of time people will bring friends or top staffers often. They're wide. I think Jeff Sessions' wife was there. Domenico, your favorite guy. I was just going to say, I'll leave this to you. Significant people can show up as well as Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney from New York who was fired by Trump, was actually in the audience, seated pretty much off to the side, right near Comey. Which was exciting for you because you've been very into his suddenly political Twitter feed. Correct. He's been on a Preet storm lately. And if you were wondering who all the people behind the senators were, that's probably more obvious. You probably would have guessed

that that is Senate staff. There's committee staff. Each senator has staff. There's lawyers. There's other staffers feeding lawmakers questions over the course of these hearings. Next question from Lauren,

who emailed, I have a question about the Senate Intelligence Committee and its ability to compel testimony. I'm very confused about why Jeff Sessions and other intelligence community members Okay, so I've been looking around for answers on this. And as with so many things in the legal profession, I am not a lawyer, but from what I can tell, there is a lot of squishiness on this. I've seen... Is that a technical legal term? Most definitely, yes. So I have seen one school of thought on this from

some legal experts is that, you know, this is silly. He should not be able to, you know, as they put it, preemptively say that the president might invoke executive privilege because, by the way, a cabinet member cannot invoke it. Only the president can. So the idea, according to some legal experts, that I might be able to say, well, you know, the president could invoke executive privilege next week, next month, next year. That's absolutely insane. And maybe I should just answer the question. But there is another point of view on this. I called up Austin Evers. He is the executive director at American Oversight, which is a watchdog group that, you know, really has been keeping its eye firmly trained on Donald Trump. They're following, as he put it, a very well-known dance that dates back to 1982 when Ronald Reagan's administration outlined all of this in a memo. The idea is this.

What Jeff Sessions can do, according to Austin Evers, is that he can say, you know, listen, let me take that question back to President Trump. Let's see if he wants to invoke executive privilege. If he would like to, then I don't have to answer it. Otherwise, what can happen is a whole mess of things. The Senate could drop this, which, of course, it doesn't seem like they will, judging by the exchanges they had last week. Or, you know, they could go back through what is called the accommodations process. They can particularize what they're looking for. Say, hey, we want to know this, this and this.

We want it in writing or we're going to call you back to the Senate. We're going to ask you again. So this could just keep going on, in other words. You know, and Congress has some leverage over these folks who testify. And if they aren't satisfied with those answers, they can hold them in contempt of Congress. And they have some teeth behind that if they want to. You know, they can jail these folks. They have the opportunity and the ability to do that. They could call in the Capitol Police and take them off to the Capitol Police jail holding cell. There is not

a jail cell in the basement of the Capitol, by the way. It's not like the vet where the Philadelphia Eagles used to go. No, they actually, I know they would do that. Jail there for drug people. But there's been a rumor or myth for a long time that there is a jail in the basement of the Capitol. There is something that looks like a jail. It's actually underneath the crypt of the Capitol, right under the star and the rotunda, where it looks like something that could be a jail. It's got bars and stuff there. That's where it was supposed to house Washington's tomb, but they actually never put it there. So if you were to go down there, you would see this thing looks like a jail and they could put someone there hypothetically.

But that is not an actual jail. And now, you know, last question. It is from Tommy on Twitter. Can we get some wild speculation on 2020 presidential candidates, which I think is a great pivot from a very dense legal action? Just wildly speculate. Let's just yell names and go from there. Well, there is the roster of ladies who are being mentioned this. So we have Amy Klobuchar, Democratic senator from Minnesota, Kirsten Gillibrand, senator from New York. These are all Democrats, by the way. Kamala Harris, Senator from California, and Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts. Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden.

Who? Yeah. You've got the former Vice President of the United States who continues to say potentially he could run. Cory Booker is all but telling us he wants to run, the Senator from New Jersey. And there's a whole host of other names. Look, here's the thing with me on this. I can't stand talking about speculation about 2020 when in particular, in this case, Democrats may have their first full on for real primary that you've seen in maybe a generation. Not to mention, this is always Democrats' problem. They wind up looking to presidential elections rather than looking at the election right in front of them. How was Obama, Clinton, Edwards not a real full-on primary? It was only three people. I'm talking about something like Republicans just had,

like 17 people or something. That's totally possible. Yeah, but a lot of Democrats ran before that. I mean, those are pretty crowded stages. Yeah, okay. Mike Gravel versus- Don't dismiss Chris Dodd's presidential campaign, Dominico. The Democrats ran before that. I mean, those are pretty crowded stages. Yeah, okay. Mike Gravel versus... Don't dismiss Chris Dodd's presidential campaign, Domenico. He moved his family and children to West Des Moines. That is true. Let's kick this forward a bit.

What? Danielle. I really just want to say that it is remarkable, and we cannot forget this, that this many women are being seriously considered as viable candidates for a major party nomination. It is not just one super well-known woman who people, you know, kind of see as inevitable. This is a whole bunch of newcomer women. This is a big deal. And we should not forget that.

No question about that. My annoyance with 2020 speculation or presidential speculation three years out has nothing to do with that issue. I do want to call on one other thing that we haven't talked about for the speculation is business people. You know, Donald Trump opening up the sort of potential floodgates for non-traditional candidates to get involved. People like Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, has been floated. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. The Rock. The Rock, correct. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. The Rock. The Rock, correct.

Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, you know, who's not running for president if you're feeding baby cows? Maybe you just want likes. What? Here's one more question. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg

is visiting every single state right now and posting these very politician-sounding posts like, just had a really great visit with a family in Ohio. Firefighters.

Yeah. I mean, who doesn't like feeding baby cows? They're kind of, they're lovely animals. That's what I'm saying. What can you look for? What are some telltale signs that you may be thinking of running for president? Writing a book. What are things that these people are doing?

Writing a book that no one will read. Going to places like where they feed baby cows, like Iowa, for example. There's more pigs there than cows. That's true. And New Hampshire, you know, if people start showing up to these things, like some Republicans who had started doing those things, like Tom Cotton, who maybe is thinking about a 2024 run, I don't know. So we'll start speculating about that, I guess.

But as soon as you start seeing people get into Iowa and New Hampshire, they start creating leadership packs. They start talking to interest groups who they know they need to shake down for money. Going to breakfast and things in the state, going to the state fair in Iowa is definitely a huge deal. It's all going to start happening. It is. All right. So we know Domenico's a little cranky about this general topic. I know just the thing. There are Iowans, too, for that matter. I know just the thing to change your mood, Domenico. Your favorite thing, other than, I guess, Preet Bharara, your favorite thing of dad jokes.

Yesterday was Father's Day. NPR's Twitter account was on fire with the dad jokes all day long. Domenico, you were paying close attention. Please give us your favorites. It was very heartening, I have to say. It was Father's Day. I was hanging out with the kids most of the day, and I wasn't on Twitter.

And I checked in at one point and saw these tweets that were dad jokes and people basically saying, oh, Domenico must have written half of these. And I was like, what? Write what? And I started to see what people were talking about. I know.

You're the dad in the room. Yeah, that's true. I was trying to filibuster because I don't have them up. All right. I just remember one because it was the only one I had heard before. I'll tell. What is Beethoven's favorite fruit? Oh, I don't know.

Banana. Oh, man, that's so bad. I'm leaving. Domenico, do you have one now? Why couldn't the bicycle stand up by itself? Come on, guys. It was too tired. I'm just going to read the credits

as Domenico continues to read. Because they're corny, and it's okay to make fun of dads. All right. We'll be back on Thursday. Domenico may have stopped reading these jokes on Twitter by then, but we'll be back Thursday. Oh, wait, one more.

Just kidding. With our regular weekly roundup. Here is a very cryptic hint. We just may be joined this week by a very special guest you will be happy to hear from. Who could it be? I don't know, but you can keep up with us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter at NPR Politics. Support the podcast by supporting your local public radio station. And for the first time, we have some NPR Politics swag on offer at the NPR shop.

It is an NPR Politics baseball hat. It's the color of our podcast logo. And as the description in the shop says, no matter your party affiliation, we could all stand to keep cool head these days when discussing politics. I don't know if it's a cool hat. It's made of corduroy. Hey, I'm happy to have something.

It's lightweight corduroy. It's like summer weight corduroy. And, you know, if you have suggestions for other gear, please let folks know. But check out the NPR Politics Shop if you are interested in an NPR Politics hat. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor.

Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.