Welcome to Party Politics, where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, political science professor at the University of Houston.

Go Coogs!

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus Also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out with us.

And talk a little politics.

Obviously a lot going on, Jeronimo.

We've got the start of the Texas legislative session.

We've got some transition at the state level for Texas Democrats.

And of course, Donald Trump is just setting the House on fire, getting new people in place, which is a very different process than we were, say, when he took office in 2016 17.

So, yeah, we've got a lot to get to.

Let's dive in.

The first thing up is that President Trump is just really lighting things up when it comes to getting positions filled.

He has this week announced a bunch of things, the, national security adviser to Representative Mike Waltz from Florida, Representative Elsie Stefanik from New York, is going to be the ambassador to the UN.

John Radcliffe, who was a former member of Congress here from Texas in the fourth district.

I was going to be the director of the CIA.

Kristi Noem is going to be Homeland security director.

Watch out, dogs!

It's funny, because I saw this thing on Twitter that said, like in our house, the dog is the national security director.

So we'll see how that plays out.

There are a lot here.

I'm going to talk about immigration in a second, because obviously those are big ones.

But I want to highlight a couple things.

Number one, that the president elect pick, Lee Zeldin from New York, to be the EPA director, which kind of shocked a lot of people who didn't see him in this role.

Right.

He had been on foreign affairs and financial services when he was in the Congress.

No real effect on the economy or on the environment.

So, that was a kind of surprise pick.

But what's not surprising, though, is I think that he's really obviously picking people because of loyalty.

That's a huge factor here.

You can see this in the who he's picking, but also who he's not picking.

He ruled out Mike Pompeo.

He ruled out Nikki Haley.

So clearly there's a real divide here.

Yeah.

This is fascinating to me.

And I won't talk more about kind of the internal workings of this, because that's what we do here, right?

We get into the kind of, you know, nitty gritty of it.

But the scholarship says two things that I want to highlight.

One is that there's a real trade off between competence and loyalty and loyalty.

Right.

And what most people say is that you can't have both.

And that's not to say that you can't be both smart and loyal to Donald Trump, but that most of the scholarship suggests that for bureaucrats who are scoring on one or the other, that they basically find either high on one or high on the other guy.

You're rarely high on both.

The other factor is that when you politicize an agency, it makes agency performance worse.

We'll talk in a few minutes here about the interim process and about how the Senate works in terms of agency appointments and recess appointments, but that's a fact.

That is something that they're going to have to really grapple with.

That is they would like to shrink government and, you know, kind of make it more efficient.

But the problem is that if you politicize agencies, it sometimes makes the performance worse.

So give me your take on sort of how you see the process playing out here in the first really week of the kind of Trump elect.

Which certainly has been, you know, potential nominations on steroids.

It's 11,000 Red Bulls after it.

Let's start nominating people back and forth.

The Red Bulls are small, but they're potent.

Oh, absolutely.

But, you know, everything is going to be fine because we have Mosque and Ramaswamy being in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency.

So why don't.

You put two people in charge of government officials.

And two billionaires with an ego?

I mean, I'm telling you, that thing is not going to end up well.

So this is an unusual event, right?

To have somebody in this role of like, you know, kind of creating a new department for finding efficiencies in government, you're creating more government to find a way.

To.

Shrink government.

Outside government.

So it's we don't know the structure right now.

So we don't know how it's going to fit into the bureaucracy.

If he's going to be in the office of the president or, you know, we don't know, but but still, there is to call $2 trillion.

It's a lot.

It's a lot, you know, non-defense, spending.

It's it's only around, you know, $120 billion.

How are they going to get to 2 trillion, you know, even, those, conservative budget analysts say that is basically absurd.

Yeah.

Can we go back to the $4.4 trillion, that we were using about, four years ago, maybe.

So it's going to be fine.

The thing is that, like, the president only has so much control over how to execute money from the budget, and if they trim that, then it reduces the president's ability to basically give money to people who he politically is aligned with in the states.

And that's a way presidents get reelected.

So, yeah, he said actually today that he didn't think he would run for reelection.

So that's at least some kind of normalcy returning to the political system.

But obviously, there's a problem for Republicans in the future.

If the Trump administration isn't friendly to giving money to these organizations locally.

Well.

It's it's now delivery time.

The promises during the campaign, as we have said, were promises that were, you know, very clear, very hard to achieve if you want to cut spending while achieving those promises is going to be very hard.

And then, as you say, the people that have been tapped so far, we have to wait for, the Senate's advice and consent.

Right?

Right.

Quote unquote.

You seem skeptical that that will be a problem.

We'll see.

We'll see.

It might be right, because nomination fights are sometimes quirky, and there are things that come up that don't always sort of appear on the radar, like when you nominate somebody.

So it could be that that's not a smooth sailing as we think.

Right.

So we have, you know, for example, the nominee for defense veteran, he served to us in, Iraq and Afghanistan.

And after returning, he has been host of Fox News.

So that's not bad or anything like that.

But but it's a portfolio.

National defense is extremely, extremely complicated.

So again that's the competence loyalty trade off.

Right.

And not to say he won't be competent in the role.

But there's definitely a trade off here that they have to think about.

I want to ask you about something also that's equally important where you are seeing Trump loyalist being put into office and that's on immigration.

The president elect is stacking the nominations for immigration positions with Hawks.

The portfolio basically includes, some serious enterprise when it comes to policy, possibly mass deportations, expansion of detention capacity, hiring of thousands of border agents.

Right.

Tom Homan has been tapped as the border czar.

Obviously, that'll be a tremendously important position.

They floated lots of ideas during the campaign for how to accomplish this.

Whole Minister spell, the notion that it's going to be these kind of raids across the nation that are going to round up people.

But there are a lot of ambiguities, a lot of questions about what this is going to look like.

So give me your sense of kind of how you think this is going to play out in the first couple of weeks of the Trump term?

Well, it's going to be hard.

This is not the 1930s, 40s or 50s where you know exactly what to do.

You cannot have, you know, once again, this infamous Operation Wetback, back in the day, it's very hard, because migration has been embedded into the economic fabric of the country.

Yeah.

You're talking about agriculture.

You're talking about construction.

You're talking about the service industry.

So having those raids that, for example, remember that were very, familiar back in the 80s and 90s is going to be very hard.

On the one hand.

And then on the other hand, then that could have important implications for things that are going to affect directly inflation.

Talking about, for example, agricultural prices, groceries, fresh produce.

And we saw that back in 2006, when there was these, once again, anti-immigrant sentiment.

And many states, for example, in Alabama, in Georgia, decided to basically make it, super illegal migrants, slaves, agricultural workers left.

And the people that supported those policies were suddenly against, you know, those policies.

Why?

Because it has very important implications.

Yeah.

Like you can't get the grapes and, turnips and carrots that you otherwise would get at the grocery for pretty cheap.

And then on the other hand, remember in the last 2 or 3 weeks of the campaign, Trump started to pivot Ryan and started to say, well, yeah, mass deportations of criminals, mass deportations of people that we don't want here.

Yeah.

So start to create, I guess, some wiggle room to see.

But then logistically, he's, you know, impossible.

Really hard.

Yeah.

They asked Senator Cruz what he thought about this.

And he said, well, we're going to start with people who have got this kind of criminal records or by people who've broken the law, then that's also equally hard, it seems to me.

I want to ask you this.

So do you think that this is a dissuasive effect?

That is to say that, like, if this starts to happen in kind of a high profile way, the people will stop attempting to come to the U.S.

Number one.

Number two, if it's the case that there are these mass deportations, they're all going to probably go back through Mexico.

If that's going to happen, then it's going to create a crisis in Mexico, which also has a real kind of.

But Mexico already said very clear.

I'll take my Mexicans.

Yeah, okay.

I'm not going to take anybody else.

So everybody else is gonna have to go through some other way out of the country.

And the Mexican government yesterday was very clear, saying, I'm not going to even allow them to enter the country.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, you know, if you deport, I don't know, someone from another country.

The US will have to deport them directly to that particular country.

Which is expensive.

It is expensive and Mexico is not going to accept it.

They said, well, they cannot verify that they're Mexicans.

They're going to stay on the plane.

Yeah.

Okay.

We're not going to let them out of.

How do they do that.

Well, you're not allowed to the plane.

Yeah.

And then you're unless.

You can prove it.

Like you're not coming in here.

You're not coming in here okay.

So that's going to be a serious complication.

And we're going to see how the Trump administration negotiates that.

They have already negotiated with the, at the beginning of the the first term of the Trump administration with the stay in Mexico policy.

But right now is not very clear if that's going to be the case, insisting we'll see.

Lots of uncertainty.

One other piece of uncertainty is that President Trump has suggested that the Senate should change how it operates.

The Senate, by the way, doesn't like it when you tell them how they should operate.

Senators are kind of independent bunch, right?

They definitely have a kind of independent streak that's enforced by the rules that give them the power to be able to kind of act on their own.

But President Trump said that he would like to have the power of recess appointments expanded.

Recess appointments are effectively, kind of emergency for presidents.

When it's the case that the Senate is out of session, they can presidents can put somebody in place to have them have a two year window of success.

Right.

But that has risks.

Some of the risks include that, first of all, those people don't get paid until they get Senate confirmed.

So who can afford to work for free?

Like that's a question.

You know, some of the people can write if it's me, that's me.

Yeah, maybe Elon Musk probably could take a pay cut.

Yeah.

Not worried about it, but a lot of other people probably couldn't.

They want this to be a real professional job.

The other is that the scholarship on this is pretty clear because the people who were interim appointments were recess appointments are temporary, and they're kind of future outlook is uncertain.

The administrative problems are high that is that oftentimes they have lower program performance than other kind of crews in those positions.

So again, government efficiency takes a hit with these recess appointments.

The bureaucracy doesn't respect them.

It doesn't invest in them the way they would if it was like a full time job where you knew you were going to be that person.

And complications.

And that's exactly what you want to avoid because the Trump administration wants to deliver.

And, you know, let's hope, for the good of the country that they deliver.

Right.

But if you start creating these policies you are generating, they want these, unintended consequences that you're sabotaging yourself immediately.

And the other important point in this regard is that when you have that lack of delivery, so you have a two year window for the midterms.

That's a great point.

And right now, if everything happens, as you know, people are thinking Republicans may have the trifecta.

So who are you going to blame?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know who you who can you can shift the blame if you control white House, the Senate and the House.

Yeah.

And you don't deliver.

Yeah.

I mean, you can they will blame a lot of people or hate mainstream media or Democrats or whoever.

They'll be somebody that they could be.

Sure.

But it's going to be less credible, and it's going to be harder to convince people who did vote for you.

And a lot of people did vote for Donald Trump for this very reason that the you're the one that couldn't, you know, the reason that you didn't deliver was because all these other things aren't, are problematic.

So that is definitely problematic.

That means, I think that the parties have to work together.

Now the appointments are one example.

I'm sorry.

Say what?

Sorry.

Let me let me be more clear.

The parties have to find a way to work together.

As Washington sometimes does.

But obviously it's a complication.

As you note.

One of the things first on Reese's appointments is that they need to have the buy in from Democrats to have a recess, right?

Like they have to have a unanimous consent, effectively to have a recess, which means that if they don't and Democrats don't agree, then they're not going to be able to have a recess appointment.

So that's one complication.

Here's another kind of nerdy complication.

That's that.

The presidency is changing in the sense that the court has basically undone the ability for agencies to have kind of interpretive ability over what the rules are.

Congress writes a rule, it's unclear.

Agency say, well, here's what we think you mean.

That's a lot of power for agencies, right?

Since the 80s, this has been sort of all right.

The court basically says this is unconstitutional.

Courts need to decide and or Congress has to write clearer laws.

Well, if it's the case that, again, everyone is sort of trying to figure out what the dynamic is here, the presidency has to have a more certain idea of what they want to write, and those rules have to be much more clear.

And so from the top down, the Trump White House has to be very clear about what it wants to do from these agency rules.

If they undo rules, how do they undo them specifically?

Because any interpretation here is going to be left to the courts and then you don't know what's going to happen.

So that creates all kinds of kind of, complications in government, which is really the watchword of the week.

I think I've said it like 30 times, not surprisingly.

Well.

And and then you bring in these, you know, appointments, recess or not, recess appointment, you are going to bring, first of all, the institutional future of the Senate or the complete abdication of separation of powers, because, you know, the advice and consent is in the Constitution.

It's not, you know, something that people say it's an interim.

It's right there.

It's not like a yes suggestion.

In the Obama administration.

Remember when he tried to, nominate people back in 2012 or whatever?

Republicans were up in arms and in fire, and this is an abuse of power and this and that, etc., etc.

obviously people don't remember that.

And obviously Republicans have forgotten, I.

Mean, Michelle.

Obama as they forgot, you know, the fraud that was going to be the selection and suddenly there's no fraud.

Everything is peachy.

But that is a serious complication.

And then you put in the role of the Supreme Court.

Yeah, that that is just fascinating in terms of yeah, what are you going to do?

What's stunning is that on the point you make about the reversal of people's preferences when it comes to unilateral power, that the scholarship, all of the scholarship on this shows that people hate executive power.

They hate presidents acting alone, except when it's their president.

Absolutely.

They care about.

So surprise, surprise, things turn around.

That's just nature.

That's just politics.

That's just partizanship.

But obviously there's going to be a lot of difficulty in sort of setting this up.

But I will say the president elect is did a good job here, getting people in place who are obviously connected to his, his interest and are going to follow through on his policies like no questions asked.

Susie Wilkes, who is, kind of a Sara Susie Willis, who's a long time, kind of confidant of Donald Trump, is going to be the chief of staff.

She knows how to make the trains run on time.

She knows how to keep Trump in line to the extent to which anybody can.

So I think that they're setting this up in a way that is much more efficient than it was in the transition in 2016.

So I do think that's going to play out in a way that's good for him.

But of course, they still have to work through all these complications in government.

But speaking of the Senate and speaking of politics, let's talk about one thing that's happening this week, and that's the election of the Senate majority leader.

Republicans, took back the Senate.

So that gives them the ability to put the Senate majority leader in place.

It's just a vote from Republicans.

So it's a family affair, but obviously it's fraught with politics.

And who gets to choose what.

And of course, Donald Trump is going to have his own objections about what should be done.

We should note that we are recording this almost literally to the minute that the Senate is choosing this.

So we don't know who they've chosen by, but the contenders, as we've said before, John Cornyn from Texas, John Thune from South Dakota, and, and Rick Scott from Florida, there's been a lot of late breaking work towards Scott, who a lot of people in Trump's orbit say should be the nominee or should be the chosen person.

But there are a lot of reasons to think that you might want to choose somebody like John Cornyn, who's raised $400 million for Senate Republicans.

That goes a long way.

Even conservatives like Josh Hawley from Missouri have backed John Cornyn.

But there's one notable person who didn't back.

Oh, tell me, Cornyn.

It is none other than his old friend.

You guessed it.

Oh, Ted Cruz, no, the rivalry continues.

What's funny to me is that, like, this is a moment for Cruz to back a Texan.

Yeah, for Texas to really benefit from this.

So it's too much to get into it.

But basically, having the Senate majority leader means you're going to get goodies, right?

Think about LBJ in that position.

Yeah.

Delivering things like NASA and other big infrastructure elements to Texas.

Well, if you know, Cornyn is not that person.

He's not in that role is going to make it harder for that to happen.

So it's a funny arrangement.

It's just a, as I said, a kind of family thing.

So, you know, we don't know what will happen.

But obviously the relationship between Suzy Willis, who is, as I just mentioned, the chief of staff, and Rick Scott is pretty tight.

So that relationship is really important.

So it's possible that's worth considering.

So what do you think about the dynamics at play here?

Well, I think the dynamics are going to be very interesting because moment Cornyn apparently perhaps.

Well, there have been longer in the, in the US Senate.

They understand the institutional responsibility of the Senate in the bonds and separation of powers.

So in certain cases, I think that if you have Cornyn and if you have, the probably the Senate, he's going to have a little bit more problematic, issues, especially on votes that require, not reconciliation.

Yeah.

And even in those cases, right.

So, yeah, yeah, when you're thinking about the nomination process, like, I don't know, like, do you want this person that has zero qualifications, as you say, loyalty versus qualifications to be the secretary of whatever, whatever.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And maybe let's try to, you know, control these things a little bit better rather than just.

Yeah, that's.

A great point.

I mean, the Senate majority leader has got a really heavy lift here, right?

I mean, they have to navigate a very close Senate.

And it's different in the House where it's very top down.

The speaker of the House chooses kind of what happens.

And when in the Senate, they really have to work with the other side to make sure they get this done.

And of course, they've got to get that to get the things passed through Congress.

So it's really important that this work effectively.

Cornyn is a dealmaker.

He's a bridge builder.

John Thune is to there are reasons to pick them.

But I think Scott is the political pick.

And if they really try to politicize all of this, then that's the way I think that they could do it the most.

And this is how I see it.

You have, midterm elections.

Oh my God, in in two years.

Don't even don't even say it.

But I just said it's sorry.

Right.

So you have to start working today.

Yeah.

And if you get if you want to deliver.

Yes Rick Scott maybe is the right choice.

But then you undo the efficiency opportunity.

How and say that you could have in the federal government the bureaucracy with these appointments.

Yeah.

If you don't do it and you have a breach bill there, then you can move some legislation and give some perhaps, goodies, to the people, not the whole bag, but at least some candy.

So I don't know.

I mean, it's it's a very tough spot.

Yeah.

And they've all had their dust ups with Trump.

John Thune supported Nikki Haley, remember?

So that's obviously a kind of red flag.

Rick Scott ran the Republican Senate campaign and didn't raise as much money as the people in the past, and they actually lost seats as a result.

So, like, as a political storyline, you know, it's hard to know who's the best choice because the future is impossible.

But it is certainly the case that a lot of people have supported, Cornyn, who knows how to raise money and get things done.

So the thing is, this is a secret ballot.

So we're never going to know who voted for whom.

And the fact that Trump has probably minimized because of that.

But it's going to be really telling, kind of who gets in that spot and what they do with it.

But let's talk leadership in Texas, because that's also going to be really telling for how the legislative process unfolds in the upcoming legislative session.

The Texas House GOP caucus is set to meet, early December to endorse a speaker candidate.

David Cook, who's a representative from Mansfield, says he's got the votes.

Speaker Phelan says he does not have the votes.

This has been a kind of internal back and forth.

So the everyone's like, show me your cards right, and no one's showing their card.

So everyone has called, but no one has done this.

So we're kind of still waiting.

It takes 76 members to get to be speaker.

Phelan, at least has got probably more than 40 people on his side.

Cook also responds that he's got 47.

He had a pledge from 40 Steve Canard, who didn't win.

So that pledge obviously goes away unless you can get represent a place to agree to vote, for him.

I don't think that's going to happen.

I think she's probably more likely to vote for Dade Phelan, but we'll see lots of churning going on here.

The other thing can happen is the Democrat, John Bryant, who is a long standing political official.

He was in the U.S. House for a long time, retired, came back to win a seat in the Texas House.

He's kind of the, senior statesman, I guess, of the Democratic Party, kind of trying to bring some of this sort of sense of moderation back to the party.

He also announced he's running, which to me suggests that Democrats are not unified around a candidate.

And that might hurt actually feelings chances because he's counting on Democrats to vote as a block to support him.

If they don't, then that makes them a really powerful swing vote.

What do you think?

Well, I mean, obviously, I don't think that Democrats are going to go after or perhaps, support Representative Cook.

And I guess.

Less likely, yes.

You go with the devil.

You know.

Exactly.

And Phelan might, you know, start lobbying Democrats and you know, the fact that you have a couple of Democrats running for the position is true.

But again, it's invalid.

Two, two, two, two, two to the least say.

But I think the important thing here is, Democrats have to minimize their losses, and their bold has to be strategic in the sense of who is going to be the one that is not going to take all my toys away.

Yeah.

And just let me keep some.

Yeah.

You can keep your favorite toy but that it.

Right.

And obviously cook is not going to do that.

Yeah Phelan might do that.

But it's not certain.

Right.

Because he still needs Republicans support.

It's a really careful balancing act.

Right.

Yeah.

So it's okay.

But I cannot give you any chairs.

So Democrats are going to say, well then why don't we're.

Going to vote for this guy?

Yeah.

So I don't know.

I mean he's going to be and then that's going to not determine how far right the next session goes because we're already there.

Yeah.

Now Republicans, have control of the national government, have control of Texas government.

So courts, you know.

Yeah, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of that, the filing deadline opened this week, and Republicans have filed a bunch of bills that are very conservative.

The Michelin star people were here giving out restaurant reviews, stars.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that the Republican Party could get, like, barbecue award for all the red meat that they're putting out there, that bills allow for people to be sued over drag performances.

They're legalizing the covenant of marriage, banning certain funding for health care plans with gender therapy.

Yeah, resurrecting the 2017 failed bathroom bill.

There are a lot of bills, right?

About 1500 bills, which is about almost 700 more than last legislative session.

So there's a bunch of stuff here.

But let me ask you a question.

Yeah.

So you control everything you have Trump winning the presidency, Congress, etc., etc.. Now you don't have the battle right now.

You don't have that person that you're going against.

Yeah.

So, you know, are you going to push for these type of like orgies.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

There's a lot of messaging bills here.

They won't pass.

Right.

Oh about 20% of bills pass.

So the likelihood of these actually becoming law is pretty low.

But for sure it's the case that it's all gas and no breaks for Republicans in the House.

And on that note, with no gas a no breaks.

That's something that we're going to keep discussing next week.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina and I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

The party keeps up next week.