Zak Kukoff on the Big Beautiful Bill: storm grounds members, every House vote counts before July 4th deadline

our next guest has an absolute hitter. I saw him in DC wearing a JLC Reverso. Not to dox your watch, but it's a fantastic dodge. Great. Great. Now, now he's got a higher security. And by the way, look at this. Oh, he's got the reverso. Let's go. The Uno Reverso. Beautiful. It's a beautiful watch. It's fantastic.

It has a great story. Beautiful watch. Great. It was actually it was a gift from my wife for my uh 30th birthday. It's a beautiful watch to my family for my 30th birthday. So, I'm thrilled to have it. Yeah. And uh if I remember the story correctly, it was different time zones for a while. That's right.

So, no better watch than the Reverso to represent where you are physically and where your future wife is. Fantastic. That's right. JLC sponsor the pod. We're ready. Really? We are so ready. Until then, getel. com. Um was lovely having you on yesterday. A lot tends to happen in 24 hours these days. What uh what's new?

Give us the update. Yeah, it's a big 24 hours. Um first of all, has anyone ever done the two day in a row? Delian did once kind of by accident. He came on, he was scheduled uh every other Thursday and he happened to stop by our YC demo day stream for a very different thing. We hit him with a confetti cannon.

It was a lot of fun. That's all right. All right. We love Delian. That's fine. big 24 hours in Washington. In fact, it started right after I hung up with you guys. I don't know if you saw this. In the background of my shot yesterday, you had this beautiful vista over downtown DC.

And as we were talking, there was a huge storm cloud starting to come in and completely raining on top of all of DC. So, you guys know this, I think people probably know. In Congress, there is no remote voting. You are either voting in person or if you are not there, you do not get a say in what happens.

And right now, the big beautiful bill which is in the hands of the house is on the precipice. It could go either way. It might pass, it may not pass, but every single vote is necessary.

And I kid you not, there was a ground stop in the morning at DCA and there were multiple members who were stopped, prevented from coming back into town to vote because of the huge storm in Washington last night. So, just to give you a sense of how quickly things move. It's a biblical metaphor for sure. A flood. It is.

It is biblical. I don't always see divine providence in politics. In fact, I just about never see it. But it's pretty hard to argue with a uh a full grad. So So does this make uh JD Vance's vote more important, less important? What what what's the read on Vance's role here? So Vance is the president of the Senate.

When there's a 50-50 tie in the Senate, which is what happened yesterday, his vote is the most crucial vote. And that's why, by the way, if you are any Dem, Governor Shapiro, AOC, whomever, running in 2028, it is now a phenomenal gift to you that you can go and Badger Daty Vance about his vote yesterday.

But the bill is in the House today. So there's no Vance vote. There's no tiebreaker. There is no, in fact, the the GOP basically has eight votes or sorry, four votes they could lose. There were eight people who didn't show up this morning. There are four votes they could lose and still get the vote passed.

And so all day there's been this series starting in the morning of procedural votes as a way of checking just who from the conference is even in town to begin with before they get to the actual vote itself. This is like literally like a roll it's a roll call. It is literally a roll call.

My mom was a teacher for a while. My grandmother was a teacher her whole career. There is zero difference between my grandmother teaching a special ed class doing roll call and what's happening today in Congress. Maybe a slight difference, but basically no difference. All right.

So, there's a couple of factions you guys talked about yesterday, the menu of different people within the GOP. The big challenge today is picking up votes where the GOP can, where the Republican party can in the menu of factions.

The two big ones to keep an eye on are the House Republican moderates and the House Freedom Caucus, which are the sort of more extreme uh further ideologically opposed folks. If you're a moderate, you don't like it for one simple reason, which is this has a bunch of Medicaid cuts.

In fact, there are far more Medicaid cuts in the Senate version of the bill, which is what you're being asked to vote on than the House version of the bill that you passed a couple weeks ago. And you don't want to hang that around your neck when you go back home.

Remember, if you're in the House, you are always in campaign mode. You're running every two years. That's why you were out of town to begin with, because anytime there's a weekend, you're flying home to your district to go pick up a couple extra dollars, right?

So the moderates don't like it because of the Medicaid cuts, huge Medicaid cuts. The conservatives don't like it. The far conservatives in the Freedom Caucus don't like it because it actually blows up a framework, a balanced budget or close to balanced budget framework that they passed in the House last time.

So they got to a basically a compromise agreement with spending cuts and with tax cuts that the Senate completely ignored. So that's much harder for them.

And part of Trump's success if this bill gets passed will be because he convinces people from the Freedom Caucus in particular to flip and become supporters of the big beautiful bill. So wrapping up on JD Vance. Yeah. If if the vote goes through in the House then people will hang on on him.

What happens if the bill passes? Does the other bill automatically die? Is there some sort of trigger there? So, if the House passes the bill today, the House is looking at the Senate's version of the bill. Yeah. The House passes that bill today, it goes right to the president's desk for signature.

That is the plan A scenario. If you're in the admin, what you're hoping happens is it gets passed, it goes through. Plan B or plan C even is the House says, "We want to reopen the bill and add a bunch of different amendments because we don't like the Medicaid cuts or we don't like the deficit expansion, whatever.

" And then it goes back to the Senate where by the way the Republican party may or may not have the votes to get it done and suddenly JD Vance gets into that spotlight again. Got it. Okay. So the so yeah so the House can't change anything in the Senate bill right now. They just have to decide yay or nay.

That's exactly right. They if they if they reopen if they make any changes which by the way a lot of people in the House want them to do then the Senate has to go through the entire procedure of passing it again which is a huge risk factor for them. Yep.

Is there any chance that the House tries to add back in that that AI uh state level AI legislation ban or is that even I think it's fairly unlikely right given the overwhelming I mean listen given it was a 99 to1 uh repudiation of a rebuke rebuke of the AI moratorum I think it's unlikely the house added it back in because that's a signal from the Senate saying look if you put this back into the bill all that's going to happens, we're going to lose even more procedural time getting it out of the bill again when it comes back to us the next number of days.

But the only way this passes before the July 4th deadline, in my view, is if the House basically swallows the Senate version as is today. Yeah.

So, you you kind of define some of the the attack lines on the right uh with the moderates going after the Medicaid cuts and the uh and the farther right Freedom Caucus, is that right? uh saying that uh they want more of a balanced bill. Have any particular attack lines been opened on the left that you've seen? Oh yeah.

Yeah. I mean the left looks at this. This is Christmas if you're on the left, right? You get basically to say, wow, the Republicans voted to take away your Medicaid, which is a huge bludgeon.

You guys remember back in the OGT party all those signs, keep your government hands off my Medicare, keep your government hands off my Medicaid, right? This is a horseshoe issue where people on the left and on the right are equally impacted by it.

And the net result of that is that it's a great campaign line no matter what side of the aisle you're on. So here's an example. North Carolina, we talked yesterday about Senator Tillis from North Carolina who's not running for re-election and who ultimately voted against the big beautiful bill passage.

Tillis has a group of folks in the House who are predominantly from his state delegation who he has some influence, some relationship with, right? many of whom have signaled, many of whom are moderates and many of whom have signaled, I have some reluctance to vote for the bill.

Part of the reluctance is because the Democratic governor of North Carolina wrote a letter where he basically said, look, if you vote for the bill, I am going to make sure that these Medicaid cuts become a big issue in the next campaign because they massively impact his state budget.

Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania did the same thing where he said, "Look, if you vote for the bill, you should know that you will be impacting the Medicaid of Pennians and I will use that politically against you. " The last part is implied. This has been really, really helpful. I've genuinely learned a lot.

So, thank you for stopping by. This is You may not have been the first person to go back to back, but I have a feeling you'll be the first to go back to back to back. This is very, very helpful. Thank you for breaking it down for us. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it as always. We'll have you back on my Chiron.

Yeah, exactly. I can't see the Chiron, but I'm hoping it says Washington correspondent. That'll make my day. We We will definitely update it tomorrow. Thank you so much. Vice President of Washington. Yeah, great. I'll see you guys tomorrow, I'm sure. Cheers. Cheers, Zach. Cheers.