On Thursday’s RealClearPolitics podcast, Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan, and Carl Cannon discuss the Trump administration deploying ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan to Minneapolis to negotiate a new way forward, Sen. Amy Klobuchar announcing she’s running to be the next governor of Minnesota, and the latest from Capitol Hill, as a debate over ICE funding threatens to spill over into a partial government shutdown Plus, American Enterprise Institute Housing Center co-director Edward Pinto joins the show for a discussion about what President Trump can do to make homes affordable again, and the panel debates whether the Amazon-funded documentary about Melania Trump was a bribe. Finally, a look at Bruce Springsteen’s new protest song titled “The Streets Of Minneapolis,” which you can listen to here. You can listen to the show live each day at 11:00 a.m. on SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly Channel 111 and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** The show opens with ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan heading to Minneapolis to negotiate with the mayor and governor to lower the temperature after protests against federal immigration enforcement led to the killing of a second American citizen. Homan said during a press conference this morning that the administration is willing to pull back its “surge” if the city and state cooperate with ICE. “This is exactly the deal I outlined on Monday, and you guys made fun of me!” Cannon said. “The tragedy here is two people being killed. We got to the point where each side can curb their excesses, and that looks like a compromise or a reset back to sanity.” “It’s clear now that Kristi Noem was the worst pick, the worst mistake of Trump’s second term. She had no experience. Homan is a professional. He’s been doing this for 35 years,” Bevan said. “Homan did a good job of balancing that this is not a retreat, but a reset, and if you let them into the jails to get these hardened criminals off the street, everyone is going to be safer. I think that was reassuring to people on the right who were worried Trump would cave.” *** After that, around minute 11, the group asks what Sen. Amy Klobuchar is going to have to do to become a successful governor of Minnesota as the state faces crises on multiple fronts. “I thought her statement was pretty compelling. I don’t expect her to brag about the Somali community fraud thing, which seems to be ‘Democrat Party related.’ What she said was, for a Democrat these days, pretty measured,” Cannon said. “You can see just from her statement, you can see why she’s going to be a strong candidate.” *** In the next segment, at minute 17, does the panel still think a government shutdown is likely at the end of this week, as Democrats refuse to approve a budget that continues to fund ICE? “Is this just the way we’re going to do it now, if there’s an opportunity and an issue du jour, you’re going to shut down the government over it?” Walworth asked. “At some point, that may lose its sting.” “You’d have to be in these Democratic conference rooms today to know, but did Tom Homan take the steam out of that?” Cannon asked. “Progressives in the streets were saying, if we don’t defund ICE, we want to shut down the government. But Democrats weren’t ever putting it quite that way in the Senate.” “I don’t see any steam getting taken out. What Schumer has proposed, apparently, is to pass a bunch of other funding bills but break off the DHS piece, and they won’t approve that until they get the reforms they’re looking for,” Bevan explained. “I think Democrats are back on defund ICE harder than ever. The leadership wants to show they’re on board and sticking up for what their constituents want. You know, they were happy to shut the government down last time on healthcare and blame it on Republicans.” *** After that, at minute 20, Edward Pinto joins the show to talk about the U.S. housing market. He is the co-director of the American Enterprise Institute Housing Center. “Yes, homes are more expensive, and the easiest way to measure that is by looking at median house price to median income,” he explained. “And then, interest rates doubled from their low levels to 6%-7%, which made it seem even more painful, even though 6%-7% historically is a pretty benign interest rate.” “What the federal government should be doing-if they wanted to lower interest rates, the best way to do that would be to come up with a credible deficit reduction plan,” he said. “Absent that, the market determines what long-term rates are, because it’s basically their expectation of inflation.” “You can’t move the needle very much on the supply side for single-family homes; that takes a long time. But it moves very, very quickly within weeks if you have a demand surge,” he said. “The federal government loves to deal with demand. It can do very little on supply, so it tends to focus on demand. So that’s why you hear things like 50-year mortgages and down payment assistance.” *** Finally, 40 minutes into the show, the panel discusses Melania Trump getting $ 40 million from Amazon for the rights and access to produce her new documentary. “We knew a lot about Jill Biden. So this will be interesting,” Bevan said. “I don’t know if I’m gonna buy a ticket and watch in the theater, but I think my wife will want to watch this. I think there might actually be a lot of women who might be interested in watching this documentary.” “First ladies are difficult to cover because the coverage tends to be fawning over them, but not insightful-in both sexist and trivializing at the same time,” Cannon commented. “But Trump shouldn’t have accepted a nickel.” “Do you get to have it both ways and say it’s a bribe, but yet you’re interested in watching it?” Bevan said. “Is it any different than Joe Biden getting $ 20 million to write his book?” *** Don’t miss an episode of the RealClearPolitics radio show – subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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