| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
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unidentified
|
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| On Mondays, when Congress is in session, we'd like to take a look at the week ahead in Washington. | ||
| And to do that, we're joined once again by NBC News senior congressional reporter Scott Wong. | ||
| And Mr. Wong, of course, President Trump set to address members of Congress and the nation tomorrow night, Tuesday night from Capitol Hill, that joint address, as it's being called, it's not officially a state of the union. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| What are we expecting? | ||
| Well, this is going to be a big speech by President Trump because it is his first major address to the United States Congress since taking office, and especially since implementing all of these Doge cuts that has been so controversial and widespread across the country. | ||
| We have seen the Democrats protest these cuts at the federal agencies. | ||
| We have seen the reaction from town halls around the country protesting Republicans who have been supportive of Elon Musk and this Doge department. | ||
| And so we will hear directly from the president. | ||
| I think it will be a victory lap of sorts looking back at President Trump's first month in office saying, look, I campaigned on these promises and I have carried out and fulfilled a lot of these promises to scale back the size and scope of government to really go after spending. | ||
| We didn't really know that he was going to do these mass firings, but we're going to hear from the president about how he thinks these mass firings have gone so far. | ||
| How much do you think that Friday night's blow up in the Oval Office is changing the speech right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How much he's going to focus now on Ukraine and peace and minerals deal? | |
| What are your thoughts? | ||
| I think it will be a big, major part of this address simply because it is in the news. | ||
| It is the biggest story at the moment. | ||
| I think everyone at this point, several days out, has now seen the blow up in the Oval Office between Zelensky, President Trump, and Vice President JD Vance. | ||
| This is an important deal in the eyes of the president, this mineral deal. | ||
| He thinks that this is the path to peace between Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| Clearly, Zelensky wanted more. | ||
| He wanted security assurances from the United States, which the President Trump was unwilling to give him in that moment. | ||
| They walked away from the deal. | ||
| Zelensky returned to Europe and Ukraine, where he was received well in the European community and did receive some additional support, financial support, as well as verbal support from European leaders there. | ||
| And so, but to go back to my original point, this is an important deal for Trump to get done. | ||
| He sees himself as a deal maker, and so a lot is writing on this mental rights deal. | ||
| And I think we will expect to hear from the president on that point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We mentioned it's not officially a State of the Union address, but all that pageantry will be there. | |
| Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States and the guests, we're expecting President Trump to have guests, and members of Congress always have their own guests to try to make their points. | ||
| What do you know about any of those things, the guests in the audience who might be referenced or guests that members of Congress are bringing? | ||
| Well, we do know that Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, sent out to his rank-and-file Democrats to say, Look, invite guests who can demonstrate being impacted by some of President Trump's policies, who have been hurt by some of President Trump's policies. | ||
| People like VA workers who are supporting veterans and veterans with disabilities, USDA workers, NOAA workers, federal government workers who sort of do the work of the country that is oftentimes unseen, | ||
| as well as people who are impacted by potential Medicaid cuts that we have heard so much about from Democrats as the Republicans try to advance their agenda, including tax cuts, and also figuring out how to pay for that agenda. | ||
| What Democrats say will come out of the pockets of people who are recipients of Medicaid. | ||
| That obviously has been disputed by Republicans. | ||
| We'll see when the rubber hits the road what actually happens on that front. | ||
| And the other thing I would also mention, John, is that we're going to see a lot of the cabinet members, very likely, key members of Trump's cabinet, who just had very bruising confirmation hearings before the United States Senate. | ||
| So you'll see some of the senators sitting there with some of the cabinet members who have recently had rough goings. | ||
| But so far, everyone has made it through and gotten through and been confirmed to the President Trump's cabinet. | ||
| And so that'll be an interesting dynamic as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
9 p.m. Eastern is when this all gets underway. | |
| Of course, that pageantry starts in the half hour or so beforehand. | ||
| Members start arriving hours beforehand to get those prime seats on the aisle. | ||
| One thing afterwards, of course, is always the response to the president's speech this year. | ||
| It's Senator Alyssa Slotkin of Michigan, the Democrat, to deliver the response to the joint address. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do viewers need to know about her and how important this is for her? | |
| She has served in the House of Representatives for several years. | ||
| She is now a freshman Democratic senator from Michigan. | ||
| What's important to know about Slotkin is that she outperformed Trump in the 2024 election in the state of Michigan. | ||
| Trump won Michigan. | ||
| She, as the Democrat, won the Senate race in that state and performed, outperformed by quite a bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Meaning, many people who marked Donald Trump for president had to also mark her for senator. | |
| So she has some cross-party appeal. | ||
| Also, she has a national security background. | ||
| She is a former CIA analyst. | ||
| And she was instrumental. | ||
| Interestingly, she has a history with Trump. | ||
| She was instrumental. | ||
| She was one of the handful of National Security Democrats in the House who had been resistant to pursuing impeachment. | ||
| We're talking about the first Trump impeachment back in 2019, early 2020. | ||
| But at one point, they all came together and wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. | ||
| These are the National Security Democrats. | ||
| Alyssa Slotkin was one of them. | ||
| Said that we now believe it's in the national interest to pursue impeachment against Donald Trump. | ||
| Remember, this was the issue pertaining to Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| This was the famous phone call between President Trump and Zelensky where there are allegations that President Trump was withholding Ukraine funding. | ||
| It's kind of a full circle moment now that we're once again dealing with Zelensky and Ukraine. | ||
| But that's sort of Alyssa Slotkin's background. | ||
| She's an interesting choice, and I think people should tune in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What makes for a good response? | |
| How high or low is the bar here? | ||
| Well, that's a funny question because there's an ongoing joke on Capitol Hill that delivering the response to the State of the Union is oftentimes the worst possible job because there's so much potential to flub it. | ||
| You know, people often remember the times when people have whiffed at those responses. | ||
| Marco Rubio's infamous, you know, grabbing the glass of water off camera and then coming back on camera is one of the more memorable ones. | ||
| Of course, things turn out okay for Marco Rubio. | ||
| He's now Secretary of State. | ||
| But oftentimes these are not very memorable speeches unless you have a major flub like the Marco Rubio incident. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The week ahead in Congress is our topic. | |
| And again, that joint address, a major component of the week ahead here on Capitol Hill, all eyes on Washington on Tuesday night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Scott, one with us for this conversation this morning. | |
| Phone numbers for you to join the conversation. | ||
| 202748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| Republicans, 202748-8001. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Independents, 202748-8002. | |
| As folks are calling in, give us an update on where we are on funding the government past March 14th. | ||
| We saw Speaker of the House Mike Johnson appear on our network, Meet the Press at NBC, over the weekend. | ||
| He said that Republicans want to push forward on a full year CR that would carry the government, fund the government through at current funding levels through the fiscal year, which would bring us to September 30th. | ||
| The deadline is less than two weeks away, March 14th. | ||
| And so government funding will run out. | ||
| We are at a risk of a shutdown. | ||
| The two sides, Democrats and Republicans, are still far apart on any sort of top-line numbers. | ||
| Democrats' line in the last many days has been, well, Republicans, you control the entirety of the federal government. | ||
| You guys should figure out how to fund the government. | ||
| Obviously, given what we know about the breakdown of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson can only afford one, maybe two defections at most on any vote. | ||
| We know that there are at least two Republicans who oppose any sort of short-term stopgap funding that we call a CR. | ||
| And so the math becomes very difficult. | ||
| Mike Johnson will almost certainly need Democrats to come to the table and help him pass any sort of funding bill to avert a shutdown on March 14th. | ||
| And so we're in this very tricky, precarious situation. | ||
| Once again, staring down a potential shutdown in just a couple weeks. | ||
| Should the idea of a full year resolution really be that hard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, we're only talking about seven months. | |
| We're five months into the fiscal year now. | ||
| So when we say full year, we're only talking about a seven year old. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a full year. | ||
| You know, Congress is notorious for kicking the can down the road with the short-term funding resolutions that we call CRs. | ||
| And this case is no different. | ||
| And so what Johnson has said over the weekend is that, look, we will, this is what he said last year as well. | ||
| We're not going to do any more CRs. | ||
| You know, CRs are horrible for the country. | ||
| It doesn't allow the country to plan ahead. | ||
| And yet we're in this exact same situation, more CRs. | ||
| Explain what Democrats will be looking for here in the next couple weeks as we come up to this government funding deadline. | ||
| And so what leverage do they have for what they're looking for? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How can they get something out of this? | |
| What some of them want is a promise written into this resolution saying that the money that Congress appropriates, remember Congress has the power of the purse, will be spent by the executive branch, by the Trump administration. | ||
| Normally, that's not a big issue. | ||
| Normally, that's the way it does work. | ||
| But in this case, Congress appropriated money, and Trump has said that, you know, we're trying to scale back the size of government. | ||
| I've created this Doge department with Elon Musk at its head. | ||
| And we are cutting spending even though Congress has appropriated this money. | ||
| This is where you're seeing a clash of separation of powers, except for the fact that Republicans control the United States Congress, the legislative branch, and the Congress, the GOP-controlled Congress, so far has said we're okay with what we've seen the Trump administration do and the Doge department do. | ||
| I want to get to this week in Doge, but let me give you some callers first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's several waiting. | |
| Brad, Fayetteville, Arkansas, Independent. | ||
| Good morning to you, sir. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's funny how Trump has fired hundreds of thousands of government employees who are just trying to put food on the table and feed their panels and pay the bills. | ||
| Meanwhile, the CIA, the DEA, and the DOD have no cuts whatsoever. | ||
| This is nothing but protection for the oligarchs and the plutocrats and the billionaires. | ||
| Trump should be ashamed of himself and the Republican Party should be ashamed of themselves. | ||
| This is nothing but a class war of the wealthy against average Americans trying to make it to another day. | ||
| That's Brad in Arkansas. | ||
| On some of the cuts that he's talking about, DOD in particular, he mentioned. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Has Doge reached the DOD or will they? | |
| They definitely will. | ||
| I don't know the specifics of, in large part, because Doge largely has operated in secret. | ||
| It has not, it is a strange, it's not even technically a department, even though they've called it a department. | ||
| It was not created by Congress. | ||
| It was created by President Trump. | ||
| And Elon Musk is not an elected official. | ||
| He was appointed by Trump. | ||
| And it's been interesting to watch how this so-called department has operated largely in secret behind the scenes with not many of its members known to the public, although people are slowly figuring out who these individuals are. | ||
| The caller is exactly right that DOD represents the largest portion of federal funding. | ||
| And Elon Musk has said that he will, if he hasn't already, that he will be targeting every federal agency, really, including the Department of Defense. | ||
| And those DOD workers have also been subject to that email saying, justify what you did last week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tell me five things that you did last week. | |
| A story from Fox that just came out earlier this morning, might have been last night. | ||
| Pete Hegset directing the Department of Defense civilian workers to comply with Elon Musk's Doge productivity email. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the DOD being impacted there, we'll see what happens this week. | |
| This is Douglas in Colorado. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Just want to say one thing. | ||
| With this budget that supposedly is coming out with big cuts to billionaires, and also it includes the corporate tax reduction from 34 to 21 percent. | ||
| Instead of cutting, why don't we increase the taxes on these people so the balance the budget is balanced? | ||
| Balanced budgets. | ||
| I'm not sure I have any comment on that one. | ||
| I will just say that you're going to hear a lot about this fight over Medicaid in the coming months. | ||
| And so what has happened in this reconciliation process and what we mean by reconciliation, just to revisit, I'm sure your callers and viewers have heard a lot about this term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always helpful to remind the project. | |
| Sure. | ||
| And as I think about it, I always think, okay, how can I explain this process to my 12-year-old daughter who's in middle school and learning about government? | ||
| And so what has happened is the Senate has passed their budget framework. | ||
| The House, just last week, passed their budget framework. | ||
| We thought it could fail, but it passed by just one vote to spare. | ||
| And basically, this is an outline. | ||
| It doesn't provide many details. | ||
| It provides some details, but not many. | ||
| And it directs the committees to then sort of fill out the details. | ||
| But we're not even at that step. | ||
| Mike Johnson, the speaker, has referred to this as the opening kick or the kickoff of a football game as he loves his football analogies. | ||
| And so what's happened now is that you have these two competing budget resolutions that have passed. | ||
| Trump has sided with the House one. | ||
| The House has quite a bit more in it. | ||
| It includes a debt ceiling increase as well as the extension of his 2017 Trump tax cuts, which is critically important for the President and his administration and Republicans. | ||
| They don't want to see taxes go up at the end of this year. | ||
| And so the two chambers now have to reconcile these competing frameworks. | ||
| And that will take place in the coming weeks. | ||
| At that point, once they figure out, okay, maybe the Senate makes some tweaks to the House one and they're both able to pass the same budget resolution, they have to pass the same one. | ||
| It has to look like, they have to be basically mirror images. | ||
| Then the committees will go ahead and start filling out the details of that framework. | ||
| And that's sort of where the rubber hits the road that we were talking about earlier. | ||
| You know, that's where we're going to start to see some major internal fights happening within the Republican Party over things like cuts to Medicaid, potentially other entitlements. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How long does that process take? | |
| I mean, are we going to be watching this play out all spring, summer, fall? | ||
| The answer is likely yes, at least all spring and potentially into the summer. | ||
| These things do take quite a while. | ||
| The challenge, of course, for the president and for Republicans who control Congress is the later that this seeps into the year, the harder it becomes, in part because you start thinking about reelection. | ||
| 2026 is around the corner. | ||
| People that are in tough elections start to get a little skeptical, a little worried about their seat. | ||
| We're seeing these town halls. | ||
| Now, these are town halls in sort of ruby red, deep red areas. | ||
| And you're seeing resistance to what's played out with these Doge cuts and also concerns about cuts to things like Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| And so as that pressure intensifies on Republicans, you potentially could see Republicans start to get a little wary and not want to vote. for this reconciliation package because they think it could cost them their reelection in 2026. | ||
| Loretta is waiting in Spring Hill, Florida. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Democrat. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Scott Wong. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I'm just wondering why the American people should let our government do the tax cuts of 2017 that Trump put in the first time again. | ||
| Why? | ||
| On each side of every party, independents, Republicans, Democrats, why is that acceptable to give the ultra-rich more tax breaks? | ||
| People need to stand up. | ||
| Tax cuts in Congress. | ||
| Trump and congressional leaders and the Republican Party would argue that they campaigned on renewing these tax cuts. | ||
| And this is a central message that you've heard every time there has been pushback to a Trump policy. | ||
| You have heard Republicans and the White House say, well, we campaigned on this. | ||
| We were very transparent with the American public. | ||
| We let them know what we were running on and what we would do if you put us into power in Washington. | ||
| And so they would argue that, you know, that this was a central tenet of their political campaign in 2024, renewing these 2017 tax cuts. | ||
| If nothing is done, if this reconciliation package fails, taxes will go up for Americans, including for the wealthiest Americans. | ||
| And so Republicans who are anti-tax don't want to see that happen. | ||
| They feel like they have a mandate to get this done because they ran on this very issue. | ||
| The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed in 2017. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why are they up in 2025? | |
| Well, they were only guaranteed for a certain number of years. | ||
| And so that very likely, if my memory serves correct, I mean, we should step back and go back to 2017 because this is the last time that we were in this exact situation. | ||
| President Trump had been elected in 2016. | ||
| Republicans had won the House and the Senate. | ||
| They owned the trifecta. | ||
| We're in a similar situation here in 2025 where Republicans control the entire government. | ||
| They're in a situation now where they can push through on a partisan basis their agenda through this reconciliation process that happened in early 2017 when they tried to repeal Obamacare. | ||
| You'll remember, John, because you were around, that that failed and by one vote, essentially it passed the House. | ||
| John McCain killed it with his thumbs down. | ||
| Later that year, they made another run through reconciliation and were successful in passing the Trump tax cuts. | ||
| They only went for a certain number of years. | ||
| That's why they are going to expire at the end of this year. | ||
| And so Republicans are once again dealing with this tax issue in reconciliation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If we're walking down memory lane here, then remind viewers what happened in the 2018 election. | |
| Yeah, I mean, there was backlash to efforts to repeal Obamacare. | ||
| There were town hall protests. | ||
| There was backlash to the Trump tax cuts. | ||
| Democrats position this as a tax cut for the wealthy. | ||
| They're doing the same thing here with the renewal of these tax cuts, saying that Republicans are only looking out for the special interests of the wealthiest Americans in our country and therefore want to raise cut taxes on the backs of working class Americans. | ||
| The Republicans' challenge here is that they will have to figure out how to pay for this massive tax cut. | ||
| Basically, the reconciliation budget that the House has passed states that they need to find cuts worth $1.5 trillion, John. | ||
| And the biggest portion of those cuts will have to come from the Energy and Commerce Committee. | ||
| What's interesting about Energy and Commerce is that Energy and Commerce oversees Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| And so to have this number, $880 billion, that the budget lays out and says ENC has to find cuts from, the House has to find cuts from the ENC committee, that is why you're seeing Democrats say, okay, if you're going to cut that much out of ENC, where is that going to come from? | ||
| It very likely will come from Medicaid, potentially Medicare. | ||
| President Trump and the Republicans have said, no, we're not touching your benefits at all. | ||
| What we're going to target is waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| And so what does waste, fraud, and abuse mean? | ||
| That's really sort of this gray area of what does waste, fraud, and abuse mean? | ||
| Where will those cuts come from? | ||
| Who will be impacted by those cuts? | ||
| And I was just going back to the numbers in the House in the 2018 House Democrats gained 40 seats in the 2018 election and took control of the House of Representatives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just a walk back to not too long ago. | |
| This is Cindy in Washington State Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I'm calling about the meeting with Ukraine and Trump in the Oval Office. | ||
| And, you know, Zelensky and Trump had an agreement, and Zelensky flew here to sign the agreement. | ||
| Zelensky met with Senator Chris Murphy just prior to the meeting with Trump. | ||
| He sabotaged the signing of that agreement, then set out to say Trump and JD ambushed Zelensky. | ||
| Zelensky and Murphy ambushed Trump. | ||
| Scott Wong. | ||
| Thoughts? | ||
| Well, I think that that meeting is in the eye of the beholder. | ||
| If you are a fervent supporter of President Trump, you find blame with Zelensky, that he blew up the deal. | ||
| Clearly, Zelensky had intentions of making a deal, flying all the way from Kyiv to Washington to meet with the President of the United States and the Vice President, as well as a number of senators in the run-up to that Oval Office meeting. | ||
| And so Democrats and critics of President Trump would say that President Trump and JD attacked Zelensky in the middle of that meeting and in front of all of those television cameras. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think most members of Congress were either home or on their way home on Friday when that all went down in the Oval Office. | |
| So you're going to get senators back today at 3 p.m. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The House is back at noon. | |
| You're up there talking to these members all the time. | ||
| Who are you most interested in going up and asking a question about what happened on Friday to what member of Congress? | ||
| I think certainly the Republicans who have in the past been supportive of Zelensky and Ukraine in this war against Russia. | ||
| You know, I think the loyal Republican supporters of President Trump, we sort of know what they're going to say. | ||
| Certainly there are Democrats up there who have taken a real interest in this Ukraine-Russian war, and I do want to hear from them. | ||
| People like Mark Kelly of Arizona, who said over the weekend that he was actually in one of those meetings with Zelensky just hours before the now infamous Oval Office meeting. | ||
| What Mark Kelly said over the weekend was that this was America at its lowest point, that it showed that America is, it showed American weakness, that it really undermined America's standing in the world, and he called it, quote, a dumpster fire of diplomacy. |