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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Well, this is the balancing act that Speaker Johnson has really had to deal with his entire time as Speaker, which is placating basically both the ultra-conservatives in his conference and the more moderate Republicans, many of whom represent sort of swing districts.
And so you heard some concerns from those more centrist Republicans who are saying, look, I know this resolution we're about to vote on doesn't say that we're going to cut programs like Medicaid or Medicare. But we're looking at the way this bill has been written.
And it seems that almost certainly in order to get to the levels of spending cuts we're talking about, we're going to have to cut programs like Medicaid. And so you had some deep concerns from lawmakers who represent districts where a lot of their constituents rely on Medicaid. At the same time, you had these ultra conservatives say, actually, I think this bill doesn't cut spending enough.
And I'm not sure if I can bring myself to vote for this resolution if it, in fact, is going to increase the deficit.
Well, I don't want to get us into the weeds too much, but the way a budget resolution is structured, lawmakers aren't required to lay out the specific policy changes that they want to make in order to hit these spending targets.
But it does instruct individual committees and say, look, you need to go and find X number of dollars of cuts when we build this legislation that we're ultimately going to put to the floor for a vote. And so in this particular resolution, lawmakers have told the committee that oversees Medicaid and Medicare spending. We need you guys to find, in this case, $880 billion in cuts.
Over 10 years, right? Over 10. $880 billion over 10 years.
So this was yet again another vote on the House floor where we really didn't know if Speaker Johnson had the support necessary to push this legislation through. He's working with extraordinarily thin margins. We saw Democratic leaders actually bring back a number of their lawmakers who have been ill, who have not been at the Capitol,
Yes, a month ago had a baby come back to the Capitol for this vote, trying to ratchet up the pressure. Speaker Johnson, as he walked out onto the House floor, said, I have the votes. Meanwhile, I was texting with a Republican who had said they were going to oppose the resolution because it added to the deficit.
And they said, by my count, there's three of us who are going to oppose it, which would doom it. And it turns out they both were kind of right. Speaker Johnson was able to push this resolution across the finish line in the end, but it took about an hour. We saw him and some of his deputies really working over about three, four Republican lawmakers.
These were all ultra-conservative lawmakers who said they didn't want to vote for this resolution because it would add to the deficit. It looked for a while like Johnson was not going to be able to get them to flip. But then something sort of notable happened, which is that the Republican leadership spirited some of these defectors off the House floor.
And when that happened, I thought I have seen this movie before because that is what happened when Johnson was reelected back in January. They took the defectors off the floor and they got a call from President Trump.
Right. And it passes 217 to 215 with just one Republican voting against.
So what House Republicans have given themselves is they've said we are going to cut taxes by four point five trillion dollars and then we are going to cut spending by two trillion dollars. So essentially you are looking at a piece of legislation here that is going to add to the deficit by two point five trillion dollars. And for a lot of lawmakers, that's a big number.
Can I just add as well, in 2018, Democrats were able to coalesce around a message that was focused on the attempted repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act, right? And that was an incredibly salient issue. And we saw in 2018, Democrats take back the House after campaigning pretty narrowly on that issue.
And a lot of Democrats that I've spoken to in the past few days think that they have a real opening to use that playbook again, If they happen. If they happen. And there's a real excitement and I think energy around that message that, as Zolan pointed out, we haven't seen from Democrats in quite some time.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, look, over the past seven years I've been up on the Hill, I've written a lot about sort of the two foreign policy wings of the Republican Party, sort of the traditional Mitch McConnell interventionist wing. And sort of the, at the time, ascendant sort of, they call themselves realists, restrainers, people who did not want to send sort of U.S. treasure, U.S. troops abroad.
And I think what we've seen over the past couple of weeks, at least when it comes to Republicans in Congress, is that that's not really a battle anymore. And that it's over. The anti-interventionists have won. They occupy positions of power in Republican leadership on the Hill. They occupy positions of power within the Pentagon. And so I think Zelensky knows that, right?
He knows that he's not going to get any more aid from Congress. And so he has to make a deal with President Trump.
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