The Press Box - Politico’s Burgess Everett on Covering Congress During a Wild Week of Negotiations

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Bryan is joined by Politico’s congressional bureau chief, Burgess Everett, to discuss what it’s like to cover Congress in the midst of the debt ceiling negotiations and what’s at the heart of the discussions (01:19). Then, they discuss Everett’s experience working on the congressional beat, including his approach to getting politicians to talk, the kind of shoes he has to wear, and why the beat is so rewarding to him (14:28). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Burgess Everett Producer: Eduardo Ocampo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Press Box Final Edition. Brian Curtis of the ringer here along with producer Eduardo Ocampo. Today I'd like to direct your attention away from the NBA conference finals to Capitol Hill. Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are negotiating to increase the debt ceiling to prevent a federal default that would happen in just over a week. Our guest today is Burgess Everett, who has been lacing up his Adidas to do shoe leather reporting on Capitol Hill for a decade plus. He is the Congressional Bureau Chief of Politico, and in my survey he is, one of the most respected reporters on the beat, a reporter who is called Grizzled in the best

sense of the term. Burgess, welcome to the press box. Thanks. Anything to distract from the Celtics. Let us start here. What's it like to cover Congress during the dead ceiling negotiation? Yeah, I mean, I cover the Senate. So right now the Senate has gone. They're gone. So I'm at home. So for me, it's been fairly chill this week, at least. Next week will be, will be terrible when the Senate actually has to vote on it. If you're a House reporter right now, you are taking shifts standing outside Speaker McCarthy's office, which is the sort of thing I've had to do countless times. It's a lot of standing around and waiting, but you have to do it because a moment will come when somebody comes out and makes news and you have to be there for it. On a week like this,

do you find members of Congress are more or less eager to talk to reporters? I think at the moment, the people that are eager are the House Republicans. I've never seen somebody do as much press as Kevin McCarthy has done this week. He will walk out of his office, do a press conference, go to the White House, meet with the president, do a press conference afterwards, and get back to the Capitol and do a press conference there. So I would say that if he's a guide, this is something that House Republicans want to talk about until there's a deal. once there's a deal, a bunch of the conservatives are not going to like it, and the party is going to be fighting a ton over it. And I don't, I think it could probably turn pretty darn ugly, to be honest with you. And what's your theory about why McCarthy's doing so many scrums during this process? My theory is that this is a guy who feels he's been underestimated his entire career. He famously wanted, was in line to become the next speaker and then did not. And Paul Ryan became. the speaker and he was doubted a ton in January about whether he could even get the votes to

become the speaker. So now here he is. He wanted to get a one-on-one negotiations with President Biden. President Biden resisted. They started with the big four congressional leaders, so the two top Senate leaders, the two top House leaders, and eventually kicked everyone out of the room except really Kevin McCarthy and his top aides. And he has a couple lawmakers who are helping him and the president and their top aides. And so he's got everything kind of where he wants it. And I feel like he feels like he's at the peak of his power and that people that didn't take him seriously finally have to. I am finally the House Speaker and I'm going to remind you of that as many times as I possibly can. Certainly what it feels like to me. I mean, I think he feels like this is this is his moment.

And when when people look back on his speakership, this is going to be one of the things that they talk about. For people coming to this story between Celtics games, what exactly are Biden and McCarthy's team negotiating right now? Yeah, they are talking about, so we have We have this extremely odd system where you have to vote to raise the country's statutory borrowing limit every few months to every couple years. And that is about to expire probably sometime in the next week or two. It's a little bit fluid. We're talking huge amounts of money coming in and coming out of the U.S. Treasury every

day. So it's not an exact science. And I think even the Treasury Secretary will tell you that this is typically something Republicans do not support, especially when there's a Democrat. That's president. And so they have on occasion use this as leverage for spending cuts. And that is what they're seeking now. And they're also hoping to get some other conservative items in there.

And it remains to be seen whether they'll get them, some sort of energy permitting reform, which is a fairly bipartisan issue. Adding work requirements to government aid is the other big thing. And I think that is kind of the biggest question mark as we're talking today about, is it kind of a big leaf that looks like it's imposing a lot of new work requirements on some sort of federal aid or is it actually, you know, kind of draconian in the eyes of Democrats and getting to a place where everybody can vote for it and it doesn't tick so many people off that it that they lose votes is sort of the dance that's happening right now.

As far as I can tell, there are two types of scoops that the Capitol Hill Press Corps is trying to get right now. One is what's happening in those meetings. What are the results of those meetings? And then the second would be what signs are conservative Republicans or lefty Democrats, as you mentioned a minute ago, giving that they might not sign on to a deal or might be angry with a deal? Am I missing any there? I mean, I do think there's also, I think the third type of scoop is like,

when is this going to actually pass either chamber of Congress? And that's not exactly something you can get as a traditional scoop, but you can, you know, I've covered the Senate long enough to sort of game this out. I know how many days it could take. the Senate to pass a bill. It could take up to a week, right? They can always speed it up or not, but that could get you really close to a default, depending on when the date is. So I think that'd be probably the third bucket right here. And then there's going to be another one after the deal is consummated. There'll be a bunch of TikToks. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Sure. It's sort of the backstory of what happened. And that is going to be very high competition. And everybody's going to want that little juicy detail to put it there top of the story to get people to sort of read the comprehensive history of how this happened. And then when the bill actually passes, you'll see a whole other avalanche of TikToks because there will be other details that people don't want to reveal until that this bill is becoming law and they can't screw it up anymore. Chip Roy was on the phone with Kevin McCarthy and he was angry. Exactly. Exactly. And now I like I like to do something because back in the day, you could, you could. fill your notebook up over a week or two or more and really, like, put this story together over time and really save the best stuff.

You can't do that anymore. Everybody's tweeting every little detail all the time. It's going to get out. You have competitors who are trying to get their things out absolutely as fast as possible all the time. So I kind of do these things, like often I'll do like a quick talk, which is like to the best absolute backstory I can in five hours or whatever and then get it up before anybody else can so that, you know, this may not be the most comprehensive. intensive story, but this is up first and it has stuff you haven't read before and we're not trying to sit on anything. It's all fresh. It's all new. It's artisanal, if you will. Quick talk. Quick talk. That's my patented phrase. So don't take that unless you credit me.

It's interesting trying to understand the minute by minute status of these negotiations. You tweeted this week, debt limit talks between White House and House Republicans are oscillating between productive meetings and near breakdowns, which is actually not the that unusual for a big negotiation? Why is that not unusual? Yeah, I mean, part of it's the way that folks use the media so they can, you can come out of a meeting and tell a bunch of reporters, I'm walking away unless X, Y, or Z happens. You know, I can think of a good, good example of that. There was a bipartisan gun safety bill that passed Congress last year. It was a big surprise to all of us who have covered so many failed stops and starts on this issue. And there were points when one of the

senators, John Cornyn of Texas, would walk out and say, we need to finish this now or I'm done. And they didn't finish it now. But it was his way of saying, let's get serious. We need to do something. And by making it look like things were going off the rails, he can help refocus the negotiations to where he wants it to be. So I do think there is like a normal push and pull to these negotiations that in the moment can feel like your hair is on fire, especially, you know, when I was a more junior reporter and having not had that experience yet, you know, you. it can really sort of jar you. But over time, you realize how much of this stuff is cyclical and how much of history repeats

itself here. And you can sort of see, I don't know, the dance, for lack of a better word, of how these things are evolving. Now, at the same time, you have people who are yelling at you saying online or wherever saying, this is not normal. Stop acting like this is normal. But in reality that there is just a flow to these things and negotiating over the death ceiling, whether you think it's right or not,

it is something that has happened before and will probably happen again. So where the incentives are to quickly tweet out a quote from a member, how do you signal to the reader that this may be just something somebody says during the negotiation rather than something that's actually terribly meaningful? It's hard. And it's something we should all think about more as we're doing this job, adding that little bit of context. You have 280 characters.

And then when you write a, oftentimes I find that for myself, the tweets will not necessarily have the context. And that's when the story will come in. And that's really written towards a whole different audience because it can be pretty depressing if you look at how many people will click the links that you tweet out to your stories. So you're speaking to two different audiences.

And I think in some ways you're hoping, you know, when you're tweeting stuff out, the people that follow you, they're pretty obsessed with this stuff if they're following you in the first place. And so you're hoping sort of they will have some of that built in context in their mind already. Now that's not always the case.

But yeah, so I mean, if somebody says this says today that things are looking really bad, you could say, well, here's the deal. The House isn't actually going to probably vote on this thing until Tuesday or Wednesday. So if it's Tuesday night and there's no legislation and there's nobody voting, okay, now it's the time to freak out, but we're not quite there yet. What is the quote of the negotiation so far? Was that Matt Gates's hostage quote? Is that the one that's gotten the most mileage?

Yeah, or though, I have to say already, the Arana McDaniel is talking about how this has been good for Republicans, and she's the RNC chair, and that's been getting some steam, some steam as well. You could also, from the other side of the aisle, look at all the times that Democrats said they would not negotiate on the debt ceiling, and now that they're doing exactly that, there's definitely quite a few of those that have been resurfacing on Republican talking points and conservative media. So let's talk about that, because you wrote a piece with your colleague, Sarah Ferris, about how, as you put a Democrats are stuck doing exactly. exactly what they said they wouldn't negotiating on the dead ceiling. How did they get stuck there?

Yeah. I think there's a couple things here. I mean, they never really tried to get this out of the way last year. Now, there's some question. Democrats, it would have taken a while, but they have the ability if you control both chambers of Congress and the White House, you have the ability to pass certain legislation by a simple majority in the Senate. Normally, it's 60 votes. That's a super majority. that usually requires some significant buy-in from the other party. If you have all chambers of Congress, you can pass budget reconciliation, which is a fancy way of saying there's certain things you can do with just 50 votes. And that's how Democrats did a lot of things in the last Congress,

because you have the vice presidential tiebreaker. You have a majority, even only only 50 seats. So they could have raised the debt ceiling on their own last Congress. Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia, had indicated that was not something he wanted to do. it also would have taken a week plus, they decided not to do it. Then you fast forward to February, where McCarthy, Speaker McCarthy meets with Biden. This is another, I think, crucial pivot point they meet, and then they never meet again until May. Democrats say, you guys got to pass something.

We're not negotiating with you until you do. Eventually, Republicans did pass something, which is really sort of the turning point because a lot of Democrats doubted that they ever could. House Republicans passed a bill that had pretty blunt spending cuts in it. And that sort of entered things into this negotiating phase. I do think, you know, it may have been posturing at the time, but Democrats probably could have been more careful about their positioning several months ago. They could have said, okay, you want to negotiate. Here's things we want.

That would have been another tactic to say, let's raise taxes on the rich if we're going to do that or something like that. But the party has since 2011 basically said unequivocally, we don't negotiate with Republicans on the debt limit. They don't care about the deficit unless we're in charge, and it's just a leverage point for them to get what they want. And in many ways, Democrats think Republicans would like to cause a recession to make Joe Biden lose the next election. And as we know from 2011, those spending cuts did kind of,

the spending budget caps did kind of limit the economic growth of the country, and Democrats didn't want to do that again. So, you know, I think part of it is that you have congressional Democrats view that I just explain. And then you have President Joe Biden. He's a dealmaker. He wants to be seen as a dealmaker. He doesn't want to default. That doesn't help him at all. And so I feel like this is sort of him. This is sort of why he was elected president, why he won the primary. He is not a sort of down-the-line partisan, that's just not the way he is. You could say, sure, he's got liberal, gotten more liberal over the years and things like that. But at his core, this is still a guy who loves a good deal.

And because of that, the rest of the party got hung out to dry a little bit here. Let me ask you a few questions about your career on the beat. Your full name is John Burgess Everett. Why is your byline your middle name? That's a good question. My parents are from Louisville, Kentucky where I guess it's somewhat common to just call someone by their middle name. So that is my reason. I tried to go to John actually professionally after college, and it just didn't work for me. So I just went back to Burgess. And I think it's worked out well because there's a lot of people that look like me to put it mildly on Capitol Hill.

So anything you can do to stand out helps. Didn't work for you artistically, John? It just didn't feel right. You know, you go by one name your whole life and then you try to change it up professionally and, you know, you kind of want to be yourself, right? You don't want to be projecting someone you're not just because of your career. So that was my decision there. It's got a pleasingly old-fashioned ring to it. I appreciate it, especially if you go, especially if you go John Burgess Everett. So help me with this. Why did political reporters start rendering the names of senators and representatives in all. caps in their tweets? So that is a Jake Sherman original. I do not do that. Punch bowl news is Jake Sherman.

I do not do that. I did not go with the flow on that stuff. So I'm keeping it lowercase, just like our founding fathers intended. I feel strongly about this. I also think, like, frankly, like he came up with it, but other people have done this obviously. No one person

is venting anything on Twitter. But I do think if you put certain things, all caps, your tweets do stand out more and they get more attention. I love reading stories about politics, but I'm not sure in all caps, rounds or Cardin really creates the excitement that reporters think it does. I think you are 100% right. And so that is part of the reason I don't do that. One thing that fascinates me about your job is that like a sports writer in a locker room, you have the opportunity to walk up to your subjects just about every day that the Senate is in session and try to ask them questions. Right.

Do you have specific places you like to stand in the Capitol where you can corner politicians? Yeah, I definitely do. And I will often be standing there by myself for an hour and a half for something like that. And maybe I'll have seen three people I want to talk to during that time. I like to stand away from all the other reporters, if that makes sense to you. There's like huge scrums are reporters in the Capitol. And my goal is usually to get people. by themselves, unless it's some court sort of crazy hair on fire moment where you just need information fast, I like to get people by themselves. Usually get a higher value conversation if you're having a one-on-one with a senator than you

would in a big scrum, trying to walk from the trains to the elevator, 30 seconds of yelling. That doesn't help me. I want that person to stop and talk and let me get that follow up in. So I at least get to sort of get to the point I want to get to rather than what somebody wants to say first off. And your spot is your spot. It would be bad form for somebody like Manu Raju to walk over and stand next to where you're hanging out. I mean, I'll let I'll let Manu do it.

No, but he and he's got his own spots too. And now that he's got TV cameras with him, he picks different places because where the TV cameras can go and where I can go are different things. It's very limited where you can film. But yeah, I mean, people will sometimes see me standing there and say, oh, he must know something's happening. I'm going to stand over here next to M. And that's fine. The only thing I would ask of people is if I'm already having a one-on-one conversation with a senator, please wait until I'm done before you interrupt me.

Sounds like a sports writing kind of arrangement there. I do think, I mean, I do. So the politics of sport sort of comparison, I think sometimes gets ridiculed. And I think that's right, right, in the sense of like politics can have actual impact on people's lives and the decisions that are being made can be important. And so, like, I don't think, you know, I think like horse race journalism on its own is not necessarily what I'm aspiring to. But what you're talking about is that is very similar. The locker room is the Senate hallways and the caucus lunch is the huddle.

And all of that kind of attracts. It's a similar cadence to the reporting and to trying to talk to these people. I think it seems to me that politicians in the U.S. capital are more accessible than athletes. are after an NBA game or something like that in the sense that it's harder to get away from me if I really want to talk to you. You don't have to say anything, but I'll at least probably be able to ask you a question. And you can just look on dead eyes as sometimes happens. But it's hard. You know, they can't just say you're not allowed in the capital today. You know what I mean? What's your method for getting a senator to stop and talk to you in the hallway?

This is going to sound old-fashioned. I just try to be polite. Most of them know me now. and if they don't, I'll introduce myself briefly. And I'll say, hey, do you have a second to talk? And usually they do. And if they don't, I actually, you know, usually let them go if it's not super urgent because I'll see them again and they will respect that I treated them like a human being in that moment and that they may actually have something to do. Sometimes they're definitely lying to you and they don't have anything to do.

And if that's the case, I will try to continue pressing them knowing that they are not being fully forthright with me that they have a meeting to get to. Now, you mentioned the Senate elevator earlier. What is the etiquette for stepping on to the elevator with a senator to continue a conversation? Yeah, I mean, typically you got it, you should ask. And so you're, you're in a mid-interview and they would say, do you mind if I ride with you or something like that? And it would be the same in the subway. Technically, you're allowed in the subway and the senator can't tell you you to get on or off. But I think it's, I think it's good practice to just, again, just say,

hey, do you mind if I do this? And sometimes they'll say no. And then I think you got to respect that most of the time, unless it's something totally crazy. But you can't, you could actually get kicked off the elevator by a staffer. There's, there's, believe it or not, a bunch of people who operate the elevators in the Senate. And they will tell you to get off if the senator doesn't want you on there. And what happens next if you resist? I don't know, but I don't think I want to know. So the senator gets elected or reelected. They have six years. Do you find their accessibility is best right after the election for those first couple years? Yeah, that's a great point, actually.

That's totally true. Not only is their accessibility best, but they're in the best mood. They're doing the most interesting things. And as they get closer to their re-election, many of them kind of clam up, start giving you a talking points. They might start avoiding you. They may do something really interesting in the sense of they may be sort of not panicking. they may be panicking about their reelection, but they may be changing course in some way and doing

something that normally they wouldn't do. And then that becomes interesting to cover. And then they want you to talk to them. You know, Joe Manchin, he's not running for reelection yet. He may run. He hasn't decided yet. He's doing a whole bunch of stuff right now that that I'm not sure that he would be doing if it was four years ago and he had just been reelected. You know, would he be putting into statements saying I'll oppose all these EPA nominees? Like maybe, but maybe not. I mean, so I do think that where somebody is in terms of their re-election cycle has a big bearing on what they're like to talk to and what they're like as a politician. Okay.

So open, expansive, maybe friendlier earlier in the term. And then later in the term, making news, maybe less expansive, a little bit tighter lip, but also making news potentially in an interesting way to send things to people. Yeah. I think, and that's, you know, that's partially, I definitely gravitate towards the senators who who are from politically tricky states because they're the ones that make or break the majorities and they're the ones who often sort of decide how things ended up a certain way. You know, like you don't want to tick off the person you need to run for re-election

if you're Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell. You mentioned how news is speeded up in the decade you've been on the beat. How else has the beat changed? Yeah, I mean, newsletters are, they were there 10 years ago, but they are, Now, you know, many people see them on the same level as writing stories. I think that's one thing that's changed. Our attention spans, I think as humans, have changed a lot, especially in this sort of hypercharged political world. And, you know, it's a little cliche.

Everybody knows that Donald Trump didn't like the media or at least attack the media while participating in the media quite a bit. But it has sort of hardened. It's made this split where more and more people are only reading news that validates their own point of view. And that doesn't mean fewer people are necessarily going to the New York Times. But I do think that fewer people are going to the New York Times and Fox News. And I think that our shared experiences have decreased as news consumers. And what that's just led to a fractured media. environment. The capital is still this, you know, it's still a competitive place where everybody's

competing for the same amount of news, scoops, et cetera. So I think the way that it has covered hasn't changed in that sense, but I do think the readership has changed and fractured a bit. Are you happiest when you can put a few of those nuggets into your pocket and write a longer story about what's happened? Yeah, I would say, there's nothing better than getting like a good story first, I have to say. But I take the long view on it in the sense that Jake's going to get some of those stories. Manu's going to get some of those stories. Some of my colleagues at Politico, like Sarah or Olivia, they're going to get some of those stories. I'm not going to get every one of those stories, right? Because that's impossible. You can't have an 100% track record on that stuff.

So what you're describing is the sort of longer form piece is something I feel like I can do more consistently and make it stand out more. And so, you know, I think first and foremost, I'd love that big scoop, but those things don't, sometimes those things just come to you in the moment. And it has nothing to do with, you outwork someone in that moment. But stepping back, telling the bigger picture, having some sort of historical lens on what you're writing, I think is very satisfying because when you write a story like that, especially if it's about a personality or someone that you really understand and can

explain well. It's something you'll remember two months, six months a year later. And I think those are the most important stories for me in terms of fulfillment. You tweeted the other day, the floors of Congress are hell on one's body. How so? They are marble. Many of them are marble. They're super hard. And the amount, I don't think people quite, not that they need to understand this, but I don't think most people understand just how much time we spend standing there waiting for people. and it's not carpeted and it's it's really tough and I'm not getting younger and it's painful. So I actually brought, I figured you'd ask me this, you know, these are the shoes that I've been wearing.

These are like Adidas mid-tops. Okay. They're definitely not dressed shoes, but nobody notices if they're all black. It's when you have that little line, the white line on the bottom of your sneaker that I think people get tuned in into that. And so I have gone, I've torn both. my ACLs, so I got bad knees. I've gone full sneaker pretty much because I need to be comfortable. Not torn both your ACLs at the Capitol. Not at the Capitol, but I have recovered while being a

congressional reporter, and that is no fun. I can imagine. So, and there's still an expectation that you're going to dress up in the style that journalists used to dress, a tie, slacks, dark shoes, if not dress shoes? Yeah, I mean, the Senate, so the House has a, there's a thing called the speakers lobby in the house. Are you familiar with this? It's a little bit. It's sort of like, it can be very nice in the winter. There'll be a fire. There's a bunch of tables and chairs. There's the portraits of all the speakers. It's kind of this like old school throwback place where members can come out and talk to the press, but you have to be dressed right to go in there. So if you're a woman, you can't have bare arms. If you're a man, you got to have a tie in a jacket. Those sort

of rules. They're pretty strict. They'll boot you out of there if you're violating them. The Senate does not have that sort of rules. This is why you see some. someone like John Federman, he's able to walk around on a hoodie and shorts. Now, the floor has its own rules, but you can vote from the cloakroom. So you can be dressed below that dress code to go on the floor and just peek into the Senate and make your vote. If you're a journalist, you know, you may be on TV, so you got to be ready to go on TV all the time.

And that might make you, you might have to wear a suit just to be ready to do that. As a print reporter, I do do some TV, but not a ton because it's hard, it's hard to do and do this job well, in my opinion. So I just try not to look like the worst dressed person there and maybe have a little bit of matching. And I do keep a jacket in the gallery. So I don't have to wear a jacket to work every day in the 95 degree heat of DC,

which can get like pretty uncomfortable. So that's my general assessment of sort of how I think about it. For sure, I don't want people thinking I'm slovenly. But other than that, I've seen no reason to, you know, be wearing a pocket square or something like that. That would just be beyond the pale, I think, for any reporter at this. Some do, though. Some do, Brian.

Well, we'll get to that later. You tweeted out a picture of Montana Senator John Tester the other day, and he had changed clothes, taken off his suit that I suppose he was wearing, and he was looking like he was about to go shopping at Cabela's. Yeah. Or just for hunting with Cabela's gear. Do you find senators do that, that they actually change? clothes to try to escape from you guys?

I think it's more that he's about to get on like a 10 hour of flight or 10 hour trip and he wants to be comfortable. Same way when they fly in on Monday afternoon, they're often like dressed significantly down. This is something that's accelerated. I'd say pandemic era. It's a holdover. And I think it was probably going to stay where it's considered somewhat appropriate now to

show up and basically sweats or something slightly. above sweats on a Monday evening vote and dip in and vote really quick and then leave and nobody's going to make like a big deal out of that. And so that's why when you see people getting very offended about what John Federman's wearing the votes, well, most of us who have covered the hill, remember when Ted Cruz was all sweaty after playing basketball and he went to vote or when Ben Sass was out for a jog during a vote and then he comes into vote with a sweatshirt on, et cetera. So there has been a bit of a history of the dress down in recent years. there's been a big conversation about Diane Feinstein from California and her future.

Have you had a chance to talk to her in the hallways of the Senate yet? I have not talked to her since she got back. She has a bunch of staffers who are basically shielding her. I did sort of figure out where she was coming in and out of and helped my colleague try to question her last week. Diane Feinstein did not answer any of the questions. And I doubt she'll answer many more off-the-cuff questions. she had a couple kind of, I would say, rough interactions with reporters after getting here where it was unclear whether she understood the questions that were being asked about how long she was away and things like that. And so I have not had a conversation with her.

I have had a, I've known her pretty, covered her pretty closely. So I know what she's like. And she could be a little bit prickly even, you know, 10 years ago or so she once told me to drink some caster oil. which was an old school insult. I had to look up. Castor oil. Yeah. That is.

That is from a different age. Way of saying you're full of it, apparently. So this is to say I have covered her over the years. I have not spoken to her since she's been back. I found it so interesting that with this whole conversation about what she's going to do and whether she should stay in office or not, that the test case was reporters, what you're talking about, going up to her in the hallway and asking her questions and then recording those exchanges so readers could judge for themselves, essentially.

Yeah, and that's fair. But if you've got to be on, if as a reporter, you got to be a little bit more honest with yourself, in my opinion, because there are several senators who by rule won't talk in the hallways. Maybe people that most of your listeners haven't even heard of, like Cindy Hyde Smith from Mississippi does not do high hallway interviews. Or Tim Scott, who's just launched his run for president, he has recently stopped doing hallway interviews, which is a way if you're pursuing national office to control your message a little bit more and make sure nobody's taking what, in his view, at least make sure nobody's taking what you're saying out of context. But I think it's also a way of not tripping up your own message because you're trying

to talk about whatever you want to. Which is all to say, there's at any given time, there are several senators who are not talking to reporters for various reasons. John Federman is not talking to reporters right now because it's difficult for him to do these interactions from what I can tell because he's got a translation software to help him answer those questions. And it does not translate well to an off-the-cuff interaction that we like to have. So, yeah, Dianne Feinstein is not talking to reporters. That's probably not a good sign because she used to. But at the same time, there's usually a few that are doing the same thing for different reasons.

Last question for you. There are reporters who see covering Congress as a way station to go on and cover the White House or do something else, why keep covering Congress? It feels good to feel like I know what I'm doing, and it feels good to really understand these senators. And I will say that the Senate, to me, is the perfect beat for somebody who likes politics, but also, you know, I have a family. So the Senate schedule accommodates that,

But these senators are always doing stuff that's interesting. They're running for president. They're clashing with the White House. They're running for re-election and people care about all those things. And so there's a reason that I've stuck with this is because I think it's pretty fulfilling. But also there's just so much there. And many times it's not about, I don't write about what's happening in the Senate that day. I merely use the Senate and the senators to help sort of fill my, as my palette to kind of fill out my picture.

You can read Burgess Everett in Politico. Follow him at Burgess Ev on Twitter. Burgess, thanks for coming on the press box. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. That is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Eduardo Ocampo. This week's recommendation is about Martin Amos,

the novelist who died recently. You'll find better people than me, smarter people than me, to talk to you about Amos's fiction, which I've just dipped my toe into. But Amos did have this side career, if that's the word for it, writing journalism and particularly writing celebrity profiles. So let me direct you to the New Yorker. February 12, 1995, put this into Google. That is the prime Tina Brown era of that magazine.

Amos wrote a piece about John Travolta, whose career had just been jumpstarted after the release of Pulp Fiction. This is just a delightful piece to read. It's amazing to see Amos interview Travolta, pull stuff out of him, and then at the same time transmit his thoughts about Travolta and about celebrity and about that whole world. Celebrity profiles are always an interesting mix of how much are we getting from the subject and how much are we getting from the author? I thought this was just a very, very interesting example of that.

It's also a sobering reminder that literary heavyweights are sometimes better at their jobs and our jobs. So, you know, if you need to feel bad, maybe stay away. In the meantime, read, relax, revise your nut graphs. Let's meet back here Monday, shall we? For more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then.