KATE: Hi. This is Kate (ph), and I just graduated test pilot school as the only civilian and only female student in my class. This podcast was recorded at…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
12:37 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, December 19, 2024.
KATE: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I’ll still be catching up on sleep after all that hard work. Here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Hey, congrats to you.
MCCAMMON: Very impressive.
DEIRDRE WALSH, BYLINE: Good job.
MCCAMMON: Hey, there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.
DAVIS: And I’m Susan Davis. I also cover politics.
MCCAMMON: A negotiated bipartisan deal to keep the government running into next year collapsed in dramatic fashion yesterday, and now a shutdown will begin at midnight on Friday unless lawmakers can scramble together a new deal. Deirdre, how did this happen?
WALSH: Well, as you said, the speaker negotiated this bipartisan deal that essentially funded the government into mid-March. His members knew he was negotiating with Democrats. We’re still in divided government on Capitol Hill, so he had to cut a deal with Senate Democrats. The bill also included money for disaster aid. A lot of his own members support disaster aid for places like North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, that were hit hard by hurricanes in the last few months. But he also put some other things on it that Democrats wanted. There was a pay raise for members of Congress. There were farm subsidies.
But conservatives were never going to vote for this bipartisan deal. Conservatives in the House of Representatives hate short-term spending bills. They rarely, if ever, vote for them, and they were very mad at the speaker. Even though the politics right now are we’re still in divided government and you need Democrats to pass these bills, they sort of piled on, and they got the ear of Elon Musk, who is now a close adviser to President-elect Trump, obviously the richest man in the world, very powerful on media ecosystem, and obviously on his own platform, X. Musk started tweeting his opposition to the deal and fired up the conservative base against it. He cheered on every single House Republican who went public, saying, I’m a no, with dozens and dozens of tweets, and the deal was dead.
MCCAMMON: And Sue, I mean, Trump isn’t even president yet – not for another month, almost – but already, he seems to be calling the shots in Washington in many ways.
DAVIS: You know, there was a few hours yesterday where there was some suspense about what would happen, and I think some pretty fascinating politics playing out, with Elon Musk essentially taking a policy position on legislation. And let’s remember, Elon Musk is basically an unelected bureaucrat. He has been appointed, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, to oversee something that’s called the Department of Government Efficiency that won’t really come into shape until Donald Trump takes office.
But taking a position on legislation for someone outside the realm of government is kind of unusual to begin with. And Trump didn’t weigh in for a while. And it was like, what’s he going to do here? Because this was a bipartisan agreement that was essentially also intended to sort of clean the decks – to get the unfinished business of Washington done and over with so Donald Trump could come into office with as clean a slate as possible. But hours after Musk opposed it, yeah, Donald Trump did what he’s done so many times before, even to his own allies on Capitol Hill – he tweeted that he opposed the bill. He even went so far to say that if any Republicans supported it, they should be primaried in the 2026 election, and then that upended everything.
And the place that Washington is at, once again, is one of, frankly, complete chaos. It’s unclear what Republicans can pass with their own votes. It denies the reality that Democrats still control the Senate. So ultimately, anything is going to have to be bipartisan, which was Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s message from the floor today. And frankly, Sarah, I don’t know how it ends. And it has put a shutdown, which seemed really off the table just a couple of days ago, not only back on the table, but maybe unavoidable.
MCCAMMON: Is this Trump driving the bus, or is this Musk driving the bus?
WALSH: I mean, yesterday, it appeared that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were driving the bus. They were the ones lobbying against this bill for hours, going unanswered. As Sue said, we have seen this movie before. In Trump’s first term, he did occasionally go on Twitter and blow up negotiations that his own party signed off on hours before. But the fact that these two unelected appointees to this outside-the-government advisory panel – the Department of Government Efficiency – were the ones driving the bus on a bipartisan spending deal is something we’ve never seen before.
It also shows you how much power these folks have and how Republicans on the Hill who were pushing for things that – will help their own constituents. Now, it’s unclear how much money is going to get in a final deal on those things, and that’s a real-life impact coming from two unelected people who don’t have skin in the game and weren’t elected to any office. And it just shows the sort of unpredictability that is sort of the new version of Trump’s second term in office, and he hasn’t been sworn in yet.
MCCAMMON: And why? Why are Musk and Ramaswamy, and apparently now Trump, opposing this deal?
DAVIS: It’s a great question. I think the opposition to it is still a bit of a head-scratcher, again, considering that their own ally on Capitol Hill, Speaker Johnson, negotiated this deal. What Trump, in a statement, along with Vice President-Elect JD Vance, seemed to indicate is, one, this broad idea that Democrats got too much in this deal, which is a bit of a head-scratcher because, frankly, it’s just a stopgap spending bill. It doesn’t contain any of the annual spending bills – just into mid-March. And a lot of the extraneous legislative provisions that are in there are actually bipartisan. You generally can’t make what we often call a Christmas tree legislation – ’cause everything that needs to pass rides on it – unless this stuff has bipartisan support, especially in the Senate, and can clear a 60-vote hurdle. So the idea that there was anything that was, like, strictly a Democratic win in here isn’t exactly accurate.
They did also take issue with the fact that the bill would essentially reinstate a pay raise for members of Congress, which I don’t think I have to explain why the optics of that are bad politics that President Trump might not want to support. But members of Congress haven’t had a raise since the 2008 financial crisis, so that was an effort to sort of keep their own salaries up with the rate of inflation.
And also, broadly speaking, I would say that, like, there is just this internal conservative rejection of behemoth legislation, and this thing was over 1,500 pages. It just had so many different policy provisions in it. And frankly, there’s a bit of just a conspiratorial line of thinking about legislation this big – that it’s just, as I think critics of this would call – like Rand Paul of Kentucky – the uniparty (ph). They’re trying to sneak stuff past you. This is a bad way to govern, doing it all in one big operation.
So just, also, the optics of what this bill looked like seemed to really certainly be rejected by Elon Musk. And to your earlier point, Sarah, I would note that some top Democrats today, including Rosa DeLauro, who’s the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has started referring to him as President Musk. And that, to me, seems like a line that we might be hearing a lot from Democrats in the coming months.
MCCAMMON: OK, let’s take a quick break. We’ll have more when we get back.
And we’re back. Deirdre, this deal, as we said, was negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson. We’ve talked about what a delicate balancing act that can be. And Trump and Musk completely undercut him quite quickly, by surprise. What does it say about Speaker Johnson’s grip on power and maybe on his office?
WALSH: I mean, I think it’s very shaky. His own members are publicly criticizing him. The president-elect is trashing this deal, and I think that it’s unclear that the speaker can be elected speaker on January 3. Look, a lot can happen a couple of weeks. We’ve seen things change in a matter of hours on Capitol Hill in the last 24 hours. If he’s able to negotiate something that Trump blesses, and Trump endorses him for speaker, there isn’t really anyone else who has the votes for the job or potentially could get the votes for the job. So we’ll see. But I just think it’s going to make his reelection very, very tough in January.
I think the other criticism that I’ve heard from House Republicans is that the speaker cut this deal to avoid making tough choices that would antagonize some of his conservative critics inside the House Republican conference so that they would vote for him for speaker in January. He could have agreed to sort of a broader bipartisan spending deal to clear all of the spending debates and not have Trump deal with that in March. You know, this is just a short-term spending deal, which means Congress is going to have to deal with this when Republicans have full control next year. And I think a lot of Republicans in the building were saying, like, let’s just clear the decks, do what we have to do, and have a clean slate next year. But the speaker knew that was going to be tough politically and still ended up cutting a deal which, in fact, was probably worse for him because of some of these items that got tagged onto it.
DAVIS: I have to admit that I’m a little surprised at the Trump-Musk opposition, in part because, leading into this negotiation and certainly up until the election and after the election, Mike Johnson appeared to be within both Trump and Musk’s good graces. He’s helped hold onto the House majority, albeit a very narrow one. He’s been down in Mar-a-Lago. Trump has said nice public things about him. Johnson, the other day, on Fox News, noted that he’s got a text chain with Musk and Ramaswamy.
And it’s hard, knowing that, to then look at the Trump-Musk opposition as a little bit of a shanking of the speaker. I mean, doing this to him puts him in an incredibly politically vulnerable position and fuels the internal critics of him – on the right and others – who might think that, hey, maybe Trump doesn’t actually have Johnson’s back, and he’s going into this vote in a little over two weeks. I think we lived what it was like for House Republicans to be unable to elect a speaker for a very long time. It was very messy. It was very chaotic, and I think this also opens the door to the fact that, come January 3, when a new Congress starts, the first order of business is to elect a speaker. And nothing can happen until a speaker is elected. And this next Congress, as we sit here today, looks like it’s in a position to start on a very chaotic note with a very dramatic speaker vote that – it doesn’t seem like Mike Johnson would be likely to have the votes, depending on how this current conflict plays out.
MCCAMMON: I mean, we’ve talked about what Trump doesn’t like and his allies don’t like here, but what does he want?
WALSH: He evidently wants to get rid of the debt ceiling or raise the debt ceiling. Congress needs to increase the nation’s borrowing limit when the country gets close to its limit, right? It can’t pay its bills if it doesn’t increase its borrowing authority. So we’ve gone through these debates year after year. There’s a bipartisan drama that goes along with this effort. And look, there is a bipartisan support for getting rid of the debt limit as something that Congress needs to do periodically. What I’m hearing today is that Republicans are trying to put together a slimmed-down version of the deal that Mike Johnson negotiated just two days ago – that would include stopgap funding, would include some disaster aid for these states that need to rebuild and would increase the debt limit for some period of time – maybe a couple of years. That would allow the new Republican Congress in 2025 and President Trump to push through a major tax package and not have to deal with the debt ceiling as any kind of hurdle they would have to deal with.
MCCAMMON: I mean, where do the Democrats fit into all of this? They are still, for the moment, in control of the Senate and the White House. Can Republicans really just muscle through exactly what they want at this moment?
DAVIS: No – I mean, pretty clearly not. And look at this past Congress. Time and time again, Mike Johnson had to rely on votes in the Democratic Party specifically to do things like pass stopgap spending bills or annual spending bills. There is a significant chunk of the Republican Party that fundamentally is going to oppose these spending bills. And when you only have one, two, maybe three votes to spare on any given vote, you’re going to need the minority party. I mean, the reality of Capitol Hill and power there – and, again, Republicans are going to take over the Senate, but Democrats, in the minority, still have the filibuster. You still need 60 votes to get spending bills through. As Chuck Schumer again said on the floor today, you can’t do this without bipartisanship. So the idea that you can just pull the rug out from a deal like this and then get everything you want in the end – it’s just a political fantasy. There’s absolutely no way to do it.
And Republicans were almost incapable of passing legislation on their own. I think there was this sense that Trump’s win and taking over the Senate and that word, mandate, we keep hearing would create this, like, renewed sense of unity within the party for everyone to get on board. But this episode is just a clear reminder that, like, Trump is so often a chaos agent, and he can blow things up in very unexpected ways. And Mike Johnson’s still a really junior speaker. He’s only been in this job for, I guess, maybe a little over a year, and he didn’t have much leadership experience prior to that. He doesn’t have a ton of political capital on his own, and I think he’s in a pretty weak position right now.
WALSH: I also think we’re in a new era of the people around Trump that have influence.
DAVIS: Yeah.
WALSH: It’s not people like Mike Johnson anymore. He did have a really good relationship with Trump that he’s spent the last year developing. He campaigned in something like 75 cities and raised tens of millions of dollars to keep the House Republican majority. He frequently flew down to Mar-a-Lago to coordinate various pieces of his legislative agenda, to make sure Trump was on board, and he really tried to develop a close relationship with him that clearly didn’t stick in this case. But the fact that Elon Musk is now this powerful is something – we’ve never seen this kind of dynamic in any kind of big government policy negotiation before, and I just don’t know where it leads. I think there is a real reluctance now, just being around the building, trying to talk to Republicans – both Senate Republicans and House Republicans – that they don’t want to say something to antagonize Musk because of his close relationship to Trump and because of the power he has over the incoming administration.
DAVIS: And, look, Musk is very publicly, today and ongoing, making very plain that he is provoking this chaos. He’s responding to people on Twitter, downplaying the idea that a shutdown would be bad, even suggesting that they could shut down the government until January 20, which is when Donald Trump would take over. That’s pretty through-the-looking-glass politics. And I think everything Deirdre said is exactly right – we’ve never had a situation analogous to this, when someone outside of government is wielding so much power inside of government.
MCCAMMON: Before we go, though, I want to ask – where does the fallout from that chaos land? If the government shuts down, who gets the blame for that?
DAVIS: I don’t know who gets the blame, but I think it would be pretty apparent that it was the Republican Party that drove the shutdown. I just – honestly, I can’t say confidently that I think it would play badly for them politically because I do think – and maybe they’re right – that part of the message they got in this election is that the American people want big, dramatic change in Washington, and maybe people look at this and think, great. Here it comes.
WALSH: I think the unanswered question is – what does it mean for the midterm elections, right? So it may be what the Republican base wants and cheers on. I mean, you see House Republicans basically saying, bring on the shutdown. Let’s just keep everything closed down till Trump is sworn in on January 20. The base loves that kind of talk. But what about people in their districts who lose out to economic assistance at a time where they really need it and there is a backlash to that? You know, these people were going to come in and help out and address inflation and the high costs that we’ve been struggling with under the Biden administration, but then what if things get worse and a couple of billionaires are the ones driving the bus? I think that is something that we just don’t know the answer to.
MCCAMMON: All right. We’ll be back tomorrow. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.
DAVIS: And I’m Susan Davis. I also cover politics.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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