<Music> Welcome to Party Politics, where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus, also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out with us and talking politics.

It's an exciting week.

Lots going on, but I feel like I say that every single week.

You say that the same thing every single week.

But we're literally in the middle of, like, the heat of session, right?

This is crunch time for the Texas house.

Texas, mostly Texas house.

They get a lot of the pressure.

But also tremendous news coming out of Washington.

Right?

We also have Donald Trump doing all kinds of different things.

So this is like a this is a big, exciting week.

The first thing actually involves a former president and that is Joe Biden.

Right.

Some sad news actually.

He's diagnosed with a very aggressive form of prostate cancer.

The question has been, of course, how can he recover from this?

Is this going to be something that he can bounce back from in terms of his health?

But then there are also, of course, political questions, which is how we make our living right.

If we made our living as, you know, medical doctors, we'd be doing that mostly, maybe on the side you're doing some of that.

But generally speaking.

I don't have a license, so I do not do that on the side.

You don't practice medicine.

You just sort of give advice.

He's always very helpful, I have to say.

But, that's one issue that the Biden kind of legacy is been shaped by.

And concern is that that this was something that wasn't disclosed to the American people.

Now, there's a kind of sort of conspiracy element to this, right, where people like Donald Trump Jr and like Ronny Jackson, a member of Congress here from Texas, are saying, like, you should have told us this is something you've definitely would have known.

Doctors in the Biden camp pushing back, saying, look, this isn't something they check for.

This is actually true.

Like at some point they stopped checking for prostate cancer.

They figure something else is going to kill you, which may be true, but it also may be prostate cancer, which hopefully doesn't happen in this case.

But this is sort of become a political storyline about the Biden legacy.

And obviously the kind of nature of this really affects what Democrats do and how they're perceived.

As an aside, the kind of statistical reporting about the kind of coalition of Democrats has come out saying that they lost in every single category, every single group, that they were like winning in.

They lost in the 2024 election.

So it's not a great moment for Democrats.

And it just kind of reinvigorated this debate about what Democrats are going to do next.

Right?

Like the leaders are ailing and they don't have a real strategy.

Donald Trump is sort of doing what he wants to do, including just taking planes from other nations.

Right.

Which we'll talk about in a second, too.

So I guess it's a long preamble to the question for you.

And that is sort of how this affects the Democrats in the present term, but also how it affects Joe Biden's legacy in the long term.

I mean, I think if you want to be fair with Joe Biden's legacy, you have to separate the policy outcomes from the rest.

And that means the politics, the potential cover ups, the new book, what is it?

'Original Sin', about Tapper and and and CNN, Host and Thompson and Thompson.

Try to separate that because you have a couple of of big goals, right?

You have the infrastructure bill you have that is a big deal.

Better whatever.

Built Back Better.

The Reduction Inflation Act.

So you have, in terms of policies, very good policies that are significantly tainted by, these, political issues.

Right?

The cognitive potential, cognitive alleged cognitive decline.

Yeah.

Now we have access to some of those tapes.

We can hear it.

Everybody sort of knew it, but everybody sort of, did not know at the time what was going on.

And there's a fear that like, it was sort of covered up or slipped under the rug.

But the audio snippets are pretty damning.

They're pretty clear that the president at the time, Joe Biden, didn't have control of sort of what he was like doing.

He didn't seem to have a real kind of focus.

He rambled a bit.

Now this happens to everyone and happens to me all the time.

I'm sorry, but I'm not the leader of the free world, and I don't have a kind of party.

You know, waiting for me to do a good thing so that they can win this sort of a different kind of characteristics here.

So, you know, we hold presidents to these high standards on purpose.

I guess the question is whether we're holding Joe Biden to too high a standard.

He is, after all, 80 plus years old.

And he's been in Washington for, you know, since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

So, I mean, that's just a fact that Democrats are going to have to grapple with.

And I think that the kind of blame Biden politics has become, you know, kind of just at its total apex.

Right.

You're seeing this not just as a Biden health question, but also as, like everything Biden tried to do, like the, you know, right, the IRA, like we'll talk about the budget in a second.

They're trying to undo that, too.

So this whole kind of thing is just one of these sort of moments where it became very political, very fast.

Right.

And on the other hand, if, you want to have a positive spin, always good.

Yes.

If you can, this gives Democrats the opportunity to have a hard reset.

It.

Right, is like when your laptop is not working or anything like that.

The you push the right, the power button.

20 seconds.

So the thing goes.

Angrily.

Push back and go back and that's it.

And then enter into the Bios just like click f2, f2, F2 to see what's going on.

I think that that gives you that gives them the opportunity to have these reset and figured out what's going to be the plan for 2026.

And I think all the pieces are there.

Everything has been one way or the other kind of destroyed level down.

It's a great.

Point.

And so now.

It's like everything's been leading to this moment.

Exactly.

So now they have the opportunities like knock yourself out.

Yeah.

What are you kind of going to come up with.

Yeah.

Kind of like what's next.

Right.

Right.

The Democrats have kind of hit rock bottom in a way.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, the numbers kind of bear this out.

And that's, I think, a good point for a reset.

But I also want to talk about the way that this affects Joe Biden's legacy.

I think about these questions a lot because I, with a coauthor and colleague, run the Presidential Greatness Project.

We do surveys of people, especially scholars, on presidential greatness.

And so we had scholars that told us that they thought that Joe Biden's legacy was pretty good.

His numbers were in the teens.

For a president to kind of initially show up on the survey that high was pretty surprising to us.

So the fact then that a lot of stuff came out after this, right, with the cognitive decline, in theory, as well as the pardon of, Hunter Biden, these all became kind of things that, like, weren't really known about.

So as they've come out, it definitely is going to hurt his legacy.

Presidential legacies are very American.

As a phenomenon like this isn't something a lot of other kind of countries think about.

And it's not just about the policies you pass, as you said, that'll be something that can be undone.

It can be washed over, all right, maybe spent around.

But what can't be undone is the sort of legacy of how you treat the rest of government, how you handle the American people, the way that you interact with your party and how successful you are.

It's more like presidential vibes, right, than outcomes.

But that's why it's hard to kind of do it.

But Barack Obama talked about this.

He says, basically, this is like the presidential paragraph, right?

What is the thing that's going to be your paragraph?

Correct.

And it's always being rewritten.

So you have to have this as part of it.

Right?

And being a one term president, he's not going to have a, you know, as much time after, right, given his age and things.

But, the fact is that this is sort of how we think about legacy.

And so he has to be kind of, you know, and that's why they've been so, like aggressively attempting to counteract some of these big questions.

Right.

But they linger.

And it has political implications for like, what's going on today as well as for Biden's legacy.

So we'll, kind of see how this forms out over the next few weeks.

But let's talk about the current president and some of the legal issues that have been transpiring around.

Them, in.

Particular, Venezuelans.

Yes, which seem to be a very hot topic.

Two things happened this last week, at the Supreme Court of relevance.

One is that the court allowed for the Trump administration to end certain kinds of protected status for about 300,000 Venezuelans.

And the court also, ordered the Trump administration not to deport any more people, under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act.

Right, because they're going to review it.

Right.

Neither of these things are permanent.

These are definitely temporary in the sense the court still has to decide if this is legal or not.

But this is still, a kind of kind of pointed moment, especially for the latter, in that the court could have said, yeah, you can keep deporting people under the auspices of this act, but they didn't.

So how they'll rule on this?

We don't know.

But this is still a pretty big moment for the Trump administration, right?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, obviously getting rid of, TPS temporary protective status for Venezuelans, TPS is a, policy that allows the federal government to give, certain people some protections from deportation due to natural disasters, you know, political turmoil in a home country, so on and so forth.

And that's, I guess, the, the, the main sentiment of that policy.

So Venezuela's got that, protective status was given the situation in Venezuela, you're talking about 350,000 of Venezuelans on the under this thing, which.

Is a lot.

I mean, it's a lot and could potentially right, right now as it stands, given that TPS is gone.

Yeah, right.

Potentially they can be deported.

Deported?

As simple as that.

Right.

Obviously it's not as simple as that, but that is removing those.

Removing TPS allows the federal government to deport them.

They know where they are.

Because the registered.

They're registered.

Yeah.

Right.

Given that they have no protections the federal government, Trump has a lot of people.

Yeah.

That the Trump administration can deport.

Right.

And increase those deportation numbers.

Yeah.

Out of the.

Blue.

Well that's kind of my question.

Seems like what you're hinting and that's it.

This is sort of a political determination.

The New York Times this weekend reported that the administration had to carefully craft the district termination about what Venezuela was doing in terms of their relationship with this gang.

Right.

They say, the federal government says is the kind of cause of, some of the violence.

It's happening.

This is the invasion in quotes.

And so I guess the question is like, it's this is just a pretext to be able to say that we want to make this change.

We want to be able to deport more people.

We want to be able to have the power under the Alien Enemies Act to do this.

Well, it's it's their narrative and it's the the difference that many communities, right, including Republicans, are really questioning because the premise of the campaign was we are going to deport, criminals and we're going to deport.

The people that we do not want here because they're criminals are bad people, so on and so forth.

So everyone was like, okay, yes, of course, that that's a plan.

Thumbs up.

The problem is that now people that are getting deported are regular members of a particular community, that work, that worship, that, you know, go to a 4th of July party, so on and so forth.

So that creates a void.

And the communities are saying like, wait a minute, you said that they're criminals.

But my neighbor, he's not a criminal.

Yeah, he's a pastor.

He's, you know, the plumber, whatever it is.

Right?

A teacher, I don't know, whatever.

So that creates that void.

So having that right.

Yeah.

And using potentially 300,000 plus Venezuelans that are registered.

Yeah.

That you have done due diligence that you know who they are.

Yes.

Etc.

Etc.

It's very, very, very, very unlikely that these are the hardcore criminals that you want to deport.

No.

And the court is insisting on this being done.

Right.

And they should.

Right.

That's a due process question, which is what the court said was the problem for the deportations that are already taking place under the Alien Enemies Act, saying, like, you have to be able to make sure that you've got this correct before you deport people.

All right.

It didn't seem like they were.

And so the court said, let's just wait.

There were dissents on the court.

They didn't say who wrote it, but they did say that there were dissenting members, which makes sense.

I mean, there's conservatives on the court who say, regardless of what happens, the president should have the power to be able to deport, right, under this act.

So that is really the crux of the question and how the rule, like we don't know.

I mean, we can speculate all kinds of ways, but that'll be something they're going to have to kind of get to, and obviously something that's going to really shape the Trump administration's legacy when it comes to how they're able to, you know, apply the an immigration policy to, to these different countries.

Speaking of legacies, Trump 2.0 has been largely fought over legal issues about executive orders, about broad pronouncements about how Bruce Springsteen looks old and Taylor Swift isn't popular anymore.

Like, all of these things are all kind of happening at once, but mostly it's been just sort of what the president thinks.

Well, they actually have to legislate to they're trying her on him to legislate.

So this week, the House Republicans in particular, are fighting to get what Donald Trump and the group of Republicans fighting for it call the big beautiful bill one huge budget bill.

They have got a framework in place now as of this record.

I mean, haven't passed it yet.

There's still lots of little details to work out, but they've gotten way farther than I thought that they would.

Oh yeah.

The compromises have been pretty interesting to see because look, if you're Mike Johnson, you're the speaker of the House.

You've got such difficult parameters here to work with.

Right?

You've got the Freedom Caucus members who want to cut spending, the mods who say you can't cut the IRA spending from Biden's light green legacy because it's going to kill some of these programs and apartments.

Like, there's a lot of kind of things that have to work around.

There are people who want the salt cap to be increased, which is sort of the, you know, you can sort of deduct your state income tax for the states that have it.

So there's a lot of different moving parts here.

But like to his credit, he's basically kind of gotten to the point where this has all been sort of solved.

By the way, the Senate is going to say, okay, well great idea, great job.

Rip it up, start again.

That's a different problem.

But this is a bill that does basically what Trump wanted to do.

It extends the Trump era tax cuts that's going to cost about 4 trillion.

It ends the federal tax on tips, which is a Trump campaign promise.

I didn't think they'd get there.

Maybe they won't, but that's a big one.

A trial tax credit, by $500 is increased.

Salt deduction looks like it'll increase to to about $40,000.

Some controversy though, and that is that it's going to cut about 260 or sorry, about $625 billion from Medicaid.

Now, the president came to the caucus last week and said don't f with Medicaid, right.

And that's not something Trump normally does swear that is.

But he swore in this.

They've definitely f-ed with Medicaid, as it were.

So I guess the sort of question is, you know, is this enough to appease Republicans on both sides?

And is it something that the Senate is going to be okay with?

Hey, it's like when you have trying to, I guess, conduct some arbitrage between kids that are fighting.

Right?

They're trying to fight over a toy train.

Yes.

There's like one train.

Exactly.

Right.

And most of the times those things do not end up in the best possible scenario for the parties involved.

Right.

So everyone's mad.

Exactly.

So didn't everyone being mad a sign that like that, that no one is better off.

And that's kind of where politics is.

But but yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

But the problem here is that it has important implications for, the midterm elections.

If you got $625 billion from Medicaid, Medicare, you're going to have significant problems, like a lot of problems.

Like 10 million people off health care problems.

Yeah.

And that is a huge, huge problem.

I'm surprised the moderates went for this, right?

I mean, this is something that's going to definitely hurt their district.

It cuts a bunch of stuff from the like we said, like the IRA and cuts food stamps.

Education programs like their districts are going to be hurt by this.

Oh yeah.

They're probably going to hear about it right.

Then.

On the other hand, you increase the federal deficit to around $3.8 billion or what?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, sure.

What does that mean?

Yeah.

Nothing is completely.

Irrelevant.

But yeah.

And part of the deal is that it increases the, you know, the cap.

But to buy $4 trillion that us like deficit is at almost 400 trillion.

I know, that's insane.

It is insane.

It is.

But you.

No, no one cares.

Apparently.

But, you know, a couple of Republicans.

It's like a talking point, and then it goes away.

Yeah, but, I mean, and we saw President Trump visiting, the Republican conference.

Yeah.

And saying, like, stop talking, get it done.

Yeah.

It's a death.

Sentence.

Yeah.

But the problem is, is that if these bill passes, it has very important implications for generations.

Right.

So true.

And we will see what happens in the midterm election.

But it affects a lot of people directly.

And it pulls and pushes from 11,000 different directions.

So I don't know what it is.

Yeah.

What's interesting to me is that every faction of the Republican Party thinks that they're facilitating what Republicans want, right?

Moderates are saying, look, we we need a win.

We have to be able to get the majority.

So moderates make the majority, right?

So they're giving in on some things.

The conservative hardliners, like people like Chip Roy from taxes are saying, like, we are sent here to cut spending, right.

We finally have unified government president with us.

Let's cut it.

But then the president comes back to Chip Roy and says, we're going to primary you.

If you don't follow along, that probably stings a little bit.

But also like this is sort of, to me, the microcosm of the Republican Party.

Right.

They're not sure what to do here.

I mean, we talk about the Democrats being in disarray.

There are the Republicans are, too, like they don't have a sense of what they want to do.

They're trying to kind of make sure everybody gets a little bit of something.

But the end result could be much worse than oh yeah, parts.

Oh yeah.

Some of these cuts are going to hurt one of the other Republican.

They're going gonna try to run on this like you said in the next election.

But there's a lot here that might be troublesome that they're going to take credit for, but they're also going to have to take the blame for.

So that creates a definite problem.

It's a microcosm to me of like, what's next for Trumpism, right?

How does Trumpism survive Trump like after he's gone?

What does the Republican Party do?

Is there a unifying force who can say, look, I want this budget deal done, this is how we're going to do it?

I don't think so.

At that point, there's no one to say like Chip Roy, we're going to primary you and Trump prices.

Okay.

Well I've got on board right.

Right.

All the moderates and you know all the obstruction-ness Trump says like they're all going to say like, well, I'm gonna do I want to do.

Right.

Yeah.

In some ways, the Republican majority, the conservative hardliners especially, are acting like they've already lost the majority.

There's nothing to lose here.

Like we're just going to go hard and figure out the rest later.

But moderates, at least to their kind of credit, say, look, if you don't keep us around, then you're going to lose a majority.

Well, I mean, none of this is.

Going to work.

And this is not a mid term, a medium term or long term perspective.

Yeah.

This is November 2026.

So true.

That's it.

Yeah.

And it already the train already started to do like the coal and it's like.

Start to see that.

Yeah.

Yeah I mean slowly and then I mean it's they're.

Well and then Mike Johnson's at the caboose saying to the moderates with like a pointy stick saying look, either stay on the train or get off, right, right.

But making them walk the plank like that is a real struggle, because they're going to have to go back to their districts very soon and say, hey, look, we got this budget deal done.

And the yelling that results will be, look, you cut Medicaid, right?

What you said you wouldn't do, right.

The kind of tax on tips is going to blow up the budget, although it may actually help people.

That's a different kind of.

Sure, sure.

Maybe.

Really interesting.

See, absolutely 100%.

But then on the other hand, you have, inflation that is.

Yeah, kind of, under control but not under control.

Then you have.

Yes.

Prices the economy.

Who knows what's going to happen.

The tariff reprise with China like the white flag thingy is going to end in a couple of months.

So it's still a lot of things in the air that affect people directly in the pocketbooks.

Yeah.

And in addition, it's like, oh, by the way.

Yeah.

Like we cut like 600.

$25 billion homes.

Boom.

Right.

Yeah I can see this being a hard pill to swallow.

So we'll see how it comes out.

Right.

Like we said, this is still in flux.

Deals aren't totally done yet and it's got to get passed the Senate.

So what it looks like at the end may be very different, but at least now, like the everyone's kind of on the hook for this.

If, if the yeah if these people are voting for it.

Let's talk about Donald Trump in foreign policy for a change.

He went to the Middle East with the hope of making some deals and came back with a $400 million plane.

What happened?

Well, I think it's a great deal according to Trump.

Why wouldn't you Say yes to the plane?

I mean, and that's what he said.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, I mean, we would be stupid to say no to the plane if someone gave.

Me a $400 million gift.

You know, I would.

I would take it be hard pressed to take it.

But here's the thing.

I didn't sign an oath to protect the constitution, which he did.

This could be a problem, right?

Yeah.

It has, you know, ethical issues.

National security issues.

Yeah.

Security for the president.

Air Force One is basically a white House on wheels and wings and that kind of stuff.

So, Yeah, I this feels like a movie, right?

That's like going to end badly.

Like, until the hero solves it.

One hero, Ted Cruz.

Right?

Ted Cruz said, don't take the plane.

Yes.

Other members of Congress said, I'm not going to ride in that plane like all kinds of issues here.

So this definitely is concerning, I think, from lots of different points of view.

But yeah, not the least of which is that there's a concern, there's this ethical conflict which obviously, the president is not that worried about because he wants to make deals.

Right?

So they spend a lot of time making deals.

Some of that was interesting.

One was that they, he announced basically he was ending sanctions on Syria.

And that was something that, you know, has been very common since the Obama term.

So, this is a real big change.

This is something Trump likes, right?

He wants to be seen as kind of this dealmaker or somebody who might do things that other people can't do, the kind of Nixon to China kind of moment.

It can work under the right circumstances.

But there's a lot of people who are worried that this might not work.

So that's one thing that they have to kind of think through.

Speaking of thinking through all the implications to big policy change, let's talk Texas.

There's a lot happening here.

We're going to have to skip a lot of it and just going to hit a couple of high points.

The two high points this week that really kind of came to the front were number one bail reform a number two school finance reform right.

Or school finance funding.

Really not reform so much.

Let's talk about bail.

The first really there are three measures that are kind of basically now passed.

The first was a measure that would make it easier to hold people who are accused of serious crimes without bond pending trial.

Another has a constitutional amendment that would deny bail to people who are in the country without legal status.

The Constitution generally, protects people for bond issues.

So there is definitely something here that has to be kind of dealt with.

But this is a big win for Greg Abbott.

Right.

This is Greg Abbott session to me.

I mean the voucher thing is one thing.

And this was one of the other big pushes that he wanted.

So he's got all of what he wants.

There's going to be lots of cries, especially from Dan Patrick about having a special session for stuff he didn't get that he wanted.

But I think Greg Abbott sort of sits back, arms folded, saying, not bad, right?

Right.

So, you know, he was on the House floor kind of taking a victory lap in a way.

And I think that this for him is basically that.

Right.

It's also an easy issue for Republicans to win on.

Right?

It's easy.

Easily dramatized.

It's something that even Democrats said they wanted, like after they passed the voucher stuff, like a week later, the Democrats said the only thing left to do is pass bail reform, right?

So to some degree, they've kind of acquiesced even to what Republicans want.

So what do you make of this?

Well, I mean, I think it's it's, one thing that, as you say, there is, I would say common bipartisanship failings in terms of getting this thing done and very similar to one of having more, school, finance increases.

Right?

It's about we're talking about, around $8 billion right there.

And I think that both parties are interested in moving this forward.

If these two things pass in the next couple of days, I think, as you say, that's it for Governor Abbott.

And there's not going to be significant appetite to say, let's call it and potentially, you know, what else can you add up in a in a special session?

Well, there's a lot of things over there of course.

But as long as you get, you know, the homestead exemption that is moving forward, bail reform and then public school finance.

Yeah, I think that's basically it.

Like, I mean, you can quibble about details and Democrats to push back on school funding saying, look, you're increasing the basic allotment by $55 that could eat taxes like that, right?

So what they said was we need more like $1,000.

That's not in the budget, at least as it was.

It was never discussed that big.

But teachers are going to get a raise.

And the money that's being infused will help some districts.

So this is probably enough to at least placate some people who say that the state isn't spending enough.

But there's still big gaps in terms of what they want to do.

So, you know, it's a session where not everybody's going to get what they want.

That sure happens.

A lot of bills died this last week because the House, you know, kind of rules sort of have a limitation on when they can be passed.

So a lot of this of course still depends on some negotiations with the Senate on a bunch of things, including on THC and whether they'll ban that or not.

That debate is this week.

We'll find out more about how that goes.

But still lots of room to happen here in terms of what the session's going to look like at the end.

But in a couple of days we will know what happened or did not happen.

And next week we'll spend all of our time talking about what the session meant.

Absolutely.

So that's it for this week.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

Thanks for tuning in.

<Music>