The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Friday, March 24

Episode Date: March 25, 2017

This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, 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

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Time is a flat circle. Actually, it's Friday, March 24th at 7 p.m. Things may change by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Republicans have spent seven years vowing to repeal and replace Obamacare, but this afternoon they pulled the plug on a House bill that would have done just that. That's the major headline at the end of a very newsy week here in Washington,

and we are going to try to make sense of all this. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. All right, everybody, we're here. The week is over. Let's do this. Blood pressure has returned to normal. I'm going to have a drink immediately at the end of this podcast.

Like within milliseconds of walking out of the studio. All right, let's just tee this up here. Throughout all of the differences they've had with each other over the last few years, Republicans have agreed on one thing, getting rid of Obamacare. Repealing and replacing the bill was a key issue for Republicans in 2010, 2012, 2014, and in last year's presidential race. But today, House Speaker Paul Ryan said this. Yeah, we're going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future. I don't know how long it's going to take us to replace this law. Ryan had just pulled the plug on a House bill repealing key parts of Obamacare. And he did that because it was clear Republicans just didn't have the votes to pass it. Sue, you were in Congress basically nonstop

this week covering this. What happened? It was never really clear this week that they were getting the votes to pass it. And as the negotiations intensified late Thursday night, the Republicans huddled in the basement of the Capitol and the president's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, delivered a message from the president written down that said he was done negotiating. They had gone as far as they were going to go and he wanted a vote on, and that if it failed, they would be to blame. Sort of calling their bluff and daring them to put it on the floor. Today, the momentum towards that vote was going in the wrong direction. Every member that came out for that bill was a no.

The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, then went to the White House for lunch, had a meal with the president, told the president, I don't think we should have this vote. I think we should just pull it. The president agreed. And that's what they announced. And just generally, because there were a lot of different dynamics here, why couldn't Republicans get on board with a bill to repeal Obamacare? They just could not find a coalition of people that could agree on what the bill should look like. The core of the opposition came from conservatives in a group called the Freedom Caucus, which I think we shorthand a lot of time and say they were far right conservatives or hardline conservatives who didn't think the bill went far enough. They wanted more. And then everything you gave these far right conservatives, you lost more centrist

or moderate members who then said the bill was too conservative and not something they could go home and support in more competitive districts. And the reality is that the Freedom Caucus is sort of the hell no caucus. They've been the hell no caucus ever since they got there. And that worked pretty well when Barack Obama was president of the United States. But now they really do have to govern. The Republican Party controls the levers of power in Washington. And as Paul Ryan said, as the guy who could make the best deals, who could seal the deal at the end. And what I find particularly fascinating is Sue talks about the Freedom Caucus. These are places that Trump did exceedingly well. And he thought that the power of his personality and the popularity that he has in those districts, that he could use that lever and say with an ultimatum, this is the last chance you've got. Do or die.

Get it done. And they crossed him. Right. I mean, again, I feel like we need to point out that Donald Trump has talked about the fact that he's a dealmaker throughout his entire career. That's been kind of his central self-defining principle. It's a big reason why he ran for president saying, I'm going to be someone who gets things done. He made two big decisions here. First of all, to do this really quickly.

I mean, this has been going on for what, three weeks? Yeah. The bill was introduced about two and a half weeks ago. And how long did it take Obamacare to pass? More than a year. Right. So the really fast timeline and then the move yesterday to say, this is it. Tomorrow is your chance. If we don't get this done, we're moving on. You know, there's also where I think we're seeing in this the collision between what was Trump's sort of

populism or nationalism and his campaign pledges and more traditional conservatism in the House. What the House bill was coming together to look like was a much more just sort of traditional big R Republican version of health care. And that wasn't really what the president campaigned on. And as the details of the bill emerge, the president never really seemed to get on board with this. Now, they said publicly, no, they're working hand in glove. The president did meet with lawmakers. I do think he wanted a win, but he promised people that he was going to cover more people and offer better coverage. This bill was going to result in coverage losses. And in the end, I don't think Republicans thought it was a very good bill. And a big key issue that kind of led to this falling apart was a change to essential health

benefits. I guess it's less critical now because it's not moving forward. But just to kind of explain what was going on here, does somebody want to kind of explain what they are, what the change would have done and how people reacted? Yeah, let me try to explain this. So essential health benefits are sort of a keystone part of the Affordable Care Act. And what they say is that all insurance plans have to cover basic things. They have to cover primary care visits. They have to cover emergency room care. They have to cover inpatient care at the hospital. They also have to cover maternity care and pediatric care and mental health care and opioid or other addiction treatment.

And what the Freedom Caucus wanted to do was take that mandate out, repeal the mandate that all of these things be covered. And their view of it was like by mandating all of this stuff and making every single plan have all of these things in it, you know, like an older man shouldn't have to pay for pregnancy maternity coverage when there's no chance he'll have a baby. So they wanted to make it so that that regulation would go away. But that generated a massive amount of backlash from, well, everyone basically who wasn't in the Freedom Caucus. And then the best part is the Freedom Caucus was like,

thanks for that. But actually, we wanted more than that. And that alone wouldn't really do what we wanted to do. So that concession repelled a lot of moderate Republicans that didn't get enough hardliners on board to pass the bill. Right. And doing something like that, the bill was essentially getting closer and closer to just what the status quo was before the Affordable Care Act became law. And before the Affordable Care Act became law, there was a lot of problems in the insurance market then too. And it just became less and less clear what the problem was that this bill was trying to solve. What I found fascinating from a presidential point of view is Trump afterward talking about the fact that this was a learning experience for him. He clearly is somebody who we knew is not really involved in the policy, not involved in

the details of what was going on. And then he seemed to oddly open the door to a bipartisan bill later on, even though he said they're moving on to tax reform. He said both parties can get together and have a better bill. Having bipartisan would be a big, big improvement. But after he repeatedly trashed Democrats in his comments. Well, yeah, I mean, to an extent where he was basically saying that, you know, it'd be better for Obamacare to implode, like he had said in the past, but opening the door to meeting with Democrats somehow to have a bipartisan bill, that is not certainly something the vast majority of the Republican conference would get on board with. Why don't we just take a listen for a little bit to what President Trump had to say in

the Oval Office after this bill got pulled. I honestly believe the Democrats will come to us and say, look, let's get together and get a great health care bill or plan that's really great for the people of our country. And I think that's going to happen. The thing right off the bat with this that gets me is he's like, we were so close. We were very close. With no Democrat support, we couldn't quite get there. We're just a very small number of votes short. Here's the great thing about pulling the bill. You can claim you were close and no one will ever know. But I don't think they actually were that close.

No. No. And close, you know, it's like the old saying, close doesn't count. Except in what, horseshoes and grenades? Horseshoes and grenades. But, I mean, close is nothing. Talk about, like, there's consequences and close is a meaningless term when you're talking about passing legislation. Think about what the real consequences politically, electorally would have meant had you suddenly had a roll call that failed and you could parse out the no's and yes's.

It would be a roadmap for people like us to be able to look at which districts were the most vulnerable Republicans and what was the game plan for 2018 and how many of those people would have to go home. They had to have in the back of their minds the vote early on in the Obama administration, the Obama presidency, when Nancy Pelosi and President Obama made Democrats take a very difficult vote on cap and trade that only passed the House, that never passed the Senate, never came up in the Senate. And a lot of them were hung out to dry. And that's a bill that a lot of people had ads run against them saying they voted for major tax increases because basically it was putting a price on the amount of carbon dioxide you use, which would have involved big taxes on gasoline consumption and stuff like that. So I have a lot of questions about like what this loss means going forward for President Trump's agenda, for Republicans and their control of Congress and what they can get done. But I feel like one thing that stuck out to me with those statements from

Trump and with some of the interviews he did immediately after this bill got pulled was like, we did everything we could. We tried so hard. We really left it out like we left it all on the. This was less than a month like and this was just the first stage like this bill would have had to go to the Senate. It would have been drastically changed. Then you would have had to do all of this wrangling all over again. Like like Sue, you were saying all week this was the easiest part of the process. This was a profound failure for the Republican Party. This was a failure on a policy level that they could not come up with an alternative to what they want their health care vision to look like, despite seven years of

campaign pledges otherwise, that they could do it. It was a failure of leadership. It was a failure of leadership on the part of the speaker and the president. And it's a failure of politics that they made campaign promises and they today couldn't deliver on it. And to hear the speaker of the House say Obamacare is the law of the land, 64 days into President Trump's presidency. It's a remarkable moment that Obamacare will survive because of President Trump and the Freedom Caucus. And on the key issue that they've focused on more than anything else, like if Republicans agreed on anything, it was getting rid of Obamacare.

And does it puncture a hole? And then we talk about going forward and consequences. Does it puncture a hole in this belief that House Speaker Paul Ryan is this ideas guy, that he's the agenda guy, that he's going to reimagine the health care system? He's going to reimagine the tax code and he's the leading force on this. And I think that this was a real blow to him and his reputation on that front. You also wonder about potential consequences for Ryan as speaker. I mean, he wasn't able to get this bill through. You know, he's supposed to be the ideas guy, but he also didn't really want to be speaker and essentially did it because he was the only one everyone could rally around after John Boehner was ousted as speaker by a lot of the very same people who killed this bill. It's exactly the same problem. And I think Republicans thought when they had the White House that unity would find itself in the party. And it didn't. And they have not found a

way to form a governing coalition. And if they don't get their act together, this could be a very bad year for Republicans in Congress and for the president. It was sort of remarkable leading into the 2016 election. There was a lot of talk about woe is the Republican Party. What is the Republican Party going to do? They're so divided. And then Trump won and they had complete control of the House and the Senate and the presidency. And then the stories were like, what is the Democratic Party going to do there? Oh, they're so divided, which they are. But there was this idea that like winning papers over so many problems and it didn't like this is a loss. So going forward, let's talk about Obamacare for a little bit, because this is remarkable to me that Obamacare has kind of like narrowly escaped death so many times.

Now, you had that 2012 Supreme Court ruling, the dramatic five to four decision keeping Obamacare alive where John Roberts was the swing vote. There was another Supreme Court ruling in 2015 that could have also killed Obamacare but didn't. And yet again, Obamacare lives to fight another day. It's like, I don't know the best movie comparison, but it's like one of these action characters that almost dies and almost makes it out just again. Is this bringing back the zombie thing? No. It is not undead.

It's mostly dead. Oh, yes. On that note, President Trump says over and over in the Oval Office tonight, Obamacare is exploding. Obamacare is going to die. We'll just let it die.

You know, the executive branch of the federal government hates this thing that it administers. Like how much harm could health and human services do to Obamacare and what happens next? Yeah. So that's the thing I've actually been kind of wondering about. Now the mandate stays in place. You know, the IRS is supposed to enforce that. Health and human services has a role in enforcing a lot of the regulations that are there. So do they gut it from the inside or do they leave it alone and let the career folks continue to do their jobs? I think that is a source of ripe for reporting. Let's remember these are people we're talking about. And the idea that an executive branch is going to down a system that provides health care for people, I think there's a reason to be very skeptical about that talk. I also think this raises a question of if Obamacare is the law of the land, all of these states that declined to take the Medicaid expansion because they thought Republicans were going to win elections and they thought that they were going to have an alternative and they thought they could do their

health care systems differently. If that reality is now changed, does that change calculuses for governors in these states who might say, well, if this is the world we live in, maybe we should take that Medicaid expansion? Right. Especially when how many other states are getting that benefit? And it's clearly sticking around. I believe it's 31 states and then the District of Columbia. But there were some states that were thinking about going there. Yeah. And it's clearly sticking around. I believe it's 31 states and then the District of Columbia. But there were some states that were thinking about going there. And there's states including North Carolina and Kansas who are leaning towards taking the expansion for this very reason is that governors have a job to do. And if you have a way to help the people in your state stopped running the ads that would be out there to encourage people to enroll. The question is, like, do they keep doing that?

Because when you control the government, when you are the government, you can only blame the Democrats for so long. Last question for everybody before we take a quick break. One of the phrases most associated with Obamacare when it first came to pass was BFD, a Joe Biden phrase. We're just going to leave it at that. You can figure it out yourself. Are we going to play that clip? I think it's family friendly. A hot mic clip. Joe Biden called the passage of Obamacare a BFD, the failure of Republicans to get a bill out of the House about Obamacare. In the scale of D's, of deals in the world, how big of a deal was what happened today? It was a pretty big deal.

Again, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. I'm beating the dead horse on this, but this has been the one unifying idea of the Republican Party in the rise of the Tea Party and the fractious Republican wings, even in the 2016 campaign with when we originally had 20 candidates on the stage. Every single Republican who ran and won for the House and Senate last year all ran on one idea, and it was doing this. And I think this failure is just it's rather spectacular. It's a spectacular failure.

Between immigration and health care, they've been the two things that have really been the glue that has held together the conservative base of the Republican Party. And it's not health care. It's repealing Obamacare. By the way, if you're taking notes at home, that was, I think, a PBFD. And there is an irony in that all of this. The part of the thing is they originally wanted to have this vote on Thursday because Thursday was the seven year anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act. And the fact that almost to the day it's likely to be because of Republicans that it remains the law of the land is just further proof that politics is comedy. And on that note, let's take a quick break. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans.

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They're USDA certified organic, so you can feel great about what you eat and where it comes from. Cook quick, tasty dinners at home. No planning or grocery shopping required. Go to greenchef.com slash politics to get $50 off any meal plan. Okay, we're back. What happens next? Well, the White House will say and the president said today that they're really excited now to just clear the decks and focus on tax reform, which is the other major domestic policy issue that the Republican Party wanted to get done this year. would probably be an understatement. I don't think that you get to have a spectacular failure and take that energy and immediately turn it around into a major political victory.

Can you repeat the comparison you made on the radio because it made me laugh? I was talking to Kelly McEvers on All Things Considered and I said, you know, if I told you that I couldn't run a 5K today, but I was going to do a marathon next weekend, you would have a right to be skeptical. And that is sort of the legislative equivalent of this. And trying to rewrite the entire tax code, both on the business side and the individual side, is harder to do than this. If they had a baseline level of consensus and had won elections campaigning on Obamacare. And they're starting from scratch on tax reform. And it's arguably the hardest thing you can try and do because think of all the special

interests that will want a piece of tax reform. And they've talked about this extensively. So the idea that this is going to somehow be easy is hard to imagine. I will say that I think that the speaker and Republicans on the Hill think that tax reform is now an act of redemption, that if you did do so poorly on this, that tax reform is their shot to actually prove to people that they can govern. But tax reform is going to also take a lot longer. Best case scenario, even if they get the ball rolling next month, tax reform is something that could easily spill into 2017. So maybe my dumb question here is when I think of tax reform and I think of Republicans, I think of far fewer disagreements than on health care or social issues because they want lower taxes. They wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare, too. Sure. What does lower taxes mean when you actually start to talk? So this is my question is like, what are the, you know, the essential health benefits we're going to be talking about that wind up being the thorny sticking points? Well, the really interesting thing about tax reform is once again, the entire ideology driving it is driven almost entirely by House Speaker Paul Ryan

and whether he can now make the case that people should continue to follow his ideas on tax reform, even though they didn't go anywhere on health care. It's going to be a challenge for him. And also House Republicans do not agree with Senate Republicans. And it's not clear that any of them agree with the White House about the exact best path to take on tax reform. Like on the House side, they're into the idea of a border adjustment tax. And when Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, mentioned that at some point in the first week of the months for them to get there. So like, what do you do in the meantime? One veteran Democrat I talked to said, you know, maybe they should think about some low hanging fruit, go for a win, do something about veterans or farmers or something where maybe they could get a little consensus, maybe bring in some Democrats.

Well, one thing that's going to be happening on the Senate side over the next couple of weeks is a vote for a Supreme Court justice. That's a big thing. And I think it says a lot about the state of the political world when you have to remind yourself that there was a Supreme Court confirmation hearing this week, which there was. It lasted four days, though Judge Neil Gorsuch was only in the hot seat for three of them. We did learn one really important thing from this hearing, and that is how to pronounce his name. Judge, my first very important question. Please pronounce your last name. I've answered a lot of things, Senator. Gorsuch is how I say it, but...

The reason I ask that question is we had probably four or five cheat sheets up here with different phonetic uh so that is gore such right that's that's high press it's gore such for everybody in the audience it's gore such uh and i give my staff credit for actually getting it right but i had a crisis of confidence when i saw the other cheat sheets and we said it wrong in npr we had some gore stitch we had some goorsuch. We had some Gorsuch. Now we know. I know. That's what Nina Totenberg has been telling us, but I still prefer to pronounce his name Gorsuch. What else did we learn from these hearings? I think the big takeaway from these hearings was that even though he's somebody who is not easily rattled and he can answer all the questions, certainly knows the law.

He made some comments and stood behind some decisions that I think made it difficult for Democrats who are facing pressure from their base to vote for him. You know, when you talk about the case in which he sided with the trucking industry and the trucker was suffering from hypothermia, the case of the frozen trucker, as Democrats have started to put it. Which I'll just pause your point right there and say that we dug into the entire history of that case and a lot more in an earlier episode in your feed. So just go back one episode to learn about that. Go on.

Sure. You know, the point is, all of those controversies, the things that Democrats wound up pushing him on, it made it very difficult because most Democrats, frankly, don't want to have to filibuster Gorsuch. They think that he's qualified. They're a little nervous about what Mitch McConnell will do in response to this. The Republican majority leader in the Senate has threatened to blow up the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees if they go ahead and filibuster him. So I think that's the big takeaway from these hearings. All right. So we're going to talk about the Democrats and their dynamics they need to figure out in a second. But going back to Gorsuch, Dmitry, you're right that he was like kind of a broken record where, you know,

it's tough to stick to your script for like the 20 hours or whatever that he testified for. But but he did a pretty good job of that. Senator, no man is above the law. Senator, no man is above the law. No man is above the law, Senator. And nobody is above the law. No man. No man is above the law.

And my law clerks tell me. My law clerks also tell me. My law clerks tell me something like, law clerks tell me. I ask my law clerks. Young law clerks straight out of law school. I get law clerks. As my law clerks know, that's been the out of law school. I get law clerks. As my law clerks know. That's been the law of the land for... Gosh. Goodness no, Senator. Oh, goodness. Goodness no. Gosh. Oh gosh. Golly.

Oh my goodness. Goodness no. Goodness, Senator. Yes. You are, quote, no friend of the little guy. Little man. The little guy. The little guy. The little guy. For the little guy. I represented the little guy. For the little guys. And little gals, I guess. I'm a human being. I'm my own man. I'm a judge. I am a judge.

But I'm not God. I'm a circuit judge. I'm now a judge. I'm a judge. Shout out to Barbara Sprunt, who, one, listened to every second of the hearings, and two, put that together. That is amazing. And I think she was fist pumping in there as this was actually playing. It takes a lot of work to sound authentic. It's going to be your ringtone, isn't it, somebody?

So, yeah, I mean, again, so like he sticks to his lane. He doesn't dive into kind of what rulings he thinks are good and which rulings he thinks are bad or how he's going to rule in the future. And that frustrated Democrats who were trying to get a reason to vote no on him. But still, after the hearings, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday said he's going to be voting no and that Democrats are going to require Gorsuch to get 60 votes. After careful deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court. His nomination will have a cloture vote. He will have to earn 60 votes for confirmation. My vote will be no, and I urge my colleagues to do the same. You've had other Democrats come out and say they're going to vote against Gorsuch for his

confirmation and also that earlier cloture vote, including Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who's one of many Democrats up for reelection next year in a state where Donald Trump won, though narrowly, narrowly, though narrowly, because I think of the Democrats who fit that category, Bob Casey probably has a much safer route to reelection than a lot of other Democrats. So, Sue, in the podcast that we did earlier this week, I think it was earlier this week, we discussed whether Democrats would actually go through with this. Now, Chuck Schumer is saying we are going to filibuster. Do you think he really means it? It was the least surprising development to me that Schumer came out and said he would be against him. I think he sort of telegraphed from the beginning that he was going to be a no and was going to urge a no. There's obviously still a lot of hurt

feelings among Democrats about what happened to Merrick Garland. And I think the Democratic base really wants to see Democrats seem or fight to the very end on this. Gorsuch, Gorsuch, Gorsuch. They're both the same, Gorsuch. He certainly didn't give them any reason in his hearings to filibuster, right? Like he survived this process and came out like someone who should deserves to be on the Supreme Court by any other measure. The question is, I think the Democrats have to ask themselves, is are they willing to force a showdown in the Senate that could just make it very easy for Donald Trump to confirm another judge if given the chance. And the doubly interesting thing about this, if we do get closer to talks of this sort of nuclear showdown in the Senate, it's still not even entirely clear that Mitch McConnell has the votes to do it, even if Democrats force that showdown.

Though Lindsey Graham has been one of the Republicans who's always been very hesitant to change the rules like that. And he did say this week, if the Democrats are going to filibuster Gorsuch, I might be more inclined to vote for a rule change. Yeah. But that's one, but you need a few more. But in the past, there's been Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine or John McCain of Arizona who are very resistant to doing a rules change. But obviously, Neil Gorsuch is incredibly popular among Republicans, and he might be the one they're willing to do it for. Yeah. And we've got, again, an entire episode. It's the last one in your feed where we get all into the hearing with Nina Totenberg making a guest appearance on the podcast because, of course, you need to talk to Nina if you're going to talk about the Supreme Court. So one other thing that happened this week, Russia, a whole lot happened with the House

Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Monday, way back on Monday, remember Monday. Ah, Monday. FBI Director James Comey made major news in front of the panel. I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the trump campaign and the russian government and whether there was

any coordination between the campaign and russia's. So that's Monday. Big development. Huge. Huge. And a lot has happened with this whole story since then. Yes. And Scott, you have been covering it. So I am going to take the reins so that I can ask you about what happened on Wednesday. OK, so Wednesday, Devin Nunes is the chair of this committee. He's a Republican. And up until Wednesday, he and Adam Schiff, the top Democrat, had been working very hard to be bipartisan about this. They kept having press conferences together. Together. And they would come. They would walk out at the same time.

They would stand next to each other. And even though both would say very partisan things, I always noticed that neither of them rolled their eyes or scoffed. They just went along with what the other person had to say. Bipartisan, super serious front. And that's basically how the intelligence committees run themselves. So it's really interesting on Wednesday that Nunes shows up by himself. And he says that he has just learned very disturbing information. He has learned basically that over the course of routine legal intelligence gathering that the U.S. has been doing with foreign intelligence gathering, they have scooped up information about people in Trump's orbit and possibly Trump himself over the period between

Election Day and when Trump took office when he was president-elect. And he says that this information was not only gathered, but then it was disseminated within the intelligence world, making its way into intelligence reports, being distributed. Even though Nunes said he didn't see any real foreign intelligence value for this. He found this very alarming. And he said that what he was going to do was go right over to the White House to brief the White House about this. This makes my brain hurt. OK, because it seems because you had Comey telling Congress there is an investigation. Yeah. But there wasn't any wiretapping. And then how is this different than what we already knew that people like Michael

Flynn were picked up on routine surveillance of foreign nationals? Yes. So Nunes said that what he was talking about on Wednesday had nothing to do with Russia. So reading between the lines, it seems like what this could be was, you know, President Trump makes a phone call to a leader of another country, which is a normal thing for a president elect to do. Maybe that phone call is picked up. Or people in high ranking positions in other countries talking about President Trump and his top aides. Again, a normal thing that would happen. And then his name would just be in a document because two other foreign people were talking about Donald Trump. But when you say that the phone call was picked up, it's not because they're surveilling Trump himself, but because they would be doing routine surveillance of an ambassador, say, or another foreign leader. This is one of the many tension points of what happened this week, because President Trump took this as vindication of his claim that President

Obama had his phones wiretapped at Trump Tower. He said, you know, see, this information came out. I'm paraphrasing. But he said this to Time magazine, among other people. They did a really interesting interview with Trump about his relationship with facts. But Devin Nunes, as much as he's an ally of President Trump, said, no, I still stick to my claim earlier that there is no evidence of a wiretap here. And having information incidentally picked up is much different than Trump and his associates being targeted. My other question is that as the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, they are doing ongoing and active investigation of their own into Russia meddling into all of this. And to come out with this information, say it publicly before you tell the committee and immediately go to the White House, the branch of government you're supposed to be independent and

have oversight over. This seemed to have breached protocol at best. So that caused Adam Schiff, the top Democrat, to, to use a very technical term, wig out. So like from Wednesday on, joint press conferences were off the table. So Nunes does his thing. He leaves. Schiff comes marching out to the same spot and he is angry and he's angry for just that reason, saying that you're investigating the White House. So is this increasing calls then for more independent investigation? Yes and no, because basically every Democrat wants an independent investigation. A handful of Republicans, John McCain and Lindsey Graham do, too, but not too many.

So not new calls from people who weren't already calling for it. So by the end of the week, it seemed as though Nunes had sort of walked things back and said, maybe I didn't handle things properly. That's right. He did say, I kind of messed up here. Any other questions on this? No. Let's move on. All right.

It seems like there's a lot of details in the story that we can let go or whether we want to or not. Our brain is just letting go because it can't keep it all in. But we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will talk about what we can't let go or whether we want to or not. Our brain is just letting go because it can't keep it all in. But we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will talk about what we can't let go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Square, existing to help small businesses succeed. Because when businesses succeed, Square succeeds.

So they let customers accept every major credit card anywhere for one flat rate and no hidden fees. They deposit your money in one to two business days or even instantly. And Square offers up to $250 a month in free chargeback protection. Sign up now for free processing on your first $500 in sales at square.com slash politics. Some terms apply. All right. Now it is time for Can't Let It Go when we end the show by sharing one thing we cannot stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise.

If you can think about anything non-politics this week, good for you. But Tamara, you're up first. I'm thinking about golf. But of course, it's presidential golf. Because it's almost golf season? It's going to be 70 degrees tomorrow. It's going to be beautiful. No. So the reason I'm thinking about golf is three weeks ago, I went to Mar-a-Lago. I went to Florida to be the radio reporter with President Trump. And both days, the White House aide, who was our minder, said, President Trump is having meetings and phone calls and he may hit a few balls. And then we'd say, OK, can you please let us know if he ends up golfing and could you please tell us who his golf partners are? And they never, ever got back to us. They never said.

But these meetings would all happen to last around four hours. Yes, they would all. The exact amount of time it takes to play golf. And the thing is that on numerous occasions, photos have surfaced of President Trump with golf gloves posing for pictures or on the golf course. And so it's clear that he is golfing, but they're not willing to admit it. All right. Can I rant? Yeah.

I don't care if the president plays golf. I don't care if Barack Obama plays golf. I don't care if Donald Trump plays golf. I don't care if George Bush plays golf. It's a stressful job and you need to relax. I also don't care if they take vacation. I agree with all of those things. The thing that gets me is this is such a silly thing.

Why not be just straightforward and honest and say the president was playing golf? So at the White House press briefing this week, Sean Spicer was asked about golf. Thanks, Sean. On a slightly different topic, in his first eight weeks in office, President Trump has made at least 10 trips to the golf course. He regularly used to criticize President Obama for spending time on the course. How is his golf game any different? Mr. Well, I think two things.

One is, you saw him utilize this as an opportunity with Prime Minister Abe to help foster deeper relationships in Southeast Asia, in Asia rather, and have a growing relationship that's going to help U.S. interests. How you use the game of golf is something that he's talked about. The argument is, well, President Trump is using golf to make deals, have conversations, do the work of the presidency on the golf course. He's not just goofing off. So I emailed Sean Spicer and some other aides and asked, who is he golfing with then?

Because if he's conducting the public's business on the golf course, we should find out who he is conducting the public's business with. Crickets. The great golf gate mystery continues. I'll tell you who I play golf with. I play golf with NPR producer Bracton Booker. We play golf a few times a year. That's awesome. Who's better?

Okay, interestingly, every time we played last year, one of us would have a really great first half and then just totally collapse, and the other person would be terrible at first and then, like, surge. So I think we're about even, but we never were good on the same hole. Like, one of us would be, like, perfect,

and the other would be, be like shanking and angry. Which is really hard because then it takes forever because somebody is always shanking and angry. We're both fast. One of the funnier side memes of the week is the reporting would go out about how the health care bill was falling apart is how many people would tweet about former speaker John Boehner like enjoying life on the golf course or mowing his lawn or having a glass somewhere low. And a lot of people were like Boehner's just laughing on the 18th hole somewhere. All right. So what besides that can you not let go? You know, I would say I feel like today is what I can't let go. This was a really remarkable and memorable day to me in covering Congress. And I was thinking about this today. Like when you cover

a beat, especially when you cover a beat for a long time, a lot of what you do is really forgettable. And you can like look back like I can't tell you a fourth interesting things that happened in the last Congress. I mean, I'm sure I could if I sat here for a while and think about it. But there's days, you know, you'll remember. And I think listening to President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan essentially acknowledge that Obamacare is now the law of the land was just kind of a mind blowing day on the Hill. And I think I will always remember what happened today. It was a really standout, remarkable day in covering this beat. And while it was a weird and tiring week, it was also a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's like so much of our time we watch paint dry. And then it's like the paint can spills out. Yeah. I mean, it's the old joke about reporting is just hurry up and wait. And this week it just felt like nonstop. And then that this is the result of seven years of and how many times I've listened to covered campaigns and just I feel like covering not only the passage of the Affordable Care Act and then the politics that have ensued and then to have this be the culmination of it, you can't make it up, right?

How about you, Domenico? I'll tell you how to let it go. The first three of five days this week, I was on vacation. Oh, nice. And I was out in Colorado, only paying some tangential attention to what was going on the first three days, which were very busy days, of course. But what I found amazing out there, you know, the weather was in the 70s, which is very unusual for this time of year. And what is my can't let go is how much they wanted to talk about climate change. People in Colorado, I mean, everybody from like at the bar, you know, regular folks wanted to talk about it because of the weather. The guy who drove my wife and I to the car rental place, I said, oh, some weather we've got is pretty nice.

And he's like, this is not a good thing. This is a bad thing. This is not the time of year you're supposed to have this kind of weather out here. Like really chastised me on it. And it sort of like backed me up a little bit because on these coasts, especially in the northeast, that kind of weather in March, the thing people will say is, hey, I'll take it. Right. There was no, hey, I'll take it in Colorado. Well, in Colorado, the economy is much more closely tied to the climate than it is.

Or we talk about the policy of it here and not the actual impact of it. Scott, I really hope that you have an upbeat can't let it go because I think ending the pod on climate change is kind of an aggressive way to roll into the weekend. All right, Scott, what can't you let go of? All right. I'm going to talk about Marlon Bundo, which is an upbeat thing. I don't know that. Well, let me tell you. Is this like Marlon Brando somehow? Yes. Oh, okay. Vice President Mike Pence, among other things, has a menagerie of pets. He has multiple cats. What? He has a pet snake who has not moved with him to Washington. The pet snake

was one of his sons is watching the pet snake. He had a beagle. You don't want snakes on a plane. You don't. He had a beagle who sadly died over the course of the campaign, which as a beagle owner made me very sad. But he also has a rabbit named Marlon Bundo. And Marlon Bundo, I was recently made aware, has his own Instagram feed.

And it's just Marlon Bundo. So Marlon Bundo has this and it is this very like amateurish in a good way, produced thing. I think a member of the Pence family is running this Instagram feed. It is very low tech. It is not like a White House Instagram feed. And it's just pictures of Marlon Bundo hanging out, chewing lettuce. There was an incident on St. Patrick's Day when Karen Pence, I guess, gave Marlon Bundo her shamrock corsage from the reception. And Marlon Bundo tried to eat the shamrock.

So there are some good hashtags going on. What's awesome about this is that under Marlon Bundo, he's Botus. He's Botus. He's Botus, and he also uses first Bundred days as a hashtag. So this was actually brought up. I was there when someone said to a member of Pence's staff, what's up with Botus? Shouldn't he be the BOTUS?

And the response is, well, the Trump family doesn't have a bunny. So Marlon Bundo is the BOTUS. You know, you're saying you don't mind like presidents golfing. Yeah. I don't mind my taxpayer dollars going to official animal Instagrams. I'm OK with it. So Marlon Bundo, give him a follow on Instagram. On that note, that is it for today.

Be sure to keep up with all of our political coverage at NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. We want to say a big thank you to Rachel Quester, who along with Barbara Sprunt produced the podcast all this week while our regular producer Brent was on vacation. And Rachel, thank you for all your help these last few months and good luck. She's going to be leaving us to go work on The Daily, a great podcast being put together by The New York Times. Tripod. I love that podcast. It'll be even better with Rachel helping it. All right. That is it. I'm Scott Tetreault. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.