Unity, Not Unanimity (with Heidi Heitkamp)

Hacks On Tap

News Commentary, News, Government, Politics

4.8 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2021

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, host of The Hot Dish podcast and co-founder and chair of the One Country Project, joins Axe and Gibbs to discuss the politics and strategy behind the COVID relief package negotiations, the intraparty tension over conspiracy theorists in the Republican party, and what Democrats must do to win back voters in red districts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, pull up a chair. It's ax on tap with David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and Mike Murphy.
0:14.7	He's happy to hear from them, but he also feels strongly about the need to make sure
0:27.4	the size of the package meets this moment. That was a new White House press secretary,
0:32.4	Jen Saki, Robert Gibbs, an old friend of ours yesterday. Love Jeff. Speaking about the
0:38.8	president's first meeting with members of the Congress at the White House, it happened
0:44.0	to be with 10 Republicans who wanted to talk to him about his COVID relief package.
0:50.3	We want to disentangle all of that and figure out what's going on from a strategic standpoint.
0:58.2	Who better to help us sort through all of that than former Senator Heidi Heidkamp,
1:06.4	currently a fellow at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics for which we are deeply
1:12.7	grateful, Heidi. Good to be with you. It's great to be here. What about this, you guys?
1:20.5	This was always, if you know, avid listeners of Hacks on Tap will know that we've been kicking
1:26.5	this around for a long time, that we were looking to this moment as the first significant strategic
1:32.9	challenge for Biden because he's got to figure out speed and heft in terms of his package here,
1:43.1	COVID and economic versus his pledge to work across the aisle. Heidi, if you were sitting there
1:52.8	as a member of the Senate from North Dakota, what would you be thinking now and where do you think
2:01.1	this is going? Well, I would be thinking that the greatest way towards permanency is bipartisan,
2:07.6	is the bipartisan direction that would be hard to justify after a campaign that says,
2:13.5	I'm going to govern for all of you and listen to all of you if the first thing that you do is use
2:18.9	a procedure that shortcuts that kind of debate. I understand the stress between getting something
2:25.5	done quickly, but I think everybody's kind of forgetting that you still only have 50 democratic
2:32.6	votes and there's been a number of Democrats who have expressed reservation about this package.
2:37.7	And so I think it really is important for Biden to sit down and try and fashion some kind of
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