Month: February 2024

The President and Congressional Leaders Meet to Prevent Another Government Shutdown

We begin with the government running out of money on Saturday, meaning that the departments of Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Education, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development will shut down. Joining us to discuss today’s meeting in the White House between President Biden and Vice President Harris and Senate leaders Schumer and McConnell and House leaders Johnson and Jeffries is Mike Lofgren. He has spent 28 years working in Congress, the last sixteen as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees, which gave him ringside seats on TARP, Hurricane Katrina disaster relief, debates on the Pentagon budget and the amazing antics of various deficit–reduction commissions. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted

Schumer Describes an “Intense” Meeting as Everybody in the Oval Office Piled on Johnson to Get Aid to Ukraine Done

Then we speak with a veteran of the US Senate, Jim Manley, a Washington DC-based independent public affairs consultant, Democratic strategist and 21 year veteran of the U.S. Senate where he served as senior advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the last six of those years and, before that, served 12 years as an aide to the late Senator Ted Kennedy. He joins us to discuss what Senate Majority Leader Schumer describes as an “intense” exchange about aid to Ukraine with everybody in the room piling on telling Mike Johnson to “get it done!”

An Update on the Many Trials Trump Faces as He Tries to Run Out the Clock

Then finally we get an update on the various trials Trump is facing and whether they will happen before the election and how much time they will take up as the all-but-certain Republican presidential candidate campaigns to return to the White House. Joining us now is Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the new corporate watchdog group True North Research.  She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government–as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief of the article three judges division for the U.S. Courts.