The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, January 3

Episode Date: January 3, 2019

Nancy Pelosi is again speaker of the House, as Democrats retook control of the chamber for the first time in eight years, bringing divided government back to Washington. Plus, Elizabeth Warren kicked off the new year by announcing that she was running for president. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Asma Khalid, editor correspondent Ron Elving, political editor Domenico Montanaro, and Congressional correspondent Susan Davis. 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 Deborah from Perth, Australia, but at the moment I'm in my old hometown of Washington, D.C. Right now I'm standing on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on a beautiful sunny day. This podcast is recorded on 352 Eastern on Thursday, January 3rd. Things will have changed by the time you hear this. Here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of the week's biggest political stories. Nancy Pelosi is once again Speaker of the House. It's official. And Elizabeth Warren kicked off 2019 by saying she's running for president. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress.

I'm Asma Khalid. I cover politics. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. All right. So we have known for a couple of months, obviously, the Democrats would take back control of the House of Representatives. But today, new session began early this afternoon. It was official. Democrats are now in charge. And Nancy Pelosi won the election to be speaker of the House. So here we are. Our nation is at an historic moment. Two months ago, the American people spoke and demanded a new dawn. They called upon the beauty of our Constitution,

our system of checks and balances that protects our democracy, remembering that the legislative branch is Article I, the first branch of government, co-equal to the presidency and to the judiciary. And Scott, you were there? Yeah, I was there. And you heard a baby crying in the middle of that cut right there. The first day of a new session is always this very ceremonial, jam-packed day in Congress because all of the new members, all the returning members are there. Former members are on the floor that day as well. Their families are on the floor that day. And increasingly, more and more members bring their kids with them. So the House of Representatives was just filled with these wiggly kids because this is a thing that lasts a couple hours.

So you had these kids standing up and yelling for Pelosi or Kevin McCarthy with their parents when they were voting. It was a pretty packed scene. Pelosi won the speaker's vote by, you know, semi-comfortable margin. Yeah, she had enough votes that she could let some people go, and a dozen did. A dozen Democrats did not vote for her. They voted for, you know, various and sundry people. Some voted for each other. And then some voted for senators like Tammy Duckworth. There was a vote for Stacey Abrams, who was the Democratic candidate for governor, unsuccessful in Georgia. A vote for Joe Biden. A vote for Joe Biden.

And, you know, I mean, these are just symbolic votes. It doesn't really matter. It was clear she was going to have enough. So there you have it. That's also a reminder that you don't actually have to be in the House to become speaker if they wanted to vote for someone like that. You don't have to be Catholic to be Pope, but they all have been. It's never. And the House speaker is pretty much the same deal.

They've all been members. One funny quirk is that there's all this formality about the new speaker being announced. And there's this, like, committee that forms to present them. And part of it is your entire congressional delegation from your home state. But because California is Pelosi's delegation and it's so enormous, this 53-person delegation, it just took forever as they walked in and in and in. Yeah, and a lot of them were singing, looked like a glee club. Another visual about all this you just have to mention.

Almost 90% of the Republican conference of the Republicans in the House are white males. And sitting over on their side, they look sort of like the senior men's chorus, all dressed alike and all looking kind of alike. And then on the other side, you had this new House Democratic Caucus, which is just down around 40% white males, less than half as many in percentage terms. It looked like a session of the United Nations General Assembly. I'd like to point out that the fashion choices were also remarkably better on that side. You just had more diversity of choices, given that not everyone was wearing a black or brown suit. That disparity was just so notable, sitting up in the gallery above

the House floor and looking down. And it really is, I mean, indicative of the direction these two parties have been going. I mean, we've been writing about it so many times during the campaign, Asma covering demographics through the 2016 campaign, and really the sort of fracturing, not just of American politics, you know, around economic issues, but of course, around cultural issues. And it, you know, is clear and noticeable today. So Scott, question for you. I mean, now that Nancy Pelosi is formerly the speaker again, right, and Democrats are in control, do we have a sense of just sort of how big of a moment this is in terms of like substantive change that we'll likely see? You'll see it right off the bat, the difference that it makes for budget negotiations and any sort of negotiation later tonight when one of the first votes that Pelosi calls for the new House will be a Democratic bill to reopen the federal government. You know, Democrats had the votes all along on budget issues to get some leverage in because

you need 60 votes in the Senate to advance. There aren't enough Republicans to do that without some Democratic votes. But Democrats, the last two years under President Trump never had the ability to write a bill and call it to the floor of either chamber for a vote. Now they can set the terms. Now they can say, we are voting on this. We are voting on that. Like if you remember 37 controversies ago, the big debate over DACA, it was always frustrating to moderate Republicans and a lot of Democrats because they said, hey, look, there's enough votes. If we did a very narrow fix, if we did just DACA and wall funding, right, there would be enough votes to pass it. But Paul Ryan never called it to a vote. Democrats can now call that or any other bill they want to a vote because they set the agenda. She did talk a little bit about some of the other things she wants to do as speaker.

And, of course, opening the government would be a starting point. Democrats will be offering the Senate Republican Appropriations Legislation to reopen government later today. But after that, she talked about H.R. 1, the first bill they're going to pass being an ethics bill. And I pledge that this Congress will be transparent, bipartisan, and unifying, that we will seek to reach across the aisle in this chamber and across divisions across our nation. She also talked a little bit about gun control, a little bit about protecting the Dreamers. That, of course, goes back to the DACA issue. And also about protecting pre-existing conditions as part of Obamacare.

That was a big issue for Democrats last fall. The most important thing that's going to happen over the next year, year and a half are these investigations that are going to be opening up and all of the ways that Democrats who've been itching to get their hands on internal documents and the like for various Trump administration ethics scandals. We're going to see that open up and Democrats in a way be able to control the news cycle like we haven't seen in the past two years where really President Trump was dominating every last turn. Dominica, when you're talking about controlling the news cycle, I do have a question sort of about the immediacy of all of this, because, you know, the Democrats are taking control of the House, but they're taking control of the House at this moment where it feels like the shutdown and the ineffectiveness of government is kind of top of mind for a lot of people. All I guess I'm getting at is if we're talking about inefficiency in government, this isn't about legislation.

I'm separating from the legislation and from someone controlling the gavel and oversight, judiciary, any number of committees to pull in anyone that they want from any branch of government or outside to talk about the topics and issues of the day in a way that we haven't seen over the first two years of the Trump presidency. You know, the difference between the minority and the majority in the House especially is so stark, so drastic. I haven't really covered Congress long enough to see how much of a difference it makes in terms of day-to-day news stories. But, you know, members say that you hardly have any say over anything when you're in the House minority. You just kind of sit there and vote no a lot. Now there's this energetic class of freshmen who are trying to put their mark right away on Congress. And there's a lot of veterans on the Democratic side who have, you know, done a whole lot of nothing for eight years in terms of actual votes, who are excited to to try and pass some bills, even though there's a Senate that's Republican and a Republican

president, they feel like they can get some of their agenda passed or at least, you know, set marks for the future by passing bills. You know, the difference between being in the majority and being in the minority is the difference between driving the car and riding in the trunk. So does that mean in the Senate, you're at least in like the back seat? In the Senate, at least you're in the back seat and you can see where the car is going and you can try to grab for the wheel once in a while. But you can't control it entirely. No, and that's why, and actually neither can the majority in the Senate. That's the truth. It's more like a car without a wheel that's being driven by some other power. All right. We'll keep talking about Congress for a while, but that is enough Congress talk for right

now. All right, Domenico, we're going to let you go. When we get back, only hours into 2019. We're already talking 2020. Ever get to Friday, look back on the week and say to yourself, what just happened? I'm Sam Sanders. Check out my podcast. It's been a minute where every Friday we catch up on the news and the culture of the week and try to make sense of it all. Listen on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're joined now by Susan Davis. Hey, Sue. Hey.

And I feel like in a lot of ways, the years 2017 and 2018 to a point didn't exist because we just kept focusing on 2016. And I kind of feel like in the same way, 2019 may never exist because we're going to be talking a lot about 2020. I'm already writing 2020 on my checks. Just go for it. Just go for it.

2020, you know, Julian Castro had announced, a couple other people had announced, but the first major high-profile top-tier contender got in the race. And Asma, she didn't even wait until 2019. Elizabeth Warren announced she was forming an exploratory committee on New Year's Eve 2018. I know, right? She came out with this video that she sent to her supporters. And in it, you know, she talked a lot about this message that she's been talking about for years, which is the fact that the middle class needs more financial stability. And that basically a lot of the economic problems that this country has is because of billionaires and huge corporations.

America's middle class is under attack. How do we get here? Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie. And they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice. One of the things that she's tried to really separate herself on has been these economic issues, right? And Scott, you know this too, right? It's an issue or issues, I should say, that she's been fighting for for a really long time. Sue, what's Warren's reputation been on Capitol Hill for the, I guess, full term now? She's

starting her second term today. She's been in the Senate. She's been a really forceful personality, and she has been someone who other Democrats, as they're positioning themselves in their own political fortunes, has become one of those senators that people want to see how she votes first to see how they're going to vote around her. You know, she's sort of setting the standard in some ways of what the Democratic Party should be about. One of the things that I think is going to be interesting to watch, and I think she's really emblematic of this as the Democratic primary plays out, is it seems like the party is still going through this intellectual debate right now over who is best to beat Donald Trump and whether that should be a woman or a minority

or whether they still need a white guy. And I hear from a lot of Democrats who are really struggling with this, that their hearts tell them that the time and who the party is now should be a ticket led by women, by people of color, but that the country may not be ready for that and that the safest bet might be to go and stick with more, quote unquote, traditional candidates being white men. That's one argument. The other argument is how far left should the party go? How frankly socialist should the party be? Should it be democratic socialism like Bernie Sanders? Or should it be somebody like a woman? And that would be possibly Elizabeth Warren, who is also someone who's made

a real commitment to the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders caucuses with the Democrats, runs for their presidential nomination, but won't call himself one and won't join the Democratic Party. You know, one of the things that I think is a really interesting question around the ideological and the identity divides is that maybe they don't all cut as cleanly as we think they do. We could easily have, say, four potential women running, and they're not all going to be ideologically on the same spectrum. And this is something that I hear from some Democratic activists is that it's not going to be as easy as maybe we've thought in the past to kind of slice and dice people into these buckets and categories, because you're going to have really different types of women. I mean, you're going to have really different types of

candidates of color, multiple candidates of color. And the party has just never been in that situation before. There was one other interesting thing that happened this week with her announcement that shows this moment that the party is in, right, where you have established Democratic superstars like Elizabeth Warren trying to reposition themselves in the wake of all this new exciting energy coming into the party with these new members of Congress. And that was Elizabeth Warren basically doing an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez impersonation by doing a live video on her Instagram feed of hanging out in her kitchen, cooking, drinking a beer. Hold on a sec. I'm going to get me a beer. Which is something that Ocasio-Cortez has done so successfully and virally.

It was really interesting to see Warren trying to take a lead from someone who's really just popped onto the national scene a few months ago. My husband Bruce is now in here. You want a beer? I'll pass on the beer for now. You sure? Come over and say hello. I think for good, bad, or indifferent, you know, personality really matters. And that ability to connect with people beyond how smart your policy is does matter.

And I'm not policy, of course, matters. But like so much of this election, especially if we're talking about a field that could be 15, 20, 25 people, that a lot of that is just going to be people's visceral reaction to who they like the most or who they connect with or who they see themselves in. And that's like a variable that we just can't really wrap our hands around. There's no way to quantify it. I mean, it also strikes me as they there's just this recognition of how important it is to reach also younger voters on different platforms. I mean, when you covered Hillary Clinton, one of the, I think, very obvious things was at times how uncomfortable it seemed she felt in certain avenues or places or sort of trying to reach a younger audience, right, or doing certain dances to try to reach. Pokemon, go to the polls. Yes, say, or the nay-nay, right, and the whip.

I mean, there were just certain things that seemed really outside of her comfort zone. And look, maybe these things are outside of a lot of people's comfort zones, but it strikes me as a bunch of candidates also realizing that they need to. And maybe also, look, they have the freedom to just do things that Hillary Clinton, being the first woman who was a major party's nominee, didn't necessarily always have. I mean, I was struck by the fact that Elizabeth Warren had this press conference outside of her house on New Year's Eve, and she comes out wearing a pair of like swanky tennis shoes and North Face down jacket. Like she was chill. She was wearing a hoodie. I mean, just that

sheer fashion choice is so different than what we saw Hillary Clinton wear consistently her pantsuits during the 2016 cycle. And I think what we're going to see this cycle is a whole bunch of women who can wear different things, whatever they want to wear, which I know sounds like a really minor detail. But to me, it is just so kind of mind bogglingly different than what we saw a couple of years ago. And crack open a beer, too, you know, crack open a beer. It was something that spoke to, you know, we have a debt, obviously, to AOC and her video. But on the other hand, there's an old expression that people would like to have a president who is the kind of person they'd like to have a beer with. And OK, I think Elizabeth Warren was making a very direct pitch to that notion and saying, I'm the kind of person you could have a beer with. Well, it's the L word, right? It's the likability word that also came up with Warren this week. And it's really hard to talk about because I think it's clear that female politicians have generally been viewed by a harsher, would you want to have a beer with them lens than male politicians traditionally have.

And I think Ron's totally right that that factor of likability matters a lot. I think when we use it, when we talk about female candidates, a lot of times it sounds more sexist or more misogynist to say that she's not very likable. But personality matters. It really does. And that's come up so many times when we've been talking to the likely staffers on these likely campaigns, talking to key advisors for these Democrats who are going to run for president. They all keep coming back to authenticity. And of course, you can't try really hard to be authentic if you're not, right? Like it's either a natural quality or not by definition. But to that last point of other people getting in the race, let's end this by talking about what we can expect in

the coming weeks. Warren is in, it's now January 2019. Feels like by the end of the month, we're going to have a lot more people in the race. Some people don't need to get in right away because their name recognition is already so high. Joe Biden in this particular field, he's already made a lot of moves that get a lot of things in place, have a lot of his resources lined up, but has not formed an exploratory committee and has not even really given the signal that he is going to run. So he may not. And then there are just lots of other people who need to get in much sooner because they need to establish that they are thinking of themselves on this level, even if not everyone is. You can put them in a couple of different camps right now in terms of where they're assembling. I think there's a few candidates who are clearly going to run, clearly signaling they're going to

run, but haven't quite pulled the trigger publicly, right? And that's people like Cory Booker, New Jersey Senator, Kamala Harris, California Senator. There are other candidates who seem to legitimately not have gotten to the point of, oh, maybe I could or should run for president until more recently. And they seem to be taking a little bit of baby steps, but also trying to make up their mind. And I think Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who got a lot of attention for his big win a couple months ago in a state where Democrats didn't do as well in other places, and Beto O'Rourke, who, of course, had been focused on trying to beat Ted Cruz and suddenly finds himself this Democratic international superstar. Or Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota,

and Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York, also in that same category. And Gillibrand is one of the people who you know is seriously thinking about it because they just happen to have a book tour right now. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, others. Kamala Harris. Yeah, just hitting bookstores and cable news talk shows near you to talk about their new book. And we should also not forget the non-politicians.

I think people like Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO who's made it clear he's looking at a run. I do think the reality of the Donald Trump presidency is he is sparked in a lot of people who might not have looked at politics as the arena they want to get in to say, hey, maybe I can do that, too. spring up like mushrooms in the next few weeks. We will get ready for two years of this conversation. Happen a lot more. We're going to take a quick break right now and come back and talk about what we can't let go from this week. What's unique about the human experience? And what do we all have in common? I'm Guy Raz.

Every week on TED Radio Hour, we go on a journey through the big ideas, emotions, and discoveries that fill all of us with wonder. Find it on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back, and we will end the show like we do every single week by talking about the one thing we cannot let go, politics or otherwise. Sue, you have the first Can't Let It Go of 2019.

I'll try and make it count. Use it responsibly. So my Can't Let It Go this week is in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. They have this really beautiful photo spread of the new power players in Washington. And one of the images really struck out to me. And it is six of the incoming female freshmen in the U.S. House, all Democrats, all diverse. And it includes many well-known names like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women to serve in

Congress this year, Ayanna Pressley, the first African-American woman to represent Massachusetts. And it's just this like power pose of younger women coming into Congress. And I think it's such a like great visual representation of so much of these themes that we talked about coming into the midterm elections. But part of the reason that's a nice image and everyone should go look at it, but the reasons I can't let it go are one, is it made me realize that I am older than half of these women coming into Congress. And there is a moment in every political reporter's life when you realize you are becoming older than a lot of the people you are covering. At least we get like a longer stretch without that

moment than like sports reporters do. Very, very. Watching the Olympics became real depressing early on when you watch the gymnasts. All I can say, Sue, is welcome to the club. Ron, I know you know this well, but also the other thing that made me laugh about it. And as I look at this image is I think it also speaks to like the generational difference coming to the Hill. Because I look at this image and it's just so evocative to me of sort of the Taylor Swift squad female crew vibe. And I would say in this, I definitely think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the Taylor Swift here. But I feel like they're really embracing this role because all of the women in the picture have since promoted it on their own social media channels. And like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it on Instagram and it's like, we're in the building. And then Ilhan Omar retweeted the image and it just says, they ain't ready. And then Ayanna Pressley like retweeted Ilhan Omar saying heading into tomorrow, like, there's no limit to what we as women can accomplish, quoting Michelle Obama. So it's just this like wave of female empowerment coming in. And I'm really curious to see how these women who

have gotten so much attention are going to be players in the next Congress. And I'm going to say things to them like, as someone older than you. Asma, what about you? So Mitt Romney wrote this opinion piece that was published in the Washington Post, I believe on January 1st, in which he basically calls out Donald Trump's character. You know, and a lot of people are saying like, wow, this is, you know, kind of bold for this new incoming freshman senator. What does it mean? Is it meaning that he's going to become like the Jeff Flake of the Senate? Whatever. So he goes on. And the thing, though, that interests me more than any of this is kind of the really kind of quirky family dynamics that he has,

because his niece, Ronna McDaniel, whose full name, she's actually a Romney, she is Mitt Romney's niece, is the chairwoman of the Republican Party. And so she took to Twitter yesterday and wrote out and said, POTUS is attacked and obstructed by the MSM media and Democrats 24-7. For an incoming Republican freshman senator to attack at real Donald Trump as their first act feeds into what the Democrats and media want and is disappointing and unproductive. And I was like, whoa, I cannot imagine calling out my uncle on Twitter like that. But, you know, maybe it's like the uncle that you don't really get along with. We don't know their dynamic here. So apparently she was on Fox and Friends saying that she loves her uncle and that Mitt Romney actually gave her a heads up about

this op-ed coming out and that they discussed the Twitter message, but that, look, in their family, they have a lot of disagreements about politics. Scott, what can't you let go this week? So as we know, President Trump watches a lot of Fox News, and not only does he watch Fox News, he tweets in response to Fox News, and he staffs his administration with a lot of people from Fox News. And that has often gotten me to wonder about the alternate universe where President Trump staffs his administration with NPR and not Fox News, and who would be up for what job and what job I could theoretically position myself for. We are one step closer to that reality because during this week's marathon cabinet meeting that lasted an hour and a half,

President Trump talked about all sorts of topics. He talked about the wheel, drones, the history of Afghanistan, a whole lot of things. But there was this moment where he he like paused and started talking about PBS and praised PBS. In fact, I watched last night PBS. I haven't seen it in a while, PBS. And I just noticed, you know, I was in the White House all by myself for six, seven days. I was very lonely. My family was down in Florida. They're all, I said, stay there and enjoy yourself. But I felt I should be here just in case people wanted to come and negotiate the border security. But I have to say that I was watching PBS and they really covered it accurately.

They said that in Chairman Kim's speech, he really wants to get together. He wants to denuclearize. And a lot of good things are happening. They covered it very, very nicely. I was surprised based on everything I've heard about him. I'll have to start watching PBS much more. You know, public media, we cover international news accurately and thoroughly.

Take that, CNN. You do wonder what like led him to actually flip though to PBS to begin with. Well, he was all alone by himself in the White House for a week. Eventually, I think alone in the White House for a week is what it takes for the president to find PBS on his remote control. You know, I have at times when family's been out of town, watched a lot of Ken Burns. I've been there. I feel that. Maybe if this trend continues, Judy Woodruff can be the next secretary of state.

Who knows? What about you, Ron? We heard from Sue about Vanity Fair. And, of course, I'm reading Reason magazine. That comes from the Reason Foundation, which is a kind of libertarian, meta-conservative organization. The motto is free minds and free markets. And their cover story in their latest edition is Misunderstood, the Unstable Genius of Kanye West. And there is, of course, a cover-sized close-up photo of Kanye wearing his Make America Great Again cap. So this is, of course, a cover-sized close-up photo of Kanye wearing his Make America

Great Again cap. So this is going to surprise, I think, some of the subscribers to reason, and some of the people who may pick it up off newsstands may be attracted to it if they're Kanye fans. But the essential point that they are making in this particular perspective is that the vehemence, and I'm quoting here, of the public reaction to West, embracing the president, reveals something unyieldingly dogmatic about our current politico-cultural moment. What is their conclusion, though, Ron? Like, why does it do that? There is a great deal of hypocrisy on the part of the left in the view of this particular magazine, and that people are not willing to accept a contrary point of view from a person of color or somebody who is in the arts and is supposed to be in some sense or

another incensed by everything that Donald Trump does. As of course, many other people, not only in the hip hop world, world of rap, but also in other elements of entertainment and outside the world of entertainment have been disturbed by some of the things that Kanye West has had to say on this subject as well as on others, and particularly by his embrace of the president. Look, I've heard that from a few African-American Republicans I've met, particularly actually in the state of Georgia, who say that they were called names during this last midterm because they did not support Stacey Abrams. They were called an Uncle Tom or a sellout. But I think the thing about Kanye that people have always found more confusing is that Kanye

has done like a 180, 360. I don't know. He's turned so many times politically, right? Like this is the man who said George Bush didn't care about black people. Like he has changed and he seems so mercurial in his politics. I had totally forgotten about the George Bush doesn't care about black people and the horrified startled look that Mike Myers gave. Was that the Grammys? No, it was Hurricane Katrina, right? But Mike Myers is next to it, was

horrified, and then pauses and then goes back to the teleprompter and then they just cut away. Sort of like they did at the end of Saturday Night Live when he came out with his hat. That clearly, I think, is a wrap for today. We will be back in your feed as soon as there is political news you need to know about. Until then, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for a roundup of the best online stories and analysis.

It's npr.org slash politics newsletter. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover politics. And I'm Ron Helving, editor, correspondent. All right. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.