The NPR Politics Podcast - Listener Mail: Sunday, April 2

Episode Date: April 2, 2017

Your questions, answered. This episode: Congressional reporter/host Scott Detrow, White House Correspondent Scott Horsley and political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Rosalie from Germany. This podcast was recorded at... 10.36 on Friday, March 31st. It's 10.36 on Friday, March 31st, and I almost failed German. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with an episode of Listener Mail, where we spend time answering your questions about things you're curious about. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. All right, before we get started, let's talk a little bit about the news that broke late Thursday night about Michael Flynn. Flynn, of course, is right at the center of the questions about whether or not there was any improper coordination or collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia. He briefly served as

Trump's national security advisor, briefly being key because, Scott, he lasted less than a month, right? That's right. But I think it was the shortest tenure for a national security advisor on record. Right. So before being forced out for misrepresenting details about a key conversation with Russia's ambassador to Vice President Mike Pence and others. So we learned last night that Flynn is apparently looking for immunity with congressional investigations and also maybe the FBI. We got a statement from his lawyer which says this is just about Flynn protecting himself. The statement says, quote, no reasonable person would submit to questions in such a highly politicized witch hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution. But shortly after this happened, Flynn critics

immediately dug this clip up from last fall when Flynn was on Meet the Press on NBC, criticizing Hillary Clinton and that FBI investigation into her email server. People like Hillary Clinton, I mean, five people around her have had, have given immunity to include her former chief of staff. When you are given immunity, that means that you've probably committed a crime. And then Friday morning, Donald Trump tweeted about this. Danielle or Scott, would either of you like the honor of reading the Donald Trump tweet? I would be happy to.

So Trump tweeted at 7 a.m. on Friday. He tweeted, quote, Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt, parentheses, excuse for big election loss, close parentheses, by media endems of historic proportion, exclamation point. Boil, boil, toil and trouble. We've got both the White House and Flynn's attorney now talking about a witch hunt. I feel like it is worth saying that when you read a Trump tweet on the radio, you have to make choices about how much of the punctuation you put into into what you say.

Like, good call with the parentheses, I feel like. As always, I err on the side of exactitude. Scott, I have a feeling you could like- Should we just fact check that the election loss was not of historic proportion? Well, that's also true. Yes. I feel like, Scott, you can probably do more

for Macbeth right there. I have a feeling. Out, damn tweet. All right, but let's move forward to taxes. A question from Phil in Petaluma, California. Phil asks, what is the border adjustment tax? Question mark. Question mark.

Is this just a 21st century repackaging of a discarded 19th century tariff? Question mark. All right, so I'm going to start on this because I love tax policy. All right, so the border adjustment tax is a simpler name for what is called the destination based cash flow tax, the DVCFT. And can you pronounce that? No, I can't. But I can say that hashtag DVCFT. If you want to follow the border adjustment tax on Twitter, that is what you should follow. I follow it myself. It is good for saying a rocking hashtag.

It really is. You get all sorts of interesting stuff. All right. So the basic idea of a border adjustment tax is this. Congressional Republicans like this because it's a way to help bring the corporate tax rate down. Right now, the federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent. We should say some congressional Republicans like this. Absolutely. Some congressional Republicans hate this. That's absolutely right. Yeah. And the idea is to bring it down, I believe, to 20%.

Now, what the border adjustment tax would do is this. If you are a U.S. company and you sell your stuff in another country, those profits, that revenue won't be taxed. But if you sell your stuff in the U.S., it would be taxed. Likewise, if you are, you know, if I make widgets in Iowa and I decide to move my factory to South Korea. Does anyone make widgets outside of economic conversations about? Absolutely not. Likewise, guns and butter are never substitutes for each other. But if I decide to move my widget factory to South Korea and then bring those widgets in and sell them here, then they would be taxed here.

In other words, you are penalizing imports and you are subsidizing exports. So companies that are in the export-oriented business like this idea. Companies that are in the import-oriented business don't like this idea. And importers-exporters are divided. And politically, Paul Ryan loves this idea. But one of the louder voices of Republicans who does not like this idea is Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, where people have pointed out is where a very big company that does lots of international business,

Walmart, is headquartered. Lindsey Graham also famously tweeted, anything that raises the cost of Coronas, tequila, and guacamole, no es bueno. Well, speaking of Walmart, retailers are a little bit scared about this. You know, a lot of the stuff you buy at Walmart, you buy at Target is imported. So the idea is that potentially one of the problems of this is that the cost of importing all of that stuff would be passed on to the consumers. People would buy less stuff. In fact, the National Retail Federation put out a fun commercial earlier this month where they sort of did an infomercial opposing the what they call the bat the border adjustment tax too much dough got you feeling low too much cash breaking your back then you need the bat tax the all-new bat tax is specially designed to make your disposable income disappear you've got sales tax and they're all of these fun infomercialish uh visuals of someone being very upset that they can't fold their wallet because it's full of too much cash.

Gosh darn it. I think we could expect a pretty big fight on this. In answer to Phil's question, this is sort of a throwback to 19th century mercantilist economic theory that everything we bring in from another country is a negative for the U.S. economy. Everything we sell to another country is a plus for the U.S. economy. Everything we sell to another country is a plus for the U.S. economy. But in terms of the House tax package, the tax bill that was drafted by the Republicans, this is really important because it raises a boatload of revenue for the federal government. And they would use that revenue to offset the big cuts they want to make in the corporate tax rate and in maybe in individual tax rates and to help kind of keep their overall tax plan from being a real deficit buster. If senators like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham torpedo this border adjustment tax, then Republicans are going to have to go

looking elsewhere for some revenue to make up for that, or they're going to have to accept just a big explosion in the deficit. So I have bad news for both of you that the next question is not nearly as wonky as this, but that's okay. We'll get back to this level. I'm leaving. This is a question from Patrick who writes, with the news that Ivanka Trump is getting an office in the White House, since she's also an advisor to the president, it made me wonder about these advisor positions. Are advisors employees of the U.S. government? Who signs their checks? If they're government employees, what requirements, etc.? Basically, what are these

positions? How official are they? So let's put a quick pause on that general question about advisors because we haven't really gotten into the fact that Ivanka Trump, President Trump's daughter, very high profile surrogate over the course of the campaign, is now basically working for Trump in the White House. So Ivanka Trump with this move is going from the sort of informal daughter advisor position to a now formal, albeit unpaid, West Wing officeholder advisor. And the significance of that is she is now explicitly subject to all the ethical rules that govern other White House personnel. One rule she's not subject to, I guess, is the anti-nepotism rule. And this came up earlier when her husband, the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, accepted an unpaid position as an advisor to the White House. So the fact that she's not paid basically is the way to get around those rules, right?

No, I think the way they got around that is that they decided the White House is not an agency of the federal government. Therefore, it's different than Bobby Kennedy being attorney general. So the White House is kind of a carve out there. This president and others have also had other advisors who are not blood relatives or in-laws, and those are also staffers. They are paid by the, when they're paid, they're paid by the government. Their checks are signed, I suppose, by the auto pen at the Treasury Department that signs other government paychecks. To give a literal answer to that question. They probably have direct deposit.

But, yeah, these are employees of the federal government, just like David Axelrod or David Plouffe in the Obama administration. These are just advisors who may be having a little extra clout because they get to go upstairs to the residence and bend the president's ear in off hours. However, I mean, it's true that a lot of these top advisors do often get some of the top salaries in the White House. So it's not that the president can have unlimited advisors then, right? Because there's a budget. Right. There's a limit to the White House budget. Congress sets that. So one way that this is limited is by how much money the White House has to give out. And has anyone ever in the history of the country been identified as a junior advisor?

That's a very good point. I'm a very non-important White House employee. That's how people go around. All right. Up next is a recorded question from Teja. Hey, NPR Politics Podcast. I've been a huge fan of the show for a while now, and I've been meaning to try this voice memos thing, but I kept putting it off.

My question to you guys is, now that the president has pulled out from the American Health Care Act and the Democrats have scored a temporary victory, how are they going to change their MO moving on to tax reform? Are they going to continue flat out opposing everything the Republicans are trying to do? Or is there anything that both sides can agree on? So I think there's two answers here. There's a political answer, and then there's kind of the interesting intersection between health care and tax reform. Politically, Trump has been saying the last few days, I want to work with Democrats. I'm going to reach out to Democrats. But the thing is, like Donald Trump has really poisonous approval ratings with the Democratic base has made it clear that they are very skeptical of any Democrat reaching out to Donald Trump in any way, shape or form, or basically doing anything other than fully opposing him with everything they can do, which is kind of an ongoing problem

for issues like one we'll be dealing with in a couple of weeks of extending the federal budget and kind of basic governance. But Democrats have made it clear that they are not here to reach big bipartisan deals with President Trump because their base views him in a very negative term. So I think Trump's going to have a hard time actually trying to reach out if he does legitimately try to do so. There's a few issues. Infrastructure always gets mentioned by Democratic leaders as something that they're big fans of. And if he's serious about, they'd want to do. And there's other some sort of smaller issues, like maybe dealing with the opioid crisis or things like that, that maybe that could happen. But in terms of suddenly saying, like, yeah, let's work on health care

after spending the last year railing on it at all points. I think that's very unlikely. I think it's also important to remember, it was not the unified opposition of the Democrats in the House that defeated the Republican health care bill. It was the failure of the Republicans to agree. They kind of stepped to the side and watched that happen. Absolutely. Had the Republicans had a unified position, they absolutely could have passed that bill over the uniform opposition of the Democrats. And likewise, the Republicans could do exactly the same thing with the tax bill if that's what they decided to do and if they were united in that effort. Now, aside from

the political arguments, there are procedural arguments that some folks have made that failing to pass the health care bill makes a tax overhaul more challenging. Some people have argued that by failing to pass the health care bill, Republicans have now dug themselves a hole where it's going to be more difficult procedurally to pass the tax bill. I don't think that's correct. It's true that passing the health care bill would have reduced the overall government revenues. And so the target, you might say, the baseline that the Republicans would have been operating from would be different. But the tax bill, the amount of tax cuts that the Republicans can achieve through the tax bill isn't really affected by overall government revenues.

It's affected by the pieces of the tax bill. And so this argument that somehow it's going to be a trillion dollars harder now to pass tax reform than it would have been had they passed the health care bill, an argument that House Speaker Paul Ryan has made, just doesn't really add up. All right. Next question is fun. It came to NPR's Sue Davis from Aaron Douglas of Battlestar Galactica fame. He asked about some of the differences between the House committee investigation and the investigation on the Senate side. Here's the question. I know they do separate investigations, but one, what happens if they reach a different conclusion?

And two, does one have more teeth than the other? I'll keep this quick because we have spent a lot of time in the last few podcasts digging into all the different dynamics and problems on these committees. Shorter answer, yes, they can reach totally different conclusions. One example is the Benghazi various committees the last couple of years. How many different Benghazi committees were there? At least there was- Seven, I think. Yeah, the House Intelligence, the Senate Intelligence, then the House Select Committee. And not only did they all kind of reach different conclusions,

but the House Select Committee had two different reports. One was the Republican report and one was the Democratic report. One could imagine the House Intelligence Committee coming up with two different reports in much the same way, a bipartisan split. And the other interesting angle about their investigation is that it's kind of like a passive investigation in that what they're mostly doing is collecting a lot of the raw information that, you know, intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies have been investigating themselves. And they're doing their own work and analysis of it. But it's not like they're out there actively, like knocking on doors in the way that the FBI is. And I wanted to make a Cylon joke, but like the moment passed.

All right. Thank you, Erin, for talking to Sue, I guess, and for listening to the podcast. Next is a question from Sam in Vancouver, British Columbia. Sam writes, as president, who pays generally for the president's meals, the taxpayers or the president themselves? Does it shift depending on whether or not they eat in or out of the White House or whether or not they're on official president business? Asking since Trump seems to love to patronize his hotel's eateries and it always attracts concern about how ethical that is or isn't, who's actually paying the bill? So, yeah, I mean, like any of us, the president buys his own food when they're eating at the

White House, at the very least, eating their own meals. The president and his family, because it's always a he thus far, they always do pay for their own meals. Yes. And of course, Michelle Obama had a nice garden outside where apparently the Obamas would eat out of as well. I'm assuming someone shops for them, though. Sure. I haven't seen Obama or Trump at the Harris Teeter. Right. Yeah. There was a famous picture of Michelle Obama doing some shopping at Target. But I think that was mostly for a drive. Didn't Joe Biden go to Costco at some point? I think Joe Biden and Obama went to get burgers a lot. That was like their their thing. Right. As their basic food and incidentals at the White House, toothpaste and toiletries and all of that. Yeah. The president and their family pay for that. However, when it comes to like the big fancy functions, you can't quite expect the first family to shell out for, you know, state dinners. So that is a taxpayer expense. When the president is on the road, he also pays. Sometimes there's a staff person that takes care of actually paying the bill. But with former President Obama, he kind of made a show of usually pulling out his wallet and paying the tab himself,

sometimes with cash. There was a famous and somewhat funny incident when he tried to pay with plastic at a Stella restaurant in New York City, and the wait person had to come back and say, Mr. President, I'm sorry, your credit card was declined because maybe he hadn't used it for a while. Luckily, Michelle was on hand and they were able to use her credit card. Now, it's a good question, though, with Donald Trump, since he's often eating at restaurants in his own businesses. Does he pull out some money and pay or do they just say that's on the House since it's your house, Mr. President? Right. And I don't know the answer to that.

We'll have to kind of pay closer attention next time the president's dining out. All right. Last question is recorded. It's from Kerry in Oregon. Hi, this is Kerry, enjoying my first day of Oregon spring break, which is quite a bit different than what happens in Daytona Beach.

But I had a question after today's pod. Susan Davis used the term big R. And I fancy myself somewhat of a wonky political junkie, and I always have trouble understanding what people mean when they use that reference. I know I've heard John McCain say Democrat Congress instead of Democratic, and I think it's meant to be used in a disparaging way, but I could really use a splainer on this. Thanks a lot. Enjoy the show. Danielle, you perked up. Yes. First of all, I really like the word splainer. Second of all, as far as I can see, Carrie has two different questions here between the John McCain Democrat thing and the big R, small R Republican thing.

So let's start with the capital and lowercase letters. So big R Republican, big D Democrat, that would refer to, you know, political parties, what sides you subscribe to. Small R Republican refers to the idea of you support the idea of a Republican form of government. That is a government where a representative democracy. So small d democratic, you know, I suppose, would refer to being in favor of a democracy. Right. It's been a Lato's republic, not John McCain's republic. Right. Yes. Like all these conversations about is liberal democracy deroding in Western Europe? That's not like our Democratic Party is falling or, you know, it's like. Yeah. When you do dig into this, there is from time to time a debate between like you know is the u.s did the founders intend for the u.s to be a republic or a democracy well james madison and federalist 10 was all about we want a republican democracy

we want people to represent the good citizens of the united states because then that acts against the mischiefs of faction. That way, it's harder for the tyranny of some small group that is self-interested to get too much power. Danielle, with the guns, the butter, the widgets, and the Federalist Papers. Exactly. He was against direct democracy. So a republic, yes, is a democracy, but it's not a direct democracy where people are making all the decisions for themselves. And in terms of Democrat used as a pejorative to describe a member of the Democratic Party, that's a little bit like America first. It's kind of a new term with an old and checkered history.

Thomas Dewey used to use Democrat as a pejorative term for Democrats, members of the Democratic Party back in the 40s. Joe McCarthy used it in the middle of the last century. It was sort of rekindled in the Newt Gingrich era in the 90s. And it's become almost universal among Republicans now. And it really sticks in Democrats' cross. But like, what's insulting about it other than that it's not their name? I guess that's it. Well, it's just it's it's only it's only used by people who want to use it pejoratively. Yeah. Yeah. It's like calling someone by their non-preferred name. It's like if I walked around calling you Scotty when you had explicitly told me to call you Scott.

Scott Horsley, how do you feel about that name? Because I'm not a fan. Scotty? Yeah. Are you okay with it? I kind of prefer Scottles. Scotulous. All right.

That is the mail for today. A reminder to write us with your questions or record them. Send them to nprpolitics at npr.org. We read all of them. And I'll actually say right here because we've gotten a couple questions about this. That is the same address to send us a recording with a timestamp at the front if you want to try doing that. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter.

I'm Scott Horstley. I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.