The Opinions - Congress Is Dying in Real Time

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

The legislative branch of the government is in crisis. The shutdown is entering a second month. Millions of Americans were given a reprieve on Friday after a judge ordered the Trump administration to continue paying for food stamps. The Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle discusses the repercussions of a weakening Congress with the Opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French, and what the future could hold for this institution.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail].  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. We are rolling into November, which I can hardly believe. And after far too many weeks apart, I have reunited with my fantastic colleagues, columnists, Jamel, Bowie, and David French. Guys, it's so good to see you. Jill. It's good to see you as well. Welcome back. Well, believe it or not, we are not going to talk about the elections that are happening on Tuesday. We're going to save our powder for next week when there will be lots of results and fascinating data to dissect. Instead, our conversation today is going to be about Congress. David, I'm so sorry. I know you would probably rather talk about something more upbeat like how the courts are still actually doing their jobs.

But you lost the coin toss this week, so we're just going to go with congressional dysfunction. Michelle, I'm all about this. I'm all about this topic. You're all about this. You're ready? I can do this topic at Joe Rogan Length. I promise you that. So buckle up everybody. Buckle up. Because both Jamel and I have been writing this week about the sad, extreme dysfunction of the legislative branch. Whether we're talking about the House Speaker not swearing in a new member or Congress' putting the hurt on millions of Americans with this shutdown. So let's just start here. We're taping on Thursday morning,

so the government has been shut down for a month on November 1st. Snap benefits are going to just abruptly stop, a program that provides food assistance to lower-income households. David, Jamel, you've had time to process. What's your take on what's happening or not happening with this Congress?

Are we seeing a difference in kind of or degree from the level of dysfunction that we've all pretty much become accustomed to. I think this is a difference in kind. I think what we're seeing with how Speaker Johnson especially is handling the house is something novel. He is keeping it out of session, right? He's essentially no one's meeting. And critically, there's not really any negotiations happening, nothing to begin the process of trying to wind down the shutdown. It's as if Speaker Johnson and House Republicans are acting as if they have nothing to do. And I mean, what I find not baffling, but just striking is even as this snap cliff approaches, Republican members seem completely, by and large, seemed completely indifferent to the fact that many of their constituents are about to lose. food assistance, no matter what kind of old stereotypes they may throw out about who they think SNAP recipients are, the fact of the matter is that many people who are represented by Republican

governors and Republican lawmakers are recipients of SNAP, and they're disproportionately children, disabled people, and seniors. So just observing how House Republicans feel no urgency. about this and have taken no steps to try to negotiate as if they have no obligation to, I find genuinely striking. And something that marks this as a different kind of phenomena. David, what about you? I'm going to agree that we are dealing with a difference in kind, kind of on two fronts here. So one is the absolute total subservience of the majority of the legislative branch to the executive branch. I mean, that, that is a thing that is a difference in kind.

So it's sort of this idea that whatever the president says, we're going to snap into line and do, combined with an absolute abdication of the power of that entire branch of government. And so the impetus seems to be that so long as the president is ready to fight, there will be no real discussion here. There will be no compromise at all, that this is going to all be about who gets to point at the scoreboard at the end of this,

whenever this occurs. And so you are looking at the absolute breakdown, at least so far, of anything approaching a legislative process. And look, this is not unprecedented to have differences between Republicans and Democrats in a budgeting process. And you know what happens is they typically, in year generations past, they would get in and hammer out, say, a 65-35 or a 70-30 compromise that would leave sort of people at the extreme edges upset. But that, you know, you know, a majority would be at least accepted, you know, comfortable with it. And now, just that very word, that word compromise, is seen as synonymous with defeat. It's seen as synonymous with humiliation and subjugation.

And that is just, that is a difference in kind. And coming from a low baseline, I should say, we're not coming. This is not like a sudden change of an otherwise healthy and functional branch of government. this is like the utter deterioration of an already diminishing branch of government. I just want to add real quick to David's points that what's especially strange about the supplication of Congress, of the Republican-led branches to the president's kind of priorities and political stances is, you know, if you are a long-serving member of Congress, like the theory and what has been the practice in the past is that that actually provides you a bit of insolating. from the president's political priorities, right? If you've been there for 20 years, from your perspective, presidents come and go, right? You know, you're not the first president I've served with. You won't be the last one. So that gives you a level of, oh, I can break from the president here

to an extent because I have a separate base of power from the president. And that's even more, that's supposed to be even more true of senators who are elected on an almost entirely different scheduled than the president. And what's striking, and this might be a product of the fact that so many members are relatively new, right? They've been there for one, two, three terms. But what's striking is how they really do fully identify their political futures with that of the president, even in circumstances where it's clear to me at least that, like, Trump is dragging you down, like substantially. The incentive here actually runs in the opposite direction, but they cannot break it. from him? Well, I'm interested in kind of particularly how Trump is impacting each team's behavior

here. So my suspicion is that Republicans in Congress, who ordinarily are worried that they're going to pay a huge price if they are participating in a shutdown or seen as obdurate are counting on the president to do whatever that weird magic he does is to blame the other team. make this all about how the Democrats are doing something horrible. I have no idea if this will work, but I do think that they've done the cost-benefit analysis and they find it less scary to risk being blamed by the public than to have to cross this president

who they are absolutely terrified of. Whereas on the other side, the Democrats, if you talk about negotiations, the Democrats don't trust the Republican, congressional folks to be able to stick to any promises they make because the Democrats have watched this president claw back stuff that Congress has already pushed through. So the idea that Democrats are going to agree to something with the confidence that it will actually come to pass is just out of, you know, out of the picture at this point. So I think it's become a very

ugly-hearted situation. Well, absolutely, Michelle. And that does raise a really important question. What's the Democrats' endgame here? I mean, I think the Republicans, what's going to go forward, is pretty clear to map out as far as the process. We don't know the outcome. The process is going to be they're just waiting for the king on the throne to raise

his scepter in a particular way and to say, you know, make a deal, don't make a deal, hold the line, whatever. We know all Republican eyes are on Donald Trump. But what is the Democratic endgame here? Because, Michelle, you said it very well that they can't trust a deal with this president. I mean, you know, the president has taken a position on executive power that is, in essence, I get two vetoes. I get the veto that is in the Constitution, the one where I veto legislation and it can be overridden by supermajorities in both houses. But also, I have this other veto, which is just called executive power.

I get to choose which laws to enforce and which laws not to enforce. And so that then raises the question, what is the Democrats endgame here? If there is no deal that they can rely on, at this point we seem to be in a situation where we're just waiting for someone to crack or break, and then in every day that passes, the cost of cracking or breaking to your own side becomes higher. Of course, something could pop very quickly and, you know, break the logjam, But at this moment, as we record, I'm not seeing how that happens. Yeah, I don't know how it happens either. I mean, this is what we're seeing, what we're seeing are the problems with this imperial notion of executive power.

This is why this is bad, because it actually renders governance impossible to do. If there's no commitment to the broader rules of the game, one of the rules of the game being, Congress does a thing and the president carries it out. And to the extent that the president has any wiggle room, it's if Congress gives him wiggle room. But absent that, we pass spending, you carry out the spending. But if you're not going to follow that rule, that's not going to be on the table anymore, then you can't govern it anymore. The only thing that can happen is for Republicans to just unilaterally govern, right?

And they don't want to do that either. So I don't know how this ends. And what I want to say is you can't have a forever shutdown. for like very practical reasons. You don't want every air traffic controller to quit, right? Like you don't want the properties owned by the federal government to fall into disrepair, right? Like there were actual things that have to happen for the country to run. And there is some wiggle room in redundancy over the course of a month, maybe if we're stretching

at two months. But beyond that, it matters that the federal government is operational. It seems to me that the president thinks you could have a forever. shutdown. And that in the president's conception of things, the shutdown gives him more power. Through some magical, convoluted transmogrifying mechanism that no one understands, the shutdown means the president is even more powerful. Well, I was going to nod to that because we are seeing him. I mean, he's been happy to use the shutdown as a tool for doing what he. We've seen Russ fought at the OMB talk about how they're going to just take this and run with it. They're going to try to lay off

federal workers on mass. And right now, the courts are currently blocking this, but this clearly is something that they're, you know, willing to experiment with. Trump has taken money from a rich donor to help pay the military, which, I mean, David, is that even legal? I mean, they're freezing congressionally appropriated funds for projects in states they don't like, basically anything that they can do to just kind of, you know, disrupt the whole. functioning of government, especially in blue areas, Trump is going headlong into this. And his response is always like, you know, come at me, bro. Oh, I don't think there's any question that it is, if Donald Trump could engineer a situation where Congress stays out of session or the House

stays out of session for the rest of his presidency, I think he'd be totally fine with that. I honestly think that he has no real desire to work with Congress in any substantial way. otherwise, you know what, he would have had a very different opening to his presidency. His party controls the House. His party controls the Senate. And instead of this flurry, this tsunami of executive orders, if he had an actual governing agenda to sort of dictate how America is going to be governed for the foreseeable future, he'd have had a legislative agenda. He'd have walked in passing actual laws. Instead, he came in with a giant amount of executive order vaporware. And so what you've done is you've created a situation when the president is

more powerful than ever, but presidential actions are more ephemeral than ever because they're all channeled through EOs rather than using his power to actually shape and change the law. And so this is so unstable. It's just, it's hard to over-emphasize how unstable this makes American governance. Yeah. How unstable, how unreliable. I mean, it's bad for business. Like, I'm not one to be super solicitous of the business interest, but if you are someone who makes money, this level of instability and inconsistency in government operations is intolerable. Like, how do you plan for the future, right? Well, globally, it's a problem, too, right?

I think other countries cannot remotely predict what our foreign policy or trade policy or anything's going to be. But I wanted to say just a real quick comment about Russ Vought, I feel like so much of the coverage of Vought is about how he's some kind of, like, evil genius. And the photo they always pick has him with, like, bags under his eyes and they're kind of bloodshot. It looks like a Sith Lord. Right, he looks like a Sith Lord.

He looks like he's like asking, you know, Anakin, has he heard the story of Darth Plagueis, right? So. I love that reference. That was for you, David. Thank you. So, but like, all he's doing is just breaking the law, right? All he's doing is saying, I'm just not going to follow the law.

And it's like, you don't have to be a genius to just be like, I don't think the law counts anymore. And I find it very frustrating that, like, so much of the, coverage of him buys into this image of this like devious plotting, scheming, vizier. What it's just like, no, he's just a guy who's decided the law doesn't apply to the president anymore, right? And that's all. And if there were a Congress interested in like enforcing its prerogatives, you could just cut that short in an afternoon, right? You drag Russ Vaughn up for oversight hearings. Like, what are you doing? Do we need to hold you in contempt?

Here's my question to both of you, which is that, yes, Trump is, you know, authoritarian curious, I guess we'll call it. But how much of this do we think is that either the people are around him or even some of the establishment Republican players knew that this Congress, and that Congress in general for years, has been basically abdicating its responsibility on all kinds of level. And so they were basically ripe for a takeover. I mean, you can certainly blame Trump for a lot of the extreme degree that we're looking at as to how far he has taken over congressional power. But Congress has been happily shoveling that out the door and letting the executive branch or the judicial branch do its job. And so if you're standing around looking from the outside going, you know, all it would take would be a really kind of strong man in the White House to take advantage of this and input whatever policies or changes,

I'm interested in. So as much as I like to blame Trump for what's going on, I feel like we should spend a lot of time here maybe smacking Congress as an institution as well. Yes, absolutely, Michelle. I mean, look, one of the trigger phrases, I'm not a big fan of like trigger warnings and things like that, but I do have a trigger warning for myself, which is the phrase, co-equal branches of government. Don't say that around me. I'm going to remember that. Don't say that. It it causes involuntary spasoming. Because it's Article 1 for a reason. Like, if you actually look at the constitutional structure,

it's not that the legislature is supposed to reign unchecked in Supreme. It's just that think of the legislative branch in the formulation of the founders is like first among equals. This is the one that you can't spend any money without it. It can fire the president. It can fire any member of the Supreme Court. You're not supposed to be able to go to war without it. I mean, all of the basic fundamental functions of government, you just can't do, in theory, without Congress, according to our structure. And this is intentional

because Congress is crafted to be the most representative part of our tripartite system of government. And so what we're seeing here isn't just congressional abdication in an abstract sense. What we're seeing is constitutional devolution, almost like a constitutional revolution, where Article 1 is receding down to, like, Article 3 level, and Article 2 is Article 1 now with a bullet. And it's not the way the system was supposed to be created or administered. And it's putting huge strains on us, just huge, because if Congress is basically irrelevant,

and the presidency is decided really by the swing states in the presidential election, then the vast majority of Americans have no meaningful say over the core functioning of the American government. And that creates a real, again, all of these things, everything we're talking about, they're all destabilizing. So, Jamel, this is kind of leading directly into what you've been writing about this week.

And before we jump in, I just want to note that I have done a lot of reporting on this among senators. And both sides know this is a problem, and both sides are really unhappy about it. It's just a question of how do you, you address it. And you have been talking this week about an imperial Congress being potentially needed to push back because we've reached such an imbalance at this point. Yeah, that's, I feel like that's a term of art just for what David is alluded to, just like a very active

Congress that is taking its role in the constitutional firmament very seriously. So, you know, I think I, you know, I'm interested in and write it quite a bit about it is like reconstruction. And, And if you're like sort of basically familiar with the timeline, there's two parts of reconstruction. It's presidential reconstruction under Andrew Johnson. Then there's congressional reconstruction, basically after Johnson's impeachment. It begins a little earlier than that, but basically Congress sidelines Johnson and really takes the full reins of reconstruction. It's Congress leading the pack. It's Congress, you know, spearheading constitutional amendments.

It's Congress doing the kinds of close oversight and monitoring. It's Congress flexing its authority in really aggressive. of ways. And I think that is what I'm talking about when I'm going to say something like the imperial Congress, a Congress that recognizes the full sweep if it's formal and informal powers, and then just uses them to try to shape things in the way that it wants to be shaped and engages with the public. And there's still room for the other branches to push back, of course. But the key thing is the other branches are responding to Congress, not Congress responding to the other branches. It changes sort of the direction of the energy in the system.

So what is there any practical path toward that, do you think? So I've been thinking about this. And some of it's structural, right? Like over time for a variety of contingent reasons, a variety of reasons that reflect the fact that this is like a big complex modern country, modern economy. Power has siphoned up to the executive branch. I think a little bit of that is basically unavoidable. But I think some of this really is.

just the members themselves. I think that if a newly elected majority of the members said, we don't want this to be so leadership focused, then it wouldn't be, right? If the Senate said, we really want to be active, then they would be. And I do think that some of this is actually just like cultivating an ethos among members, among people who want to be members, to think of themselves not as passive members of a party, but like active members of a legislature who have a lot of individual power. But I also think it reflects the absence of like real ambition, real ambition not simply to ascend to a higher office, but ambition to use the office you have in the most aggressive and maximalist way that you can.

So before we get your take, David, I just want to throw in. One of the things that senators have complain to me about in respect to this whole leadership-focused way that it's run is that fueling that problem in part is, unsurprisingly, the way that money is dealt with. The Senate leaders control huge campaign funds that they can decide who gets this piece of or things like that. And that is a very powerful tool in a system where money is just so vital to survive. in these campaigns. So, okay, that's just one piece of that. David, you know, kind of what is, what is your thought on all of that? Yeah, you know, I think we're going to be in a difficult position until a fundamental, there's a change in a certain fundamental reality. And that

fundamental reality is that every Republican member of Congress believes that their entire career, every Republican member on Congress knows that their entire career, their place in that house depends on Donald Trump's approval. So I think even Mike Johnson, and the Speaker of the House, if Trump came out and said, he needs to go, then Mike Johnson loses his job. And why do we know this? Because look at the last 10 years, how many people are left in the Republican Party who Donald Trump has specifically targeted. I mean, I can think of one in the state level, Brian Kemp in Georgia. This is somebody, he's the Harry Potter, the boy who lived of sort of the GOP. He's feud with a kind of magical reverence. Yeah, exactly. How did you pull this off?

But this will not last forever. So I think there's two, a couple of things to point out here. Number one is it's a mistake to think this will be a 50-50 nation forever. We've had the 50-50 moments in American history. And the logjam has always broken in a particular direction. One way or the other, the logjam tends to break. If you go back and you look at American history many, many times when you've had extreme presidential power and abuses of presidential power, that's been followed by a snapback,

by constitutional amendments or congress. acting in some decisive ways once the log jam is broken. And so I have some ideas for... You have thoughts? I have thoughts. I have constitutional amendments that I think could really help this. And I know that sounds pie in the sky because we have a log jam right now, but the log jam will break. And I think there are some lessons we have learned about the original 1787 constitution that just lend themselves to abuse. And the anti-federalists spotted this coming from miles away. So, for example, the pardon power.

The pardon power is a republic destabilizing vestige of monarchy that needs to be fundamentally reformed. That's one. Here's another one. The first sentence of Article 2 is, as George Clinton wrote as Cato and anti-federalist, vague and inexplicit, and that lends itself to lots of mischief. Can I interrupt real quick when you said George Clinton, I was like, is he about the quote, Parliament Funkadelic?

And then I... Of course. I mean, normally I would. Normally. He's thinking New York lawmaker, George Clinton, and the... Yeah, okay. Yeah, not Parliament Funkadelic, yes. Okay, let me just throw on.

You guys are such geeks. I love it. Sorry. Continue. Continue. But, you know, here's another one that I think is an important idea. Expand the House. So there's, I think there's a number of ideas of reform that are floating around out there

that can help prevent this situation from happening. again. But we have to get through this moment. And the real impediment here, the real impediment is the primary voters. Even something as grotesque as January 6th did not break that bond between Trump and the primary voters. And so in that circumstance, they think legitimately there are no lines that Trump can cross where he will lose the loyalty of the primary voters in the Republican Party. I do think we have to wait until this cult of personality has, however it's going to end, has ended before we can move on from this. That fever has to break. But then I do want an episode devoted entirely to David and Jamel's list of amendments and reforms. So I'm just putting my 10. It's funny David said that because I have, I myself have like on a, you know, an document, like me sort of putting together like an omnibus amendment. how do we constitutionalize a series of reforms that prevent this from happening again?

What I throw in there is just in the same way that the first lines of the 14th are basically overturning Dred Scott. I think we need to constitutionalize overturning Trump v. U.S., which is just a ruling that... Oh, totally agree. To be fair, I guess some reasonable people can disagree about that ruling, can they? Can they? Really? But at the very least, I think what we're seeing is that how a corrupt president interprets it is as a license to do whatever they want.

And I think there needs to be some sort of constitutional clarification of the president's criminal liability. Okay, so I'm changing my thought. We're now going to have a whole series of episodes on this because clearly one's not going to do it. So now, before we switch for our closing recommendations, I did want to take you guys back because we haven't been together since the magical renovation project of the. East Wing began, which to me smacks of Trump trying to take us towards some kind of glorious, I don't know, it's got like old empire written all over, you know, a gilded ballroom or whatever. And I have been, I guess, pleasantly surprised or taken aback by how much this is really ticked off a lot of the country.

Were you guys surprised by this? I mean, I'm not surprised that people were mad. It's crazy. It's a crazy. It's, listen, when they were, when he was a. like, I want to put up a ballroom. I was like, all right. I mean, it's ugly. It's like garish. But if it's just going to be like looming over the White House, you know, whatever. I don't like it, but whatever. I would prefer that he went to Congress and said to Congress, I need money to build this

thing. Why do that when you've got rich friends? When they would do it immediately, right? I mean, it's because this is like a, in my opinion. But he doesn't need Congress, Jamel. This is a pay-for-play operation. I would be shocked if a ballroom ever gets built. But then when I, I, I don't, I, I open up my computer and I see that they've demolished the East Wing as if it belongs to him, as if it's just something he can do. The White House is very distinctly not a palace, right? Yeah. Give it time. There's so much gold. The palace in the capital is the capital, right? The White House is a relatively modest executive mansion by design. And as imperfect as American democracy is, as often quite bad, American democracy has been.

And the White House is this symbol of the relationship of the government to the people. It's open to the public for the most part, right? You can go visit it. You can go hang out. You don't need to be a rich donor. You can just go. And given the importance of the symbol to, I think, how Americans conceive of themselves, and symbols matter, right?

These things really do matter to how people understand themselves. It makes total sense to me that you'd be like, even if you're basically sympathetic to Trump, You'd be like, wait a sec here, you know, this isn't, this isn't yours to demolish. And if you want to tear it down, you at least have to go to Kong. You have to go to us and ask us if we are going to allow this. But isn't this project then the perfect metaphor, the perfect symbol? Oh, yeah. You know, he's taking, he's taking a reckon ball to a whole thing.

It's like so on the nose. Yeah, I don't care if there is a ballroom built. In other words, that do we possibly need a ballroom? I'm very open to that argument. I'm totally open to that. I like to dance. I'm not open. I'm not open to the idea that the president can just demolish any part of the White House on his own authority or all of it.

Like what's the limiting principle here? Right, right. You hate to go, you know, from White House to Venezuelan boat strikes. But as I was talking about the other day, what's the limiting principle here to stop Trump from designating anybody as a terrorist enemy and ordering their death? Like, what's the limiting principle? What's the limiting principle? Can he demolish the whole White House? And when you see the White House demolished, just suddenly part of the White House just demolished with no real conversation or discussion, it has a very kind of tangible effect that other things don't have because it's just right in front of people's faces. But one last thing before we get to our recommendations, I just want to say, Michelle, somebody needs to stage an intervention for both Jamel and for me, because I also have a Google doc of constitutional amendments. And so it's there is there a name for this condition?

I'm going to come up with one before next time we need. It's nerdlinger. That's what the name is. That works for me. Okay, guys. So let's end on some lighter recommendations maybe. Or at least something that does not involve a Google Doc, perhaps. David.

Go. Okay, bear with me here. Because this show has changed a lot in its evolution. So season one of the morning show on Apple TV was like very heavy, like prestige TV, I felt like a very cinematic, weighty, like really well done, in my view. And then seasons two, three, and now we're I think in four got just sort of like a soap opera, more like, you know, do you remember Dallas and Falcon Crest from like the 1980s? I'm sorry, have you met me? Of course I do. Yeah, yeah. So all of a sudden it's gone from kind of this big meta-commentary around Me Too to something much more like Dallas and Falcon Crest for the 2020s. And I just got to say I'm here for all of it. You're there for that. I'm here for it. So the morning show, Apple, it's been great.

It's on my list because you are reliable, I have to say. I'm nothing if not reliable in streaming recommendations. Okay, Jamel. I've been trying to catch up with movies. I usually watch a lot. a lot of movies every year. Last year, I think I clocked like 230 movies. This year I've just been not watched, for whatever reason, just not watching this much. But I'm trying to pick up the pace again and try to catch up with stuff that came out this year.

And I watched the 28 years later, which is the kind of legacy sequel to 28, 28 days and 28 months or 28 weeks or whatever, the previous two films. And I went into it thinking it was just going to be, you know, like, I like those are the two movies. But it's just going to be like a fun zombie picture. What I was not anticipating it being was an actually very thoughtful coming of age story and at times quite profound and moving kind of meditation on life and death and rebirth and coming to terms with the nature of the world in which we live. There's zombie thrills and it's kind of gruesome and stuff, but the emotional core of the film is so thoughtful. And there are moments of like,

like genuine visual and emotional beauty in the film. And it's like this legacy zombie sequel. So I'm going to recommend 20 years later. It is like, I think it might be my favorite film with the year so far. Really? I was so struck by how deeply felt it is. And it has maybe the best child actor performance I've ever seen. Yeah, I've seen it.

He carries the film. Well, I'm going to pivot and I'm going to do less a recommendation than a plea. And I don't want it to be like a kind of down. but I want to recommend that as we roll into November, you find a local food bank and donate. I have a friend who launched one during the pandemic, and they are just overrun already, even before we get into the Thanksgiving season. I've had other friends come to me asking how they can get in touch with her and donate. I've got my husband contacting the local food bank in our neighborhood. It's one of those things where it's good for your soul, and the need is,

just overwhelming. So that's mine. Wonderful suggestion, but I'm just going to say you made us look bad, Michelle, like around the Thanksgiving table when people say, what do you want for Christmas? And someone says, I want a new car. And somebody else says, I want a new boat. And somebody else says, I want suffering to stop in the world. No, no. See, I would have pitched sinners the movie, but Jamel had already gotten me with his horror movie. We can have too many horror movie recommendations. So fine. Donate to your local food bank. get out there and watch the horror movie centers. Is that better?

There you go. There you go. Okay. All right. And with that, we're going to end it, guys. Thank you so much. I have missed you. We'll leave it there. Have a great election day. And I'll see you next week. See you next week. Thanks, Michelle. See you all later. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Veshaka, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Brusick. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro.

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