Washington Wednesday: Shutdown shut down

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.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 12th of November.

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

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

First up, shutting down the shutdown. The house is expected to vote as soon as today on legislation that will end the longest government shutdown in US history. The breakthrough follows the defection of eight senators on the Democrat side breaking ranks to back a spending bill that extends federal funding to the end of January.

EICHER: We reported yesterday that progressive commentators were livid, and even some Democratic officials were surprised that the long standoff left them no better off on day 40 than they were on day one. For one of those who broke ranks, it came down to a conclusion that the confrontation actually gave the White House greater political advantage. For another senator, Tim Kaine of Virginia, it was purely practical.

KAINE: I've got some folks who didn't like the vote, but I'm going to have a whole lot of federal employees who are going back to work and they're getting their paychecks.”

MAST: The breakthrough also followed threats from President Trump to end the Senate rule that oftentimes is the only leverage a minority party has, the filibuster. The word itself comes from an old Dutch term for pirate, because in the early days, a Senator who launched a filibuster was seen as seizing the floor and refusing to let go.

EICHER: You won't find the filibuster in the Constitution, though it's a Senate invention that allows 41 senators to stop the other 59 calling a vote. It used to mean standing on the Senate floor and talking till you dropped these days, it mostly means threatening to.

MAST: But back when it really did mean talking, no one did it better than the fictional Senator Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 classic film. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

STEWART: You all think I’m licked. Well, I’m not licked! And I’m gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause, even if this room gets filled with lies like these.

MAST: In September 2013 during a filibuster over Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz used some of his 21 hours of talk time to read a good night story to his children watching back in Texas on C-SPAN.

CRUZ: Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam I Am. I do not like green eggs and ham.

MAST: What the Senate really loves is not so much the speaking as the gumming up of the works. According to the progressive group the Brennan Center for Justice, there have been more than 2500 votes to end a filibuster since the year 1917 more than half of those coming in the last 12 years.

EICHER: Joining us now. Political scientist and world opinions contributor, Hunter, Baker. Hunter, good morning.

BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, I wonder, Hunter, whether the threat of nuking the filibuster was enough to end this thing. Because I think there is a real fear, and I'd love to hear what you have to say about this. A lot of Republicans did not want the filibuster ended. I'm sure Democrats didn't either, especially as they have another year to go before the midterm elections, and I wonder whether there wasn't a fresh memory of Republicans making Democrats rue the day they tampered with the filibuster rule. It was back in 2013 Democrats went for what was known as the nuclear option, changing Senate rules so that most presidential nominees, including lower court judges, could be confirmed with a simple majority, so Republicans then would double down by 2017 and that cleared the way for President Trump's three nominees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, to be confirmed to the Supreme Court with no filibuster. What do you think?

BAKER: The Senate is not supposed to be the same kind of body as the House. Sometimes there's been a metaphor employed setting up the house as the cup of the hot coffee and the Senate as the saucer. You know, some of you may have, as I did, saw my grandfather, he would drip some of the hot coffee into his saucer to cool it down, and the Senate is supposed to cool down the passionate, hot ideas that come out of the house, and so that's the idea behind the filibuster, that you can slow things down and cause there to be greater debate and consideration. But I think that what we've seen with these shutdowns is an abuse of the filibuster. The filibuster, as mentioned earlier, is not in the Constitution. It's just a Senate rule. And I just think it's important that everybody look at how it was used here, the mere threat of the filibuster, right? Not a real filibuster. The mere threat of the filibuster triggers this 60 vote cloture requirement. And this was not done by the Democrats to stop something. It was done to essentially try to force the Republican majority to pass positive legislation. It was meant to try to force them to pass the extension of these COVID-era Obamacare subsidies. In my view, that's basically an illegitimate use of the filibuster. This is the minority party trying to force passage of legislation that they could not ordinarily get. And if that is going to become the new normal, then I think the filibuster is not long for this world.

EICHER: So just a quick question, do you think that it was the threat of blowing up the filibuster that caused everyone to walk back from the brink here?

BAKER: I think that that's part of it. It gives significantly more power to any senator because they have the potential to kind of stop everything. And so that makes every one of them an important player on the board. But I think in practical terms, there are just some senators like Angus King from Maine. I think he just felt responsible. He just thought, you know, this is a disastrous situation, and I need to do something to try to help with that. I think you look at somebody like Tim Kaine in Virginia, which has a ton of federal employees, and of course, he referenced that that, that you know he needed to vote to end this thing so that the federal employees could get their paychecks.

MAST: Presidential pardons are back in the news, with 77 issued over the last few days by President Trump. I want to call attention to the most famous pardon recipient, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, in a real sense, this may be one of the last chapters in a highly interesting political career. Depending upon how you define it, Giuliani may be the only true Republican mayor in the last 100 years in New York City. You had Michael Bloomberg, but he became a Democrat, as did John Lindsay. But if you count Fiorello La Guardia as a Republican, and Bloomberg and Lindsay. It's still just four in the last century. Giuliani is one of those.

EICHER: But he was a cultural curiosity even just as he was coming on the scene, Giuliani made a cameo in the popular TV comedy Seinfeld. Remember this?

GIULIANI ON SEINFELD: … My only indulgence, I guess, would be that I eat a lot of frozen yogurt. But it's non fat yogurt. They got Giuliani, and he doesn't even know it. Now look what you've done. We've got to do something. Mayor Giuliani will do everything possible to cleanse the city of this falsified, non fat yogurt.

EICHER: Well, he did more than simply fight phony yogurt, though he did do that. Giuliani was credited with making the city livable again by aggressively fighting crime, and his term was ending when 911 struck, and he was a steady presence on the scene.

GIULIANI: All that we know right now is that two airplanes struck the two large towers of the World Trade Center. We spoke to the White House, apparently there was also an attack on the Pentagon…

MAST: As a New Yorker, of course, he was friendly with Donald Trump after serving as Associate Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Giuliani later became Trump's personal attorney. Work that drew him into the post 2020 election battles, multiple lawsuits and landing in more popular culture venues. Here he is in April 2022 on the set of the celebrity singing competition the masked singer.

NICK CANNON: Oh my goodness, former Associate Attorney General, former Mayor of New York City…

NICOLE SCHERZINGER: Is that Robert Duvall?

KEN JEONG: No, that’s not Robert Duvall.

NICK CANNON: Rudy Giuliani!!!

EICHER: Well, Hunter, what do you make of this new and possibly last chapter for Giuliani receiving a presidential pardon to head off any federal charges stemming from the 2020 election in the hubbub around January 6?

BAKER: Rudy Giuliani is one of the most, I think, tragic figures in American politics after 9/11. I'm not sure that you could think of an American politician who was riding higher than Rudy Giuliani. He had, before he became mayor in the early 1990s, he had actually gone up against the mob in New York and really had won. Then he becomes mayor and just revolutionized the fight against crime in the city, made the city a lot safer and more prosperous. And so for a person like that to end up as kind of a remainder, an afterthought in the Donald Trump story is really shocking. You know, at the beginning of the century if you said Rudy Giuliani may be president, a lot of people would have said, Yeah, I could see that happening. Or if you had said, I can see Donald Trump becoming president, nobody would have thought that was the case. But Giuliani ran for president as a Republican, and he really failed, I think, because he would not reverse his pro-choice views. He could not get past the Republican primary electorate as a pro-choicer. Donald Trump shrewdly learned that lesson, and sincere or not, it took us to the point of the reversal of Roe v Wade.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, let's not skim over these, these pardons. As we said, there were 77 of them connected to widespread concerns about the 2020 election challenge. The pardons clear people from Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows to Sidney Powell, another personal attorney. Cleared them of any wrongdoing, preempting any federal charges that might come in the future. And these were the same kinds of pardons President Biden issued for many of his family members under federal investigation. What do you make of all this?

BAKER: I think that the practice is worrisome on a pragmatic level. You can kind of understand it because you see this increasing sort of lawfare practiced by both sides. And you you worry about people sort of ending up on an enemies list or being hounded, really, in the same way that I think Donald Trump was hounded prior to this 2024 election. But on the other hand, when you put these preemptive pardons out there, you're really damaging the truth-finding process and our ability to investigate certain things and figure them out. So I am worried that we'll enter into a period where both parties will start doing this as a matter of course.

MAST: You know, Hunter, it is interesting in light of the fact that this week's pardon system from January 6 and 2020 election results that the Supreme Court has decided to take up the question of mail-in ballots. Now this is a case out of Mississippi centering around the definition of Election Day. What are the ramifications of counting mail-in ballots received after that day? If they are, in fact, ruled impermissible, the decision may cast some of the events of November 2020, and January 2021 in a different light. So what are you watching here?

BAKER: I really don't think that this is a partisan issue. I think that if you ask most Americans, Do you want to know the outcome of the election on election day? Do you want to be able to on election night do we really want to know who won the election? I think that most people are going to say yes, I want to know that. I just think that the court should really think seriously about requiring that ballots be received by election day. Nobody is surprised by an election. We have a gigantic run up that is covered by the press ad nauseum, day in and day out. So if you want to cast a ballot by mail, it should be a very simple thing to submit that ballot, say a week in advance. If we don't do that, if we allow ballots to come in, and sometimes you hear, you know, the desire to let ballots arrive as much as 14 days after an election, then you just create an impression that you can sort of find out what has happened on election day, and then there's room for all kinds of potential tampering and and messing around after the fact of the election to try to change the result. I hope that the court will take this opportunity to nail this down and say that, look, yes, we need to. We need to have the convenience of mail in voting, especially for people who may find it difficult to get out and vote physically. But we can certainly have a responsible timing when it comes to submitting the ballot.

MAST: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and Provost at North Greenville University. Hunter. Thank you.

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.