The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, June 22

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

Senate Republicans unveil their health care plan, and former podcast co-host Sam Sanders stops by. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Scott Horsley, and editor/correspondent Ron Elving. 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

This week, Invisibilia, NPR's show about the invisible forces that shape human behavior, is looking at the biased concepts in our heads and whether it's possible to change them. Meet members of a support group in Southern California called Racists Anonymous, and a young black police officer trying to train his fellow officers and himself to combat prejudice. You can listen to Invisibilia in the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, this is Sarah Kafer, currently at a Sheetz in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The following podcast was recorded at... This is the best possible timestamp, 2-17 on Thursday, June 22nd. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage

at NPR.org, the NPR app, or your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, here to talk about the Senate health care bill. It has actually been released. The latest on Russian hacking in last year's election, the Georgia 6th special election, and a few other things. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, editor and also correspondent. Scott, you are in the White House today, which means there is an extra seat in the booth. Exciting news. When we get to Can't Let It Go at the end, that extra seat will be filled by one Sam Sanders. Can I just say with a timestamp,

an Altoona Sheets is the most on-brand location for a Sheets, except maybe, just maybe the Breezewood Sheets. But will there be equal time for a Wawa timestamp at some point? Scott, we're moving forward. Okay. Yeah, Scott Detrow is a partisan for Sheets, in case you didn't notice. The big news this week, no time for Wawa. The big news this week continues to be health care.

We have talked about this for a while, but we haven't had that many details because we didn't have an actual Senate bill. It's been negotiated for a few weeks behind closed doors. That bill has now been released. Scott Horsley, you have been reading this text. What is jumping out to you as the biggest things in this actual bill? Well, this bill is, first of all, a large tax cut weighted towards the wealthy, $700-plus billion in tax cuts over the next decade, the lion's share of that going to people in the upper 20% of the income ladder. And if you cut that much in taxes,

there's got to be some give in government spending. And the Republicans in the Senate proposed to do that by phasing out the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act. That was people who made a little too much money to be covered under traditional Medicaid. It was expanded in a lot of states, not all states. That goes away over a period of years. And in fact, traditional Medicaid, which is a huge social safety net program, would get dialed back under this program. It would also gradually get the squeeze put on it. Federal spending on Medicaid would go down over time. So states would either have to make up the difference or, more likely, push people off the Medicaid rolls.

Well, let's just pause on that for a second, because, Ron, that's a huge political deal. It is. And President Trump campaigned on a promise, which was then picked up by some of the other candidates for president, saying he would not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. In at least one tweet, he included Medicaid. Yes. And we are now seeing rather historic cuts in Medicaid that would pare this program back to a degree that I don't think most people could possibly imagine it being cut back. And there are going to be opportunities here for the states to waive the requirements for essential health benefits that are required under Obamacare,

and which would still be required under the House bill. They have a waiver in the House bill as well. Some people are saying that the waiver in the Senate bill is even more generous, gives even more flexibility to the states to bail out on providing essential health benefits. And your perspective on generous might, generous has different meanings. What you mean by generous is that it would be even easier for states to say, ah, these essential health benefits, things like covering maternity care or mental health care or some of these other things. Meh, we don't want to do that. On Medicaid, Tam, what are you thinking?

Well, so what we should say is that the House version of this health care bill also made really big cuts to Medicaid. Now, President Trump had described that version as mean. Which ever since then, the Taylor Swift mean song has been in my head. What is that? I'm not going to sing it for you. As you were saying. So the president said that the House bill was mean. Now, it's not clear which part of it he thought was mean,

but the Senate bill continues to have very dramatic cuts to Medicaid. There's a slight difference. And Scott Horsley, you can probably explain this better. But I think that they phase out the taking away of Medicaid expansion over a longer period of time. But in the process, they make the cuts to funding to states actually deeper. Well, they phase out the Medicaid expansion over a longer period of time, but the end result is the same, which is that the Medicaid expansion goes away. And the cuts to traditional Medicaid under the Senate bill are actually deeper than the cuts in the House version. Now, the House version, according to congressional forecasters,

would leave 14 million fewer people covered by Medicaid by 2026 than the existing law, I'd say the Senate bill is going to be in that same ballpark and possibly might have even fewer people covered by Medicaid. The biggest fall off you'd see from the squeezing of traditional Medicaid would come in the years after 2026. So that won't necessarily show up in the CBO score that we see next week. But over time, that would have a really dramatic effect on this program, which right now covers about one in five Americans. I mean, Medicaid is the biggest health care safety net program the federal government has. A lot of people don't know that. It's actually bigger than Medicare. It covers about half the births in the country.

It covers about two-thirds of the seniors who are getting long-term care in nursing homes. It's a huge program, and the Senate bill would make huge changes to it. And we'll get numbers on what exactly this would do in terms of coverage from the CBO sometime next week. Yeah, the Congressional Budget Office. They're the nerds. Yes, but they are also the people who are the referees insofar as we have them. And we should point out that it is controlled by Congress, which is controlled by Republicans. So it should not really be described in some sense or another as a critic of the plan. They are the people who are charged by the Republican leadership with doing this scoring. And we should also note that Medicaid expansion was responsible for the majority of people who got health insurance for the first time because of Obamacare.

All right. Let's move on to the other big questions. Scott, what else does this do in the other key areas we've been talking about? Well, of course, the other big thing that the Affordable Care Act did was set up these exchanges where people could buy insurance on the individual market. The individual insurance market had always been sort of problematic before Obamacare came into effect. It's certainly not perfect under Obamacare, but this would make some changes to it. That insurance is subsidized for some people under the Affordable Care Act and would be subsidized by some people in the House version. The Senate subsidies are, for some people, perhaps more generous than the House subsidies, but they are definitely less generous than the subsidies that are offered under Obamacare. So fewer people would qualify for government subsidies under the Senate version than under the current law. And the coverage that

would be offered would be probably less comprehensive than what's covered under the current law. You're talking about the subsidies. That's something that President Trump talked about last night when he was doing that campaign event in Iowa. Let's take a listen. He's starting out here by talking about just the dynamics in the Senate in terms of how many Republicans there are. So we have a very slim 52 to 48. That means we basically can't lose anybody. And I think and I hope, can't guarantee anything, but I hope we're going to surprise you with a really good plan. You know, I've been talking about a plan with heart. I said, add some money to it. A plan with heart. But Obamacare is dead. Scott, based on Trump's criteria, would you say this plan has heart compared to the House bill?

I mean, there's still, in terms of spending, he's talking about when he says more heart, put some money in it, he means more generous subsidies. The bottom line on this bill is going to be pretty similar to what it was in the House version, and certainly less generous subsidies than what are offered under Obamacare. Yeah. And the big difference on the subsidies between the House bill and the Senate bill, as I understand it, is that the Senate bill does a little bit of means testing so that who gets a subsidy is based at least a little bit on your income. That's right, which is like Obamacare, whereas the House version, the subsidies were only based on age. So it was good for young, healthy people, especially those living in cities where health care costs tend to be a little bit lower. Not so good for older and sicker people and people living in rural areas

where health care costs tend to be higher. By the way, older rural people, a lot of those are Trump supporters. So this is a bill that has the potential to really negatively impact a lot of the president's own supporters. What's this do for the pre-existing condition question? Well, this is a really interesting dynamic because the Senate bill does away with the individual mandate. That is the requirement that everyone go out there and buy insurance. But it doesn't do away with the requirement that insurance companies cover people, even if they have preexisting conditions. I thought both of those were connected to each other in terms of just how these things work. You've been listening to the podcast, Scott.

I've been listening to Scott Horsley. Regular listeners know those are bound up together. If you want to cover people who have free existing conditions, you've got to have something like the individual mandate. Otherwise, people can simply wait until they get sick and then go out and buy insurance, and that's not how insurance is supposed to work. And, in fact, it doesn't work. But that is what this Senate bill does in its current form. Now, there's a chance that senators could tweak it and put something akin to what's in the House bill,

which is a provision that says if you don't maintain continuous insurance coverage, the insurance companies can charge you a whole lot more money. That's another sort of stick to try to get people who are healthy at the moment to buy insurance before they really need it, before they get sick. But right now, the Senate bill doesn't have something like that. And as a consequence, it has the potential to really destabilize individual insurance markets, even in states where right now they're working pretty well. So for people who were unhappy with Obamacare because they had an

insurance plan back in 2009 that they liked, they had a doctor that they liked, you know, the people that if you like your plan, you can keep it, and they found out that wasn't true and they were unhappy. If they think that this is going to just simply go back to the status quo pre-Obamacare, not so. This has the potential of really disrupting the individual market. So even well-to-do people who don't have a pre-existing condition may find it hard to buy an insurance policy that's really comprehensive in what it offers. Ron? And Scott, just real quickly, that provision with respect to continuous coverage and what it does to your right to have insurance, your right to be issued insurance by an insurance company, if you don't have continuous coverage.

They had a problem, I think, in crafting the Senate bill because to fix that, to actually address that would be to violate the requirements of sticking to fiscal issues. It's a policy question and that would require 60 votes, which means democratic cooperation. It's a parliamentary problem, and that's why it's not in this discussion draft. But if you don't find some way to either have the individual mandate or something like that continuous coverage provision, then you really run the risk of putting insurance companies on the hook to cover people only when they get sick. And that can be very destabilizing for insurance markets around the country. Any other big picture takeaways on the bill itself in the, I don't know, oh, two hours you've had to look at it, Scott, before we shift to the politics of this? Well, again, the big picture here is this is a huge tax windfall for the wealthiest Americans that would wind up cutting health insurance for some of the less well-off Americans

and especially the most vulnerable. And one big thought that I had on this, and I think there was a similar thought that happened with the House bill, but this doesn't really repeal and replace Obamacare. Like, you know, reading through the bill text makes that very clear. The bill text is about 150 pages long, and it has basically a bunch of lines that say, strike provision 11AB from section 17 of the Affordable Care Act. So it's basically a bunch of changes to the Affordable Care Act. It's an edit. Edit and modify Obamacare.

And that's why you have some of the most conservative senators like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz who are saying, well, we're not sure we can go along with this. We really want to do the repeal part. That's right. Tam, can you catch us up to speed on what the Ted Cruz's of the world are saying today? Yes. So there is a statement out, a joint statement on the health bill from Senators Cruz, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Lee of Utah, and Paul of Kentucky, quote, Currently, for a variety of reasons, we are not ready to vote for this bill, but we are open to negotiation and obtaining more information before it is brought to the floor. There are provisions in this draft that represent an improvement on our current health care system, but it does not appear this draft, as written, will accomplish the most important promise that we made to Americans, to repeal Obamacare and lower their

health care costs. Ron, being open to negotiation when you're the key vote on a bill that they want to pass in a week or so, it's usually a pretty good place to be when you're a senator, no? Absolutely. The window is open for business. These four senators are making it clear that they would like to get something in exchange for their vote. Now, that would probably, in their minds, be some policy change in the actual bill itself. But we shall see. There are also senators who have problems with the bill in other regards and who are at the opposite end of the Republican spectrum. Right. Because if you make Rand Paul more happy, you're probably going to make Susan Collins less happy. And Tam, she put out a statement right before we went in here. Do you want to give us the summary of it? Yeah. The summary of it is essentially, I will do some reading over the weekend. I'm going to read this. I am going to wait for the CBO score from the Congressional Budget Office. And I'm going to do a lot of thinking. That is not a yes. That is not a no. But she is widely seen as one of these critical votes.

You know, Senators Cruz, Johnson, Paul and Lee seem to be forming a block here to say, if the four of us are out, this thing can't pass. But there are other senators. Another one, Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona, put out a statement very similar to the one from Collins. So it's clear that there are a number of Republican senators who are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're maybe not totally on board with this thing. You may not have the votes. But until the voting happens, you just don't know. I mean, I wouldn't look at this and say, well, there's six senators, Republicans who say, no, this thing is going nowhere because people can change their minds and often do. Let's remember what happened in the House. They had the House Freedom Caucus saying, no, we're not going to vote for this. And that deprived the House Republican majority of the votes they needed to pass the legislation with only Republican votes. Of course, the Democrats in opposition. So they had to sit down and deal with the House Freedom Caucus and bend to the House Freedom Caucus and rewrite parts of the bill to get those hardline conservatives on board before they could come back and then really put the squeeze on a few moderate Republicans, especially Californians, and say, you guys have just got to be with us and put us over the top now that we got the House Freedom Caucus on board. So watch for a similar dynamic here. They talk to the four that we just described, the hardline conservatives, and if they can get them on board, then they go back

to the two, three, four, however many there are who don't want to commit from the other end of the spectrum and tell them you can't stand in the way of the entire Republican agenda. So last political question. We've only been talking about Republicans, you may have noticed. As this has been happening, Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, has been walking around the Senate all week in different places with this big prop, setting it up on an easel behind him. And it's a big red sign that just says mean Trump's quote about the House bill. And today he took a Sharpie out in front of reporters and wrote E.R. So meaner. What else can Democrats like Chuck Schumer do other than walk around with props? Talk about the details. Talk about the tax cuts. Talk about the

elements of this that will be hard for the typical populist Trump supporter who might have considered himself or herself a Democrat in the past to feel really warm and fuzzy about something that is quite so weighted to a more traditional Republican upscale constituency. Scott Horsley, last question for you. When the House bill was in that final days of negotiation, President Trump and the White House were really involved. Trump was meeting with all these different lawmakers, bringing them in. He was working the phones. Seems like so far far they've been pretty hands off on the Senate side. Do you expect that to change at all? Not really. The White House says they will continue to be a resource with some technical advice and they're happy to weigh in as need be. But the margin is not so large. There aren't

dozens of senators to work here. There's only a handful of senators that they're going to need to lean on. And I'm not sure that the president has a whole lot of leaning he can do on these folks. When do we think they could vote? They're looking to vote next week before the Senate goes home for their 4th of July recess. Yeah. So basically, there's going to be a score that comes out that says probably how many millions of people will lose insurance under this plan and how awesome the tax cuts will be for folks. And within a day or so, they will get to the floor. Apparently, it's supposed to be an open process with amendments, but it's unlikely that any

of those amendments would stick. And then they will just vote and be done. All right, Scott, you are playing the role of Kerry Johnson today in that you have other things to do and you're going to leave us Kerry Johnson today in that you have other things to do and you're going to leave us, I guess. That's fine. Great to be with y'all.

All right, bye, Scott. Bye. We'll miss you, Horsley. See y'all. When we come back, Russia and that special election in Georgia. Be right back.

All right, we're back. Russia time. First off, when Jim Comey testified, the quote of the week was, Lordy, I hope there were tapes. To be honest, I don't think there were tapes. I don't think many people thought there were tapes. But President Trump has weighed in on whether or not there were tapes. Tam, what do we know?

And I will now do the part of my job that I believe is approximately 10% of my job, where I read President Trump's tweets. Oh, that's like way more than 10%. No, no, no. Just reading the tweets themselves. That is at least 10% of my job. Just the time you spent, like, if you ran a stopwatch on when you're reading the tweets? Yes.

Okay. Yeah, maybe 10%. I believe it to be about 10%. Okay. Go ahead. So here we go. Today, the president tweeted, With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking, and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea, dot, dot, dot. Tweet number two. Whether there are any tapes or recordings of my conversations with James Comey.

But I did not make and do not have any such recordings. So this is kind of a full reality show situation in that it was hyped up and it was promised and it was coming soon and it was coming Friday. And here we are. Ron, are you a little underwhelmed? Well, as you suggested, we're not surprised to learn that the president is not going to play us some tapes of those conversations. But Lordy, it would have been fun. It probably would have been great fun for James Comey, who I'm sure believes he knows what was said that day. Now, of course, the president's exact words were, I didn't make any tapes and I don't have any tapes. But he was leaving open the possibility that someone else might have been making tapes and someone else might have tapes. Now, that's really parsing it awfully closely. I think the impression we were supposed to get from the tweet was that they don't exist.

Okay. But the timing of this big reveal is relevant because a House committee had said, hey, you've got until Friday until you give us these tapes, if there are any tapes. I have reached out to that House committee and asked whether there was actually any formal communication other than, I don't know, like a link to a tweet. We don't have an answer on that. And I don't want to be conspiratorial here, but this also came out two hours. It's 2017. Conspiratorial is in. Let me be conspiratorial then. These tweets came out about two hours after this big fat health care bill dropped. This big fat, potentially unpopular with, you know,

lots of question about whether it has enough Republican support health care bill. It seems like pretty good timing. And the other thing about these tweets that is interesting to me is that the president has them linked and he doesn't normally link his tweets. Was it a thread? Yeah, it was a thread. And I know this is like a very technical thing, but the president doesn't usually tweet in threads. So this really seems like a tweet that was or a series of tweets that was planned, that this was not just President Trump sat down at his desk and felt like this was the moment. But this is actually really relevant because if there in fact had been and maybe there still could be tapes, the key question now in this investigation, there's the key question of whether or not there was any collusion, but almost as important now is whether or not there was any obstruction of justice. And obviously, a conversation of this big moment would have gone a long way.

We do have instead very detailed contemporaneous notes from one Jim Comey. You were covering a hearing yesterday, which was another Russia hearing. But this one was actually about the hacking and about what was going on. And it was sort of less splashy and potentially more. We could learn some stuff from it, right? Yeah, it was Jay Johnson, the Homeland Security Secretary during President Obama's second term, who would have been a key. He was a key player in all of this because the Department of Homeland Security plays a big role in working with states on things like our elections being handled out smoothly and safely. So it was interesting because as we have learned more about what happened last year and as we have learned that this wasn't just hacking into DNC emails, this was this was attempts to to get into voter databases in something like 30 states, maybe more. We continue to learn more. The question has been like, OK, this was a big deal. Why didn't the Obama administration do more to stop it?

So Johnson was really pressured by Republicans and Democrats who all were actually for once reading from the same script at these hearings. And the thing that he kept saying was hindsight. That came up a lot. You know, in retrospect, it would be easy for me to say that I should have bought a sleeping bag and camped out in front of the DNC in late summer with the benefit of hindsight. I can tell you for certain that in the late summer fall, I was very concerned about what I was seeing. And this was on my front burner all throughout the pre-election period. He yet again was the latest person to confirm that the DNC really stiff-armed a lot of help from the FBI and other government officials who wanted to get involved after they had been hacked. But there was that frustration.

And here's Adam Schiff. He's the top Democrat on the committee. He's one of the people asking pretty pointed questions of Johnson. Why wasn't it more important to tell the American people the length and breadth of what the Russians were doing to interfere in an election than any risk that it might be seen as putting your hand on the scale. Didn't the public have a compelling need to know, notwithstanding the claims made by a campaign about a different kind of rigging, and the need to rebut the idea that this was

being presented to the public deliberately to influence the outcome? Yes, yes, and yes, which is why we did tell the American public everything we were in a position to tell them on that date. And Johnson was pretty defensive, pointing out that he and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, put out a big statement on this on October 7th. Unfortunately, October 7th was a monumentally busy day in the news cycle. That was the day that WikiLeaks began releasing John Podesta's emails.

It was also the day that the Access Hollywood tape happened. Oh my gosh, that all happened? All three of those things? I knew that the Podesta emails and the Access Hollywood happened. You know what else happened that day? I finished a really finely crafted feature that was totally irrelevant the moment I finished it and it never aired. But yeah, so Johnson was saying, hey, we did put out a statement. That statement was a big

deal in itself. And Peter King, Republican from New York and others were coming back saying, yeah, you could have put out more than a few statements. You know, you could have, the president seemed to be very happy to talk about Russian hacking in December. Why didn't he get up and give a press conference on this? OK, so I have one question about this, which is for a long time, the Obama administration and then the Trump administration have said, yes, there was hacking, but voting machines weren't hacked. The vote wasn't affected. Does this testimony change our knowledge at all about any of that? No, Johnson said the same thing. He talked about the poking and prodding, I think was the term he used, of voter registration databases. He said he qualified saying that there was no intrusion into actual results, which was interesting. He said something along the lines of, to my current knowledge. Well, he's not there anymore.

Pointing out that he hasn't looked at any classified information since January 20th, but I still thought that qualification was interesting. There's a little bit of a red herring here, which is that we continually hear there's no evidence that any votes were changed. There's also not much evidence that that has been alleged. That's not what people have been concerned about in looking back on the hacking of the 2016 election. Perhaps they should have been. And there has been some indication that the Russians were working at it. They were trying to figure out some way to get at the actual vote counting or at least registration of various actual voters in the United States. They were going after that

as well as after the impressions that people might have of John Podesta or of the Democratic National Committee. But the larger issue is whether or not we are disturbed and learned that the Russians were so busy and so effective at getting into hundreds and hundreds of different computers around the country that had something to do with the campaign or the election. That's the essential issue here, not whether or not votes were changed on November 8th. Yeah. One other thing that's happened since then was, Tam, since you, I don't want to up that to 11% of your time, so I will read this next. Why, thank you. I appreciate that. You're welcome. Okay, so this is from this morning. By the way, if Russia was working so hard on the 2016 election, it all took place during the Obama admin. Why didn't they stop them? All the experts are saying there's no question we're not even going to debate whether or not Russia did this. And yet Trump still is saying a statement that he had made months ago where he

said something to the effect of, yeah, I believe it was Russia, but there are a lot of people who do hacking. And yeah, but yeah, I think it was the Russians. And just this week when he was asked the question of Sean Spicer, who is the fellow who used to do the press briefings on camera at the White House before that became an endangered species. Sean Spicer said, I've not sat down and had that conversation with the president. That's the answer for everything now. As to whether or not the Russians tried to hack our campaign or election in 2016, Sean Spicer would have us believe he has not had a conversation with the president on that subject. All right. So three other odds and ends Russia roundup updates. OK, go for it. One, the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This is a committee we have not talked about. It's another committee, but they are starting their own different investigation. They are going to be looking at just the obstruction of justice issue. Trump firing Comey, other questions around that. As part of that, they're going to look at some things that Comey said during his hearing about some pressure that Loretta Lynch may have put on him during the Hillary Clinton email investigation, wanting him to call it a matter and not an investigation. And I think his response was, we're not the Federal Bureau of Matters. So yet another investigation.

We have a primer on all the different investigations going on at NPR.org. Written by none other than Scott Detrow. I update it very frequently. So you can check that out there. Two, Bob Mueller, special counsel, made a couple different trips to the Capitol this week to meet with the heads of all these investigations to talk about deconfliction, which is something we talk about with both Syria and congressional investigations in two very different terms. Yes, but you can see the similarity.

Yes. So it is not an issue of whether or not they're going to shoot at Bob Mueller's jets, but whether... No, and drones. It could in fact be an effort to cool Bob Mueller's jet. And I think update number three, the Senate passed a pretty robust bill recently dealing with keeping these sanctions on Russia in place, maybe tightening them. And as part of it, not letting the president scale back sanctions without congressional approval. That's now in the House. And there's some indications that the White House is not really super thrilled with that language and is hoping that the House waters it down a bit. Yes. And also this week, the Treasury Department imposed some new sanctions on Russia related to its activities in Ukraine. Shockingly,

Russia is not pleased with that. It's not clear whether imposing those sanctions is part of a case that the White House is making that it does not need the Congress to step in and mandate what its sanctions do, but new sanctions nonetheless. It stands out from recent congressional history to see the Senate suddenly pass legislation saying that they want to codify, put into actual permanent law sanctions that had been put in place by the Obama administration back over the years with the Crimea matter and also with respect to the meddling in the 2016 election. To actually see the Senate step forward and say, we want to codify some of that. We'd also like to add some other little

sanctions around the edge of our own and show that we're displeased with what the Russians are up to. That's an unusual thing for a Republican senator to do to a Republican president and an unusual thing in recent history, going back decades, for Congress just to say, hey, we want a little bigger part of the foreign policy authority. And that is your Russia roundup. No, I think we should have Bela Laika music at that point. A little something from Dr. Zhivago. I was thinking the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy theme. That works too. Okay, one of those.

Maybe one day. Alright, now we are moving on to Georgia. The Georgia here in America. Not the one near Russia. Tuesday's special election. It was a win for Karen Handel, the Republican, by a little more of a margin than we were expecting. She beat John Ossoff 52 to 48. Republicans were pretty happy about this. Here's a Trump tweet. Do you want to read it or do you

want me to? Yeah, I think, you know, to keep me up to the 10 percent now, I probably need to read this one. Trump tweeted, Well, the special elections are over and those that want to make America great again are five and oh, exclamation point. All the fake news, all the money spent equals zero. No question about it. The Democrats have suffered through these through these special elections, trying to make them a referendum on Donald Trump in the end, succeeding and then being handed all these losses. As you say, the Ws all go to the Republicans. But let's also look at what happened from one district to another. There's a fellow named Archie Parnell, not nearly as much of a household name to political junkies as John Ossoff. And up in the state of South Carolina, not too far away from the Georgia 6th,

he ran for a seat that had been opened up in South Carolina, and he came within just three points of winning that seat. So wait, he actually was closer. He was closer. And here's the deal. He had almost no money at all. He had almost no presence from the DNC and the DCCC and all the other acronyms we use all the time that begin with a D. Nobody came in to help him hardly. And under the radar, he made the case much better than the National Democratic Party with all of its baggage and all of its symbology could make it in their big featured race in Georgia. There's a real lesson

in that too for the Democrats. So two more things on this. One, I just want to read something funny from McSweeney's, which I feel like I should ask Sam Sanders, who's listening right now, his help in defining this. I was going to say it's a very popular humor site for the set of people who drink their drinks with giant artisan ice cubes in them. Can you do better than that? Sam gives me the thumbs up. Okay. It's like a literary... It's highbrow bougie humor. Yes. I'm a fan. All right. The headline headline is this is the definitive think piece on yesterday's special election results, which I wrote last week.

And I will read one paragraph. One thing is for sure. This election will bring a new dynamic to Washington because it has shown leaders in Congress and the White House that what is possible in today's fractured political environment? Democrats really learned their lesson. Republicans also learned a lesson, which is probably different than the Democratic lesson, but is equally important. It's safe to say that everyone has learned something, and now their sense of what is possible will be changed for good. Okay.

So going on to the next cause celeb, Ron, I feel like should be the one. Yeah, I think Ron should probably talk about this. The iron stash issue. He's like biting off of your style, Ron. I'm going to have to recuse myself. I feel really passionate about mustaches and I don't want to. I just feel that my position on mustaches

is well too well known. I am currently in a non-mustache period, so I guess I can hop in here. Not that I ever only have a mustache. Just to be clear. Just to be perfectly clear. This is a Democrat who announced this week that he's going to run against Paul Ryan and Paul Ryan's Southeast Wisconsin district. And he did so with a really powerful web ad. This is repealing and replacing Obamacare.

Now that is Paul Ryan speaking. Everybody doesn't get what they want. Randy Bryce is the man who made this ad, and he is going to run to defeat Paul Ryan in 2018. My mom is probably the most important person in my life. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. This guy's an iron worker. He talks about that in the ad. I work hard, and I earn every penny that I make. And it ends with a really powerful tagline. I think it's time. Let's trade places. Paul Ryan, you can come work the iron and I'll go to D.C.

And immediately, I mean, this was I saw this ad come through my Twitter feed, which I know is not real life. But it came through my Twitter feed, you know, the morning after John Ossoff lost. And there were all of these people from various stripes saying, look at this guy. Raising money is not ultimately how you win back the House. Obviously, you need money,

but it's message and it's timing and it's candidates. Yeah, and it's candidates. And they need people like this fellow and fewer people who have been congressional aides and not much else in their professional life. Okay, one more quick break. We will come back and we will be rejoined by one Sam Sanders. All right, we're back.

Sam. Hey, is this thing on? What are you even up to? Are you taking pictures? I'm taking pictures because I haven't been in the booth with you guys in forever. Ron, smile. I'm afraid I've gotten a little more gray hair. Oh, so have I.

Look at this beard. Wait, you're bald. No, in the beard. We were not supposed to talk about this. So, Sam, you know, 2017 has been a little, I don't know the right word for us here in the politics podcast. How have things been for you? Well, like the first two or three months after the inauguration, I left the desk. We were trying to make this new thing.

It was very nebulous, cerebral. So it was like a little bit kind of Iprila for a while. I was just like floating through space. I feel like I would be like pounding away on my keyboard on some deadline and just like roll by in your socks like, hey, what's up?

But now it's getting real. Yeah. I have this little show that's launching tomorrow, Friday. What's it called? It is called, I'm not going to,

I mean, it's been a minute since you've been on this podcast, Sam. Oh, you beat me to the punch. It's called, It's Been a Minute, which is another way of saying it's time

to catch up. And this show will be a twice-a-week talk show that hopes to do just that, taking a lot of DNA energy from the politics podcast and making a little new stuff. The format's really simple. Fridays are big conversations about the news of the week, large and small, with lots of listener interaction. Me and usually two friends, other journalists from inside or outside the building. That's Friday.

And then Tuesday conversations, we're calling them deep dives. It's me talking to one person or talking about one big idea. So our first deep dive posting next Tuesday features one of my favorite new actors, Lena Waithe. She's a star in Netflix's Master of None. Which is so good. So good. She has this brilliant Thanksgiving episode that is just phenomenal and made me cry on a plane a few weeks ago. It was really good.

I feel like I can't wait to hear that because I just finished season two. There's so many episodes that had me spellbound. Like, what's going to happen? It's really good. Yeah, yeah. What's another, because I know you've been taping for a while. You've been trying out stuff on NPR One. What's been the best conversation

you've had so far? We've had a lot of really fun ones. I also talked with Lakeith Stanfield. He is the actor who yells the title line in Get Out. He's the guy at the party that yells, Get Out! He was awesome. Talked with Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show.

Talked just yesterday with BuzzFeed's writer who writes on star culture and celebrity culture. Her name is Anne Helen Peterson. She has a new book all about unruly women. The title is a little risque, but it's awesome. So that's been really fun. But honestly, the funnest part, you know, we've been testing this show out in NPR One since February. And we've had thousands of listeners there give us survey feedback, send notes to Brent and I on how to make the show better. And they've been a part of the show

really since day one. So it's really exciting to see this community build and see where it's going to go. So each week on the show, I should say, we talk about one thing we can't let go, politics or otherwise. Sam, you're here. What can't you let go? Well, I will add a really quick note to the discussion of Wisconsin Mustache Man. That commercial, that ad represents one way forward for that party appealing to working class white men who might have economic and racial anxiety. And a lot of folks say that doesn't mesh well with Democrats that want to double down on the Stronger Together coalition. The question is, can the Democratic Party do both? Do they want to do both? And who, besides Barack Obama, can do it for them? So that fascinates me. But besides that. Or maybe they run as different Democrats in different places.

In different places. But when it comes time for 2020, you know, it's like, who's the one? Oh, let's just not go there yet. I know, I know, I know. But my real click today is a song that has been number one in the country for the last, like, five weeks. It's called Despacito. Mm-hmm. Despacito. Quiero respirar tu cuello despacito. And it is half Spanish, half English, which means it's the first majority Spanish number one in the country

since the Macarena in 1996. And yet it has Justin Bieber. So this is a thing. This song was pretty much primarily on Spanish language radio until Justin Bieber got on the remix when it shot to number one. But since this song shot to number one and Justin Bieber became tied to it, it's become very clear that he has been faking the funk. When he's been asked to perform this song live, he says, I don't know the words.

Sometimes, because he doesn't speak Spanish, instead of saying despacito, he sings Dorito. But he actually sang it, right? It's not like a military situation? He sang the original in the studio, but he hasn't sung it live since then. So he sings Dorito. So we should call this like a NAFTA song because we have like

a Canadian singing in Spanish? Oh yeah. Actually yeah. I mean that is actually I give you snaps for that. It was like

it was quite nearly a Domenico dad joke but but with trade implications. I know. But the song is very catchy. Okay. That's all.

And who's the other artist? Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, who I was dancing to when I was in college. Oh, yeah. He's good. All right, so I'll go next. Sam, I'm really excited about your podcast, but My Can't Let It Go is actually another podcast that I discovered. I'm going to let you finish, but me? I did.

I'm sorry. Just call him Kanye. It's okay. It's okay. So I was excited about your podcast, but then I was kind of cruising the charts of non-political podcasts to find things to not think about this for once in a while. And I discovered just last night, there's a podcast where LeVar Burton just reads to you.

Sign me up. On one hand, I'm like, okay, I know that this is yet another old millennial marketing, nostalgia marketing. Are we old millennials? We're old millennials. We talked about this with Asma last year. Yeah, that's old millennial. If you voted in 2004, that's the dividing line. Remember?

We decided willennials. It was a thing. I remember that. If you are on the older edge of the millennials, LeVar Burton is very exciting reading because of Reading Rainbow. Sing the theme song. Brent's playing it for us.

Butterfly in the sky. I can go twice as high. Take a look. It's in a book. A reading rainbow. I can't hit the I. I can't do anything. I thought it was, I can't go anywhere.

But you know what? Lyrics, they're fungible. Lyrics, lyrics. Anyway. Dorito. Dorito. But you don't have to take my word for it. Oh.

Ron. Ron's just like, I'm going to go now. And now, speaking of sports. Ron? Ron's just like, I'm gonna go now. And now, speaking of sports, we have to turn to the most important sporting event that has happened this week. And of course, as you know, I'm referring to the Bad News Babes,

the journalists who cover Capitol Hill who are female, and the Congressional Women's Team who had their annual Armageddon. And again, for the second year in's Team, who had their annual Armageddon. And again, for the second year in a row, our own Tamara Keith drove in the winning run. In fact, to be sure, last night, Tamara Keith drove in all the runs for the Bad News Babes. There were two on one triple. Very nice.

And I should point out that they won two to one. And our own Tamara Keith also caught the game. Very nice. And I should point out that they won 2-1. And our own Tamara Keith also caught the game. She was the catcher, the starting catcher for the Bad News Babes. And she was named the most valuable player. Let's chant it all. MVP! MVP! It was a great game.

Yeah, I almost started crying when I got to third base because I was like, I've never hit a triple in my life. This is the most amazing game of my life. What motivated you? Well, actually, what motivated me is we got to have walk-up songs this year. We got to choose our own walk-up songs. What did you pick? I chose the Star Wars theme song. Of course you did. Of course she did. And so in an incredible reversal

of the usual political cliche, Tamra hit a triple and thought she'd been born at third base. So we got a letter this morning in the NPR Politics email inbox from a listener named Lily. She's a high school student from Baltimore, and she wrote us. Here's what she says. I went to the Congressional Women's Softball Game for the first time tonight and wanted to share my very positive experience. I went to the game with a politics seminar I'm participating in this week, but didn't realize Tamara Keith was participating until I got there. I was impressed by how many people attended the game and lent their support to the amazing women participating. In the toxic political climate currently dominating discourse, this type of event

seems to take on new and greater significance, and it surely did this evening. I ended up quite moved and was surprised by the degree to which a game of softball impacted me. I had a wonderful evening and congrats to Tamara on her win. Thanks so much to the whole team for all the hard work you do. Sincerely, Lily. That's awesome. That is amazing. That is so cool. You know what the really cool thing was?

The thing that had me crying well before I was on third base is Crystal Griner, who is one of the Capitol Police officers who was shot in that attack on the congressional baseball team practice, the Republican congressional baseball team practice. She helped save Scalise, right? Yeah. She was one of the ones who fought back against this shooter, but she was shot in the ankle and severely injured. She got out of the hospital yesterday and came to the game in a wheelchair to throw out the first pitch.

Wow. And so watching from the outfield, she threw it twice and it seemed to me that she wasn't satisfied with her first throw and wanted to throw it better. Is that what happened? That's right. Crystal Greiner is a tough, awesome woman. And she threw out that pitch and she was like, gosh, I need to do that again. Like from a wheelchair. From a wheelchair.

Well, that was a great moment to watch from the stands, too. Yeah. I feel like, Tam, that counts as your can't let it go. Yes. I can't let go of Crystal Griner. That's a good thing to end it on. So that's going to do it for us. We will be back Monday.

You can keep up with us on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram. We're at NPR Politics at all of those. Our email address for questions and comments is Nprpolitics at npr.org. That is where you can send those timestamps to. And I will say that we will accept a Wawa timestamp. If you want to record it in a Wawa, we will play it. There you go. And before Monday, before you guys are back, check out my thing.

It's called It's Been a Minute. Trailer's in iTunes right now. First episode out tomorrow afternoon, Friday afternoon. Please listen. Yeah, the trailer makes me want to listen. Thank you. Check that out tomorrow. We'll be back Monday. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover

the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. Sam, you want to? I'm Sam Sanders. Something. And it's been a minute. That's good. It's nice to see you, Sam. Thank you for been a minute. It's been a minute. That's good. It's nice to see you, Sam. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.