This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Sen. John Thune facing heightened media scrutiny as majority leader.
Organizations like The New Yorker and AP News are paying close attention to Thune's actions and leadership style, particularly how he's working with the White House.
SDPB's Dakota Political Junkies analysts offer a local perspective.
Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader and a member of the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. Michael Card, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of political science at the University of South Dakota.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Lori Walsh:
No surprise. U.S. Senator John Thune from South Dakota is getting a lot of press lately.
There was an extensive profile on him in the New Yorker on March 31 by David Kirkpatrick. Was also interested in an AP story by Stephen Groves talking about him and his approach.
Obviously, Stephen Groves reported in South Dakota before, in the state Capitol. So there are a lot of people with eyes on Thune.
Why? Anything interesting happening in Congress that's worth watching right now? Everybody seems to be asking the same question and maybe a political scientist is the best place to start about the separation of powers and what Congress's role is with a president who is determined — as probably all presidents arguably are, but this one in some new ways — to gather power and use it and leverage it as quickly as possible.
Michael Card:
Right, and since Franklin Roosevelt we have had an obsession with the first 100 days of new president's term.
There is a uniqueness here that we haven't seen a lot since the New Deal days and that is that the Republican Party has a trifecta. They have the presidency, they have a majority control in each of the chambers of the legislature or the Congress in this case. I think the other part is a new president, when there is a legislature or a Congress of the same party, they work very hard to get those nominees approved and they may not be giving them the full examination, but they leave that up to the opposition party to raise the questions.
And since they only need a simple majority to be approved, it looks like what Senator Thune, or majority leader Thune, that's his role here, more so than as a senator. He left the questioning up to the committees and in that sense he was able to remain free but still to guide the process along and give general parameters as to how they were going to do this.
And they've just slowly marched ahead and confirmed all that remained nominated.
Lori Walsh:
And I had kind of almost forgotten this idea, Jon, that there might be a recess appointment because leader Thune said, we're going to do this the old-fashioned way. We're going to stay here all night until these people are confirmed. We're on your side Mr. president.
That is not insignificant that that is how they did because we're going to talk in a minute here about all the other things that are happening with this administration that Congress can or cannot address.
But this was an important but early look into how leader Thune was going to run the Senate.
Jon Hunter:
True. And I think John Thune is a good person for this position. He has demonstrated thoughtfulness throughout his Congressional career. Remember that he has slowly evolved into this position. Remember he kind of move up the ladder at least a little bit.
And so he was a whip for a while and then assistant leader and so forth. So he understands it as well as anyone. He has been willing to challenge the president, I would say in private. A couple of times we've seen some public statements on behalf of him. But I think when you talk to him, I think you get an honest feel of who he is and what he's doing. I think he realizes that the separation of power has changed or the shift of power has changed. I would guess that John would be very frustrated with that. The fact that they can, the president can merely issue executive orders and ignore Congress altogether.
I would guess that internally that's very frustrating to him. He also, I think, realizes perhaps that Congress abdicated some of that by not being able to get anything passed on their own. And so for the longest time, especially if you have the filibuster thing in the Senate and the fact if you ever have split houses by parties, they can't seem to get anything done.
So they kind of handed the power to the presidency and the courts. And now you have a shift where if the president's going to ignore the courts, that gives a whole new thing. Then we're heading toward some sort of totalitarianism.
If you ignore Congress and the courts order you to do something and you say, forget it, I'm not going to. That's a whole new realm that we haven't seen. It wasn't the FDR thing. FDR pulled people, pulled Congress along, maybe strong-armed them. He did certainly have appointments to the Supreme Court that helped favor him.
But that was a completely different situation. And I remember he was fighting both the Depression and later World War II, whereas it wasn't necessarily in for his own particular satisfaction or for his own gain.
Lori Walsh:
Michael, we don't know how much of this will shake out. The Trump administration is ignoring Congress on certain things, money that has been appropriated saying that can no longer be spent, that department's being shut down. We are not going to comply with this federal judge's order because we don't think a federal judge can provide a check on a president. That's the Supreme Court that does that, so we're going to go through an appeals process. A lot of this takes time to sort of play out.
Meanwhile, people's lives are upended.
Michael Card:
Very much so. And I think the thing that we have to remember as a basis for considering any of this is that our founders considered the separation of powers to be the ultimate protection of personal liberties so that they would check each other and not form a totalitarian regime or that the Supreme Court couldn't run amok with their own judgments and nor could the Congress. And so each was to have mechanisms to check the power of the other and the authority of the other because they separated out the authority. We've also done that in our state.
It's Article II in the South Dakota constitution. It certainly was the basis of how to keep a republic operating without falling into tyranny. I'm getting a little nerdy on this, but the rationale for a republic was to have it be before the emperors in the Roman system.
That is that you elected representatives, they were elites, no doubt. But we're seeing that to some extent the elites are becoming senators and representatives. It's not a citizen legislature like South Dakota has, but the republic failed when the emperors became emperors, when the consuls became emperors. There were two consuls who were meant to check each other's power. They had to deal with the Senate. And so when that ends, that's when the republic ends. And I think that's what political scientists have is a fear of what seems to be the direction we're heading.
Jon Hunter:
So far, you don't see much pushback from Congress because those are Republican majorities. They may vocalize some things, but by and large they're falling in line. I'm curious if in 19 months from now, if Congress changes, which I think it's likely to do, if they will be equally ignored and just say, forget it, Congress doesn't matter, even if Congress takes a vote.
We have a situation where Congress has passed certain federal laws and the President is telling the Justice Department, don't pursue that. Don't prosecute these white collar crimes and don't prosecute those people telling people essentially you can break the law that Congress passed and a previous president would've signed because I declare that.
So I'm just kind of curious how this happens when there isn't the at least tacit support by both chambers of Congress.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. All right. So they have been consumed with confirmations in some ways and there has not been a lot of legislation that's come out of Congress. Also, they're very careful about what they say, being pretty much every Republican member member of the Senate and the House is cautious about what they say publicly. This is a president who's very sensitive to anything that might be said about him publicly and he's probably going to know about it.
But what's Senator Thune's job right now beyond the confirmation hearings?
Jon Hunter:
First of all, I think it's a very hard job really to corral the members of your own party with a fairly thin majority and to get them to pass kinds of things. And again, I think John's a great person for this. He tends to build consensus. He tends to get along with people even though they may disagree on particular issues. I think he's very skilled at that. And so that's really the first part.
Building that bridge to the White House is the second part, and that's where he has to balance this thing. And I remember pretty clearly when Tom Daschle became leader, when President Clinton was in, is that Tom really had to change a little bit of how he acted in Congress. He really needed to now carry the water for President Clinton.
I don't think this is going to happen to John, but South Dakotans tend to lose people a little bit when they start acting to Washington or they don't. I think Tom still came back and visited 66 counties a year, but I think some of them, he had to drive through fast when he was a leader.
Again, I think corralling your group and his responsibility as being the leader of this Republicans in the Senate and then building the bridge to the White House, there's probably a bridge also that I'm less aware of to the House and to the Republicans in the House.
Lori Walsh:
What would you add to that?
Michael Card:
That's a little more challenging because the House wants to reduce the deficit much more than the Senate does, but part of that's because the Senate has to represent the whole state. The rural areas of the country are beneficiaries of Medicare and social security. They're growing older faster, if you'll accept that as a metaphor because the younger people are leaving.
So the whole state is getting older and the Senate is not at all into eliminating that $880 billion cut that basically is going to have to come out of Medicare and Medicaid that the House passed. So what they've done is they've basically passed separate bills but said, we'll work it out. It's just passing the buck, kicking the can down the road, passing the buck a little bit.
But when they come back from this Easter Passover recess, they will have real challenges and it will be a real challenge for Senator majority leader Thune to get a bill through the Senate that will also get through the house in terms of allocating funds. And so what they've decided to do with the Senate generally wanting tax cuts, is they are calling the continuation of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to be a continuing appropriation, so it's not a new tax.
Now in South Dakota, I'm fairly confident that our Supreme Court would say no, but Congress may not have that challenge because who has standing to sue?
Lori Walsh:
All right, so I want to go back because you mentioned Tom Daschle, and so I was looking up today in preparation for our time together, sort of what were some of the things that defined Tom Daschle's time as leader, and of course Mitch McConnell, looking up some of the things that people think of his legacy of cementing the makeup of the current Supreme Court. And one of the things I saw in Daschle's quotation from him was that he blamed the Bush tax cuts for the disappearance of the budget surplus.
And I thought, budget surplus? Was there a time that we had a budget? What are we talking about?
Jon Hunter:
Believe it or not, there was.
Lori Walsh:
And so my point to that is I am not a young person. I mean, I was an adult during that time and I had forgotten. For younger people, people younger than us, they might never remember a time when Congress really legislated.
That might be like the golden era of Congress. They're used to a president coming in and really saying, what happens in the White House is really matters more than who you sent to Congress. Are we forgetting what Congress is supposed to do is what I'm wondering?
Jon Hunter:
Well, I think to a degree, yes. If you don't mind me speaking first here, here's an interesting thing about that particular time. It was really the dot-com bubble that helped cause this. And so the valuation of these dot-coms went way up and people sold them had made all sorts of, so it was the receipts side, the income side that made at a surplus. It wasn't that we were reasonable about spending.
Now here's another thing, if I may get personal for a quick second. So this is a story I hope is okay. It was right during that time I wrote an editorial to Madison Daily Leader and said, "Hey look, let's take this surplus," and boy, it's tempting. Everyone wants to spend it. Those were the days when you had congressional earmarks. I'm going to give it to every person so I can get re-elected.
I said, "Let's leave that temptation back. This is the editorial and use it to pay down some of the long-term debt." I said, "The 30 year bond especially would be a great thing."
So anyway, a few weeks go by and I get a call from Senator Daschle's staff and said, "Senator Daschle would like to meet with you on Saturday," whatever it was. And I said, "Really? No kidding?"
He said, "Find a restaurant where you can have lunch." And it was on a Saturday though, so it was a weekday and then a staffer called the day before and said, "Did you get anything by FedEx today?" And I said, "No, I didn't." And he starts to scramble.
So next day we met at the restaurant next door to the newspaper. I brought Mary and the kids and Senator Daschle came and he presented me with a framed print of the Congressional record in which he had submitted my editorial.
So the congressional records, and he stood up on the Senate and said, "I would like to submit to the congressional record this editorial by a newspaper in our home state." And it listed that editorial about not doing it. It also included, I think there were two editorials, one from Dana Hess who you also know and now with South Dakota Searchlight, but at the time editor of the Pierre Capital Journal and he had something similar to that, but I thought it was a really nice gesture to give this big frame print of the congressional record. And then we talked about it at lunch of course, but he was rock solid on that, on paying off the debt with his surplus and not blowing it. And that's not really what happened. I do remember about the same time Madison received an appropriation that was an earmark from Senator Johnson at the time to build some building.
Lori Walsh:
Tim Johnson. Yeah.
Jon Hunter:
Tim Johnson. Yes. Anyway, forgive me for bringing in that story.
Lori Walsh:
America, if you had listened to Jon Hunter, today's conversation would've been a lot different.
Jon Hunter:
Didn't you bring up my editorial where I misguessed?
Lori Walsh:
You don't have to remind people of that. This cancels that out.
Jon Hunter:
No, I'm going to send a link to everybody.
Lori Walsh:
Also, leader Thune, we are available for lunch. You don't need to frame anything for us.
Jon Hunter:
We'll pay for lunch
Lori Walsh:
We'll treat you for lunch.
Go ahead, Mike.
Michael Card:
That was a very different time in the sense that we were concerned about budget deficits and spending, and then 9/11 happened and we took the war from Iraq off of our budget considerations, except we just were going to spend money. It wasn't considered part of the operating budget.
Lori Walsh:
And the bipartisanship of Tom Daschle and Trent Lott became toxic.
Michael Card:
Yes.
Lori Walsh:
And now we have this vast separation of how difficult it is. They were sneaking behind the lines to go visit each other because if they were photographed together, they would both be seen as selling out.
Jon Hunter:
I agree, Lori, that I think you phrased it correctly. That was an inflection point where the leaders didn't. Now it turns out that they did meet a lot during that time and they had a good relationship and they did admit, they both have admitted they undermined each other at times, but it was a different relationship.
Lori Walsh:
That brings up that the media landscape is different because who are they hiding from? They're not hiding. That's too strong of a word, but the press and social media and how quickly information goes out.
Michael Card:
Well, as a non-journalist here, I can say most of us believe that if it bleeds, it leads. And so you need conflict and controversy in order to get people to read a story.
Now that's a non-journalist perspective, and you're both looking at me as if I have two heads.
Lori Walsh:
That's not how I think at all.
Jon Hunter:
We put good headlines in the paper. "Congress did another good job today." That's the headline.
Lori Walsh:
I'm kind of outside the it bleeds, it leads world of journalism. Okay, so I went back to Senator Thune rescission is something else. We talked about the courts and this New Yorker article, I think, which is about, it's called "The Senate's Age of Irrelevance."
A whole lot of people have shared it. You really should read it all the way through. It's just really good journalism, for starters.
A certain amount of things need to be sorted out in the courts. That's painful and difficult and remains to be seen. And probably we need to have Mike Thompson come in and explain to us exactly how this works.
But I want to talk about this budget-cutting thing. If Congress has appropriated some money and then DOGE and Elon Musk and the president say, no, that's not going to get spent there. There is this way that they can try to get through Congress through the process of rescission, which I had no idea existed. But then you have to get the votes.
Michael Card:
In law, in statute, there is the Congressional Impoundment Act. It was used built support in the Republican party for something like that through Lyndon Johnson. But it was basically Richard Nixon wanting to control, spending, again, wanting to control and put money towards policies that he was in favor of in activities, and basically said, "I'm not going to spend this money," and Congress has standing to sue and the Supreme Court ruled, nope. If Congress appropriates it, you have to spend it.
That part is exceptionally clear and has been stood up a number of times when it's been challenged. The rescission part is really getting acquiescence from Congress that, okay, we're not going to spend this, and that can be done in the form of resolutions. But the specific details, I'm sorry I can't march us through that.
Lori Walsh:
You know who can march us through that? Leader John Thune. Because according to this article, he explained it to Donald Trump, the President of the United States, which brings me to my point of this is a person who needs to understand how government works so well that he can play all the cards at all the right times. Is he up for that task?
Jon Hunter:
Absolutely. I believe that he is up to that task. He understands this well. He has, I think all the characteristics it would take to do this. Now, whether it's enjoyable for him or not, I don't know. There've been times when he thinks like, should I run again, because Congress has changed while he was there. But I think he's very, very capable of doing that and could be the best person that I can think of who could be in that job.
Lori Walsh:
Some of the notes I took from my reading of the article of what he has to do if he wants to be successful according to his agenda, obviously Democrats would disagree with this, but he's to keep all the Republicans pulling in the same direction. He has to offer the White House insight into how to move its agenda forward in an effective way, which this White House doesn't always know, including Elon Musk who's working outside of this. And as Susan Collins says, "His brilliance does not extend to how the government works," so he has to explain it to people. He has to understand how it works himself so well, and he can never get outflanked by anyone, and he has to handle and be very attuned to the constituents because they are calling in droves.
I hear all the time people are calling, "We talked with Senator Rounds staff, we talked with Senator to Thune's staff, we talked with Congressman Johnson's staff." So the impact, people are alarmed at what's happening. So he has to be really attuned to that because that matters in the future.
What else? He has to play the media effectively. He has to play the long game. At some point he has to stand up and say no. He has to know where that line is, where he'll say, 'No, you can't do that." This seems like an incredibly hard...
And they can't lose the Democrats in two years because the Democrats, by the way, have a huge gaping opportunity here if he does not do all these things for his party.
Michael Card:
And he has to keep his own staff sufficiently familiar with all of those other things, so that if he's not available to talk, that his chief of staff can marshal the-
Lori Walsh:
And he's an honest guy. He has to be able to sleep at night.
Jon Hunter:
All difficult. Yes. And there is certainly a balance. I think it does get down to something that we're not used to in this situation is that he has to develop a staff of his own who can support him.
And so congressional staffs are not necessarily very big. You have some people back in your state, you have some people in Washington, but in some cases your staff is the majority whip or those sorts of things. But if he can get his, again, a top quality chief of staff, a top quality communications director, a top quality, each of those kinds of things, he can do that. You talk about the constituent services, Lori. That is a critical element, and I think that often depends on people back in South Dakota, and I think he has three offices, is this correct? Aberdeen, Rapid City and Sioux Falls.
So to have those staff to answer the phone, to send letters in response that would say, "Here's what..." I mean, it looks like it comes from Senator to me, very well be written by a staffer and get his signature. But to have that kind of thing and be able to respond honestly, promptly, is staffing. Now, you do get an extra staff when you're a majority leaders you don't have to rely on your South Dakota staff. That's something we don't often talk about is kind of leadership of your own paid staff. We always think of leadership as leading other senators, but this is actually his team, and if he can put that together, he can pull this off.
Lori Walsh:
We, is it a constitutional crisis? You mentioned Congress suing the White House, and that seems to me like we hear a lot about this is a constitutional crisis. The executive branch doing something, ignoring a federal judge. Is that a constitutional crisis and then people, "Oh, yes. Oh no." You hear all the talking heads, but Congress suing the president, that seems like a constitutional crisis to me. What scenario does that happen under and has that ever happened before?
Michael Card:
Probably not. As a body, it's usually by someone who you have to have been shown harm. And so I think I misspoke when I said that Congress sued the president, and right now, I don't expect Congress to sue the President for the next two years, but someone could find someone who is expressing a loss of services due to money that's already been appropriated.
Even in our own state we are not going to be able to implement the new social studies curriculum as designed because the money was removed, among other things. Certainly our, what is it? I think it's East central co-op, I hope I've got the right name, is losing almost a million dollars in terms of being able to provide services to individuals within their catchment area.
And so it's not going to be hard to find people who are aggrieved and have some sense of standing to sue. But as you noted earlier, Lori, courts move really slow and right now we're still dealing with temporary restraining orders.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, temporary injunctions and... Yeah.
Michael Card:
That then can be appealed to an appellate level of court and a three judge panel and then maybe the full panel, and then possibly getting on the shadow docket of the Supreme Court for an immediate decision, and then months before they would have a full hearing and then months before while they negotiate, what should the law be as we move forward?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, so even extremely, in South Dakota, extremely popular president in the sense judged by the number of people who voted for Donald Trump and the number of people who voted for John Thune. So there is a sense that their agendas are aligned in many really important ways, although it does seem like they're not aligned in other ways. But you also have many, many, many people being impacted by the administration's policies, and that creates a sort of swirl of chaos and stress. Everybody I talk to, "How are you?"
"Well, it's stressful right now because there's so many changes, tariffs, trade, education, funding disappearing." Everybody seems kind of on their heels right now.
Michael Card:
Yeah. How will this affect me and those I love?
Lori Walsh:
Right, exactly.
Jon Hunter:
I think, I'm not sure you can compare the popularity of John Thune with the votes of Donald Trump two years later. John Thune had earned that landslide victory by serving all those years in advance, not necessarily by his current agenda for this, and Donald Trump's passing in South Dakota as well as some other states was due at least in part to the fact that that was better than the alternative, that the people didn't like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or whatever that kind of thing was. I think they're kind of two separate issues.
I think they have different agendas. I think Senator Thune is trying to find what parts of my agenda can dovetail with the presidency's, and let's focus on those kinds of things where we disagree. Let's just not get so involved in those things. But I think they may have won their vote, their recent votes in South Dakota for different reasons.
Lori Walsh:
Okay, that's a fair point. Meanwhile, people are starting to announce that they're going to run for office. Meanwhile, people are on barnstorming tours, listening to people, talking to people, protesters are showing up in the street, people are raising money, gathering their forces for election 2026.
Jon Hunter:
Well, that's why Mike said it's a two year gig. It's a two year run, it's slim majorities. And I think with all the numbers of protests and all those kinds of things, I would, again, my track record on predicting, it's not so hot, but I would predict that you'd lose the majorities in one or both houses.
Lori Walsh:
Nationwide. Not in South Dakota.
Jon Hunter:
No.
Lori Walsh:
Nobody's predicting that. There'll be a serious challenger to Mike Rounds, to Dusty Johnson?
Jon Hunter:
There's a lot to shake out there, multiple possible candidates for governor, and who's going to go for it if Dusty Johnson leaves that seat, who would go for the open seat? And the power of the incumbency is very strong, especially in South Dakota, but I think many other states too. So to be an incumbent is a big deal.
Michael Card:
Everything you say is news if you're the incumbent, it's not necessarily so if you're the challenger, but I think there's a lot of factors to consider. It's who has the money to run? Where are they on the ideological spectrum from a more populist, that's not the right term, but I would say the traditional Republicans through to the MAGA Republicans, through to the group that really fought against the pipeline and other areas.
So where is a candidate on that particular spectrum and how did they vote? And then which one of these races is going to become clear first? Is Senator Rounds going to run well, that changes the dynamics of the other two races. If he does run, if he doesn't run, it will be exciting for the news, media, because there are essentially three statewide races, and the least important of those is probably the US House in terms of fulfilling national policy.
But that is our only representative in Congress in the House of Representatives, so that will still draw lots of candidates. I've heard lots of names, but they do seem to be based on who has the money to run, who has the ground game, which may be even more important is somebody's got to gather signatures to put you on the ballot.
Then you have to run a race. So now you need to get out the vote effort. You've got to get yourself out there, and you need money to do those things to get your messages out. And then whether they will support you or not is largely going to be based on where do you fit on this ideological spectrum.
Unfortunately, the Democrats don't have a bench. They don't have a ready set of candidates to run, and it has been very easy to cast the local Democratic Party as the National Democratic Party, and I would maintain, and others would challenge my maintenance of this, but in South Dakota, we're all pretty conservative. Not far right, but we're all pretty conservative, and I think a lot of that has to do with most of us who have been here a while, have experienced monetary shortfalls, we're used to living on a tight budget, we're used to natural disasters that you could end up losing your entire cattle herd.
Lori Walsh:
We're used to not being taxed.
Michael Card:
Yeah. And we're used to not being tax. And we're used to not getting the services that would've come with those taxes. I remember doing some focus groups for the border regions that people were satisfied with the education that their children got because it's really good for what we pay for it, was the line we kept hearing over and over again in these focus groups.
Lori Walsh:
Let's close with a little bit about media attention that we're seeing on Leader Thune, the seriousness with which he's being treated, and then the way that former Governor Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security is showing up in the national spotlight with a much different, the headlines are much different.
Jon, we're seeing her approach is very different than Leader Thune. She has a very different job than he does, but also the national media is keying in on some things that we have also addressed in the South Dakota press with Freedom Works Here and now you see a national advertising campaign with her front and center.
How is that playing out nationwide?
Jon Hunter:
Good question. Yeah, I think former Governor Noem, now, Secretary Noem has clearly taken the publicity playbook that she got from the president to be governor, and now taking from that to her current position. So she does want to make herself front and center the face of Homeland Security. So every press release, every photo op will feature her in front. That's her style. She did it in South Dakota. She seems to be continuing.
A new $200 million budget featuring her for Homeland Security where she can point at the camera and say, "If you're an illegal immigrant, I'm coming after you." Pictures of her holding guns and so forth. It's a very different thing. If you talk about Senator Thune, I don't think he seeks any of that. There's a lot of it that comes with a job you don't need to look for anymore because of that position they'll take plenty of photographs of him in Statuary Hall when they have press conferences.
But I think he will then sit down with a journalist and discuss this thing, kind of in rational terms. I don't think, he's not about to try to push something out to the media, but I think if the media went to him, and I don't know this, but I would think that even in this advanced job, which separates him a little bit from South Dakota, I bet a South Dakota media outlet could still get an interview one-on-one with John Thune. Well, you have Lori.
Lori Walsh:
I'm trying for the next one now.
Jon Hunter:
Yeah, before he became leader.
Lori Walsh:
Sure.
Jon Hunter:
But yeah, so one-on-one in this studio, he has been accessible, so it's a very, very different approach to public media than Secretary Noem.
Lori Walsh:
I just reached out today to all three of the offices, again asking over the break to come and talk to us, and they haven't heard. It's too soon to hear, because I just sent the email shortly ago, a period of time ago, but I keep hearing how busy they are, and I do believe that. Now, I would like you to make time for me because you're making time for a statewide audience on public broadcasting. However, when they say they're busy, man, they got to be inundated. I mean, inundated.
Jon Hunter:
Well think of, and just for an offsite, you have to think of their health at times too. So you can't work seven days a week, 24 hours a day, so you have to think of and some family time and other such things that you do. It's a difficult balance, and I'm thinking most, of Senator Thune who has these multiple jobs to fulfill much more so than Representative Johnson or Senator Rounds, but we want to make sure that he's a healthy mind and healthy body to fulfill these things we've asked him to do.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Are you hearing from people about how lives are disrupted or people are celebrating, or what are you hearing on the streets, as it were people asking you, what's going on with this, that, or the other thing?
Michael Card:
Well, there are some people who are very definitely scared. There are some people who are very happy with things are finally getting done, finally looks like we're going to attack the budget, although we haven't really seen any evidence that we're reducing the budget yet. I think I recall your episode with Monday Macro, which pointed out that we have a $1.7 trillion deficit every year for the past foreseeable years, certainly even through the Trump administration, as well as through the Biden administration.
And so to make a dent in that we have to not only fund what we're currently funding or reduce it, but the only real way to reduce the budget is there's about 800 billion, excuse me, that's national defense. There's about 1.5 trillion for social security and about 1.5 trillion for Medicare. And so if we're going to reduce our budget deficit, that is just one year spending, we've either got to raise revenues by 1.7 trillion through taxation and tariffs aren't likely to give us that much money. A couple hundred billion, which to us is big money, but it's not. When we are considering that a trillion is a thousand billions, and so the scale is just incredible.
But we're not going to get anywhere on deficits until we take seriously. We have some combination of budget cuts and tax increases.
Lori Walsh:
Right. Right. Those episodes of Monday Macro on scale and on tariffs are going to age particularly well.
Jon Hunter:
Yeah, it was great on Monday.
Lori Walsh:
Those were very timely. As well our Dakota Political Junkies conversations about Senator Thune, leader Thune, as we look at his legacy that he's kind of forging right now and watching what he does next. Thank you so much for coming here and spending so much time with me.
Jon Hunter:
Thanks, Lori.
Michael Card:
It's been a pleasure.
