Brooks and Marcus on voters fed up with gridlock in Congress

John Yang:

The collapse of a deal to end the partial government shutdown and more fallout from the war in Iran give us a lot to talk about this Friday.

And, for that, we turn to Brooks and Marcus. That's "The Atlantic"'s David Brooks and Ruth Marcus of "The New Yorker." Jonathan Capehart is away this evening.

So, we wake up to the news that, overnight, the Senate Republicans and the Democrats have cut a deal, unanimous -- passed by unanimous consent. Then, a few hours later, the speaker of the House calls it a joke, says he can't vote for it.

David, what do you make of all this?

David Brooks:

Oh, we get to watch the decline of American democracy in real time.

(Laughter)

David Brooks:

I thought the Democrats were wrong to start this thing. I think, if you don't like what the opposing party does, you go to the voters and you try to beat the other party in the next election. You don't shut down the government.

But it turns out the Republicans are -- don't -- haven't learned democracy 101 either, because when you only control 50 percent of the House, sometimes, you have to compromise to make the ship run. And the House Republicans apparently don't understand that. And so they're unwilling to go with the Senate compromise, which was a compromise.

And it had some things Republicans didn't like. But guess what? That's politics. And so, to me, what's happening in the country is that people are not saying who's right and who's wrong. Are we blaming the Democrats or are they blaming the Republicans? They're saying the whole ruling class is screwed up.

The entire elite establishment in this country cannot run things. And so that impulse, which has been building for decades, is what got President Donald Trump elected. And if we continue to see Americans looking at their ruling class and saying these people are total losers, total incompetence, then we're going to elect the craziest person we can, and Donald Trump is going to look sane compared to whoever comes next, whether it's the Democrat or the Republican.

John Yang:

Ruth, what can be done about that to try to change that?

Ruth Marcus, "The New Yorker": Oh, it's very easy. We will just fix it in a nanosecond.

(Laughter)

Ruth Marcus:

Look, you and I, all three of us, have lived through government shutdown after government shutdown after government shutdown.

And I want to take a little bit of issue with you, David, because Democrats don't have a lot of levers of power, right? They don't have the control of the House. They don't have control of the Senate. They don't have control of the White House. They have a grievance with the way DHS is being run.

They have a particular grievance with the way ICE is being run. And they have very few levers of power to try to achieve reform on that, which, by the way, they weren't getting out of this deal. So that's an important point to be made.

But when you have one party in charge of these three axes of government, and it can't even agree with itself on funding one of these important agencies and allowing TSA agents to be paid, you are going to get blamed for that.

And I think, as much as people are just generally frustrated with government writ large, they are going to be particularly frustrated at the end of this week and at the end of next week and probably the week after that with the operations of the Republican Congress.

People are furious at these delays at airports. And I think they are unnerved by something else that happened this week that's not really related to the shutdown, but goes to trust in government, which is the accident that -- the tragic accident that happened at LaGuardia.

I think this all folds together and is just a state of real public unhappiness.

John Yang:

Ruth, I want to stay with you. You talk about the reaction of the public. And this started out, as David pointed out, talking about ICE, the Democrats talking about ICE.

Then it became the TSA agents. And then today the speaker made it firmly an issue about border control. Talk about the messaging war that's going on here.

Ruth Marcus:

Well, the messaging war is, I think, primarily for people, what have you done for me lately or, more accurately, what have you done to me lately?

And if you are making me -- this was completely predictable, by the way. If you're not going to pay TSA agents, they're going to end up not showing up on the job. They're going to leave. The fallout from this is going to take weeks, months to fix. God forbid some people who aren't adequately trained allow something to sneak through in the interim.

So I think the messaging war of you are inconveniencing me or you are making me feel unsafe is going to win out over the border messaging war. Because, by the way, there's so much money in the ICE bucket, pardon that pun -- I didn't mean to make it -- that ICE is fully funded. So failing to fund DHS here is actually not affecting border enforcement.

But it is affecting, as Lisa said in her very good piece, so many thousands of other people.

John Yang:

David, the president tried to take unilateral action to try to do something about this. He sent ICE agents into airports to help TSA. He signed an executive order to have them -- have the TSA paycheck start flowing again.

What do you make of that?

David Brooks:

Well, it's unconstitutional. But we have crashed through that so many times. I'm glad he's doing it.

I flew a bit this week, and people were going up to this the ICE -- the TSA agents wherever I was and thanking them for showing up to work. And God bless those people.

If I could nurse our disagreement over...

Ruth Marcus:

Oh, good.

(Laughter)

David Brooks:

The Democrats controlled all three branch or all three, House, Senate and White House, through much of the 20th century, through large sections of the 20th century, and it didn't occur to the Republicans, as I don't think it would have occurred to the Democrats of that era, to shut down the government, because they assumed that making the U.S. government function well and that democracy was more important than the partisan fight of the next two weeks and winning the news cycle.

And they assumed that, if they degrade the government, then the voters would punish them. And Newt Gingrich broke through that norm a long time ago. And now we're seeing the norms degrade. And so Congress has become dysfunctional. And TSA is becoming degraded because of all this. The federal agencies are becoming degraded because of the repeated government shutdowns and the Trump assault.

And so we're just seeing a destruction of the basic functions of government. And, to me, that's the most important -- more important issue than who happens to get blamed and who's doing what messaging on what cable TV show.

Ruth Marcus:

Well, that's where actually we can agree, because one of the really unfortunate fallouts here is that the fundamentally important issue, which is not who wins the messaging war. And we could keep going on that, and we will keep arguing when we're off the air, because that's what we do.

David Brooks:

It's going to be a fun weekend.

(Laughter)

Ruth Marcus:

And another thing is that there does need to be -- there is a -- I think the public fully well understands that ICE needs reform, that what happened in Minnesota is not OK, that what we're seeing across the country is not OK, and that we need to put some controls there.

That is something that the way I think that this budget fight is going to play itself out is not going to end up happening, because Republicans will manage to get the funding done through a reconciliation measure. I'm sorry to use that word. That will be done with a majority vote. And so we won't -- Democrats will have lost their leverage for reform.

John Yang:

Well, another thing that the American -- or a section of the American public is questioning and wondering about is the war in Iran

The president has said at the beginning that we had won militarily, that we had pounded the Iranians. And then he says that they're negotiating. And now he's sending more troops. What's going on here?

David Brooks:

Yes, I guess my big picture is that there's -- we are achieving militarily. There's a curve of the more and more we achieve militarily, the more we degrade the Iranian regime, the more we make it hard for them to build munitions that going on to the future. And that's all positive.

But there's another curve. That's the economic pain curve. And the economy is being hit. The stock market is being hit, the world economy. Christine Lagarde, the European -- former head of the European Bank, is saying it's going to be a catastrophe.

And so, at some point, these two curves cross. And that's when it's time to end the war, for sure. The problem is the downward sloping of the economic curve is exponential. We make incremental progress in degrading Iran's ability, but the collapse of the economy could go out of control.

And so, to me, I think Marco Rubio said today to do two to four more weeks. I'm rooting for as short a time as possible. They can say, we degraded Iran seriously, they're not a regional power, let's declare victory and get out before we cause pain all around the world.

John Yang:

Yes, Ruth?

Ruth Marcus:

Ooh, I think you're way to optimistic in terms of your assessment of the upward military curve.

Yes, the regime has been degraded militarily. Yes, important people have been taken out. Does that make us safer or does that make us less safe? Because let's be clear. We have not achieved what the president told us on night one we wanted to achieve, which was regime change.

The regime is not changing. If anything, the regime may be coming more hard-line, more inclined to insist on developing nuclear power, nuclear capabilities. It may be more incentivized to go after nuclear weapons, which is the biggest potential threat to the U.S. And I take it very, very seriously.

It may be more incentivized by this latest round of attacks then it was previously, even after June, even after other assaults. And, in the meantime, we are now negotiating to fix something that wasn't broken when we started, which is access to the Strait of Hormuz. So I do not see the military arc in the same positive light, though I -- there have been some achievements -- that you do.

John Yang:

And, David, there's some elements of the president's supporters who are questioning this, who say they feel a little bit betrayed.

Joe Rogan earlier this month: "He ran on no more wars." And of this, what's happening now: "We can't even really clearly define why he did it."

Tucker Carlson:

"This war is something he promised he wouldn't do, not once, but countless times."

Megyn Kelly says:

"No one should have to die for a foreign country."

David Brooks:

Yes, I'm puzzled by this. When you look at the polls, I would not say too many MAGA people are flaking off. They're mostly supporting.

But the sort of MAGA people that I know in the media and in podcast world, the people I started "The Weekly Standard" with all these years ago, Tucker Carlson, a guy named Christopher Caldwell, they're really upset because they're more philosophically inclined. This really is a betrayal of what they thought they were getting.

But I wouldn't say it's yet a mass movement among the Republican ranks.

John Yang:

Ruth?

Ruth Marcus:

I think we need to wait and see, because the unhappiness with TSA is magnified with the unhappiness at the gas pump, the unhappiness at the grocery store. And that is something that the -- unhappiness with what's going on in your 401(k), and that's something the president is going to have to really deal with.

John Yang:

Ruth Marcus, David Brooks, thank you both very much.

David Brooks:

Thank you.