The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, March 9

Episode Date: March 10, 2017

This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, 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

Hey everybody, I'm Kelly McEvers, host of NPR's Embedded. On March 9th, we are back with our new episodes about police videos. What did he do to deserve to be killed that night and shot so many times? People see what they want to see. Almost no one can see those videos from a neutral perspective. I was thinking, see the gun, see the gun, don't kill him till you see the gun. Find Embedded on the NPR One app or at nPR.org. On the NPR One app.

Or on your local public radio station. Okay. Okay. Ho hoa. Here's the show. Here's the show. Cheers. It's the NPR Politics Podcast, here to round up some of the week's political news.

We'll talk about the Republican plan to overhaul health care, It's the NPR Politics Podcast here to round up some of the week's political news. We'll talk about the Republican plan to overhaul health care, Donald Trump's wiretapping allegations, and a lot more. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. All right, guys, it was beautiful outside. It crisp, lovely, couldn't be nicer.

Couldn't be nicer. All the Congress people were walking outdoors instead of walking indoors today. Wait, who said you could go outside? All right, so today is day 49 of the Trump presidency, which means we are almost halfway through his first 100 days. At the top of his agenda for the first 100 days was to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. And Monday evening, after years of talking about it, Republicans finally unveiled their plan to do just that. So, Sue, current status, it has now made it through two committees in the House of Representatives. It's actually moving at a pretty steady clip considering how significant this legislation is. It was dropped on Monday and it passed the two key House committees that it has to come through today.

They're putting it together into a final bill and it could get a vote in the next couple of weeks. And if you consider that the Affordable Care Act took about a year and a half to get from this beginning to end. It is moving at a pace that is extraordinary for Congress on a legislation of this importance. OK, so what is in? What is out? How does this compare to Obamacare? OK, so let's start. This is repeal and replace. So let's start with repeal. What it gets rid of is the individual mandate. That's the government saying you have to have insurance. Or you have to pay a fine. Or you have to pay a fine if you don't have it. It gets rid of those tax penalties that would have fined you if you didn't have your insurance. It also gets rid of the subsidies that helped you pay the insurance. And it gets rid of taxes that were included in the Affordable Care Act to pay for all of this. That includes things like

a tax on tanning beds. That was an issue that came up in the hearing last night. It gets rid of taxes on medical devices. And here's what it's replacing it with. It's creating a system of refundable tax credits that will be available to everyone based on how old you are and how much money you make. And they start at around $2,000 for people in their 20s, and it will go up to $4,000 for people in their early 60s. How much does health insurance cost? Depends on where you live. So that is scalable to state. So that's a different equation for every single state. It also keeps the Medicaid expansion in place, but it'll change the funding

formula for Medicaid, which is something that Democrats have been very much opposed to. But this is a long term goal for Republicans. So it reshapes the Medicaid program. It creates a system of tax cuts. It gets rid of the mandate. But and conservatives would say it's just a mandate by another name. It does allow your insurance company to penalize you if you let your coverage lapse. So if you go back to sign up for it, the fine you're paying isn't to the government anymore. It would just be to your insurer. And just for clarity, this is not employer-based insurance. This is not the insurance that all of us sitting at this table have. This is insurance on the individual market.

So this is people whose employers don't offer them insurance or people who are marginally employed or people who own small businesses, for instance, or work at a small business. And make too much money for Medicaid. And we should say, so there's the repeal bucket, the replace bucket, and the keep bucket. And what did they keep? And they kept the popular parts of the law. Funny how that works. The provisions that you can't deny people with pre-existing conditions coverage.

The provision that lets parents keep their children on the insurance plans till 26. Lifetime caps, you can only charge people a certain amount. The things that people really liked about the law, for the most part, those are staying in place. You know, people prefer to have what they have and not have it taken away. Yeah. That's just the simple bottom line on a lot of this. And let's get clear. Republicans made a couple of promises and Donald Trump made a couple of promises. One was to get rid of Obamacare. That was clear. And they're going to it seems like they're going to accomplish that. They made some other promises. You will have cheaper, better coverage. Your deductibles will go down. They've even been so specific on that. Your premiums will go down.

And more people will be covered. And more people will be covered. Those are absolutely impossible circles to square. So I've seen this described by conservatives as Obamacare light or Ryancare, which is an interesting pushback from conservatives where they are not calling it Trumpcare. They're calling it Ryancare in reference to the speaker, who is someone who has been a familiar foe of the conservative activists before. Conservatives don't like this bill. But let me be clear, it's a small group of hardline conservatives. I'd say the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are going to go home and be able to look at their constituents and say, I stood up to Donald Trump and I was the Republican that stopped the repeal of Obamacare. That that is an untenable political position. And we're just at the phase of the

process where they have to, you know, fight the conservative fight. But at the end of the day, this is about team party politics and they have to vote. And it's the first big legislation. It's about whether they can do this. And as Sue said, they're going to present it to these members as a binary choice. Oh, do you want to vote for repealing Obamacare or against repealing it? And they can lose 21 conservatives. Yeah. They have a cushion in the House. They can lose 21 of these guys and still pass it. If you're a conservative, it seems to me that you can make a case for calling this the worst of both worlds, the worst of all possible worlds.

And by the way, you can get help in doing that by just about all the groups that endorse conservative candidates for Congress, talking about heritage, talking about the Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, all kinds of bona fide conservative groups are saying, no, no, no, no, this isn't what we wanted. And here's a little bit of a wonky little thing that is going to sound, you know, like my eyes glaze over, but it's the tax credits in the bill are refundable. That means if you don't have a federal tax bill, if you're one of the 40 some percent of Americans you don't have a federal tax bill, if you're one of the 40-some percent of Americans who don't have a federal tax liability, you can still get your tax credit as a credit that you get refundable and advanceable so you get it even before you buy your health insurance. So how exactly is that different from a subsidy? It is exactly the same thing as a subsidy by a different name. And what it does is it enables

people to get health insurance, which was what Obamacare was about, expanding coverage. But it does it basically the same way that Obamacare did in many respects. They just call it something different and you do a little bit different paperwork. And that's what's driving all these conservative organizations crazy because it amounts to a new entitlement. We should be clear, too, like this debate is illuminating in real time for a lot of the country, the very philosophically different views of the two parties and that at the core of Obamacare and the creation of it, the message from Democrats was that the government had a moral responsibility to do this and equated health care coverage almost as a civil right and

that it was much bigger than just a tax revenue scheme and that Republicans philosophically, one, they don't think that that experiment worked, but two, they don't think it is necessarily the federal government's role to tell you you have to have health insurance. They see their role as fostering a marketplace and an economy and a free market where people are incentivized to buy insurance and take care of themselves. If you were a Republican and you were creating a health care bill, if you were repealing and replacing Obamacare, is this really what you would come up with? This seems to be sort of like it still has. It is Obamacare light. It is Obamacare 2.0 because it keeps the same basic

structure. It just makes it much less generous in terms of the subsidies and the coverage. There's no doubt about it. And much to everyone's surprise, or maybe not so surprising, Obamacare has been getting more and more popular as it gets closer and closer to being on the chopping block. Well, because people start to ask what they're going to lose. And I said a moment ago that for a Republican, this might be the worst of both worlds. And then I gave the conservative critique of the bill. But what's going to happen if this does become law, if Ryan's bill becomes law, is that a certain number of people are going to find the equation very different for themselves in buying health care insurance.

They're no longer to be mandated to do so. And so they're probably going to have to go without if the bill goes up for them a thousand, a couple thousand dollars. Those people are going to tend to be older people, less healthy people and people with lower incomes. Now, what that means is down the road, they're not going to be calling it Ryan care or Trump care. Someone's going to be calling it don't care. You could work in messaging, Ron. You could be on a podcast when you grow up. They call it the American Health Care Act, but somebody, I don't know where, I've been up for too long, but they said, you would say it, AHCA.

And they're like, it sounds like someone clearing their throat. You kind of need a better acronym. So the next significant hurdle for this legislation is it's awaiting a score. And what a score means is that when nonpartisan budget wonks that work for Congress take this legislation and they put out official estimates on how much it's going to cost the government and how many people it's going to cover. So for the wonks listening, this is what's called a CBO score. Yes. The Congressional Budget Office. And it's a nonpartisan office. I think it was

also in the news a little bit this week because White House spokesman Sean Spicer sort of and many Republicans on Capitol Hill, maybe a little bit of policing the refs a little bit ahead of the game saying, I mean, the CBO, I mean, their numbers aren't always, you know, you can't really trust exactly what they say. And I think they're preparing for a CBO score that may well likely say it's going to cost more money and it's going to cover less people. Because if you repeal $600 billion in taxes over 10 years, that means the government is taking in less money. And the budget process doesn't necessarily look at a tax credit as equating to coverage. So just for budget purposes, and they don't weigh in on the merits of policy. It's just purely from this sort of like analytical accountant standpoint,

that just saying a tax credit is available to you, they may not necessarily equate that as being able to account for coverage the way an individual mandate would because that would be akin to law. Mara, you were in the White House briefing this week and you were asking Sean Spicer about this very thing. I think the CBO score is going to matter. People are going to look at that. They want to know what is this going to cost and how many people are going to lose their coverage. And even though the White House is very busy pre-butting or undercutting the authority and credibility of the CBO, it is considered the gold standard.

And just to remind everyone, right now it is run by a Republican economist. President Trump today tweeted, despite what you hear in the press, health care is coming along great. We are talking to many groups and it will end in a beautiful picture, exclamation point. So what is his role? He, in a tweet, described it as our health care plan. That is really interesting. He did not say it was Ryancare, although I suppose if it starts getting in trouble on the Hill, he will start calling it that. Certainly conservative groups, including Breitbart, former news organization of Steve Bannon, the president's top strategist, is calling it Ryancare. And Ryan used to be, of course, the biggest enemy of the Trump wing of

the party. I mean, Breitbart went nuts. Obamacare 2.0. But the White House says that they are in full sales mode. Trump not only said it's our plan, he said he plans to be twisting arms, making sales pitches, all the things that he's supposed to be great at. What we haven't seen him do yet is go out of Washington, make a big speech, hold a rally, explain why this is so great. Though they're promising he will. But they're promising that he will. But that supposedly is being saved for the Senate phase, which is going to be a much higher hurdle. So they're hoping that Paul Ryan and Tom Price-

And he's Health and Human Services Secretary. And some of these guys can get together, Mike Pence, and muscle the House, get the House to pass it. Then they take it over to the Senate. They're going to run into a serious situation there. They only have 52 Republicans. They have no Democratic support, no independent support. So they're going to need every Republican minus maybe two. And right now there are about half a dozen running around sounding very uncommitted to the bill,

including people who surprise you like Tom Cotton of Arkansas who said flatly this will never pass the Senate. They need to go back and start over. I do think, though, a key point to remember when we talk about conservatives and the fight that's going on, that maybe more than half at this point, important to remember in this, most Republicans in Congress have not served with a Republican in the White House. And when we talk about governing lessons, these guys are also going to get a governing lesson in how much harder it is to go up against the president when he's got the same letter after his name. And again, you know, we do live in two very bifurcated countries where people look at the president very differently. But the people that are speaking out the loudest against this bill do come from places where Donald Trump is at his most popular. And what I think is so ironic about this is when you look at the charts about who would this hurt the most, it's going to hurt older, rural, working class voters, a lot of them white, Trump voters.

It's going to hurt them more than those young millennials who didn't vote for Trump and are getting a big gift because they don't have a mandate anymore. But Trump voters, at least the ones I've talked to recently, are ready to get behind their guy. No matter what. They are like, hey, Donald Trump, tell us which senator is blocking your agenda and we will make that person miserable. But that's the hardcore activist base. Then there are people who voted for Trump because they believed him when they said he would get them cheaper, better health care.

But there are going to be some mixed messages over the next couple of weeks and months as this goes into the Senate. There are going to be a lot of people saying, no, actually, this isn't what President Trump promised you when we were all for him back last fall. This is something different. Now, they may need somebody to blame. I don't know whom they're going to blame. Maybe it'll be Paul Ryan. But these folks are going to be, and I'm talking about conservative talk radio and a lot of the mainstays of the Trump coalition in terms of communication. So Donald Trump's going to have to get out there. He's going to have to put it on the line personally, have rallies, not only in Kentucky and Arizona, but in Southern Ohio to pressure Rob Portman and some of these other people who aren't on board. And that's going to cost him a lot of capital. And it's going to identify the final product with him over Ryan or anyone else in Congress.

My hunch is that it's going to be easier to get people like Rob Portman in line than we think. But one of the... Well, because he'll be a good Republican. Yeah, he'll be a good Republican. But the interesting thing is when you look at the messaging that's coming into all our inboxes from conservative groups, they're talking about Ryan care and they're saying Trump is being misled by Paul Ryan and the GOP establishment. They're not turning on him at all. That's fine because they know that that would be difficult for them in terms of their own basis. But that ultimately may not get the job done because what you're trying

to do here when they talk about Paul Ryan is you're finding the villain that you can hold up to those voters and say that's the problem. They need to start over and come up with a different bill. Let's talk about another big story this week. President Trump in a series of tweets accused former President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower before the election. Thus far, the White House has not produced any evidence of that. The former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said it never happened. We talked about a lot of this on Tuesday in an episode. So go back and listen to that if you missed it. But just one little coda on this whole thing. Yesterday at his press briefing,

Press Secretary Sean Spicer struggled to answer this question. Is the president the target of a counterintelligence investigation? I think that's what we need to find out. Of course, this is a question because if the president is alleging that he was wiretapped, why would you wiretap somebody if you weren't investigating them? But then at the end of his briefing, Spicer was handed a sheet of paper and clarified this. One last thing just to clarify, I think Jill asked this, but I just want to be really clear on one point, which is there is no reason that we should that we have to think that the president is the target of any investigation

whatsoever. But then today, Spicer was asked to clarify a New York Times report that the Justice Department did not tell the White House that there was no investigation. The Justice Department is saying, though, that they never gave you the assurances that you gave us. OK. No, no. What the assurance I gave you, Margaret, was that I'm not aware. And that is 100 percent accurate. So when you said no reason to believe it was I'm not aware. That's right. There's an investigation. Right. I mean, I don't know that they're not interchangeable. So many double negatives. So little time. You know, Donald Trump once again put his staff in a really difficult position. And actually,

of all the tweets he's ever done, this one had the biggest practical daily effects. Donald Trump and most of his top officials have gone to ground since he tweeted this. We saw the president at a pool spray where the press was kept so far in the back that they couldn't ask him a question. So he has not had any interactions with the press. When the new executive order on the travel ban was rolled out, his secretary of state and his homeland security secretary and his attorney general left without answering any questions because they would be asked first and foremost about this. The president of the United States said that the former president wiretapped him. That is an incendiary, huge statement. He's never produced any evidence. We've heard, as you just said, from one intelligence official after another that there is no evidence that Barack Obama wiretapped Donald Trump. But add this to the false claims about crowd size, illegal votes, etc. But this one is the biggest yet.

Well, here's the deal. of an investigation somewhere last fall of someone who was in and out of Trump Tower, that they got caught up in some larger investigation of some other activity. That's one thing to say, and that's quite possible. On the other hand, what Donald Trump said on Saturday morning was that President Obama had wiretapped him to violate, in violation of our very sacred election process, meaning that this was something that personally was done by President Obama to try to torpedo candidate Trump last fall. Illegally. He accused President Obama of doing something illegal. Totally illegal. It would be a Watergate-style crime.

It did in a president back in the 1970s. And there has got to be some kind of basis for making that kind of remark as opposed to the other kind of investigation that I described a moment ago. You know what I just realized? That all three of those things that Mara listed have in common, the crowd size and the voter fraud and the wiretapping alleged. All of those things relate to the president and his victory and how he feels about his victory. But the things he says now that he's the president of the United States their time in office. They'd never brought it up. They never talked about it. They never tried to re-adjudicate it. They moved on. They moved on and totally,

and they acted, as Dick Cheney, the vice president, said at the time, look, you don't win a part of the presidency. You're either president or you're not. If you're president, you're 100% president. You go forward no matter how you got there. And let's move on ourselves to a break. And after that, we're going to take some of your questions. This podcast and the following message come from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. When it comes to the big decision of choosing a mortgage lender, it's important to work with someone you can trust who has your best interests in mind. With Rocket Mortgage, you'll get a transparent online process

that gives you the confidence you need to make an informed decision. Skip the bank, skip the waiting, and go completely online at quickenloans.com slash NPR politics. Equal housing lender, licensed in all 50 states. NMLSConsumeraccess.org, number 3030. Support for this podcast and the following message come from ABC, presenting the critically acclaimed drama American Crime, returning Sunday, March 12th. This season explores the world of forced labor and sex trafficking. Starring Felicity Huffman, Timothy Hutton, guest star Sandra Oh, and Emmy winner Regina King.

American Crime, new season, new crime. Premiering Sunday, March 12th at 10, 9 central on ABC. Okay, we're back. And let's talk about North Korea. This week, the U.S. military announced that it could be used to track Chinese missile systems. All of this came just days after North Korea test fired some ballistic missiles that went into the waters near Japan. And all this comes on the eve of a trip that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is taking to Asia. He is visiting next week Japan, South Korea, and China. So this is potentially the first big foreign policy test for the Trump administration. All right. First of all, fad sounds like the end of a tweet, if you put an exclamation point after it.

But this is a serious business. And the serious business here is that we are going through another round of escalation in a very sensitive and volatile part of the world, where, just not to beat around the bush, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, is a highly volatile and difficult person that no one can quite figure out, and who has apparently been consolidating yet another round of power, which involves the deaths of some relatives. And that is a troubling situation, not only for the Korean Peninsula, but of course, for Japan, and ultimately for China as well. And what we have here is a classic case of escalation, where threatening behavior by one country leads to more defensive behavior on the part of another country. We're doing war maneuvers with South Korea and the United States military.

Which we do every year, but it makes North Korea tense. Yes. And it was suggested that maybe this would be a time to let it go for a year to perhaps cool the situation out a little bit. But on the other hand, that makes South Korea feel much more vulnerable if we start stepping back even a little bit. So instead, we're sending in a new defensive missile system, defensive, but a defensive missile system can strike other people as an aggressive move because it suggests you're going to need it. And just to remind people that when Barack Obama met with Donald Trump during the transition, this is the number one thing. He said North Korea should be the thing that worries Donald Trump the most because it was the foreign

policy problem that worried him the most. And that was according to a report in The New York Times. The thing that stands out to me about this is that so far, we're 49 days into the Trump administration. We haven't had any external crises. We haven't had we haven't had a natural disaster or any sort of huge natural disaster. We haven't had a foreign power do something that we had to respond to. We haven't had a terrorist attack. There has been lots of crisis communications happening in this White House, a lot of things that have been created by tweets or executive orders that are signed. But those are all things that the White House can control.

The thing that tests every president is the stuff that you can't control. And we haven't seen that yet. And don't forget, the second level of the government right under the cabinet secretaries is mostly empty right now. Remarkably empty. I think 2,000 positions are unfilled, not even people nominated for them. And Donald Trump has suggested at one point that he doesn't even think you necessarily need to fill all of them. They will know soon. They will know soon when the top level is for some reason or another distracted or empty, and there is no one to step in behind. I would suggest actually they've already seen that situation with Jeff Sessions, who was forced to recuse himself from any investigation that may go forward regarding Russian connections to the Trump

campaign. When he stepped aside, there was no deputy to take it over. And the deputy is still going through the confirmation process. OK, a quick update to another big story from earlier this week, the Trump administration's new executive order on immigration. We also talked about that in depth on our Monday episode. So go back and listen if you missed it. The order doesn't go into effect until March 16th, but it's already being challenged in court by the state of Hawaii. And we also know that the state of Washington's attorney general wants to renew the challenge that they successfully brought against the original executive order that was issued on January 27th. And they say that the fundamental flaw in that original executive order is still present in this one, even though they have narrowed the order considerably and cleared up a lot of the problems that led to it being stopped in the federal courts.

All right. Let's answer a few listener questions. Our email address for your questions and comments is NPR politics at NPR.org. This week, Jeanette writes, Dear NPR Politics Podcast Team, Less than a day after the Republican replacement for the ACA was unveiled, there is already some GOP resistance. Is there a Democratic analog to this? How much Democratic opposition was there when the ACA was first unveiled during the Obama administration? All right. Who wants this one? Jeanette, Jeanette, Jeanette. Yes. The short answer is yes. You are on to something, Jeanette. And not only was there Democratic opposition, but I would say at this stage of the game, what conservatives are angry about, they're like little kittens compared to

where the left was with the Obama administration. A couple of things that I think some listeners may remember where a White House spokesman at the time, Robert Gibbs, in an interview disparaged liberal activists as the professional left. And this was like a controversy at the time where liberal activists were calling on him to resign, that he should leave the White House. Rahm Emanuel, who was then the chief of staff, who's now the mayor of Chicago, was seen as a huge opposition to liberal activists. There was a very famous incident where he was meeting with liberal groups and they told him that they were going to run ads against conservative Democrats who voted for the bill. And he called them bad words. You can Google it if you would like to know what he said.

And it was widely reported in The Wall Street Journal. And that further inflamed tensions with the left. And then on a substance. So they had these character clashes, right? They had these personality disputes. But then they had this very dramatic policy fight at the beginning over whether or not there should be what they were calling the public option. And that fight lasted a long time, right?

Months. Don't forget, the Democrats are the disunified party. Republicans generally stick together and heave their stuff over the finish line without a lot of dissent. Don't forget how Obamacare eventually got passed. The Democrats started with 60 votes in the Senate. They had an incredibly large majority. They had more of a majority than the Republicans have now. Ted Kennedy died and he was replaced by a Republican, Scott Brown. They lost the 60th vote. Sixty! They had that much of a filibuster-proof majority.

Danielle Pletka, Jr.: They had a filibuster-proof majority. Danielle Pletka, Jr.: But of course, then they of course used the rules of reconciliation. This is too much detail to get into. But the point is, they had a terrible, terrible time passing Obamacare without a single Republican vote. And at the time, the moral of the story was supposed to be that on huge pieces of social legislation that change one-sixth of the American economy, it's really a good idea to have bipartisan buy-in because that's the way to make these things lasting and fixable, et cetera, et cetera. But wait, what do we have now?

Fast forward to today. The Republicans, although they have a little bit more unity on this, are going about it in almost exactly the same way. And they have worse numbers. Smaller numbers, which means they're doing a better job of staying together, but they have just as much help from the other side of the aisle, meaning zero. And they're in a hurry. Yes. Yes, they're in a hurry because they want to use the reconciliation rules just exactly the way the Democrats did 14 months into Obama's term. Only now we're two months into this term and we're seeing them, you know, marking things up at 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. because they're trying to get this thing, as Mara says, heaved over the

finish line before we get through the reconciliation season. And before they go back for recess and have to explain to their supporters who voted for President Trump because he was going to repeal and replace Obamacare, why, if they haven't done it yet, they haven't done it. Or if they have done it or if they're going to do it, why it looks so different from what they were led to expect. And the next congressional recess is around the Easter holiday in April. More town meetings or not. The town may meet, but the congressman may not. All right. Next question is from Megan. Megan writes, Hi, NPR. I am stuck in a blizzard in the Lake Tahoe region and I'm reading all about the wiretapping

allegations from President Trump. There are a lot of calls for Congress to investigate, Congress to investigate Obama, for Congress to investigate Trump's ties to Russia. But what exactly is an investigation? I'm guessing the members of Congress don't put on their detective hats and whip out their magnifying glasses in search of clues. Thanks so much, Megan. No, but they do take, they get in a car, go over to Langley, and they go to CIA headquarters, and they read raw intelligence, among other things. So they interview intelligence officials, they find out there's an investigation ongoing into Russian meddling in the election,

they're going to look into that. Now the White House has asked them to add to that investigation whether President Obama abused his power by wiretapping Donald Trump. They're going to find that out, too. They want him to look into leaks, too, find the leaks. I mean, congressional investigations are sort of at the core of our democracy. I mean, this is something that the founding fathers wrote about was congressional oversight over the executive and judicial branches. And to varying degrees, the committees in both the House and Senate, they do have subpoena power. I mean, they are investigators in that sense. You can compel anyone to come and testify before Congress. And pretty much everything, and why she's talking about all these things called to investigate, pretty much anything in the public realm falls

under congressional jurisdiction. There's not many things that they couldn't launch an investigation of. I mean, there's been very many famous investigations. And going back to the earliest days of the country, probably the most famous in modern times would probably be the Watergate investigations. either very important and when they're done well, they're done bipartisan and they usually put out a report or have some broad prevailing purpose or they're very partisan. And probably the best example of that in recent times is the special committee to investigate the Benghazi committee, which was very much driven by Republicans and seen as a partisan outfit. So investigations can be both partisan and nonpartisan. And in terms of these investigations, at the moment that both the House and Senate intelligence committees are investigating, it seems like they're sort of taking different paths in what they want to emphasize. And it's not clear how much of the result of those investigations will be made public because it's the intelligence committees and they're dealing with highly

sensitive information. And it appears that the main objective of those two investigations is to more or less get past it and move on. They don't seem to be particularly motivated to get to the bottom of any of these accusations. And what we're really talking about is whether or not there would be some kind of really independent, bipartisan group that would have a serious mandate to get to that bottom. That does not seem to be on the horizon. The leadership in both houses and it seems adamantly opposed to that. And obviously, whatever they say about wanting investigations, the White House doesn't really want this to go on any longer either. Though I think the Senate Intelligence Committee is taking it more seriously than the House

Intelligence Committee. Certainly the House Intelligence Committee under, you know, Devin Nunes has shown far less interest. And on the Senate side, I'm not so sure where Richard Burr is going. It does seem as though it's a bit more bipartisan and there is a little bit more seriousness. But in the end, we'll have to see if they produce more of a product than the House. Well, Megan, thank you for the question. And we hope you survived the blizzard and enjoyed beautiful Lake Tahoe. I can't feel that bad for you because Tahoe is so gorgeous. Okay. Finally, last week on the show, we were talking about Alexa and how you can now ask Alexa to enable NPR One and then ask Alexa to play the NPR Politics podcast, which is a really fun thing to do. Anyway, in that podcast, we claimed Alexa's Apple counterpart,

Siri, does not tell jokes very well, which is why Anna wrote us this email, subject line, Siri does have mad jokes. Hey, y'all, don't appreciate you hating on my girl, Siri, for not having jokes. Ask her what zero divided by zero is. Keep up the good work, Anna. Okay, let's see if we can do this. Okay, Siri, what is zero divided by zero? Imagine that you have zero cookies and you split them evenly among zero friends. How many cookies does each person get? See, it doesn't make sense. And Cookie Monster is sad that there are no cookies. And you are sad that you have no friends. Oh, she's mean. Thanks a lot, Siri.

That is funny. Siri does have mad jokes. All right, that will do it for the mail. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, can't let it go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from SimpliSafe Home Security, who believes protecting your home shouldn't be a hassle, not when there are over 2 million burglaries in the U.S. each year.

That's why SimpliSafe makes protecting your home a breeze. Go online today, and in just a few clicks, you'll be the owner of a professionally monitored security system. Get 10% off now by going to simplysafeNPR.com. We know you love podcasts. We also know you know people who don't. That's why this March, you're going to hear a lot about Tripod. It's a month-long campaign from all your favorite podcasters, including NPR, to get you to recommend a podcast that's any podcast to a friend. And if they don't know

how to listen, show them and give us your recommendations with the hashtag Tripod. That's T-R-Y pod. Thanks for spreading the word. Okay, back to the show. All right, we are back and it is time for my favorite part of the show. So can't let it go when we all share something we cannot stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise. I'm going to go first and speak directly to America's dad, Tom Hanks. Thank you, Tom Hanks, for the beautiful espresso machine that you had delivered to the White House press briefing room. This is a very fancy espresso machine. And not the first one that he's given them. That's right.

So let me read the note that came along with it. It was typewritten using a typewriter because Tom Hanks loves typewriters. To the White House press corps, keep up the good fight for truth, justice, and the American way. Especially the truth part. Signed, Tom Hanks. Analog Tom. Still typing on a manual typewriter. That's great. So how do you fancy pants White House reporters, who brings in the espresso?

Well, so it takes Illy pods, which are like Illy brand espresso. Oh, right. Like a little, you know, it's like a teabag full of espresso. But who buys that? Well, Tom Hanks bought the first batch. I don't know what happens after that. I think this is why the last machine he got us was underutilized. That and people don't ever clean it.

So it gets disgusting and people don't take the pods out. They just leave them in and then it's like, yeah, moldering. So this is actually, that's why we can't have nice things. Thank you, Tom Hanks. Yeah. Mara, what can't you let go of? China is my can't let it go today because Donald Trump was granted 38 trademarks by the government of China. And that will cover everything from hotels, golf clubs, bodyguards, concierge services. The reason he's doing this is basically defensive. He doesn't want to have other people using his name in China. But what's interesting about this,

and here's the backdrop, is that I actually asked a question in the briefing last week, because Donald Trump very famously after the election said that he might not want to adhere to the one China policy. A big break with the U.S. foreign policy for many, many years. He made a call to the president of Taiwan, which was shocking. Then he said that he would only consider going back to the one China policy, he said this on Fox, if he got something in return from China on trade or North Korea. Now, tell us what the one China policy is. Well, the one China policy is that we only recognize the People's Republic of China as China. We don't recognize Taiwan as having its own government.

So I asked Sean Spicer, well, he said he wouldn't reaffirm the policy unless he got something from China. Well, lo and behold, after a couple of weeks after that call to Taiwan, he had a conversation with the president of China where he reaffirmed the one China policy. And I was wondering, what did Donald Trump, the super negotiator, get in return? And Sean Spicer said very cryptically to me, well, the president always gets something. And I followed up on that many times in emails asking, what did he get? Radio silence. Now we hear about these trademarks. Is this what he got? So I can't let that one go. Ron? Briefly back to the White House

briefing room where we had Tom Price this week introducing the first phase, as he called it, of the new American Health Care Act. And this was striking because he brought along a visual aid. He brought a big, big stack of paper that he said was Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act from 2010. And then he showed us a much, much, much smaller stack of paper that was this new bill. Notice how thick that is. Some of you will recall that I actually turned the pages

and went through that piece of legislation in a YouTube. The pile on the right is the current bill. And what it means is that we are making certain that the process... He pointed this out with the obvious point that since this bill was so much shorter, it was clearly superior because it wasn't going to do all that government that was clearly implied by the larger stack of paper. And there does seem to be a certain belief that the more paper you have, the longer a bill is, the more complicated the tax code is, the worse it is, the more it's over-governing and overreach. And this was a way to illustrate this and it was a photograph that was very widely circulated. And so that's what I can't let go. Lawmakers are always obsessed with the size of their bills.

Sue, what you got? Okay, I haven't been on the podcast in a while, so I'm going to just exercise a point of personal privilege and I have two can't let it goes. One is personal, one involves politics. I'll go with the political one first. So there was a story this week that I just loved because I think it is something that should be referenced in maybe Ron could use this in his classes to teach about the ways in which Washington really works. And the headline of the story is in role reversal, Mick Mulvaney trying to get conservatives to back GOP establishment health bill. Now, Mick Mulvaney is now the OMB director, the Office of Management and Budget, which means he's basically the president's top budget guy. And he spent all weekend crafting this bill and making the case for it. Now, when Mick Mulvaney was in Congress,

he was a member of the Freedom Caucus, those same group of hardline conservatives that we were talking about earlier in the podcast who are the sort of, you know, give me liberty or give me death conservatives. There is no room for compromise. It's the conservative way or the only way. He was part of the Vote No Caucus, who voted against the Republican leaders when he was in Congress. And he is quoted in the story as saying, and it is just so rich, and it just tells you how priorities can change depending on what your job is in Washington. And he is quoted talking about the Freedom Caucus saying, if they think the House is going to pass their bill, they're being unreasonable. And just the richness of this that's within, you know, a 72 hour span,

you go from being in the Freedom Caucus to being the budget guy making the case for the bill is just so Washington. And I just couldn't let it go. My personal can't let it go. And I thank you for giving me a platform for this because I've also exercised my rights on social media. A great disappointment in my life this week was the Washington Post announcing that after a decade, they're canceling their annual peep contest, their diorama contest. Okay, explain what it is. So every year, the Washington Post held a contest where people in the region would send in dioramas using peeps, those Easter candies that are ducks and bunnies, in sort of current event situations, either reflecting the news or the campaign or sometimes things in pop culture. And they had

a contest and it was hilarious. And they would put the pictures on the website and it became sort of like a viral thing within the Washington city area and I loved it and every year I loved it and I thought it was like such a great funny thing I looked forward to it every year the paper announced this week that the interest was waning in the peep contest not for me wait the interest was waning yeah and that they weren't that's what they always say when they've decided they don't want to do it anymore. That is what I feel. I think it's probably a lot of work for them, and they're just not wanting to do the work. I don't know what the truth is, but I did tweet at Marty Barron.

How about NPR? How about NPR picks up the peep diorama contest today? And I wonder, some of these are really involved. I mean, some people out in the region were probably already working on their peeps and probably were really, you know, disappointed. You think about it year round. You have to think about it constantly. And they last forever. I know.

They're naturally preserved. Hey, America, how do you feel? Have you ever? Are you ready for a peep diorama contest from National Public Radio? Let us know. Well, I would say you probably shouldn't mail them to us. Don't mail them to us. But if you were working on a peep diorama, take a picture. And if nobody else cares,

I promise you I will care. It's a small thing, but it brought me joy and I'm going to miss it. Probably was not big with Bezos's peeps. Okay, that is a wrap. And we will be back in your feed on Monday or Tuesday of next week. We always encourage you to support your local public radio station. It's pledge time around the country right now, so it's an especially great time to find your local station and donate. That is the best way to keep the podcast and all the work we do going. Go to npr.org slash stations to find yours and donate. And big thanks to those of you who've done it already.

All right. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.