The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, September 20

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

After days of back and forth over the terms of a hearing, attorneys for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting, have begun discussing her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. Plus, President Trump attempts to declassify materials related to the Russia Investigation. And we take a step back and look at how women are shaping politics in 2018. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Asma Khalid, political editor Domenico Montanaro, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, and justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Helen. I'm in PyeongChang, South Korea, just about 180 miles from Pyongyang, North Korea, where the historic Inter-Korean Summit is underway. This podcast was recorded at 5.12pm on Thursday, September 20th. Things may have changed since this was recorded. Here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of political news. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault, but how the Senate will deal with the accusations, which he denies, before they vote on his confirmation is still to be determined.

And is this yet another Me Too moment? How is it impacting the midterm elections? I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Keri Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. All right, Kelsey. So when last we had a podcast, there was a hearing scheduled for Monday where Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh were supposed to testify. She had accused him of attacking her sexual assault at a high school party some 36 years ago. He categorically denies it. Okay, so that was Monday. What has changed? Between now and then, we have

had a flurry of letters going back and forth between people on the committee, senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the attorneys for Christine Blasey Ford. And it all kind of culminated in just about an hour or so ago, there was an email from Blasey Ford's attorneys to the committee saying that they're willing to have her come testify, just not on Monday, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley wanted. Now, they're saying that she wishes to testify, but that she has been receiving death threats and she is, you know, in fear. She had to flee her house and she wants some specific protections that they don't outline in this very short email. But they asked to set up a call to discuss the conditions under which she might appear sometime later in the week. Well, and Grassley had set up sort of a deadline of 10 o'clock Friday morning that she needed to have her bio and her opening statement in and submitted to decide whether she was going to testify or not. Right. And she said that she wants the FBI to

conduct an investigation into her allegations before she testifies. And, you know, her lawyers noted that a hearing on Monday is not possible. She said that the committee's insistence is arbitrary. So that's a big piece of this where they're trying to determine what and when they should be able to testify, especially considering Brett Kavanaugh has had all this time to prepare. Carrie, there has been a lot of conversation this week about, well, should the FBI investigate this?

Can the FBI investigate this? The FBI can and has reopened background investigations in the past. And it had happened with the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination. It happened with the nomination for at least one cabinet secretary. And it happens with a bunch of lower level nominations. The FBI is not going to conduct a criminal investigation, but it will try to gather some facts and present them to the White House and move on from there. The key here, though, is the White House has not asked the FBI to reopen that background check. And without it, the Bureau is not going to do that.

So is that the issue that the White House has to ask for this? Because the senators keep saying, oh, it's the White House, the White House has to do it because it's the executive branch? Is that what it is? These materials go to the White House because it's a nominee the president has put forward. And the issue here is that President Trump has come out and said, listen, this is not the job of the FBI. He says the FBI doesn't want to do that. It's not clear to me, in fact, that the FBI has rejected the idea, just rather that they have not been asked to do it. President Trump has also pointed out that Kavanaugh has already had six background checks and that he feels satisfied that all the information that he needs is in there. And, you know, Domenico, you mentioned that Ford's attorneys say that Monday is an arbitrary date, but it's not really all that arbitrary from a political standpoint if you're a Republican who wants to get Kavanaugh on the court by the first week in October when the Supreme Court is supposed to start its session.

Yeah, they wanted him approved yesterday. Literally. Well, in fact, there's a big question about whether this nomination can be successful, whether this guy can get on the bench before the court term starts. In fact, lots of Republican lawyers were talking about that this week, and panels are previewing the next Supreme Court term. And they think it's unlikely, actually, that Brad Kavanaugh, if he is confirmed, will be on the bench in time for the start of the term in October. And that means if there's a four to four tie, that the lower court decision holds, that the lower court opinion holds. So it's possible that we're going to have eight justices here in cases for at least some period of time. If he gets confirmed, can he join at any point,

or does he have to wait until the next term? No, no, he can join at any point. The issue is whether there are ties in matters that have been argued before he gets on the bench and what happens then. Sometimes they actually re-argue that case. That has happened before. You know, remember when Justice Scalia died and the bench was down to justice? They've had to re-argue cases. Down to justice for a year. That's right.

You know, the bigger deadline here, though, politically, is the November midterm elections. Because Democrats, we've started to see over the last couple of months, make some inroads in potentially having a shot at taking back the Senate. Now, still very much an outside chance. But if Democrats were able to take back the Senate, suddenly they control the nominating process. They would have more numbers. And that would mean that Republicans don't have a majority to confirm Kavanaugh or anyone else, frankly, and that would all but derail any nominee that President Trump puts forward. Another interesting thing is that Kavanaugh's nomination isn't particularly popular. I mean, his approval ratings have been falling even before these allegations came out. Gallup put out some

new numbers earlier this week where they basically said it's normal for a nominee to kind of lose steam throughout the confirmation process. But a new poll just came out from NBC saying that his opposition is increasing nine points since last month. And that's a big change. Since he testified. Yeah. Between before he testified and after he testified. Well, we're seeing his nomination become even more partisan than it already had become. But also when you hear Christine Blasey Ford and her attorneys say that they want an FBI investigation, that's because they're really leery of going through

something that winds up being a he said, she said kind of thing, which is what happened with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas in 1991. They really want to be able to have a shared set of facts. Imagine that a shared set of facts that is all agreed to as a premise and a starting point for Democrats, Republicans and possibly having other witnesses who are able to testify and talk about what happened if anything did. But Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the committee, made it pretty clear earlier this week that he only intends for there to be two witnesses, if there in fact are any witnesses and if there is a hearing. Some of that seems to be part of the negotiation that the attorneys for Ford are asking for. And Democrats have said that they deserve to have more witnesses present. So I don't think that that's necessarily fully decided at this point. I think we'll get more information once we know what happens with this call that the attorneys

have asked for or if this call happens. Before we move on, I just want to explore very briefly what is going on here more broadly politically. It's potentially perilous for Republicans who don't want to seem like they are dismissing a very serious allegation, but at the same time, want their nominee to become a Supreme Court justice. And it seems like they're trying to balance that. They're trying to find a way to be sensitive without derailing this process. Part of that has been the amount of transparency that they have tried to make public. So they've been on Twitter, they've been releasing constant press releases and putting out these letters, making sure that the public is aware of the steps that they are taking,

the many, many steps that they are taking to have a thorough investigation and the thorough vetting of their own and the number of options that they have given to Ford. The options Grassley offered were having a public hearing in Washington, having a closed door hearing with the committee in Washington, or being interviewed in some other way, including the possibility of sending a bipartisan group of committee staff to California where she lives to interview her there. They want the public to know that so that they can kind of inoculate themselves against these attacks from Democrats who say that this has been an unreasonable process and that this is just, as we heard from some senators who think that this is just turning into kind of a circus. really caused a lot of backlash toward them. In fact, the following year became known as the year of the woman because of a lot of women who wound up running and winning for office. And we're already in a political environment

where we have a record number of women running for office. And any misstep by Republicans in how they treat Christine Blasey Ford, while at the same time trying to confirm Kavanaugh could really be problematic. Is there any risk for Democrats, too, though, that they look like they are just obstructing and they weren't going to vote yes anyway? Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's also a real serious risk here for those Democrats who are running for reelection in states that President Trump won in 2016, because there are plenty of Republican voters who think Kavanaugh is a good

choice or they voted for Trump in the first place because he would put a conservative on the court. And those people are going to put a lot of pressure on these Democratic senators to vote for Kavanaugh. And these accusations make it very, very difficult for any Democrat to go and say that they can support him. If anything, those are the people who are going to be under the most pressure. People like Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri surprisingly came out in the midst of all of this saying that she was going to oppose Kavanaugh, but for completely different reasons and said it was about dark money and campaigns.

All right. We're going to move the conversation on to another item that happened this week. The news of this came on Monday, just as all of this Kavanaugh stuff was really blowing up in the news. And then President Trump makes the announcement that he ordered the Justice Department to declassify a bunch of materials related to the Russia investigation. What did the president ask to be declassified and why? The president has ordered immediate declassification of part of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application on Carter Page. Carter Page, of course, a former Trump campaign advisor who had a lot of ties to Russia. The president also wanted out there text messages about the Russia

investigation involving some very familiar names, people like former FBI Director Jim Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe, former FBI Agent Pete Strzok, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. He wants all of those text messages out and unredacted. And finally, he also wants some interviews out with respect to the Russia probe, interviews involving Bruce Ohr, a DOJ lawyer who's been on his enemies list, and a whole bunch of other materials, too. Yeah, I mean, the remarkable thing is some of those names were not household names until the president started tweeting about them a lot. And many of them, you'll notice, although not all, have lost or left their jobs since those attacks began. So, Carrie, my question is, what's the controversy there?

I mean, isn't, you know, transparency a good thing, I guess the White House would say? That's what the president argued. Well, there are a lot of concerns from former national security officials, former Justice Department officials. I spent some time canvassing them this week. The head of the National Security Division at the Justice Department under President Obama, David Criss, the guy who literally wrote the textbook on national security law, said that this was off the charts. He'd never seen anything like this before. Talked to Kerry Cordero, who helped process these FISA applications inside the Justice Department, says this is a very dangerous move. It sends mixed signals to

people who provide information to the U.S. intelligence community about whether we're going to expose them and expose sources and methods. And finally, David Laufman, who a former prosecutor who prosecuted some terrorism and national security cases over the years, says there's a notion that if you start giving some of this stuff away, that in your terrorism cases, in your cases involving espionage, that defendants are going to ask for some of these materials in the course of litigation. And a judge might say, listen, DOJ, President Trump declassified this stuff. Why shouldn't this terrorism defendant have it? You know who really likes this? Yeah.

All of President Trump's very strong defenders in Congress. So we're talking about people like Devin Nunes, Congressman of California. We're talking about Mark Meadows. He's the chairman of the very conservative House Freedom Caucus. These guys immediately put out statements commending the president because they think that it's going to uncover the partisanship within the FBI and that it will, you know, prove that the point that they've been trying to make all along is that the FBI is out to get conservatives. Well, and these these House Republicans have sort of been pushing this narrative, pushing it out on cable, pushing it out there, in some ways, getting it into the president's ear. They are on Fox News constantly talking about this. And they

are they will talk about this anytime that they are given an opportunity. And it's something that Meadows has been pushing for months, if not more than a year. Is the idea that this would then somehow undermine the investigation, blow up the Mueller probe? Is that the goal? Remember, the president did this only three days after his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, appeared in federal court in Washington, pleaded guilty to two felony crimes and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation. And remember, this investigation involves foreign connections between people in Russia, cutouts, and potentially members of the Trump campaign. So if you're releasing information about an active and ongoing investigation,

that cannot be helpful to the people conducting the investigation. That is a feature, not a flaw. Well, President Trump spoke about this earlier in the week. He said it was all about transparency. That's what he said it was about. And transparency is in most of these press releases from the House Republicans who really like this because that's their line here is that this is about unveiling some hidden things that are happening within the FBI. And I should point out that even though the president on Monday announced an immediate declassification, we have seen no such materials yet. It is Thursday evening. And the Justice Department, the FBI and

national security officials say they're putting these materials through a process, a review process. And the thinking is that they may ask for certain redactions before these materials are released, which could or could not create another tempest with the White House. And think about what was happening that day on Monday. All over cable news was the allegation against Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford. You know, and then suddenly that night, we've got this declassification story. You have a story about trade and tariffs that the White House was going through with and about the capping of refugees all at the same time, all dumped at once. And we really don't have any real movement on the declassification that we know of yet. I think there is activity behind

the scenes. There is a process and the officials are going through that process. What's going to turn up? I don't know. You know, where there has been a little more movement, though, is President Trump once again decided to beat up on his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, this week, repeatedly calling out Sessions and saying that he doesn't believe he has an Attorney General. So Jeff Sessions, once again, a convenient target for the president's unrest. Carrie and Kelsey, thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you.

And we are going to let you go. But when we come back, Domenico is going to stay here. We'll be joined by a couple of our other colleagues and we're going to look at why women are running for office and turning out to vote in record numbers this year. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Grow with Google. Digital skills are becoming more and more important in today's economy. Hi, I'm Daniel Alarcón, host of NPR's Spanish-language podcast, Radio Ambulante. This week, a year after the earthquakes that devastated the country, Mexico is still dealing with the aftermath. Schools were especially damaged and the government promised to rebuild them fast. But two journalists discover that the truth about that reconstruction is much more complicated. And we're back and we're joined now by Asma Khalid and Daniel Kurtzleben.

Hey, guys. Hey, Tam. Hey there. How's it going? You were already here, Domenico. Oh, I was? Hi, Domenico. Hey.

I didn't see you there. Nice to see you guys. We are going to take some time now to step back and look at the year of the woman. This is the second year of the woman. There was another one in 1992. More women than ever are running for office up and down the ballot. And more women have turned out to vote in primaries this year. Guys, why is this happening? Why is this happening now?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Next question. Okay, let's expand on that just a little bit. I mean, look, the expansion in energy among women this year and the expansion of candidates among women this year is overwhelmingly on the Democratic side. It is simply huge. And that has propelled the number of women candidates across the board to records for governorships, Congress, both houses and state legislatures. Now, what happened with a lot of those women, as I'm sure you all can guess, is that after Donald Trump was elected, he already had very high unfavorables among women. Women in really big numbers disapproved of him when he was elected and did afterwards,

especially among Democrats. And a lot of women were so upset that not only did they come out to big, giant women's marches worldwide, but a lot of them after that held on to that energy in a way that we were all wondering about when those marches happened. We all said, will that hold? As it turns out, they did. They organized and a lot of them for the first time said, all right, I'm going to go out and run for office. Among Republicans, it's not all that remarkable, to be perfectly honest. It's kind of a wash. It's similar to past years. Yeah. The number of Republican women who are running is right about on par with where it was in 2016.

Really on the Democratic side, this is huge. I'm joining you all right now from Michigan. I've been doing some reporting in Michigan's 11th congressional district, which are, you know, a pretty good chunk of affluent, not entirely, but pretty affluent suburbs around Detroit. And I met a woman yesterday who told me she got really energized as a result of Donald Trump's victory. You know, prior to that, she had sometimes voted Republican, sometimes voted Democrat. But one thing I thought that was fascinating is she said if she's looking at voting this year for her ballot, she will likely vote Democrat up and down the ballot. She says that her ticket will probably be all women with the exception of just one local judge.

I mean, that's incredible. Just that, you know, down from Congress to local state rep, state senator, there are just women who are nominees on the Democratic side. And that's not, you know, unusual just to this district. There is a sort of feedback loop to that point on the Democratic side. Democratic voters, but in particular Democratic women, pollsters will tell you, are in particular energized by women candidates. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans not only to say there should be more women in office, but Democrats are more likely to believe that there is something about electing more women that will somehow make politics better, that it is a good thing to elect more women to office. It was you, Danielle, who at the outset

said, really, this is about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And I cannot overstate that. Yeah. I mean, there are so many, many women I am meeting, particularly on the Democratic side, who say that they never even thought they would go to a rally or knock on doors or be engaged. And frankly, some of them thought that they were independents prior to Donald Trump's election. And now these are the women who are sort of on the ground doing grassroots activism in the Democratic Party? And you ask them why. And singularly, they will say it was Donald Trump's election. You know, and some of them said that they they didn't really think that much about it. But then they started thinking more about their children. And they worried what type of, you know, sort of world politically their children would be growing up into. And that Access Hollywood video that came

on the eve of the 2016 election was motivating for a lot of people. You know, if you go to the origin story of the Me Too movement, there were stories of men behaving badly before that, but that sort of put lighter fluid on it. And now on the eve of these midterms, you have controversy about an alleged sexual assault related to the Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, that's been playing out. And that's affecting voters, too. Absolutely. And you can't quite put this in a vacuum. You could argue you can make a very good argument that, you know, there was a powder keg sort of growing already before Donald Trump got on the scene even. I mean, you had stories of Bill Cosby, for example, and women were already getting fired up. And

women of color, for example, were very powerful within the Black Lives Matter movement, that sort of thing. So there was a certain amount of activism growing. And I mean, plenty of women were fired up in 2008 by Hillary Clinton. That added to it. Feminism was also just becoming more cool, to be honest. And so I think you had a lot of women, particularly among liberals, who were starting to change their thinking anyway. I think Donald Trump, you could argue, was a huge catalyst, but not exactly the only factor here. You know, we're talking about so much about how this is about Democratic women. But there's a lot of evidence of crossover, actually.

When you look at the numbers among suburban women, for example, in our polling, you know, President Trump's approval ratings are at record lows. And that's really significant because Democrats have to take back 23 seats to win back the House if they're going to do so. And a lot of those districts are in the suburbs and those suburban women are going to be so key to who wins in those districts. Another piece of evidence of this is that in our latest NPR Marist poll, Trump's approval rating among women is 2862. In other words, only 28 percent of women approve of the job he's doing. Now, you might say, well, sure, women have been on the side of Democrats. Look at the exit polls from 2016. President Trump won 41% of women or thereabouts. So there has been a decline and a decrease as President Trump has

played to the base. And I think the big question is, will we actually see shifts among white women and then married women? You know, political scientists used to talk a lot about this idea of a marriage gap, the tracking polls that they've been doing around Donald Trump's favorability. And she said herself she was shocked because in the last year and a half, his approval rating, his disapproval rating, I should say, has actually increased by 17 points among married women. I mean, that is huge in just a year and a half time span. Asma, you are in Michigan, you are covering a congressional race, but you're also have been there talking to women in this week where the Supreme Court fight and the allegations of sexual assault against the nominee have been very much present on people's minds and in the news. How is that playing? Yeah, I've been talking to a number of women,

Democrats, Republicans, young, old, married, single, to try to suss out how people are feeling about this. And some of it, right, is falling along somewhat predictable lines. People who already opposed Kavanaugh just think this is one more thing that possibly could discredit him. And people who supported him worry that this is just an effort to smear him. I feel it's a little bit more political than personal. It doesn't look good. It doesn't look good to me. He was a very young man. She was a very young woman. Things happen. It needs to be investigated. We need to figure out if it's true. One of the things I think that's interesting about those set of clips is I don't know that you could exactly tell who was the

Republican and who was the Democrat. And I say that in part because one of the other interesting divides I noticed was somewhat of a generational difference. There was a much older Democratic woman I met who had some concerns about this being used in a political way. It's not that she did not believe the allegations, but she just sort of had had concerns about the political nature of this. And then the last woman's voice we heard, that was a 21 year old college student who really felt like this needed to be investigated. And she also says, you know, maybe, hey, this is being driven by Democratic politics. But she's also a college student who's grown up in the Me Too era, who feels that when there are these types of accusations, we need to investigate them. And that's kind of different than what we hear from older Republicans.

And she's a Republican. She is. We've been talking about this historic number of female candidates, more women running for office than ever before. But women are not a monolith. You're kidding. We're all different in our own special ways. But so are these candidates all messaging

in the same way? Are they messaging in different ways? How are they describing or not describing their gender? That's a great question. You'll be surprised to know they're not all running in the same way. Who do you know? Yeah. No, of course they're running in different ways. I mean, you have young, fresh candidates who are running on. I'm new. I'm young. I have fresh ideas. You have longtime incumbent candidates running on experience. You have that. But you also one of the most interesting aspects that there is out there is that there are so many races where women are running against women. And you might be inclined to think, oh, in a woman versus woman race, gender disappears. But that doesn't actually seem to be true. Big case in point here is an open Senate race in Arizona where you have Martha McSally, a representative and a former fighter pilot running against Kristen Sinema, also a representative from Arizona. And Martha McSally has made her big selling point. Here I am in front of a fighter jet. I am tough. After eight years of fighting,

I won my battle for the religious freedom of American service women. Now I'm deployed to D.C. to fight for Arizona. Though in Kentucky, there's a Democratic candidate, a woman, another fighter pilot, because there are a lot of people with military experience running this cycle. That Top Gun background is good optics, man. So Amy McGrath is the candidate and she has an ad where she is also in front of a jet. Someday I'll tell my kids about flying combat missions

and about working at the Pentagon. And then though, she has other ads with her family, with her kids. There's an ad where she talks about how she takes her kids to the doctor to get their shots. And my 90th mission is running for Congress to take on politicians who put party over country. But some days this is my toughest mission. Cute little toddler getting his shots. He drops trow and runs out of the doctor's office at the end.

It's very lighthearted and adorable. Now, you can look at this one of two ways. One is that Americans are getting more comfortable with women candidates. Women candidates are getting more comfortable showing, you know, I'm tough, but I'm a mom. I'm this, but I'm that. There were women who were breastfeeding in their ads this year, for example. That said, what I have also had one analyst tell me was, you know, listen, in the age of social media, people value authenticity. Men and women alike are doing this.

So there are a couple sides to this. They're trying to make ads that'll go viral. Absolutely. And a lot of these have. This year of the woman, if we can call it that, has allowed people and sort of a greater diversity of candidates to come forth. I was listening to Stacey Abrams, who's the Democratic nominee for the governor of Georgia recently at this congressional black caucus session. And she mentioned a comment that really stuck with me. She talked about how she she herself described herself as a woman with a darker shade of hue. Right. There's often been this idea that certain black candidates, maybe

people can run. But but she said, you know, she's a woman just with a darker shade. And on top of it, she does not fix her hair. She's like, I have natural hair. And to me, that was interesting because she had this thought that that was sort of an uphill battle traditionally in politics. And I've heard this from other African-American women candidates as well, which makes me just wonder if overall we are seeing just a greater diversity of types of people who are running and feeling like there is space for them. Most definitely. So there is a greater diversity of types of people who are running for office. When we all wake up after the election and look at who is elected? Will the House, will the Senate look like a greater mix of people?

Maybe a little is the answer. OK, explain. All right. So I have some numbers crunched by the wonderful people at the Rutgers University Center for American Women in Politics. They do a lot of great stuff on this. Here is what they found. If women won all of the House contests where they're currently favored to win and if they won the toss ups, and that's a big if, they would hold 24 percent of House seats in the next session of Congress. Currently, they hold 19 percent. So even with this massive wave of candidates this year that we all can't stop talking about and that's worth talking

about, it's not going to be close to parity. It's just going to increase by maybe 5 percent. And the reason for this, and Danielle, you've reported on this in the past, which is fascinating, is a lot of these candidates are running in really competitive to not remotely competitive. There's no chance. Well, maybe there's a chance, but there's very little chance that they'll actually win. They're running in tough races. You look at all these races that are solid Republican seats and you have a first time candidate running against a guy or woman who has been in that seat for quite a while because usually these first time candidates are Democrats. And you can look at that and see, oh, you had all of this energy out there this

year. They wanted to contest every seat and contesting every seat means, yeah, contesting the really hard to impossible to win seats. So there's a lot of people who are going to lose. And by the way, while we talk about this big wave of candidates, women only represent, I think it's around one in four candidates that came out this year. I mean, in addition to the wave of Democratic women, there was a wave of Democratic men that came out. So really, it was just a whole bunch of energy on the Democratic side. But Democratic women have won at a higher rate. And if there happens to be 25 percent, 24 percent women in Congress versus 19, here's the other question. What difference does it make?

I mean, I would argue it all changes, right? Like we've been talking about the Kavanaugh, the Senate Judiciary Committee. I mean, there was a point when that committee had no women on it. And I think anybody watching the confirmation hearings now would arguably say that the tone feels different with even just a couple women on that committee. So I would argue any type of change arguably changes just the conversation, even if it is maybe on the margins. But beyond that also, I'm not trying to in any way diminish the importance of the number of candidates, but I would argue that's not the only metric that we're seeing this year. The extreme level of activism you're seeing from women who were never engaged,

you know, never thought that they would knock on somebody's door is also monumental. And I feel like we'll see the ripples of that for election cycles to come. Okay, guys, we are going to end this conversation here. And we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, can't let it go. Support for NPR and the following message come from Newsy, the TV news channel with honest, in-depth context on the stories that matter. Newsy is for people who aren't satisfied with getting only the loudest part of the story. Newsy delivers more, more context, more solutions, and greater understanding of the people and events that shape our world. Learn more at newsy.com slash watch.

Hi, this is Peter Sagal. For 20 years, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me has been making fun of the news with comedians and celebrity guests. We got silly limericks. We got terrible impressions. If you think the news is a joke, wait till you hear our show. New podcast episodes are available every Saturday. And we're back. It's time now to end the show the way we always do by talking about the things we just can't stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise. Hey, Asma, what can't you let go of? Anybody I would say who viral conversation around identity politics because a script writer for Sesame Street in the 1980s and 90s said basically that he imagined Bert and Ernie as, quote, loving partners. And a lot of people then took that to mean that they were in a gay relationship. And so Sesame Street, long story short, they kind of quickly responded and said that these are puppets, puppets don't have a sexual orientation. And, and this kind of exploded

into something much, much bigger. And I guess for me, it raised these really interesting questions of to what extent like we as adults, take our politics and subscribe it to four-year-olds who may or may not even know or care about what relationship Bert and Ernie have. And I say this in part because growing up, so growing up, there was this joke. And I've always intrigued about the later interpretations of Bert and Ernie as a gay couple, because growing up, the joke in our family was I had a really, really round face and my sister looked a little bit like Bert and so but the thing is that we used to joke all the time that we were like Bert and Ernie and even like friends of ours would say this it was you know when my sister the other sister would make this joke so to me it was always really interesting because Bert and Ernie when I was a kid was this

idea of two people who were so, so fundamentally different from each other, but had this lifelong relationship with one another. And to me, that was always my sister and I. There's this whole philosophy out there that every Muppet is a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. Bert and Ernie are the perfect pairing of this. A lot of people like to say that they're either Chaos Muppets or Order Muppets. You know, when you were a kid, you identified with one or the other. I identified with Bernie.

I had never heard this before. Oh, yeah. I was in Ernie. With Bernie? No, with Ernie. Oh, oh. I identified with Ernie. Okay.

Danielle, what can't you let go of? Well, let's stay in the realm of things that are geared towards children. So a teeny bit of backstory here. Months ago, I was at the beer garden near NPR having a beer with various people on our desk. And I happened to be there sitting next to one of the editors on the science desk. Her name is Giselle Grayson. And we got on the topic of her kids. And she told me, did I ever tell you about the project I did with NPR people and children's books? And I said, no. And I guess this was before there were a lot of children's books on Audible

and that sort of thing, but she wanted a way to read to her kids without having to constantly read to her kids because she had to get other things done. So she got various other NPR people to record children's books, including a certain White House correspondent on our desk. One summer morning, as butterflies were flitting between the zinnias... Oh, my goodness. Scott Horsley.

This is amazing. Scott is multi-talented. He is, of course. It's an awesome... That butterfly just flew right into the swamp all by itself, said Eposamondas. Why do you always tell me not to go into the swamp by myself? The lilting

southern accent, it's delightful. And so, listening to it, it just brings a smile to my face. I cannot handle how much I enjoy it. I'm going to go next because mine also involves something a little swampy. There is a story that took the internet

by storm this week, and it is a little swampy. There is a story that took the internet by storm this week, and it is a little bit political. A little bit? Just a tiny little bit political. Okay. The mayor of Livingston, Texas, Judy Cochran, she did something remarkable.

She killed a 12-foot-long, 580-pound gator. That's a monster. That's the alligator. You ready to get him, Steven? Wait, Nana, you better hit him good because that's that horse eater. So there was a video. It went relatively viral. I think someone in the family posted it on Facebook. Then it became a local news story. ABC 13 in Houston interviewed Judy Cochran, 73-year-old great-grandmother, who described why this particular gator was in her sights. Three years ago, we came up missing a miniature horse. I said, don't mess with Nana.

My grandchildren call me Nana. We've been talking about powerful women in politics, more women in politics. And not only is she the mayor, but she can kill a gator. Not that I want to defend gators. But how does she know that this is the gator that ate her mini horse years ago? Well, it's probably just been hanging out in the pond getting fatter and fatter. I don't know. She had a permit.

Or she attacked an innocent gator. Right. Well, and so, you know, because this is 2018 and she became a global sensation, the New York Times has a story now saying that she's gotten some mean phone calls and people. For hurting the gator? Well, just all kinds of people thinking she did something wrong and being concerned and, you know, in defense of the gator. Gator's going to gate. Give me five.

Domenica, what can't you let go of? I can't let go of yet another NFL controversy because it just never ends now. And it is, again, political. And it has to do, again, with the halftime show. It's barely the NFL season yet. And there's already a halftime show controversy. And that's because there are reports unconfirmed at this point, but multiple reports that the new halftime show this year

will be Maroon 5. Okay. Okay. What's wrong with that? Well, the controversy is it's in Atlanta and a lot of people felt that it was disrespectful to have Maroon five play the halftime show when there are so many other groups from atlanta who could fill in let me read you a tweet from jake ruse atlanta home of outcast ti future ludicrous usher etc gets maroon five to play the damn super bowl okay maroon five with all the artists from Atlanta that are 100 times better, somebody on the Super Bowl entertainment booking staff needs to be relieved of their duties pronto. That's from Poetic Genius. Is Maroon 5 even still a going operation?

I didn't even realize they were from Atlanta. No, they're not. Oh, I see. It's the Super Bowl. But they're so vanilla. Don't you think that to some degree this is the NFL saying, we want to have this super, super generic halftime show? I mean, I just can't imagine anything Maroon 5 doing

compared to previous halftime show. And there was all this controversy with Justin Timberlake and whether or not he should be doing that halftime show. People were mad because he wasn't bringing Janet Jackson on stage because he was part of that whole original controversy with her they were mad that he even invoked Prince after Prince died and just a lot of haterade in that direction and now the same thing with Maroon 5 and you know what the NFL's goal is is to have this you know, halftime show that has broad appeal since it is the most watched show in the country.

And you have a whole and you have a lot of other people upset about it. I can't even name them. We're in five song. All right. That's a wrap for today. We will be back as soon as there's a political headline that you need to know about. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.