Welcome to a very special bomb-let edition of bombshell. I am Lauren D. Young-Schelman. I'm Roda Iagar.

And I'm a very croaky Aaron Simpson. And we are here recording on Wednesday after the election.

We usually record on Sundays, but decided to, instead of just guessing wrong on everything

that was going to happen, to wait until after the election, to talk a little bit about what

the 2018 election means for foreign policy and national security. We do not typically

talk about Congress because they have their own problems and we've got enough to mess with in terms

of the executive branch. But shockingly, perhaps shockingly to Congress, they should and can play a

pretty big role in both the defense and national security and foreign policy and also

trade space. So we wanted to do a couple of things in this short episode. First, give a quick

overview of who's who in the brand new zoo, particularly on the House side. Secondly, to talk about

what the election means for defense spending, defense budgeting.

And then lastly, just talk about oversight more broadly.

Oversight's a bit of a foreign concept in Congress these days, but we'll see what they do this time around,

you know, from the AUMF to trade to sanctions that Congress could, in this instance, with a changeover in party, play a pretty significant role.

So, starting up at the top, looking at our results, Erin, who is this new Congress? Who are we welcoming to our fair

city? Well, that's a good question. As I think everyone probably knows by now, the Democrats

took the House last night and we'll have the new

majority there. The Republicans held on in the Senate and in fact actually gained some seats,

and we'll talk about that here in a second. Of the many seats that the Democrats flipped, and a lot of those were in districts that Hillary Clinton won in 2016,

there's actually quite a few veterans, but actually quite a few national security alumni

from a variety of agencies.

So we have Mickey Cheryl out of New Jersey along with Tom Allenowski.

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