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

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

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

Thanks for hanging out with us and talking politics.

Lots going on.

This reminds me of, like, the Trump days.

Remember what it was like when everything was happening kind of all at once.

And there's so much you have to kind of, like, consolidate.

That's what we're going to try to do this week, because we got to prep people for their weekend conversations because, you know, it's going to come up.

It's going to come up.

One thing that definitely is going to come up is Elon Musk, obviously is the head of SpaceX.

And he was in Texas this week for a launch.

And he was joined by his best bro friend, none other than President- elect Donald Trump.

But it occurred to me, in addition to it being an interesting kind of bromance, that this is a sort of story about how Texas plays into the kind of political world of Donald Trump.

There's always been a strong connection there.

We've talked about this over the course of the last year, but it doesn't seem actually like there's a lot of Texans who were being tapped for the cabinet.

John Radcliffe.

Right.

Former, we talked about this, a couple weeks ago, former member of Congress from Texas.

But that's kind of it.

So what do you make of kind of Texas, his role in this besides Musk?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, we'll see.

Yeah.

I mean, we all, have heard, you know, Don Buckingham offering line.

Oh, yeah.

Or, mass deportation facility.

I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah, like 1400 acres, which is.

That's a good.

Print.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Down there in in Stark County.

So it's, I don't know, it's trying to insert themselves.

I think Texas will benefit one way or the other.

Obviously, Elon Musk has, spurred the growth down.

RGB making prices of land completely unaffordable.

Some of it's free, though.

Apparently they're giving out land like.

Well, yeah, but obviously, you know, creating, you know, economic growth there, job opportunities.

So we'll see Austin too right.

Yeah.

You know, seem to us.

Well Tesla's here.

X is here also as well.

And we'll see what else he's going to bring or buy now that, he's investment.

He's going to go, yeah.

You know, I guess, some return.

Good to have a good return.

I'm thinking about the politics of this, where we had expected to see a lot of exodus from Texas politicians to the Trump administration, possibly Sid Miller.

So far, no, possibly Ken Paxton.

That's a no, because Matt Gates got the nod temporarily.

We'll talk about that in a second to, but people like, like Wesley Hunt, the member of Congress who in Houston was a huge Trump.

Up and.

Down.

Yeah, I mean, he never he didn't get a nod yet.

Beth Van Dyne also didn't get a nod.

She's also a staunch Trump supporter.

We may see some judges down the road, right.

There are some jurists who are conservative and probably in that Trump orbit.

This being that fifth circuit, if someone retires from the Supreme Court, there you go.

Yeah.

Like a. James Ho.

Right.

And and also to like maybe more important than kind of the head of the serpent is like the body of the serpent and that's that.

You've got a lot of staff members, people who are like think tank, you know, members, people who are kind of really generating the intellectual side of how to develop policy, like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, or the America First Foundation.

Right.

This is where, Brooke Rollins is the head.

This was sort of done after Trump left office.

So there are several kind of policy connections and personnel connections, just surprisingly not at the top of the ticket.

But let me ask you, if they haven't gone in for example, ag Paxton dad primarily.

Well, not primarily, but part of his job was to sue the Biden administration every other week.

Yeah, why does he going to do.

I mean, and I'm asking.

Yes.

Seriously.

Right.

What do you say?

You mean here, right?

Yeah.

Because right now, and I've been thinking a lot about these, especially Texas Republicans have been having these for the past four years, these aggressive stance against the Biden administration.

And that's fine.

Yeah.

Now they have the whole train, the whole enchilada.

is theirs.

Right.

They control Texas government up and down.

They made, you know, pretty good gains in this election.

The Senate is controlled by Republicans, the white House, the House.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

They've got the combo platter.

Right.

You got you got the crunchy taco.

Right, right, right.

But they're stagnant.

But the now what I mean.

Yeah, it's a great question.

Just this week, right there was the 100th case that the Trump the Paxton brought against the Biden administration.

The numbers will decline, but I think you'll still see a lot of pressure from Texas and other states to try to change the federal government's policies, because even though Trump comes in as a kind of, you know, as a Republican president, you know, they'll change agency heads and they'll develop some new policies.

Things don't change immediately.

There's still great policies in place that the you know, that the Paxton, camp would like to see change in Texas would like to amend so they'll still sue them over various things, but you won't see the kind of same resistance.

So things will probably go.

And we have, more skin.

Ramaswamy.

You know, just streamline.

Batman and Robin, just like checking for waste, right?

There you go.

It could work.

And they're going to have their work cut out for them, especially on this next issue, which is about mass deportations.

The president elect Trump this week more or less said that this was on the agenda for the first week of the camp.

His his administration.

He plans to declare a national emergency.

This is something presidents can do.

They're allowed to basically trigger an emergency through statute, and then it gives them expanded powers.

The courts allowed them to have the big picture here is that we've got a basically about 11 million undocumented people in this country.

If those people are eventually sent out of the country, it could affect up to 20 million people in this nation.

But wait, there's more.

Oh, the economic impact is serious, right?

There are people who have said this could basically cost between 150 billion and $300 billion to carry out, as well as just the impact on like certain services, right, certain sectors of the economy.

So there's a chance that you could see the GDP dip because you're getting rid of a lot of.

Absolutely.

So it's a trade off for President Trump.

Right.

In terms of facilitating his campaign promise, but also making sure the economy stays pretty stable.

So what do you think about the kind of expectations that are going to happen the first few weeks of this?

Well, certainly he's going to declare a national emergency.

Probably he's going to use or he has said that he's going to use the military to carry out one way or the other.

It is 1,000% unclear how.

Right.

You have the policy commit an act that prohibits, the involvement of the U.S. military in civilian public safety situations.

You would have to deputize them as, Ice agents, or Border Patrol agents, you know, to exercise immigration law.

So it's very complicated.

Pulling them off of other stuff like FBI, local law.

Absolutely.

That just their stuff, they're doing that now.

They're not going to do.

But that that's another implication.

Whether it's going to be in the interior of the country, the border of the country, whatnot.

But what I think is, especially in the last two weeks of the of the campaign trail, Trump started to finesse the argument.

We call that the art of backtracking.

Well, I mean, just finessing the argument.

Sure.

I'm from him, from 11 million, so on and so forth.

Now we'd we're going to deport criminals.

So you saw that trend change as people like Ted Cruz were saying, okay, well, I'm going to be everybody.

It's going to be just these.

Exactly.

Okay.

Because then you generate these, especially when you're thinking about the agricultural sector, the agriculture industry, farmers that are heavily reliant on, migrant labor, whether, it's through, special visas or, you know, undocumented migrants.

And that's going to have a heat.

And that heat can heat directly into our pocketbooks, right?

Because, you know, prices of you know, agricultural, produce so on and so can go up immensely.

Yeah.

So that's a pretty high.

That was part of the reason the heat won.

So and we have seen it, we saw it back in 2006.

And before that when states like for example, Alabama, Georgia started to have these anti-immigrant legislation migrants left.

Yeah.

And left a lot of crop on the ground.

And they had a huge hit.

So we're going to see how that plays out.

But, I think you could easily come up with the with the, campaign promise.

Yeah.

You have a lot of, of people that are right now, in jails, you can just deport them without waiting until they have their sentence.

Off you go.

Yeah.

That's good.

And some of the kind of things they can undo from what the Biden administration has done are also easy fixes.

Right?

So there's a special visa free humanitarian parole process for people from Cuba and Haiti and Nicaragua.

That's something they can undo kind of immediately.

I feel like they could sort of fairly quickly accomplish at least the goal of having a prima facie case that we've done what we said we were gonna do, which was to deport people who are a danger to the, you know, citizens here.

Correct.

But the farther they go, the harder it's going to be on the economy.

So that's the question is like, when do you stop?

Right?

When do you sort of make the case that you've done what you said you were going to do and then hopeful, like the hopefully the economy basically kind of writes itself?

Or is there an endless appetite for this, which it seems to me there is.

Right.

Republicans are always looking for a way to say like, we have to fix this problem.

And just if you deport, let's say, how many people is that like less than a million people?

500,000 people at best.

That doesn't strike me as a fulfilling of a promise.

Oh absolutely not.

But but it's very complicated to do otherwise.

And if you stop at TPS, that is, the temporary protected status, for example, for, countries that are eventually coming at a higher rate, like Venezuela.

Yeah.

Then you give the illusion, people are going to be less likely to get, you know, cross the border.

Yeah.

Without that potential benefit of having that TPS, protective, status and and then you have the role that Mexico is going to play.

Yeah.

And the role that Canada is going to play, if you start mass deportations, are you going to see people trying to get into Canada?

Yeah.

And Canada, the the border of the East.

Pause.

Like, you have no idea.

There's just.

Like elk and trees and.

That's it.

And maple syrup.

Yeah.

But that is the best.

Yeah, yeah.

That it.

I'm just thinking of going actually, now that you make it.

So that will create a problem for Canada kind of is going to say, we can because they're dealing with their own problems, especially with asylum seekers.

Interesting.

And Mexico has said like, you know, you can deport whoever you want.

Yeah.

We're not going to take no Mexicans.

Not you.

So how are you going to deport them?

Coordinating flights from here to, I don't know, let's say Venezuela.

Right.

All those things are a logistical nightmare.

And this is going to be very complicated and super expensive.

Let me ask one more question on this.

You did a paper years ago about remittances.

That's the money that people in the US send back to other countries, right?

From what effect does the mass deportation have on that and the economies of those countries?

Correct.

I mean, it depends.

And, and depends in the sense of, for example, for, Mexico, remittances are the crown jewel to, stabilize the Mexican peso.

Interesting.

And without them, it's going to be very hard.

It's free money and remittances.

Not only in terms of the one side, the migrants and every single month or whatnot could have a very important implication in Mexico creating perhaps.

Yeah, more, yeah, more undocumented migration to create from Mexico the.

Incentives to come.

In.

And right now, Mexico is transitioning from a country that sends migrant into a destination country.

Yeah.

And now you have more people staying in Mexico, more people that travel from Central America, from Venezuela, just staying in Mexico.

So that's an additional problem.

So we're going to see, how this thing plays out.

Nothing short of world chaos.

Right.

Okay.

Well let's go from chaos internationally to chaos in Washington okay.

So obviously the president elect has picked a bunch of different people to be in various cabinet roles.

We'll highlight a few here as we go.

Some of these picks are pretty solid picks.

I mean, Linda McMahon as an interesting pick, right?

As, who's going to be the head of the Department of Education, right?

People like, say she's never been in the classroom, but she knows how to manage agency.

She was head of the Small Business Administration.

She's also a character in the Nintendo 64 game on the WWE.

Right.

Interesting little tidbit.

No other cabinet member has that right.

But that's a kind of solid pick, it seems to me.

Somebody who likes Trump and is loyal to Trump and, you know, managed agency, others are going to be more controversial.

So we talked obviously about this last week.

Matt Gates is a great example of that.

You may have heard a little something about this.

He's been under investigation.

Federal investigation for some sexual abuse, crimes.

It turns out they didn't they didn't ever, issue charges, so.

But the House is investigating some of his other behaviors that may be more problematic.

This is definitely going to come out, at least in some of the hearings.

You know, Pete Hedgepeth, who is going to be the nominee, for, for a cabinet position is also, accused of sexual assault and, issued a settlement or agreed to a settlement with the accuser.

This was also known to the Trump administration.

I'm asking this question because I'm wondering kind of what the president elect's end game is here.

Some of this is definitely like a finger in the eye of the Washington establishment.

But some of this obviously is about trying to get people who are loyal in these positions.

But like we said last week, there's a real trade off between competence and loyalty.

And the way that the agencies are scored and the way that the performance of these agencies is scored definitely takes a hit when you have people who are political appointees.

One thing we saw, actually, here's interesting note that when President Obama was in power, what he did is he put his political appointees into positions that he didn't have as much use for.

They weren't central to his agenda.

Now, the I guess the question is, if president elect Trump is doing the same kind of thing, where, you know, you're getting people who are like Matt Gates, you know, people who are loyal and maybe problematic, but who are otherwise going to be, you know, like out of the way, right?

Like not essential.

That is, as of our recording, Treasury has not been set and Treasury is critical.

Right.

And so that's an important role.

Whereas maybe Trump thinks of some of these other roles are not that critical.

Well, I mean, but you're talking about two of the biggest agencies with a huge, impact on the economy, national security, so on.

And so you're not.

Not as big on Trump's agenda as I think the way that this is the way the scholars say.

Right.

They say basically like presidents try to get their appointees out of the way, like we're going to put you as a friend in this other position, but we're not going to have you in a really pivotal role for the things like.

Right.

But but what I'm trying to say here is that the DOJ, whether it's in the president's agenda or not, so it's extremely important, whether, the Department of Defense, with nominee access, is huge.

It has the biggest budget of all.

Agency has a huge impact on national security, foreign relations, you name it.

I mean, it's just.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, it's it's something that I can see I see the argument and see what the literature says.

Yeah.

But I'm like, you know, maybe Department of Interior, you know, it's fine.

Right.

Or.

Yeah, actually, I, I don't know Doug Burgum.

Right.

As interior is actually a good place because he's from a state.

That has a.

Lot of land that definitely is publicly.

Man.

Sure.

But but that he's like, I don't know what.

You're trying to say is like, yeah, it's unclear.

And I think that's exactly right.

I mean, obviously we have sort of trends that we think about that are kind of practical and how political science studies this.

But then there's the pic of like, Mehmet Oz to be the head of Medicare and Medicaid Services or the pic of, you know, Sean Duffy, who I remember from the real world.

I used to love that show.

His wife too is in the real world cast.

Yeah.

You know, there are obviously the kind of reality show elements to his his cabinet, but it's, I think a deeper connection is that these are people that the Trump thinks he can control and thinks that are loyal to him, and they probably largely are.

The real question is like, are they going to get confirm that's the real substantial question.

If they don't go through raises, a politician is going to be some of them complicated.

If the Senate says, wait, we're not willing to give you the prerogatives of advise and consent of the Senate.

If that happens, then we'll see that there's going to be some problems.

And again, this issue, let's suppose that, President Trump can have all his nominees go forward.

Even Maggie o the Senate takes a recess.

They all go to Tahiti.

Exactly.

Let's go on the beach.

Just like, yeah, earbuds in, don't listen to recess.

And everyone, they come back and like, all the agencies are staffed.

Okay, let's suppose that.

So in terms of balancing campaign promises, how how you know, people that do not have administrative experience and you're not talking about 15 people, you're talking about massive departments like RFK in Health and Human Services.

That's an insane size of the bureaucracy.

It's very complex sewn into how are you going to deliver it?

Right.

You don't even know.

Yeah.

Well, that's a great point.

And one of the things that the scholarship says on this is that, like the people who are political appointees have like less productive times in office.

So basically their scores on the metrics that the Bush administration put into place to measure agency performance lower.

So there's a trade off, right?

Like I said, I mean, you know, you can put people who are loyal to you in these positions who are politically faithful, but it might not mean that they're going to get the kind of performance of that agency you need, and they've got to perform.

Right.

I mean.

So.

Remember, Trump's whole campaign promise was I can fix it.

Well, if it turns out that you can't fix it because of this kind of bureaucratic not, then it's going to make it even harder for you to claim that you've done it and easier for Democrats in two years, less than two years or more.

I hate to bring it up, but the midterms where they're going to say, look, I mean, you promised it.

It didn't deliver.

They're going to clean house.

So I think that's the real kind of problem that he faces.

In addition to just getting some of these folks put on the rolls.

So we'll see.

But let's talk about other transitions.

There are a lot of kind of soul searching going on right now for Democrats.

We have seen a transition in the top level of offices at both the national level at the DNC.

Jamie Harrison is stepping down and then also in Texas, the Gilbert in your Hosa, who's been the head of the Democratic Party in Texas for more than a decade, is also stepping down.

Let's first start with the DNC nationally.

Jerram Jamie Harrison obviously decided to step down.

The role of the DNC chair isn't really a policy making role.

They don't choose what issues candidates run on.

Really, what they do is raise money and make sure the infrastructure of the party is set to go.

But there's been a lot of generational divide about how to do this.

You've got Nancy Pelosi, you've got Steny Hoyer, you've got Joe Biden leaving the stage.

The younger generation is coming along saying, we want to have a say in how this goes.

So people like Martin O'Malley, who you may remember, ran for president very briefly.

Yes.

He was a governor of Maryland.

Is interested strategist Chuck Rocha, who is, one of the keynote strategists for the Latino vote, is also thinking of running, names like, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Kaine have come up.

Lots of potential options here for Democrats moving forward.

What's the play here?

What's the move that's going to get them the votes they need in the midterm?

And then four years from.

Now, Rahm Emanuel.

I would love to see Rahm.

He is a bulldog.

oh yeah.

Exciting to watch.

Yeah.

I mean, that would be very interesting to watch.

I think Democrats need to really, put this sign and say, closed for renovations will be back in two month or something like that, and really focus on the autopsy of the the scarring election and what has happened before.

Yeah.

But when a restaurant closes, like, for renovations, it often means that they're closing permanently.

Correct.

You don't think that's what happening?

I mean, literally, we're going to reboot.

We've got the money.

We're going to make this better.

Exactly.

And I think that there's still appetite to counterbalance, the new MAGA movement.

The question is that the branding of the Democratic Party is not the right branding.

Yeah.

The branding of talking to the average working family is not the way that working families are expecting to be talked to.

Yeah.

So the once they figure out that we have had and we have talked here in terms of, in our humble, very humble opinion, what happened in the, what happened with, the Syrian election?

It's a way of how they're communicating with the with the average voter, and they need this one time preferences.

Yeah, the top of the ticket.

Right.

Because we know that actually, if you look at the numbers that the Democrats performed well in states where they were battlegrounds, but of the five key battlegrounds, Harris lost, but four of four of them Democrats won.

So there is still a messaging that can work, but it's not coming from the top of the ticket.

So the infrastructure needs to be tweaked.

The money's got to be there.

They have to spend it more wisely.

Their stories this week about how Harris in the campaign blew through more than $1 billion.

A lot of it was like Cardi B for like, you know, $500,000 concert or something.

Yeah, there's a lot of kind of wasteful spending when you've got that much money on the books.

But given the short period and wanted to kind of blow through it and not have anything left saying like it's all revealed.

But obviously there's a lot of things that have to happen.

But let's transition from talking about the National Party to talking about the state party.

Last week, Gilbert Hinojosa ended his 12 year run leading the state.

It ended in a kind of ignominious fashion, right.

He, in a narrative discussion with a journalist about what happened, during the campaign, said that maybe they had gone too far to do things like protecting transgender rights.

Right.

There were some blowback from this.

That's not why he was fired or why he stepped down.

But it is a symptom of the confusion of the messaging from the Democratic Party.

Like are the Democratic Party members supporting the rights of people who are transgender or not?

And it was unclear from his statement and then apology and then eventual firing.

Things have not gone well for the Texas Democratic Party, right?

He came into office in 2012 with the Obama bump, with the hope that Texas would be purple and the Latino vote would bail out Democrats.

That has not happened.

Nope.

The Democrats have gained about a million voters over the course of that time period, which is pretty good.

But Republicans wait for it gained 2 million voters.

So they're finding new voters.

And Democrats are two, but not as many.

I feel like in your house.

So was living on borrowed time.

There was just a kind of inevitable conclusion to this.

Right.

So he ran against Carl Robinson, who was the former, chair of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats.

And also Kim Olson, who's a former.

Yeah, statewide candidate.

They pressed him to do better to enhance the field operation.

They hadn't really done it.

So to me, I think they failed on money messaging mobilization.

It's just been a bit of a disaster.

And we have seen and I think that the field operation is critical, and especially if you want to, woo the Latino voters to your side.

Yeah.

If you don't have field presence.

Nothing is going to happen in a consistent one two.

Right.

That's been.

The story.

Absolutely.

I mean, they cannot go and we have Senate 11,000 times, to the well, every two years.

If you are not there every single day, nothing is going to happen.

It's easy to dunk on him by saying, like, you didn't do a good job because you're a Democrat in Texas.

But that, frankly, is the case.

And they've got to build an infrastructure that's going to work for them for the future.

So, obviously since about 18, it's been kind of downhill and all I've done is make excuses.

Like in 2020, they came out with a report that tried to sort of justify what happened.

It was a lot of finger pointing and now a solution.

So definitely they're going to have to reboot.

And, you know, re examine things.

But last thing I want to talk about this week is Greg Abbott.

The governor has issued an executive order that's going after Chinese espionage.

So Greg Abbott, in addition to being a border hawk, and being a tax cutter, can add spy hunter to his list of accomplishments.

Basically, the executive order is, set to target and arrest people who have been trying to, influence, people who are of Chinese descent in this nation from the Chinese government.

This has become a kind of flash point.

Do you think this will have any kind of political effect?

Jean Wu, who is from born in China, now a member of the legislature here in Houston, has said, you know, this is something that we can work together on.

So bipartisan support on this issue.

Absolutely, I think so.

And it's, but allegedly in this operation or Fox Hunt, it's, targeting naturalized citizens or permanent residences.

So, you know, good for the governor.

And we'll see if these pans out.

And spy hunter.

Yeah, I spotted him out to get him, like, a tuxedo and a martini.

Why not?

And I think it's good.

And if they can work in a bipartisan way, it's more than, well, the better.

Yeah.

And we'll continue this conversation.

And these spy hunting next week.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

We'll see you next week.

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