The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, May 4

Episode Date: May 5, 2017

The House votes on health care. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, congressional reporter Geoff Bennett, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, 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, guys, don't forget to check out Up First, NPR's new morning podcast. It's ready at 6 a.m. Eastern time every weekday before my coffee is ready. Always about 10 minutes long. And you'll often hear some of us from the Politics Podcast on Up First talking through the day's headlines. So check it out. Up First from NPR on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, this is Melinda Bertram. I'm a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Northwest Cameroon. This podcast was recorded at 453 Eastern Time on Thursday, May 4th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public

radio station. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of political news. House Republicans have finally passed a bill repealing key parts of Obamacare. We'll talk about what's in it and what comes next, plus the president's executive order on religious liberty and 2016 deja vu with James Comey and Hillary Clinton. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Jeff Bennett. I also cover Congress. I'm Susan Davis. I, too, cover Congress.

And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. It's almost like a lot of congressional news happened this week. Hmm. We have a lot of congressional correspondents. I hope you don't feel uncomfortable, Ron. I cannot tell you how comfortable I feel when talking about Congress. You literally wrote a book on Congress, so it's cool. Conflict and Compromise, How Congress Makes the Law. It's very outdated.

It is. I think you need a new title and a new introduction. Well, at least we should change the verb tense. Well, speaking of conflict and compromise, it's been about a month and a half since we sat in this studio and we sorted out a major defeat for Republicans, their failure to pass an Obamacare repeal. But that's exactly what they did this afternoon, passing a bill on a really narrow margin. The final vote was 217 to 213. A huge cheer went up from House Republicans as they got to that magic number, 216.

But that's when Democrats began chanting this. That is, I'm not going to sing it. Na, na, na, na. Hey, hey, goodbye. A suggestion to vote would cost Republicans their seats. This vote is a big deal. It's probably the biggest vote we've seen this year in Congress, aside from the Senate confirming Neil Gorsuch.

But it was still kind of unusual for President Trump to hold a big celebratory rally in the Rose Garden of the White House with Republican lawmakers. That's the sort of thing you do when your bill is passed and becoming law, not when the House has passed it and has to go to the Senate and then back to the House, etc. But anyway, here's President Trump. We just have developed a bond. This has really brought the Republican Party together. As much as we've come up with a really incredible health care plan, this has brought the Republican Party together. So Trump thinks it's really incredible, but Democrats are warning that they're going to make sure that voters are reminded of this vote over and over and over again over the next year.

So let's start with what's different. Jeff, what is different in the actual bill compared to what we were talking about in March? Yeah, so all the momentum we saw this week owed to two big changes. The first was an amendment negotiated largely by Congressman Tom MacArthur. He worked with, he aligns with moderates, but he worked with House conservatives to work on this amendment that allows states to opt out of the Affordable Care Act's current requirement that insurance companies charge people the same regardless of whether or not they have a preexisting condition. But that change in and of itself wasn't enough to bring enough Republicans along because there were plenty of Republicans who felt like that change would have left some of their older and less healthy constituents without crucial protections. And so this week, Congressman Fred Upton, he negotiated yet another amendment that provides $8 billion over five years to help fund what are known as high-risk pools. Those are pools for sicker people who live in those states that opt out of existing protections on those preexisting conditions.

And Democrats have said that $8 billion is nowhere near enough to give the stability. Democrats, some Republicans, frankly, independent analysis, sorry, independent analysts say really it's a drop in the bucket. And members of Congress don't really know if it's enough because the Congressional Budget Office did not review these current changes. So we don't know how much it costs. We don't know how many people would be affected. But the key difference here is instead of just across the board making these changes, it's saying, hey, states, you can do this. You can not do this. It's up to you. Right. The question is, you know, this gives a lot of power and a lot of

responsibility to the states. Do governors really want to have that kind of power and responsibility and the burden, frankly, of negotiating some of these deals? We'll see. So that's what changed in terms of the bill itself. Sue, a lot shifted politically over the last month and a half. Yeah, I think, you know, after they failed the first time in March, if you remember, then the speaker was said, Obamacare is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. There was a lot of doubt that they could get this back together. There's a couple things. One, I think that the president and the vice president, after that initial failure, really decided that they wanted to vote, that it was just not politically tenable to not have the Congress even vote on what has been the party's single unifying idea for the past seven years. And I think a growing number of Republicans felt the same way.

Fred Upton, who's the Michigan Republican, whose amendment helped get them to yes. You know, he's kind of one of these guys that's a good example of a very loyal Republican. He is there because he wants to pass legislation. He does not want to block legislation. And him trying to move this ball forward and trying to bring a lot of those like-minded Republicans with him, I think, was very key in the end, too. And I talked to Republicans. I talked to Peter King today, who's a Republican from New York, who said, you know, yeah, this is a tough vote politically for a lot of lawmakers. But for a lot of other lawmakers, it would be politically suicidal not to do anything. Now, Ron, when we

talked about shortfalls from President Trump's first hundred days in office, that that failed House vote was one of the top things we kept talking about. So how big of a deal is this for Trump that this got through, especially since he seemed to once again play an active role in the end, meeting with people like Long and Upton at the White House, making calls? Let's give the president credit. He weighed in at just the right moment in just the right way. He didn't just make calls. He had the key players, people like Billy Long from Missouri, people like Fred Upton, we've already talked about. He had them to the White House along with a couple of other guys who were wavering, and he got them to walk out and say, all right, now we're going to vote for it. When you get that right after meeting with the president, the president obviously is going to get credit.

Whether that's where the credit should lie or not, the president is going to get that credit because it happened on his turf, and he seems to have been the person who put it over. Now, this $8 billion seems to have been critical for Upton and for others. It's the amendment that was added in the Rules Committee with Upton's name on it. $8 billion over five years is not going to buy you a whole lot of bailout for these high-risk pools, but what it will buy you is a swell fig leaf. And that fig leaf has been applied and it covers the deal that was made with the House Freedom Caucus. That's really what put this baby over the top. But the thing that everything you're saying that kind of doesn't mesh up with that, or I don't know, maybe it does, is that every time Trump talked publicly about this bill in the last week or so, he said things that were wildly at odds with the reality of the bill in

terms of what it would do, what it guaranteed get guaranteed. Like he was just talking about a totally different bill. And that's why I think the credit for the success of this bill lies squarely with Western North Carolina, with Mark Meadows and with the deputy whip, Patrick McHenry, because McHenry in particular was seen, you know, cajoling members on the floor. That was the real heavy lift. And Mark Meadows, I mean, even when the pundit class said that health care was dead and gone, he said that, no, it wasn't. And they're going to take another crack at it and they're going to get it across the line. And, you know, now here we are. So one key question, and both parties are talking a lot about it, is what this does for people with pre-existing conditions. I mean, that's probably

like the defining trait of Obamacare, other than the fact that everyone has to have insurance, the fact that insurers cannot discriminate against people who have pre-existing conditions in terms of offering health care or the basic rates they're charging. Who is the lucky person who wants to walk us through how this bill would change that? So what the bill does is it creates a new pathway where each individual state could go to the federal government and ask for waivers from two of the Affordable Care Act's existing provisions. One of them affects pre-existing conditions, and one of them affects what are called the 10 essential health benefits. The 10 essential health benefits are

health benefits that every insurance policy in this country has to cover. Includes things like maternity care and hospitalization. Mental health coverage. Mental health coverage. And this affects, this is one of the things that affects all insurance policies. This isn't just the individual market. And the other one says that if you have a preexisting condition, if you have diabetes, if you're born with cancer, if you need surgery, if anything, no insurance company can deny you coverage. And before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could do that.

And they did regularly. So now a state can go to the federal government and ask for waivers from those. Now, the argument for waiving the essential health benefits is the Republican argument is that this is part of what's driven up the cost of premiums. If I could buy a cheaper plan, I don't need some of those things, I can do that. Yes. And should a healthy 22-year-old guy have to buy a plan that covers all those things, that covers maternity care, that covers an ambulance ride? Can't someone just buy a plan that just covers catastrophic injury? Yeah.

You know, and no, you can't anymore. And Republicans are saying if you get rid of these or give states the right to tailor what each state has to cover, costs will go down and people will have more options. On the preexisting conditions front, what it does is that in the current law, it's something called community rating, which says that all people, whether you're healthy or you're sick, need to be charged about the same amount of money. And what this would do is essentially waive that community rating principle and let states charge people more money if they let their coverage lapse. So if you have continuous coverage, which is what this bill aims to do, it should not affect you. But if you let your coverage lapse, and the coverage period is only 63 days. So if your coverage ever lapses for 63 days, it would allow an insurance company to charge

you more money. What Fred Upton sought to do and what they say this bill will do is part of the reason the states can get these waivers is if they create mechanisms to cover sick people. And that if states create these pools to help protect the sick people that live there, the federal government will provide money to help people pay for those expensive premiums. So yes, your premiums could go up, but the Republican bill is saying we're going to help you be able to afford it. That was like a drum solo of healthcare explanation. Well done. But in short, this is what this gets translated to politically. Republicans voted to ease the pre-existing conditions protections. And that is why it's so politically dangerous. Even if you go through that long explanation in which, hey, at the end of the day,

it might not hurt people with pre-existing conditions. It also could. And they've cracked that door. And it largely depends on where they live. Yeah. So we're going to talk about the Senate in a moment. Republicans feeling good here, feeling like, hey, we actually accomplished something. But Democrats were feeling pretty chippy and feeling pretty confident on the House floor when this was happening. You heard the hey, hey, good buying. Nancy Pelosi was speaking before this vote, too, and said that Democrats are just going to talk about this bill over and over and over again. Most Americans don't know who their member of Congress is. But they will now when they find out that you voted to take away their health care and the rest. They will know when you put an age tax on them or undermine Medicare and Medicaid and the rest.

Oh, yeah, they're paying attention because it's really personal with them and their families. Sue, what do you make of this Democratic argument that this could be a good thing for them to run ads on? Well, a couple of things to remember about the vote today. The most recent public polling we have showed that the people that like this bill had something like a 17 percent approval rating. I mean, this is not inherently a very popular piece of legislation. And the most recent polls this week showed more than half of Americans don't want Congress to touch the existing law that protects people with pre-existing conditions. So, yeah, they're poking a tiger here with what they're trying to do from a policy level. Healthcare is an incredibly personal, intense issue. And I think we've all seen and experienced that as we've gone to these town halls in the past couple of weeks, people showing up at their

congressman's office. You know, the rule about health care, it's like whoever the last person who touched the hot potato owns it. So even if the bill eventually becomes law, you know, you get the good and you get the bad. So if the Democrats are going home tonight saying, OK, all right, you guys wanted to do this. Now you own it. The Republicans in the House are going home tonight saying, OK, now it's up to the Senate. And they're having a good chuckle over that. There's some, what, 217 Republicans who voted for this bill. I think only about seven or eight of them are having town halls next week so far that are scheduled.

The thing I keep coming back to with the Democrats is that remember how miserable of a job Democrats did in selling their own health care bill heretofore? I'm interested to see if they do a better job trying to pin whatever problems arise on Republicans. The other problem Republicans have politically is all the major stakeholder groups in this, for the most part, are against the bill. The American Medical Association, very gold standard brand, are against the bill. The AARP is against the bill. I mean, that is not—and think about the reach that the AARP has to their membership. This bill is not particularly good for older Americans. Who likes this bill?

One of the things, well, I'll tell you why older people don't like it, is that one of the things Republicans did was change the formula by which you can charge younger people and older people for their premiums. And under the current law, you can only charge older people three times the amount of money you can charge younger people. And if this law were to pass, you could charge older people five times as much as you could charge younger people. Older people aren't going to mind that. Older people are going to say, oh, I should pay a little bit more because I'm older. That's been the experience we've had. That's politically, yes. It's okay, Ron. They're not really engaged voters. And with all the hurdles that exist in the bill in its current form, Republicans this morning still made the point that, oh, you know what, the Senate will fix all the bad stuff.

Oh, boy. And, you know, I would love to see how many people would have voted. Twenty Republicans voted no. I wonder what would have happened to that number if everyone who voted for the bill knew it was going to become law on Monday. They wouldn't have been able to pass it. I can tell you that. Because I talked to enough Republicans who said their yes was conditional on getting a better bill.

Getting a better bill in the Senate. Correct. Now, okay, first of all, you might want to ask from a constitutional standpoint, should members of the House be saying, well, I don't like this bill, but I'm sure we'll get something better from the Senate? Is that the way the system is supposed to work? We know it is the way the system works. It isn't normally what you hear from House members.

They usually say something like, I hope the Senate doesn't mess up this great thing we've done. But so, Scott, you but you had a good question. Who likes this bill? Yes. That is a hard question. And that is a question that I have been posing to Republicans this week, because when Congress went on recess a couple weeks ago and we all went out on road, and I was in a conservative district, I was in a moderate district. And that was the thing I was looking for is who are the people that are actually calling their congressman and saying, please pass this bill. And all I encountered was people who either hated the bill because they

didn't want to change the popular parts of the law, or conservatives who hated the bill because they just didn't think it was a very good bill. And when I talked to one Republican aide this week who said, you know, who are the people you're trying to please here? And he was like, look, this is the bed we've made and this is the bed we need to lie in. We have promised people we're going to do it. And that if we do nothing, the political long term effect is do you just completely depress your party's base going into the next election? And I guess maybe one other group of people who would be happy about this bill are people lined up to receive the billions and billions of tax breaks that are written into it. Sure. And that's another way in which the bill reverts back to the pre-Obamacare status quo.

The Affordable Care Act included hundreds of billions of taxes on predominantly the wealthy, and it was a redistribution of wealth. The intention of Obamacare was to tax the wealthy, to use that revenue to make health care more affordable and cheaper for lower income Americans. The Republican health care bill repeals all those taxes. So what does that mean? The wealthier get a tax break. So, OK, so that is the bill as it is now. That's the bill that was voted on. But I think we all agree that whatever the Senate ends up doing will probably look nothing like that. And that's because they have even less wiggle room in the Senate. You know, they've got a narrow majority and they have to

keep everybody in the caucus happy. And you have you have the Ted Cruz's of the world over here saying that we want the most across the board repeal of Obamacare possible. And you have a lot of especially a lot of Republicans who represent states that took the Medicaid expansion who are not too thrilled about voting to suddenly, you know, boot hundreds of thousands of people in their states off insurance. So how do you fix that problem? One thing I think we should say at the very top, because I've gotten a lot of questions about this on Twitter, too, is people saying, well, Democrats will never vote for this. And that's the point, is why they're using this thing called a budget reconciliation bill. The bill that they will have in the Senate doesn't need Democrats, and it can't be filibustered.

It's a specially protected bill, so they only need Republicans. And that's an important thing to remember. And where is that? Really important to remember. But there's a parenthesis. There's an asterisk there. And that is we still have to see whether they can get their whole bill through the Senate under reconciliation. That's a decision that's up to the Senate parliamentarian who does not work for the Republicans. It's a non-elective, non-partisan position. And depending on what that person rules, we could either see some or all of this bill go through the Senate with just 50 votes that could all be Republican.

What is the CliffsNotes version of why the House bill that just passed might not fit under reconciliation? If it does not pertain strictly to budget, that is to say it doesn't have a tax and spend kind of implication. Some of the policies that are in this bill are not strictly. That could run afoul of the parliamentarian. The big issue here in the Senate is whereas House Republicans could only have afforded to have lost, what, 22 votes without Democratic support. In the Senate, they can only afford to lose two Republicans. Yeah. And so, as you said, the conservative wing and the moderate wing of the Republican Party in the Senate at this point are on vastly different pages. But substantively, what they could do, the changes that the Senate could make to this bill is they could add more money for the preexisting conditions.

They could add more tax credit money for low-income Americans. And they could give sort of a longer runway for the eventual death of a Medicaid expansion. One thing that was interesting in terms of what changed this time around compared to before, and we were all talking about this earlier, is the first time the House tried to pass this bill, there was all sorts of Senate criticism. Senators like Rand Paul from Kentucky, Tom Cotton from Arkansas were just railing on this bill, saying it was a bad bill. They had to restart the process.

This time around, you did not hear much from the Senate at all. It was like crickets on that side of the building. And they also said the process was moving too quickly, which is pretty funny considering how quickly the process moved this week. But, you know, John Thune told reporters this week that, you know, people are coming to the conclusion that it's pretty important at some point we legislate on this, we've got to deliver. And his voice matters because he's part of Republican leadership in the Senate. That's right. In other words, the word went forth that we should stop trashing what the House is doing, because at some point or another, we're going to have to get involved. We're going to have to clean it up and try to pass something that the country would like better and that we like better.

We, the Senate Republicans, we're probably going to have to deal with a lot of pushback from some of our constituents. So let's try to all get on the same page and stop trashing the House Republicans. But like, is the Senate into doing this? Because it seems like they were talking more about tax reform. They were moving forward with their lives. Yes. I mean, yes, they're very much into doing this, but they're just going to do it a very different way. And already the Senate, after the House passed it,

I mean, the Senate's attitude and reception was sort of like, well, wasn't that adorable? You know, now we're going to get to work on this. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already said they won't even start until they get a score from the Congressional Budget Office. They have some parliamentarian reviews to do, as Ron alluded to. But they've already tapped sort of a 12-member working group to say, you know, let's actually come up with a bill that can pass this Senate. And they've kind of just brushed the House bill to the side. I mean, that's sort of the shell, the vehicle that they will ultimately use to pass a bill. But the Senate does not look at the House legislation in any way, shape or form as something

they are obligated to take up and pass. So I don't know what the best like HGTV show metaphor would be for this particular. Fixer upper. Fixer upper. So this is just like a total rip out. It's a gut job. It's a potentially it's a gut job. It's going to end up with a lot of shiplap. A lot of shiplap. Yeah. And a pergola in every yard. And I think the one thing that we have not heard a lot about in the House debate, which has been remarkable considering how much impact it has, but we're going to hear a whole lot about in the Senate fight to come, is over what this bill does to Medicaid. Not just about the Medicaid expansion,

but also how it's funded. And that is an issue that's just going to run, what the House bill does is just going to totally run into a buzzsaw in the Senate. And that's just one of many, many, many, many issues that the Senate just looks at the House bill and says, yeah, this isn't going to happen. All right. So if you don't mind looking one step further down the road, when the Senate finishes and has something completely different, then there are two different bills. And then we get a little something called? Conference. Oh, man.

But this, yes. And this is what made the Rose Garden football spiking so funny to me today. Like, this was like declaring you won the Super Bowl at halftime. You know, it's just they're not. And I've never seen it. Is it even halftime? It's not even halftime. You're right. It's like after the first quarter being like, well, we won this one. But that may explain why they did it, because this may be the one moment they're sure that they can celebrate. Now, they probably will get something down the road. I'm not saying they won't, but they can say for sure right now on May 4th they have something to celebrate.

So they might as well go ahead and do it now. And the majority of Americans who don't follow this as closely as we do, all they'll know is that President Trump had Congress in the Rose Garden. And they were talking about how successful his repeal and replacement of Obamacare was. All right. So let's take a page from that. And right before we go to our first break, say, you know what? Great podcast. Good job, everybody.

It was fabulous. We're done here. I want to thank everybody. Scott's been just great. Scott, you've done a great job. Sue. All right. We'll be right back with James Comey and a 2016 flashback.

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Instead, it is the part of the show where we talk about what we can't let go this week. Instead, it is the part of the show where we talk about what Washington could not let go this week. And that was the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton was on TV. Trump was responding. And of course, that led to Twitter arguments about it. This all started when Clinton did her first extended interview with CNN's Christiana Amanpour. Clinton gave a couple of reasons for why she thinks she lost last year. I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey's letter on October 28th and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off. So we had that. And then the very next day, Comey got to respond. He was in front of the Senate for an oversight hearing. And Democrats had a lot of questions and a lot of thoughts about that letter. And because of that, Comey offered his most

detailed explanation yet of why he decided to send that letter to Congress. October 27th, the investigative team that had finished the investigation in July, focused on Secretary Clinton's emails, asked to meet with me. So I met with them that morning, late morning in my conference room, and they laid out for me what they could see from the metadata on this fellow Anthony Weiner's laptop that had been seized in an unrelated case. What they could see from the metadata was that there were thousands of Secretary Clinton's emails on that device, including...

So Comey went on to say that those emails may have been the missing ones that the FBI had never been able to find from Clinton's first few months as Secretary of State. But they couldn't yet be sure until they went through them. And Comey was faced with two choices, to speak up about it, and this is how he framed it, to speak up or to conceal it, knowing the information could leak out. And so I stared at speak and conceal. Speak would be really bad. There's an election in 11 days. Lordy, that would be really bad. Concealing, in my view, would be catastrophic, not just to the FBI, but well beyond. And honestly, as between really bad and catastrophic, I said to my team, we've got to walk into the world of really bad. I've got to tell Congress that we're restarting

this, not in some frivolous way, in a hugely significant way. Lordy. Ron, were those his only two choices? There is also the fear that this would leak. And we had already heard Rudy Giuliani speaking of all the people that he knew in the law enforcement community and what they were hearing. And he was already out on television strongly suggesting there was going to be something out of the FBI in the next few days. So a lot of pressure was being brought to bear on him. And surely, he had a tough decision to make. I think the thing that is really galling to Democrats when they look back on all this

is that he made a very different decision when they look back on all this is that he made a very different decision when it came to revealing everything he knew about the Russians. But one could also say he would have had a third option. He's mentioned two choices. He would have had the option of first doing at least some forensics on that laptop to see whether or not they were in fact emails from the period of time he just described or whether they were, in fact, emails from the period of time he just described or whether they were, as they in fact turned out to be, just copies of Huma Abedin's correspondence with Hillary Clinton or copies of what she had from Hillary Clinton. She was, of course, the very close personal aide of Hillary Clinton, and she's Anthony Weiner's wife.

Right, because as we know, about a week later, on the eve of the election, basically, the FBI came out again saying, well, we'll look through all those emails. Nothing new there. And we saw it on Twitter in response to the Comey hearing and sort of relitigating the 2016 election. Comey's impact on 2016 feels like the argument that will never be resolved. No. You know, and there are many well-reasoned, thoughtful arguments on both sides of this, that he did not ultimately sway the election and that potentially he did in places where it may have mattered. I don't think we can conclusively say one way or another. And I'm not sure we will ever be able to conclusively say one way or another.

But if you follow Clinton alumni on Twitter or conservatives on Twitter, this is like such a flashpoint. And I just think it's going to be one of those arguments that we will have for the rest of our lives. Well, you know, just in terms of how much of a jolt at the time it was, I am never, ever in my life going to forget sitting in the Trump rally in New Hampshire before the rally started, when the news came out, when Jason Chaffetz made that tweet about this and just feeling the room just erupt in excitement and frenzy as you could feel the wave of the room learning about it and talking about it. It was just a crazy moment. Jeff, did anything jump out to you from all of this rehashing and testimony? When he explained his motivations and he said that it

was that meeting that Bill Clinton had with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch back when former President Clinton boarded Loretta Lynch's plane in late June. He said that was the capper for him. He had to prove that the election was not rigged. And that was one of the reasons why he decided to go to go public. Will we talk about 2016 again on this podcast? I feel like we will probably. And one quick note on all of this. On Monday, Sally Yates, the former acting attorney advisor, is not being truthful about the details of a conversation

that he had with Russia's ambassador during the transition period. So that will be a newsworthy day. We will be covering it and talking to you about it next week. All right. One more thing that happened today. President Trump signed some more executive orders. This one was about religious liberty. He directed the IRS to use its discretion when it comes to a ban on churches endorsing political candidates. This is something that we should be clear is rarely enforced already, but it's something that Trump talked a lot about when he was campaigning. It was one of many ways that Trump tried hard to court evangelical voters. Trump also said he's working to give religious organizations more latitude to not cover contraception in employer health insurance plans and that he's, quote, directing the Department of Justice to develop new rules to ensure religious protections are afforded to all Americans. Ron? This was a great cosmetic event in which a lot of people who favor religious liberty and all of its applications, and that is a controversial term, but it's been used to cover a number of things that perhaps could be

characterized as something other than the practice of religion. It's been used to cover people who don't want to provide services to people who they disapprove of. Let's just say – One version of that went all the way to the Supreme Court with a Hobby Lobby case. That's right. And certainly we also have seen people, for example, who refuse to provide their wedding services to people who are having a wedding in which both of the partners are of the same gender. So this was a thank you to the organizations that supported Donald Trump and his campaign and did so partly because of his statements about the Johnson Amendment. The Johnson Amendment is actually part of the law. And an executive order only sets directives for

policy in an administrative branch. It doesn't absolve that administrative branch of enforcing the law. So the law has not changed. What he has done is he said, let's make this a lower priority in terms of enforcement. But is it a priority at all? It was already almost non-existent. But there were evangelical ministers who actually went in together on a pact to say, let's test this law. Let's actually get out there and not just talk about moral issues. That's fine. Not just talk about religion and politics. That, too, is fine. The only thing the law says you shouldn't do as a 501c3 nonprofit and a church fits into that sector, that segment of the law, you can't go out and say vote for Jones and vote against Smith. That's the only thing it prohibits. So they went out and said vote for Jones or vote for Smith or vote against somebody. And they absolutely deliberately

challenged the law to see if it would be enforced. And when they're in that federal supermax prison in Colorado? No. So watching Donald Trump stand there today with Paula White to his immediate right, I just thought that what he was saying about allowing, you know, pastors to fuse politics into their sermons and everything, I just felt like it was red meat to the establishment evangelical base because younger evangelicals, younger diverse evangelicals who are sort of fueling the rise of non-denominational evangelical megachurches across this country don't fit neatly into one partisan political tent. And I think for a lot of them to hear sort of partisan talking points from a pulpit would be spiritual malpractice. Who is Paula White?

Paula White is an evangelical icon, really. She gave this amazing prayer, actually, at the convention that could have like risen the dead. And it really just felt, no one heard it. It didn't make cable TV. But Donald Trump has relied heavily on Paula White, basically to make sort of like an entree to evangelical and Christian audiences. So beyond the substance of these executive orders, I'm interested in the process of it, right? In that for the eight years of the Obama administration, and arguably for the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, the rise of the use of executive orders has become sort of an increasingly contentious, debatable point, and whether it's executive overreach and going around the legislative branch.

And that was one thing that, especially under the Obama years, that we heard overwhelmingly from conservatives and House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in particular. And I wonder at what point, and maybe this is just it's not bad when it's your side doing them, that Republicans maybe start to bristle at Trump's enthusiastic use of executive orders. And I think that they gave him a pass on his executive orders that were reversing President Obama executive orders. That was sort of a zero-sum game. But if he continues at this pace, the people that see this more as a constitutional issue, if it may start to create a little pushback. I think they would find it distasteful for him to continue at this pace,

and that would be distasteful for him to continue to broaden it out into more and more categories. As you say, as long as he's reversing things they opposed at the time Obama did them, it's fine. And as long as they're doing things that serve the interests and the viewpoint of their own constituency base, such as this one, they're not going to have a problem with it. But if he starts to get frustrated, as Obama did, with Congress's refusal to pursue his agenda, which thus far we aren't seeing, then I suspect they would push back much more actively. All right. Well, we are going to take one more quick break. We'll be back with Listener Mail and Can't Let It Go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. When it comes to the big decision of choosing a mortgage lender,

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All right, we are back. It's time for listener mail. And since we're all Congress people here, we're going to do a couple questions all about Congress. Thanks, as always, for writing us with your questions. You can send them to NPR politics at NPR dot org. And thanks for all of you who also take the time to record those fun timestamps. That's the email to send those to as well. All right. So first question is from Tom in the UK. He writes, Hey, NPR politics team.

Donald Trump said in the CBS interview with John Dickerson that he found the Senate archaic and slow moving. Is there anything that Trump can do short of constitutional amendments which would alter the way the, quote, archaic Senate slows him down? All the best, Tom. No. Next question. Next question. One thing he has mentioned, of course, as you know, is he has said maybe we should change the rules to pass bills in the Senate with 51 percent vote and meaning no filibuster.

And Leader McConnell has asked that very question coming off of Trump's tweet this week. And he said, no, we're not going to do that. And there is also a resolution that's been signed by 61 senators saying no. And this is also like a foundational principle of our government is that it's separate but equal branches. So, no, the president has no individual power to change the way the legislative branch works. And I found that while Democrats get annoyed at Republicans and the other way around, and the House and the Senate get annoyed at each other,

it seems like the thing that unites everyone in Congress is the president telling them how they should run Congress. And vice versa. I don't think the president really cares much what Congress has to say. Thank you, Tom. Next question is from Shabtab in Atlanta, who's in medical school. He writes, as a person who hardly gets any breaks or time off, I keep hearing that Congress is trying to rush things because they are about to go on recess.

Why are they always on break or is there something they have to do in that recess that keeps them getting so much time off? I'm really trying to figure this out. Yes, the answer is dodgeball. I just want to jump in here because I have been corrected a time or two by members of Congress, including Virginia Fox of North Carolina, because I referred to it as congressional break once many years ago. And she said, oh, no, it's an in-district work period. So, you know, members of the House and Senate, they use recesses in various ways. Sometimes they work at home in their home offices. They go to meetings and hearings. They read legislation.

Sometimes if it's a long enough recess, they take vacation. But it is not as if they are just at home twiddling their thumbs watching Netflix. I agree with Jeff. And this is one area where I always feel like I come to Congress's defense and that we do call them recesses or breaks. And they are. They're a recess from the legislative session. But a lot of times members have to do some of the hardest work back home. This is when they have their town hall meetings. This is when they meet with local businesses and constituents and really try and stay in touch with their districts. But I think

sometimes the optics of when we say, oh, they've only worked X amount of weeks this year or they're only in session X amount of days, it can make that sound like they're not working very hard. Can you explain the CODEL? Sure. A CODEL is short for Congressional Delegation. And it is just a shorthand term for when members of Congress travel. Sometimes it's domestic, but for the most part, it's when they take trips abroad. And oftentimes they use these congressional recesses to travel to various places around the world, popular destinations. There's usually an annual codal to China. There's usually an annual codal to Israel.

There's also regular trips to Germany because the U.S. has military bases there. So, yeah, and particularly in the Senate, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee often uses these breaks to go abroad. The other thing I think that we learned ourselves from being out in the country in people's districts these last two weeks is that it is no easy lift coming back and forth to Washington every week, especially the further away you live from Washington. So getting a week or two at home where you can actually talk to people, work in your home office, work with your home staff, I think is really instructive and useful for a lot of members. Which is why members used to come to Washington with their families, buy houses or rent houses, actually live here and go back home occasionally. Now we've reversed the ratio. Now they're back home more than they're here. Many of them never get any kind of permanent residence

in the metropolitan area. They sleep in their office or they sleep in a hotel or they rent a room or it's B&B or whatever. But they only are here three nights a week and they're back home as often as they possibly can be. That's the new definition of representing a district or a state. Thanks, Shabtab. Hope you get a vacation sometime. Thank you to all of the listeners who wrote in about a really important topic, who invented flight? This was a thing last week. Ron, you and I were riffing on this, whether Ohio or North Carolina deserves the credit. We got a lot of email. Angel in Ohio wrote pointing out that, hey, they built the plane in Dayton. You need to give Dayton the

credit. They just had to go to North Carolina for the wind. She says, give Ohio a break after all, without Dayton, we never have Kitty Hawk. and a listener in New Zealand wrote in to say that everyone in New Zealand will tell you that Richard Pierce a farmer from Pleasant Point in the South Island lays claim to the home of flight there are memorials to him and everything I don't know if you also

live in a place that thinks it invented flight please let us know thank you for writing in on a whole range of topics and And on that note, now it is time for Can't Let It Go. This is how we end the show each week with something we can't stop thinking about politics or otherwise. Jeff, you're up first. I am up first. You know, the thing I can't let go is the fact that we are living in an era of woke late night TV hosts. Gone are the days of the congenial Jay Leno types.

Because just this past week, Seth Meyers used a segment of his show to trash the Republicans' health care plan. Stephen Colbert caught some criticism for making a vulgar joke about President Trump and Vladimir Putin. And then when he was called to the carpet about it, there was a fire Colbert hashtag, the calls for boycotts. He didn't apologize. And he's like basically shot into first place, mostly because he rails on Trump every night. That's right. And then this past week, we also have Jimmy Kimmel, who used his

13 minute monologue to sort of detail the birth of his son and the heart issue that he had. And he'd used that to make a point. And there we saw President Obama weigh in. He congratulated Jimmy Kimmel and said this was the whole point of passing the Affordable Care Act in the first place. Jimmy Kimmel was the first person to get former President Barack Obama to weigh in on the healthcare debate, this current healthcare debate that we're having. So that's what I can't let go this week. Our colleague, Eric Deggans, who's our TV critic, he did a really smart piece along those same lines during the election about how sort of the public thinks so poorly of the news media that the late night hosts have become sort of like the moral conscience of the news,

like the new Walter Cronkites, and that people hear their opinions and absorb them better than they do from traditional news anchorman. They're in many ways like the new Jon Stewart. Like they're filling the void that Jon Stewart left when he left his show. Yeah, that's true. And it also gives us an idea of the political leanings of people who stay up past 11 o'clock at night. All right, Sue, how about you? So as the only lady in the podcast today, I feel like my Can't Let It Go is particularly appropriate because it's about the Girl Scouts. And I, full disclosure, was a Girl Scout.

And I recall being a Girl Scout very fondly. And so I saw a story on NPR.org this week that I just can't let it go because I keep thinking about it. And it's about how the Kansas City Catholic Archdiocese is now going to cut ties with the Girl Scout groups and that they want basement, the idea that it, to me, it just seemed like one of those cultural things about just how everything is politicized and polarized these days. And that even the Girl Scouts are sort of subject to this kind of criticism. And at the same time this week, there was this other image of Girl Scouts. I don't know if you guys saw this, but it kind of went viral in the scout world. On scouting Twitter. Of an image in Europe, in the Czech Republic, there was a neo-Nazi rally, and there was a picture of a 16-year-old Girl Scout in her uniform facing down a neo-Nazi and sort of

arguing and fighting. And the Girl Scouts were there as sort of the counter-protest. And I just thought it was a good sort of balance of sort of the ridiculousness of what one side of this argument is doing and a sign of that the Girl Scouts stand for good things. What was the specific concern about the Girl Scouts? The association that the archdiocese said that they were troubled by the secular trend of the Girl Scouts, which has historically always been a secular organization, but certainly with ties specifically to the Christian faith. But that the Girl Scouts in their teachings, particularly more of the modern Girl Scouts, have taught about famous women in history.

And some of those women, like feminist icon Gloria Steinem, are mentioned in that, and women who have supported abortion rights. And that has kind of muddied the issue. The funny thing is, so I'm also Catholic. I also was in scouting growing up. Were you a Boy Scout? I was. I'm an Eagle Scout. That does not surprise me. Why am I actually surprised by that? That is not at all surprising. Scott Horsley as well. Also not surprising. Scott Horsley, I feel like even less surprising. So the funny thing is that I actually had totally missed the story until you emailed me about it earlier today. And when you emailed me about it, I was watching Pope Francis's TED Talk. Just like that clash got me thinking that I think part of the appeal that he's had in kind of reaching out into like the political world in terms of the secular world all over the place

is not that he's changing positions on things like that, but that he just kind of focuses on big picture. Yeah, the big picture stuff. Ron, how about you? I was going to talk a little bit about, well, any number of things that happened this week that I can't let go. But really, we have to doff our cap, and I think that's the right metaphor here, to Ryan Zimmerman. He has just been named the National League Player of the Month for April. That is something, of course, that somebody wins every month. But he has had a phenomenal April. He is batting 426 at this point.

He has had 10 double-hit or at least two-hit games in a row. He is on fire. Just this very day, before we started to record this podcast, I'm told, of course I was not watching the game, but I was told that he got another hit, which makes it his 11th game in a row of getting a hit. I realize that's not... This is the Nationals' first baseman. The Nationals, the Washington Nationals, although it's not just because it's the Washington

Nationals, Scott. It's because- You just admire his work. I admire his work. At his advanced age, he will be 33 in September. Wait, is he only 33? He is only 33. People think he's older-

I think of him as so old. Because he debuted with the Nats way back in 2005, the first year they were in Washington, D.C. But the point here is that he's an inspiration to older fellas who play a younger man's sport. Oh, my God. I'm now like the age of the old over-the-hill baseball player. I do think we should all doff our caps, as I said, to achievement by senior citizens. All right. So I'm up last. And conference calls have like a particular place of like hatred for radio reporters because, you know, these are, you know, when a newsmaker wants to talk to a lot of reporters, they'll generally do some sort of call in conference call, and the vast majority of the reporters on the call could care less what they sound like because they're print reporters, they're taking notes, they're often breathing

loudly into their phones, and the few and far between radio reporters are desperately hoping for audio quality just good enough that you can use it in a radio story, and it never happens. But this week, Mick Mulvaney, the budget director at the White House, had the conference call from hell. It just totally descended into anarchy, and it's the most amazing thing I've ever heard. So the problem was that they had issues with muting, and when it came time for the questions, everybody's phone line was open, and it was like a reply-alcalypse, but on a conference call. So let's just listen to the first part of when it really goes downhill. All right, let's try this. Who would like to ask a question? This is going to be a disaster. This is going to be a disaster because somebody

put the call on mute. Yes, you were first. Please identify yourself. We'll do one or two of these. The music is playing. Doug Obey with Inside EPA. I just wanted to ask, you mentioned that the Democrats didn't get renewable energy subsidies. Which subsidies are we talking about here? They could ask for new subsidies. The music is the perfect answer. Hello? It gets like worse.

I'm sorry, I thought I had some questions. No, your audio just died. I'll try to answer it one more time. And clearly we're having a lot of background noise here. So this continues, and then the song changes, which kicks it into a whole higher gear. You're breaking up. Hello? And then someone yells.

Real stellar c of the White House. I don't even know. I've listened to this ten times. I have no idea what that person screamed. It sounded like, this is unbelievable. Anyway, it just fade to black. I like the little Telstar beep, too. That's very useful on your track.

That's like a humanizing moment to me, because who among us has not been on a conference call where you wanted to yell, this is unbelievable. That is a wrap for today. We'll be back in your feed next week. You can find us on all the things Facebook, Twitter, Instagram at NPR Politics. And we didn't have much time to talk about it here today, but the French presidential election is Sunday. If far right candidate Marine Le Pen wins, it'll be a major upset.

She's down in the polls by double digits. So keep up with NPR over the weekend for any surprises. Make sure you check out Up First. That's NPR's daily news podcast. It'll be posted first thing Monday morning. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Jeff Bennett.

I also cover Congress. I'm Susan Davis. I, too, cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, providing a little variety editor-correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.