Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by Senator Chris Coons at the great state of Delaware. We are speaking on Friday at 11-15-ish.

I'm time stamping this because by the time this comes out, I don't know what's going to be happening with the government shutdown.

It does appear, Senator, that there will be at least a brief shutdown. But real progress has been made, I would say,

even in the past 10 minutes, where we've seen Lindsey Graham drop some of his most notable

objections to a deal. He's got some other objections. But walk us quickly through the state of play.

And can you, you know, there's obviously some Democrat liberals out there who

are upset. What you're doing essentially is a short-term extension of current DHS funding to continue

to talk about reforms to ICE. They wanted a reform is just right off the back. Can you address

those criticisms?

So thanks, Sam. Thanks for a chance to be on. And thanks for a chance to talk this through,

because this is where the translation from a slogan to a statute requires some understanding of the process and the details. What I hope and think we are teed up to do today

is what the Democratic caucus unanimously agreed on when we met earlier this week. Every one of us

voted against funding six major departments of the federal government, including like HHS,

which does a lot of important health care work,

Department of Education, Department of Housing, Department of Transportation, and DHS. So every one of us stood and voted against that and then forced the White House to negotiate directly with Chuck Schumer,

and they came to an agreement to meet our

demand that Homeland Security be peeled off and then given a two-week extension to negotiate

the specifics of statutory constraints on ICE and CBP agents. Meanwhile, we pass the other five.

So let me talk to each of those.

Pass the other five. Why does that matter? I'm an appropriator. We have worked for months.

Tammy Baldwin has secured big wins in terms of rejecting Trump's cuts to NIH and CDC and NSF and AmeriCorps and a whole lot of other things

Democrats care about without having to accept Republican policy poison pills.

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