Special: Bernie Sanders & the Democratic convention, Congress passes opioid bill and House GOP wins Obamacare lawsuit

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MR. WILLIAMS: Hello, everyone. I’m Pete Williams in for Gwen Ifill, and we’re picking up where we left off on the weekly broadcast. And I’m joined around the table by Abby Phillip of The Washington Post , Susan Davis of NPR, Josh Gerstein of POLITICO , and Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal .

Jeanne, one of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party remains Bill Clinton. What is he up to these days? And does he remain a potent weapon for Hillary Clinton?

MS. CUMMINGS: He can be. He can draw very big crowds, and especially some of the working-class folks that Hillary’s going to need to energize. I mean, if the Democratic Party can come to full unity, she’s going to have a lot of weapons. You’ll have Bill Clinton in one city. You’ll have Hillary in another. You could have the president someplace else. You could have Joe Biden somewhere else. So they are going to have a major arsenal. And, if it comes down to it, Michelle Obama, who I believe is quite reluctant to go through yet another campaign, but she does really care about her husband’s legacy. And the way to preserve that is to elect Hillary Clinton, certainly not Donald Trump.

MR. WILLIAMS: You just mentioned Joe Biden. Of course, he said this week that he really wished he had been able to run for president. He thought he’d be the best president. So no doubt, though, that he’ll eagerly campaign for Hillary Clinton?

MS. CUMMINGS: It still may take a little while. There’s still friction between the two of them. But I found his remarks this week to be the first clear signal that he’s coming around and he’s ready to stand up. And let’s face it, he loves campaigning. (Laughter.) He loves it, so.

MR. WILLIAMS: Yes, he likes crowds and he likes people.

MS. CUMMINGS: Going to Scranton, just, you know –

MR. GERSTEIN: And Donald Trump could help make the sale, don’t you think? (Laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMS: Abby, assuming that Bernie Sanders is not the nominee, will he try to have some presence at the convention? Will he try to shape the platform?

MS. PHILLIP: It’s already happening right now. The talks are happening between Bernie Sanders’ campaign and the DNC about these committee slots. They’re being – some of them have actually been set since January, but now they’re trying really hard to make sure that his loyalists are on the committees, especially the Platform Committee. They’re not talking very much about what they want out of the platform, but you can guess that he’s going to try to codify some of those movements that he pushed Hillary Clinton into in the primary – stuff on the minimum wage, on Wall Street, even potentially on the issue of whether superdelegates should remain part of the Democratic nominating process. That’s one thing that I –

MR. WILLIAMS: That would be true for next time.

MS. PHILLIP: For next time. I think Democrats are really going to push back hard on that one. It’s unlikely to happen, but I think we might see some effort to make it happen.

MR. WILLIAMS: A question for all of you about both parties: Who cares about the platform, other than the people who go to the convention?

MS. CUMMINGS: Precisely. And that’s why I think Bernie Sanders is going to win quite a bit. You know, and the platform is a statement of the aspirations of the party, and the – and the party – a big chunk of the party is –

MR. WILLIAMS: But not the candidate.

MS. CUMMINGS: Exactly.

MS. PHILLIP: What it’s really about is also Bernie Sanders needs to figure out what to do with his people once this is all over, and they need some kind of organizing principle. They need a kind of win on the board. I think the – I think that some of his supporters view the platform as a kind of this is what we got.

MR. WILLIAMS: Consolation prize? (Laughter.)

MS. PHILLIP: You know, this is what we got. And now, you know, once this is over, let’s pivot, deal with Trump, and then figure out how we can use all of this power and money to do something for – to make the party a little bit more progressive.

MS. DAVIS: Senator Lindsey Graham this week, talking about the party platform, talked about a Bob Dole line where he said the platform is the hard thing you do at the convention that you immediately start running away from in the general election. (Laughter.)

MS. PHILLIP: Just ask the Republican Party. (Laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMS: Well, Susan, speaking of Congress, in the midst of the obsession with Donald Trump’s visit, something actually got passed with bipartisan support about a nationwide epidemic. What was that?

MS. DAVIS: Yeah. Not just bipartisan support, supermajorities of support in the House this week. They passed 18 smaller piecemeal bills that are meant to deal with the opioid addiction crisis in this country. The Senate has also already acted on it. Ninety-four of the senators in the chamber voted on that bill. They’re going to go into final negotiations. The fight in negotiations is not going to be over the substance. It’s going to be over how much money do we want to commit to this, to fighting the opioid addiction.

The two things in this that I think are really fascinating is, on the one hand, on the policy front, this – we as a country are shifting away from dealing with drug epidemics as a matter of law enforcement, and shifting towards looking at them as a public health problem. And that is a fundamental shift of public policy. On the political level, what has been fascinating to watch in this legislative battle is that some of the most passionate and hard-core advocates for this have been conservative Republicans, who are not necessarily the same group of people that you would have thought would have been fighting on this front. And it does show you how vast and how rampant the opioid addiction problem is in this country, how it has creeped into every constituency. And between two and three million people in this country are either addicted to opioid drug prescription pills or heroin.

MR. WILLIAMS: Wow. Josh, finally, yet another challenge to Obamacare. This one got a little traction from a federal judge this week. Tell us about that.

MR. GERSTEIN: Well, a federal judge ruled that one of the funding mechanisms for Obamacare, this is money that goes to insurance companies to reimburse them for paying some of the co-pays and deductibles that poorer Americans are reimbursed for under Obamacare, that Congress, probably accidentally, just never funded that. The administration said it was sort of implied in the way the law was structured that they could draw it from a larger pool of money. And the judge just didn’t buy it. She said this section of the law, they never appropriated any money. They authorized it, they never appropriated.

MR. WILLIAMS: So why is that a problem?

MR. GERSTEIN: Well, it’s a big problem because these insurance markets are already a mess. A lot of insurance companies are pulling out of them, many of them badly miscalculated how expensive issuing this Obamacare insurance was going to be and have lost tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. This would just add one more wrinkle if they still had to cover these deductibles and co-pays for millions of Americans, but the government wasn’t going to pay them back.

The one, you know, silver lining here, perhaps, in the judge’s ruling is that she put it on hold. So by the time the appeals court sort of sorts out whether they agree with this and the potential of a Supreme Court challenge I think, you know, President Obama would have transitioned off to run his presidential library. And it’s possible there might be a change in Congress where they could fix some of these things. These are a lot of the messes that were left by the way this bill was dealt with at the very last minute.

MR. WILLIAMS: And who filed this lawsuit? And what was their basic constitutional argument?

MR. GERSTEIN: Well, the lawsuit was filed by the House of Representatives. And this was one of their main legal attacks on Obamacare. And they essentially argued that this was one of many areas where the Obama administration reinterpreted the law, took words that were not there, and decided, in this instance, that they had the authority to spend tax money that Congress never actually directly appropriated. At least, that’s what the judge said, agreeing with the House, and a pretty substantial legal victory against the president.

MR. WILLIAMS: And the Obama administration’s already going to appeal this, right?

MR. GERSTEIN: Yeah, they say they’re going to appeal it. So the battle will drag on for now and the subsidies will continue to flow. So it’s just another example of, as I say, the hodge-podge in which this legislation was passed. It’s the kind of thing that normally you’d pass a small bill to fix it, but Congress being what it is at the moment, they don’t have any agreement to do that. (Laughter.) Maybe next year.

MR. WILLIAMS: All right. Thank you, Josh. Thank you all.

Stay online and check out our expanded election coverage on 16 for 2016. That’s where you’ll find a deep dive on key issues being presented by the presidential candidates from free college to common-sense gun reforms to building border walls. All that’s at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

And we’ll see you next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra.