Hello, everyone. My name is Chad Davis. My role at Cato is the Vice President for Government Affairs.

I lead federal, state, and external affairs here. I'm joined by my friend Pat Eddington. I'll let Pat introduce himself.

So I'm one of the senior fellows here

on staff. I work essentially issues at the nexus of the Bill of Rights and Security kind of writ large.

I'm a member of our criminal justice and constitutional studies team teams here at Cato, And so I wind up getting myself into an awful lot of trouble and an awful lot of issues as we kind of go along here.

But our topic today, of course, is we're getting very close to the end of September of 2025.

And at the end of September every year here in Washington, we go through this insane

ritual, and we have now for decades, of trying to keep the federal government open. And, you know,

there have been a lot of shutdowns that have happened since May of 1980. But the current occupant

of the White House, Donald Trump, holds the record for being

president during the longest shutdown. That, of course, happened during his first term between

December 22nd, 2018, and January 25th of 2019. That went on for 35 days. That's basically

what, over five weeks. Yeah, over basically five weeks. And, you know, back in that particular period of time, you know, one of the big issues was the so-called dreamers. Of course, it had to be immigration related. If there was going to be a shutdown back then, It was going to be immigration related almost certainly.

And there was a long, long shutdown, and Democrats essentially were digging in, trying to find a way to get some kind of protection for these folks known as dreamers.

And, you know, that shutdown petered out.

Now we have, you know, kind of in the new Trump term, a very radically different kind of environment. And maybe, Chad, you can help us, help our listeners kind of understand

how the political dynamics are so much different now than they were during his first term.

Yeah, but it's, uh, the issues are a little bit different.

There always seems to be some sort of issue that gets wrapped up into these debates.

This time around, it seems to be focused on health care.

There were some health care benefits.

I'm not an expert on the health care benefits, but I know that that's the focus politically at this point. And there were some that were rolled back recently in legislation. And now the two parties seem to have dug in on whether or not to restore this benefits. So the benefits were brought in during previous Democratic administrations.

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