Washington Wednesday: Senate tactics and Texas standoff

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 6th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Today, political shenanigans in Washington and Texas.

World Opinions contributor Hunter Baker joins us shortly to discuss the big stories this week, but first, an update on last week’s nominations battle in the Senate.

WORLD reporter Carolina Lumetta has the story.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: The Senate stayed in town for rare Friday and Saturday votes last week.

More than 100 executive nominees have made it through committee and are waiting for a floor vote in the Senate. Normally, the chamber gets through the approvals quickly by bringing the names to the floor in batches and asking for unanimous consent to approve them. But Democrats have jammed the process by forcing the chamber to vote on each one individually. Here’s Democratic New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.

CORY BOOKER: I have a real problem with a lot of these nominees. And I just have some concerns about us making sure that we honor a process where we're doing our advise and consent.

Now 6 months into the second Trump administration, the Senate has only confirmed 127 of the president’s 368 nominees so far. The President will need Senate approval for roughly 1,300 during his term. I asked Booker whether he’d consider supporting batch approvals for less controversial names on the list.

BOOKER: I don't even want to put those into the categories that you just mentioned. There are– every single nominee by the mandates of the Constitution deserves our examination and scrutiny.

The delay is prompting Republicans like Texas Senator John Cornyn to look for workarounds. I spoke with him in the Capitol subway.

JOHN CORNYN: We've never seen obstruction like this before so I think it calls for something, something extraordinary.

The Texas Republican is one of several who want to remove debate time requirements. When Republicans were in the minority, they often blocked unanimous consent to slow down the Democratic agenda. But this is the first time the tactic has been used for all presidential appointees. Senate Majority Leader John Thune displayed a chart in a floor speech on Saturday showing how unanimous consent rates have been declining for every president since Obama.

THUNE: These numbers are not moving in the right direction, which is why I would argue that we’ve got to change the process by which we do this, otherwise we’re going to deteriorate to where any president that comes in here is going to be very very hard pressed to do the job the American people elected him to do.

In the end, though, the Senate called it quits Saturday night…confirming just 8 more nominees. No changing any procedural rules, and a massive backlog still to work through.

Republican leaders said they would revisit both goals in September. When they return, they will have to reckon with that promise…as well as a government funding deadline.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta in Washington.

MAST: Joining us now to talk more about this and other stories is political scientist and WORLD Opinions Commentator Hunter Baker.

Hunter, good morning.

BAKER: Good morning.

Hunter, you heard Senator Booker saying every nominee deserves full Senate scrutiny, but as Carolina noted the “all nominees” move is a new tactic. Do you see it as a principled move or just playing politics, and I wonder whether we’ll see more of the same when the shoe is on the other foot. What do you say?

BAKER: It’s politics, and it’s been going on increasingly for, you know, maybe the past 20 years or so. I think in particular this instance, some Democrats have pointed back to the end of the Obama administration, after Justice Scalia died, and the Republicans said we are not going to have any process on looking at another Supreme Court Justice until after the election. And so some of them are basically saying, hey, you know, payback is tough. Now it's your turn. Now, what's different is, is that we're not talking about a single high profile position. We're talking about kind of everybody, right? You know, just this big blank slate. And the reason they have given is, in my mind, more of a rhetorical reason than a real reason. Basically, they're saying these candidates are historically unqualified. I find it extremely difficult to believe that's the case. I think instead, it's more just a matter of political combat.

EICHER: Speaking of gumming up the works (or whatever he says), dozens of Democratic state legislators in Texas walked out, actually left the state, to block a vote on a new election map. The effect was to deny Texas Republicans a quorum and essentially shut down the legislature. Democrats fled to several different sanctuary states: New York, Massachusetts, Illinois. Here’s Texas Democrat John Bucy III speaking from the Land of Lincoln:

REP. JOHN BUCY III: Not for fairness, not for representation, but to manufacture five more Republican seats in Congress to enable Trump to cling on to power.

The at-large lawmakers are facing fines of $500 a day they remain AWOL, but donors appear willing to foot those bills—for now at least.

Hunter, of all the issues Democrats could stage a walkout over, why this one?

BAKER: Well, there's a history here. So it's really kind of a legacy of the Civil Rights period in American history, there was a time when the courts, in an attempt to ensure fairness and representation, would essentially mandate and support the formation of majority minority districts, right? So in other words, to use gerrymandering specifically to create, say, a black district. You know, similar logic applied to federal management of many school districts for a very long time. I think that it was probably only within the last 15 years that the federal government had stopped supervising some of the districts in the south. And so what's happened is, is that a federal appeals court in Texas has said those majority minority districts are no longer constitutionally necessary, and Texas is basically saying, okay, then we would like to redraw the lines with the idea that we no longer have to create majority minority districts.

MAST: Hunter, do you think they have a moral high ground to stand on when it comes to accusations of gerrymandering? And really does any politician?

BAKER: No. Nobody has a moral high ground on gerrymandering. I was in Georgia working as a lobbyist around the year 2000 when there was redistricting at that time, and I have never seen anything as acidic and unpleasant as the gerrymandering that was done at that time. Now, at that point, it was Democrats trying to hold on to a Democratic majority in the state of Georgia, but it's nobody likes it if you're on the other end of it, right? If you're in the minority, then you hate it. Because what happens is the majority is using their power to sort of squeeze that map in the most advantageous way possible. But there is just nothing unusual about it. What's what's a little unusual is the fact that they're doing it kind of halfway through a decade instead of waiting for the next census. So I'm not surprised. It's bitter. I'm also not surprised that they have fled, because when you're deeply in the minority in a body, there's nothing else you can do other than just lose.

EICHER: As we reported Monday, really rough jobs report for July, but even worse for June and May. For those two months the jobs figures were revised down by more than a quarter million. President Trump was so angry about it, the lead economist in charge of the agency that counts jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics well, he added her to the job-loss totals:

TRUMP: I mean, the numbers were ridiculous, which she announced, but that was just one negative number. All the numbers seem to be great.

Yep, he fired her. I did talk this week with David Bahnsen and he said this is not a good look, but what do you say about it from a political standpoint?

BAKER: I would say that politically at first blush, it looks bad, right? You know, this is the kind of person, a reporter of official statistics, who is supposed to be non-political. However, that being said, I actually think that it's somewhat naive to think that those statistics and that position is purely non-political. You know, one thing that you learn in the world of social statistics is, first of all, there are lots of measurement problems. There are lots of assumptions that have to be made, and a person can lean in different directions as they make those assumptions right to get the numbers. Now in this case, was that happening? I don't know, but what I can say pretty authoritatively is that particular number has not been very accurate from report to report for quite a while. I think that there are measurement problems, and I think that they do need leadership that's going to find a way to get past some of the measurement problems of these surveys.

MAST: Hunter, I have a follow up to that. What do you think this says about the credibility of numbers like this, as does this chip away at people's trust in these numbers in terms of them being an economic indicator?

BAKER: Yeah, so it is a problem, right? I mean, if you if you look at the stock market, the stock market reacts to these numbers. It's really problematic if people make major money decisions based on based on an incorrect report. Now, how do you get past it? I'm not sure, because, you know, some of this stuff is developed via survey, and the problem is, is that it is really hard to get responsiveness to surveys in the same way that we did in the past. So you know, we need to not only worry about being non political, but we need to worry about being accurate. And there may have to be a paradigm shift in how we develop accurate information.

MAST: Ok, Hunter Baker is a political scientist and WORLD Opinions Contributor. Thanks so much!

BAKER: Thank you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.