The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, April 6

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

The Senate goes nuclear while tensions rise after the use of chemical weapons in Syria. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, congressional reporter Geoff Bennett, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. 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, it's Rachel Martin with NPR News, and you know what? We're doing something new, and we want you to be part of it. It's called Up First. It's the morning news podcast from NPR. It's a way for you, in about 10 minutes or so, to get up to speed on the news of any given day, the most important stories, the biggest ideas, the stuff you need to know as you go through your day. Up First, it starts April 5th. You can get it at NPR One or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. Hi, this is Karen Kasper from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This podcast was recorded at 3.50 on Thursday, April 6th. 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 here with a roundup of just some of this week's political news. The Senate went nuclear this afternoon and tensions are on the rise over the use of chemical weapons in Syria. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Jeff Bennett, I also cover Congress. I'm Susan Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Jeff Bennett. I also cover Congress. I'm Susan Davis, and I also cover Congress. Except for me.

I'm Mara Liason. I cover politics. And Jeff, if you missed last week's roundup, Jeff's name is new. He is our new congressional reporter. Jeff, you're sticking with us for two weeks now. Indeed. I've become expert at bobbing and weaving around tourists in the capital. It's the height of tourist season.

Sue, explain to me that there's just going to be more and more as the spring progresses. Yeah, we're at like peak school field trip time and peak kids are off from school and parents do like the family trip to Washington. I got to explain cloture to a middle school group and I felt like I missed my calling to be a high school or middle school civics teacher. Well, on that note, cloture was the word of the day in the Senate. There's a big summit underway this afternoon at Mar-a-Lago. And also, Devin Nunes is out as the head of the House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation. So let's start with the moment this afternoon when Republicans in the Senate win nuclear. The clerk will report the motion to invoke cloture.

Stay with us here. It started with a cloture vote. Cloture motion. We, the undersigned senators, in accordance with the provisions of Rule 22 of the Standing Rules of the Senate, do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination of Neil M. Gorsuch of Colorado.

This is the vote to end the debate, and you need 60 senators to agree to that in order to get to a final vote. The vote here was 55 to 45, so... Three-fifths of the senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is not agreed to. And this is when what we've all been calling the nuclear option began to happen. And for something with as dramatic a name as the nuclear option,

this was pretty hard to follow and got pretty procedural. Here's Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. I raise the point of order that the vote on cloture under the precedent set on November 21st, 2013, is a majority vote on all nominations. So what was he trying to do here? OK, so when he refers to that 2013 vote, what he was referring to is when former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also invoked the nuclear option to lower that threshold from 60 votes to 51 votes to proceed with the consideration of a nomination. What McConnell was doing was he was saying the Reid precedent, as it's known, should be extended to Supreme Court nominees. The 2013 decision did not.

It only applied to lower court judges and all other executive branch nominees. So in this movement today, McConnell was essentially asking the chair to make a parliamentary ruling to say that he was correct. And the chair is whoever's filling in for the president of the Senate, Mike Pence, because he obviously doesn't sit there all day. In this case, it was Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer. This is her response. The precedent of November 21st, 2013 did not apply to nominations to the Supreme Court. Those nominations are considered under the plain language Rule 22. The point of order is not sustained. Which triggered an appeal. I appeal the ruling of the chair. And then a Republican vote to overrule the chair.

The question is, shall the decision of the chair stand as the judgment of the Senate? This was called by Orrin Hatch, who's the president pro tem of the Senate, which means basically he's the longest serving senator in the majority. The clerk will call the roll. Mr. Alexander. No. Ms. Baldwin. So this is the vote on the nuclear option, which the Republicans won by voting no against the old rule, basically. On this vote, the ayes are 48.

The nays are 52. The decision of the chair does not stand as the judgment of the Senate. So I don't know if the excitement of the moment is really conveyed by all this floor tape. But Sue, I saw you in the gallery. What was interesting to me is that the Senate was like actually filled. All the senators were sitting at their desks. All the reporters were actually in the Senate chamber. That doesn't happen that much. No, it's pretty rare that all the senators will actually gather.

And I think they did because they knew that there was going to be this series of procedural votes that they were all going to have to stick around for. You're right. It's a pretty big impact for what seems like a pretty normal course of operations in the Senate. I think when people hear the nuclear option, they expect senators to be fighting on the floor and debate. And it all went down pretty civilly. There wasn't much heated debate leading up to it. It could have a really big impact. And we don't know what that impact is going to be long term. In the short term, we know Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed to the Supreme Court on Friday. That's no longer in doubt. And the two main questions coming out of this are now that you can get a Supreme Court justice through the process with only a 51 threshold at all turns, does it create a world where presidents will now nominate more hardcore partisans to the court? Does the court by nature become more partisan? And what does that mean?

We don't know the answer to that question, but that's one of the questions. And the other question is, you know, in 2013, when they weakened the filibuster, they said they would never touch Supreme Court nominees. Four years later, they've now touched Supreme Court nominees. And the question now is, is the legislative filibuster next? And Mara, you did a story this week where you talked about how this fit into long term trends about eroding power for political minorities. Well, that's certainly been what's happening in the Senate. When Harry Reid got rid of the filibuster for lower court judges, he said the reason he did it was because the Republicans were blocking all Obama appointments, even ones that were considered consensus candidates. So he did that.

And they were. And they were. They were. There's no doubt that even though both parties have been chipping away at these precedents, the things that made the Senate the world's greatest deliberative body, supposedly, because it had all these protections from the minority party. Even though both parties have been chipping away, the Republicans have chipped away more and more effectively. So this is a kind of long, slow devolution of the Senate into something that looks more like the House, where you don't need buy-in from the minority party. That means you're going to be more polarized. I think what Sue just raised as a question to me is an inevitability.

Of course, we're going to have more extreme judges because they only need 51 votes. You don't need any buy-in from the opposite party. What I also think is interesting is would an opposition Congress ever confirm ever again a nominee from a president of the other party? Because they don't have to anymore because the filibuster is gone. And because we know during the campaign, at least three Republican senators, I think Cruz, Burr and McCain said if Hillary Clinton was the president, and they maintain majority in the Senate, they wouldn't confirm a single nominee from her for eight years. So in some ways, you know, we've been on the slippery slope for a while, and now we just took another big step down.

And thinking about the stakes, I keep coming back to what John McCain said in the halls outside the Senate chamber this week. I mean, he was in rare form, really dropping, you know, figurative mics all over the Senate this week, talking about this filibuster. And he said, anybody who thinks this is a good thing for the Senate is a, quote, numbskull and a stupid idiot. Now, he and every other Republican voted for it. And, you know, the Senate was always supposed to be the slower moving chamber of Congress, the most deliberative body in the world. As Sue points out, there is a real worry that this could lead to legislation as well, even though Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer right now say

that it won't. but time will tell. So in the debate leading up to this, it was kind of like, yet again, a situation of parallel universes where Mitch McConnell and other Republicans pulled up every Democratic slight that they had seen over the last few years, like that 2013 move to do the same thing for lower courts. And every Democrat talked about the fact that McConnell and Republicans didn't even allow a hearing for Merrick Garland last year. Chuck Schumer did say one thing at one point that I think everyone could agree with. He put this in big picture terms and saying this is really just kind of the end result of a trend going back decades. Was it the Bork nomination or the obstruction of judges under President Clinton?

Was it when Democrats blocked judges under President Bush or when Republicans blocked them under President Obama? Was it Judge Garland or Judge Gorsuch? Wherever we place the starting point of this long twilight battle over the judiciary, we are now at its end point. I just thought that was a really good point. And I do think when we're talking about what happened today, we most recently go back to the 2013 Reed precedent. But these judicial wars have been happening over the course of my entire lifetime. You know, this is not something that started four years ago and is ending now. The increasing polarization of these judicial fights has been something that has been percolating in the Senate for the past

30 years. And Schumer was right. Today was a culmination of basically a generation of fighting over the courts and what the court should look like. And, you know, even though Harry Reid took a big step down the slope, the Merrick Garland fight was really big because to deny a nomination, a hearing, even a hearing, and any votes at all, I think was a huge step. And that was every time Republicans said, well, there's never been a partisan judicial, a Supreme Court filibuster. Democrats' heads would explode because all they were thinking about was Merrick Garland. And today was all about Merrick Garland. I mean, some Democrats would make the argument that they didn't think that Gorsuch had the qualifications or he didn't answer questions

well enough in his hearing. But this was really about the politics of this and the simmering resentment among Democrats for what happened to Merrick Garland. And the fact that the Democratic base right now is so lined up against the Trump administration that I don't think it was feasible for most Democrats to be seen as giving Trump a win in any way, shape or form. And that was why the last minute effort to avoid all of this failed. You know, the women of the Senate have a history of working together and really working together to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. And Susan Collins of Maine worked with Christopher Coons of Delaware, Democrat, was not able, she's been working with him all week, and was not able to

come together on this because she said the two sides were too far apart and the level of distrust was just too high. I also think we have to mention the Republican politics of why they were just as eager to do this, like the McCain's and other people even thought it was a bad idea. This is probably going to be the signature achievement of President Trump's first 100 days in office and that the politics for Republicans to really be able to give the president a win and to give the party a win was also an incredibly animating force on the other side. And I think it goes even deeper than that. This is the reason Republicans held their noses and wanted Trump to be president. This is it. He would say on the trail, you know what, you might not like me, but you know what, the Supreme Court, that's why you're going to vote for him. And this is why they've put up with everything that makes them nervous and queasy about him. This is it. Yeah, to Mara's point, I mean, the GOP base definitely fights harder when it comes to issues of the judiciary.

That might be changing. That might be changing. And that's what's going to cut through. I mean, it took, what, two minutes and lots of tape to explain what happened today. But what will cut through is Neil Gorsuch. He's mild-mannered. He's, you know, objectively fit to hold that seat. You know, the fact that this is a major win for Republicans who've been angling for a win for months now is really what resonates. Well, it was much easier to understand the move last year saying, we're not going to vote on this guy. And it seemed to animate the right and not really animate voters on the left as opposed to other issues.

Mitch McConnell rolled the dice and he won big on that one. And also, you cannot say that Merrick Garland ideologically was the liberal equivalent of Neil Gorsuch. Neil Gorsuch is extremely conservative. There are many legal analyses that say he's more conservative than Scalia. Merrick Garland was about as centrist a nominee that any Democrat would have put forward. So all these, this trend is not just limited to the judiciary. It's been happening in all politics. Things have been getting more partisan, more entrenched. So why wouldn't a Senate majority just make the same change for legislation?

Well, that is a really good question. And, you know, that's what Sue raised earlier. And McConnell has been very adamant, no, as long as I'm leader, we are not going to change the legislative filibuster. There's not a single member of my conference who would want to do that. Well, actually, he's telling the truth. Because on the legislative filibuster over time, that would benefit Democrats. Because look how hard it is to undo expansions of government benefits or power, Obamacare, Exhibit A. And it's very hard to roll them back. And if Democrats got into power

and there was no legislative filibuster, they would pass all sorts of things that Republicans would find very difficult to get rid of. There are advocates in the Senate, particularly among younger Democrats, who do want to get rid of the legislative filibuster, who do want to make it easier to do these things. Because if you think about the things that had majority support in the eight years of the Obama administration that never saw the light of day because of the filibuster, the public option in the original version of the health care bill, carbon tax to combat global warming, universal background checks for guns after the Newtown shooting. I mean, a lot of Democrats look at those things and said things that had a majority of support in this country couldn't get through because of the filibuster.

Think about on the other way around. You know, if Republicans now control all branches of government doing things like tax reform and changing the tax code, the ability for Congress to do much more sweeping changes without any minority input is dramatically increased and could dramatically change what presidents in Congress are capable of doing. Right. And it means that we're just on another step down the slope toward tribal politics, which has been happening in every aspect of politics, not just in the Senate. Well, on that really chipper note, let's shift gears to the other side of the Capitol, because we had some big news coming out of the House today, too. For weeks, Republican Devin Nunes has been batting back criticism about how he's running the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian interference in the election. The basic complaint was that Nunes seemed more interested in helping the Trump White House than investigate it. That particular story

has taken so many twists that I would just advise you to take a stroll back through the archived episodes of this podcast because we spent, you know, three or four episodes explaining all the different ways that that has come up. So Nunes has rejected these Democratic calls that he stepped aside. House Speaker Paul Ryan has made it clear that Nunes had his support. And then suddenly this morning, Nunes said he would do just that. He's stepping down as the point person on the Russia probe, even though he's going to stay chair of the committee. We also learned that a reason he's doing that is because the House Ethics Committee has launched an inquiry into whether or not he mishandled classified information, presumably in that process of having press conferences about classified information that

he received during a meeting at the White House. Sue, the House Ethics Committee, basically, how does it work? What can we expect with this? The House Ethics Committee is a bipartisan committee. It is the only committee in the House that's evenly split between the two parties. So you do need to have bipartisan consensus to move forward on any matter, which does mean that the fact that the House Ethics Committee agreed to open an inquiry against Nunes suggests that at least some combination of the Republicans on the committee agreed that it was necessary. The outside Congressional Office of Congressional Ethics is also looking at him, but that is not related to Congress. The House Ethics Committee is essentially their own internal ethics enforcement, that it's your peers judging you and making sure that you're abiding. And it doesn't have to be about the law. Remember, the House has its own code of ethics and standards of behavior that members are held to. So it's possible that you could violate the ethics of the House and not be breaking any laws. It's also important to note that this is just an inquiry. What they do is

they establish an early phase to see if it even merits an ethics investigation. And if it does, they will again have to make another public announcement, say they are launching a subcommittee investigation into Devin Nunes. We're not there yet. And it is true that for the last several weeks, he has been a distraction. He's been a news story in and of himself. The party's trying to move ahead to tax reform and infrastructure. But yet the stories of Russia and Nunes' role in oversight is dominating front pages of newspapers. Mara, so Nunes was one of the point people on the committee's investigating Russian interference, possible ties to the Trump campaign. Of course, you have the Senate investigation and the FBI. President Trump seems to tweet about this

a lot, dismissing it as fake news. How big of an issue compared to everything else Trump is dealing with has this whole Russia thing become? Well, I think it's a big issue because it's caused so much collateral damage. Nunes was just the latest victim of the self inflicted wounds of the Russia investigation and the White House's response to it. So you've already had Sessions had to recuse himself. Manafort had to step down from the campaign. Paul Manafort. You had General Flynn, the national security advisor who lasted 24 days before he had to step down. All of these people have been caught up in this kind of bizarre set of circumstances where Russia meddled in the U.S. elections. 17 intelligence agencies

have confirmed that. And for some reason, even though the White House keeps insisting there was no collusion, various top officials keep on dissembling or lying about their contacts with Russia. Then we have the alternative storyline that the White House has been pushing, which is on March 4th, the president misinterpreted a Breitbart article and tweeted that President Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower. And since then, the White House has been going to great lengths to muster some evidence for the president's claim. No intelligence. And as they're doing that, you've had lots of people in official positions saying there's

zero evidence. Nobody has said there's any evidence, but the White House has been working very hard to come up with some. And this is what caused the downfall of Devin Nunes, because the White House said, well, we weren't really talking about wiretapping phones. We were talking about surveillance in general. And then the question became, did the Obama administration mishandle in some ways that surveillance? Let me just pause you there because this is the ongoing problem. If you are lost at this point,

again, I would say that just go back through our podcast feed at every twist and turn here. We have talked about this in one way or another, including earlier this week when Mary Louise Kelly was on to talk about the whole unmasking. And just simplify it. There are two storylines. One is we know Russia meddled. The question that is under investigation now is, was there collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia? The second question is, did Obama administration officials somehow mishandle classified information or surveillance. The two things that really jump out to me here with this latest development of Nunes stepping down is one that Nunes, you can basically argue, is collateral damage for the scramble to prove

a tweet after the fact when the tweet itself was wrong. We had wondered what will be the real world consequence of Donald Trump's tweeting when he's president. Now we know. Now we know. This is a good example. There's several more examples, but this is one. The other thing is that Democrats do not have much power in Congress right now. Right. And they always go and they have these press conferences and they make demands when it comes to this saying, we want this, we want that. They've actually gotten a lot of what they've demanded. Nancy Pelosi's demanded that Michael Flynn step down or be fired. He was. That Jeff Sessions recuse himself from the Russia investigation. He was. That Devin Nunes recuse himself. He was. This is not to say that the

Trump White House or Republican leaders are like listening to what Nancy Pelosi has to say, because all of those were kind of self-inflicted wounds. But it's still interesting that all these things are happening. But it also seems like all of these twists and turns with Nunes have essentially neutered the House side of the investigation into this. Both chambers are launching separate investigations. And it seems like the House side of this equation has been largely dismissed, including by Republican senators who have kind of said, you know, this is really on us. And the Senate investigation being led by Richard Burr of North Carolina and Mark Warner of Virginia seems at this stage to be the actual tip of the spear of the congressional investigation into this. Definitely. The people are looking at the Senate

as the best opportunity for a credible outside investigation. I wonder, though, does Nunes' stepping aside quiet the calls from Democrats for an independent investigation? I don't think so. I think they'll keep that up. I don't know if they'll ever get it unless, but this, you know, when you're dealing with such a story that's unfolding in such real time, at some point it may become necessary to appoint a special commission. All right. We're going to take a break real quick. Before we do that, just want to give a plug to our NPR colleagues at the new podcast Up First. You heard the promo at the top of the show, but we also want to let you know you'll hear a lot of us on Up First. It's a 10-minute long morning news show taped every

morning at 5 a.m., released at 6 a.m., designed to give you a short take on the biggest news stories of the day. Of course, these days, that means a lot of politics, which is why you can hear us on the podcast. This morning, they had Tam and Domenico on. I'll be on there soon. Sue Davis will be going on there a lot as well. So check Tam and Domenico on. I'll be on there soon. Sue Davis will be going on there a lot as well. So check it out in your podcast feed. We'll be right back to talk about some more international news right after this quick break. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. When it comes to the big decision of choosing a mortgage lender,

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because information and facts have never been more important. Each day, news and politics seem to move faster than ever. Each weeknight on MSNBC, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, and MSNBC's team of journalists bring you the most important news of the day. With insight and perspective that allows you to make up your mind and know that you're in the know. Weeknights beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC. All right, we are back. One thing that's happening right now as we tape, President Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping of China at Mar-a-Lago. That just got underway, so we don't have much to say about it right now. But check in early next week and we will talk about anything that comes out of that. Something certainly will, we assume, given how much President Trump has talked about China

in pretty hostile tones over the course of his campaign and early in his administration. Another thing happening internationally, one image being viewed around the world this week, those horrible pictures of children attacked by chemical weapons in Syria, apparently by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The president yesterday in a joint news conference with King Abdullah of Jordan said he had also seen those images. It crossed a lot of lines for me. When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal, people were shocked to hear what gas it was.

That crosses many, many lines beyond the red line. Many, many lines. You hear him say red lines there. He was responding to a question about red lines because the White House had spent much of the week blaming the Obama administration for inaction in Syria back in 2012 when chemical weapons were also used. Mara, Trump is president now. What can he do? What is he indicating he can do? This was one of the most extraordinary moments because even though Trump's foreign policy had not been fleshed out, he came in with a very, very clear approach. America first. We are not going to get involved overseas. We're going to put our own interests first. We are not going to get involved overseas. We're going to put our own interests first. We're not going to talk about human rights. He was very consistent about Syria as a candidate. He

criticized President Obama, not just for making a red line and then erasing it, but for thinking about intervening at all. He said, this is not our fight. All of a sudden, he's saying, my mind has changed on Syria. Well, I do change. And I am flexible. And I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me. Big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching it and seeing it.

And it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility. And it's very, very possible. And I will tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. Okay, just a few days before President Trump said his views had changed, his Secretary of State was saying quite simply that getting rid of Assad is not part of U.S. policy. I think the status and the longer term, longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people. This was from Rex Tillerson. One of many things he said lately that have kind of led to a lot of a lot of criticism. But then today, he's in Florida and he's saying there's no role for Assad.

Assad's role in the future is uncertain, clearly. And with the acts that he has taken, it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people. This is not a pivot. This is like fishtailing, swerving into traffic. This is so – it's changing every 24 hours. We don't know what the president's policy in Syria is. We do know that he's holding talks with his military leaders and advisors about Assad felt that he could act with impunity and commit this heinous attack. And one other bit of context, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., spoke yesterday and she held up pictures of the victims of this chemical attack. And she said Russia cannot escape responsibility, sounding much more like Marco Rubio and John McCain than the president himself. And she said Russia there because

Vladimir Putin has been a big booster of the Assad regime. That's right. And rhetoric and policy are not the same thing. Of course, in diplomacy, words are all you have here. I'm looking to see what happens next, because it is true that the U.S. lost a lot of credibility on this issue under the Obama administration. But let's go back a little bit, because it is true that the U.S. lost a lot of credibility on this issue under the Obama administration. But let's go back a little bit, because I think that this criticism of Barack Obama comes up a lot. And I think we need to go back to 2013 and remind people that Barack Obama did ask Congress to approve an authorization for the use of military force against Syria. And before Congress could act on that, Vladimir Putin stepped in and cut a deal that

circumvented Congress's need to vote. And it was becoming very clear in Congress that Republicans in Congress did not have the votes to approve an AUMF for military strikes in Syria. That's use of military force. Use of authorization for the use of military force, because many in the Republican Party did not want the U.S. to engage in another war in the Middle East. So the idea that this was Barack Obama alone, yes, this did happen on his watch. But the reluctance for military action among both parties in Congress in 2013 put the president in a position of having to do military strikes without his Congress behind

him. But there was at the time people thought he was asking Congress to give himself a way out. In other words, he wanted Congress to buy in. Many presidents have ordered military action without congressional approval. And he was saying, well, wait a second, if I'm going to do this, I want Congress to also be responsible. But what Sue just mentioned, Putin stepped in and made a deal. You know what that deal was? To get rid of chemical weapons. So it turns out that deal was pretty hollow. I keep coming back to what the Syrian people must think about all this, hearing more threats, more words of condemnation, and yet nothing seems to change. And these aren't the first horrific images that we've seen. I keep thinking about Alain Kurdi, that three-year-old boy who was washed up on the shores of Turkey.

So, you know, we'll have to see what the U.S. does to either force Russia's hand in all of this or to do something about Assad to stop all of this from happening. And also really interesting if the administration that's been so critical of NATO and other alignments around the world that at the same time, they're now talking about a coalition to combat Syria, you know, and that is going to be an interesting test for Trump, too, who has questioned all of these alliances, that he may need to rely on them if he does, in fact, want to take action. Yeah, I think that what's happening this week is partially the weight of the presidency on him, but also realizing that America first, which sounds good, and it's pretty clear, is really hard to enact as a policy, because we have to be engaged in the world and we do have alliances and we can't

do all the things we want to just by ourselves. And if you decide that you're going to try to take out Assad, then does that create a vacuum where ISIS thrives? It's like a six or seven way problem. And one thing that Obama said right before he went out the door was somebody basically said, you know, why didn't you do more in Syria? And he gave this very long answer and said, the American people, by and large, don't want to commit what we need to commit to do something here. Russia is very interested and they're going to do what it takes. We don't seem to be willing to do what it takes. And what is what it takes anyway? Because what's the solution here? Like a vacuum for more ISIS? You know, the second the second after Assad, the next powerful force in Syria is ISIS. That's who would come in. I've

said this before, but, you know, the moral to me, the takeaway from the week is this is reality television without the television, which is that it's really, really hard. He couldn't pass health care. His party is divided. His White House is divided. And as Sue said earlier in the show, that's maybe one reason why Republicans were so desperate to get Neil Gorsuch on the court, because that's the only hard, clear, feel good story that Republicans have for themselves. I think it's very possible, as Sue said, that that will be the only big legislative accomplishment that he has for his first 100 days. All right. Well, we're going to take one more quick break and we will come back and do Can't Let It Go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Green Chef. Green Chef delivers organic ingredients and easy recipes to cook delicious meals.

What sets Green Chef meal kits apart? 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. We're back. Before we go on, a correction to last week's roundup. In our Can't Let It Go segment, we played this very funny tape of President Trump at a listening session with police.

All this live television. It's always live for me. You know, unfortunately, other guys say, make this speech, nobody cares. With me, everything's live. One mistake, and it's no good. But we just can't make mistakes, right? So we don't make mistakes. Go ahead, Ken. I'm Chuck Canterbury, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police from South Carolina. Well, that sounded funny. It's still funny. But

it turns out that guy actually does go by Ken, according to an article in the Philly Voice. I'll read the quote. Chuck Canterbury's full name is Kenneth, and he goes by his middle name, Charles. Trump called Canterbury Chuck throughout the day, but kept it formal for the meeting with the press. So we stand corrected, Ken or Chuck. Before Can't Let It Go, real quick, Mara, we were talking before the break. You had one other point on all of this. What happened this week in the Senate? The Senate got rid of the filibuster to confirm the nominee of a president who lost the popular vote and is under 40 percent. I mean, that's really something. We don't know where this is

going. I mean, in some polls, he has 35%. Even though the Republicans have control of almost every aspect of American power, state legislatures, governor's offices, the Senate, the House, they're on their way to having a durable conservative majority on the court, the White House, they represent a minority of the country. And as Sue pointed out earlier, their policies are also not as popular as Democratic policies. And I don't know where all this leads, but... So is it just that they're that much better than Democrats at elections? Well, there's no doubt about that. There's no doubt about that. But I do think that if you're going to enact policies that are wildly popular inside the Republican Party but not in the country at large, what happens over time when you do that over and over again?

And you take away all of the guardrails that forced you to work across the aisle. In other words, getting rid of the filibuster almost takes away a protection that the Republicans had. In other words, the filibuster prevented them from getting too far off to the right, which could hurt them in the future. Now they have no... Yes, it saved them from themselves. It's kind of like putting a lock on the refrigerator because you're dieting. Well, you know where you hid the key. There's no law that says you have to have a lock on the refrigerator. They just took the lock off the refrigerator. It's also like Republicans right now, they have control, but they don't have a governing coalition. In other words, they have control, but they don't have unity. So it's preventing them from even moving forward with their ideas like the health care bill failure. That to me was so extraordinary. I don't you know, there's so much happening in Washington that we just kind of zip by it. But the fact that the Republicans in the House that have no opposition, they've been voting on this for seven years, could not

repeal Obamacare. That's extraordinary. And we should say that this week there were like four or five different moments where Republicans were like, no, we're really going to do Obamacare repeal this time. Here's a meeting. Here's a press conferences. Here's a hearing. By and large, was that just for show? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Why? You know, I don't think that they're ready to concede failure on what had been their signature campaign promise for the past seven or eight years. And I think that there are corners of the Republican Party that still think that they can do something on health care. I think the prevailing winds are moving in the other direction or that the things that they're going to do on health care are going to require Democrats, which is also a concession that you're not going to repeal and replace Obamacare. But the Republican Party is really fractured.

And this election, even though they won across the board, didn't change that. And finding that governing coalition is going to be incredibly challenging for House Speaker Paul Ryan in particular. And the thing that's so interesting about Donald Trump, I mean, the promise of Donald Trump, the kind of theoretical promise of Donald Trump was that he wasn't beholden to either party. He was postpartisan. He was postpartisan. He didn't have a fixed place on the ideological spectrum. So he could come in with these things like infrastructure and form these coalitions with Democrats. Well, he ran so divisively. And if you're toxic to one party, you're not. And has done nothing at all to reach out since he's gotten into office. He hasn't actually governed as a Trumpist. Let me ask you guys, all of you, you might have thoughts on this one thing that so Trump did an interview with the

New York Times yesterday, and there were a lot of interesting things to come out of it. But one of it was he said something like, well, I'm saving infrastructure because I'm just going to put it on to something else to get some votes with it because it's so popular. What did you make of this? That actually was not as crazy as it sounds, because many people have conceived of tax reform as if you do it either revenue neutral or revenue positive, the revenue it gets you, you put into infrastructure. That has been one of the thoughts about tax reform. But he has not explained what he wants to do with tax reform. They've rejected the carbon tax. They've rejected a gas tax. They've rejected the border adjustment

tax. So we don't know what they're planning to do with the tax reform. The one thing we know is they want to run the show from the White House. They don't want to fall into the same trap of having Paul Ryan tell them, no problem, I've got something that's going to pass and then have it fail. And not only has he not explained it, he hasn't sold it to the conservative members of the Republican Party because this morning, members of the House Freedom Caucus rejected the idea completely out of hand. Rejected which idea? Marrying infrastructure. Yeah. I mean,

this is like going to be the philosophical clash of this administration is that like Trump's philosophies are not conservative inherently and that the worldview of the House Freedom Caucus and the campaign positions that Donald Trump won a national election on don't overlap in a lot of ways. And even more fundamentally, he hasn't presented an agenda that expresses his philosophy. In other words, he's kind of let himself be grafted onto the House conservative agenda, which crashed and burned on health care. He hasn't come out. You'd think that a president who was postpartisan and was offering something really new would come out with these well thought out policies and a sequence of how he wanted to do

them, maybe infrastructure first, you know, making coalitions with Democrats right off the bat instead of insulting Chuck Schumer at every turn. It doesn't make a lot of sense. I think that to me, you know, the takeaway from these first couple of weeks has been incoherence and weakness. It's just, it's all a muddle. Well, you know, it's interesting, too, because I had a conversation with Jim Himes, who's a Democrat from Connecticut, and he's the head of something called the New Democrat Coalition, which is like the business-friendly side of the Democratic Party, in theory, where you would go to mine for votes for these bipartisan ideas. And I was talking to him about

working with Trump, and he was like, you know, there's actually a lot of Democrats that do want to work with him. But you have to also recognize that like the hell no part of the Democratic Party is growing by the day that they if Democrats wanted to work with him on things like infrastructure, the politics will prevent them from cutting any kind of deals if he continues to be really inflammatory in other ways. All right. And after all that, now it's time for Can't Let It Go, when we all share just one thing we can't stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise. Mara, you're up first. My Can't let it go this week is Merriam-Webster, the dictionary, which has had a very active Trump trolling Twitter feed for quite a while. But this week, they kindly and helpfully explained to Ivanka Trump what complicit meant, because she gave an interview to Gayle King of CBS,

where she said she didn't know what it meant. But if it meant being helpful and working for good, she was happy to be called complicit. Merriam-Webster, of course, pointed out that actually complicit means to help commit a crime or do a wrong in some way. Merriam-Webster has had some thoughts over the last few months. Many thoughts. They've defined facts when the alternative facts came up. They've explained what a clack is when people are paid to applaud. And they've been very active, very political. All right, Jeff, you're up next. I guess somebody has to talk about this. Yes, the ill-fated Pepsi ad, which fell flat.

So I've been working on that joke for hours. So I tend to roll my eyes whenever, you know, armchair activists and the Twitter outrage machine revs up. But I think on this, the outrage was warranted. So if you haven't seen the commercial, it's still online. And so in this nearly three-minute commercial, Kendall Jenner, she strolls through this protest, and then she plucks a can of Pepsi from this iced tub, and then she hands it to a police officer, runs back to the crowd, cheers, and then end scene.

Now, as you might imagine, and as you will recall, it led to a torrent of tweets and jokes and memes, probably none better than from Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King, who wrote, if only daddy would have known about the power of hashtag Pepsi. And the outrage here is that you have corporate America appropriating a very real moment in American life, the Black Lives Matter movement, which, you know, of course, were protests against the police killings of unarmed black men. And then, you know, using it for their own commercial pursuit. So Pepsi pulled the ad and then apologizing for it, they ended up apologizing to Kendall Jenner,

which then led to a completely different scandal, mini scandal. But the reason I can't let it go is because this commercial, in order to have made air, had to go through several layers of vetting. Like hundreds of people, right? Yeah, I mean, from the storyboarding to the casting to the production. And so the fact that it made it to air, I think, is really telling. Unless, of course, this was all an intentional attention grab on the part of Pepsi, in which case I would say, well done. That was one of my favorite Twitter theories about this ad is that Pepsi actually knew exactly what

they were doing. A guy was tweeting about his wife's an ad executive and saying, like, everything in advertising right now is about virality. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Going viral. Viral. Like, that's the key. Like, social media going viral and that they knew this ad would go viral. They just heavily miscalculated how hard and swift the backlash would be to it, which that is what maybe is seemingly surprising about all of this, that nobody in the room thought, maybe this could go the other way.

But this is testing one of Donald Trump's most basic beliefs, which is all publicity is good publicity. Because viral is just a lot of publicity. And was it a good thing that Pepsi got all this attention? They end up pulling the ad. Though with the Twitter thing, I had the good fortune, I guess, of not being on Twitter for like a 20 minute chunk when this happened. And I just came out and I was like, what is happening? And just had to like, finally, after five minutes, I was like, okay, this is what everyone's angry about. Is that it was like equal opportunity anger in that it didn't even seem to be like liberal anger or conservative anger. It seemed like there was just universal pushback to this ad

from all corners of this debate being like, this is just in bad taste. Pushback at the very idea of it, because I, like a lot of people, I think, saw the ad after I consumed all of the tweets about it. And then when I saw the ad, I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah, it's as bad as everyone was tweeting it. Exactly. Sue, you are up next. So My Can't Let It Go this week is about senior White House advisor extraordinaire Jared Kushner,

who, among his many duties this week went to Iraq to meet with military officials on the ground. Which sounds like a less pleasant trip than his recent trip to Aspen that got him headlines. Much less. And in this, he was meeting with military officials, he's meeting with troops, and there was an image from the trip that the internet just had a lot to say about. And it's an image of Jared in sunglasses talking to military officials, and he's wearing a flak jacket. But underneath his flak jacket, he's wearing a jaunty blazer. And the image of it's really striking, because if you ever see when senators or lawmakers or even the president goes over and meets with the troops, they try to dress down, you know,

sleeves rolled up, they wear their fleeces. It's sort of the like on the ground with the troops. And Jared just looks very Upper East Side in this. And so he took a little bit of ribbing on Twitter about the way that he looked. And it's just funny because it makes you think about how much optics matter, you know. And I think Jared and Ivanka are two people who are so usually aware of sort of their look and their image. And he looked kind of out of place in this situation. Well, the whole meme about or I hate it. I don't want to say meme. I promised myself I'd never say that word as long as I live. Okay, I'm not going to say it. The whole storyline about Javanka right now is that they look perfect, but underneath, they're not able to do what they're supposed to do. The press on them and the press that they contribute to

and promote is that they're the secret good guys. Every story has a secret good guy who's working behind the scenes to temper all the rough edges off Donald Trump. And how many different assignments? Because at a certain point,

like early on, it was like, OK, wow, Jared Kushner got another high profile assignment. But at a certain point, it's become like cartoonish and like the cart of assignments has toppled over.

And now every time there's a new assignment for Jared Kushner, like everyone just makes fun of it because it's right. He's solving the Middle Eastern peace process. He's the shadow secretary of state. He's running a new office of American innovation meant to streamline the federal government. Right. They've also tapped him to work on criminal justice reform and changing sentencing laws, as well as the country's opioid crisis and how to address that. Did you mention Mexico? No.

Don't forget Mexico. I won't. And he's also responsible for staff shakeups at the White House. Yeah. And he's clashing with Stephen Bannon at the White House. So it's just kind of like this image of him looking kind of out of place, maybe undermines this idea that he really is, you know, the mastermind at the White House right now. All right. I guess I'm last. So I went to my first baseball game of the year last night. The

Nationals beat the Miami Marlins. Two things that were kind of politics adjacent that jumped out. One was there's this apartment building right across the street from like the left field tower where you kind of walk up the ramp to go to the steps. And there's always like different things hanging from it. Like people are Nationals fans, other people who like other teams just kind of like hang their stuff out to be like, you know, in your face Nationals, go Pirates or whatever. So I was walking up and I took a picture because one porch had a Trump make America great again sign hanging from it. And their neighbors one over and one up had a big resist sign hanging.

I was very curious if they hang out or not. It was very DC. It was a very DC thing, yeah. The other thing, so they, you know, halfway through the game, they race presidents. And the racing presidents are those huge, literally larger than life mascots that run around.

Yeah, and they started with the Mount Rushmore presidents and then they added Bill Taft for like no real reason uh but then like the last couple years they've cycled through like earlier 20th century presidents first it was calvin coolidge then it was hoover so this year i'm all excited i'm ready to go watch the presidents and just the original four come out and they've cut taft and they've cut the rotating other president so i looked into it there is a definitive website about the racing presidents called Let Teddy Win, which goes back to Teddy Roselle used to never win. And it turns out they were making their way from Coolidge to Hoover and FDR was up next. And that presented problems because FDR, of course, was in a wheelchair.

Wow. So, like, apparently the Nationals really thought this through and did research and did outreach to disability groups. Like, is there a way we can do this and like, you know, champion people with disabilities? But like it seemed like any way that could have gone would have been like a minefield. And they were just like, you know what? No extra presidents this year. I had no idea so much thought went into the racing presidents. Maybe Pepsi could take a lesson from the Nets.

That is a wrap. We'll be back next week unless there's big news tomorrow. Maybe there will. It feels like there probably will, in which case we'll do our best to get something to you. But also don't forget to subscribe and listen to not only our podcast, but Up First, NPR's new daily news podcast. And you can keep up with all of your political coverage on your NPR One app and on your local public radio station. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Jeff Bennett, and I also cover Congress.

I'm Susan Davis, same-sies. I'm Mara Liason. I'm the national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.