| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Middle and high school students join C-SPAN as we celebrate America's 250th anniversary during our 2026 C-SPAN Student Cam video documentary competition. | |
| This year's theme is exploring the American story through the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| We're asking students to create a five to six minute documentary that answers one of two questions. | ||
| What's the Declaration's influence on a key moment from America's 250-year history? | ||
| Or how have its values touched on a contemporary issue that's impacting you or your community? | ||
| We encourage all students to participate, regardless of prior filmmaking experience. | ||
| Consider interviewing topical experts and explore a variety of viewpoints around your chosen issue. | ||
| Students should also include clips of related C-SPAN footage, which are easy to download on our website, studentcam.org. | ||
| C-SPAN Student Cam Competition awards $100,000 in total cash prizes to students and teachers and $5,000 for the grand prize winner. | ||
| Entries must be received before January 20th, 2026. | ||
| For competition rules, tips, or just how to get started, visit our website at studentcam.org. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We are in open forum, so we will get to your call shortly. | ||
| You can keep calling in, but hold the line because we've got Eleanor Mueller in. | ||
| She's a congressional reporter from Semaphore. | ||
| We're going to talk about what's going on in Congress. | ||
| Eleanor, welcome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| So what's going on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great question. | |
| We had the Senate in session last night and they advanced a bill that would that we're moving towards reopening the government. | ||
| So refresh us on what happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I was there for about 12 hours yesterday on a Sunday. | |
| Good times. | ||
| And the senators had a big breakthrough on this bipartisan deal. | ||
| It's the same bipartisan deal that we've been talking about for weeks, but I think that there was a group of eight senators who caucused with Democrats, Angus King, an independent is one of them, who decided that this has gone on long enough and that this is something that they need to accept. | ||
| They got a few additional wins. | ||
| You know, Senator Kaine of Virginia negotiated some protections for federal workers who were laid off as part of this continuing resolution. | ||
| And then that's what wound up advancing late last night. | ||
| So exactly eight Democrats, exactly the number that they need. | ||
| And we'll take the rest of the votes at some point this week. | ||
| And what did they say about why they switched now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They, Senator Shaheen, who was one of the key architects of this deal. | |
| You know, she's retiring after this term. | ||
| She said last night while the vote was still open, they saw this as the only deal on the table. | ||
| You know, they're taking a lot of heat from other Democrats in the Senate, other Democrats in the House, Democrats on the campaign trail. | ||
| But her point was we weren't going to get anything else out of Republicans out of President Trump. | ||
| And so we have to just move forward with what we feel is what's up for offer right now. | ||
| Now, the narrative before this was that the election on Tuesday was giving a lot of momentum to Democrats and that this gave them the impetus to hold on and to keep waiting for a better deal on the ACA. | ||
| They did not get that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We heard that last night a lot from some of these progressives who are upset about the deal. | |
| You know, Senator Bernie Sanders said repeatedly, Tuesday was about Americans wanting us to push back on Trumpism. | ||
| Agreeing to this deal is doing the opposite. | ||
| It's greenlighting Trump, it's greenlighting his agenda. | ||
| And we've seen similar arguments now from even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, you know, really senior leaders who say that it was a mistake to take this deal and walk away with it. | ||
| So what is facing minority leader Schumer now? | ||
| Because it seems that he's had he kind of gone along with it like he did in March and said, no, we need to be the adult in the room and we need to keep the government open, he would have gotten a lot of pushback and a lot of anger. | ||
| He's getting that anger now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you kind of can't win if you're Chuck Schumer. | |
| You know, he voted for a bipartisan funding deal earlier this year. | ||
| He took a lot of flag. | ||
| He voted against it this time. | ||
| He's still taking a lot of flag for not, people are saying keeping his caucus aligned. | ||
| There's not a ton he could have done, right? | ||
| I mean, these and the Senate especially members have minds of their own. | ||
| And if these centrists wanted to take it upon themselves to say that enough is enough, we've got the longest government shutdown in history. | ||
| We have a Republican-controlled House, Senate, White House. | ||
| We're not going to be able to push them too far to our side. | ||
| We just have to move on. | ||
| Then there's not a ton that he can do about that. | ||
| So now what happens on the House side? | ||
| Has Speaker Johnson officially called the House members back to Washington? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this is the million dollar question at this point. | |
| Johnson has not called members back to Washington yet. | ||
| You know, obviously we're seeing travel delays across the country, so it's going to take them a while to get here once he does. | ||
| But he did say last night that instead of giving them 48 hours notice, he's giving them 36 hours notice. | ||
| Well, that 36 has not started yet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Has not started. | |
| And we don't know when it's going to start. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We don't know when it's going to start. | |
| They're having a call this morning at 11 a.m. | ||
| So I think we'll hear more then. | ||
| He's also doing a press conference at 10. | ||
| So both of those things should give us a little more insight into what the game plan is. | ||
| The holdup is that we don't have a time agreement yet in the Senate. | ||
| So it could take them a day. | ||
| It could take them several days, depending on whether or not some senator, whether a Democrat or Rand Paul, who has issues with some of the hemp provisions, decides to hold things up. | ||
| Now, explain that part as far as holding things up. | ||
| How does a senator do that and how long can they go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So to secure expedited consideration of something in the Senate, you need every single senator to implicitly be okay with it because just one of them can object and then force them to move through the entire lengthy Senate process of conserving a bill. | |
| So they'd get there eventually. | ||
| And that's what could it take? | ||
| It could take, I think, four days, if I'm not mistaken, is how long it could take. | ||
| So the earliest we're looking at is about Wednesday with that 36-hour notice. | ||
| Latest could be, you know, this weekend into next week. | ||
| But again, I think that a lot of the senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was saying this last night, accept that this, even though they don't like it, is the inevitable outcome. | ||
| And so at that point, are you really going to withhold federal workers' paychecks, children, food aid benefits? | ||
| Or are you just going to say, you know, we're going to do what we can from now on and move on? | ||
| No, once the House gets back into session, you know, the critics of Speaker Johnson have said that he's trying to hold the House out of session so that he doesn't have to swear in Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, thereby triggering the discharge petition on the Epstein files. | ||
| So what happens with that now that the House has to come back? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said repeatedly that when they are back, he will swear in, replac Grijalva. | |
| So he'll have to do that as soon as they come back to Washington this week. | ||
| That will then almost immediately trigger that discharge petition. | ||
| Now, House Republican leaders do have the option to change the House rules to still prevent that bill from getting a vote on the floor despite the discharge petition. | ||
| Johnson has signaled at least that he's not going to do that. | ||
| I think this week we find out whether or not he means it. | ||
| And the CR will go to the end of January. | ||
| What happens at the end of January? | ||
| Could this all happen all over again and the government shut down again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the deal is three full year bipartisan appropriations bills, one extension of all other funding levels through January 30th. | |
| That's that continuing resolution. | ||
| That's what includes the protections for federal workers. | ||
| And then separately, this promise of a vote by mid-December on a bill that the Democrats have approved on these enhanced health care subsidies. | ||
| That was what we saw some of the Democrats who helped craft this deal say last night: hey, January 30th, if we don't have what we want from Republicans on health care, we'll have the option to do this again. | ||
| Of course, the impact will be restricted because they'll have these full year's appropriations bills in place, but they could still press them in the same way that they have been for the last month or so. | ||
| Do you know anything about where you think the vote's going to go, that the ACA extension vote in the Senate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that that's that is, yeah, it's a fantastic question. | |
| I mean, we don't even know what the We'll leave this here and take you live to Capitol Hill now, where the U.S. House is about to gavel in for what we expect to be a brief session today. | ||
| No votes are scheduled on this 41st day of the government shutdown. | ||
| This is live coverage on C-SPAN. |