from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, May 2nd.

The federal budget. Congress is taking that up now for the next federal fiscal year with

Medicaid and many other things in

play and Republicans in the House and Senate, not yet seeing eye to eye with each other, never mind

the Democrats. This conversation will touch on tariffs as well, which seem to have caused a shrinkage

in the economy in the first quarter of this year, the first shrinkage in a long time,

one more quarter like that, and it'll officially be a recession. And with me for this is semifor, congressional correspondent,

Kadiah Goba. Kadiah, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you for having me, Brian.

Let me actually start with an article of yours from about three weeks ago. April 10th,

you wrote, House Democrats are encountering a new obstacle as they try to drive a wedge within the

GOP on tariffs. Their potential Republican allies aren't moving in their direction. Is that still

the case after these numbers came out this week,

showing we're halfway to a recession?

Well, I think the point of the article was that Republicans have a little more leverage right now

in terms of where tariffs are and where their economy is.

So essentially, if you look at, I think any resistance towards Donald Trump is going to be based

around lack of likeability, which as you pointed out, is there's some

indication there in polling, but also how the economy evolves. And for me, it was about explaining

certain states in the country, your listeners probably know about the state and local tax deduction

argument and or battle right now.

I think those lawmakers have just a little more leverage in terms of going into these negotiations for reconciliation and increasing the salt cap because if their states are hit with, you know,

tariff prices or issues centered around tariffs, then that means that they won't have the support

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