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

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus, we're Political scientists here at the University of Houston.

And we are bringing you just a whirlwind of information this week.

Boom.

Well, not boom anymore.

It was intense But the potential for a boom was there and is still there.

Is The president obviously.

Oh good question.

The president is giving basically a two week cease fire with the hopes that they can continue the negotiations in Iran.

This is driving the news cycle.

And what's funny is that it's kind of taken over as the story line.

We're not going to let that happen because we've got a lot of things to get to.

A lot of additional things that we'll chat about.

But obviously Iran is the biggest thing.

Give me your takeaways from the kind of brink of disaster that the president was promising and then paused on.

Well, it went from annihilation of a whole civilization to let's have a sit down, let's chat.

Let's chat things to Pakistan of all countries in the world.

They intervened and, well, the issue is that nothing, absolutely nothing has been resolved.

I think the same.

Yeah, it reminds me of like when Jerry Seinfeld and Newman, like, agree to alliances or like, greet each other.

It's always very cold, but like formal.

Right.

So I don't know if we're seeing any real progress here.

The White House says that they're getting progress.

They are getting, kind of temporary reprieve when it comes to the political implications of this, the economic implications of this.

Right.

Market has sort of calmed down a little bit.

Oil prices have come down a little bit.

The public is kind of placated.

Republicans have something that they can kind of brag about in terms of progress.

The Iranians are saying, though, that they've won this round.

I mean.

And they're saying, yeah, the street's still open.

They control it.

They're saying they still have got enriched uranium.

And yeah.

They didn't control.

They still have the same leader- ship structure.

They didn't control this trade before the Strait of Hormuz before now they do, the Iranians are still there.

And he's not 2015 when, the administration of President Obama, basically.

We are negotiating a two year accord.

Right.

I don't know what you're going to accomplish in two weeks, but we'll see.

Yeah, in two years, they were able to get 97% out of the and reach, uranium for military grade and reach uranium.

And right now, not a single gram has come out from, Iran if that's going to be accomplished.

We don't know.

And that was the, the, the I would the quintessential reason, for the US to attack Iran.

So, Yeah.

Like, I don't know.

Well, I. Will say that one reason that they said that they wanted to attack, I mean, they labeled on a lot of additional kind of concerns with Iran.

All of them are very true, very rational.

We've talked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or like this is definitely.

Oh yeah.

It's terrible.

Yeah.

And so the White House definitely has its ground here they can stand firm on.

But the issue I think was number one it wasn't consistently applied.

Number two, it's sort of so many different reasons that the I think American people weren't quite clear about what exactly it was, including a lot of Republicans in Congress.

And the third is that, now you've got this kind of blustery rhetoric that seems to have taken over all of this.

Right.

So the president had a primetime speech last week.

He had a press conference this week where he lambasted Iran like 80 different times.

And it makes it seem like it's just this kind of war mongering administration.

It's a ploy.

It's a tactic.

And it shouldn't be useful because they did come back to the table.

But how long it'll last, we don't know.

And it isn't the case that this will last forever.

This is the kind of thing where if you're the White House, you have to follow through on some of these threats at some point.

And so far that hasn't happened.

It's always kind of we're going to delay and delay.

So I am the same, I think, and you that I don't see any real progress here.

Now, of course, we could see real progress the next couple of weeks.

And the happily, there wasn't just sort of destruction that was promised, but there's always that, kind of lurking.

And so I guess the question is sort of what's next for the politics of this?

How does Congress respond?

How does the American people respond?

Who?

Right, right.

The US Congress, we used to teach this in class where there are other branches of government.

The check the White House.

Yeah.

Well, Surprise.

Yeah.

Absent.

You have to look in your history books, but they're still out there.

But I want to make the case to you that Republicans are growing weary and the Democrats are growing empowered.

The Democrats are basically unified around the concept of kind of being against Trump, but they don't see the point of this.

And like we said, there's good political reasons.

That's the case.

And obviously in in a midterm year, they want to, you know, try to do as much as they can to take down the incumbent.

But there is real, I think, kind of promise here, where again, they haven't been, White House hasn't been very clear about what they want here.

The exit strategy sort of not so obvious.

They've kind of boxed themselves in to spending, you know, a half $1 billion a day on this.

And that adds up fast in addition to the other kind of economic consequences of this conflict going forward.

So it's muted a bit.

While the negotiations are ongoing.

But the long term problem still remains.

So for Democrats in Congress.

They're kind of empowered.

They've said impeachment on the table, the 25th amendment potentially, given the president's extremist rhetoric on this, and they're in a position where they're going to try to push for war powers resolutions that are going to limit the president's power in Iran.

That could potentially happen because they can just get a couple of Republicans who want to join with them, and it will ultimately potentially go forward.

I think the impeachment route is useless because now impeachment has been used over and over and over and over and over, and everyone is impeaching.

I see Al Green just, trying to impeach the president again.

So impeachment.

It's like when I send you an email, it just goes to spam.

Yeah delete.

Like whatever.

Like, I don't know, I don't need that.

Yeah, I don't care.

Not important.

What next?

No.

And the numbers aren't there.

Right.

Like they don't even, you know, kind of have the ability to do.

Right.

25th amendment.

That's even more complicated I think.

So I think that the Democrats want really to take advantage of this thing.

They have to flip the narrative and say, this war has cost you.

Yeah.

Instead of 30 bucks, your, to fill up your tank, now you're paying 50 or 60 bucks or something like that.

Yeah.

And that prices in terms of oil and especially of gas are not just going to come down tomorrow, right?

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, they have gone up.

Yes.

This week again.

So it's going to take some time for the markets to basically get back into that, supply and demand, sweet spot.

And so far we haven't seen it because moving oil from those countries to the rest of the world is very, very slow because they use huge tankers, and these huge tankers go at a very, very, very, very low speed.

You're going or averaging around 10 to 15 knots.

Yeah.

It's like me driving I was not like you driving.

Yes.

No it's.

Just terrifying.

Yeah.

You it's it's like think about it like Houston, Dallas Fort Worth like big big, big traffic.

Yeah.

That slow like traffic is slow.

Yeah.

You're in a parking lot, basically.

Yeah.

So it's going to take a while back to get that, market into the, optimal, stance.

Yeah.

And I think Republicans are really worried about this because this is going to drag things along economically that's going to hurt them politically.

And we've got midterms coming up soon enough that you're starting to see results trickle in from places like North Carolina, from places like Wisconsin.

And the Republicans are taking it on the chin, and they're not losing all these seats because sometimes they're so gerrymandered it's impossible for them to lose.

But you're seeing 20, 30 point swings in some of these places.

That could be really problematic for them.

I still think it's possible that the War Powers Resolution comes from this especially.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's true.

And that may or may not limit what the president can technically do.

The other way the Democrats can push back on this and even some Republicans is through the budget.

The president has proposed a massive increase in the budget, literally World War Two levels, making Ronald Reagan blush.

Levels of increases.

Yeah, the biggest in history in defense spending at 1.5 trillion.

And there's obviously some consternation about that number.

Now, this is the president's proposed budget.

And it doesn't always come from reality, but it certainly gives you a sense of where the White House is.

And it's an opportunity for Congress to push back on the White House.

So, you know, dust off your history book.

Right.

Let's bring this back into the political science realm, where we can talk about how the other agents and government check what the White House does.

Yeah.

Because the implications of, of not only that of the budget is that you have to cut around 10% in non-discretionary, spending.

And that means, you know, guess what?

Transportation, education, housing and social service programs.

Yeah.

So it's also going to potentially affect the real constituents of Congress.

Yeah.

Especially because these programs are very, pinpoint to certain parts of the country.

Yeah.

And I think Republicans are worried that this is going to make them look bad.

It's going to make them look like they're simply focused on just this conflict.

Right.

But we are seeing them try to find ways to be more optimistic about this.

So there was over the weekend, a, kind of tragic event in that that one F-15 fighter was shot down.

Right.

The U.S was eventually able to rescue the entire crew, which is great news, but the image of it, well, we'll say image in quotes, got shared and it was a fake image.

It was an AI generated image.

So people like the governor of Texas, like Ken Paxton, Sid Miller, the ad commissioner all shared the image.

Like, I don't know if they thought it was real or if it's real, but the definitely is an indication of kind of Republicans looking for wins on this.

Yeah.

Where there are few and far between, and it gives you a sense of just how much AI is taking over.

We're going to talk about the new AI from Ken Paxton against John Cornyn in a few minutes, but that definitely is a signal of where things are going politically and in terms of campaigns.

Let's talk about another kind of visit that the president did this week.

And that's historically to the Supreme Court.

He showed up for oral arguments for his pitch to get the Court to overturn the concept of birthright citizenship.

This is a monumental decision in any number of ways.

But what do you make of number one, the kind of whole legal question around birthright citizenship at the court and the president showing up in person to at least for 13 minutes?

Watch the deliberation.

Well, let me start with the other one.

Well, it's an attempt for him to pressure, right?

It's an attempt, once again, to scaling things to a certain level, to intimidate and to be frank, the president, he's very good at that, right?

He intimidates people and then gets them back to negotiation and makes them do whatever he tries to do.

In this case.

He's good at the intimidation, but does the effect work?

Exactly.

And that's the question.

Yeah.

And that's the question and in this case, I don't think he's going to work.

Yeah, right.

I don't think it's it's, Those robes are like shields.

You like go ahead.

Yeah.

Right.

So the whole idea is that, the argument is that, parents who are undocumented or, on on, temporary visas, and have children here, those children who should not have, to have automatic citizenship based on the parents legal status, because apparently they are not under the allegiance of the United States.

Opponents said that, birthright citizenship has been a longstanding principle in US law that is rooted in the 14th amendment.

And finally, the problem is that, you know, justices is doing, oral arguments.

Questioned how, on the one hand, Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts says how the administration can justify excluding a large group of children from citizenship.

Yeah.

And just Elena Kagan.

Just highlighted that, the 14th amendment, historical reasons and also that, you cannot have, limit in scope with that.

So we'll see what happens.

But I don't think it's going to be, a ruling that could favor ultra, immigration policy in this state.

It doesn't seem to.

I mean, it's hard to know because the justices are always asking tough questions.

But the Chief Justice called the the the, attorney generals or, arguments with the DOJ as arguments based quirky, which doesn't sound like, praise.

I'm not a lawyer, but probably not going in the right direction.

Quirky is not good.

In the Supreme Court.

Yeah.

I mean, if you wrote that on a student's paper, it's, you know, probably not a great sign that you're on the right track.

But, you know, it's hard to know because the justices asked tough arguments of the ACLU as lawyers, too.

So exactly how the world knows, you know, we don't know.

But yeah, like you said, this affects a tremendous number of people at 200,000 people per year are offered this birthright citizenship.

So there's definitely, a large chunk here.

But to me, I mean, legal questions aside and, you know, that's a different kind of, you know, subtopic.

The political angle here is the most important to the fact that Trump showed up to this in person is certainly an indication of where the base is.

And obviously, him just pushing the case all the way to the Supreme Court is, I think, a win for him because he's able to basically suggest that, you know, he's willing to go the extra mile to try to push these arguments as far as possible.

You know, maybe there's a chance you get a favorable decision, or maybe they trim the restrictions or regulations in such a way that the law can be rewritten.

So there's always an effort and always a value, it seems, and kind of making the case in front of the Supreme Court, and especially when you've got multiple members who the president's appointed or are sympathetic towards the president's goals.

So there's an opportunity here.

And I think that really by itself is a win, even if it's the case that ultimately maybe the case doesn't go exactly their way, it might be one of those where you get like a unanimous decision the other way.

And yeah, you never know.

You never know with this court.

But, it's going to be interesting because it would redefine historically, legally, the position of the US in terms of what the 14th amendment really means for the history of the country.

But we'll.

See.

So true.

Well, another kind of question mark this week was over the firing of the Attorney General.

Pam Bondi doesn't have anything to do with the pushing of this case.

That's a sort of separate, you know, wing of the DOJ.

But Pam Bondi has been under fire from Republicans and from Democrats for several months, and the president decided that it was time for her to go.

The indications of exactly why are unclear.

Even the acting attorney general said, I don't know why the president fired her.

There's no obvious thing, except in two things kind of came to light.

One is that she kind of mishandled the release of the Epstein files.

People even like Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a member of Congress, are saying things like, you know, this was really not the way it was supposed to go, and they're unhappy about it.

She's not the only Republican saying, all right.

So that's one thing.

The other was just the president seemed to imply that the attorney general wasn't doing enough to go after his enemies, which obviously is it got its own problematic, outcome to it.

But, she wasn't doing enough, and he effectively fired her as a result.

So I guess I got two questions.

Number one, what do you make of this, and does it have any kind of political impact on the White House?

And number two, who's next?

Well, the White House has been remarkably consistent in its personnel.

But, you know, last couple of weeks.

Yeah, I'm not.

So, I have no idea who's next.

It could be, I don't know.

Yeah.

I mean, could be the acting, Attorney general.

It could be you.

You know what?

Thank you.

Yeah.

Well, do you need to be a lawyer?

Maybe.

That's a great question.

I think the answer is no, but I'm not sure that's in Texas.

You don't have to be in an attorney.

Right.

Right.

But it really obviously helps.

Because you're directing, like, you know, a huge agency that's suing people all the time.

Yeah, but I want to sue everybody, and I think no one will ever let me.

So yeah.

I'm the implications are just, astounding.

Right.

And and worried that the beginning of the Trump administration, you I'm going to quote a very eloquent professor.

Okay.

Yeah.

You said that the problem is with loyalty and efficacy in terms of implementing the policy goal, both, separate ways.

Right.

They're negatively correlated.

Yes, yes.

And this is the responsiveness competency tradeoff.

Yes.

This is that case, right?

Pam Bondi, extremely loyal to the president, 100%.

Those, hearings in Congress, you could see it, like very, very, very aggressive responding to senators to Congress with, not too much, respect in terms of the executive branch versus another branch of equal power.

Yeah.

And I think that that loyalty also did not.

Yeah, permeated in terms of advancing what the president wanted regardless even what he wanted.

All right.

It's not yeah, 100% legal.

That's a great point.

Yeah.

I think that's why people are kind of puzzled by this, right?

I mean, there's a life span in politics, especially at these very high profile kinds of a position.

So, you know, maybe you just kind of ran your course.

So it's possible that she just kind of ran the course and it's time to make a move because she's generating too many negative headlines.

And that's something definitely the president doesn't like unless it's kind of something that he's able to direct or something he's in charge of.

Who's next?

Well, I don't know.

There's a couple of possibilities.

I got this from Fox News.

Okay, so this gives you a sense of where things are.

There's a bit of a freefall here for the MAGA movement.

We've seen it unraveling in lots of ways, including in Texas.

But there's a possibility Tulsi to see Gabbard might end up going.

She wasn't sufficiently willing to condemn Joe Kent, who was a counterterrorism expert, who well, I think the administration after the Iran discussion, possibly Lori Chavez-DeRemer who has been under fire from her own inspector general office for allegations about having affairs and drinking alcohol on the job.

That's another bad set of headlines.

You don't want.

Maybe Howard Lutnick, who's been a long time ally of the president but who's been tied to Jeffrey Epstein in ways.

But who remembers the Epstein files?

That was like, yeah, a couple of, I don't know, days ago.

Yeah, it feels like a million years ago.

And that's part of the kind of rapidity of the cycle that makes it hard to keep track.

But never fear, we're here to break it all down.

Right.

Let's shift gears and talk about Texas and the Senate race especially.

But some things that are connected to the attorney general that are obviously going to be part of the discussion about what happens.

Two things this week for the AG.

One is that the attorney general informed the acting Comptroller that the Attorney General's office would no longer represent the comptroller in a federal lawsuit regarding access for Muslim schools to the new state voucher program.

This actually comes a couple of weeks after the two had a pretty big dustup.

The attorney general said that Ken, that Kelly Hancock, the acting and now outgoing, comptroller, was, negative things, bad things.

Right.

Some ugly language to suggest that he's not doing his job.

Well, the other is that the attorney general's office is under scrutiny for essentially reallocating some taxpayer funded hotel rooms to donors and other private citizens.

They then failed to pay the cost of these.

And, ultimately, an audit pressed them to pay it.

That just makes it look like the attorney general's office is kind of still basically at the whim of these donors.

And you can bet this is going to be part of what is a new ad against Attorney General Paxton from John Cornyn.

But just to kind of round it all back together, to me, obviously the politics of this are bad for Paxton and it'll be part of something that they discuss.

But it's also a fight about the comptroller, who is an appointee of Governor Abbott, and Ken Paxton, who is more aligned with the person who beat Kelly Hancock, the comptroller.

Done Huffines, who's going to be the incoming comptroller, likely if he wins the general election.

So this battle between the Comptroller and the Attorney General is still a...Proxy battle.

Proxy fight.

Yeah.

Which we know we're used to in Texas.

Asymmetric battle.

I like that, yeah.

That's good.

That's a good title for a book I like.

I think you should pursue that.

But that's exactly we're finding here.

Right.

You've got the attorney general and the comptroller fighting on a couple of different dimensions.

This is obviously just in keeping with this longer kind of term civil war in the Republican Party.

But what are the politics of this?

How do you think this is going to play out in the Senate race in particular?

Well, it's not going to play at all, I don't think.

I mean, and we have seen it.

It's a. Small issue.

It's a small issue among the other, big issues that Attorney General Paxton is, fending off.

But we have seen it here.

We have said it 11,000 billion times.

He's made of Teflon.

Yeah.

And they seem to kind of just.

Yeah.

Take.

Yeah.

Like take shrapnel.

Right.

He's like Terminator part two.

Like absorb those bullets.

It tastes like, Bruce Lee when he was on TV.

And then whoosh the arrow and she catches it like whoosh, just like that.

So they should make that into an AI ad.

Oh, yeah.

Because that's what the people want.

But speaking of AI ads, as I mentioned earlier, and we were talking about Paxton's got a new ad against Cornyn.

That's basically all AI.

The thrust of it is that John Cornyn went on vacation and quotes when Trump needed him to stay and fight, over, some of the kind of things are happening in Congress, right?

Especially over the shutdown.

And, you know, DHS funding, which is still unresolved, by the way, what do you make of this?

I mean, not just in terms of what I means and campaigns, but also whether or not this kind of thing sells, like, can Paxton get those Trump supports?

I don't know, I mean.

We have seen it, right?

We saw it, for example, in these local election of, state seat in Florida.

Actually, that incompetence Mar-A-Lago where Democrat won the election because the opponent, the Republican opponent was making it about, President Trump.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So one of the things that I question is, if, right now, this realignment, given that President Trump's popularity and especially since we have been seen, rising prices of gas, this and that if you are going to travel, maybe you're going to pay, if you check your back 1050 bucks more, gas surcharges in terms of, flying airlines, so on and so forth.

So people are feeling these directly, we President Trump.

So it may not be a vote against Paxton per se, quote unquote.

But he may be a vote against President Trump and therefore, Paxton, he's going to pay the the broken plate.

So that's that's one issue.

And then the other issue is just the tête-à-tête between, between, Senator Cornyn and AG Paxton.

It was going to get it, right.

Senator Cornyn has banked after, getting into the of a lot.

Yes.

Money.

That's like $9 million, right?

It's an incredible amount of money and definitely is going to go a while to help.

And they promise a big money bomb the next couple of weeks.

So get ready for ads.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaking of getting ready, the legislative session is right around the corner.

It'll start in January.

The House and Senate both have interim charges, which is like their homework.

Right.

We talked about this before.

On the House side, they're having a select committee on aviation infrastructure.

I think an important question.

And health care affordability.

That's interesting.

They're going to study data centers, which we talked about last week.

Lots of questions there about energy usage.

And they're going to talk about annexing part of New Mexico of course.

But why stop there.

Why not get a little piece of Oklahoma just above Texas.

That's ours.

Yeah.

What do you make of all this?

Well, I mean, it's it's a mixed bag, right?

I mean, some of the things are, very important things, like, data centers, AI, water power.

Those are the real important things.

And if I was, speaker of the.

House, okay.

And, you know, hopefully we'll be one day.

That's... Indeed.

This is upcoming.

Yeah, exactly.

I would focus on those four things.

Period.

End of story.

Really get these things right?

Yeah.

But also we have, you know, annexing the state neighbors.

Why not?

And we have to see what New Mexico does.

But it's probably they're going to say to El Paso, it's like come, yeah, come.

We'll take that little sliver.

Yeah.

You're already on the national grid.

You're not giving up El Paso without a fight.

This is hard.

I mean, I understand, but you never know.

And then obviously you have property taxes etc.

etc., etc., etc.. Right.

And the amount of, directives, that the house used around more than 50 pages, the, Lieutenant governor, directs are almost 20 pages.

So it gives you a mixed bag, but a bunch of stuff that in my humble, very humble opinion, dude, we should just focus on the real things that really mattered to the state.

Yeah, well, and depending on the political outcome, we might.

Right?

we've seen the past when there's been a more kind of consistent, like political share, where Democrats are done slightly better.

The session ended up being less political, so it could be that way.

But I tell you this, I'm not going to learn how to redraw Texas, because if we have to annex this part of it, then I'm going to draw it the old way forever.

But in the Senate, you know, Dan Patrick's talking about things like THC reform, which he's been very much against the, you know, regulatory structure has changed on that.

And so he wants to continue to pursue a ban.

He's also talking about things like prediction markets.

Right.

Which I know you're a huge fan of.

Making bets is all about your life.

Sit around waiting on stuff to happen.

But yeah, he is not a fan of betting.

And so there's a good chance that that could be regulated in Texas too.

That's a huge industry as well.

Well, on that note, I bet that you're going to enjoy this episode.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

The conversation keeps up next week.

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