Scott Wong breaks down the 2026 C-SPAN Student Cam competition ($100K prizes, Jan. 20 deadline) before diving into Capitol Hill’s ACA subsidy standoff—Gene Shaheen’s three-year extension clashes with GOP hardliners like Bill Cassidy and Rick Scott, who push for HSAs tied to Trump’s past proposals. Bipartisan talks hint at income caps or shorter renewals, while Problem Solvers’ Brian Fitzpatrick threatens a discharge petition by Dec. 31. Speaker Mike Johnson’s grip weakens as Greene and Mace revolt against leadership-backed bills like the NIL regulation, sparking no-confidence murmurs. Callers blame Biden for inflation, but Wong notes Republicans’ broader focus on affordability, while Greene’s 60 Minutes interview reveals MAGA fractures—colleagues’ shifting loyalty and her "America First" pivot—undermining Trump’s poll rebound despite his price-cutting push. [Automatically generated summary]
Whether or not that results in some kind of extension for these critical ACA subsidies for millions and millions of Americans is an entirely different question.
This is really crunch time for Congress.
They're here for two more weeks, as you mentioned, before they depart for the holiday recess.
This week will be an extremely critical week because we are going to see Democrats and Republicans in the Senate taking a critical vote on extending these ACA subsidies for three years.
A clean bill, nothing attached to it, just a clean vote on extension.
You'll remember this is part of a deal that was negotiated by Gene Shaheen, Democrat from New Hampshire, with the Republican leadership in order to reopen the government during that government shutdown.
They're giving them a vote.
One thing we're also watching is whether or not there's some kind of Republican counterproposal that will be, you know, going in tandem with this Democratic proposal, whether or not John Thune decides to bring that to a vote in a side-by-side vote.
So we're looking for Senate Republicans to perhaps bring a version of their own bill to potentially extend the ACA subsidies, make a replacement for that.
Obviously, House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that he will unveil a Republican plan.
We haven't seen the Speaker's plan or the Speaker endorse plan yet.
We expect to in the coming days.
On the Senate side, we have seen some proposals.
Now, most Republicans, especially the conservatives, don't want to extend the ACA subsidies at all.
They think that this was something created by the Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Democrats pushed that through on a party line vote.
They renewed it during the Inflation Reduction Act.
And so now we're in this situation.
Republicans say, well, this is Democratic created.
They should be the ones to solve this problem themselves.
Senators Bill Cassidy and Rick Scott, both Republicans, have floated proposals to sort of replace these subsidies with direct payments to health savings accounts.
These are some of the ideas that are floating out there.
These are some ideas that possibly could get a vote in the Senate in the side-by-side that we were talking about earlier.
And those would mirror requests from Donald Trump basically to create a sort of HSA account for Americans, replacing that ACA subsidies, something that Democrats have not really talked about in a serious way.
Really, they want to try to extend those in a clean fashion.
I wonder, you know, there are bipartisan talks happening on the rank and file level.
You talked about Bill Cassidy.
You talked about Rick Scott.
Are there conversations happening on the leader-to-leader level between Chuck Schumer and John Thune, between House Speaker Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries on the Democrat side?
The leaders do speak from time to time on various issues, whether it's national security or things like reopening the government.
We haven't seen any formal sort of talks when it comes to health care.
Now, on the House side, there are numerous bipartisan talks happening, mostly among the Centrist, vulnerable, at-risk members who have tough elections heading into 2026.
Jen Kiggins is teaming up with Josh Gottheimer and Democrats in a group of about three dozen who unveiled a framework to try to renew these ACA subsidies for two years, but with a bunch of caveats, things like income caps and other provisions that would sort of restrict the number of people who would be eligible for these ACA subsidies.
So those talks are continuing.
Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the leaders of the problem solvers, this bipartisan group, the problem solvers, has put forward, is planning to put forward his own plan in the same vein to try to extend these subsidies.
He says, look, if we don't get a vote by the end of this year, when the subsidies expire December 31st, I could force a vote through a discharge petition similar to what we saw just a couple weeks ago with the Epstein files and how that vote was forced to the floor and how everyone was forced to go on record on the Epstein files.
I want to get into the discharge petition mania happening on Capitol Hill in a bit, but first I want to invite our viewers to join in on that conversation.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
I mean, Scott, just to kind of button this up on health care and affordability, that's what this conversation is about, right?
How to make the country more affordable for more Americans.
There was an article from NBC earlier this week.
The headline was, people aren't done.
Dumb.
Republicans worry that they're not doing enough on affordability, where your colleagues quoted a number of lawmakers who say that midterm messaging is underway.
It fits in with this narrative on whether or not health care prices will spike.
It fits in on whether or not things are affordable for Americans.
Is there a realization just among people on Capitol Hill right now that this is where the conversation is for a lot of Americans?
That piece that you referenced by some of my colleagues, they interviewed two dozen Republicans.
These are lawmakers, aides on Capitol Hill, strategists who said there is an acknowledgement that they are not doing well in terms of being able to message to voters, to the American public, that they are solving the affordability problem.
They acknowledge that they need to do more.
And they also say that, look, President Trump isn't helping by calling affordability a, quote, Democratic hoax, right?
We have heard that term from the President of the United States on several occasions.
Republicans on the Hill say that's simply not helpful for our cause.
They are trying to figure out how to tackle this.
Clearly, earlier today, you heard from a number of your callers who are saying, look, gas prices are down.
And that is true.
It has ticked down from a year ago.
It's about $2.95 a gallon based on AAA, down from about 302 a year ago.
So in some areas, yes, prices have come down, but in other areas, prices remain stubbornly high when it comes to groceries, meat specifically, other products that you buy in the grocery store.
And so it's a real challenge for Republicans who are in control of everything to try to implement policies that will actually have a real impact in bringing down a lot of those costs.
Turning to House Speaker Mike Johnson and how he's doing, especially after his bruising week last week, you wrote a piece.
The headline on NBC is, Speaker Johnson struggles to keep control of the House floor.
The Louisiana Republican has had a rough few weeks as rank-and-file Republicans discharge petitions to go around him and block a key leadership-backed bill on the floor.
Talk to us about what's going on.
Your opening line, I think, kind of says it all, but less than a year before the critical 2026 midterm elections, Speaker Johnson is losing control of the House floor.
I think this really was one of the worst weeks for the Speaker of the House since he became the leader of the House a little more than two years ago.
There are members of his own party in open revolt against him, specifically a handful of GOP women, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace, others.
In addition, a number of Republicans have either brought or are threatening to bring discharge petitions to the floor.
And you know this, what discharge petition is, is just a way for rank-and-file members to force a vote on any piece of legislation, especially legislation that the leadership doesn't want to come to the floor.
So we saw that successfully done with the Jeffrey Epstein files bill just a couple weeks ago.
Now Anna Paulina Luna has filed a discharge petition to force a vote to ban lawmakers and their family members from owning or selling or trading individual stocks.
Well, I will just say that one lawmaker I spoke to last week said that there are a number of very upset individuals in the Republican conference walking around Congress.
They're carrying grenades and they have the pin pulled out of the grenade.
I thought that was quite the image.
You're referring to the motion to vacate.
And these are sort of no confidence votes that we have seen from time to time.
One took out Speaker Kevin McCarthy, which led us to Speaker Johnson a couple years ago.
They have changed the rules so that one member cannot force a motion to vacate vote.
It can't just be a single member.
It now has to be nine members who have to sign a petition, and that then could trigger a vote.
So far, I'm not hearing that that's where things are headed.
Obviously, it would be disastrous for House Republicans in trying to preserve their very narrow majority if they had a big speaker fight in the middle of this midterm season.
And so I don't think that's where this is headed, but we have seen crazier things.
And on Twitter, excuse me, on X, the new name, we have from Jimbo Bakersfield, a California independent voter.
And he asks you, does Mr. Wong believe that Congress will be unable to pass another CR, so a continuing resolution, on January 30th, 2026, after people's health care insurance skyrockets in parentheses and Congress does nothing?
Well, we saw that the 43-day shutdown, the longest in history, was extremely disruptive.
There were a number of Democrats who thought that, you know, based on polls and other things, that that was actually a productive thing to shut down the government, that they felt the voters were on their side, that while there was significant pain felt in the federal government and among federal employees, that they had actually, you know, been able to stop President Trump and stand up to President Trump.
And so I think there probably are a handful of Democrats who would say, you know, we should do this again.
We have leverage, we can disrupt the administration.
But at the same time, that was extremely disruptive, not only to the economy and to the long airport lines that we saw, the people who were not getting paid, who were waiting in food lines.
There's a human cost and certainly an economic cost in the billions of dollars to shutting down the government.
I'm not sure that Democrats want to go there again and do that.
I think many of them feel that they've made their point and they feel like they have a win under their belt, a political win under their belt.
And so it's not something that I've heard many Democrats talking about, but it's certainly an option.
Scott from Georgia, a Republican, your line is open.
unidentified
Good morning.
Mr. Young, don't I mean, Mr. Young, don't you think that we are far too down the road with ACA to be making changes and not go ahead and approving the subsidies?
Any change we would make now, such as HSAs, that's not going to have any effect, a positive effect.
When you have medical costs, what they are, you know, you've got maintenance drugs at $30,000 a month, an HSA isn't going to solve that.
And there needs to be a comprehensive overhaul.
But the entire medical world has adjusted to ACA and has absorbed that.
And a last-minute change and just throwing away the subsidies, which are an integral part of the ACA, wouldn't work and would be disastrous.
There certainly is not enough time between now and the end of the year to see some sort of major overhaul to the ACA or Obamacare as we like to call it.
You know, Republicans have been trying to repeal, reform, replace Obamacare for the better part of 15 years.
Actually, I arrived on Capitol Hill as a reporter in 2010, right in the aftermath of the passage of Obamacare.
That's how long I've been around.
The Republicans have been at this a long time trying to do something.
Certainly they've been able to tweak things around the edges, but not a wholesale repeal and replace, as we saw with that disastrous effort during Trump's initial year in the White House, 2017, when we all remember John McCain and that infamous thumbs down vote that killed that repeal and replace effort.
And so this is going to be an issue, I believe, that will be kicked into 2026.
It is an issue that Democrats feel that they are on strong footing on in terms of a political issue that they can rally behind in the 2026 midterms.
But at the same time, the health care cliff that Democrats have been talking about is right around the corner here.
The more urgent issue is these ACA subsidies that impact virtually every person that is an enrollee in the ACA system, 24 million people.
And so that is that, and we're talking about costs that could double, triple.
You know, these are real dollars.
These are real lives that will be impacted.
And so that's why people are watching this so closely.
I watched many of my colleagues go from making fun of him, making fun of how he talks, making fun of me constantly for supporting him to when he won the primary in 2024, they all started, excuse my language, Leslie, kissing his ass and decided to put on a MAGA hat for the first time.
This break between Marjorie Taylor Green and President Trump has been one of the most fascinating to watch because she for a number of years has been his number one cheerleader on Capitol Hill.
In fact, whenever we would look for a lawmaker to defend President Trump on the Hill, we would often turn to her and she would be the voice for that.
This has been an extremely public break.
I assume that President Trump, if he had not watched that interview, I think he was at the Kennedy Center last night, but he eventually will see clips of this interview.
He has lashed out at Marjorie Taylor Green, calling her, of course, a traitor, which she said incited a number of threats against her, her family members, specifically her son.
She says that is one of the big driving reasons of why she decided she's going to resign her seat in January, a full year before her term is over.
Some of the things that jumped out at me, she described a phone call with President Trump where she said he was extremely angry with her and questioned why she was endorsing the release of these Epstein files and had signed that discharge petition.
She says that she brought up a number of these threats that she had been receiving and that Trump was not sympathetic to her concerns and what she was saying and her safety and her family's safety.
And Leslie Stahl asked Marjorie Taylor Greene, do you consider yourself MAGA?
Are you MAGA?
And she says, I am America First, sort of sidestepping the question of MAGA.
She says, MAGA is Trump's term.
I am America First.
That's interesting.
She's seeing a differentiation between MAGA and America First.
That's led a lot of people to speculate: is she going to run for president in 2028?
She certainly has a name ID.
She has a fundraising base.
She's popular to a certain segment of the population, certainly in the Republican Party.
She was asked that very question: Are you running for president?
She says, absolutely not.
She says, there's, quote, zero chance that I'll run for president.
We will see.
If that proves to be the case, people certainly have changed their minds.
And I don't think he would disagree with that characterization at all.
He sort of leans into that.
He embraces that sort of divisive position.
I would point out that the recent Gallup poll from last week pegged him at about 36%.
So he had been in recent polls in the 40s.
He's now dipping into the 30s.
That is extremely bad for a party in power, especially when they're trying to retain their majorities in the House and the Senate.
And so I think that is also what's driving some of these breaks with the president, very public and passionate breaks with the president from people like MTG, who say the president has deviated from this America First agenda that he campaigned on in 2024.
He said he was going to focus on Americans.
Why is he, in her words, why is he at the White House hosting the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?
Why is he having meetings, she said, with Zorhan Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York, a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist.
So she has said that he's essentially taken his eye off the ball, not focusing on domestic issues here at home, focused too much on issues abroad.
She says, you know, that's why we've, she and many other Republicans say that's why he's taken a hit in the polls.
And I think that is one of the big driving forces of why we're seeing a bunch of Republicans finally deciding to stand up to President Trump after years and years of being absolute loyalists.
unidentified
Ron from Pittsburgh, a Republican, you're next.
Hi.
I just wanted to ask more about, well, first, Margie Taylor Greene doesn't have much sway over members of Republican voters, over any Republican voters outside of her district.
She's not like an AOC or a Bernie Sanders.
I think she's more of a sideshow act right now that Democrats and the media are sort of seizing on, and maybe she's trying to set herself up for a very, very low-level elected position in the future.
But my real point today is that if they want to include those ACA subsidies again, why can't the Democrats offer some sort of budget cut elsewhere or at least acknowledge how terrible the trillion-plus dollars in debt will affect our country in the future?
It's often complicated for Congress to sort of pair one issue with another issue over here.
There are different committees involved.
Obviously, the Appropriations Committee, one of the most powerful, perhaps the most powerful in Congress that controls federal spending, is working, as we were discussing earlier, on a year-long, you know, fiscal year-long plan to fund the government for the rest of this 2026 fiscal year.
It's an interesting idea, certainly, that the caller raises, but I just think that given the time constraints, probably simplicity is better.
That's why we are seeing these offers by Democrats, these votes that we'll see later in the week on a clean extension.
Three years, obviously, is a non-starter with Republicans.
But it's an interesting idea that we're seeing from people like Brian Fitzpatrick, the problem solvers leader from Pennsylvania, who is saying, look, if we are right up against that deadline, I'm going to force a vote through discharge petition and get everybody on record because people in all of our districts are going to see major hikes in their premiums,
and that's unacceptable for me and many of my colleagues.
And so that will be interesting to see if he follows through with that threat and if we actually see not a three-year plan, but perhaps a two-year or a one-year plan or even shorter, just to buy Congress a little bit more time to make some progress on reforming health care.
Brian Fitzpatrick is an interesting congressman to watch because he seems very much so primed to buck both President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson in the coming months as we get closer to midterms.
I want to point to this another ex post that we got, a question for you from Sue B. Witting, New Jersey.
Are there any good ideas floating around on Capitol Hill to bring down health care costs for everyone, not just those enrolled in ACA?
Some people, such as myself, have also seen a steep increase in homeowners' insurance.
I mean, affordability, obviously, in general is top of mind.
The reason we're talking about health care, number one, because of the subsidies that are expiring in just, what, 23 days or so?
It's really, you know, we are really on the cusp of this.
But second, health care is such a large portion of just the costs that everyday Americans pay.
Everyone is impacted by health care.
Everyone has to go to the doctor, the dentist, the optometrist.
These are things that we are doing during the course of our year and just trying to keep ourselves healthy.
And so this affects every single American, and it's a big portion of our overall, our overall cost of living.
And so that's why there's so much focus on, you know, when it comes to affordability, on health care and trying to lower costs.
unidentified
John from Wisconsin and Independent, you're next.
Thanks for taking my call.
A couple of things here.
With a divisiveness between blue states and red states, and you were talking about earlier the price of gas, the price of gas here in Wisconsin has paid $2.59 a gallon to fill up.
In California, it's $5 a gallon.
The majority of the difference is state taxes because there are blue states and blue states tax higher on goods and services typically.
So that was my one comment.
And another comment on health insurance.
I have private health insurance through my retirement plan from my employer, which I'm extremely thankful for.
I retired early at 56 years old.
And my plan has gone up.
It's going to go up $50 a month this year.
It's been going up every year since I retired.
But the main thing with all of the inflation, price of food, is Biden and the inflation.
When he passed all those bills and inflation ticked up to 10%.
Right now, currently, the annual inflation is like 3%, which is about normal, 2.8%.
There's constantly inflation.
So, I mean, Trump's doing the best he can to try and bring prices down.
I just didn't know if you have any comment or anything to say about what I had to say.
I would just say that what the caller said is echoed by the President of the United States.
He has blamed a lot of these rising costs and inflation on President Biden.
However, Biden's in the rearview mirror.
He's the candidate from the last term.
He's not going to run for political office in the future.
So people that are looking to the future, people, number one, they always blame the president who's in the White House or the party in power.
Certainly we have seen that reflected in midterm elections and in a president's first midterm elections where we oftentimes, almost all the time, see the minority party, the opposition party, take power because of voters turning against the party in power.
It appears to be headed in that same direction for the 2026 midterms based on the polling, based on that very narrow, narrow majority that Speaker Johnson is holding on to just by three seats in the House of Representatives.
And so I'm not sure it's a wise strategy for Republicans to be looking in the rearview mirror and blaming Biden when voters are focused on the here and now and looking to the future.
I think C-SPAN is a huge, huge asset to America, not just the coverage that we get of both chambers on one and two, but programs like Washington Journal that allow policymakers, lawmakers, personalities to come on and have this question time during Washington Journal.
unidentified
So it's a huge benefit.
I hope that all these streaming services carry C-SPAN as well because it's an important service to the American people.
I'm actually thrilled that this time in Washington Journal, I'm getting a lot of really substantive questions from across the political aisle.
Our country would be a better place if every American just watched one hour a week.
They could pick one, two, or three.
Just one hour a week, and we'd all be a much better country.
Boston-based writer Doug Most's new book is called Launching Liberty, subtitled To Build the Ships That Took America to War.
Most, who spent 15 years at the Boston Globe, writes, and I quote: In total, American shipyards produced 2,710 Liberty ships in essentially four years, peaking in the spring and summer of 1943, when almost 800 ships were built in seven months.
A lot of the credit is given to Henry Kaiser, who produced half of all Liberty ships, 1,490.
By 1943, average time per ship was down to 42 days, the fastest month recorded.
Author Doug Most is currently working at Boston University.
unidentified
Author Doug Most with his book Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War.
On this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
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Next, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio give brief statements to reporters after their annual meeting of U.S. and Australian foreign and defense ministers.