Hello and welcome to the Punchful News Readback Podcast.

I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen, and this week I'm joined by Laura Weiss

with some exciting tales to tell about the shutdown fight in the Senate.

Now, full disclosure, this is Friday evening.

The Senate is about to start voting on the shutdown

averting measure. So I'm sure when this is out, it's already happened, but just like,

you know, it has not happened yet here in Readback World. But we're here to talk about all of the

action leading up to what was a really dramatic week in the Senate with regards to DHS funding, with regards to Arctic Frost provisions and everything in between. Before I do that, let me just welcome. Laura, Laura, thanks so much for joining me. How you doing? I'm good. Thanks for having me, Max. It's always great to have you on. Of course, no Eagles talk this time. So you got to get that out of the way early.

I don't bring up these painful memories, okay?

I'm done for a couple of weeks.

I need a couple weeks off.

I know.

That was me to me to bring up so early, but it was like ripping off the Band-Dade.

Anyway, you were in the Capitol late Thursday night for one of the Senate's classic long days.

And this was all about trying to avoid a shutdown, which really was prompted by the federal

agent shooting of Alex Pred in Minneapolis.

Over the weekend, senators, especially Democrats,

were really unhappy about these scenes and said, we cannot fund DHS in the way these bills

are written unless this was negotiated. And I want to ask you about how the week started because,

you know, heading into this week, it didn't really look like a shutdown was going to happen.

You know, Democrats in the House largely voted against the DHS bill.

But because in the Senate it was all packaged together with the other minibus, everyone thought, okay, this is going to pass.

...