Congress spent the week on yet another chaotic down-to-the-wire funding battle. So as we close out the week,

we turn tonight to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That's New York Times columnist David Brooks

and Jonathan Capehart, Associate Editor for the Washington Post. Jonathan, I'll start with you.

What's your assessment of the drama surrounding this government funding battle? Keeping the government funded is the basic function of Congress.

It should be this straightforward, non-controversial process, not the source of political brinksmanship, and yet.

And yet, non-controversial, I love that description because it hasn't been that way since Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House.

Look, you had Speaker Johnson negotiating in good faith if you listened to Congressional Democrats with them to come up with what we can now call Plan A.

It wasn't what Speaker Johnson had promised his caucus.

It was more than a thousand page bill, had lots of stuff in it.

But it kept the government open.

It got disasterated.

It did a bunch of things.

And what was it?

Monday?

Early in the morning, Elon Musk starts tweeting against it.

Then President-elect Donald Trump joins in.

You can't expect anything to get past

if you swoop in at the last minute and blow up the deal, and then blow up the second deal

by saying, oh, we should just eliminate the debt ceiling. When you've got people in your own

conference who ran on, you know, cutting the debt ceiling. When you've got people in your own conference who ran on,

on, you know, cutting the debt and things like that. And so what happened this week, to me,

was not surprising. What is surprising is that they actually got a deal done and they got it

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