00:00Joining us now from Washington, we have Bloomberg News congressional reporter Eric Wasson.
00:03Eric, I appreciate you getting up. I saw you sending notes very late last night.
00:06We did offer to send you coffee, but you told us shockingly and very impressively
00:10that you've never used DoorDash or Uber Eats. I wanted to focus on that before we get to Congress
00:14because it's so lovely.
00:17As you can see behind me, I print books, you know, so we make our own breakfast here.
00:21All right, all right.
00:21I do appreciate the offer, guys.
00:23All right, we're very grateful nonetheless. Can you walk us through where everything is at?
00:27You know, the Senate passed a version of this with an ICE carve-out.
00:31It went to the House, and then it went nowhere.
00:33The House has done something that's DOA in the Senate.
00:35Just please update us on what's going on between the two chambers.
00:38It's an extraordinary breach between House and Senate Republicans.
00:41You know, John Thune crafted this bill middle of the night,
00:44basically funding the full Department of Homeland Security for the rest of the fiscal year
00:48until October, except for Border Patrol and ICE immigration enforcement activities.
00:54That passed unanimously on a voice vote. As soon as it got to the House,
00:57it was promptly rejected by the House Freedom Caucus.
01:00And Speaker Mike Johnson, who's always, you know, trying to shore up support with different parts of his conference,
01:05went along with that Freedom Caucus demand to reject the Senate bill.
01:09Instead, they passed an eight-week continuing resolution for the whole department.
01:13But that, again, funds ICE without any new reforms that Democrats have demanded.
01:17And Chuck Schumer said that's DOA.
01:19So the standoff continues. Importantly, Trump has signed this memo paying TSA agents as soon as Monday.
01:26So that should alleviate the lines.
01:27But it's important to point out there are other members of the department,
01:30whether you're a Secret Service worker, you know, human trafficking, people in the secretary's office,
01:35you know, people who are doing communications.
01:37You know, there are a lot of people who are not going to get paid, continue to not get paid.
01:40It's going to become a difficult thing.
01:42This is over 40 days now, you know, and they're going to be held hostage.
01:46I don't see the Senate and House coming back during this two-week recess.
01:48And I don't really see a solution anytime soon.
01:51The main thing they're going to try to do is this budget reconciliation bill
01:54and a massive package similar to the Trump tax bill where they did put some immigration enforcement money.
02:00But they need all Republicans to unite.
02:02Everyone wants to throw their things in.
02:03I talked to a member of the New York delegation who wants the SALT deduction of all things extended again.
02:09So this is going to become a massive food fight.
02:11And these workers are going to be held hostage.
02:13Now, the president could try an extraordinary measure to try to potentially illegally pay
02:18those other DHS workers from this fund for border security.
02:22But, you know, I don't see a solution anytime soon that's really permanent.
02:25You bring up the president.
02:26And I want to play a little bit of sound here of the president in Miami last night,
02:29speaking at that FII conference, addressing what's transpired here
02:33and also his relationship with the leadership in the Congress.
02:35Let's take a listen.
02:35I understand John Thune and I understand Mike Johnson.
02:41They want to be sure that people aren't coming into our country like they have for the last four years.
02:48I don't want to say they've ruined it.
02:50They made my job a lot harder.
02:52They made my job a lot harder.
02:54The president, they're on the tarmac traveling to that conference.
02:56Eric Wasson, talk a bit about the president's engagement,
02:59not with this memo, finding a way to pay these TSA workers,
03:03but with this issue more broadly and what that says about even more broadly than that,
03:07the way that he's been interacting with this Congress and with congressional leadership.
03:10I thought it was an extraordinary comment because it's almost like Trump was playing peacemaker
03:13between feuding, you know, House and Senate Republican leaders,
03:17which I'm sure a role that he would enjoy is still questing after that Nobel Peace Prize, after all.
03:23You know, but he's trying to, I think in that case, smooth over differences.
03:27It's extraordinary that, you know, Speaker Johnson called what Thune did a joke, a ridiculousness.
03:33We asked him about it.
03:34He tried to sort of sidestep it and say that that was Chuck Schumer who really engineered this.
03:38But we're trying to see what kind of long-term consequences of this rift will be.
03:43Can they do this new tax and spending bill?
03:46Are they able to unite in a midterm message?
03:48Certainly the tension between the two chambers is extraordinary.
03:52You know, but the immigration issue was historically one of Trump's strong suits.
03:56I think the American public generally wants stronger borders.
03:59But then what happened in Minnesota with the ICE enforcement, the sort of chaos and the practices
04:05sort of weakened his popularity on that, gave Democrats an opening to demand these changes.
04:10That was very interesting last night.
04:11There was a small press conference, barely attended by media, of Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Swasey,
04:18two members of the Problem Solvers Caucus.
04:20And they have a very intriguing idea to sort of pass some of these reforms.
04:25You know, a Congress that's more open to compromise would probably embrace something like that.
04:29But it's such a long shot.
04:30They're even talking about a discharge petition, a really long shot petition to try to get this done.
04:35But Congress is nowhere near grappling with this.
04:37But I think if the public were to be consulted, they would want to see some kind of changes to
04:42ICE behavior,
04:43maybe not having masked agents, you know, be able to go willy-nilly into people's homes.
04:47But then we're going to see some kind of changes.
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