The NPR Politics Podcast - Shutdown Averted; GOP Healthcare Push Continues

Episode Date: May 1, 2017

Plus the White House Correspondent's Dinner without the President. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, political reporter Vanessa Romo, 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

Hi, this is Brie Reynolds from Edmond, Oklahoma. This podcast was recorded at 1210 on May 1st. Things may have changed by the time you listen. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the show. its dinner to rally in Pennsylvania. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor.

Hey, Domenico. Hey there. And we are not the only two people in the studio right now. Thank goodness. We have a special introduction, a new member of our podcast team, Vanessa Roma. Hello. Hi. How's it going? All right. How are you feeling about your first podcast?

You know, a little nervous, but I'm going to, you know, just jump right in. It's taped, so don't worry about it. Vanessa, tell us about yourself. I'm from L.A. I was living in New York, but I really miss L.A. and the sunshine, though I'm super glad to be here now that it's finally getting warm. An important fact about the podcast is that we are all mostly dog people. You told me last week that you have a dog. I do have a dog. He's got a great name.

At least I think so. My last name is Romo. His first name is Momo. I thought it was Tony. What kind of dog is Momo Romo? He's like a little Havanese, Maltese kind of mix. So white, fluffy, small, terrified of the world, really. I like the name.

I mean, I have a cat. I'm not like all total dog people. I have a dog. You have a cat? I do. I have the world, really. I like the name. I mean, I have a cat. I'm not like all total dog people. I have a dog. You have a cat? I do. I have a dog, too. You just talk about your dog more. Well, you know.

Okay. All right. So let's start with the spending bill. This news broke late Sunday night. Congress has reached a deal to fund the government through September. The vote itself will happen later in the week. The deal is like surprisingly normal in status quo, given the general vibe in Washington right now where that never seems to be the case. One key detail of this bill, which we talked about last week, is that it is not going to include funding for the wall that President Trump wants to build on the U.S.-Mexico border. Domenico, what do you make of this?

Well, you know, the thing is this is back to where Democrats and Republicans were. They were trying to get, you know, a one week stopgap funding bill, the continuing resolution or CR, as some people will talk about, and then maybe something to fund the government for the rest of the year. They keep doing this because they can't pass a budget on their own. But Donald Trump decided to weigh in with just a week to go, not even four days or so, and decided he wanted to call for things like border wall funding, health care subsidies to be stripped out and tried to play some negotiations where you want to do dollar for dollar cuts to Obamacare subsidies or dollar for dollar funding of Obamacare subsidies and border wall funding. Democrats weren't having any part of that because neither is popular. So Democrats felt like they had a lot of leverage. Trump eventually did for once. They did. Yeah. And Trump eventually reneged on his demands. And now we're back to where we were. So I have a quick question. How did he explain the fact that the funding for the border wall was no longer a sort of

number one priority for this? Well, he talked about that, and I think we'll probably get into this more when we talk about his rally this weekend. He has continued to insist, no, we are going to build this wall. This wall is a priority. But the key thing is, this was his first moment to press for it. And he very quickly backed down before he backed down so quickly on that demand that it was never even a serious part of the actual negotiations. And I just wonder, going forward, if that's going to mean that a lot of people who, you know, make laws and have a lot of influence and power are going to shrug their shoulders when the president decides to take to the megaphone. So late last night when I got like a Twitter message saying that they'd reached an agreement

on a new spending bill, I was really shocked. I couldn't believe it because the fact that it was going to go through September, I thought that was really surprising because this last one was just like a week long. And so it really made me wonder, what are people sort of rescinding ground on? It's a really detailed bill. The text just got released a few hours ago, so we're still sorting through it. But a few key things. Trump did get a win out of the fact that it spends more money on the military.

He wanted to see a spending increase. He got it. It also does increase money for border security, about a billion dollars extra for more enforcement, more surveillance, things like that. And that's something that actually both parties are fine with and happy to fund. But, you know, Trump had wanted to defund Planned Parenthood. This bill does not do that. It also does not pull federal funding from sanctuary cities. So we talked about this when Trump introduced his budget. This is kind of that coming into play in real life. The president has a very loud megaphone, but is actually not really involved in the budgeting process at all. And for now, those Obamacare subsidies are continued within this legislation.

So if you have health care and you're looking to sign up for this coming year or the next year, at least for now, that stays in place. But we know Republicans are pushing to reshape health care and repeal and replace Obamacare, as they put it. So we're not sure where that's going. We know that they're pretty close on the votes with that. Yeah. And sticking to the budget for one more point before we talk about that, this seems like a really long time. And I guess, given past performance, given the last bill was for one week through the end of September, it's a long time. But this process is going to repeat itself again in the fall, and we'll see how long they fund the government for next time.

But on health care, let's talk about that quickly. In the last few days, we've seen a lot of signals that Republicans are feeling increasingly bullish on the effort to pass a version of their health care bill. We got into the details of the new language last week. It basically gives states the ability to opt out of key Obamacare requirements like mandates for specific kinds of coverage, protections for people with pre-existing conditions. It did win the support of the Freedom Caucus. That's the conservative wing of the Republican caucus. kinds of coverage, protections for people with pre-existing conditions. It did win the support of the Freedom Caucus. That's the conservative wing of the Republican caucus. Moderates still skeptical. House leaders in the White House have been doing a lot of lobbying, though, and the White House at least seems to feel like it's making progress. Here's Ryan Pribis,

Trump's chief of staff, on CBS This Morning. Are you expecting a health care bill this week? Well, I certainly hope so. I think so. I'm an optimistic person. Do you have the votes, do you think? I think we will. I think it will happen this week. That's Priebus, and here's Gary Cohn. He's Trump's National Economic Council director. Do you have the votes for health care? Do we have the votes for health care? I think we do. This is going to be a great week. But, you know, the White House has said that before on a lot of things and kind of been found out to be not quite totally in touch with what was going on on the Hill in terms of whip counts. Well, you know, we don't know Gary Cohn's track record at this point of knowing whether or not we should believe his spin. I mean, there are others who- Thinking more about Sean Spicer.

Well, I wasn't going to call out names, but if Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway had said, this is definitely happening, we'd say, eh, let's see them bring it to the floor. Now, Gary Cohn, we know, is pretty close to President Trump. And if he's saying, you know, this is going to be a great week,

it seems that he's signaling anyway that Republicans are, if not there, they're close. Because if they were there, they would have brought it to the floor already. Exactly. Because that's what the Republican leaders on the Hill have been saying all along. We're not going to have a set date for the vote. We'll hold the vote when we have the votes, which they clearly don't since they haven't scheduled a vote yet. So it sounds like they're going to move ahead without a CBO score. And I think the last time that they tried to push ahead with the GOP health care bill, they found that 24 million fewer people were going to have health coverage by 2026.

Yeah. And that was that was a key moment to where opponents rallied around that number. And it really took hold in the narrative, despite the preemptive push from both the White House and Republican leaders saying, don't don't pay attention to the CBO score that's coming out. The Congressional Budget Office is the nonpartisan referee in a lot of these legislative fights. And when you want to know how much something is going to cost, they're the ones who are going to bring in the numbers. And that really had an effect on derailing the last Republican version. No surprise then that they're going to vote without that CBO

score this time around because they won't have that complication. Which is funny because, you know, this one of these ebbs and flows things when the Republicans were the minority party, they criticized all the time the Democrats for moving forward without giving the proper time to digest bills, to read bills, to analyze their effects. But when you're in the majority, you see things differently. I was just going to ask a numbers question. So how many votes sort of are up for grabs? They've solved about half of their problem because the last bill got called off because you had the 20 or so Freedom Caucus guys, you had a little bit larger number of moderates, and both of them had different kinds of concerns, but they were all skeptical.

This change seems to have made the conservative Freedom Caucus guys happy. But it's the moderates who are increasingly skeptical about it. And, you know, Domenico, you've seen the approval rating for the last push. It was 17 percent approval for that bill. This language doesn't really change much of those issues. So I have to imagine moderates still might have political questions about this. Yeah. And, you know, these numbers are interesting to me because it's not at all clear exactly how many Freedom Caucus members there are. There have been reports that there's, you know, 30 plus. There's some that show that there are fewer than that. But then of the moderates, you know, you were saying that there's some 20 of them or so and they're not happy with specific things that would reduce the level of benefits that people could get that would be required for insurance companies to cover.

So they don't want to have to go home to their districts and try to defend something that they feel is worsening care or worsening coverage. At the same time, you have the Freedom Caucus that wants to give more of an ability to the states. So this newest amendment that was put forward by actually a New Jersey moderate, the MacArthur Amendment named after that congressman, says basically that states could opt out of certain requirements for coverage and could make care, advocates of Obamacare anyway, say, could make it more expensive for insurance companies to cover. Yeah, because even as Republicans have railed on Obamacare for years, one of the key messages from both President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan was that they would keep

some of the popular things of Obamacare like that mandate that you can't be frozen out of insurance. And President Trump is sticking to that line. Here he is on CBS. Everyone was talking to CBS, I guess. Here he was on CBS's Face the Nation over the weekend, arguing that point to John Dickerson. People out there with pre-existing conditions, they are worried. Are they going to have the guarantee of coverage if they have a pre-existing condition or if they live in a state where the governor decides that's not a part of the health care or that the prices are going to go up. That's the worry.

The American Medical Association says we actually have to make coverage completely unaffordable for people. We actually have. Well, forget about unaffordable. What's unaffordable is Obamacare, John. So I'm not hearing you, Mr. President, say there's a guarantee of pre-existing conditions. We actually have a clause that guarantees. OK, excellent. We have a specific clause that guarantees. Okay, excellent.

We have a specific clause that guarantees. Vanessa, what is Trump talking about here? Okay, so he's basically saying that there's a specific clause in the bill that guarantees coverage for pre-existing conditions. And so the section he's referring to says, nothing in this act shall be construed as permitting health insurance issuers to limit access to health coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions. So that's one line that he's talking about. Right. That's the clause. Yeah. But the broader effect of the bill is actually quite the opposite. Right. That's because the amendment would allow states to seek waivers, which could lead to folks with

pre-existing conditions being put in high risk pools. You know, these high risk pools that they're talking about kind of shifting people with major health problems too could lead to situations where they're just paying enormous out-of-pocket costs to get coverage. But I mean, this is a lot of spin. The president trying to say that this is going to be better than Obamacare. He said he didn't know healthcare was so complicated. And one of the big problems as far as healthcare being so complicated that President

Obama ran into was how to message when it comes to healthcare, because it is so easy to pick holes in it. Yeah. And I think, you know, one question that we've had is, at this point, are Republicans serious about getting a bill signed into law? Or are they serious about creating the appearance that there is constant forward momentum on this and they haven't just given up on health care? And I think this is going to be a key week to get an answer to that question, how far they push it, how successful that push is. Let's also talk about something that just happened over the weekend, though. And that was a pretty busy weekend that, Vanessa, you were covering for us. This was the White House Correspondents

Dinner was happening in Washington, D.C., but Donald Trump was not there. The president went to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to do some counter-programming. He held a big rally, thousands of people at the Farm Show in Harrisburg. As you may know, there's another big gathering taking place tonight in Washington, D.C. Did you hear about it? And Trump was very happy to draw out the contrast when he was speaking to the crowd. and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation's capital right now. So, Vanessa, you were in that hotel ballroom. Were there Hollywood actors?

And was there consolation happening? There were not many Hollywood actors. So I was on the red carpet. And the one celebrity that I definitely recognized easily and quickly by sight was Matthew Modine, who, for those of you out there who don't know who he is, he was most recently in Stranger Things. He was the only star, I guess, that you could say who really made it out there, other than Madeline Albright and Al Sharpton, who were also there.

Washington stars. Washington stars. Washington stars. There was a little bit of consoling going on. I was in the photo press pool section of the red carpet, and there was a lot of reminiscing and talk about like the grand Obama days and like the, you know, the star power that showed up to that event. So this was a much more low-key evening? It was so low-key that there was a photographer next to me

bidding on a washer and dryer on her phone. That is how low-key it was. Wow. Did they get the washer and dryer? I think she found out it was gas and not electric, so no. Okay. I actually enjoyed this one, I think, a lot more than some of those past years. Because you've been to both the before and after of the president covering your not going. And I think my first one was the last Bush one.

So it was a big difference even from those days. But the theme of the night was the First Amendment. There was a much greater focus on the scholarships that the White House Correspondents Association puts out. You had those scholars on the stage, which is the first time I can remember that actually happening. I feel like in this era of the Trump era, it's been actually nice to see journalists kind of remember what their job is. Because I should say that, you know, we haven't directly said this, but this is an event that's gotten a lot of criticism. A lot of criticism. Becoming more and more bloated and more and more self-involved over the years.

And raises some ethical questions about whether or not journalists should be, you know, rubbing elbows with the people they're covering and being super critical of. Yeah. And because of that, there are certain news organizations like The New York Times that don't go to this event. though, that in general, it is a nice night where the press and the president are able to sort of come together and acknowledge the role of the free press and the role that it plays within free democracy, which distinguishes us in many ways from other countries that jail journalists. You know, and Donald Trump was the first president to miss this dinner since 1981, when Ronald Reagan couldn't make it. And he had a pretty darn good excuse. He was shot. Yeah. The other thing that I think is really fascinating

is that Clinton went every single year. So we're talking about like the Monica Lewinsky years. And made some allusions to those scandals, too. Right. And so, I mean, he had thick enough skin that he was still willing to go to that. And so that's really remarkable. And that was one of the jokes that Hasan Minhaj, the comedian, made. It was talking about how he felt Donald Trump didn't have a thick enough skin to be able to take a joke. And what Trump said was pretty predictable. I mean, I said beforehand that I thought he would use what he was doing in Pennsylvania to hit the press and say, you know, while the elite are gathering, we're seeing here I'm with the real

people. Yeah. And Trump's appearance on Saturday night was just such a vintage peak campaign trail Trump, you know, the the taunting the media and the press pen crowds booing the media crowds chanting, lock her up. Trump kind of making this big, bold promises. It was like peak running for president, rowdy crowd, energized crowd, Donald Trump. So I thought that was a really interesting contrast. Yeah. I wanted to go back just quickly, Domenico. So you're talking about how this is a moment for these young journalists who have been awarded these really fabulous scholarships. And I actually spoke to one of them. His name is Koichi Shirayanagi. And so he was a little disappointed

that the president wasn't there. but he had this to say. When I was 10 or 11 years old, I told my mom that I'd do something so wonderful that I'd meet the president of the United States one day. And here I am at the event where I'm supposed to meet the president of the United States, and he doesn't want to meet with me. And you know what? That's perfectly fine. Still a lot of time. You can meet the president one day. But you know what?

To be fair to President Trump on this, his appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, either 2011 or 2012, I think it was 2011. That's kind of like this critical moment in the Donald Trump running for president origin story where that was the year that he had been the loudest critic of the totally untrue theory that President Obama was not born in the United States. He was pushing that theory. He was also floating around for president. for a birth certificate, Trump's at the event, and not only Seth Meyers, the speaker, but

President Obama just rail on Trump in a not ha-ha-ha or poking light fun way, in like a pretty hostile way, and the whole room seemed to turn on him. Well, you know, look, Scott, if I were saying over and over again that I was questioning whether or not you were born in the United States and were a legitimate podcast host, then you might have some cause. Sometimes you question the second, but that's cool. I don't think so. But OK, so one thing like that. I'm not saying – I'm just saying that it is like – it is such an illustrative moment of the Washington establishment and Donald Trump not really having much to say to each other even though he's now as president in charge of it.

He's president. I have to say that 2011 dinner, what's really fascinating about it, my Facebook memories popped up from that night. And I'd forgotten that while I'm going through the magnetometer line where they are checking you for whether or not you have any metal or whatever. Magnetometer. That's what they're called, yeah, for when you go in the room. And in front of me was Donald Trump. And I had taken a photo and you see Donald Trump from behind where I had posted it to Facebook. And what would you have said at that dinner, at that moment or later in the night,

if someone tapped you on the shoulder and they were like, I'm the ghost from Christmas future. That's the next president of the United States. Like, would anyone in that room have been like, Donald Trump's going to be the next president? Well, first, I would have questioned the legitimacy of ghosts. I mean, does anybody believe? Except that premise. Except that premise. Well, OK, so let's say we pass the premise and this person is legit, then I would be wondering what were the causes and the reasons that Donald Trump, of all people, would be able to become president of the United States, because certainly not that night, if someone had said he's going to be the next president, relationship, his side especially, where he rails on the media over and over again.

But yet, what was Trump doing the week before this weekend as his 100 days mark came up? Giving interview after interview after interview to the media in the Oval Office. Yeah. It's a good point, Scott, because repeatedly over and over again, we've seen that Trump's rise had everything to do with the media, even though he was bashing it. We could talk about that all day, but we are out of time. One more story we're watching this week is the White House invitation that President Trump extended to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. He's the authoritarian leader accused of overseeing the killing of thousands of drug suspects without any sort of due process. This happened this weekend during a phone call that both sides described as warm and friendly.

Nothing's been scheduled or finalized yet, though, and we're waiting to hear more explanation from the White House for that infrontation. We're also seeing reports that Duterte himself is now backing away from that idea. So we're going to let that story play out for a few days and dig into it on Thursday in our weekly roundup. That'll do it. As I said, we'll be back Thursday. Our email address for your questions and comments and also your timestamps that we use at the beginning of the show is nprpolitics at npr.org. Vanessa, you made it through your first episode. Number one. Yes. One down, many more to go. We're glad to have you.

Thanks. All right. That's it. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Vanessa Romo, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.