Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 10/6/23

Jeffrey Goldberg: Kevin McCarthy makes history, just not the way he imagined.

Unidentified Female: The office of speaker of the House is hereby declared vacant.

Jeffrey Goldberg: In a week that could go down in the books as one of the most historic imaginable, Kevin McCarthy loses his speakership.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH): We need someone who can unite the conference that I think I can do. That's why I'm running for the job.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA): I've got a long-proven record and somebody who knows how to unify Republicans to fight on the battles that matter.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And the race to see who could possibly govern the Republican House Caucus is well underway.

Plus --

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY): MAGA extremists plunged Congress into pandemonium.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The anarchic spirit that is alive and well among House Republicans threatens to exacerbate the federal government's dysfunction and places support for Ukraine in peril just as another potential shutdown looms, next.

Good evening and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK.

Last week, we asked whether Kevin McCarthy had the worst job in Washington. We now have our answer. Kevin McCarthy doesn't have the worst job in Washington because he doesn't have a job. Technically, of course, he is still a member of Congress so he is employed, but it will be up to someone else to try to build a stable ruling majority in the House.

McCarthy's defenestration was dramatic but in retrospect inevitable. Now, we have the prospect of Donald Trump promising to heal the wounds of the Republican Party and we have at least two men seeking, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, seeking the speakership.

Earlier today, Trump endorsed Jordan, the hard right Ohio Congressman, for the role.

What does all this mean for the health of the party and the country and for the 2024 presidential campaign? Here to discuss with me are Nancy Cordes, Chief White House Correspondent for CBS News, Eugene Daniels is the White House correspondent at Politico and the co-author of Playbook, and Chuck Todd is the chief political analyst for NBC News. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, Chuck, for joining us. Just remember one thing, I am the captain. I'm the captain.

Chuck Todd, Chief Political Analyst, NBC News: I know how to be a guest.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We will be testing that proposition this evening.

Chuck, let's start with you. What happened? What does this all mean?

Chuck Todd: Well, you put it pretty well. This was inevitable. We watched this with the 15 ballots. We watched this when they agreed, when Kevin McCarthy, the lesson we tried to teach our own kids, we've ESOP (ph) try to teach us these lessons, you want something too much, you do whatever it takes to get it. Sometimes be careful of some of the deals you made.

And he made a deal in order to get the final votes to get the speakership. It wasn't even for people to vote for him, just to vote present at the time, to allow to actually get the gavel. He agreed to this basically anybody at any time could decide we are going to have a vote to kick you out of the job. And it just --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Imagine going to work like that every day.

Chuck Todd: Right, every day with the end goal for you. And he bragged about going about -- he said, do you have -- he seemed to take comfort in having no plan B or plan C, just like I get through today and I'll see what tomorrow brings.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It was a very burn the boats.

Chuck Todd: And here we are. Look, I think either this gets settled quickly behind because the conference is exhausted. Let's see how the weekend is. They all went home in order to essentially calm down, look in the mirror, is this really what we want to do over the next six months.

So, if this either happens really quickly, and I'm skeptical that it will, or we could go, I think, the rest of this calendar year in the sort of speaker list no man's land with a sort of a person that holds the gavel and we will be governing, and apologies for the use of this word, governing by discharge petition, which I think might be inevitable even if we get Jordan and Scalise as speaker.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You promised me you weren't going to use the term, discharge petition.

Chuck Todd: I thought of all places that I could use it but on a show by The Atlantic.

Jeffrey Goldberg: This is a show --

Chuck Todd: You used defenestration.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I did use defenestration. This is a show devoted to the discharge petition.

Nancy, what do you think this means about the Republican ability to govern in the House?

Nancy Cordes, Chief White House Correspondent, CBS News: Well, what the White House is arguing is that it's chaos over there, right? They're trying to create this very clear --

Jeffrey Goldberg: You don't need a White House to tell you that, right?

Nancy Cordes: Exactly, but they're pumping it out day in and day out. They are arguing that over on one side of Pennsylvania Avenue, they are all about order. They are all about getting things done for the American people, and that what's happening over on the Republican side of the House is just anarchy.

And they're trying to make the case that the Republicans can't govern and that, for that reason, people need to vote Democrats back into power in the House and, of course, vote a Democrat back into power in the White House in 2024.

But the reality is that this has serious implications for White House policies as well. And their preference is Ukraine most notably, if chaos reigns in the House for months and months, how is the White House going to get the $24 billion in Ukraine aid that it has promised the world it's going to get over the finish line? How are we going to fund the government in 40 days and stave off a government shutdown? So, it has very real implications, not just for the White House, but for the American people.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right, I'll ask you an even harder question. The White House is saying that they can't govern. Can they govern? I mean, you're watching this very closely.

Eugene Daniels, White House Correspondent, Politico: The Republicans?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Eugene Daniels: I mean, at this point, it seems like it is almost impossible to try to get the House Republican Conference to want to be a governing party. You look at Paul Ryan, John Boehner, every Republican speaker, the last three have ended and have met demise in some way, right?

And so what it tells is that there continues to be a faction, and now a growing faction within the Republican Party in the House, that isn't interested in governing, isn't interested in even changing the tools of government to make government smaller, but really just like throwing their hands and saying, we're here to destroy it. And that is different than it used to be.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, in other words, we're not going to have, Chuck, a selection of a speaker, and then we're going to have stability come to the fore?

Chuck Todd: No. Because I think whatever deals Scalise and Jordan have to cut in order to get somehow unite folks to get this.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Scalise with the hard right, Jordan with the more establishment.

Chuck Todd: You know, it is interesting, to hear some of the moderate Republicans say, well, Jim Jordan has a relation. You know, this is one of those things, three days with the hard right maybe he can keep things calm.

Three days ago, I would have said, no chance Jim Jordan can become speaker of the House. Watching sort of moderates who are battered, they sort of are exhausted from kind of, they figure, well, if we put him up and they depose him, then, you know, so be it, you know, at least we tried to work with those folks.

So, you know, we'll say, I will, one thing about the White House, I know the White House believes this will -- the comparison is helpful to them. I think it helps the Democratic Party more than it helps Joe Biden. And, unfortunately, for Joe Biden, and this happened to Barack Obama, when Washington doesn't look like it's functioning, the person in charge of Washington for many people in this country is the president of the United States.

Yes, they know that the Republicans are causing this angst, but it doesn't help him. What are you doing to try to calm this down? What are you -- and I've noticed it in our own polling, Democrats are benefiting more from the problems of Republicans than Joe Biden is. And you even see this in

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, somehow, voters assume that the president should be able to calm down that --

Chuck Todd: Whether it's fair or not, and some of it is irrational. And you go through, you know, hey, I thought voting for Biden was going to get rid of Trump, I thought this was going to do this, and there's a lot of, you know, whatever you want to call these voters, they're not paying attention to day to day, they're living their own lives, they thought, wait a minute, I thought this was going to get rid of this.

So, this is a problem for Biden. He needs a functioning speaker as soon as possible, because I do think that doesn't look good if Washington just can't work.

Nancy Cordes: Right, people think that the president is in charge.

Chuck Todd: Some people put too much under the president's seat.

Nancy Cordes: Exactly, and if we have a government shutdown, a prolonged government shutdown, that has significant implications for the economy. And President Biden has staked his re-election on his handling of the economy.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. You know, I wanted to come to that, but let's do it right now. I mean, we're talking about this election, this selection of a speaker, but government shutdown looms pretty quickly. I mean, give us a little forecast there.

Nancy Cordes: Well, the whole reason that we went through this this week is because McCarthy committed the sin of being willing to pass a short-term spending bill just to keep the government open. He didn't buckle to Democratic demands. He just kept the government funded at its current levels for 45 days. And that was enough.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He wasn't spending out free cars.

Nancy Cordes: No. And that was enough to get him deposed.

And what Republicans want, what they really want is to pass not just one spending bill to keep the government open. They want to pass 12 appropriations bills, something that in much better times Congress has not been able to do for decades. And now they want Congress to do it without a speaker in 40 days.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right, it can't be done with an effective speaker.

Nancy Cordes: Right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, you can't do it without a speaker.

I just want to -- before we leave this subject, you mentioned something. You talked about Ryan, Boehner and now McCarthy, the three amigos here, the three amigos of unhappiness.

Eugene Daniels: Right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And it raises this question. I was trying to think of who's had a good week, who's had a bad week, sort of thing. Nancy Pelosi has kind of had a weirdly good week reputationally in the sense that when she was the speaker, she seemed to be having a pretty good time and got a pretty good handle on this. My question is, was she better at being speaker than these previous Republicans or was the Democratic Party less apt to go revolutionary on her?

Eugene Daniels: I think the answer is both, right? Nancy Pelosi is deft at maneuvering any kind of drama, right? She knows not to bring any vote to the floor that she didn't know exactly how people were going to vote. She knew how to protect folks, right, protect either moderates or protect people like AOC or Ilhan Omar and folks that maybe they didn't want to take. And that's something that you have to be able to do, including make sure that people feel heard, right? They have to feel like you're listening to them and not stabbing them in the back.

One of the problems that McCarthy had is that he was seen completely untrustworthy, not just by Democrats. And he went back on his word with them plenty of times, but also with Republicans over and over and over again. And when no one trusts you and no one is going to be able to have your back and save your job, you've lost, right? That is exactly what happened.

Chuck Todd: But this Republican Party has changed. Look, what you describe with Nancy Pelosi, I could have given that to Tom DeLay, okay? And I say Tom DeLay, he wasn't speaker but he essentially ran. He was -- Hastert was his sort of puppet. And that was a very efficient Congress, and he didn't go to the floor unless he knew what the votes were. So, all those things, in some ways, Nancy Pelosi watched that as sort of when she was just moving up in the leadership ladder.

But you now have a faction of the Republican Party. The chaos is the feature, not the bug. They're not interested in governing. The farthest left faction of the Democratic Party is still pro-government. The farthest right faction of this party are nihilists. And they're not interested. In fact, they think, hey, government is so messed up --

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, you're saying these are people who went to work in government who hate government?

Chuck Todd: They don't want it to work because they say it doesn't work when it works. And why do we want it to work?

So, this is the -- you know, sometimes it's asymmetric warfare you're having. This is an asymmetry. This is why you're like, they're talking past each other because you do have a group of now House Republicans, enough of them to cause this when you don't have a large majority. He only had that narrow majority.

And I think that to me is why I can't get my head to 218 for anybody because of these eight to ten that are there to gum up the works. It is not an accident.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, you're predicting paralysis followed by shutdown?

Chuck Todd: I'm not predicting shutdown because the tools are there. I think there's so much there. Look, look at how normal we've already made government shutdowns, right? We've passed laws to make it easier to shut down the government. We can talk about whether that was a good idea or not because you took all the tough stuff away. You know, the FAA still works when we shut down the government. Military still work. You know, we don't do -- you know, if we really had that on the table, these guys wouldn't ever shut down the government, but they've actually made it, quote, easy to shut down the less noticed parts of government.

But I do think that these 20, particularly these Republicans, they don't want this, these moderate Republicans in the Biden districts. I think they are -- and especially if they don't get a speaker next week, I think it's every member for themselves. And that's why I think we'll weirdly enough avoid shutdowns and get Ukraine funding.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, wait, let's talk about those -- there are 18 Republican members of the House who are in districts that that Biden won. They have to count among the big losers of this. Is that is that fair?

Nancy Cordes: Sure. And that's why you have moderate Republicans like them banding together and saying, we're not going to elect any of you as speaker unless you promise to change the rules so that we don't see this again, where one person can basically call a vote to get rid of the House speaker. They don't want this to happen in perpetuity, which it will. It will happen again, because even if you get a deeply conservative speaker of the House, at some point, they will have to compromise with the other side.

That is the job of the House speaker, is to work with the president, is to work with the Senate. You can't just ignore that part of the job.

Chuck Todd: It's actually what politics is supposed to be about.

Nancy Cordes: Right.

Chuck Todd: It's the very definition of it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, I don't mean to turn this into a good week, bad week kind of thing, but I'm going to keep rolling with it.

Chuck Todd: Can we do up arrows and down arrows?

Jeffrey Goldberg: I got a board. The -- Donald Trump, Eugene, pretty good week. He looks, if nothing else, incredibly relevant.

Eugene Daniels: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes?

Eugene Daniels: I mean, part of the thing about Donald Trump that we, I think in the media, have to remember every time that we cover anything he says is that he's often just throwing himself into the conversation, right? It is very hard to see Donald Trump really wanting to be speaker of the House, right? You have to come to work a lot. You have to let people talk about them renaming a post office in a random town.

Chuck Todd: Oh, I think it's actually like that.

Eugene Daniels: But that is what this makes clear is that when he's able to do that and say that, and then others get around it and almost turn it into this fever dream, that reminds you that this is Donald Trump's Republican Party.

If anyone had questions about that, those are gone, right? This shows that folks are -- that this man is the leader of the Republican Party. The things that are happening in the House are partly due to him. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey Goldberg: But we'll talk about Jim Jordan in this context. Jim Jordan is Mr. Impeachment. I mean, Mr. Impeachment of Joe Biden, Mr. Impeachment. If he becomes speaker, then the House is completely Trumpified. Is that fair or is that an overstatement?

Nancy Cordes: I think it's completely fair. In fact, no less than Liz Cheney said the other night that there was no one in the House who knew more about the planning for January 6th that was going on at the White House than Jim Jordan. She argued that if he becomes speaker, that you can't trust the House Republicans to follow the Constitution.

I mean, you know, for Liz Cheney, she is not beloved by the modern House Republican Conference, but for -- you know, she is a conservative Republican, for her to say something like that is pretty notable. But he is racking up support. Even people who support Scalise have been saying, I'd back Jim Jordan if he ends up being the House speaker.

Eugene Daniels: Scalise told my colleague, Rachael Bade, today that even if it was Jim Jordan, he would support him. He wouldn't stand in the way of saying all of that.

Chuck Todd: This feels like the wild card round of the playoffs. We are a long way from them. Maybe I'm wrong.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Parse the difference between Scalise and Jordan. Put them in their lanes. Tell us who --

Chuck Todd: Well, actually, if you want to just to be -- this easiest way is Scalise is probably on the most conservative end of the business wing of the party. He's still, at the end of the day, a chamber of commerce Republican. He's going to show up to the realtors. He's going to have those conversations with the bankers.

Jim Jordan doesn't care about those people. He's more of -- he was always sort of a populist. In some ways, you could argue maybe he was onto something before Trump got it. He was kind of the marginalized member of the Ohio delegation back in the Boehner -- when Boehner and Kasich ran Ohio Republican politics, Jim Jordan was their punch line. You know, they were the ones that he would -- they were snickering about.

Nancy Cordes: Legislative terrorists.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Exactly.

Chuck Todd: By the way though --

Jeffrey Goldberg: As we've learned with Trump, don't turn people into political punch lines, yes.

Chuck Todd: Donald Trump -- I understand the political discussion, but Donald Trump's behavior in court this week was -- and I know we're numb to this sometimes and it's the boiled frog, whatever you want to call it, but my word, he's on another level of anger, some might call it, with his attacks on the judicial system, his specific attacks on the clerk inside that courtroom.

Look, he's personally rattled. Trump Tower maybe in receivership soon, right? So, he is absolutely panicked. I think he's lucky this House chaos happened this week because there would be a lot more attention on his truly erratic behavior this week in court. It was astonishing, I think, some of the things he did.

Eugene Daniels: And that's one of the reasons someone told Playbook, someone around Trump told Playbook, that he wanted to be a part of it, that he knew what was happening.

Chuck Todd: He wanted out of the story.

Eugene Daniels: He was like, you know what, I'm going to jump in the air.

Chuck Todd: That's a more fun story.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, yes, watch this, not that.

Let me turn the subject to a matter of great consequence, Ukraine. And, again, I don't know why I'm doing this, but good week, bad week, not a great week if you're President Zelenskyy. I want you to listen to one thing that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine just recently said.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian President: The situation with the United States is dangerous, but I'm thankful to the president, to Congress. I know that we have bipartisan support.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We don't know that we have bipartisan support. When you have to say we have strong bipartisan support, it means maybe you don't have strong bipartisan support. Going to the split --

Chuck Todd: I'm an optimist. I really am. I do. I think this support is really strong in Congress, this bipartisan support.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You might be a little Pollyanna-ish. Wait, hold on.

Chuck Todd: I think this is the lovely world of the discharge petition, but I'm just -- I'm less concerned about this. I hope I'm --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Nancy, tell us why he's wrong.

Nancy Cordes: Well, first of all, there was a vote in the House last week where a majority of House Republicans voted against Ukraine funding, and it seems to be growing all the time. It seems to be becoming this litmus test for Republicans kind of the same way that the COVID vaccine did, where suddenly, if you're for it, you're not a real Republican.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Zelenskyy as Fauci is what you're -- yes.

Nancy Cordes: Right, exactly. I'm totally equating them.

But the other issue is that the White House, the president, just this week, spoke to world leaders, allies, and said, don't worry, I'm confident that we are going to pass this funding. And just a few hours later, the House speaker was deposed. And so now this funding is completely in limbo. And the reason that Zelenskyy has to be worried is not just because he needs that $24 billion, he certainly does, but also because the U.S. has been a leader in a global coalition in support of Ukraine. And there are people in those countries, politicians in those countries that are getting weary of funding Ukraine as well. And if the U.S. leadership falters, then there's the possibility that the coalition falls apart.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Eugene, you get to decide.

Eugene Daniels: I think I'm on the next on this because even when you --

Nancy Cordes: Just because he sees me every day at work. He knows it.

Eugene Daniels: Exactly, that's it. I mean, when --

Jeffrey Goldberg: We might have to move your chair closer now. That's the way it works.

Eugene Daniels: We asked Biden about whether how he was feeling the day after he had this call after McCarthy was gone, he said he was worried. Though then, you know, Karine Jean-Pierre the White House press secretary, said he's both confident and worried, which is kind of difficult to do, but, hey -- but, you know, he talks about himself as this eternal optimist.

But he knows at the end of the day there isn't as much bipartisan support as there was and the American people are losing support. And once that starts to happen, it is going to be easier for House Republicans to say, whether American people aren't behind this, we don't have to do this either. That is dangerous for this coalition that they've been building, the American -- Joe Biden and his team pulling this together was a feat. It is the it is the biggest part of their foreign policy that's been a success. And if it goes away, it's not just bad for Ukraine and the world, it's also bad for his election about what he's been saying about being -- wanting to be president again. He said, I'm going to bring America back. This is -- if that happens the other way, it's not that.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Chuck, we're all grateful and happy about your successful tenure at Meet the Press. And because of that, your reward is that I'm giving you one minute to discuss the discharge petition. Tell us why -- think about this.

Chuck Todd: It's a side effect.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The current prescription drug. Tell us why it's so important. Tell us why it's so important to you. Now, you have about 50 seconds.

Chuck Todd: No. I mean, look, it is if there is a bipartisan majority in the House. In fact, there's probably 300 votes for Ukraine funding in the House. You only need 218. Obviously, more of them are on the Democratic side than the Republican side.

I just think that what -- you know, it's in some ways, you know, there's a great line, Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, when the old man is claiming that, oh, don't worry, they can't breed and he says, life finds a way.

Look, this is one of those things where there's going to be a way this is done. It's going to be painful. It's going to be ugly. It may, unfortunately, start -- I think the longer term threat is it may start fraying the coalition.

Jeffrey Goldberg: How does it work?

Chuck Todd: Well, you have to literally get 218 people to sign a petition to say, bring this bill to the floor, and they have to do it. It's just an old -- in the same way, you might walk around old fashioned, sign your name here, give me 218. There will be 200 Democrats, Mike McCall, you know, and 20 of his friends, maybe, you know, Don Bacon and those folks.

Jeffrey Goldberg: What would lead them to such a level of paralysis and desperation that they're just going to go the old fashioned route?

Chuck Todd: Now, there's also the Pentagon accounting error that has happened twice over the last six months where they magically found, oh, look, we found $5 billion, an error in banking in your favor, monopoly --

Nancy Cordes: And President Biden had this mysterious comment the other day where he said there might be another source of funding, but he wouldn't say --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, you prompted that. What was the --

Nancy Cordes: We don't know exactly. We pressed him, we pressed the White House press secretary, we don't know what that other funding source is, but, apparently, he thinks it's out there.

Chuck Todd: There is some money that is inside the state department that can be used for this. And that's --

Jeffrey Goldberg: But these are all Jerry-rigged kind of little mechanisms here.

Chuck Todd: I'm not saying it's like a MacGyver. I'm just confident that there's going to be funding for this sooner now. Look, the longer political, I take your point there.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we are going to have to just stay tuned to next week's episode to find out where that money is. Unfortunately, we've run out of time and we have to leave it there for now. But I want to thank our panelists for joining us and sharing their reporting.

And be sure to tune into "PBS NEWS WEEKEND" Saturday. John Yang travels to North Carolina to report on the dangers of living near chemical facilities.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.