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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Well, I think today's ceremony really underscored what is supposed to be the pro forma nature of the January 6th congressional counting of electoral votes. This is a performative ritual in which Congress counts the electoral votes from each state and certifies the election of whoever won the presidency.

Obviously, if your first introduction to this ceremony was four years ago, you had a very different view of what happened on that day. Indeed. And so today's counting of electoral votes really was what was supposed to happen.

You had Vice President Kamala Harris overseeing the entire ceremony, overseeing essentially Congress certifying her own loss.

And you had a pretty stark scene, I think, in which she's standing there sort of staring straight ahead as one by one lawmakers stand up and they are announcing the states that she won as a presidential candidate, but they're also announcing the states that she lost.

And so as we go through the roll call of states, not only are we reliving sort of the calls on election night, but Harris is reliving it too.

And at the end of this entire process, it falls to her to be the one to say that Trump was the candidate who won the electoral votes to win the presidency. Thank you very much.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think lawmakers were largely pretty relieved to see that they were able to all come together here, complete their ceremony without any major events. But I also think at the same time, you'd be kidding yourself if you pointed to this particular vote.

and said, well, Congress is going to be a pretty drama-free institution, a pretty united institution moving forward, when in fact, you only have to look back to the vote that played out on the House floor on Friday with the re-election of Mike Johnson to the speakership to see there are some pretty raw divisions within the House Republican Conference that are likely going to animate this Congress moving forward.

Well, really, Michael, this is the continuation of the story that you and I have talked about for so long now, which is that there is this group of ultra-conservative, anti-spending fiscal hawks in the House Republican Conference who feel that they have been again and again let down by House Republican leadership.

When it comes to matters of government spending, these are the guys who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy when he was Speaker. And this time, when it came to the re-election of Speaker Mike Johnson, they decided to play the role of the thorn in his side yet again.

So on paper, it should have been a glide path for Johnson. But these ultra conservatives for months now have been nursing the same grievance against Johnson that they had against McCarthy, which is that when it comes to keeping the government open, avoiding a shutdown, passing these massive spending bills, both Johnson and McCarthy routinely relied on Democratic votes to keep spending levels flat.

And it is something that has just infuriated these hard right Republicans. The other factor that was working against Johnson here is that he had an extraordinarily thin margin in the House. So in order to win the speakership on Friday, he was able to lose just one Republican. And we knew going into the vote that, in fact, he already had lost at least one Republican.

We knew that Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky was going to vote against him.

Exactly. And so that meant that he could not afford to lose anyone else on the House floor during that vote. And we got our first sort of inkling that there was going to be real trouble for him on this first ballot early on.

Adams. There are a number of Freedom Caucus members whose last names start with B or C, which is relevant only insofar as the roll call is called alphabetically.

And so lo and behold, Biggs of Arizona. We get to Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona. His name is called out. And he doesn't respond.

Silence. And Michael, I have to say, sometimes lawmakers are not necessarily the most focused on the floor. Sometimes they're hard of hearing. And so the first time his name is called and there's silence, you're thinking maybe there's a mistake, maybe he's running late. But we saw him standing on the center aisle of the House floor.

His name was called again. And he was staring just sort of defiantly straight into space.

And they moved on. And we saw that happen several more times throughout the roll call. Clyde. And it became extraordinarily clear, especially given which lawmakers were refusing to answer, that this was a concerted effort to deprive Johnson of the votes he needed to become speaker and basically to put a stick in his eye.

And his predicament gets worse as we go down the roll call, because not only has Thomas Massey voted against him, voted for another Republican lawmaker, but... Self. Donalds. Two other Republicans cast their votes for other lawmakers as well. So now you had six lawmakers refusing to answer in protest and three Republicans voting against him outright.

Showing 141–160 of 234 · page 8 of 12