Hello and welcome to the Punch Bull News Reback Podcast. I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen,

and today I'm joined by Laura Weiss, one of our co-authors of the vault, and someone who's covering

all things House of Representatives for Punch Bull News. Laura, thanks so much for joining me. How you doing?

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Max.

I'm all right. It's busy times here in the Capitol as we were talking about.

It's always busy. And it's especially busy in terms of news this week with the shutdown.

And that's what we're talking about right now is how the House and Senate are reacting to the ongoing government shutdown.

It started October 1st. It's showing no signs of letting up.

And I really want to hear your take on what the House is doing because as everyone knows, the House is on recess.

It's been on recess for a long time.

Mike Johnson announced late last week that they will remain on recess for the coming week.

Meanwhile, the Senate's in. But Laura, tell us about your take on what you're viewing in the

house. And is there a way out of the shutdown? Yeah, so it's been a really interesting shutdown in the house because the house has just been gone.

They haven't voted since the shutdown began.

They haven't been formally in Washington since the shutdown began.

So this week, like, it was so interesting.

It almost felt like every single day was a repeat of the day, but with different breaking news.

It was just like Mike Johnson would do his press conference, and he had some different guests.

And, you know, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, would do his press conference.

And the rest of the day was, you know, maybe doing the pro forma's where they

kind of just have a member gavel and gavel out the way they need to do it when the house is out

of session and just kind of eerily empty over on the house side. There were, though, some members

...