Welcome to party politics.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, 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 joining us and talking some politics on a pretty interesting week.

First of all, the Cougars are number one in basketball.

This is, of course, this recording.

So we're not going to jinx it right.

But you.

Know what?

The party politics.

First thing I think.

Well, it's not a curse, but the most important thing for me, at least, is that the women's swimming and diving team, they won for the seventh consecutive year, their championship of the American Athletic Conference.

This is.

Great news.

It's it's never been done.

And it's, you know, consistently and, you know, you have to watch them swim.

They're just simply amazing.

So congratulations to the women's swimming and diving team at the University of Houston.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Now, very nice.

So not surprising because obviously, you know, cougars dominate in every sport.

But one surprise this week politically was that President Joe Biden made a trip to Kyiv.

Right.

And this was a President's Day kind of surprise that people weren't really expecting.

It's the first trip from a U.S. president to a war zone in nearly a decade.

Other presidents, of course, have visited you know, these sorts of conflict ridden zones, Uemura George W Bush going to Iraq during the Iraq war.

So it's something that presidents have done to kind of gain a kind of momentum towards and right in the president's got a couple of things that he's asking for from Congress.

The first is that he's announced a new $500 million aid package for the Ukraine, basically setting them up like GI Joe, artillery ammunition, anti-tank weapons, howitzers and other kind of long range weapons.

They said in quotes, which makes me think that's very GI Joe technical.

Right.

The other is that they have come to determine that that there may be war crimes committed in the Ukrainian conflict.

So there's a lot on the plate of the administration here in terms of the foreign policy towards Ukraine.

What do you make of the president's surprise visit?

Is this going to kind of change some minds?

Because there are a lot of Republicans who say we are spending too much money to begin with and we should just kind of close off off the spigot.

Well, I think there's two fronts.

One is the domestic front.

And in the domestic front.

No pun intended.

Right.

Or maybe you didn't do that.

Well, no, not not at all.

Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina, you know, released a letter praising President Biden's for this move.

Obviously, at the end, he says, well, okay, these are words we want to see action.

And there is a point where people want to see more action in terms of the US involvement.

But obviously this has to be weighted in such a way that, you know, you don't escalate the conflict.

And I think that US foreign policy and you know, Secretary of State Lincoln, what they're trying to do is, you know, move forward but without really getting into the conflict all the yeah.

And then you have the international front and I think the international front is very interesting because these gives a signal to Europe and you know, basically NATO's ally saying we are here until this thing is done.

Yeah, okay.

And that creates that part.

And then you have Russia another front.

Yeah.

And that one is a little bit more complicated because President Putin gave his State of the Union.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he just called the state of the Putin.

All right.

I don't know.

Whatever he said, he goes, yeah.

There's no union.

But he was very belligerent.

So he's pulling down, not quitting one of the last remaining nuclear weapons treaties with the US.

He's like saying, I'm not going to play now.

Yeah.

So he's pushing it, pushing it, pushing it and we'll see, you know, at the end what's going to happen.

But once again, this was a gut punch to Putin's, I guess, public image.

Yeah.

Well, in the fact that the president of the United States could go there in the middle of this hostile conflict and safely enter and exit is a kind of, as you say, a kind of gut punch to the efforts from the Russian government who wanted to have.

This is a quick turn around, basically, you know, grab that territory.

It's been a year.

And that's why Biden when it was like the anniversary of the invasion.

So that's interesting.

This clearly reaffirms the US's role there.

And so there's going to be dissent about this.

Like we said, the Republicans are a little bit cautious about how much to spend and whether to spend, you know, any more.

But certainly this helps, I think, to kind of prime people's opinions about this because, you know, foreign policy is a kind of policy where presidents have a lot more control.

Right.

They're able to shape opinions.

They're able to, you know, make sure they can convert elites to their side.

So although Republicans are going to complain about it, this is certainly something where the president has a natural advantage in this kind of a show on Presidents Day.

Right.

Like makes it something really powerful.

Logistics.

There's no U.S. boots on the ground over there.

So the logistical and the logistics must have been a nightmare.

Right.

She he traveled 10 hours by train from Poland to Kiev overnight, ride back and forward.

So, you know, obviously the US gave heads up to Russia saying like President Biden's going there, you better not.

Yeah, you don't know what.

It's going to end up being like a movie, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, but you're right.

And you write about Russia to the New York Times this week had a really interesting article about the way that the Russian people have handled this conflict.

And it's it's telling because although initially it was assumed that this was not a country that was going to go in that direction, like Putin campaigned on basically being a kind of, you know, peace candidate.

But that didn't happen, obviously.

But internally, a lot of the Russian state control is essentially feeding the people in Russia, the, you know, company line.

Right.

So all the news channels have basically dropped entertainment in favor of more kind of news and political talk show stuff in schools.

They do flag raising ceremonies that they're like in patriotic education.

So there's a lot of control there.

That's, I think, at least for now, settling in.

Right.

I mean, the U.S. is still, you know, population wise, public opinion wise, right.

A little bit, you know, kind of uneven on this, more supporting than not.

But the Russian government is all in.

And so the Russian.

Asking a question since you are presidency.

Yes, highly renowned.

Indeed.

Indeed, sir.

Yes.

Tip of the cap.

Thank you.

Thank you very.

I'm waiting for my compliment.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll give you.

It's not in my notes here, but.

Yeah, I'll get to you.

Yeah.

Maybe if I keep going down it.

But the question is, you know, Russia is not a democracy.

Yeah.

Public opinion in Russia is, you know, like my opinion on baseball, right?

It's nonexistent.

And it's not important or.

Heavily biased, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So my question is how long Russia apparatus is controlled by obviously President Putin, but also by these big Russian oligarchs?

Yeah.

So all the sanctions and everything else is hurting them, right?

This is bad for business.

So my question to you is, when do you think that the Russian oligarchs are going to say, you know what?

And now like these need to stop now?

Yeah.

And you need to go, yeah.

Like when the sanctions start to work?

It's a good question, actually.

And that's really what the U.S. is hoping for.

They're hoping that steady pressure really makes a difference.

And although we have a kind of short term memory and, you know, politics, that's why we do this show every week.

Because there's always something.

Crazy and new and like a huge list of it.

Most of the time, this sort of economic sanctions take longer to work.

So a year is not like out of the question for this to be kind of timeline trajectory.

So it might be that's still working.

But one of the things that was reported in The Times piece is that essentially a lot of people are leaving Russia, right.

People who disagree are either being kind of targeted and pushed out or just leaving on their own.

So there's a change in country in a way that is going to set up this kind of geopolitical conflict in the future.

So Ukraine is kind of just step one of I think a lot more of these is really frankly step ten of like 100 because there is going to be more of this to come.

But let's go from one institution to another.

The U.S. Senate this week, the U.S. Senate actually obviously made up of a bunch of different types of people.

And that's why it's interesting, some of them very old, some of them very young, some of them elected for a long time, some elected very recently.

On the front actually this week, Dianne Feinstein defy is leaving the Senate.

We reported weeks ago that, you know, California was jumping ahead like they decided that, you know, many candidates were going to wait for her to retire since obviously, you know, she's older now and has been in the Senate for a long time.

She's decided to actually retire, which is going to set off a kind of frenzy of a bunch of different candidates.

Katie Porter You know, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, Democratic Representative.

Barbara Lee, Democratic representative likely to announce soon.

Dianne Feinstein has been in the Senate since 1992 when they were two women and now there are 25.

So she's seen history unfold.

Oh, yeah.

She's also seen, frankly, California move from a kind of purple state to a very blue state.

So.

Right.

You know, her time in the Senate has been pretty monumental in that way.

So it's interesting.

And the reason why we care about this is because we talked about this a few weeks ago, but basically the Democrats are going to be in big trouble in terms of defending Senate seats in 2024.

They hold a narrow lead right now, 51 to 49, but they're going to have to defend 23 of 34 seats up for grabs.

And just one or two means Republicans are going to get that back.

And some of those seats include West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, not Democratic strongholds any more, places where the likelihood is, even if they get the senators or Democrats in those states to run again, that they might lose those seats.

So every seat matters not to California is going to go red, but you know, the tenor of it, what might matter.

So I know it's very interesting because, you know, California for the past, I don't know, 30 years or something like that, until Senator Alex Padilla came back was has been represented by women.

Yeah.

So that's, you know, very telling in terms of the political culture of the state.

Right.

And also the nature of having women being representing California in the US.

And so I think that's that's very interesting to see.

You have Katie Porter and as you said, Barbara Lee also running well, potentially.

Well, they already announced.

Yeah.

I mean, I think all but announced, right?

Yeah.

Exactly.

So I mean, I think that might keep it in that tradition and I think it's something that is extremely important.

And then on the other hand, is yeah, but it's going to depend who runs on the on the Republican side.

And I think that that's going to be key.

They have to pick the right candidate for the right state.

So if they pick, you know, super, let's say MAGA Republicans in the state that are like maybe not he's not going to work.

Yeah, right.

It wasn't so long ago that Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor as a Republican.

Yeah, it's a state that was in transition for much of the nineties.

I worked in California and the politics and it was pretty interesting to see.

You know, it's pretty exciting to see.

Yeah, I didn't get any town literally didn't see the sign or the beach.

The whole time I was there.

I'm going to report to you.

But I say this because a lot of people thought that Texas would become like California.

Okay.

We're going to talk in a few minutes about Senator Cruz running for reelection, kind of what that prospect looks like.

But a lot of people think that because of the demographic change that is happening, happened in California in the eighties, late nineties, that Texas would basically follow suit.

It has it.

And Texas is certainly behind California in terms of that mix.

But it's certainly the case that Texas hasn't moved in that direction the way that California did.

So it's interesting to see that transition over time.

So speaking of senators who've been in for a long time, two senators who have not been in for a long time, who've just been elected.

This week, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Health Center to receive treatment for clinical depression.

He's a freshman senator, and this is the second hospitalization since the campaign.

He had a stroke while on the campaign, which set him back.

In terms of being able to do a lot of that campaigning.

I think this is pretty brave.

I mean, people looked at this and said that Fetterman was the kind of, you know, macho candidate who was going to to kind of tell it like it was.

But I actually think that's the wrong reading of what this was.

I think that he was an honest candidate.

Like he presented himself as somebody who was of the people, like he knew people struggles.

And you saw that all over his campaign ads.

They liked him.

They trusted him.

And, you know, I don't know how the stroke played into it.

Probably not that much because things are so partizan now.

But he captured the hearts of these Pennsylvanians.

And so I think being honest is his secret sauce.

And I think for him to seek treatment is pretty, pretty bold in the middle of all this.

Well, absolutely.

And especially since, you know, depression or clinical depression is not something that is uncommon.

According to the CDC, you have around 4.7% of adults age 18 and over.

That translates in around 12.3 million people in the country, adults in the country that suffer clinical depression.

And there has always been this taboo about mental health.

And I think that having Senator Fetterman send like, yeah, I mean, I have it and I have to treat it and depression is a treatable symptom, right?

You can treat depression with the right combination of, you know, therapy, right?

Combination of, you know, medical advice in terms of medicines or this or that.

So I think it's it's very brave.

And I think that, you know, it's not on their put on the wall.

And that would make him, you know, being closer to the people because, you know, the people.

Yeah.

You know, suffer this type of struggle.

Yeah.

Financial, you know, mental health, physical health.

And it's, you know, always a hustling.

And he's been portrayed as a hustler.

He's like, I have this thing.

I'm, you know, honest enough, as you said, yeah, go check myself in the to what happened.

And he's not the only one actually.

Senator Tina Smith from Minnesota came out to his, you know, aide and said that she's been treated for depression, which he told us from New York, also talked about being hospitalized for depression.

So there is, you know, a precedent for this and it's something that everybody has to deal with.

And I think it just makes politicians all the more human.

And that means that, you know, they're going to be better representatives one way or the other.

I agree.

But speaking of races, speaking of how the Senate might shape up, obviously, Texas, as we said, has been a state people have identified as one of those that might flip so far, no flipping.

But as we talked about or hinted at last week, the senator, Ted Cruz, has said that he this week is going to run for Senate, not for president.

He doesn't rule out running for president, but basically says he's going to focus on running for Senate.

I got a call from a reporter, drummer Jeffers, the Dallas Morning News and drummer said flat out to me, I don't believe him.

I don't believe he's going to, you know, run for Senate, not for president.

But obviously, this is something that, you know, is sort of to be taken up down the road this is a tough map for Democrats.

Like we said, a few of the pickup opportunities include Texas and Florida, both really challenging.

So if the Democrats are hoping to pick up Texas and Florida as part of their pathway to keeping the Senate, things are not going well.

Picking up a Senate seat from Ted Cruz is going to be really tough.

So what do you make of the possibility of Ted Cruz losing now to presidential?

So it's a little different than yeah.

Or, you know or past been tried, which was a disaster for Democrats.

What do you think of that prospect?

Well, I mean, Ted Cruz is a very, very first of all, he's one of the smartest politicians in the state of Texas.

Right.

He's has a pulse on public opinion and especially on his key constituency, that he knows exactly what to do.

And so he's very smart, he's very studious, and he knows exactly what to say, when to say and how to get the votes right now.

Also, on the other hand, he's extremely, extremely.

Polarizing, right?

Right.

Either you like Ted Cruz, is.

It the beard is that you.

Don't like.

Right after he won with the beard, people were like, nope.

So it's either or.

Okay, there's no middle ground.

So either people like Ted Cruz or they don't like him.

So that gives you know, at least it cracks the door open for Democrats to look for a good challenger.

I'm not going to even say like you cannot recycle, you know, you know, potential candidates.

I don't know that Democrats have done that, though.

Right?

Yeah.

So it hasn't worked.

It definitely hasn't worked.

Right.

So you need to have, you know, a very good candidate.

Yeah.

That is articulate, that knows what to do.

And also the Democratic Party needs to invest heavily.

Yeah.

The other thing I think they need is an issue, right?

And I don't mean issues.

I mean issue that needs to be the driving focus the most vulnerable thing that Ted Cruz has or the Republican Party has.

That's what they need to use.

Now, keep in mind, this is going to be during the presidential election, right?

So they're concurrent and you're going to have Donald Trump running for how long?

We don't know.

Right?

Right.

But certainly that's one of those things that Democrats have used successfully to be able to say that Republicans are too extreme and maybe they can lump Ted Cruz there.

But you're right.

I mean, Cruz's approval is at 44 and that's pretty good.

That's about as good as most other statewide officials.

It was lower earlier in the year.

It rebounded.

Remember, it just a year ago was the the period where Ted Cruz, like, fled for for Cancun during the winter storm.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

With one suitcase.

Yeah.

So that became kind of a reoccurring meme that's problematic for him.

And I think that's definitely a political liability.

But the other thing is that this is basically a brand new state.

It's funny that after six years the population has changed so much right?

New people have come from all over.

So there's going to be a whole new breed of politics of, you know, kind of voter who looks at this for Democrats.

They're better off in a presidential action year.

Typically, the gap is a little lower.

Donald Trump won Texas, but only by about 5%.

And that's Trump.

So it's a little different than like a different kind of Republican.

But that's definitely an issue for Democrats.

The real problem is not only just general turnout, although they're going to get a bump in a presidential, but the fact that they had a bunch of known Democratic voters who didn't show up, about 700,000 Democrats didn't show up to vote in 22.

That showed up in 18.

Also, young people didn't turn out the turnout, 25%.

That's 75% of young people stayed home.

So that's a coalition.

They've got to get active.

And if they don't, then I don't see a way that they're going to beat Ted Cruz regardless of the numbers.

That's good candidate.

Yeah, I'm a big pile of money, right?

Yeah.

And as you say, I think how.

Much money are we talking about?

Meaning, are we going to set this?

Are we going to set this bet right now?

Oh, yeah.

Over under.

I mean, I'm not going to say any bets until you pay me my other bet.

Okay.

Okay.

I mean, if not, I'm.

Yeah, you know, it's just.

Maybe it would do it.

Like, all or nothing, like, you know, or doing nothing.

Right?

What are you doing?

No.

But, you know, the issue here is that, as you said, they need to.

Big issue.

Yeah.

One single thing that can rally people around, because if they start talking about 11,000 things, people lose attention.

It's like, wow.

It's been it's been the common problem for Democrats.

And it's been, I think, something that they can fix pretty easily.

Some of the people who have been talked about as possible, people to run against Ted Cruz, including former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.

Representative Colin Allred from North Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez have been very active on the move all day.

My story, James Talarico, who's a very young member to connect education.

So there are, I think, good candidates Democrats could come up with.

But obviously, as you said, it's going to take a lot to get there.

And Democrats have a tendency to kind of, you know, be fairly vicious internally and then their candidate comes out bruised and unable to compete.

So that could be a potential problem.

But talking about things that are bruised, we'd learned this week actually that vouchers are apparently not dead on arrival in the Texas legislature.

The speaker of the House, who has been kind of wishy washy on support for vouchers, said this week that it wasn't D.O.A., which is a basically a sign that it's not a no, but it's not a yes.

So it does remind me a lot of kind of dating in high school, right?

Not a no, not now.

But maybe like a later.

We'll see.

Like, I'll take that.

I was happy with that back in the day.

Oh, you were.

I was very happy with that.

Yeah.

Take what I can get.

Get.

We know the governor added this is an emergency item.

This has been, you know, talked about in Republican circles for a long time.

So it's certainly the kind of the sort of the kind of policy that's polarizing even by Republicans.

And even more so this week when a new audio leak came out from the Texas Education Agency, from one of the commissioners, the deputy commissioner, he basically said that this is a program that could, in fact, take money from public schools.

So this is the first kind of admission to some degree that this is problematic for funding of public schools.

What's your take on where vouchers are right now?

Are we seeing momentum towards it or is it still just kind of like these stops?

I mean, I think that, you know, the Democrats might play ball.

Yeah, right.

One way or the other.

Mm hmm.

If... what the problem?

Let me take a step back.

Yeah.

So big step back is Democrats.

Play ball with that would.

Be pretty monumental.

The issue here is how schools are funded, right?

Our current funding schools are based on enrollment and not attendance.

So if you have some money here.

Right, and you say, well, I'm going to give you or you're going to be losing students because they're going to go to a private institution or whatever it is, regardless of the amount that the government is going to provide.

So if you start losing kids in one school, they're going to get less money.

Right.

So by The Factor, yes, schools are going to be losing money, but public schools are going to be losing money because they're going to be losing kids.

If you change that to enrollment and not attendance, then right, you can one way or the other secure funding for public schools.

Yeah.

But the key issue here is that you cannot implement these without having a wider net in terms of how you're funding public schools.

Yeah.

Based on enrollment and not attendance.

Yeah.

If they happen to do that.

I'm representing Gina in the house I just introduced have filed a bill that would do that.

Exactly.

I think that they would have a chance to do it because on the other hand, the political alliances between Democrats and Republicans, because as we have said before, all Republicans don't have options.

It's public school or public school.

End of question.

Completely.

So I think that that makes this interesting.

And then Democrats would have another important opportunity there to extract more goodies in terms of education.

Okay.

And say you want to do your school vouchers.

Fine.

Okay.

This is how much it's going to cost.

I see you see you're playing chess, right?

That's good.

And I think that the you know, Republicans have some case has been playing checkers sort of thing, things that like, you know, the school system's going to be the same.

You're not going to lose any money.

It's not true.

I can't be true.

It just by the by the by the logic of it and by the way that the funding works.

This is tricky because this is the kind of thing that is constitutionally provided.

Like this isn't something that we just sort of, you know, can give more money to or not like these things have to be done or there's going to be lawsuits, but no matter what, that's going to be lawsuits.

Right.

So I do think you're right.

I mean, there's a lot of moving parts in terms of school finance and the voucher thing really presents a lot of, you know, complications.

So we'll keep an eye on that.

But I do think that at least there's been a kind of sense that there's not a, you know, not a no right now.

It's a maybe.

And that's probably good enough for a lot of what, you know, the powers that be in the Republican Party want.

But speaking of funding, actually our last item of the week is that Glen Hager, the comptroller for the state of Texas Bears, respond to a complaint from Harris County Hospital, Ted Heap.

And what the comptroller find is that Harris County, in fact, did defund the police.

At issue here is a state law that was passed by the GOP in the last legislative session that bars large counties from cutting law enforcement spending without getting approval from voters.

So basically what this amounts to is that the comptroller said that the county cannot increase property tax collections now or they have to go to voters to ask them to okay it.

And you know how voters love okaying, you know, defunding police in quotes.

Now, the Harris County attorney this week said that he was going to challenge Hager's finding in court.

Interesting all around.

Obviously, as a legal matter, it's complicated, but also is important because here is Glenn Hager able to step into this role and have a pretty sizable amount of control over what counties do so he can fill that leadership vacuum in the future no matter how this comes out.

Right.

My my response to that is that both comptroller here and Harris County need to go and ask for help.

And that help is going to come from Count Dracula, from Sesame Street, so they can get their numbers right to.

Three.

Million.

Exactly.

And start counting.

Right.

You're totally right, because this is an accounting issue.

It's how the county's applying a different formula, how the controller itself is applying the formula.

And I think, you know, to certain extent, yeah, let the court decide which is the formula that is right and and see how it do it.

So we're going to keep a very, very close tab on these accounting matters.

But for these week, Brandon, this is it.

That said, this was brought to you by the letters.

I.

And im Brandon Rottinghaus Thanks for watching.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina We'll see you next week!