The NPR Politics Podcast - House Democrats Nominate Pelosi For Speaker; Republicans Win Final Senate Seat

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

House Democrats nominated Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to serve as the next speaker of the House. If approved by the full House, Pelosi would again wield the gavel in January — a dozen years after she became the first female speaker in 2007. Plus, Republicans claimed another Senate seat in a runoff in Mississippi, wrapping up the midterms elections for the Senate. This episode: political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. 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

Hey, Tam. Hey, Scott. So I cover Congress, you cover the White House. But before we both did that, we were both member station reporters. Where we covered politics. I started at KQED. I was at WOSU in Ohio, KPCC. And I also worked at KQED.

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Senate special election runoff. This podcast was recorded at 4.14 p.m. on Wednesday, November 28th. And things may have changed by the time you hear this. Well, on the show. Well, they certainly changed since the time he cast that vote. That's true. Hey there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast. House Democrats have nominated Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. And Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith won a runoff for Mississippi's Senate seat. So this was a very fitting timestamp we had today. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter.

I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. All right. We got a couple of things to cover today. Let's start with the latest news. Let's start with the Democratic House leadership elections. Scott, you were year and to be their nominee for Speaker of the House. This does not mean she's going to be Speaker of the House. There is a formal vote on the House floor in January. And Pelosi still has a little bit more work to do to get to the votes that she needs to win that election in January. But she won today's election.

She was the only nominee. So that's probably not that surprising. But she did earn 203 yes votes, which is an interesting number to talk about. Let's get into that. I mean, 203 votes to what? It was 32 votes against her. Right. So she did pretty well. Is that fair to say? She did pretty well. And her team is pretty quick to point out that she did a lot better than she did two years ago when Democrat Tim Ryan ran against her in the internal elections for a Democratic leader. She got substantially more votes this time around. Will we know the 32 votes against her and will they stick to that? Because she needs some of those people to win elections as speaker, right?

She needs 218 votes in January. And here's where she was facing some problems over the last few weeks. You had 16 Democrats sign on to a letter saying that they would have vote against Nancy Pelosi in today's internal caucus election. And more significantly, they would vote against her on the House floor when she runs against Republican Kevin McCarthy for Speaker on the first day of the new congressional session. That would be a big deal because Pelosi can't afford to lose that many votes. However, over the last couple weeks since that threat emerged,

she has been able to win over some converts to support her. And just as importantly, Democrats have continued to win seats in those uncalled races. So it looks right now that if all those people on the letter vote against her, she would still have the votes she needs. Pelosi also has a couple more weeks to work her legislative magic or threats or a mix of those two things to flip some of these no votes into yes votes. Right. Well, that's really interesting. I want to get into that a little bit, Scott, when you were talking about sort of the wheeling and dealing she's been doing. Around this time last week, things looked quite a bit more uncertain for Nancy Pelosi, right? So can you tell us a few of the deals

that we know of that have happened for her to obtain some of these votes? She has been holding a lot of one-on-one meetings with current House Democrats and, more significantly, with this big wave of freshman Democrats who will join Congress in January. And she has been making a lot of promises and cutting a lot of deals and giving people what they want in order to get them to support her. The most significant was a meeting that she had with Ohio Democrat Marsha Fudge.

Marsha Fudge was the one Democrat amidst all the talk of Democrats saying they wanted a new leader. Marsha Fudge was the only one who said, and you know what? I'm thinking of running to be speaker. Nobody else had stepped forward to challenge Pelosi. Pelosi meets with her. They talk a while. Fudge goes back to Ohio over Thanksgiving. And then just before the holiday

announces, you know what? I'm going to support Nancy Pelosi. And then a few minutes later, Pelosi's office sends out a press release saying, hey, I created a new subcommittee on elections, an issue that Marsha Fudge cares a lot about. And you know what? Marcia Fudge is going to chair that committee. So is there causality there? Because the thing is, when you've when you've led a caucus for as long as Pelosi has, and when you're in charge of leaderships and you're in charge of committee assignments and chair assignments and setting the agenda, you can give a lot of people what they want and you don't really have to give up that much. Like Nancy Pelosi saying, I'm going to work for a liberal priority isn't

really that much of a give for her, you know? So, you know, it's funny because a lot of people will say that Congress doesn't get anything done, you know, things don't get passed, and they get frustrated by a lack of progress. And then when you have someone like Nancy Pelosi, who actually knows how to make these kinds of deals to get things done, a lot of people, especially people new to politics will say, oh, that's just dirty. It feels gross. It's icky, right? At the same time, that's how politics works and has to function. I don't know that there's a different way that that can be done. Sure. Well, and looking at what happened today and what happened over the last couple of weeks, that has shown how she can pull the levers,

maybe even twist a few arms within her own party. But let's look at how this, what this might mean for how the next Congress will work with the president and how Nancy Pelosi will work with Donald Trump. Today at a press conference, Nancy Pelosi talked a little bit about how optimistic she is about that relationship. When I was speaker and President Bush was president, He treated me and the office I hold with great respect. He would jubilantly call me number three. He's number one. The vice president was number two. I was number three. He never began a meeting unless the speaker was present. We worked together on many issues. I would expect nothing less than that from this president of the United States. We work together on many issues. I would expect nothing less than that from this president of the United States. We are a co-equal branch of government. So she just drew a parallel between

working with George W. Bush and working with Donald Trump. Is there a giant buzzer with that? Yeah. How much do we believe this? Do we believe that she's feeling pumped about this? Well, I think, I mean, Pelosi talks about that Bush relationship a lot. Often she will she will start meetings with reporters by hauling out this picture of her and George W. Bush and saying, I can work well with Republicans. I've done it before. That being said, she clearly has a very progressive caucus and she has priorities that don't really line up with the president's. So I think I think it gets back to that deal cutting that that isn't really in favor right now. I think when it comes to the types of of government funding bills that that's coming up next week, which she won't be negotiating because Democrats aren't in charge yet. I think on, you know, the the always vaunted we could work together on infrastructure things that Democrats and Republicans say she'll be happy to cut deals to get as much of the Democratic priorities as she wants.

The question is, how politically tenable is that in this environment where the base doesn't love the idea of cutting a deal and getting 70 percent of your goals? You know, one of the things that I think is interesting that's happening is you have both Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi saying they want to be, quote, bipartisan. You know, Donald Trump said, you know, he wants to do he'll look at infrastructure. He'll look at some other things. Right. He started to talk about criminal justice reform. And you have Nancy Pelosi talking about how she's worked well with other Republican presidents. There's a political reason for that. And that's because independents really want to see the political parties come up with something together to compromise, to make the country work and move forward.

And there's a tremendous opportunity right now for Democrats in particular to try to hold independents because they voted very strongly with Democrats in this 2018 election. Part of that was to fuel a sense that Democrats need to be a check on President Trump, but not necessarily stand in the way of everything. I'm really skeptical that deals will be cut with Pelosi and Trump because you go back to the most high profile thing they've negotiated on, and that's the year plus back and forth about whether or not they would find a permanent fix for the people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Unlike, say, George W. Bush, President Trump changes his mind a lot. He can do it literally from hour to hour on a certain issue. I wonder how effective you can negotiate on that front and get things through Congress. But as Pelosi was pointing out all along as she

was trying to get support, she's got a pretty good track record of getting a lot of her priorities through the House in a way that Paul Ryan didn't. All right, we're going to leave that there. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to swing over to the Senate and talk about the final Senate battle of 2018. Hey there, we're going to get back to the show in a second. But I wanted to give you another reminder that if you like what you hear, you can support this podcast by supporting your local public radio station. Just go to donate.npr.org slash politics to support fact-based journalism. Okay, back to the show. And we're back. Let's head to Mississippi, where last night Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith won her seat, but she didn't win it without controversy. Domenico, give us the rundown.

What happened? Well, Cindy Hyde-Smith wound up winning 54 to 46. But there was a lot of controversy leading into this. You know, Mississippi is racially tinged history. And there were a couple of comments that surfaced that Cindy Hyde-Smith had made previously that got her into some trouble. around that she would be at the front row of a public hanging if a certain supporter had invited her. She joked about endorsing a degree of voter suppression and saying that there are certain groups of voters, maybe we don't want them to vote so much. And it came out that she'd attended a segregated school. And all of these things became things she had to talk about, apologize for. And it took, in some ways, President Trump coming down to Mississippi to help put her over the finish line. All right. So this is the final Senate election of 2018. So I want to kind of zoom out and look at what we've learned from this past election cycle and what it can show us and specifically about the South, because it looks to me like you have these red

states like Alabama and Alabama's special Senate race last year, Georgia's governor race this year, this Senate race in Mississippi, the's governor race this year, this Senate race in Mississippi, the Senate race in Texas, I could go on. These races in these red states where Democrats really had been able to compete. And I'm wondering, does this mean that this opens up the map for Democrats to some degree? Or were some of these races just one-offs against flawed candidates like Roy Moore? Well, I mean, the fact of the matter is the floor came up for Democrats across the country. You know, Republicans had the best Senate landscape since the direct election of senators. You had 26 Democrats up for election, just nine Republicans. You know,

that's a big deal when Republicans are only able to net two pickups and struggle in a place like Mississippi. That should tell you that something is going on and that Democratic voters are energized in the era of Trump. Now, whether a Beto O'Rourke or Mike Espy or, you know, Stacey Abrams can get over the finish line in some of these states that have voted Republican for a very long time. That was a different situation. Right. Well, and speaking of those two pickups, you know, now Republicans control 53 Senate seats. Democrats will control 47 come January. With that kind of a cushion for Republicans. I mean, what does that mean for some of these big votes that might come up next year? I think it's a really big deal. I mean, the two pickups are not the tremendous victory that

President Trump framed it as saying it wasn't getting enough attention, but it does make a big difference in the Senate. And let's just take today. Today, the Senate voted to advance the nomination of a controversial judicial nominee from North Carolina named Thomas Farr. And Jeff Flake voted against it. And there was a big question of whether Tim Scott, another Republican, would vote against it. And there was a big question of whether Tim Scott, another Republican, would vote against it. And everybody voted except for Scott. And it was stalled at 49-50, 50 against, 49-4. And the Senate just waited around and waited around for Tim Scott. And they didn't know if he was going to vote for or against this judge. And the Senate basically ground to a halt for about a half hour waiting for Tim Scott to decide what to do. And that's because with these margins, one or two Republicans have tremendous control over what passes and what doesn't pass.

Right. I suppose it's a lot like the Brett Kavanaugh hearings this year, where everybody was hanging around outside Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski's office, just waiting on these one or two or three Republicans. Yeah. So adding two more votes, it doesn't sound like a lot, but it just about doubles the cushion that Mitch McConnell has for votes to lose. If this nomination had come up next year and Tim Scott and Jeff Flake, of course, Flake's not going to be there, had decided to take a stand, McConnell could say, that's great. I got the rest of the votes. I need to pass this. And I think that'll be a big difference when it comes to nominations, because McConnell said, hey, with Democrats in control of the House, I don't anticipate passing a lot of these bills that the House sends us. So what I'm going to do is focus even more on judicial nominations than we did before.

And we know that over the past two years, Mitch McConnell has made judicial nominations his number one priority. So I think those two extra Senate votes give Republicans a lot more Republican judges. Right. A small change and a big change at the same time in the Senate for next year. So, guys, I have a piece of political trivia I want to throw out to you because Cindy Hyde-Smith is now the first woman elected to Congress from Mississippi. Now, going into last night, there were only two states in the country where a woman had never been elected to Congress. Now there's only one. Do you guys know what it is? Oh, my gosh. Don't come. Don't come at Danielle. Really? She is like, you know,

you know what? Number 48. Do you even raise your hand in class? Nope. If I could drop this mic, I would. All right. That's a wrap for today. A reminder that you can keep up with all our best online analysis by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. You can subscribe by going to npr.org slash politics newsletter, all one word, politics newsletter. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.