Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest, the greatest Gab Fest in the history of the Earth edition.

For December 23rd, 2011, I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate.

I'm alone in Washington, D.C.

John Dickerson has fled. He's fled Washington for the safer confines of somewhere in the Midwest, John.

No, I'm in the South. I'm in Tennessee. Does Tennessee the South? I guess it is the South. It's a border state. Come on.

All right. You're in the South. John Dickerson, Slate's chief political

correspondent and political director for CBS News was there. And then joining us as ever from New Haven is

the inimitable Emily Bazelon Slate senior editor. So no one will try to imitate you, Emily.

Few. I'm so relieved. It's a problem, usually. We are going to, didn't you have a fake, wasn't there a fake Emily Bazelon on Twitter? So someone did try to imitate you? Yes. So apparently you are imitable. Yeah. It didn't go that well. Remember it was like posts about the goddess Demeter? Oh. Huh. She's a good goddess. She's a pretty good goddess as goddesses go. So you could do worse than having a fake Emily Bazelon better than posting about like, you know, Aphrodite or something. True. So we're going to have three topics today. We're going to talk about the payroll tax standoff in Congress. We're going to talk about the state of the Iowa race as we approach the caucuses in the fall of

Newt Gingrich this week. And we will talk about more Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich's views about

the role of judges, according to the Constitution, what is the proper

balance of our three branches of government? And we'll have cocktail chatter, of course.

So as we tape today on Thursday afternoon, the House and Senate and the White House are in

a kind of standoff where the Senate has passed a form of a payroll tax extension, unemployment benefit extension, Medicare payment extension with a huge bipartisan majority.

The president wants to sign that two-month extension.

The House Republicans have kibosh this deal passed their own one-year extension of these

same things with different ways to pay it off. There is now a furious battle about whether the House

Republicans will retreat and adopt the version that was passed by the Senate and that the president endorses.

John, can you explain a little bit the political battle that's happening here and what's likely to come of it?

Yeah, well, it's basically a replay, chapter four or five, depending on how you want to count, of the battle

we've been having all year with the debate between spending reductions and tax cuts and

or tax increases. And so this was an extension of unemployment insurance and extension of the

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