Susan Page knows all about politics.

She does it every day.

Award winning Washington Bureau Chief of USA Today, bestselling author with a brand new book out. We'll talk about the queen and the presidents, the hidden hand, the shaped American history. Susan, welcome back. Hey, Brian, it's great to be back with you on your great show. Oh, great. So thank you for saying that. First off on what's going on. Have you ever seen

two back-to-back shutdowns, lockouts, unfunding problems that we had in the fall, and now we had in

the winter that's bleeding into the spring? This shutdown of DHS, the partial shutdown,

sets a record every single day. It's already the longest on record.

And I got to say, even though the Senate has managed to patch something together, I don't think there's, I think no one in Washington has any confidence that we are, see a light at the end of this tunnel.

But it's a partial shutdown.

It's not not funding all of DHS. It's just ICE and Border Patrol, right?

Yes. And, you know, the fact that it's a partial shutdown and we don't have social security checks in danger and the whole government isn't at risk.

I think it's one reason that keeps the dispute keeps trailing on and on and on because it doesn't really

hit home except for the TSA. And if we begin to see problems again with those incredibly

long lines at airports, that is what I think might put pressure on Congress to finally pass something.

So do you believe that any speaker would be able to, period,

and through time through who you've worked with, be able to deal with this slimma majority

and get things like this passed? Well, it's definitely a tough task. I mean, the majority could

not be narrower. Now, I will say that Nancy Pelosi did have a very

disciplined caucus when she was speaker, sometimes with a narrow majority, but not one as narrow as

this. So definitely, you've got to feel for Mike Johnson every day getting up trying to hold his people

together. And as we're hurtling toward the

November midterms, which has, believe me, the focus of every member of Congress.

So that's who we're at right now. And the other big story is the Virginia story. They passed

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