Welcome back to a special Friday dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by Steve Hayes.

And this week we are talking to Mick Mulvaney. He was elected to Congress in 2010, became a founding member of the Freedom Caucus.

Once Donald Trump was elected, he served as director of the OMB and then the acting chief of staff from 2019 to March 31, 2020.

From there, he became the special envoy to Northern Ireland until he resigned following the events of January 6, saying,

we didn't sign up for what you saw last night. It's going to be an interesting conversation.

Let's dive right in. Mick Mulvaney, thank you for joining us. The Biden administration has rolled out a $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

What advice would you give to Ron Claim your successor if they actually want to get this done?

Well, they're going to get it done. I mean, they've figured out a way and I think it's probably legal to do it with a new version of reconciliation.

So they'll be able to do with 50 votes in the Senate and notwithstanding the objections of folks like Joe Manchin,

they'll find enough money for West Virginia to get that vote and they'll get it passed.

So I don't think I need to give Ron any advice. He knows exactly what they are doing.

Whether or not it's a good idea is an interesting discussion, but they're certainly going to get it done.

Someone asked me the other day, they went down the list of all the things that were in the bill and they asked

how much of these things actually come along. I'm like, I think probably most of them.

When you're willing to run a government as if you have an overwhelming majority in a mandate,

when you only have a 50-50 split in the Senate, there's almost nothing you can't do.

When it came to the American Recovery Act, Republicans didn't really message against it. They voted against it,

but they didn't hit the airway. They didn't do what they did with Obamacare,

really driving down the popularity of the legislation and the accomplishment.

It's self, instead, there was a lot of Dr. Seuss talk and some culture war stuff that they focused on during that time.

We're seeing Mitch McConnell and others come out and say that they want to make the point that,

what was it that McCarthy said? Only 6% of the money is actually going to go to roads and bridges.

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