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Chad Pergram, I know that you are the person to go to when it comes to anything that's happening on Capitol Hill. And there are a lot of things happening on Capitol Hill at the moment. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
Thank you for having me. It's not quite hockey season, but there is a hat trick of things going on. We have impeachment of the president. We have maybe a leadership challenge to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And will the government shut down? So, you know, that's our hat trick. That's our trifecta. So here's how I understand this. And please correct me if I am wrong. There basically seems to me to be
Two factions within the right wing of the Republican conference on the House side, one that wants to advance a probes bills without doing a CR and one that has coalesced around a CR that they've basically worked out in negotiation with some other members.
And that that basically pits sort of Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy and Kevin McCarthy against each other in sort of a different way. Is that is that an accurate frame of the situation? Yeah, that's pretty close. I mean, you know, depending on the day, the bill, it might be hard to figure out who's on which side on some of this. But this is what happens when you have a four seat majority majority.
majority that's a little bit smaller now that Chris Stewart, the Republican from Utah, resigned. His wife has health problems. This was as of Friday. And you have other members who have been away. Steve Scalise, the majority leader, he parachuted back in on Thursday last week for the first time since his cancer diagnosis. So we're not 100 percent sure on his availability to vote. You have somebody like Anna Paulina Luna,
the Republican freshman from Florida who just had a baby, who also apparently has been a little bit sick too, and said that she would come back to vote no on a CR to fund the government because it was that important. Now, let's be clear here. A CR, a continuing resolution, that just funds the government at the current level. So when you get to September 30th, the end of the government's fiscal year, that's what they do a lot of times here. They just re-up that funding. Well, these conservatives, these arch conservatives, the reason they oppose that
is because that's renewing the old funding and they view that as and that's not a cut okay why would we agree to the old funding that was passed by you know democrats in the house democrats in the senate president biden so that's the red line for them and then you have this this deal that came out from rusty johnson republican from south uh south dakota who's a chair that what they call the main street caucus here on capitol hill and even uh you had scott perry who chairs the freedom caucus from pennsylvania
sign on to this deal that would keep the government open. There would be a small cut in all other spending except for Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon and would fund the government for a month. And also, you know, the sweetener in this is some border security. But you have certain Republican members who are just, you know, against doing anything that is close to a CR or just, you know, some funding that just keeps the government open.
And so that's why they are willing to vote no. And I'm going to tell you right now how this is going to go. I don't know whether or not the government's going to shut down, but this is the crystal ball. The crystal ball was very murky last week. It's still murky about a government shutdown, but it's much clearer about this scenario. So this deal that they put out Sunday night doesn't appear to have the votes. I asked Kevin McCarthy just a little bit ago. I said, yes.
you know, aren't you trying to communicate to your members to pass your bills because you're on better parliamentary and political footing if you've passed some bills, but you get to next week, which we've witnessed before in terms of his experience, where basically if the House side is the side that has passed something, it gives them advantage when it comes to the
the theater of play. But yes, please continue. Getting jammed by the Senate. Exactly. And that's exactly what Kevin McCarthy said. And so what will probably happen is they may or not may not be able to pass any bills over here. They couldn't even pass their own defense spending bill last week, although McCarthy says they'll try again this week.
So you get down to the end of the week. You have Chuck Schumer realizing that he's running out of time, too, because it does take a little bit more time to do things in the Senate. He overcomes a filibuster over there. They get, you know, 70, 80, maybe even 90 votes. There was one vote last week, 91 to 7, to start debate on a defense bill. So, you know, this is going to be in the upper, yeah, upper ranges here.
And you're able to move some bill there that just keeps the government open with a big coalition of Democrats and Republicans, and they bounce it back over to the House. Now, Kevin McCarthy can take that and probably pass it with anywhere between 275 and 350 votes. That's astonishing if you think about it. I mean, look at how many votes they ultimately had for the debt ceiling back in May.
But the risk for Kevin McCarthy and that averts a shutdown. The risk for Kevin McCarthy, though, is he puts that bill on the floor with lots of Democrats and Matt Gaetz and Lauren Bogart and others are warming up in the in the wings here. And they introduce a motion to vacate the chair, which McCarthy probably prevails on. But they are basically demonstrating a vote of no confidence in the Republican speaker. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
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Yeah. I mean, I obviously, you know, these these figures sort of take on a different aspect when they when they wade into the question of whether McCarthy should be vacated or not. When you look at what Matt Gaetz has been doing within this context.
You know, analyze him for a moment for me. You know, just historically, I know that you're very aware of kind of the way that history repeats and their different personalities and types that come into Congress. What is Gates really following in terms of his analog? Is there something like that historically?
Yeah, you've had different members who are always a thorn in the side of leadership. Okay, there's always a handful. Okay, that's not a surprise. I remember a few years ago there was Tom Tancredo.
who is a Republican from Colorado. And I remember there was, you know, a big bill trying to fund the government. And he went to the leadership or the leadership came to him and he said, I can help you. And they said, oh, really? And he said, they listened really closely. He said, I'm not going to vote for it. So don't bother with me. You know, and that was the helping. You're eliminating the time suck going and trying to court his vote. There's always been members like this.
So this is not that new. The difference here, and this is the historic precedent, is that if Matt Gaetz or somebody else moves to vacate the chair, and let me clarify what that means, that means that you potentially have a mid-Congress vote for Speaker of the House. My TV Guide, and I've been here on Capitol Hill for a long time, my TV Guide does not have that program listed in it. I've not seen that show before.
I have seen a speaker resign in the middle of the Congress. We had that happen with, you know, John Boehner. You know, we had that not that long ago back in the late 80s with Jim Wright. You had a speaker bankhead in the 30s die in office. So having a vote like that in the middle of the Congress is not unprecedented. I would just suggest I don't think that there's anything close to it other than the Bob Livingston sort of self-reliance.
Yeating, you know, post Clinton, you know, of right. Right. Right. Where he was kind of the speaker designated. Right. But they never had the vote. Right. But here's where, again, I was talking about it coming down to the math. I can tell you more more precisely where Kevin McCarthy stands with his conference compared to whether or not there's going to be a government shutdown. And here's why. Because this is the parliamentary mechanics that nobody knows about how this process would work.
So let's say Matt Gaetz at any point in time, whether it's before they fund the government, don't fund the government, whatever, he introduces his resolution. That is privileged. It goes up the floor first because that is one of the highest levels of importance here in the House. And so what would happen immediately is you have a secondary motion.
So the vote is not actually on deciding whether or not Kevin McCarthy should continue to be the speaker. The vote is on a motion to table, which is to set it by the wayside, or to refer it to committee, either House administration or House rules. And so the chances of that happening are pretty high. But here is the nightmare scenario.
Let's say for whatever reason that motion to refer or to table does not pass, that secondary motion. And I realize this is complicated. I realize it's in the weeds, but it's really important. No, it's really important. So that fails. Then you come back to that original motion, which is the motion to vacate. And if the secondary motion failed, the primary motion, which is the motion to actually have a new speaker's vote, probably succeeds. Now, here's the problem. Let's just say the government has shut down.
You cannot and say you have the votes to pass a bill to fund the government. You can't get to that bill. Why? Because the higher precedent, mind you, is getting a speaker of the House. And you remember it took 15 rounds and five days back in January. Well, it might take and you have to have an outright majority of the entire House. Kevin McCarthy is in this position right now because he doesn't have the votes.
And so how long does that go on for? And does Kevin McCarthy ever win or somebody else? I have no idea. That's a bad scenario because the government could be shut down. The one point I would just say, and this is the sort of the same situation as I was writing about it back during those that period of time with McCarthy, was there was nobody else who was going to get 200.
They couldn't get to that threshold of like even conceivably being an alternate speaker. And that I mean, I think that this is a this is an absolute, you know, shoot yourself in the foot kind of Republican activity, you know, GOP on GOP violence, as we used to say. And and I think that but I think that it's very likely at this point. I mean, given the given the tenor of what we're hearing.
Yeah, it's hard to believe. There's two things that we saw coming for sure. Kevin McCarthy talked so much about impeachment over the summer, it was inevitable that they would get to having an impeachment inquiry, whether they voted to start one or not, and whether or not they ever actually impeached the president, which is probably unlikely. Why? Because of the math. The votes aren't there to do it. Okay. First thing. But the other thing that was inevitable is that ramping up at the end of August, having this big funding fight,
Basically, what we heard after the debt ceiling fight in the spring is that Matt Gaetz or somebody was going to file this motion to vacate. What we're experiencing right now, Ben, are the echoes of that 15-round speaker's race in January. These chickens are coming home to roost. This is exactly why this took so long. And again, if Kevin McCarthy can't get the votes...
Who? The obvious people would be Steve Scalise, maybe. There's a reason why he kind of showed back up at the Capitol a few days ago after dealing with his cancer treatments. OK, just say I'm here, number one. But I mean, you know, I think I've expressed to you before, you know, Steve Scalise is not more attuned to the to the demands of this of this portion of the conference than McCarthy is.
And then, you know, what are you left with? You're left with Tom Emmer, you know, I mean, or Patrick Henry from North Carolina. Yeah, exactly. So but but here's but here's the missing part of the calculus. And this program has also not been listed in my TV guide before. You could have conceivably and this if we get to that stage.
I'll underscore it again. If we get to that stage, this is unprecedented where you could have a coalition speaker. You could have just enough Democrats and just enough Republicans come down and say, all right,
We can elect a speaker with an outright majority. I've talked to you twice here about how they might get close to 300 votes on the debt ceiling bill, which they had well over 300 votes and maybe even just for a straight CR. There's a group of people here on both sides of the aisle who just want this place to work, and they don't want to be beholden to the Freedom Caucus and the people on the fringes.
I don't know that this will happen, but I'm saying that that scenario is much more in play than it probably ever has been of a coalition speaker in the history of the House of Representatives.
Chad Pergram knows because he is brilliant and knows all of this history. You do not have to be a member of the House of Representatives to be the speaker. That's right. Anybody that is. And that's never happened either. That's never happened. But it is a political geek's dream that you would just call.
Or nightmare. Or nightmare. That you would call someone out from the mists of time to come in and be the speaker who is beholden to no one. You know, Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House. Exactly. Well, and I remember, you know, President Clinton, this is before his problems with Monica Lewinsky, but they were talking about, you know, when he leaves office, you know, when he was president in 1999, he was still going to be a young man. And they thought about, well, could he serve on the Supreme Court or something like that?
Now, each speaker's election, there is almost always a vote or two for people who aren't members. There have been votes for Rand Paul, who's a member of the Senate.
Late Colin Powell. OK. My favorite was David Walker, the controller of the currency. That that that was one that kind of caught me for that. Well, I believe. Yeah, that was I'm trying to think here. I'm trying to while you're thinking I would I would just vote for Newt over and over again every time. There I know exactly who it was. I know exactly who it was. I had to think for a second. It was the late Walter Jones.
Oh, yes. And Congress in North Carolina voted for David Walker. Yeah. Yes. That's it. Look, I mean, it's amazing. It's astounding that we're at this point. So I have to ask you about the impeachment impeachment. What? What is this? I thought we're just talking about government funding. You see this. And I asked the speaker this a minute ago. I said, doesn't this interfere with that? He said it definitely slows it down.
Yes. The impeachment inquiry described to me a little bit the difference between the inquiry process here versus a normal impeachment, because I've been asked this and I've tried to explain it, but I don't think I do a very good job of it. Can you do a better job, please, and explain for us what is going on with an impeachment inquiry?
Well, when you vote for an impeachment inquiry that gives the House a little more power, supposedly, it formalizes it to say, okay, we're really serious about this. And in fact, there was an opinion by the Trump Justice Department in 2020. This is during the first Trump impeachment. But they said, because the House has passed a resolution supporting an impeachment inquiry, we're going to formalize our process of giving documents, but you have to have done that, which the House did.
Go back in time to August and September of 2019. And Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, was much in the same position, talking about impeachment, coming out, having a press conference, saying she was going to have impeachment. And you had Doug Collins, the Republican from Georgia, who at the time was the top Republican in the Judiciary Committee, saying this isn't really impeachment because you haven't passed a resolution. And Kevin McCarthy said the same thing and everything else. So guess what?
Republicans in the House cannot pass a resolution formalizing the impeachment inquiry because why? It's about the math. They don't have the votes. Because they have 20 to 30 members who are from Biden voting districts who do not. Yes, 18 specifically from Biden, but probably 20 to 30, if not more, who are not convinced that they should even go down this road. Even some conservatives, Ken Buck from Colorado. So basically, Republicans are and Kevin McCarthy said over the summer.
He said, if we're going to do impeachment, we're going to do it by the book and follow all the processes. Well, if you don't pass this, then you're not really following the processes. Nancy Pelosi, because she's Nancy Pelosi and could always get the votes together. She eventually adopted an impeachment resolution for an impeachment inquiry on Halloween, ironically, of 2019. So, yes, yes. So so so there you have it now.
Again, let me go back another step here. You know, that resolution, even though we've talked about that in the context of the last administration, supposedly you need that. But the way Congress has changed its rules for investigatory powers over the past 20, 25 years, you don't need it as much.
And so if you say you're doing an impeachment inquiry, you're doing an impeachment inquiry. If you do like Lauren Boebert from Colorado did in June and try to put a snap resolution to impeach the president on the floor, and if the House were to vote for it, whether or not there had been any investigation, any documents, any interviews, depositions, witnesses, guess what? The president is impeached. So...
It is a little bit of nuance. That's just as easy as saying Beetlejuice three times and then having him show up. Well, I wondered if Kevin McCarthy, after what happened with Ms. Boebert in Colorado, if he wished he could say Beetlejuice three times and get Boebert to go away. But I don't know. I don't think that's the way it works, unfortunately for him. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. You know, but here's the thing that I'm interested in about this.
They are now putting themselves kind of on a plot line for actual impeachment, meaning like you have this inquiry start and then there's kind of a ticking clock of when are you going to actually roll this out there? Do you believe that the House Republicans plan to do this, say, you know, the same week that Donald Trump appears before certain courts, you know, or something like that in the spring of next year?
I don't know that. I will say, though, there's a band of Republicans in the House, even conservatives, who say we ought to be able to wrap this up quick. I asked James Comer, the chair of the Oversight Committee from Kentucky last week, I said, what is your timeline? He could not give me one. He said, because every time we have a deposition, we find out something new. I can't put a timeline on that. But there are competing camps among House Republicans about how fast this should go.
And there's certainly some. Do you believe that James Comer thinks that this gun charge is a smokescreen? Well, he said as much. We interviewed him on the steps of the Capitol last week and he said that's the only thing I can't. I saw that live as it was happening. Yes. Yeah, I can't. I can't connect to President Biden. So now that's not to say there might not be other charges, but that's kind of where we are right now.
The problem, see, this cuts two ways for the House Republicans. Number one, there are some Republicans who say, let's do it. Let's figure it out quickly, get it done. Then we can get back to business. Because once you get to impeachment, it consumes all news oxygen. That is unless the government is shut down and you're trying to figure out who's the speaker. OK, I'll just put that out there, that caveat. But number two, you know, you could roll this out all year long in 2024. And there are some Republicans who would like to have that. The downside of that
to the core Republican base, Ben, is that you have some Republicans in the House and just, you know, people on the street who like they really want to see President Biden impeached. And if this goes on and on and on and again, Warren Bogart even said that she would put her resolution out there again if this doesn't happen quickly. At some point, they're going to say,
What are you doing? You said you were going to impeach. But does the public here at the other way to say, oh, they're they're impeaching president. They don't know the mechanics of this. They don't know all the parliamentary stuff that I've run you through. And so they just hear impeachment, impeachment, impeachment. And it actually helps the party overall because they are, you know, it's death by a thousand cuts to President Biden. So, you know, this could go either way. I look at I look at this and I think that it's very risky for Republicans because I think on the one hand, their base very much wants.
to see Joe Biden impeached. They believe that he's incredibly corrupt. And actually, the polls are on their side in terms of what we've seen from CNN and other entities that have pulled this question. There's tons of belief among independents, even among some Democrats, that Joe Biden has done corrupt acts, et cetera. The problem for them is that that gets in the way of them doing anything that they can actually hold up to voters as a reason to reelect them.
And it's the same kind of problem that Democrats faced before. Do you believe that this leadership team has a plan to be able to work through this? Or are they so distracted by the fact that they could get vacated at any moment, you know, for any justifiable or non-justifiable cause?
that they're just incapable of being able to lead in a certain way on this point. It's the same problem with the debt ceiling and funding the government, that there's a certain group of Republicans who just want this and this is all they want. It may undercut them on the main if they just deal with impeachment and deal with impeachment. But Kevin McCarthy and others have to continue to appease them dealing with impeachment in some form or they're going to get undercut there.
It is popular with certain sects of the Republican base. Okay, that's important there. But as we've seen, you know, certainly with the impeachment of former President Trump, but probably the more glaring example,
was 1998 with the impeachment of Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton's approval rating was well over 70% because they did not see this as legit in any way, shape, or form, no matter what he did with Monica Lewinsky. I don't know if you have a favorite SNL presidential sentence. Oh, I know what you're going to say. I am bulletproof.
That episode, you have Dana Carvey playing Tom Brokaw, I believe, right? Now we go to the White House for an important match. And they come out. Who was playing Clinton at the time? Oh, it's Darryl Hammond. Sorry, Darryl Hammond. Darryl Hammond. He comes out and he just says, I am bulletproof. Next time you best bring kryptonite. And walks away. That's the entire. But that's the entire skit.
It's exactly what it distilled it into 30 seconds. Look, Chad, it's always a pleasure to talk to you and to have you guide us through this. Let me just ask you one last question. When you are covering these members, you obviously know the difference between people who are there because they are serious politicians bent on trying to help the country.
and people who are there because they are giant weirdos who just need the affectionate response of the people who are in the crowd. What proportion, what percentage of the Congress at this particular moment is made up of serious political people and giant weirdos? I have not done a scientific study on this, but I will direct you to Alan Simpson.
who was the Republican whip from Wyoming for years and probably the funniest member I have ever encountered in all of my decades. He was a hilarious man. I loved every interaction I had with him. Yes. So in 2002, you had Bob Barr, who was a conservative Republican from Georgia, lose his primary. And you had Cynthia McKinney, who was a liberal Democrat, lose her primary. This was like August of 2002.
And so the New York Times called up Alan Simpson, then out of the Senate, to say, "What does this mean?" And this is one of my favorite quotes of all time in politics. Alan Simpson said the following: "20% of the people in your church, your country club, and in your place of work are screwballs and lightweights and boobs, and you would not want them unrepresented in the Congress." So there's your percentage.
Not mine. Alan Simpson's. That is perfect, Chad. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thank you. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
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