The NPR Politics Podcast - What's Next For Congress In 2018

Episode Date: January 2, 2018

It's 2018, which means it's an election year. But Congress has a lot to do before all attention turns to the midterms, including agree on government funding, and work out a deal on both Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the Children's Health Insurance Program. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith and congressional correspondent Susan Davis. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Guy Raz here, host of How I Built This, with the recommendation for another podcast for you to check out, namely How I Built This. Every week, I talk to the people behind some of the most inspiring companies and brands in the world, with stories of incredible persistence, grit, and insight. You can find How I Built This on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Scott Detrow, host of the NPR Politics Podcast, here to tell you about an opportunity to see our podcast live in person in Washington, D.C. We're headed to the Warner Theater on Thursday, January 18th.

And you can find tickets at WAMU.org slash events. We can't wait to see you there. Hi, this is Kat flying home to New Zealand via Australia after spending the holidays with friends and family in the U.S. We just crossed the international dateline into 2018, bidding farewell to a very interesting 2017. This podcast was recorded at... 108 on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, with the NPR One app, or on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Happy New Year. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It's 2018. It's an even year. And for a politics podcast like ours, that means one thing.

It's an election year. We'll preview that in a little bit. And we'll also talk about what's on Congress's plate as it returns for a new year. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. Happy New Year, everybody. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. Can I push one thing? I stole this idea from my cousin on New Year's Eve, and it was a great idea, and I'm an evangelist for now. In addition to the Phil Collins midnight thing, which I did do, and it was great, she and her kids take a lemon

and write bad things from the last year on the lemon, and then shortly before midnight, throw it out the window. I thought you were going to say they make lemonade. They don't make lemonade, but they throw it out the window. I co-opted that and used a large sweet potato because there were a bunch of people at my house, and it couldn't all fit on a lemon. Just toss the sweet potato. Where did you throw it?

You live in the city. I have a yard. I gave it a high arc in the yard. I did not throw it into the street. So there's just a sweet potato laying in your yard? The next morning I picked it up and threw it away. Okay. I bet it was really, really frozen. My dog was like really intrigued, but I threw it away before the dog could eat the sweet potato. I feel like you should bury it in your yard. That seems like more of a symbolic thing about saying goodbye to the year. The thing is I thought of this to do at 1157. So there wasn't time to got it. Yeah. So listening to your intro, it made me think, oh, gosh, I can no longer say it's too soon to talk about 2018. Oh, no, it's 2018. We're doing it. We like we are it is now

game on. We get to talk about the midterms and we don't even have to apologize. Well, this will make you feel better. We will talk about the midterms in the second half of the podcast. We will start with what's coming up in Congress. The tax bill, as we know, is behind us that is signed into law. But Congress has a lot on its plate. And Sue, the to do list sounds to me very suspiciously like the December to do list. And a todo list that sounds suspiciously like things we've talked about a lot, which the number one priority is to keep the government open. Before they left for the Christmas break, they passed a short-term stopgap funding measure

that keeps the government running until January 19th. And in the meantime, they're trying to negotiate all sorts of unfinished business with the intention of hopefully using this final spending bill as a likely vehicle to pass all this unfinished legislation. So there was a lot of stuff in the air that was secondary to the main, you know, funding the government issue, just the mix of them, DACA, CHIP, healthcare stabilization, FISA. Of all of those, what is the most important? In the short term, the first thing they have to do before they can move forward on pretty

much anything else is they need to find a bipartisan agreement on what the spending levels for the government should be. That is why that is the first priority this week for congressional leaders who are meeting with senior White House officials to try and basically just get an agreement on a number for both how much money the government's going to spend on defense spending and for all the other priorities. They can't really move forward on all these other negotiations until they just kind of get that top line figure. Tam, there's a meeting with White House officials and congressional leaders tomorrow. And then over the weekend, President Trump gets together with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan at Camp David.

Are there any priorities the White House is pushing for when it comes to shifting funding around, adding some places, taking it away other places? Well, the main priority that President Trump has had is that he wants more money for defense. Obviously, he'd also like to fund his wall, but that may have to come with the negotiations over DACA. And in reality, that may have to go by the wayside during the negotiations over the DREAM Act. So let's actually talk about that for a minute, because in September, we all talked about the fact that DACA was probably going to be punted to December because Democrats had leverage then. Democrats chose to not use that leverage in December. So the question is, what do Democrats push for in a couple of weeks when it comes to saying we won't do X or else when it comes to DACA? But I guess the other question is where President Trump actually stands on that,

because remember, he initially was on board with the big picture idea of some sort of compromise, but then he had that real hard line document that came out that said, you know, these 20 things are my immigration priorities. Where is he between those two positions right now? He at the moment, I think, is closer to that hard line document. In addition to saying that he wants funding for the wall, he also wants to end what's called chain migration. That's what they call it, where it's immigration policy based on, at least in part, on family ties. He wants it to be based on merit and like who has a lot of education or the potential for a good job. That would be like a complete rewriting of the immigration system and is a complete rewriting

of the system that doesn't actually even have a ton of Republican support, much less Democratic support. And now comes the moment when I would like to, for my first time in this calendar year, read a Trump tweet. He has been tweeting about DACA just this morning. He says, quote, Democrats are doing nothing for DACA, just interested in politics. DACA activists and Hispanics will go hard against DIMS. We'll start falling in love with Republicans and their president, exclamation point. We are about results. So important reminder here that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is ending because President Trump made a decision to end it. He set the end date for March 5th. Sue, at the time he said that seemed pretty far off. March 5th, not that far away at this point in time. He did. And we should also note he made the decision to end it because the program was being challenged in the court system. It was an Obama era program, which many Republicans believed they would have been victorious in the courts, that the president does not have unilateral authority to do that kind of immigration policy.

Now, the challenge that they're going to have, and I think the challenge we're going to see thematically throughout 2018, is there is no solution to the immigration question that isn't bipartisan. There is no immigration bill that can pass the House with 218 Republican votes. Nothing can get through the Senate without 60 votes. They're going to need at least nine Democrats. And you can't do anything unless the president agrees he's going to sign it. So the challenges are the dynamics, the legislative demands of what 2018 is asking for fundamentally call for more bipartisan solutions than the big legislative priorities of 2017, which were repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act and passing comprehensive tax legislation. And there was talk about some sort of group forming. Jeff Flake from

Arizona was one of the people talking about that, saying we feel like in mid-January we can have some sort of bipartisan conversation on the Senate floor. Absolutely. And I will say that one of the reasons that Democrats left town without putting up a bigger fight over immigration is by every measure in the Senate, there are sincere bipartisan ongoing negotiations going for a comprehensive immigration bill. And Jeff Flake said that he's been given assurances by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that that will get a vote potentially as early as January. Mitch McConnell has said he will bring an immigration bill to the floor if he knows it has the 60 votes to pass. But Democrats have said all along they're never going to vote for a wall.

Ending chain migration is a pretty drastic change that doesn't seem like it would have 60 votes. What do either of you think Democrats could realistically accept in exchange for protection for these 800,000 or so people who are in the country? I think Democrats would give a metaphorical wall. They would be more than happy to have significant increases in funding for border security, drones along the border, things like that. But an actual physical wall that President Trump can pound on and say, this is my thing that I got. They are not going to say yes to that. And they're going to make the case and they already are making the case like you can't hold these 700, 800,000 young people hostage for your wall. But the president, Tam, hasn't he also been sort

of he's waffled a bit on the wall as well, right? I mean, at times he said it's going to be a big, beautiful wall. It's going to be a physical structure. But he has cracked the door to negotiating a wall in terms of, you know, he's talked about using drones or other forms of border security. I mean, it seems like the intention is really to give some measure of certainty that the U.S.-Mexico border is more tightly controlled for illegal immigration, which in the past many Democrats have also said that they do support. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the day, whether it is a physical wall that he can touch, whether it is see-through or not see-through, how tall it is, what it's made of. And, you know, it could be that this comes down to how do you define wall? And can President Trump claim victory in this case? So we've talked about this in a couple of different spurts before. And this is something

that, as you said, is complicated, has been tried and not resolved several times in the past when there were big Republican majorities, when there were big Democratic majorities, when it was mixed government. So it seems to me like it's very unlikely or at least a very high bar to reach for this to be resolved within the next month. There is. I don't think we have a good read yet of where those Senate negotiations are. Like I said, top negotiators, people like Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who the DREAM Act has been one of his driving issues in Congress, has also sounded like he believes there is a bipartisan solution to be had. We know what Democrats want, right? We know that they want a path to either legal status or citizenship for the so-called DREAMers.

What we're not entirely sure yet is how much they're willing to give and how much they need to give in order to get Republicans and President Trump on board. They've done this before. The Senate has done this before. They know how to do it. They have the tools. They probably have the votes. The question is, is the timing right? Is the political incentive right? And, you know, for Democrats, how hard do they want to draw a red line and not negotiate on these issues? Because I do think, again, as we enter this midterm election year, they see keeping things like their base, Hispanic minority voters and others excited about this issue, they have an incentive there too. Okay, so the things we just talked about are

probably going to dominate the next few weeks. And as I mentioned before, I'll mention again here, just to sum up, other things still in the air, the Children's Health Insurance Program, that had expired. They put enough money to keep it going for another month or so, but they're going to have to resolve that in a long-term way soon. Same with a law authorizing foreign surveillance, FISA law, that was renewed for about another month. And then there's the question of, again, something we've been talking about for several months. Is there going to be some sort of stabilization for the health care market? Susan Collins had insisted on it in exchange for her vote on tax cuts.

It didn't happen, but she feels confident it'll happen this month. That all being said, turning the page to a broader look at 2018, it was a pretty tumultuous year for the most part for the president and his own party in Congress, but it ended on a really positive note, getting that big accomplishment done. I mean, does that keep things going in a smooth way for 2018 or does that all depend on what happens in the next two or three weeks? Well, I didn't want to be predictive in 2017 and I don't want to be too predictive about 2018 either. It's January 2nd. You can just turn that resolution out the door. That's true. You're absolutely right, Scott.

The Republican Party ended 2017 on a very high note. The party, in terms of the relationship between Capitol Hill and the White House, is probably the strongest it's ever been. I think they have found a path to how to work together. I think the president sees what it feels like to have a big legislative win and probably wants to have that feeling again in 2018. The demands of an election year are just different. Historically, the bulk of the legislative work in an election year tends to be pretty much wrapped up by the summertime, right? Like you don't really get a lot of big

legislative victories in the fall of an election year. So I think we're looking for a January through springtime crunch in terms of the big legislative push and how successful they're going to be. And the thing that I would look to, and maybe this will all be worked out by the end of the week with this retreat at Camp David, and they will do like a trust fall and everyone will be on the same page. But at the moment, the president, the House speaker and the majority leader, all Republicans are all emphasizing different priorities for the year ahead. And that seems like not the best way to proceed rapidly towards one goal. So you have Mitch McConnell saying everything needs to be done in a more bipartisan way. I mean, he's looking at the reality of the

Senate. He's looking at the numbers. He's looking at the midterms. He's looking at a lot of things. You have Paul Ryan, who wants to take on so-called entitlement reform, possibly Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, talking about doing reconciliation again, this process that makes things have a lower bar, the 51 vote majority in the Senate. And then you have the president talking about infrastructure, DACA and welfare reform, which is somewhat different than what Paul Ryan is talking about. The president's idea, according to aides who've spoken to Mara Eliason, of what welfare reform is, is sort of means-tested government programs. So that could be Medicaid, but it wouldn't be Medicare,

and it wouldn't be Social Security. It would be things like food stamps and possibly Medicaid. I think it'll crystallize a little bit more later in the month. I do think that congressional leaders, when one party controls everything, they are certainly looking to the president to set the tone for the agenda for the year. He's probably going to do that in his State of the Union address later this month. And then shortly after the State of the Union, Republicans and Democrats do this, too. But Republicans will have their annual retreat where they, you know, they leave Washington, they go away for the weekend and they kind of fight out and work out

what they want their priorities to be for the year. Okay, I need to circle back to something that Tam said. Yes? If you had to be caught in a trust fall by Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, or Mitch McConnell, who would you pick? Who do you think is most trustworthy? Paul Ryan. P90X, baby.

Mainly because he's the strongest. You know he's going to catch you. Based on how Donald Trump has treated his allies and cabinet members, he would be pick number three for me to be caught in a trust fall. I could just see him walking away. I also think people really trust Mitch McConnell. But if we're just going on strength here, you want the guy that's got the six pack, right? That mix of trust and strength.

Yes. You want the guy that's made fitness a priority because you know that he's going to like... And he still wins. He's like, I got this. I'm going to catch you. Yeah. OK. So Paul Ryan, too much McConnell, three Donald Trump. That's our power rankings. Trustful and trustful. Yeah. OK. And I think that's a great point to take a quick break. We will come back and talk about politics. I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. I'm Cardiff Garcia. And we are here with a new show. The Indicator from Planet Money. On every show, we take some number in the news and we dive into it to find the big idea behind it.

Get it on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. As we said, it is an even number year. It is a midterm election year. And let's just start by looking at the big picture, historic picture. And this is generally not great news for President Trump and Republicans, because by and large, no matter who you are in your second year as president, there's a good chance your party is going to lose seats. If you are not popular, there is an even greater chance your party is going to lose seats. If you are not popular, there is an even greater chance

your party is going to lose seats. Sue, what all do you think about when you think about, is this going to be a good year or a bad year for the incumbent party in a midterm? So I think the most important thing to remember about the midterms, especially in the modern era, is they are essentially a referendum on the president. It's your first chance to cast a federal vote since the president's been in your first chance to cast a federal vote since the president's been in office. So one of the most important things that people look at is what is the president's approval rating? And right now, President Trump is going into an election year with an approval rating that hovers in the high 30s. I think it's around 38%

right now. Oftentimes, they say they use 45% as sort of the bar for over under on how well you do. If the president's polling above 45 percent, the losses tend to be less severe. The deeper you go under 45 percent, it tends to get pretty ugly. And actually, in 2010, President Obama was just around 45 percent and he lost 63 seats. So in 16 of the last 18 midterm elections, the president in power has lost seats in the midterm election. One of the most notable and recent exceptions to that was George W. Bush. And that was after 9-11. So you've got that. And another number that we've been hearing a lot about lately is the it's what's called the generic ballot number. And why don't we just explain what that is to start with.

Tam, can you walk us through that? So that is like a pollster calls you up and says, are you more inclined to vote for a Republican or a Democrat? It's not, are you more inclined to vote for your representative? It is, do you want a Republican in the congressional seat or do you want a Democrat in the seat? And it is not looking good for Republicans on that front either. We're talking about consistent double digit leads for Democrats on that.

And over the last month, it was something like 15 point, 18 point advantages for Democrats. I would just point to and, you know, we've said this time and time again, that special elections are not necessarily indicators of anything or they are they are special for a reason. And there they can be outliers. But there has been sort of a pattern in almost all of the special elections in in 2017, which is that the Democrats outperformed significantly Hillary Clinton in these special elections and the Republicans significantly underperformed Donald Trump. Now, that doesn't mean in most of those races the Republican won anyway because they were safe Republican seats. But if you were to sort of extrapolate that out, that enthusiasm the Democrats showed in a lot of these races to, you know, seats with narrower Republican majorities, then things get mighty interesting in 2018. Especially when you talk about those generic numbers that you brought up, Scott. I mean, the polls that have them, if the polls are accurate and the polls hold and you're talking about generic advantages of 15, 18 points, those are not wave numbers. Those are tsunami numbers.

I mean, those are numbers that should scare Speaker Paul Ryan. He should be thinking about that number when he goes to bed at night, if they hold. Obviously, we're going to say this a lot, but it's still really early. But the signs that we're seeing, the tremors that we're seeing, are potentially very encouraging good factors for Democrats to have a good midterm. But there are a couple asterisks. Of course. I feel like last time I said asterisks, I got yelled at a lot by the internet. So, you know. How did you say it? Asterix? Now I actually don't remember. Well, someone will let us know. Caveats. Just say caveats. A couple caveats here. Play it safe.

One is that when you're talking about the generic ballot number, there is not a national congressional election. Of course, these seats are divided into districts and the districts do not exactly reflect the populace. They lean Republican because Republicans, by and large, were the ones drawing them 10 years ago. So they've got that in their favor. Republicans do. The other thing is that the one other thing you tend to look at is the economy, the unemployment rate. And by and large, that's doing really well lately. It's been doing really well.

And I also think you're going to hear a lot. And we saw a lot of a rush to these news stories before the holiday. And I think Republicans are going to do their part to make sure every voter is aware of them going into the midterms is not only that the economy is doing well, but that after they pass their tax legislation, this wave of stories about companies giving bonuses or raising wages or doing things like that. And I think that they're trying to make an argument going into the midterms that you are better off because Republicans are in control. You're going to have more money in your wallet. Your wages are going to go up. Whether that's a compelling argument or not, I don't know. But that is the ground that Republicans would like to be fighting the 2018 midterms. Tam, how much is the White House, is President Trump planning on actively campaigning? And how much do the Republicans in the tough races want to be campaigning with him?

I think that remains an open question and something that they are trying to figure out. If you if you look at the way President Trump, like in that New York Times interview last week or in his tweets, perceives his ability to affect candidates fortunes. He sees himself as a kingmaker. He sees himself as somebody who can bring you up 20 points, even if both of his candidates in the Alabama Senate race ultimately ended up losing. But his perception is that he is the best thing to happen to any possible candidate. And why wouldn't everyone want to campaign with him? He may like past presidents in midterm years here. Thank you. But no, thank you from people in competitive races. And I think the other thing to look at is also what happens with Steve Bannon or not just Steve Bannon, but what he represents, which is this idea of, you know, more Trumpian outsider, way outsider Republicans challenging the the incumbent Republicans. And do those do those people make it through the primaries? Do those primaries beat up those Republicans and give Democrats openings, particularly in Senate seats, where the map is not really in their favor, in Democrats' favor?

But, you know, does Mitch McConnell's worst nightmare come true? And you have a bunch of primary challenges. I also think in 2018 in the Senate, you know, Republicans just have a really strong built in advantage the way the map shakes out this time around. They're much more on offense. Democrats are much more on defense. And I think thematically what you're going to be hearing about all of 2018 is these Democrats in red states running for reelection in states that Donald Trump not just won, but won big. People like Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, and how do Democrats navigate this path of trying to run for reelection in places where the president is actually still quite popular? Yeah, and I'm thinking like Claire McCaskill in Missouri also. But then on the other side of the ledger, looking at Nevada, for instance, where there's a challenger to Dean

Heller, and Dean Heller, the Republican senator there there is wildly unpopular. There's a Republican challenger who happens to be someone with like the losingest record in congressional races, but still a challenger with a name, Tarkanian, which is familiar to UNLV basketball fans, because I think it was his father was the coach at UNLV. One race I'm going to be paying attention to that has absolutely nothing to do with control of the Senate, but it's still pretty interesting, is the primary in the California Senate race. I'm going to be focusing a lot on democratic dynamics over the next year. And that is a race where you have Dianne Feinstein running against a challenger, Kevin DeLeon, who's the president of the state Senate, who has really carved out a hashtag resistor persona for himself against

someone who's being criticized for trying to be one of those governing lawmakers in the Senate, trying to reach consensus deals, not always coming out with flaming criticism of Donald Trump. So where is the Democratic electorate right now? I think that'll be one place to watch. And Sue, we also keep waiting for more shoes to drop on the sexual harassment stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's I think that storyline is going to continue into the midterm election year. We have two sitting congressmen, one Democrat, one Republican, who are facing these allegations, who are in the middle of ethics investigations. Both have said they will not run for reelection, but they're not going to leave Congress. And we know that this month there is bipartisan legislation being worked through that's

going to be introduced this month. The chief sponsor of it, Greg Harper, he's the chairman of the House Administration Committee, says he'd like to have that bill passed out of the House by the end of the month. Essentially, what it would do is remake the process on Capitol Hill by which people file sexual harassment complaints and would do things like if a member of Congress is involved in a complaint personally, that they'd have to pay any settlement out of a recent election. And that is the fact that this week, Doug Jones will be sworn in as the new senator from Alabama. How much of a difference does 51-49 make compared to 52-48 when it comes to the Republican Democrat breakdown in the Senate? When you're talking about majorities this narrow,

every vote really does count. The thing that we said so much in this podcast in 2017, when we were talking about what the Senate could do, is we said, how many times did we all say, there's only 52 Republican senators, they can only lose two votes and still pass it, right? I mean, I don't even, the tally on that, I can't even imagine. That was the election is a long way off of 2017. Exactly. And the context for that was always that Republicans were using a special budget process to try and get through on Republican votes alone, their bills on health care and taxes. This year, if you take Mitch McConnell at his word that he wants things to be more bipartisan, really to do any bipartisan legislation in the Senate or any legislation through the normal legislative process, you need 60 votes. So the number I think we're going to talk about a lot in 2018 is nine, which is the number of Democrats for people like Mitch McConnell are going to need to get on board to pass any kind of bipartisan legislation. So one other one other number, Tam, maybe you might know this because you've covered

Pence a lot. Such a narrow margin means that Mike Pence is probably going to vote for more tie-breaking votes. He had six votes last year. That was one of the most ever for a first-year vice president. Does anyone know the vice president who holds the record for tie-breaking votes? Was it in this century? Dick Cheney? No, not in this century. He's a statue.

You pass him in the Capitol sometimes. I don't know. John C. Calhoun. Oh, Ron Elvin would know that. Shouldn't we also note, too, that there's another new senator this week? There is, yeah. Lieutenant Governor Tina Smith, she's a Minnesota Democrat, will be sworn in to the seat of former Senator Al Franken. One more reminder of the repercussions of the sexual harassment and allegation stories that have affected U.S. politics. She's a close political ally of Democratic Governor Mark Dayton, and she is expected

to obviously be the appointee for the seat, but she has already indicated that she plans to run for the seat in a special election this year to carry out his term. And Franken's resignation was effective today, I believe. He had lingered in the Senate after announcing he was going to resign. It created some awkwardness and some questions about whether he was rethinking that. But no, as of today, Al Franken, no longer the Minnesota senator.

All right, that is a wrap for today. Happy New Year. Other fun fact, this is the fourth calendar year we have podcasted now, which is weird because I still think of it as like a new thing. Yeah, 2015, 16, 17, 18. All right. Happy New Year. We will be back on your feed

with our second podcast of 2018 on Thursday. In the meantime, you can keep up with all of our coverage on NPR.org, on your local public radio station, and on the NPR One app. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © BF-WATCH TV 2021