The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, August 30

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

President Trump's White House Counsel Don McGahn may be leaving his post, but his goal of tilting the court for conservatives is nearly accomplished. Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh begin his confirmation hearings next week. And the president attacks Google's search algorithms calling them biased. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, White House correspondent Scott Horsley, and national security editor Philip Ewing. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Corey calling from the Zion Stone Valley Church Picnic Grove in Dalmatia, Pennsylvania, where I'm attending my family's 100th annual family reunion. This podcast was recorded at 1 45 Eastern on Thursday, August 30th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of the week's biggest political stories. President Trump's White House counsel, Don McGahn, may be on his way out, but that has not stopped him from trying to get more judges confirmed in the Senate. And we will preview the confirmation hearing for President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

That happens next week. We'll also talk about President Trump's fight with Google's search algorithms. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent. And I'm Scott Horsethight. I cover the White House. All right. So we are actually going to pick up exactly where we left off with the last podcast, because we were talking about Don McGahn, his time in the White House, his role as White House counsel. But we didn't really get into one big part of McGahn's his time in the White House, his role as White House counsel.

But we didn't really get into one big part of McGahn's legacy. And that is the key role he has played in the Trump administration's aggressive push to get a whole lot of federal judges on the bench. Yeah, this is record material, Scott. Under Don McGahn's tenure as White House counsel, President Trump has nominated and confirmed 26 federal appeals court judges and something like 33 district court judges. That is astounding. These are lifetime appointment jobs, often going to people in their late 30s or 40s. These are people who could be on the bench for decades. And they're really a game changer when it comes to the federal judiciary. First of all, I have a question about the pace, because it's been mentioned a lot of time that this is such a remarkable clip. And it's not like any other White House wouldn't love to get as many judges confirmed as possible. What is it about the Trump administration that's been able to get

this happening so fast? Is it just the circumstances of Republican control in the Senate, too? We'll give credit where it's due. Starting in 2014, when Republicans took control of the Senate, they put a freeze on a lot of judicial vacancies the last two years of the Obama administration. We remember how they refused to consider former President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, but they used similar tactics to preserve a lot of vacancies on the appeals courts and the district courts. So when Donald Trump came into office, he found a very large number of existing vacancies just waiting for him and Don McGahn to slot conservative judges into those posts. There's another thing going on here, which is that the Trump White House and the Senate,

which Kelsey is going to talk more about, have prioritized confirming federal judges over executive branch nominees. Remember, there are still nominees for major agencies and departments that have not yet been confirmed because federal judges mean more to this White House and this Senate. Yeah. And while McGahn is getting a lot of credit for this, I think another person who should be recognized here is Mitch McConnell. This is Mitch McConnell's plan that Mitch McConnell has been executing and has been planning for decades.

This is everything he's wanted from his career. And the people on his staff and Republicans in the Senate waste no time celebrating that and kind of tooting their own horns that they've been able to make this happen. Carrie, there was some news this week with a latest batch of judges going forward. Can you explain what happened? Yeah, remember that the Senate stayed in session in August mostly to confirm federal judges. And this week there was a deal between Senator Mitch McConnell and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, to advance more judges. Some of these people were relatively non-controversial.

They were even people who may have been advanced by President Obama. But still, that's more lifetime appointees coming down the pike with many more vacancies to come. One part of the reason that this went quickly, at least this week, this batch of judges went quickly this week, is that a number of senators wanted to go to the funeral for Senator John McCain, which was happening on Wednesday and Thursday of this week in Arizona. And so there was more pressure on Schumer to make a deal so that they could leave and could be in attendance. Which is another great example of even when you're talking about lifetime appointments, votes that will matter for decades, timing and getting out of town is often a big indicator and factor when it comes to the

Senate. Yeah, particularly when they are judges, like Carrie mentioned, that are relatively non-controversial. Though I should say this is still upsetting a lot of Democrats and people on the left who say it doesn't matter if they were non-controversial. They say it doesn't matter who the judges were. They want Democrats to stop going along with this big McConnell plan to get a bunch of judges confirmed. They don't want Republicans to have this big McConnell plan to get a bunch of judges confirmed. They don't want Republicans to have this big stamp on the judiciary going forward. In fact, there was a big Twitter campaign about this earlier in the week where people like Dan Pfeiffer, who of course was an official in the Obama White House, tweeted something like,

maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like a crazy thing for Democrats to agree to. And Rick Hasen, a law professor in California, said, why does Senator Schumer go along with this? What could possibly be in it for him? So there's pressure coming from the grassroots left on it. One other thing to say about Don McGahn is he was Donald Trump's campaign lawyer. And during the campaign, he was one of the people urging the president to publish a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Right after Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, Donald Trump made public a list of very conservative judges that he would consider to fill that vacancy.

That was Don McGahn's urging, and that was one of the ways that Donald Trump won favor from social conservatives, including evangelicals, who otherwise might have been sort of skeptical of this thrice-married New York businessman without a real solid conservative political track record. Before we turn to the Kavanaugh hearings, which are coming next week, Carrie, all these federal judges that have been appointed, are there any big picture themes that are emerging in terms of the types of people or their

backgrounds or their ideology? These are rock solid conservatives. These are young people, mostly in their 40s, who have a long, long time to serve on the federal bench. And they tend to be people who have been pre-approved in some way by conservative legal elite groups like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation or others. Important to note, Scott, they're also far less diverse than President Obama's nominees. Mostly white men, though not exclusively. Some more women have been coming down the pike. Some more Asian Americans have been coming down the pike. But these are people who are unafraid in large part to stick their thumb in the eye of their own colleagues on the bench. I did a piece in the last couple of

months about Jim Ho, a new judge appointed by Donald Trump on the Fifth Circuit, who's already waded into very controversial campaign finance, gun, and other social values issues. And that brings us to Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court. His confirmation hearings begin next week. Before we talk about what we can expect at the hearing, Kelsey, can you take us through what it's been like in the Senate as Brett Kavanaugh has met with senators, as they've looked over information? What has been the trend of the past few months? Well, when this all started, they brought Brett Kavanaugh up to the Hill to start his meetings the day after President Trump announced him from the White House. From there, he had a fairly steady clip of meetings with senators.

But as people will probably remember, they were all Republicans at the beginning. And up until just a few weeks ago,'t want to meet with Kavanaugh until they had received documentation of his time working in the White House and his time in other parts of public office. So they wanted millions of pages of documents. And so far, they actually have only received a very small number of them through official channels. Most of the documents they've received have come through the Bush Library. And they have been, as Democrats have complained, been processed by staff at the Bush Library. And they have been, as Democrats have complained, been processed by staff at the Bush Library. Ironically enough, remember that Senator McConnell this year was trying to advise the White House

not to pick somebody with a long paper trail because he worried that it would take forever to go through those documents and delay the confirmation process. Republicans wanted this pick on the bench in time for the term to start. And what happened is that there was actually a lowering of expectations to the deep unrest of Democrats in the Senate and progressive groups outside the government. In fact, Don McGahn, the outgoing White House counsel, had a meeting with Senate Republicans in late July. And after that meeting, Senate Republicans suggested that they were going to go ahead with this process without those millions and millions of pages of documents.

Yeah, Democrats have been aghast about this. There's no good way to explain how upset they are because they also are kind of helpless here. Democrats filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Archives for them to produce more of these documents more quickly. But they have not gotten much from that request. And they followed up by saying that they would consider filing a lawsuit if that request isn't fulfilled within 20 days, which falls right in the middle of Kavanaugh's hearings at the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Democrats don't really have a lot of leverage here. They don't have enough votes to block him.

They have had a hard time breaking through the noise in the atmosphere of Washington lately. And they have had a hard time reaching out to their own voters who, when they are polled, say that they don't rank the Supreme Court at the top of their list of issues. And it's just hard. You know, look at what's in the headlines today. We have North Carolina's voting maps up in the air. Today, the Justice Department weighed in on a major affirmative action case against Harvard. These are all major, major issues for Democrats. They don't seem to always understand that the people who rule on those things are federal judges and the Supreme Court. And we should say the reason why Republicans are aware of that Republican everyday voters is because the Republican Party has spent decades laying the groundwork for their voters to

understand that. It has been a major tenant of the voter education that Republicans do. They tie it very directly in ads and in paperwork and in their conversations with voters that you care about the Supreme Court because the issues you care about are decided there. Democrats just didn't do that. And Kerry's quite right. We all pay attention to the high profile cases that make it to the Supreme Court, but most cases are decided at the lower federal court. So these district judges and appellate court judges carry an awful lot of weight as well, and they're going to be making those decisions for years, decades to come. So what can we expect of these hearings next week? We can expect that they will start with some opening statements on Tuesday, and then either Tuesday or Wednesday, we'll get an opening statement from Kavanaugh himself. And before

senators get their chance to ask him questions, this could take the majority of the week. And I think the biggest fireworks will happen in the first or second round of questions where Democrats are going to have take that moment to make their mark. Even if they can't stop him, they are going to use this as an opportunity to hopefully reach out to the voters who they feel like haven't been hearing them as much and maybe see if that there's a last ditch effort to slow things down. Carrie, it's interesting to take a look at where we are right now, because when Anthony Kennedy retired, there was so much conversation about how he was the key swing vote on one of the most high profile, emotional, consequential Supreme Court issues. And that's the issue of abortion rights. This was going to be the

consequential battle for the swing seat. And here we are on the on the verge of the hearings. And it seems like it's almost a done deal. You have Republicans like Susan Collins indicating they'll likely support him, and you just haven't seen this big battle. How did this shift? Yeah, Brett Kavanaugh actually met with Senator Susan Collins, who says abortion rights are an important issue for her. Kavanaugh told Collins that, in his view, Roe v. Wade is settled law. What Senator Collins didn't seem to take a step further in, though, is that the Supreme Court doesn't have to follow precedent. The Supreme Court makes the precedent. And Brett Kavanaugh could change his mind or evolve in some fashion or show himself on abortion rights in a way he has not yet as a federal appeals court judge.

So not just abortion, affirmative action, and a number of other issues. Guns. We're going to get some questions to Brett Kavanaugh on his approach to the Second Amendment and guns. Gay rights. Not just gay rights, but how the rights of people who are LGBTQ clash or conflict in some way with people who have firmly held religious beliefs. Remember, we had that Kate case, the last term of the court,

and there are more of those challenges moving through the pipeline right now. Kelsey, are there any key senators that we should keep our ears open for what sorts of questions they ask or how they approach these hearings? Well, I would be keeping my eye on people who we might see running for president in 2020. I was thinking ears as we're radio, but you know, both. Yeah, okay. I'm keeping my eye out for what Senator Kamala Harris has to say.

I'm keeping my eye out. Gosh, I'm actually really interested to see what Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the committee, has to say about this. She was notably one of the people who was originally refusing to meet with Kavanaugh,

and she kind of broke the dam along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, sending the message to Democrats that it was okay to start meeting with him. But then she came out of that meeting with a pretty strong statement criticizing him. So I will look forward to hearing what kind of questions she has for him, because I think it will speak to the overall concerns of the Democratic Party. I'm going to be listening for two Democrats on the committee, Pat Leahy of Vermont and Dick Durbin of Illinois. They have already been on the record saying they believe Brett Kavanaugh misled them back in 2006 during his hearing to join the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals here in Washington. They think that Kavanaugh did not tell the complete truth about issues he touched,

national security issues in the W. Bush White House, including surveillance, warrantless wiretapping and the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Speaking of 2020 there, you also have to remember that you also have Cory Booker is on that committee and you have Amy Klobuchar, all names that are kind of floating around in the 2020 mix. It's going to be I would expect that those will be a little bit explosive. All right. Well, we're going to take a I would expect that those will be a little bit explosive. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. Carrie, we are saying goodbye to you. Bye-bye. Bye.

Thanks for coming in. You shall be missed. And we will be in your feed a lot next week covering those hearings. NPR is also covering them live on your old-fashioned radio. So look for that next week in the podcast. We're going to take a quick break right now. Be right back. Support for this podcast and the following message come from ACT,

a flexible CRM trusted by millions worldwide. Manage customer contacts, track sales opportunities, and create professional marketing campaigns, all from your laptop or mobile device. Call 888-643-6400. Mention promo code NPR for a free Amazon dot with your purchase of ACT. Or visit act.com slash NPR to sign up for a free 14-day trial. ACT. Growth made easy. This is Terry Gross, the host of Fresh Air. The Emmys are approaching, so this week we're doing a special series of Emmy nominees and people from nominated We are back. We have traded Kerry Johnson for Phil Ewing and a player to be named later. Hello, Phil. Hi, thanks for having me. And I'm looking forward to that prospect. So if it's Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, President Trump is feuding with someone or something on Twitter. This week, he has focused a lot of attention calling out

Google and other social media platforms for what he says are unfair practices, specifically when it comes to the news they highlight in their algorithms. We're going to fact check this. We're going to add some context. But first, let's hear what the president had to say in an Oval Office availability earlier this week. With respect to Google and Twitter and Facebook, there is a big difference. And in fact, I hear that the holding hearings in Congress over the next couple of weeks, and I think it's a very serious problem because they're really trying to silence a very large part of this country. And those people don't want to be silenced. It's not right. It's not fair. It may not be legal.

But we'll see. We just want fairness. Do you think you want to regulate them more? We're just going to see. We're just going to see. This followed a series of tweets where the president claimed that Google's search results are rigged. What was he talking about? That's right. This has been a leitmotif for the president for his entire career in politics. They're out to get us. The system is rigged. And this week he extended it to the world of big tech.

Trump is a very tech savvy president on the one hand, his use of Twitter, but he also doesn't use a computer. He's not the kind of guy who would sit down and type his name into a Google search box and be able to see what it has to say about him. So, Phil, what do we know about the claim versus the reality? Here's what Google said about these complaints by the president. The company said, searches on Google are not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology. The company also said this, we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment. So its response is just technically, scientifically, Google does not have a conservative bias. It doesn't have a bias one way or the other. If anything, according to the tech world and according to Google,

it's biased toward giving you whatever you want. And if, in fact, people in the White House are doing searches for Donald Trump and seeing a lot of negative coverage, that presumably reflects the amount of negative coverage as opposed to some kind of systemic problem by Google. Kelsey, this is an interesting evolution because a lot of Republicans have for a long time felt that the media is biased. There's nothing new to that complaint. President Trump has taken it to much more extreme rhetoric. But now he's adding the way you find that news to that to that list of complaints as well. Yeah. And it's been a fairly effective message among a lot of Republicans because they already had that feeling. And it's actually been a fairly effective fundraising tool as far as we can tell. This is popping up in some of the messaging that

congressional campaigns are using to kind of tell people why it's important to get more Republicans elected. Conservatives across the board have picked up this theme as something that they think is a winning push to try to get behind, to complain about Facebook, to complain about Twitter, to complain about, in this case, Google. And as we heard the president say in that clip, next week, there's two big hearings in Congress where the Senate Intelligence Committee and then the House Energy and Commerce Committee are going to focus on this specifically. And I expect that we're going to hear a whole lot more about this then. I think it's important to remember that things resonate typically with, you know, the greater public and voters when they seize on a kernel of something

that that person already believes and that this kind of conversation that the president's entering into, there was foundation laid there and people already are, you know, have been expressing those feelings. We saw this on the campaign trail, at least for this past several years. Yeah. And Scott, President Trump has been pretty blunt about the fact in the past that often when he's railing on the media and its coverage, one thing he's trying to do is kind of insulate himself against any negative stories that would come out. It seems like this is along the same vein. It's interesting that he would include Twitter in that broadside, though, because he's obviously used that as a very effective vehicle for his own communication with his supporters. Yeah, he said at one point during the campaign that it was like owning the New York Times without all of the big financial losses in terms of just the platform that Twitter gives him. And I mean, this podcast and almost every single podcast we do is a great example of how much he

can control the conversation through just tweeting stuff out at six in the morning. I think when the president first tweeted about this early in the week, it was easy to kind of dismiss it as the sort of thing that he sees something on Fox News and tweets about, and then it's never heard from again. Reporters asked Larry Kudlow, the White House economic advisor, about it, and he seemed to be giving it the minimum oxygen he possibly could. But we do have Congress holding hearings next week. We have Senator Orrin Hatch writing to the Federal Trade Commission asking about this. So it's possible this will have more of a half-life than some of the things the president tweets about. Yeah, and it's not like he's the first person to have one complaint or another about

the big social media giants. We've seen like this remarkable shift over the last couple of years from them, Facebook, Twitter, other platforms being these companies that every politician wants to suck up to in court, to companies that people have a lot of concerns and criticism about and increased conversation about whether or not there's going to be any sort of broader regulation. Phil, has that gone anywhere beyond, you know, stern talking to's at high profile hearings and towards some actual legislation? The short answer is no. But this so-called tech lash that you just described is definitely a bipartisan phenomena. Democrats are very angry at big tech because of, among other things,

the way it was used in 2016 by foreign influence mongers to wage this information campaign that distorted the information picture inside the United States with fake Facebook accounts, fake Twitter accounts, fake Reddit pages. There were all kinds of things that have since come to light. And Republicans, as we've been talking about, and conservatives are frustrated about what they call this bias or this unfairness in the way that their speech is handled. And so even though there's no bill, there's no actual legislation that these tech companies are trying to fight, they want to keep there from being one if, in fact, this so-called tech clash continues. And so that's what they're going to tell Congress, that they can police themselves, that there is no bias and that everything is going to be fine because they ultimately want to be responsible for their own destinies, not regulators in Washington. Those hearings will be happening next week. So I guess what I'm trying to say is we are going to

have a whole lot of podcasts about hearings next week because we will recap those hearings, just like we'll be recapping the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Hearing Palooza next week on the NPR Politics Podcast. Tune in. Right now, we're going to take a quick break, then we're going to come back with Can't Let It Go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation,

where opportunity takes root. More information is available at waltonfamilyfoundation.org. Fall TV is gearing up, and whether you watch on your sofa or on the subway, Pop Culture Happy Hour is here to help. We'll tell you what we're looking forward to and how you might find your next favorite show. We're back.

We're going to get to Can't Let It Go in a moment. But Scott, it was actually a big week for things happening on the trade front. Can you catch us up to speed? That's right. And it could be a bigger week. By the time you hear this, we are, as we record this, we are in the midst of furious negotiations between the U.S. and Canada. But earlier this week, the White House announced an agreement in principle with Mexico, the other partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement. So the question now is, will Canada join that pact and make it an updated North American trade agreement, or will it be some sort of just bilateral deal between the U.S. and its neighbor to the south?

And I guess, Scott, I should not be too surprised by this, but your can't let it go has a little bit to do with trade this week? Well, yes. On Monday, when the president announced this handshake deal with Mexico, he actually did it in front of the TV cameras and had Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto on speakerphone. The president is on the phone. Enrique. Or did he? That was the plan. We've all been sitting in a conference room where you try to bring somebody in on speaker and they're just not there or there's some connectivity problems. Hello. Happens even to the most powerful man in the country.

Hello. Hello. It's sort of painful to watch. In fact, some folks have had some fun with this, setting up along the VEET end credits and splicing in various movie scenes of people on the telephone. The thing it reminded me of, though, actually, is the scene from Dr. Strangelove when Peter Sellers is trying to talk to the Soviet president and calling out, Dimitri, Dimitri, just as Trump is calling out Enrique, Enrique.

Hello? Hello, Dimitri. Listen, I can't hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? The bomb, Dimitri, the bomb. The bomb, Dimitri. The hydrogen bomb. The hydrogen bomb. How long did that go before he hopped on the phone, though?

It felt like an eternity. It probably was only a few minutes. President Trump, how are you? Good morning. Thank you, Enrique, and congratulations. Kelsey, what can you not let go? My can't let it go is kind of like a perfect hybrid of things that really are my favorite things in the world. Congress, politics, and indie rock. Go on.

All we're missing is baseball. Uh, my can't let it go is the Texas GOP Twitter account going after Beto O'Rourke, the Democrat running for Senate in Texas. They tweeted a picture yesterday trying to kind of needle Beto O'Rourke into doing a debate with Senator Ted Cruz. And it was a picture of him and his band from the mid-90s band called Foss. And it says, maybe Beto can't debate Cruz because he already has plans. And on the picture, it says, sorry, can't debate. We have a gig. Now, this kind of caught fire, not in the way they were expecting.

Wait, so their attack on him was that he used to be in a band? He used to be in a band. He used to be cool in the 90s. Wasn't Ted Cruz like in the debate club? He was. There are a lot of photos. There's a picture floating around of Ted Cruz in like mime costume. Oh, no.

And like him like smoking a cigar in college and like rearranging a debate board. And it's kind of elevated Beto O'Rourke to this like national hero of like if there wasn wasn't if they needed somebody, if Democrats needed somebody to be the cool guy of this election cycle, the Texas GOP kind of gave them that in this situation. You know, the funny thing about this band is it's this band that nobody's really ever heard of called Foss. But the drummer from the band went on to be the front man for two of my favorite bands in college at the drive-in in Mars Volta, who are kind of really big part of the post-hardcore indie scene. And I mean, it reaches out to a lot of people who may share that kind of thing. And you saw articles in Spin and in GQ and BuzzFeed. And the response that the Texas GOP had a little bit later was based on the reaction to our tweets. We can confirm that Beto is in fact going to receive 100 percent of the vote from BuzzFeed contributors, out-of-state liberals and people who use the word rad.

We feel very owned. So I'm going to be thinking about the intersection of Indy Rock and politics for at least a few more days. Phil, what can you not let go? the intersection of indie rock and politics for at least a few more days. Phil, what can you not let go? What I cannot let go is something to do with somebody that we pay very close attention to in my world, the national security beat, and more broadly in the public radio world, and that's Kim Kardashian. On August 25th, she said this on Twitter. I'm just going to read this to you. Who has listened to the Serial podcast? I'm on episode four now and dying to know what you guys think. Is he guilty or

innocent? This is going to speak to some of our listeners. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. And she followed up on August 26th by saying this. Okay, wait, so still listening to the Serial podcast. But so what? I'm four years late. I just heard about it. Any other good podcast to listen

to? I think we have a suggestion for her. First of all, nobody spoil it for her. Kim, if you're out there, go to the podcast app and download the NPR Politics podcast. You know, I think it's good that she, in that first tweet, basically summed up the entire concept of serial. Did she finish it yet? She's going to be disappointed. We are waiting to see. And we're still waiting to see if he's guilty or innocent. We are waiting to see whether she will post another tweet to her 58.7 million followers about the cereal podcast. Maybe she can use her skills in getting pardon attention to President Trump once she finishes cereal.

There could be another episode of this podcast about another pardon by Kim Kardashian for the president. Add on if you're listening. I guess I can't make fun of her too much for that because I only watched the finale of Mad Men three days ago. And I was like, oh, this is great. And people were like, yeah, it is. It was great. Years ago. Yes. Scott, what can't you let go? Well, I actually have to give major credit to our colleague covering Congress, Susan Davis, who's off this week and was giving us play-by-play updates of a very important news story happening right now. Of course, John McCain's funeral services are happening today. There's a funeral service in Arizona. Saturday, there will be a

funeral service in the National Cathedral in Washington. But there's another very important funeral happening today. And that is the funeral of Aretha Franklin. Famous, iconic, century-defining soul singer Aretha Franklin, who is going out on brand and in style in that, as Sue was pointing out in a moment-by-moment screenshot blow to us. We got at least seven, eight texts about this. Aretha Franklin was laid out in her casket in a beautiful bright red dress, bright red heels, and her legs or her-

Ankles were crossed. Her ankles were crossed, just posing in style. And not only that, apparently there were wardrobe changes over the course of the viewing. Weren't they like custom Christian Louboutin heels? Amazing. They were. Gotta go out in style.

Yeah, and our friends over at NPR Music put together a really great remembrance on Spotify, and you can go check that out. And I think that's the best place to leave this episode. We will be back in your feeds next week with those episodes looking at the Supreme Court hearings. Until then, I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. And I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House.

Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Bye.