Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast.

We are, this is, I guess, this is the second episode of the Biden administration week flies by.

I've lost all sense of time but in last week's episode we were recording just I think about two hours two or three hours after

the new president had been sworn in we are now a weekend

It's hard to say if things are you know are things different than one would have

thought are they more eventful or are they less eventful I think it's's about what I would have expected. We have to me the very

expected prospect of Senate Republicans quickly kind of shaking off the whole insurrection thing and deciding we need,

you know, kind of no harm, no foul, we're not dead, let's move on.

And you had this standoff, kind of very ornate and notional standoff in the organization of the Senate. And let's back up a bit to just explain what that means.

Basically, each Congress lasts for two years, right?

They said, I don't even know what number we're on. It's like the

120th Congress, I can't remember. In any case, and at the beginning of each of

those, each body, but it's more important in the Senate tends to be because the rules are a little, a little more complicated,

does an organizing resolution.

And that's basically kind of like coming up with a

constitution for the Senate for the next two years here are the rules that we're going to do

and you pass it and and in most cases that is just taking the rules from the last Congress,

just voting on them again and moving ahead.

Where it sometimes gets a little more dicey

is you have to decide how many seats does the minority have on each on each

committee and how many seats does the majority have now that should be in general, it should be proportional to how many seats they

have, but the math has never exact, right? So there's a little fiddling there. But in this case you had this, almost like a, almost like a shadow

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