Share This Podcast

• Check out Burgess’s work – www.semafor.com/author/burgess-everett
• Call Congress – 202-224-3121
• Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8
• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast

Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/

TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, February 13th. Ooh. I’m Jane Coaston and this is What A Day, the show reminding you that Valentine’s Day is tomorrow. I repeat, Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, there’s still time to get chocolates. [music break] On today’s show, President Donald Trump is once again facing off with former President Joe Biden in the polls. Spoiler, America’s missing its ex. And after a long two months, the immigration crackdown in Minnesota is finally ending. But let’s start with Congress. Capitol Hill was surprisingly busy this week. Republicans and Democrats yelled at one another. Republicans yelled at other Republicans. And amazingly, some actual business got done sort of. But as of our recording, it looks like it wasn’t enough to avoid a partial government shutdown. On Thursday, Senate Democrats blocked a bill that would have funded the Department of Homeland Security without reining in federal immigration enforcement. It included no end to immigration and customs enforcement agents hiding their faces, no requirements that they show ID, and no end to racial profiling, which are just a few of Democrats’ demands before agreeing to fund DHS. But Senate Democrats aren’t ready to back down anytime soon. What A Day newsletter writer Matt Berg spoke to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday. 

[clip of Chuck Schumer] This debate is killing Trump. 90% of Americans have seen the videos that show the brutal slayings of so many and have shown how they don’t obey the law. They’ll just knock in someone’s door without a warrant. They’ll say, we’re arresting you. We’re not telling you why. And they put you in a dark cage with no um uh no ability to have a phone, have a lawyer, et cetera. And so overwhelmingly, Americans are on our side. 

Jane Coaston: Americans are also siding with Democrats against President Trump’s tariffs, according to polling Pew Research Center released last week. We mentioned yesterday that the House voted to rescind President Trump tariffs on Canada Wednesday, an important sign that maybe, just maybe, Congress doesn’t love tariffs either. So for more on a wild weekend in Congress, I spoke to Burgess Everett. He’s a Congressional Bureau Chief for Semafor. Burgess, welcome to What A Day! 

Burgess Everett: Hey Jane, thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: Let’s start with the Department of Homeland Security. On Thursday, Senate Democrats blocked a spending bill that would have funded the agency with no changes to immigration enforcement. And if Congress doesn’t make a deal to fund DHS by Saturday, a swath of the agency will shut down. What do we know right now? 

Burgess Everett: The shutdown’s happening. The Senate is gone. These members are scattered all over, not just the country, but the earth right now. A bunch of them went to Munich. So the majority leader, John Thune, says he’ll call people back when there’s a deal, but they’re not really close to a deal at this point. And so we’re heading into our third shutdown of this Congress. It’s as dysfunctional as the institution can be. And um if you want to kind of zoom out about how little effort there is being put to solve this problem. They left that Thursday at 4.15 before a shutdown 36 hours later. So I can’t recall ever seeing that in my time covering Capitol Hill. 

Jane Coaston: Okay, the Senate basically dipped. Like, why is so little effort being made to make a deal? 

Burgess Everett: I mean, they’re so far apart and part of it is Democrats, honestly, Jane, they think they have the high ground here politically, and that usually translates to the policy debate here as well. I mean you see the polls, Americans think ICE has generally overreached. I know Republicans back Trump, but a lot of independent voters and certainly Democratic voters who are Democratic leaders are responding to here in Congress, they are reacting to that. And so they’re really far apart. I mean, when you have the Democrats not even willing to entertain a two week funding extension for a critical, I would say government agency, that gives you a sense of not only how far apart they are, but how kind of uncompromising Democrats are right now. They just feel like the wind is at their backs on this issue. 

Jane Coaston: I also, and I wanted to ask you, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a partial government shutdown before where it’s just like one agency and technically, I believe that 90% of the people who work for DHS across all of the departments are still going to have to come to work even though only a small percentage are going to be paid. So has that ever happened before? 

Burgess Everett: So the 2018-2019 border shutdown, which now we have to be very specific about which shutdowns–

Jane Coaston: Yes. 

Burgess Everett: –we’re talking about because there have been so many. The one over the Trump’s border wall was a partial shutdown, but a larger swath of the government. So that was not a full government shutdown like the one in the fall was. And you’re correct, a bunch of these folks are gonna have to come to work without pay. People, TSA, Coast Guard, FEMA, places like that. Now I don’t have a full answer on this yet, but I do know the Trump administration has $75 billion plus to fund ICE CBP operations across the country from the big, beautiful bill last year. Now, I saw how creative the Trump Administration was at paying Defense Department officials and folks like that during the last shutdown, so I do kind of wonder, do they dip into that money to pay some of these other government workers? 

Jane Coaston: So what’s next? Like, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s moving on this. A lot of people are out of the country. Are we at least in a week long partial shutdown? 

Burgess Everett: That’s what it looks like to me. The Senate’s not supposed to come back until February 23rd. Now I have two small silver linings moving forward. One of those is Democrats, Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee just told me a few minutes ago that they’re preparing an offer, counter offer to the Republicans this weekend. So still talking, right? The other silver lining is no one’s talking about the substance of these offers. I know that’s a weird thing to say. Why is that a silver lining? Usually that’s a sign that negotiations have gone completely south, but somebody leaks an offer, they publish it, and it just shows that things have fallen apart. Right? And so those two things kind of make me think, hey, there’s still some positive momentum here. 

Jane Coaston: On Wednesday, the House voted to end Trump’s tariffs on Canada with six Republicans alongside most Democrats voting to do so. Most of those Republicans are probably not even running again. And it’s worth noting that this is more symbolic because Trump obviously is going to not sign that, but in general–

Burgess Everett: Right. 

Jane Coaston: We’re starting to hear more discomfort from Republicans about Trump’s tariffs, specifically from members in battleground states. What are you hearing? 

Burgess Everett: Yeah, I mean, the Senate was actually ahead of the House on this because the House had used this, I won’t get too deep into it, but they’d used their own rules to shield their members from these [?]–

Jane Coaston: Yes, we actually are going to get to it. 

Burgess Everett: Oh boy. 

Jane Coaston: Because this is a show where we do get deep, but–

Burgess Everett: Okay. 

Jane Coaston: Please continue. 

Burgess Everett: And and so this will come back to the Senate, the Senate will almost certainly pass it and it’ll go to Trump’s desk where he’ll veto it. I do think the number of Republicans willing to vote against the president on this is not equal to the number of Republicans who are uneasy with the tariffs. You know, if this was some secret ballot vote, you’d see way more Republicans breaking with the president. The policy though, isn’t always what motivates their votes. The president has shown that he is so upset when Republicans oppose him. You know, you go back a few weeks to this Venezuela resolution in the Senate, where he says, they should all be primaried for voting against me. And two of them flipped this week on the house tariff vote. He says, I’m going to primary anyone who votes against me and only six of them vote for it. And I think, you know, 20 or 30 might’ve been considering it. It goes to show how personal he takes these votes and the politics of them. 

Jane Coaston: You mentioned this a little bit and I did want to get to it because over the past year, Speaker Mike Johnson had basically barred any discussion of getting rid of Trump’s tariffs. But Tuesday night, there was kind of a Republican rebellion and now that bar is over, which could lead to more anti-tariff votes. Can you tell me a little more about what comes next on that front? 

Burgess Everett: The things that the Senate has passed, I think would translate probably to the House, because again, you’re only going to have a handful of Republicans willing to break with the President. And the only reason that rule ended in the House was because of these retiring Republicans and Thomas Massie who fears nothing from Trump at this point, because they’re in a–

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Burgess Everett: –blood war in their primary. I mean, Democrats can launch these votes now with some impunity, and so I think you’ll probably see it on Mexico. Brazil has been another one. You probably would see it on um European countries and things like that, all of our allies. At some point, they will lose their political salience. The more of them pile up, the more Trump vetoes them. However, when Trump vetoes them, that means they have to vote on them again. So these loyalty tests are only going to become more frequent and give Republicans more opportunities to break with the president. 

Jane Coaston: Also on Wednesday, the House passed the SAVE Act, which is actually just an updated version of legislation that the House passed last year. What’s changed since then? And what does the SAVE Act do? 

Burgess Everett: Save America Act actually. 

Jane Coaston: Ah yes. Oh.

Burgess Everett: The Save Act turned into the Save America act. Basically what happened was they fused the ideas of needing photo ID to vote and also needing proof of citizenship. So yeah, those passed the House. 

Jane Coaston: And just to clarify, what would the Save America Act change if it was signed into law? Because I know that as far as I can tell, it would mean that you would need a passport to vote, which if I’m a Democrat, I’m thinking, that’s actually kind of awesome, based on if you look at the numbers as to which Americans have passports. 

Burgess Everett: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know the particulars of every state, but it would create that federal standardization to that. And I have heard some Republicans say, well, the coalitions have been so scrambled at this point that it may not actually hurt Democrats. But I’ve heard no budge from Democrats. Only one house Democrat, Henry Cuellar, voted for it. Um. So it also feels there’s a little bit of a shirts and skins exercise to it at this point. And there’s a lot of sort of false hope, I would say, being built across conservative circles that this could somehow pass the Senate. Um.

Jane Coaston: Yeah, that was actually my next question because it seems really clear that it’s not going to pass the Senate. You’ve already seen Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska announce her opposition. So one, why is this false hope building? Is that just kind of a Trump thing? And two, why is it not going pass the senate? 

Burgess Everett: Okay, I mean, Trump wants to kill the legislative filibuster. So that’s the primary hurdle to a piece of legislation like this, which is that you have all the Republicans to vote for it, you still don’t have 60 Democrats who can block it. So just to begin with, Trump wants to get rid of that. Now, there’s other Republicans like Mike Lee, who want to kind of find a way around the 60 vote threshold. Um. It’s unworkable, at least in the eyes of Republican leaders because it would open up all these other avenues to majority votes, where if you have the Save America Act, It also has obamacare subsidies attached to it and also repudiation of Trump’s tariffs. So nobody’s actually entertaining doing it in the Republican leadership right now. 

Jane Coaston: This was, compared to last year, a very eventful week in Congress. Lots of people yelling at each other. Lots happening. 

Burgess Everett: We didn’t even get to the indictment, the attempted indictment. 

Jane Coaston: I know, an attempted indictment of six members of Congress, which was based on a statute that I had to look up. What do you think we can expect from the rest of the year? What can we be looking forward to or fearing? 

Burgess Everett: Boy, I mean, it’s so hard to predict. I do think one thing I’m pretty confident is this is not the typical run the ball for three yards midterm year. Like I’m not preparing for like nothing happening in them to just kneel the ball down and go to the midterms. It just doesn’t feel like that kind of year. It kind of did a few weeks ago, but then the Venezuela operation happened. And ever since it seems like it’s been total chaos. We have a federal reserve fight right now in the Senate whether to replace the chairman is going to happen later this year. So there’s going to be a lot of interesting stuff happening just in Congress, and then there’s the X factor of what the president is doing and how does Congress respond to it. I mean, just that indictment piece that we talked about, Senator Kaine told me that was like the main thing Democrats were talking about this week when they should have been talking about the Department of Homeland Security. Like they are having to react to these things in real-time and it’s affecting decisions for the entire government. So strap yourself in, I just think it’s going to be a crazy year. 

Jane Coaston: Burgess, as always, thank you for joining me. 

Burgess Everett: Thanks Jane. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Burgess Everett, Congressional Bureau Chief at Semafor. More news, for you! But first, remember to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify or Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, please set us up with your friends. There are a lot of lonely Americans just looking for somebody they can fight fascism with, and we think we’d be a great fit. Let us know. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Tom Homan] I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude. A significant drawdown has already been underway this week, and will continue through the next week. 

Jane Coaston: Border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday that the two-month-long surge of federal immigration enforcement into Minneapolis has ended. The decision comes after more than 3,000 federal immigration agents were sent to Minnesota as part of what Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz called, quote, “an unprecedented federal invasion in all aspects of life. Homan had argued that the surge had left the state, quote, “safer” and thanked state officials for their assistance. But Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey emphasized the trauma the surge had caused in the city. Writing on Twitter, quote, “this operation has been catastrophic for our neighbors and businesses. And now it’s time for a great comeback. In January, immigration officers in Minneapolis killed two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good. While Holman was in Minnesota Thursday, the leaders of three federal immigration enforcement agencies were back on the Hill, this time answering questions from the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Questions from Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul like, can you be mean to federal immigration officials? 

[clip of Senator Rand Paul] With Alexander Pretti he’s filming uh in the middle of the street. We see two women that are as you watch the video jaw boning complaining protesting yelling maybe not being nice but they’re protesting, well lets keep the videos stopped and so my question uh to Mr. Scott first is is yelling at um ICE officers or border patrol is that a form of domestic assault on the officers? 

[clip of Mr. Scott] No, sir. 

[clip of Senator Rand Paul] Mr. Lyons? 

[clip of Mr. Lyons] No, sir, it’s not. 

Jane Coaston: Glad we got that cleared up after two people were killed and dozens of protesters arrested. A federal judge agreed to block the Pentagon from punishing Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly for participating in a video that called on troops to resist unlawful orders. The judge said the Pentagon, quote, “trampled on Kelly’s rights” after threatening to take away his retirement rank and pay. Kelly, a former Navy pilot, spoke out after the ruling in a video posted on Twitter. 

[clip of Senator Mark Kelly] Today a federal court made clear that Pete Hegseth violated the Constitution when he tried to punish me for something I said. But this case was never just about me. This administration was sending a message to millions of retired veterans that they too can be censured or demoted just for speaking out. 

Jane Coaston: Kelly had sued in federal court to block his January 5th censure from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The judge’s order prohibits the Pentagon from implementing or enforcing Kelly’s punishment while his lawsuit is pending. Hegseth said in a post on Twitter, quote, “this will be immediately appealed” because it’s not like he has other things to do. 

[clip of Kristen Welker] Do you see Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate leader of Venezuela? 

[clip of Delcy Rodríguez interpreter] So yes, I can tell you that President Nicolás Maduro is the legitimate president. I can I will tell you this as a lawyer that I am. They are both President Maduro and Celia Flores, the first lady, are both innocent. 

Jane Coaston: Well, well, well. So much for regime change, am I right? Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, spoke with NBC News’ Meet the Press moderator, Kristen Welker, for an exclusive interview in Caracas. Rodríguez became Venezuela’s top leader after the U.S., you know, captured Nicolás Maduro last month in the middle of the night from his compound and brought him to the U S to face drug and weapons charges. But Rodríguez still appears to be playing the Trump administration’s game. She met with U. S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, on Wednesday. Wright was in Venezuela for a first-hand assessment of the country’s oil industry. The visit further asserts the U.S. Government’s self-appointed role in turning around Venezuela’s dilapidated energy sector, because, obviously, all of this is about oil. Right? Rodríguez told NBC News she’s been invited to the White House and expects to visit at some point. Sometimes you don’t really know what you’ve got till it’s gone or until it’s left the White House. Axios has taken a look at several national surveys with the, quote, “same alarming trend.” According to some recent polls, voters now think former President Joe Biden was better overall than Trump. And on top of that, an NBC poll found that, quote, “49 percent of adults strongly disapprove of how Trump has handled border security and immigration.” That’s about a 10 percent increase from last summer. In other words, Trump has frittered away his political capital on the key issues that got him elected. And that’s the news. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, join us in hoping for the absolute best for the Guthrie family, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how, like many of you, we’re thinking about Savannah Guthrie and her family after the kidnapping of her mother more than a week ago, like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and I am praying for Nancy Guthrie, Savannah, and a good outcome from this whole tragedy. [music break] What A Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters and Matt Berg. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison. And our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.