Catie Edmondson

speaker

234 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 17 Oct

Catie Edmondson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

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The Daily · Republicans Take Control of Congress — and Harris Certifies Her Own Loss · 7 Jan 2025 podcast

How is this any different? But the difference here, I think, are the expectations. Republicans are starting this year thinking we have a real opportunity here. We just won big. We won the House. We won the Senate. We won the White House. This is our time to deliver for our voters, for our constituents. And so there's a lot of pressure on Mike Johnson to deliver.

Yes, that is the message. That is the sort of Damocles they want hovering over his head. They want him to know that he is on thin ice. And I think what's striking about that is it's shaping up to be a very different environment than what we're seeing over on the other side of the Capitol, where Republicans also have a majority in the United States Senate.

Well, while all of this drama was playing out in the House on Friday, things were much calmer over in the Senate. We saw the newly elected senators get sworn in. But probably the biggest change was that Mitch McConnell is no longer the Republican leader.

And that's for the first time in about two decades. Instead, we have a new leader helming the Republican conference, and that is Senator John Thune of South Dakota.

Well, it was an election that was lacking in drama, but that wasn't necessarily a foregone conclusion. So back in November, when it became clear that Republicans had won control of the Senate, there was, I would say, a clutch of MAGA conservatives who said, look, if we're going to have this governing trifecta, why don't we make sure that we have a true MAGA loyalist leading Senate Republicans?

Right. because they felt that they had been somewhat smothered by the leadership of Mitch McConnell, who did much to enable Trump, but also was quite critical of him at times.

And this is where Senator Rick Scott of Florida threw his hat in the ring to challenge John Thune to lead the Senate Republican conference.

That's right. Now, one incredibly important difference between how the House elects the speaker and how senators elect their party leader is that the Senate does it by secret ballot. And by the time the first round of ballots were cast, it was clear that Rick Scott was not going to have the votes to lead the Republican conference at all.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. It gives them this insulation of plausible deniability that members over in the House certainly do not have. And I think that helped Thune get over the finish line here. But I think a lot of these Republican senators saw Thune as an institutionalist. He actually served as McConnell's deputy. He was McConnell's number two.

He absorbed a lot of the responsibilities that McConnell kind of had to relinquish as he was dealing with health problems in the last year. And I think they also saw him as someone who wanted to guard the Senate's independence as an institution in a way that Rick Scott was certainly not campaigning on.

Well, you know, I think it might be best explained in his own words. Senate Majority Leader Soon, welcome back to Meet the Press.

He actually went on to a Sunday show a couple of days ago and was asked, How would you describe your relationship with President-elect Trump right now? What's your relationship like with Donald Trump? And his response was, Well, you know what?

Which I think kind of tells you all you need to know.

Well, Trump himself actually once accused John Thune of being a rhino, a Republican in name only, which is one of sort of the worst political slurs that can be bandied about within the Republican Party.

Well, that is because John Thune not only did not support Trump's effort to challenge the 2020 election results, but he also was quite publicly skeptical of that effort to overturn Biden's electoral victory.

I actually remember very distinctly a reporter asking Thune in the halls of the Capitol leading up to January 6th, 2021, asking him, John Thune, what do you think about Donald Trump's effort to overturn the election here? And Thune's answer was, I think it's going to go down like a shot dog, which Trump did not take kindly to. But four years later.

Thune himself explicitly says a number of the major agenda items that Trump has coming into the White House are ones that he believes in.

that his incentives and Trump's incentives are aligned. At the same time, he is certainly not a MAGA loyalist in the vein of Rick Scott. And I do think one of the reasons why Republican senators ultimately voted to have him lead their conference was because they are looking for a leader who is willing to assert a little bit more independence.

And they thought he would provide some sort of level of protection for the Senate as an institution at a time when Trump has strongly suggested he wants to co-opt that independence for his own agenda.

That's right. That is going to be the question of this Congress.

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