Liam Donovan and Brendan Boyle: The Great Grift

Transcript

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Speaker 12 with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 7 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 6 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 5 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 12 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 13 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 5 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 1 Everybody, a couple of notes. First up, there was the Palisades fire in Los Angeles that started last night.
There's now expanded. The four or five fires around LA, Southern California.

Speaker 1 And so just want to send our thoughts out to the folks that are involved in that at some level, people that have had to evacuate. I've had some friends who have had to evacuate.

Speaker 1 Producer Katie Cooper is out there and has been posting some pictures of some fires that look a little too close for comfort for me. We're hoping for the best for everybody on that front.

Speaker 1 I had the most minor experience with this in Oakland. We had the apartment building right behind mine caught on fire.
And we had to evacuate one night, go to a hotel.

Speaker 1 And man, it's scary stuff just kind of monitoring your phone, trying to look at the app and trying to see where the fire has expanded to, whether your house

Speaker 1 is in the target zone. So it is tough.
I was already planning on doing a climate episode here in the next week or two. And so

Speaker 1 we'll be doing that and having a longer talk about this.

Speaker 1 As far as today's schedule, just a reminder, on Wednesdays, I do the political fluffery with my buddies Sarah and JVL over on the Next Level podcast.

Speaker 1 Every Wednesday, it's out Wednesday late afternoon usually. So make sure you subscribe to that feed or you go check it out on YouTube.

Speaker 1 We'll be doing the Gulf of America silliness, the Eileen Cannon horrors, Joe Biden's interview with Susan Page, all that kind of political stuff we'll be doing with Sarah and JVL on the next level.

Speaker 1 Today, on Wednesday, sometimes we'll be doing fun, longer form interviews about various topics.

Speaker 1 Today, I wanted to do a double header and just get deep on the budget stuff because the actual substance of what is going to impact people's lives this year is the immigration bill, the tax bill, and potentially the government shutdown.

Speaker 1 It's all related to this congressional, whatever you want to call it, process called reconciliation.

Speaker 1 And I've noticed I've been throwing around the word reconciliation a lot, and some of you might not even really quite get it.

Speaker 1 So I brought on my friend Liam Donovan to give us kind of a 101 of what is reconciliation, and then the Democrats' budget ranking member, Brendan Boyle, in the House to talk about kind of the Democrats' strategy and what sort of leverage they have on this.

Speaker 1 So we're getting nerdy on budget stuff, but you know, I got some jokes in there for you. We do some bro talk at the end.
It's great. So stick around.
You'll enjoy it.

Speaker 1 Up next, Liam Donovan and Congressman Brendan Boyle.

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We've got a budget doubleheader today. Up first, a former aide to Senate Republicans.

Speaker 1 He's a political analyst, lobbyist, and co-host of the Lobby Shop podcast. Also, an active opiner on X and a buddy, Liam Donovan.
How you doing, man?

Speaker 14 Tim, it's good to see you.

Speaker 1 Thanks for having me. It's been a while.
Long overdue. Long overdue.
First inaugural visit to the pod.

Speaker 1 I've called you into service today as a hill nerd expert, particularly on reconciliation, because what we've got coming down the pike, you know, in the non-renaming the Gulf of Mexico category, you know, in the seriousness category, we've got immigration, budget stuff, government shutdown, tax extenders, but it's all connected to this word reconciliation, which I've been like tossing around on the pod for the last month.

Speaker 1 And I realized we got to give people the basics. You know, we got to do how a bill becomes a law, and then we can get into the strategy around it.
But first, but first,

Speaker 1 I feel like people deserve a palate cleanser. You know, if we're going to get really dorky on Ways and Means Committee stuff, I feel like we deserve a brief palate cleanser first.

Speaker 1 So I want to play for you a take from one of the guest hosts on Fox News to 5 yesterday. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 15 It actually is not the first time this has happened. They're calling the president, you know, the president-elect bananas and crazy for coming up with this idea.

Speaker 15 But by the way, this is not the first time that America has tried to buy Greenland. Back in 1867,

Speaker 15 Democratic president Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland for $100 million, which would be about a bill this, you know, in our day and age, $1 billion.

Speaker 15 Didn't happen, obviously. Still very important.
And as you mentioned, Jesse, has a lot of minerals. Very important for our country.

Speaker 15 I think the president may be on to something.

Speaker 1 A lot of minerals. I know we're not fact-checking anymore, according to Mark Zuckerberg, but

Speaker 1 I'm pretty certain that Harry Truman was not president in 1867. I don't know, Liam.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 14 I'm kind of inked into this junk history with Jojine. Like, this is, I could, I could run with this because I'm genuinely curious.
Like, which elements of this has any...

Speaker 14 Like, yeah, did something happen in 1867? Did something happen in

Speaker 14 the late 40s? I genuinely don't know. And now I'm kind of curious.

Speaker 1 What I've learned here for you, because this isn't Facebook, so we can do a fact check, is Andrew Johnson's Secretary of State in 1867, Andrew Johnson, America's worst president until Trump.

Speaker 1 His Secretary of State did, I think, flirt with, you know, or mention or consider a Greenland purchase. Not Harry Truman.

Speaker 1 But, you know, close enough. Close enough.
Do you, before we do it, do you have any other hot takes? Gulf of America. What do you think about my take?

Speaker 1 I i think that as those of us in the gulf states louisiana we have real problems with the gulf of mexico with hurricanes with coastal restoration insurance rates i think that jeff landry and ron de sanctimonia should cut a deal with trump and say gulf of trump we'll call it gulf of trump but you've got to give us one trillion dollars for coastal restoration and and you know insurance for climate change disasters that's my opinion big beautiful gulf i like it i mean i i heard somebody made a good point i think we're thinking too small we need to go Somebody put out a golfofcrypto.com.

Speaker 14 We got it. We got to think sponsorship.
We got to.

Speaker 1 Sell it. I think that was sunny bunch.
I think that's like how we can sell a bunch.

Speaker 14 I think that's a source of revenue for a reconciliation conversation.

Speaker 1 Gulfofcrypto.com. That's rename everything in the red states.
Like, why are we calling it the Great Salt Lake? You know, I mean, that could be.

Speaker 14 Make it like NASCAR.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Citibank Salt Lake.

Speaker 1 All right. Much to think about there.
So, reconciliation. Just first off, fundamentally, what the fuck is this? Like, why is reconciliation the only way the Republicans can pass things?

Speaker 1 And why can there be maybe one or maybe two? Let's just give us the basic fundamentals first.

Speaker 14 Well, working backwards, I think everybody understands from a schoolhouse rock perspective, or most people do when they think about it hard. It's nice to have control of the U.S.
Senate.

Speaker 14 Like it gives you fancy titles and chairmanships and gavels, and you can call yourself the majority leader and you can schedule the votes.

Speaker 14 But the way the Senate works, I mean, there's two fundamental problems. Unless 100 senators agree on things, it takes a lot of time to do really anything.

Speaker 14 And even if you go through all the procedural steps, you still need 60 votes to do almost anything.

Speaker 14 That's because there's procedural steps to get to the final passage. Yes, maybe to pass that bill in the end, it only takes 50 plus one.
You know, the president, vice president can break the ties.

Speaker 14 It's really hard to do most things.

Speaker 14 And so what that means is when it comes time to fund the government, as we saw in December, the reason Republicans were very frustrated and the reason conservatives always get mad at the end of the year at the end of the fiscal year is because, well, Democrats have a role in this process too, if you need to get 60 votes.

Speaker 14 The virtues of budget reconciliation, which is a process that was created about half a century ago and has sort of evolved over time, is that it's one of the few mechanisms by which Congress can do an end-around around the filibuster for a limited prescribed categories of issues, specifically spending, so appropriations, revenue, so tax and tariffs, and the debt limit.

Speaker 14 So there's sort of three flavors within reconciliation.

Speaker 1 So you can't do a five-week abortion ban under reconciliation.

Speaker 14 So the short answer is no. But I want to get to that because there are interesting ways to come at things that you want to do, not facially, right?

Speaker 14 You can't just, yes, you can't just insert that in there. And this is a little grim to go through it with that, but there are creative ways that you can get at policy issues issues through it.

Speaker 1 Like, we're going to do a tax on any abortion after a certain number of weeks, you know?

Speaker 14 Like, in all seriousness, and that's like this sort of 301 stuff, but like at the 101 level.

Speaker 1 Back to 101. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 14 But the point is, we've seen in the modern era, you know, like post-1990, whatever, let's just say Bush era on reconciliation has become the preferred way, particularly in, you know, quote, so-called trifecta, when one party has unified control of Congress and the White House.

Speaker 14 This is the way things get done.

Speaker 14 And early on, particularly in the Bush era, we think back to the Bush tax cuts, the 01, 03 tax cuts, that was done through reconciliation, but it actually had Democratic support in some cases, significant Democratic support in some cases.

Speaker 14 So it makes things easier. And as a sort of a baseline case, it means that to the extent that one party has consensus, they can move things through within those parameters of tax.

Speaker 14 spending and debt limit.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 14 you can only do one reconciliation reconciliation process per fiscal year. And this is where it gets confusing because we're talking about this year, next year, last year.

Speaker 14 We are currently in fiscal year 25, and we were even in calendar year 24. We did not do a budget for fiscal year 2025.
Typically, that happens last year. Typically, that happens in calendar year 2024.

Speaker 14 Because in divided government,

Speaker 1 it says we, the royal we, the government, the House Republicans.

Speaker 14 By law, according according to the Budget Act, Congress is obligated to, I mean, that the White House produces its document. Congress passes its budget.
They did not do that.

Speaker 1 So the House Republicans did not do that.

Speaker 14 Republicans did not do that. And I mean, Senate Democrats as well.
So the divided government did not do that.

Speaker 14 The precedent that we're looking at here is in 2017, where for the first time, because in 2016, calendar 2016, there was not a budget done in fiscal year 2017.

Speaker 14 Republicans, when they sort of caught the car, Trump won. They picked up both chambers or kept both chambers in Congress.
They realized, well, guess what?

Speaker 14 We can dust off that budget shell that didn't happen from the sort of ongoing fiscal year.

Speaker 14 We will use that to repeal Obamacare, and we will use the next one for next year to have a big, beautiful tax bill. And

Speaker 14 part of that came true. And actually, if we think back eight years ago, around this time, they did the first step in the process.
They passed a budget resolution.

Speaker 14 And I say shell because normally a budget is a big, huge document that has all kinds of details and weighty issues. That's not what we're talking about here.
I mean, it's just sort of numbers.

Speaker 14 But in order to get to the fun part where, or messy part, where you're actually putting the package together, you have to quote unquote instruct committees.

Speaker 14 You need to give sort of a number, a target number that tells

Speaker 14 whether it's the Ways and Means Committee or any other authorizing committee that you need to raise or lower the deficit.

Speaker 14 You need to raise spending, lower spending, raise revenue, lower revenue by X dollar amount.

Speaker 14 Only then, and once it's adopted mutually in both chambers, only then can you go down the road of actually putting together legislation.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's the first option. So they could do a reconciliation using last year's budget, but they have to do it by the end of this fiscal year, which is what, April?

Speaker 14 It is September 30th.

Speaker 1 Oh, so I have till September.

Speaker 14 And really, I mean, I don't think there's any any real question. I think they will,

Speaker 14 to the extent that we're going to do one here and now, they will use that fiscal year 25 budget. I haven't heard anybody suggest otherwise.
But to your point,

Speaker 14 that only is ripe until the end of September. Now,

Speaker 14 here's the real issue. When we're talking about one bill or two,

Speaker 14 it's not whether you would use that second one when it ripens, because of course you would. Why wouldn't you? You would want to pursue that.
The real question is whether you do tax up front.

Speaker 1 Okay, so just, yeah, so let me just lay the lay of the land here. So, so that's, so that's the process.
So, like the short, and I just one more question on the 101.

Speaker 1 It has to be budget neutral, a reconciliation bill.

Speaker 14 So, that's the fun part. It does not have to be budget neutral, but you need to give yourself permission via these budget instructions for how much it can raise or lower the deficit.

Speaker 14 And the important thing here, and there's there's a really interesting sort of historical precedent here.

Speaker 14 If you think back to 2017, and this is, remember, this is in the sort of the lowest of lows in the first year of the Trump presidency, where it felt like Republicans were never getting anything done.

Speaker 14 Obamacare dreams, you know, fizzled.

Speaker 14 And you had on the budget committee, you had much more traditional Republican sort of spectrum here where you had the old school budget hawk in Bob Corker, who said, no, it's got to be, every dollar has to be paid for.

Speaker 14 We're going to do revenue neutral tax reform. And the other side, you had Pat Toomey, the supply sider, the Art Laffer disciple saying, no, no, no, it's going to pay for itself.
It's fine.

Speaker 14 Where they ended up meeting in the middle was saying, okay, fine, because the scorekeepers won't give credit for all these great, you know, macroeconomic effects.

Speaker 14 What we're going to do is say, did those play out?

Speaker 1 The budget cut? They did.

Speaker 14 They did not pay for themselves indeed.

Speaker 1 Oh, they didn't pay for it. The dump tax cuts didn't pay for themselves?

Speaker 14 Look, I think that's going to be an interesting factor here.

Speaker 14 Democrats pointing to those, you know, the old, but then there's going to be the same conversations again. But the upshot is where they met in the middle was $1.5 trillion.

Speaker 14 And the reason we're even here back talking about this contextually is in order to fit $6 trillion of tax cuts into a $1.5 trillion bag, they had to play with the dates such that most of it, particularly as it relates to the individual side, you and I and anyone listening to this podcast, our tax rates, because it was not done in a permanent manner, because there were not long-term pay fors, it expires after seven years.

Speaker 14 So it expires at the end of this year. Now, that goes to, I think, your underlying question, which is it cannot raise the deficit in the out years.

Speaker 14 So in congressional budgetary scoring, we use a 10-year window. And so the short answer of this is reconciliation can only do things for 10 years.

Speaker 14 Now, the reason why the corporate rate is permanent is that because some of the things that the corporate community gave up, they sort of throw off revenue. down the road.

Speaker 14 So that's permanent, but everything on the individual side was like temporary cuts, just pure candy. So you can give yourself permission within that 10 years to raise the deficit as much as you want.

Speaker 14 You could just say, forget it, like these are good, tax cuts are good, they're going to pay for themselves, and we're going to pay.

Speaker 1 Okay, got it.

Speaker 1 So, all this is important because now we get to the next question, which is both the strategic political question about whether the Trump administration and this Congress can get anything done and what exactly it would get done and what Democrats can fight.

Speaker 1 That's what we have Brendan Boyle up next to talk about.

Speaker 1 So, their discussion right now, for people who are not reading political political huddle, is there's a big debate about whether Stephen Miller and his gang, I was talking to Banner about this in my interview, the immigration hawks, the MAGA traditionalists, they want to use last year's budget to do a really fast bill that is immigration and drilling.

Speaker 1 You know, and it's like we are going to fucking deport people, we are going to fund a bunch of Sheriff Joe's, we're going to fund ICE, and like we're going to fund detention centers and camp.

Speaker 1 We're going to do all that. We're also going to drill and whatever.
May they throw some other stuff in there. And it is just a funding bill to pay for that stuff.
That's what they want to do.

Speaker 1 The more traditional Republican types, including Jason Smith, who runs the Ways and Means Committee, he's concerned that

Speaker 1 this herd of cats won't pass a tax bill.

Speaker 1 And then the second bill would be just this Trump tax cut extender, and then they'll deal with Trump tax cuts and Doge and any stuff that's like pure fiscal.

Speaker 1 The Jason Smith, the Republicans, who really only care about the tax cuts, don't care that much about all the sheriff Joe's. They

Speaker 1 think that like the only way to keep all of the troublemakers in the House caucus in line is to put this all in one big thing so they have to vote for it.

Speaker 1 And if they don't vote for it, they will be betraying the Trump cult and they can use the power of Trump's bleats

Speaker 1 to pressure them into submission. So it's like it's a strategic question.

Speaker 1 But I think the downside of that one big one from the MAGA perspective is, well, A, they might get some shit they don't want in there and be forced to vote for it. And B,

Speaker 1 who the hell knows, right? Like, that's going to take a while. Trump might not get any actual wins for months.
And who the hell knows what happens by then?

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, we might be invading Panama and like that, you know, people might not be like, you know, might want to take the burden in hand.

Speaker 1 So is that a good summary of like kind of the strategic debate happening between the sides?

Speaker 14 That's a good summary of the debate. And I think, and I think the current debate, I mean, the one or two bills is the MacGuffin, right?

Speaker 14 It's going to matter, but it's downstream from the real question, which is, do you agree on tax? Can you agree on tax? And how soon can you agree on tax?

Speaker 14 Because that's what it really boils down to is when are we going to do tax?

Speaker 14 And the Miller proposition is from a, you know, just from a tactical standpoint, like that's, it's a tactical question, really.

Speaker 14 If you want, as Republicans profess to want for, you know, the last several months, they want to do this out of the gate. They want to do first hundred days.

Speaker 14 That will not include a broader agreement on tax because they just don't, not only do they not agree, they don't even understand.

Speaker 14 This is, I think, puts in perspective. I did the math earlier this morning.
And of the members who were in the chamber, in the House in 2017, so not that long ago, eight years ago,

Speaker 14 the people who were around to vote for the bill in 2017 that we're sort of trying to extend theoretically, of 219 Republicans that are in the House right now, only 84 of them were around.

Speaker 14 So like a third of the conference. And of those, like several didn't vote for it.
Like Stefanik didn't vote for it. Issa didn't vote for it.

Speaker 14 A handful of others didn't even vote for it. So most people don't have any idea what we're really talking about.

Speaker 14 And now, if the ignorance were good and people didn't care about things like deficits, it would be easy.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 14 the real issue is that when you have such a narrow majority and you do have people, you know, principled or otherwise, people that are like, no, we have to pay for this stuff, it's going to be really hard.

Speaker 14 And remember, as I said, whatever you do on the substantive side, you have to agree on like the bottom line, the sort of macro picture first.

Speaker 14 So you can't even do the first part, that budget resolution that has the instructions until you agree on the bottom line.

Speaker 1 So you got to get people to agree that like, okay, in this reconciliation bill with the taxes, we'll figure out the details later, but it's going to increase the deficit over 10 years by 2 trillion, whatever.

Speaker 1 I'll just pick a random number. But you got to get like Chip Roy to agree on that up front before you can even start doing the details.

Speaker 14 Bingo. And that's the exact issue.
That's that corker, that corker-to-me conversation. And here's the key.
That's why Republicans got it done in 2017.

Speaker 14 And frankly, it's why Democrats almost like lit themselves on fire with the Build Back Better bill, which was sort of resurrected as the IRA.

Speaker 14 But because they never had that conversation with Joe Manchin of like what the bottom line is going to be, what you had was like Bernie Sanders and Mark Warner say, okay, well, like maybe it'll be 3 trillion or something like that.

Speaker 14 Manchin was never on board with that.

Speaker 14 So you have to hash that stuff out up front, figure out how big your box is, and then you can put whatever you can in it and go with the trade-offs that lead to that. But that's the fundamental key.

Speaker 14 Now,

Speaker 14 you could always put an instruction of, you know, lower the deficit by $1 to the ways and means and finance committees, but that would be locking yourself into. paying for everything.

Speaker 1 Well, the good news is we've got some lead negotiators and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for the White House who really like deeply understand this process and want to do big cuts.

Speaker 1 And so I'm sure they'll just pop off on Twitter about like, guys, what's the big deal? We'll just pay for this.

Speaker 1 We'll find the Doge cuts somewhere at the Department of Education. No, no biggie.
Piece of cake. And then they can just resolve that on X, right?

Speaker 14 Piece of cake. But I think to your point, this really boils down to the strategic question, such as it is, is, do you need wins up front?

Speaker 14 And if you do, you should, and this doesn't, this isn't exclusive of tax. If you can agree on tax things, do it.

Speaker 14 Like find what you can agree on, build consensus and make a move as quickly as possible because you just can't count on the future. You don't know if and when things will go off the rails.

Speaker 14 Remember, because they kicked the can into this year, you still have to fund the government again on a bipartisan basis with democratic help within the first hundred days, March 14th.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is why we're getting to Boyle next. That's an interesting question, right?

Speaker 1 Because that is, so this is the other like context around all this when you just sort of think about the timing, right?

Speaker 1 If they decide decide to go the route where they got to negotiate through all this stuff and they got to go through ways and means and it's going to take months and you got to pay off the New York and California guys that want assault reduction.

Speaker 1 And in the meantime, in March, you run up into a funding the government debate, which is separate but related, right? It's the same people.

Speaker 1 So it's the same troublemakers that you're dealing with, you know.

Speaker 1 And the Democrats, at least for now, are saying that they're not going to bail them out this time.

Speaker 1 I'm somewhat skeptical that they will have the fortitude to like sit through a government shutdown and watch March Madness, but we'll see. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Can these guys even fund the go and doesn't those things relate? Like, don't you need a win kind of because you have this, you kind of know you have this failure coming in March?

Speaker 14 Here's where it gets interesting because it's not what Stephen Miller will tell you.

Speaker 14 It's not necessarily what you hear from Bannon, but like part of the virtue of doing a spending bill up front is that remember, you need 60 votes for the appropriations, the traditional appropriations process.

Speaker 14 And if you need 60 votes, you're not going to get money for the wall. You're not going to get money for more defense without giving something up to Democrats.

Speaker 14 Like that bargaining that has to happen in the appropriations process, guess what? You have an easy button. You can do the things that you agree on.

Speaker 14 So, like, the reason we don't just CR in perpetuity, the reason our CRs are like three months is because the defense hawks typically, there's enough members who care about defense above all in both parties.

Speaker 14 You can't CR forever.

Speaker 14 So if you could plus up defense and plus up border or whatever, get your wall money before that, like come out of the gate, that's part of, like it's, it's kind of unspoken, but that's a big factor here.

Speaker 14 Because if you could plus those things up, then who cares if you like Republicans, if they could agree on a CR and stick together and get it out of the House, that puts the Senate in the position where, what, are Democrats going to filibuster that and like shut down the government?

Speaker 14 Probably not.

Speaker 1 But are they able to do that?

Speaker 14 If you got a bill out of the gate,

Speaker 14 if you went to bill strategy, I don't like that terminology because I think it misses the point. But there are tax things that you agree on that you could put in there.

Speaker 14 Like you could make Jason Smith happy at some level by taking, remember, there was a Jason Smith tax bill last year that was meant to serve as a bridge between the expiring provisions and the end of this coming year.

Speaker 14 Remember, the cliff that we're dealing with isn't till the end of this year. This Congress is not prone to turn its homework in early.

Speaker 14 And without the forcing of a deadline, that's why the anybody who's realistic about tax like you're probably going to need to be either up against the fiscal year deadline or up against the calendar year deadline to get it done and if you've done nothing with the first six nine twelve months what was the point of this two-bill strategy and i mean and this is where let's just get into you know a little parlor game That's like kind of what I see, right?

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know how they do anything before nine months unless they try to jam through some relatively inoffensive immigration and energy thing or inoffensive to Republicans.

Speaker 1 There would be plenty of offensive immigration things in there to me. But like, I don't know.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 14 No, I think that has to be the rubric. It has to be, and Trump has given them license to do this.
He has certain instincts that are better than the politicians, and his instincts are right here.

Speaker 14 Like, he's not helping in that. He's sort of like sounding off.
Whoever talked to him last and made a persuasive case, he's like, yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 14 And then the next day he's like, well, like, these guys seem like they have a good idea too. Like, whatever.
I don't really care. That's kind of where this has landed.
Like, one bill, two bill.

Speaker 14 I don't care. You shouldn't care.
What you should care about is what can we agree on? And let's get some wins. Johnson knows his conference.
Jason Smith knows his conference.

Speaker 14 The politics of House Republicans are probably such that they need to say we're going to do one bill.

Speaker 14 When they go down that road and realize, okay, we can only agree on so much, then you kind of call the audible as you go. But that instruction piece is the important part.
And so I think what

Speaker 14 we could imagine happening here that kind of solves the problem is, again, a nominal instruction to the Ways and Means and Finance Committee, like something that wouldn't be a big deficit number, but that would just mean that whatever they put into the tax piece has to sort of be offset.

Speaker 14 As I said, Smith has a bill, the Smith Wyden bill, which was sort of the trading of the extensions of corporate tax policy that had rolled off for some plus-ups in the child tax credit.

Speaker 14 I don't think you could get Republicans to agree on the child tax credit piece because that's something for the broader discussion, but you could certainly take the tax piece of what they agreed on and passed through the House last year, put that in here.

Speaker 14 You've built that bridge to the end of the year. You have to get into this process.
This risk for Republicans is you failed to launch.

Speaker 1 I mean, isn't that the most likely thing?

Speaker 14 I think you have to get started to even establish where your trouble points are. And the more you sort of, we're literally like arguing how many angels are dancing on the head of a budget resolution.

Speaker 14 It doesn't matter. Just figure out what you can agree on and go for it.

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Speaker 10 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 13 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 The budget offsets, besides the random shit the Doge finds, to me, it's like there's going to have to be health care cuts in here, right? I mean, what do you think it is?

Speaker 14 Here is the fundamental question, and it's playing out quietly, but it is how do they grade themselves? How do they agree mutually to score these things?

Speaker 14 And if you listen to what Chairman Mike Crapo from Idaho, the chairman of the Finance Committee, is saying, He's selling the idea, and he's not wrong. Typically, we don't pay for

Speaker 14 ongoing tax policy, like the current policy baseline.

Speaker 14 That is a nearly $5 trillion question. If you just say current policy is current policy, this is people's own money.
We're not going to sort of like.

Speaker 1 Well, their plan is $5 trillion.

Speaker 1 The king of debt, man, $5 trillion tax cuts. We're just not going to pay for it.

Speaker 14 And as crazy as that sounds, Trump is.

Speaker 1 Trump's fine with that. Trump's fine with that.
The question is, is Chip Roy fine with it?

Speaker 14 And that's the real question: is who out of the 219, where are your trouble spots there? And how do you sell the politics of this?

Speaker 14 Because I think the revenue pressure and the appetite and desperation to find the loose change in the couch cushions of the federal government comes down to, okay, what are you obligated to pay for?

Speaker 14 And again, maybe they split the difference. But if they can agree, okay,

Speaker 14 we don't have to pay for current tax policy, then all of a sudden that takes a huge weight off of that pressure.

Speaker 14 And then, you know, that's just to ensure that no one, that you and I don't pay more in taxes or any of our

Speaker 1 relatives or what have you.

Speaker 14 Everyone's taxes go up, which is another way of saying like Tax Tax and Jobs Act really did reduce almost everyone's taxes.

Speaker 14 Didn't necessarily get credit for that, but the flip side is when it goes away, everybody's taxes go up. Politically, that's untenable.

Speaker 14 So part of the problem with the two-bill argument or one-bill argument is a tax bill is going to happen. The only question is: do you have to run, do you have to bargain with Democrats to get it?

Speaker 1 Well, this goes to my next question.

Speaker 1 What do you think?

Speaker 1 How much leverage are the Democrats going to have here? Like, I'll boil up next.

Speaker 1 Because I think that they're going to have a lot. I just, like, the margin is so small, but you know these guys better than me.
Maybe they all get in line for Mr. Trump one time.

Speaker 14 Let me give you the model. This won't happen, but this is what they should do.

Speaker 14 This is the ideal situation. The model is: don't do what you did in 2017, which is go in without a plan and spin your wheels for seven months before realizing you just wasted it.

Speaker 14 You take the model that Democrats did. It gave them no political benefit.

Speaker 14 But from a substantive matter, if you think about what Democrats did in 2021, they came in, they immediately passed a budget resolution.

Speaker 14 Now, they had a leg up and they had the urgency of the COVID moment.

Speaker 14 And they had a plan that had been relatively socialized and sort of campaigned on, but they immediately moved on the American Rescue Plan. Republicans didn't think they could do it.

Speaker 14 The idea that with a 50-seat Senate majority with people like Joe Manish and Kirsten Sinema, people didn't think they could get that.

Speaker 1 Republicans thought they'd have a lot of leverage in there.

Speaker 14 They were trying to negotiate. Democrats passed it.

Speaker 14 That passing it set the tone and put Republicans on notice that if you don't bargain with us, if you don't help us, we're going to go back and do more by ourselves.

Speaker 14 So that was how you got the bipartisan infrastructure law.

Speaker 1 Democrats are way more agreeable, though. No, they are.

Speaker 14 But this sets up the model for the theoretical virtues of the two bills. If you can demonstrate a baseline level of legislative competence of Trump getting the stragglers in line,

Speaker 1 you laugh. Well, shit.
Well, shit, Liam. I mean, if I could bench press 300, then you know, I'd be doing better at the gay bar on the weekend.

Speaker 14 It should not be that difficult

Speaker 14 if you can get out of your own way to pass

Speaker 1 these boys.

Speaker 14 You pass something that

Speaker 14 opens up leasing, throws off revenue that way. It offsets some of the border and wall spending.
You throw in some stuff for defense. It's not that difficult to find what Republicans could agree on.

Speaker 14 You could even layer in some of the tax pieces that I mentioned from the Smith-Wyden bill, but you have to do something that puts Democrats in a position where they are inclined to help.

Speaker 14 Because remember, Trump has things he wants to do that actually Democrats aren't against. Taxes on tips, things like that.

Speaker 1 This to me is a big question, actually. Not what the Republicans can prove competence.
They can't.

Speaker 1 Whether the Democrats have the fucking resolve to be like, nope, nope, not dealing with you, not dealing with you. Because I don't think that they do.

Speaker 14 I think you saw it with the Lake and Riley stuff that's going on right now.

Speaker 14 I mean, even listening to people like AOC, I think there's a recognition that they just can't be seen as reflexively against policies.

Speaker 1 Why, though? The Republicans were seen as reflexively against everything that Obama and Biden did. They suffered no consequences for it.

Speaker 14 I think it's less about whether there'd be consequences to suffer and more that the repairing the party's image that Democrats need to do is just different than the needs and capacity of Republicans to improve their image.

Speaker 14 But I think there's a recognition that things

Speaker 14 are seen as populist and are seen as politically effective. Democrats have to change their tack on those things.

Speaker 14 But the upshot is, I think the virtue of doing what you can now is that there are lots of things that Democrats can and probably would work with you on if you can put them in a position where there's pressure.

Speaker 14 And remember, whether it's Joe Biden and his budget or Kamala Harris and her campaign propositions, Democrats actually agreed with, they wanted to extend $60,

Speaker 14 like about $3 trillion of the tax cuts and jobs acts policies. They wanted to extend that.

Speaker 14 So the way this would go at its best is work with Democrats on the things that are bipartisan, overlapping, with the leverage of being able to go back and do do everything else on a partisan basis in that in that second bill.

Speaker 14 But the problem is without the forcing mechanisms of the urgency of running up against a deadline, it's just really hard to stand something up right now and come up with these sorts of, I mean, if you say, oh, we're going to do it all at once, well, that's fine, but you're probably going to be waiting to the end of the year.

Speaker 1 Yeah. All right.
Final thing. I like your Pollyanna version.
I don't think it's going to happen. Liam Donovan, Crystal Ball.
Does the government shut down in March?

Speaker 1 Do these guys have either of these bills, one or two or anything passed by Memorial Day?

Speaker 14 They won't have,

Speaker 14 I don't think the government shuts down for any in it. I mean, you might see a partial, you know, you could do like the CR most of it and the parts we can't agree on, you shut down.

Speaker 14 But I don't think it'll be, I don't think it'll be a significant shutdown.

Speaker 14 You never put it past him, but I think that's part of the problem is that like the last Trump shutdown was so pointless, like it, it just kind of like ran its course.

Speaker 14 At this rate, I wouldn't expect passage by Memorial Day. They need to decide, not one bill, two bill,

Speaker 14 when do you want a bill? Because if that's the goal, if the goal is to pass something by Memorial Day, that's fine.

Speaker 14 But you just need to decide then if we haven't agreed on things by March, we just got to go. I think they will.

Speaker 14 I think there will be a recognition at a certain point that the longer you wait, the harder things get.

Speaker 14 But I just think people need to understand that if you intend to move a tax bill in the first tranche, that it won't be a sort of universal deal that covers the $5 trillion in policy that we're talking about.

Speaker 1 All right. I got my big box of popcorn out.
We're going to be keeping you around.

Speaker 1 You're always a little bit more, I don't know, sun-kissed about potential options than me. And, you know, sometimes my cynicism, I get surprised.
So we'll see how

Speaker 1 it all shakes out.

Speaker 14 I think Mike Johnson had a better showing than I might have expected even hours before it played out.

Speaker 14 And that should tell you that if you can narrow it down to a limited group of holdouts, I think Trump can turn the screws in ways that would be formidable. But the problem is

Speaker 14 he can't help you at this stage.

Speaker 1 He's the closer at best. Yeah.
I do think that eventually they get something.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it is because of this reason is that in the end, people are going to be loath to want to be seen as the turret in the Trump punch bowl.

Speaker 1 But I think it's going to be dicey on the way there. And I think once one thing is passed,

Speaker 1 it is going to be a shit show once one thing's passed. Anyway, Liam Donovan, thank you so much, my man.
We'll be talking to you again soon. Up next, Congressman Brendan Boyle.

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Speaker 10 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

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Speaker 1 All right, we're back with Democratic member of the House representing Pennsylvania's 2nd congressional district, which covers Northeast Philly. Go Birds.

Speaker 1 He's the top Democrat on the budget committee and a member of the Ways and Means Committee with Brendan Boyle. How you doing, Congressman?

Speaker 17 Hey, great to be with you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, welcome to the pod. We just had Liam explain the basics of reconciliation, you know, the

Speaker 1 bill becomes a law and stuff.

Speaker 1 So if people have stuck around or fast-forwarded to you, I want to focus in this conversation from your vantage point on kind of how the Democrats are going to handle dealing with Republicans on these issues, countering them, maybe dealing with them.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 And so I want to start with, you know, as ranking member on the budget committee, like what tools are are at your disposal in the minority, you know, in particular when it's going to come to these one or two big budget bills.

Speaker 17 Yeah. So one actual quick word on reconciliation before we mercifully move on to your question.
A very easy way for people to just remember about reconciliation. It's a way to avoid the filibuster.

Speaker 17 Simply put, that's it. It's a way to pass things in the Senate with simple majority because of their goofy, antiquated rules.

Speaker 17 So there are all these sorts of rules, though, that come with reconciliation that the majority party has to follow.

Speaker 17 And that actually is the beginning of the answer of your question, making sure that we attack the things that they're doing that don't qualify for reconciliation.

Speaker 17 Republicans successfully did that to us four years ago in a number of ways when it came to Build Back Better. But if we take a step back from that, which is kind of processy but important,

Speaker 17 on the larger picture, messaging, we have to do this time exactly what we we did eight years ago when it came to Trump's tax cuts and his ultimately failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Speaker 17 And that was simply point out to people what they're trying to do is take away health care from tens of millions of Americans and pass big tax cuts for billionaires that you, the American people and the middle class and working class, will have to foot the bill for.

Speaker 17 And that, frankly, is what we're already starting to see right now in 2025.

Speaker 17 We're talking about $4.5 trillion of tax cuts, promising $1.5 trillion of cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Speaker 17 That was in the budget continuing resolution that the Republicans passed, the internal agreement. I always love this, by the way.
The media will breathlessly report Republicans reach an agreement.

Speaker 17 They finally reached an agreement amongst themselves. With themselves.

Speaker 1 So congratulations. And didn't actually even have to put their name, their vote on the line for it.
It was a private agreement.

Speaker 17 Yeah, but they did put it down uh on pen and paper which is interesting four trillion dollars of cuts they commit themselves to two and a half trillion discretionary which is again annoying capitol hill speak for basically most of the things government does and then one and a half trillion for social security medicare and medicaid those will be deeply unpopular uh if they really actually follow through them you're also on the ways and means committee first hearing is uh coming up here next week on the trump tax cut extension which at some level at the political level i find funny because throughout the campaign, it didn't feel like there was a huge focus on the Trump tax cut extension as the prime issue.

Speaker 1 And that's the first thing these guys are leaning into. It's going to be part of whether they do one or two reconciliation bills, extending the tax cuts are going to be a part of that.

Speaker 1 But your point is to do this offset, which is going to require a lot of cuts, I think particularly to Medicaid.

Speaker 1 They're doing it to just

Speaker 1 at the baseline to extend the tax cuts that are already passed. I mean, is that kind of your assessment of what they've got planned? And how do you plan to kind of message against it?

Speaker 17 Yeah, so first I would completely agree. I think it's fair to say the Trump campaign was not a policy-heavy campaign, not exactly releasing a lot of policies and plans.

Speaker 17 A lot of talk about Hannibal Lecter, not as much talk about extending the Trump tax cuts. But it is funny, isn't it, that no matter what Trump or folks in the right wing talk about,

Speaker 17 always the top priority is delivering those tax cuts for the people who have been financing and funding their campaigns.

Speaker 17 That was the top priority in 2017 in Trump 1.0, and it's the top priority again this time around. So I think for them, it's the single most important issue.

Speaker 17 When you look at the tech pros, when you look at people on Wall Street and others who held their nose and went along with Trump, This was always going to be the payoff.

Speaker 17 It was going to be deregulation combined with extending the Trump tax cuts, 83% of which go to the richest 1% of Americans.

Speaker 1 It kind of reveals just the fraudulence of the MAGA populism at some level.

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, say what you want about the tenants of Steve Bannon, like at least, you know, he's for increasing taxes on the top 1%.

Speaker 1 These guys, like the populism a lot of times, is rhetorical, and then the policies don't really match that. How do you guys get that to sink in?

Speaker 1 And it's both a messaging question, but also a process question over on the Hill. Like, how can you make the case

Speaker 1 to people that these guys are betraying their promise to working-class Americans?

Speaker 17 We obviously were not successful in doing that in 2024. One of the things I learned is that it's really hard to warn people about a hypothetical.

Speaker 17 Sometimes, unfortunately, maybe it's just human nature. They actually need to see it happening before they respond.

Speaker 17 I mean, I remember I was having one interaction with a voter in Philadelphia, younger guy, Latino, was talking about how he had, in his opinion, he had more money in his pocket and costs were less five years ago than they are today.

Speaker 17 And he didn't like Trump. He disagreed with Trump on immigration and he was still going to vote for him on that basis.

Speaker 17 And I tried to tell him, look, you know, most of their agenda is actually about extending tax cuts for the richest 1%, possibly cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to help pay for it.

Speaker 17 Just didn't work. Just wasn't interested.
I think sometimes people actually have to see it happen. And you know, in 2017, I will take some hope in this regard.
In 2017,

Speaker 17 in the history of polling, the only tax cut that has ever been unpopular was the Trump 2017 tax cuts, the TCJA. You go back to the JFK tax cut in the early 60s, majority approval.

Speaker 17 This is all from Gallup, by the way. Reagan tax cut in 1981, hugely popular.
Bush tax cuts, both in 2001 and 2003, were also also popular.

Speaker 17 The Trump tax cuts consistently polled around 40% approval, 55% disapproval in 2017.

Speaker 17 That coupled with the attempt to take away Obamacare, those were the two twin reasons why we took back the House in 2018.

Speaker 1 I want to talk about some other inflection points. So they've got

Speaker 1 to have to pass this bill at some level with the tax cuts. There's going to be some immigration stuff and some Doge stuff in there.
I want to talk to you about that.

Speaker 1 But the other thing that's happening, you know, probably before they get that done, is having to keep the government open, right? It's funding the government. And they'd extended that

Speaker 1 through March. I'm wondering how you, as kind of ranking member, are seeing that fight coming up.

Speaker 1 I know that there was some talk from Speaker Jeffries about how, you know, there's not going to be any more bailouts on this sort of thing.

Speaker 1 Republicans needed Democratic votes to keep the government open over Christmas. What do you think is the lay of the land on that?

Speaker 1 And how much do you plan to hold the line to that promise to make the Republicans fund the government themselves?

Speaker 17 Yeah, look, anytime the last couple of years, Republicans in the majority needed to pass anything, they needed Democratic votes to do it. I mean, anything of substance.

Speaker 17 They are not a functioning majority. They need Democratic votes for each and every one of those major items.
So that gives us leverage. And, you know, I'm not a cheap date.

Speaker 17 I don't know why we as Democrats would give any yes vote. unless we're making sure that our priorities are also being met.
So that's my approach. I know it's Hakeem Luter Jeffries.

Speaker 1 What priorities? Deal with me.

Speaker 17 So first and foremost, I mean, the attacks that are being talked about ongoing, reopening the Inflation Reduction Act, like what we did on energy transition, those sorts of things, complete non-starters.

Speaker 17 I mean, I will not vote for one dime of cuts in those areas. We talk about the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was bipartisan in the Senate, wasn't bipartisan in the House largely.

Speaker 17 Any attempt to claw back those dollars, complete non-starter. If you're talking about cutting Medicaid, which by the way, most of that money in Medicaid nowadays goes to pay for nursing homes.

Speaker 17 A lot of people don't realize that. Yeah, it's talking about health care for the working poor, but it's also paying for a lot of grandmas and grandpas who are at nursing homes as well.

Speaker 17 So those would be some of the priorities.

Speaker 17 Certainly there are many other, but I don't see why we as Democrats would give an inch on any of this if they're going to come to us and provide the votes necessary to pass, unless we make sure that we're having our priorities met.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You, I think, had expressed some openness to cutting a deal with them in exchange for getting rid of the debt ceiling forever.

Speaker 1 Is that right?

Speaker 17 Yeah, so I've been pushing for many years now my bill, the Debt Ceiling Reform Act. You know, the debt ceiling is crazy.
It's an accident of history.

Speaker 17 There's this fairy tale that's told about it that the founding fathers in my district in Philadelphia conceived of the debt ceiling so that we would have this sober conversation on debt.

Speaker 17 It's a great story. It's total BS.
It came about in 1917 and it was by accident. We were going into World War I, about to enter it.

Speaker 17 Treasury didn't want to come to Congress each time they had to pay a specific debt.

Speaker 17 So they created this concept of the debt ceiling to make it easier for them to meet the debt obligations that we had already incurred.

Speaker 17 And it's really only since the Tea Party Congress won in 2010 that we have seen the debt ceiling weaponized as this unbelievably destructive threat against the American worldwide economy.

Speaker 17 So I want to end that dysfunction once and for all.

Speaker 1 Should we end the dysfunction, though, while they're in charge? I guess is my question.

Speaker 1 I mean, if the dysfunction is mostly being caused by Tea Party Republicans creating problems for the Trump administration,

Speaker 1 Should you be in the position of helping them resolve that dispute? I guess is my question.

Speaker 17 So Tim, here's the problem, though, with that. There's an asymmetry here.

Speaker 17 When there's a Republican in the White House and Democrats control Congress, people know we're not irresponsible enough to actually threaten and follow through with blowing up the American economy by not raising the debt ceiling.

Speaker 17 And for the first time in American history, our nation would default. People get that we're actually not going to do that.

Speaker 17 However, when the situation is reversed and there is a Democratic president, as we saw with Obama and Biden, when there's a Democrat in the White House and there's a Republican Congress, they really are crazy enough and have enough crazies on their side not to raise the debt ceiling.

Speaker 17 So my view is I'm not looking to do Donald Trump any favors. Don't get me wrong.

Speaker 17 If we look at our long-term interests, both as Democrats but also as Americans, if Donald Trump wants something and wants us to raise the debt ceiling, then one of the things that we should negotiate for is, all right, we'll raise the debt ceiling, but not just this time.

Speaker 17 We need to permanently take this off the table to make sure it's not used against a future Democratic president.

Speaker 1 Maybe this is my darker angels coming out here, Congressman. But don't people need to see the consequences? Look, you're talking about that guy you talked to in Northeast Philly.

Speaker 1 Like, don't people need to see the consequences of what they elected, though, for a little bit?

Speaker 1 I just, I'm skeptical that Democrats are going to have the intestinal fortitude to let these guys wallow in their own failure.

Speaker 1 And I do wonder what you think about that.

Speaker 1 I mean, how you balance letting them wallow in their own failure versus the obligations that you mentioned that the Democrats seem to be the only ones who feel.

Speaker 17 Yeah, you're speaking to my Philly nature, which is...

Speaker 1 Throw some batteries at them.

Speaker 17 Listen, attitudinally, I agree with you. Debt ceiling is one because the consequences.
are so catastrophic. I mean, no economist has explained to me how we would actually come back from this.

Speaker 17 So I would put that off to the side as kind of a special example.

Speaker 1 Okay. What about the government shutdown?

Speaker 17 Yeah, that's different. We know that we can weather government shutdowns.
Unfortunately, in my decade here, we've suffered through a lot of them. You can recover from those.

Speaker 17 And I'm of the attitude, they're in the majority.

Speaker 1 Let them carry the votes.

Speaker 17 I was willing to go along with the government shutdown last time, especially when they went back on the very bipartisan agreement that they negotiated.

Speaker 17 And, you know, unfortunately, they didn't have to suffer the consequences of their actions back in December. But we may well see that actually happen in mid-March.

Speaker 17 In fact, as we sit here right now, I think there's a much greater than 50-50 shot of a government shutdown.

Speaker 1 Maybe that first weekend of the March Madness. Yes.
Gives you some time, Thursday and Friday.

Speaker 17 I have missed the two best days of the tournament. Finally, we've transitioned to what I really want to talk about sports.
The best two days of the tournament are that Thursday and Friday.

Speaker 17 And I have not been able to see much of that because we're typically in session for whatever reason, those days. So, you know,

Speaker 17 if I'm sitting in my office.

Speaker 1 Not that you want them to shut the government down then, but

Speaker 1 if they were going to do it, there'd be worse days.

Speaker 1 The other two issues that relate to this budget, these budget conversations, are immigration for the possibility that they're going to throw immigration in with the tax cut bill, which I think seems very possible at this point.

Speaker 1 Doge or whatever we want to call that. On Doge first, I'm all for cutting red tape.
You know, I'm still a Jeb Bush

Speaker 1 Republican somewhere inside of me. But there's so much corruption going on with these guys.

Speaker 1 Like the idea that you have one of the biggest government contractors as a point person on this, and that they are going to be targeting certain companies for tariffs and targeting certain companies for cuts while

Speaker 1 his companies are still receiving government funding. I mean, this is the swampiest shit that I've ever seen.
And I do wonder how you kind of navigate potentially dealing with those guys on

Speaker 1 streamlining government things that make sense while also making sure the public knows the extent of the corruption that is coming down the pike.

Speaker 17 They are great grifters. And to me, it's pretty obvious.

Speaker 17 So how other people can't see the fact they're grifters is always

Speaker 17 kind of astounding to me. I said, look, if...

Speaker 17 If anyone in this administration is really sincere about actually identifying areas where there's inefficiencies in government, where there's government waste. I mean, go back to the 1990s.

Speaker 17 That was a big part of Clinton Gore's first term, which a lot of people have forgotten about. If Vice President Gore headed that up, they made some real progress.
It's been about three decades.

Speaker 17 I think that

Speaker 17 if they really want to work with us on a serious effort to find inefficiencies and eliminate them, that's great. I would welcome that.

Speaker 17 Forgive me if I'm more than a little skeptical that that's what they're really about. And the idea that you can find trillions of dollars of government waste is nonsense.

Speaker 17 We all know that if you're really going to be talking about cutting trillions of dollars, there's only a few places where that money is. Social Security, Medicare, and Defense Department.

Speaker 17 Defense Department is about $900 billion

Speaker 17 a year. Social Security and Medicare a lot more than that.
Three of them comprise the vast majority of our federal budget.

Speaker 17 In order to do the sort of things they want to do and tackle the deficit and debt problem, those are the areas they would have to cut. And that's just the simple reality.

Speaker 17 That's not a Democratic talking point. It's math.

Speaker 1 And can Democrats get back the populist mantle a little bit by going after these guys? Going after, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Sometimes I feel like the oligarch class kind of feels like a highfalutin word, but going after these rich assholes that are trying to get the Harris, maybe is a better way to say it.

Speaker 17 It is amazing how almost everyone who's coming into the Trump administration is a billionaire. Forget top 1%.

Speaker 17 You know, top 1%, I think if you make $5, $6 million a year, you're in the top 1%.

Speaker 17 Someone making $5 million a year is like an impoverished case to this crowd.

Speaker 17 So, I mean, these really are plutocrats, and they unfortunately use the language of populism to con enough people that Trump is really fighting for them.

Speaker 17 And yeah, I mean, sometimes people need to actually see that, what the results of that are, are, as opposed to those of us attempting to warn about it preemptively.

Speaker 1 Last one on the deal in question is immigration. Ruben Gallego, I think that he spoke co-sponsoring the Lake and Riley Act, and I think Federman II over in the Senate.

Speaker 1 This is kind of a complicated thing to navigate, right, as Democrats, right?

Speaker 1 Like there's going to be certain immigration bills, you know, punishing undocumented immigrants that committed violent crimes. Like

Speaker 1 it seems like a no-brainer, right?

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 some of that stuff is going to be all mixed up in a lot of the really pernicious attacks on sometimes even legal immigrants.

Speaker 1 Like we saw with regards to Haitians and who the hell knows what dastardly stuff Stephen Miller has in mind. So

Speaker 1 how do you navigate kind of that question,

Speaker 1 both politically and legislatively?

Speaker 17 Yeah, well, a couple of thoughts on this. First, you brought up immigration earlier in the context of reconciliation.

Speaker 17 Let's not forget that four years ago, Democrats attempted to address immigration in what was the Build Back Better Act, and the Senate parliamentarian stripped it out. No one's bringing that up today.

Speaker 17 I actually think Republicans are going to have a tough time dealing with, aside from just increasing money for enforcement, that they would be able to do.

Speaker 17 But any of the kind of policy changes they're talking about, they're really going to attempt to do it in this reconciliation bill. I think they're going to have real challenges.

Speaker 17 So that's the first thing.

Speaker 17 Second, Speaking kind of more broadly on the issue, frankly, I've always thought that President Obama had it right when he talked about we're a nation of laws and we're a nation of immigrants.

Speaker 17 We can be true to both. I myself am the son of an immigrant.
I mean, all four, my father and all four of my grandparents were born elsewhere. I revere that we are a nation of immigrants.

Speaker 17 But yeah, if someone is here undocumented or illegally, and they committed a serious offense on top of that, of course they should be deported.

Speaker 17 I think there's widespread agreement when it comes to that.

Speaker 17 But at the same time, we as Democrats should not ever go along with the gratuitous, really ugly sort of rhetoric and the stuff that we saw directed toward Haitians in Ohio during the campaign, I mean, which is pretty clearly racist.

Speaker 17 The irony is, by the way, and this is anecdotal, we have a Haitian-American community in my district.

Speaker 17 Some of the hardest working, most solid family people I know happen to actually be those Haitian immigrant families.

Speaker 17 You know, again, you don't want to generalize, but this is actually a pretty positive perception that I have of that community. But of course,

Speaker 17 it wasn't really about immigration. It was going against an immigrant group that's black.
So I think that as Democrats, we can get this right. Ruben Gallego is one of my best friends in Congress.

Speaker 17 We came in together, and I know we're both pretty like-minded on this issue.

Speaker 1 I'm going to do a little bit of straight politics and some bro talk to close it out. The president, President Biden, who's still the president, you wouldn't even know

Speaker 1 the president-elect, you know, changing the name of Gulfs and everything already before he's in there.

Speaker 1 But President Biden said in an interview this morning that he does think that he probably would have won if he had stayed in. I'm wondering your thoughts on that.
And also,

Speaker 1 you know, being from PA, you know, being from Northeast Philly,

Speaker 1 everybody's got a theory on what Democrats could have done differently. I'm wondering what your theory is on what the party could have done differently to win that key state.

Speaker 17 Yeah, probably no person sat through more TV campaign ads than I did. I'm in the Philadelphia media market.
We were inundated from May on, literally every single commercial break.

Speaker 17 I'm also a white guy who watches a lot of sports. So I was subjected to more Trump ads.
I mean, I saw the anti-trans ad. I must have seen that.
No exaggeration. I might have seen it 500 times.

Speaker 17 So I consumed a lot of political information, also was sitting in on focus groups and looking at the data pretty much daily. And I'll say this, a couple thoughts.
First,

Speaker 17 I don't think it's an accident that at this point in history, every single party in power from Europe to North America to Asia to South America has suffered at the ballot box.

Speaker 17 You saw it whether it was the Conservatives in the UK in July or the Liberals in Canada right now. or American Democrats.

Speaker 17 The worldwide inflation crisis has turned the the public worldwide very sour on whoever was in power.

Speaker 17 Number two, I go back again to the conversation I talked about earlier, but also some focus groups that I happened to sit in on.

Speaker 17 Boy, there were people who were just dead set against voting against Democrats, no matter what happened in the campaign. I came away from one focus group.
This was a non-college educated young males.

Speaker 17 It was a pretty diverse group. So it was early, mid-October in Philadelphia, was on the other side of a one-way window.

Speaker 17 And I came away from that conversation that night actually pretty pessimistic about our chances to win this election.

Speaker 17 When you look at that exit poll, when they asked people, are we on the right track or wrong track as a country? It was three to one, wrong track over right.

Speaker 17 Really hard for the incumbent party to win a presidential election with those kind of fundamentals.

Speaker 17 And in fact, I'm still of the belief that if Republicans had a candidate like a Jeb Bush, like a Mitt Romney, I don't think they would have won by 1.5% in the popular vote.

Speaker 17 I actually think it would have been much larger than 1.5% in the popular vote and roughly 1.4% to 1.7% in the three battleground states that decided the election.

Speaker 1 So three to one, we're on the wrong track. I'm going to take it that you disagree that maybe the incumbent president would have done better.

Speaker 17 I think structurally speaking, this would have been,

Speaker 17 you know, as someone who,

Speaker 17 you know, I supported Joe Biden very early on in 2018, 2019. I thought he was our best candidate to win.
I think that history has proven me right.

Speaker 17 I had real concerns with some of the positions Kamala Harris took in 2019. I think Kamala Harris as a candidate in 2024 was light years better than the race that she ran in 2019.

Speaker 17 But the reality is, I think for any Democratic presidential nominee, it was going to be enormously tough to win this race.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there was baggage from 2019. There's no doubt about that for her.
I want to go back to the young men in that focus group, the working-class men you were talking to.

Speaker 1 That is one answer that a lot of people turn to, that the Democrats failed at either delivering for or communicating to a group of people that were in the core of the coalition, like working-class men, particularly working-class men of color.

Speaker 1 You know, some of that is, you know, whatever, shorthanded as you need to go on Rogan.

Speaker 17 But I'm wondering what your thoughts are just generally about kind of outreach to younger men first thing we do have to remember you know the reason why the term it's the economy stupid has kind of stayed in our lexicon for three decades is because it is right a lot of the time i mean what i was hearing in those focus groups the economic concerns really were the primary driver.

Speaker 17 But the other thing was, and I go back to this one focus group in particular of non-college educated younger males, None of them were watching cable TV.

Speaker 17 None of them, because they were asked, where do you get your information? None of them said broadcast news. None of them said cable TV.
None of them said radio.

Speaker 17 It was all YouTube, ads, podcasts, so congrats. Thanks.
And TikTok.

Speaker 17 Oh, and then also text messages from friends. I mean, I think other peers have a lot of credibility.

Speaker 17 And anyone who's run campaigns knows this as well, that some of the best surrogates are actually, if you're trying to reach a voter, it's someone in that person's family or their neighbor, as opposed to some big celebrity.

Speaker 17 So I think that, yeah, the critique that we as Democrats have to figure out and do a better job of showing up in what we still call alternative media spots, but maybe we shouldn't be calling it alternative media spots anymore if it turns out, you know, roughly a majority of people are actually getting their information that way.

Speaker 17 You know, for someone, I think we're the same generation, same age, when we grew up,

Speaker 17 cable TV was in its infancy, but it was still the three major networks. Fox was just starting, let alone Fox News.
Very different media landscape that my daughter is growing up in today.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, you've set me up for my final segment.
And I'm sorry, you're the guinea pig for it because I just thought about it yesterday. We don't even have theme music for it yet.
But

Speaker 1 if the Democrats are struggling to communicate to young men, to bros on bro podcasts, we're here. We're here.
We're on a podcast. We're on YouTube.
And so my final segment is Bro Talk.

Speaker 1 And I want to see how you can do it's a little, you know, maybe a test run in case you want to go on Theo Vaughn sometime in the future. Question number one: What is Zin?

Speaker 1 And should bros be able to get their coffee and citrus flavored Zen without any BS from the government? Do you have thoughts on either of those?

Speaker 17 Jesus, I don't fucking know.

Speaker 17 What the hell is that?

Speaker 1 No, I.

Speaker 17 You don't know about Zin.

Speaker 1 Here's one thing.

Speaker 17 I am never,

Speaker 17 I think people can sniff a phony a mile away, and I'm not going to BS someone if there's something that I don't know. So that is, you know, I consume a lot of sports, a lot of, a lot of people.

Speaker 17 That's good.

Speaker 1 No, that's good. This is fine.
A non-phony answer is good. Look, JD Vance went on Theo Von.
He doesn't know any of this shit.

Speaker 1 So not BSing and cussing is good.

Speaker 17 Yeah, JD Vance is also an extremely strange guy. So

Speaker 17 that's not the kind of company that I necessarily want.

Speaker 1 No, it's not a company. This is my point to the Democrats.
If JD can do it, who is like a non-human, I think that the Democrats can figure this out. Okay.
Zinn is like a smokeless tobacco.

Speaker 1 It's like a chewing tobacco thing. And some blue states are getting rid of the good yummy flavors.
I don't fucking know about this either. But this is what my bros say.
All right.

Speaker 1 Bro, question number two. Do you have any hot takes on the college football playoff?

Speaker 17 Well, you won't be surprised because you probably know this. I am predicting that Notre Dame will win the national championship, 12th national championship.
I'm a Notre Dame alum.

Speaker 17 I was a subway alum well before I went there. I was on radio doing sportscasting in college for Notre Dame football.
I'm a die-hard fan, and it's been really exciting, by the way.

Speaker 17 I always wanted an eight-team playoff. I thought 12, they went a little too many, and I think some of the blowouts in the early rounds show that.
That said, it's such a money grab.

Speaker 17 They're not going to go back to eight. The college football playoff is a lot better.
I mean, think of how.

Speaker 1 You thought 12 is too many? Yeah.

Speaker 1 You had a home playoff game. That is true.
That's a good question. That was pretty cool.
Touchdown Jesus, home playoff game. That was awesome.

Speaker 17 By the way, that reminds me, we need to, real quick on this,

Speaker 17 we need to move the quarterfinals also on campus. That was amazing that Friday night.

Speaker 17 I was watching it actually from my office, wondering if we're going to have a government shutdown because it was that same Friday. That was amazing the Friday on campus at Notre Dame.

Speaker 1 That Tennessee, Ohio State game with all those Tennessee fans going into the shoe, and it was snowing. That was, I mean, that ended up being a blowout, but the vibe was so cool.

Speaker 17 So if you do the round of 12, the first round, and the quarterfinals on campus, then the semis would be at the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day, and then you get the national championship a week later.

Speaker 17 I think that's actually the way they should do it.

Speaker 1 All right. You're busy, unfortunately, as ranking member of the budget committee.

Speaker 1 I would volunteer you for Charlie Baker's job as NCAA chair. I like those reforms.

Speaker 1 Congressman, I did have a list of other bro questions about the Nelk Boys and Bitcoin and the Kraken app, but we're going to let you off the hook on that one. We're going to save those.

Speaker 1 We're going to save those for whoever my next victim is.

Speaker 1 Appreciate you coming on the Bullard podcast.

Speaker 1 Let's keep in touch, particularly as we get deeper into the budget stuff as we head towards March. Sounds good.
See you, Congressman.

Speaker 16 When you see my fork and tongue and you hear my twisted song,

Speaker 16 my sign is the fire line, uncontrolled.

Speaker 16 My bitter ruthlessness is a beacon to behold.

Speaker 16 Got cancer growing

Speaker 16 someday to die

Speaker 16 where the water is flowing. I'm gonna drain the rivers right.

Speaker 16 Cause it's in war, is a dream

Speaker 16 keeps me running through the night.

Speaker 16 I'll take it all

Speaker 16 and summer

Speaker 16 by the dawning of the sickly morning light.

Speaker 1 The Bullworth Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 2 There are two types of fishing.

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Speaker 19 Gun violence isn't just a policy issue. It's personal.
Every day in America, 125 people are shot and killed. For too many, it's left a mark.
And for all of us, it's a crisis we can do something about.

Speaker 19 Every Town for Gun Safety Action Fund is the largest gun violence prevention organization in the U.S. We've helped pass life-saving laws and built a nationwide grassroots movement.

Speaker 19 You believe in progress. So do we.
This is your moment to act. Go to everytown.org and donate today.
Together, let's build a future free from gun violence. Everytown.org.

Speaker 3 What does Zinn really give you? Not just smoke-free nicotine satisfaction, but also real freedom to do more of what you love, when and where you want to do it. Why bring Zinn along for the ride?

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Learn more at Zinn.com.

Speaker 3 Warning: this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Liam Donovan and Brendan Boyle: The Great Grift

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