11-12-25 - 10am - Burger Index and Blue Slip

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Michael and Dragon.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Well, you certainly don't hear of anybody throwing a Jimmy
John sandwich too delicious. You don't hear anybody throwing a
Quiznos sub too damn expensive.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Something to be said for subway there, Michael, as your
biggest Florida goober, I wear that g on my back,
no problem. Sometimes it gets hidden by my cape. Though.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
As long as you have your cape so you can
fly around, that's that's all we need, sweetheart. That for goober.
So I have a question, and I again i've this
has been in my pos. No, it's not what you think.
It's a pile of stuff. My pile of stuff for
back I'd say five six days now, and I'm finally

(00:47):
ready to, I think, dive into it. And it kind
of reached its nadier last night when I went with
his friend to the Colinbine Steakhouse up on Federal and
I'd always heard about it, and as you know, it's
like it's like an iconic place in Denver. It's got
to be one hundred years old, and it looks like

(01:08):
it's a hundred years old, and it's it's really strange.
But you go in and the very first thing I noticed, Ray,
you love this. So the menus are a blue sheet
of eight and a half by eleven paper laminated. Okay, it
was laminated, and the prices have changed, so they've scratched
out with the black magic marker the old price and

(01:30):
written in the new price on top of the laminee topes.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yes, so that got me to.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
Thinking about gee, I wondered, And I should have asked
that the waitress how you know what the server was? Oh,
use the word waitress. Somebody's gonna be offended by that
now too. I should have asked what were the old prices?
I can I know what the old prices were, just
by comparison, because compared to the steakhouse that that Tara
and I and my friends took me to on Saturday

(01:58):
for my birthday, let's just say that one was magnet
orders of magnitude more expensive than Columbine Steakhouse was. So
the two two of us ate pretty cheaply last night,
but it was still more expensive than And I don't
know when they changed the prices than the original price
when they.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
First laminated those menus.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
So my question to you is are things really more
expensive or not? Or is it just that perception is reality,
and you perceive things to be more expensive when they're
really not. Because the new buzzword, what is it, that's right, affordability.
Everybody's talking about affordability now. Well, door dash, Yes, door dash.

(02:42):
I've never used DoorDash my entire life, but apparently DoorDash
has done their first ever State of Local Commerce report,
and that report, when you dig into it, finds that
prices on everyday essentials have either stabilized, which means they've
leveled off or they're actually falling.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
And the local restaurants.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Remain resilient, which means there are prices that got checked
up during COVID are still there, but their business has
you know, maybe the customers customer, uh, the number of
customers has dropped off a little bit, but they're still
able to maintain their profit margins and they're still able
to keep the door open. That's the way I would
interpret door dash saying that restaurants remain resilient. And I

(03:28):
found this one interesting buried in the report is that
week day downtown lunch demand is rebounding in more than
half of US city's So this report kind of gives
us a street level view that nuances beyond these broad
national indicators that we keep getting getting on all the

(03:49):
cable channels and from the cabal.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
How do they do this? What's their methodology?

Speaker 3 (03:54):
Well, it's built on hundreds of millions of transactions across
grocery stores, restaurants, and main street retail this year. It
highlights this is what they This is kind of the
TLDR of the report. It highlights a fourteen percent drop
in breakfast basic price baskets between March and September, a

(04:19):
ninety three percent year over year survival rate for restaurants,
and a twenty I'm sorry, a two point five percent
national rise in business district weekday lunch orders, with outsized
rebounds in places like San Francisco and Chandler, Arizona.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
So what does this report?

Speaker 3 (04:42):
It's what they did is they compiled they compiled transaction
derived indicators from literally hundreds of millions of orders so
they could figure out what the localized economic conditions are
across thousands of neighborhoods. They were aiming to complement the
lagging sample based national stats with real time microeconomic signals

(05:06):
from on platform purchasing behavior. So now that they obviously
i didn't know this, but this is what the report
tells me. That door dash has now expanded in new
verticals such as grocery and retail, and that data, that
data increasingly spans beyond restaurants. So it gives door dash
a broader lens on local commerce patterns in all the

(05:29):
essentials that we buy, prepared food and household goods. Those
three categories, the essentials, prepared food and household goods. So
what are some of the key price indicators? Is this
align with what you see because I can tell you
that in our household, it just seems that the grocery
bill hasn't gone down.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
The eating out bill, I wouldn't say has gone up.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
I'd say it's stabilized now from COVID from the shutdown,
that's I ever forget that from the shutdown, when a
lot of restaurants went out of business and they were
faced with increasing costs of you know, everybody had to
take your stuff out. Always fascin the immediate, Oh we
can cook your food, but you can't eat it here.
You got to take it home. I mean, the dumb
assy that we put up with was absolutely insanity. But

(06:19):
I noticed that our eating out prices have generally leveled off,
but they've leveled off at a new baseline. So the
you know, the Chinese food, you know, you might go
for two people and the Chinese food might cost you
twenty five bucks, now cost you thirty five or forty bucks,
and it's leveled out at that price. I don't see
any drop in it. Prices for everyday essentials like toilet paper, diapers.

(06:43):
Dor Dah says that was flat over the same time frame.
Now I would imply from that that there's some sort
of stabilization going on in household goods after all of
those previous inflationary spikes. They have a cheeseburger index. Yes,
they've got cheeseburger index. That index highlights meaningful regional affordability dispersion.

(07:10):
That means they went to all sorts of different places.
They everywhere from like Lincoln, Nebraska, to Milwaukee to Detroit.
So it's offering significantly lower typical prices versus the high
cost markets.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
Which I would throw the front range in.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
I think we are a high cost market, effectively doubling
purchasing power for comparable items in those locations. Which is
a good point here to put a little asterisks in
and think, yeah, this might be true in Chandler, Arizona.
It might be true even in San Francisco. It might

(07:46):
be true in some place in Nebraska, someplace in Wisconsin.
It might be true in some of these places like Detroit.
But is it true here? I don't think so. Now,
restaurant continuity I found pretty interesting because I find that
as I travel around Denver and go to business lunches
and things, that I see more and more restaurants being

(08:08):
closed down. When you read Westward, you know, when you
read when you read it either weekly or maybe daily,
I forget, but they'll have a list of recent restaurant closings,
and it seems to be a staple of the newspaper.
So whatever Patty Calhoun does to send people out, they

(08:31):
get list of all the restaurants closing, and every week
they've got plenty of people to listen that all these
restaurants have closed. But according to door dash, ninety three
percent of restaurants that are active on door Dash. There's
that there's that parameter. In September of twenty twenty four,
we're still open in this past September, September of twenty
twenty five, Now. The reason I point that out is

(08:55):
because all the other stories that I read indicate that
that's contrary to the expects of these widespread closures in
high cost environments, which I think, once again we have
to take Denver put it out here on its own,
because I think Denver is one of those high cost environments.
And I'm eventually going to get to another story, not today,

(09:17):
but eventually about why is it that Denver is such
a high cost area. Well, I think, in a nutshell,
not going into the details, it is regulations, all the
environmental bull crap that they're shoving down our throat, prices
in general, and just the influx of let's say, twenty
five to thirty five year olds who have disposable income

(09:39):
that are willing to spend it on. You know, I
jokingly mentioned something about a six shot latte. I have
no idea of a six shot latte costs, but I
bet it's more than five dollars. I bet it's not
quite ten dollars, but it could be. I'm just not
a coffee drinker, so I don't know, but they're willing
to pay that old boomers are probably not.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Just give me some black coffee. That's all I want.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
New restaurant on boarding in other words, opening bringing new
employees in accelerated more than eighteen percent year over year.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
And again it's in places where you would least expect it.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
They in particular pointed out the Raido Texas, Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
Saint Paul, Minnesota, and their argument is that indicates continued
entrepreneurship and platform adoption in secondary metros. So if you
live in New York, you live in La or San Francisco,
you live in Harrison County, Houston, Texas, then maybe it's

(10:36):
not so much. And then I hear all the horror
stories about Las Vegas, about how Las Vegas is. You know,
the big mantra about Las Vegas right now is they're
nickel and diming everybody to death.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
He said.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
If you know a free cocktail where you're playing you know, poker,
or you're you know, pulling the one armed Bandits or whatever,
now you're paying for those drinks. They're nickel, and they're
charging you for everything. They're charging for parking. Oh, you
want to go swim in the pool we have already
built here. Yeah, we're gona charge you for that too.
So the consumer sentiment, which is the most important thing
to me, mirrors that resilience because seventy two percent of

(11:09):
there of their customers they talk to reported they see
the same or more shops opening relative to last year.
Now that's obviously a churn, but that churn means that
it's being offset by new people entering the market or
established places starting to expand. But is it true here?

(11:31):
I don't know yet. I'm just giving you this broad
overall picture because the perception, I sincerely believe that the
perception is being driven by the narrative on the cabal.
The cabal is trying to convince us that prices having
come down, that inflation remains high.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
It's not.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
It's you know, between two and three percent, which is
pretty normal for any booming economy, any growing economy. But
we're pounded and pounded and pounded about the EU shoe
of affordability, and with gas prices coming down, of course
that's not going to change overnight. But when you think
about if you're driving an eighteen wheeler and you're paying

(12:10):
X dollars a gallon for diesel, or you're commuting to
work and you're paint, whether you're buying regular unleaded or
premium unleaded, and that's dropped by seventy five cents, just
drop by a dollar. Whatever it is that starts to
ripple through the economy because virtually everything that we do
relies on energy. I had had I had to fill

(12:33):
my car up last night, didn't have enough gas to
get home. Well, obviously that affects my income because okay,
I gotta fill the car, gotta fill the car up
all the time anyway, because I drive him to work.
But for the people that live paycheck to paycheck, for
people who really you know, if I watch people do this,
maybe you've done it. I'm only going to put ten

(12:54):
dollars in. Well, all that's doing is that's postponing the pain.
Eventually that ten dollars worth of gas, being with the
price of gases might be a couple of gallons. If
you live in you know, San Francisco or you live
in Manhattan. That two gallons of gas for ten bucks
is I gotta last you very long? And you're right back.
They're putting ten dollars in again. So are there any

(13:16):
consumer shifts in behavior? Their data indicates that households are
spending smarter. What does that mean to you because I
thought about it. I tried to think, in my life,
am I spending smarter? I don't know that I'm spending smarter.
I think I'm just being a little and maybe this

(13:38):
is the same thing. But you know, maybe today I'm
not gonna go out for lunch. Maybe today instead I'll
just you know, in fact, I got a meeting to
go to, but I don't think lunch is involved. But
instead maybe I'll just snack on something, you know, diet
coating nuts and just move on. And there are people
they're taking advantage of localized price differentials because again, categories

(14:00):
like breakfast staples deflate while the others stabilize. So maybe
habits begin to shift. Platform level behaviors I think are
probably indicative of a broader substitution pattern, which means that
consumers like you are turning to value driven options. You're

(14:20):
taking advantage of membership savings you had just order timing
and the occasion weekday lunches versus how many times do
you go out on the weekend? Do you out during
the week or have you stop doing that? And as
returned to office, habits incrementally normalized, they're not back to normal.
Yet even in this building, they don't seem to be

(14:41):
back to normal. That people shift where they spoke. I
don't have to go to lunch. Maybe I was too
lazy to bring lunch anyway, so every day I went
out to lunch. But if I'm not going to the
office but three or four days a week, then that
fifth day that I don't go, or the fourth and
fifth day I don't go, I don't go out to
ear for us save some money. What are the implications

(15:06):
and what's the context with say door Dasher's trajectory. It
complements door Dasher's broader twenty twenty five narrative. They're experiencing
accelerated growth. They see an expansion of their grocery partnerships
with Kroger and others that are out to like two

(15:26):
thousand almost three thousand stores, and of course they're expanding
into new verticals that expand the data set that underpins
their local commerce insights. So it's just it's just one company,
But it shows us that perhaps, just perhaps that the
affordability crisis is not as bad as we think, but

(15:48):
maybe only in some areas. Because in all the how
many times, how many times you think I found.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Colorado on the story.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
How many times as I dug through the report and
did a word source, do you think I found Enver
or any of the suburbs or Colabado Springs or four
Collins are Boulder.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
None.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
I didn't find it at all. No saying it's not there,
I just didn't find it. So I think we're still
one of those high cost cities, and so I think
we're an outlier, which obviously would lead to a pretty
intense political discussion about why are we an outlier? What
are all the factors that make us an outlier? So
this state of Local Commerce study, the door dash is done,

(16:29):
kind of gives us a granular, real time lens on
local economic dynamics. But just in those cities where they're
operating that are not high cost cities that we have
easing prices on key stables, we got resilient restaurant ecosystems,

(16:49):
and we have a cautious but what I would describe
as a broad based downtown lunch recovery. Yeah, why do
I think the downtown lunch recovery is important? One that
means people are going back to offices, That means that
people are actually on their lunch time, going out and
spending money on lunch as opposed to brown bagging it.
So all that indicates increased economic activity. So increased economic

(17:13):
activity translates into a higher gross domestic product, which means
that as a consumer economy, we're doing more and more consuming,
which means that the economy must be growing. Why is
it that we don't feel that way? Why is it
we keep getting fed just the opposite that actually over enough?
We are in an affordability crisis, are we?

Speaker 4 (17:36):
Michael? I would say that my door dash would be
even cheaper if I didn't have to pay the delivery
fee that the Colorado State Pollup Bureau tacked on a
couple of years ago. I think it's like twenty nine
cents per delivery. So anyway, affordability is something that I
don't necessarily want to say good job, because then they'll

(17:59):
just tack to make it higher.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
Hey know that you're on K zero way? Are you
drinking coke? Zero? Now?

Speaker 3 (18:06):
No, it's just still the same old MacDonald's diet coke.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Same guy was in the window today, Oh hi Michael,
Hey yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
He actually said hi Michael, yeah wow.

Speaker 3 (18:18):
And which kind of gave me the creeps because that
means that money. Because this was at the where you order,
the ordering spot in the drive through. What would you
technically call.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
That, Yeah, just the speaker the speaker. Yeah, I mean,
but I wasn't.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
I guess I was at the speaker, but I was
in my car, so I'm not really standing at the
speaker anyway. He said, Oh, hi, Michael, come on around.
You gave my code.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
But yeah, so you already he already knew that you
were there because you gave him whatever code it was.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yes, that makes a little bit of sense. Yeah, yeah,
it doesn't female you go that he knew I was.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Well, at least he's easier to train than the early
morning girl at at like five am, which she had
a teacher how to say teach trying to say thank
you thancome.

Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yeah, thank you, You're welcome, thank you, and you're welcome.
Good grief. So I imagine most of you know what a
pink slip is drag, and I know what ping slips
are again, Yeah, pink slips all the time, king slips everywhere.
Do you know what a blue slip is? I'll tell
you what a blue slip Isn't a blue slip is

(19:26):
in just a minute. But I want I want you
to think about something about what really goes inside the Beltway.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Right now.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Trump's been in office since well it well not in office,
but it's been a year since he was elected and
since January twentieth. We're now in November, so it's been
just about eleven months. Sometime next week it'll be eleven months.
He still does not have all of his political appointees

(19:52):
confirmed by the United States Senate for those which require
a Senate confirmation. This is something that has given me
nuts for decades now. Fortunately I had two Senate confirmation hearings.
I had one for my first presidential commission and then
one several years later for the second presidential commission, you

(20:13):
know post nine to eleven, when they stood up that
wonderful organization called the Department of Homeland Security. But in
both cases, I fortunately had a couple of senators that
from Colorado, Wayne Allard and Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who saw
to it that we you know, wam bam, thank you man.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
We got it done.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
But now, if you don't have your team in place,
the bureaucracy runs anock. They do what they want to do.
They're they're like a They're just like the energizer Bunny.
They just keep doing what they had been told to
do prior to the election. And even though during the

(20:57):
transition from Biden to Trump, I've tried to explain this before,
during that transition team, during the transition period, the transition
team parachutes all of these people into all the departments
and agencies. Now they're not the people who will ultimately
take control of that department and agency, as if they
ever really do get control of it, but that's in

(21:18):
the story for another time. So they parachute in and
the purpose is find out everything you can about the
five ws, where, when, and why of what's going on
in that department or agency. They compile this gigantic book.
My book when I showed up in DC in January
of twenty twenty of twenty twenty twenty, I wish it

(21:41):
was twenty two. In January of two thousand was probably almost,
you know, six inches deep, and there's two or three
of these books. And it was every program, it was
every policy, every regulation, every initiative that the prior administration

(22:02):
in this that in that case it would have been
the Clinton administration. What they were doing and so our
job was once we got confirmed, because we can't do
anything until we're confirmed, was to go through those books
and decide what to keep, what not to keep, what
to change, what not change.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
But to do all of that.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
But you can't do any of that until you're confirmed
by the Senate because you have no authority, so you're
really just in limbo. So all I could do was
just read through the books and start marketing it up
and try and to decide what I wanted to change,
what I wanted to do, and everything else while I
waited on the Senate to confirm my nomination.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
And of course you you don't.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
It depends on you know, the White House has priorities,
so clearly the under Secretary Home Insecurity is going to
get a lower priority than say, the Secretary of State.
I understand that, but again it hinders you because you
don't realize how quickly four years goes. We stop and
think about. Right now Trump is getting close to his

(23:02):
first year to twenty five percent of his term almost finished. Now,
for you Trump haters, that's a reason to be ecstatic,
and for the Trump lovers, that's a reason to be concerned.
So back to the pink slip. The blue slip is
something that began as a courtesy. It was not a rule,

(23:23):
and it's certainly not in the Constitution. Back in nineteen seventeen,
the Judiciary, the Judiciary Committee at that time, they started
sending literal blue slips of paper to home state senators
because remember then the senators represented the states. So the
state would send their senators a blue piece of paper

(23:48):
in which they would get the views on the nominees
who would serve those states. Now, the animating thoughts simple.
A senator might know local conditions better sold. The committee
ought to listen to that local senator.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
But listening is.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
Not vitally and for the first decades that difference mattered.
Negative or unreturned slips were weighed. Then the committee often
proceeded so the full Senate could decide on a nominee.
That was what is required in the Constitution. Advice and
consent in substance consultation. It's married to accountability. That's not

(24:22):
what's occurring now. A people like that curmudgeon listener are
the reasons why conservatives have a problem building a big tent.
So yeah, go away, us scubers need a safe space.
I know, because you're all all of you are just
so so pathetic and weak and sad and well, you know,

(24:45):
I love my goobers, I really do.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
I love my audience. They're great. Although here's the butt.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
The text line number is three three ones ye o
three keyword micro Michael. I'm not reading the other not
logging into it. That's not mine mine three three one
zero three. So if you want to scream at me,
if you want to yell at me, are you going
to give me kudos? Or are you going to tell
me to go away? You got to do that at

(25:17):
three three one zero three? Keyword micro Michael. What are
you looking at?

Speaker 2 (25:20):
I'm just going to say that you're a special boy
and you need your own text line.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
Do you think you're No, it's because.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
The NSSA has to read through them and approve anything
that shows up. I don't want you to think that
the NSA would be reading anything. So I mean, how
would I know that?

Speaker 2 (25:38):
But I you know that, Well they're not right now
because the government shut down, so resuming tomorrow hopefully then
maybe oh.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
You silly boy, silly boy, So you think that because
the government shut down, that all the nerds with their
little headphones on sitting out at Fort Mead are just asleep,
or they're at subway eating sandwiches. Eh, they're listening to yours.
Be they're listening to you. Back to the blue slip.

(26:05):
So the blue slip changed in the nineteen fifties. That's
when they converted this consultative custom into a one senator
veto no hearing unless you had two positive slips. Now
this is again another slippery slope today. The motive was
not noble. The effect in the South this is this

(26:28):
is truly part of old Jim Crow. It was to
keep integrationist judges off the bench. So the result was
not just delay, It was trying to drift. It was
trying to effect public policy.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
So this practice that.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Was intended originally to gather facts became a mechanism to
block and then later chairs reverse course. Again, it's like
anything that you think the government does today, Well, hold on,
I'll tell you about something they do differently tomorrow. You
had Ted Kennedy, then you had Strong Thurman, then you

(27:09):
had Joe Biden, then you had Orain Hatch from Ohio,
from Utah, they all permitted the hearings to proceed despite
missing slips if the White House would quote consulting good faith.
Then came along Patrick Leahy, and he reverted to strict
enforcement in two thousand and one. So it's not that
long ago, and blue slips once again operated as a

(27:33):
pocket veto. Now the history's not a straight line. It's
just simply a pendulum. But that alone lot of cautionness
against treating a committee habit as somehow that were part
of the constitutional architecture.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
It is not.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
The Constitution's architecture is pretty darn clear. The President nominates,
the Senate gives advice and consent by majority vote, not
sixty votes, a majority vote. There is nothing in the constitution.
There is no role for a single senator silently blocking

(28:09):
a hearing on a nomination. There is no role for
a secret hold that never has to be to be defended.
You you just put your blue slip on the clerk's
desk that says I want to hold Michael Brown's nomination.
And so Michael Brown never understands why, well, I can
go have a meeting with that senator. Let's just say

(28:30):
it's in current. It's contemporary. It's contemporary. You know, you
know that John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennett would put a
hold on my nomination to be dog catcher. So how
do I find out what the objection is? I already
know what the objection is. I'm a Republican. They're Democrats.
That the Constitution doesn't deal with that. The Constitution says,

(28:52):
your job is to give advice and consent. You're vetoing
a presidential nomination, and you're not giving any reason.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
You're not being held accountable for your reasons.

Speaker 3 (29:02):
Now, what the White House will do is, and they'll
do this anyway, but in particular in case of a
blue slip, they'll schedule meetings. All right, Brown, we want
you to go meet with Hickenlooper and Bennett. So I
go up and i'd sit down their office. What's your objection?
You know, what are your concerns?

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Why do you you know?

Speaker 3 (29:19):
Me being the what as would be that I am?
Would probably just say to them, how come you don't
like me? But what's the problem? Tell me what the
problem is. That's not a way to do nominations. That
is a one man man in this case of duo
Bennett and Hickenlooper deciding that, oh, that guy's never going
to get into his position as the undersecretary. That's not

(29:43):
what the constitution requires. The blue slip is an accretion,
a barnacle on this whole of all these appointments. Now,
barnacles can be harmless, but they can also slow down
the ship. And today what are they doing? They're slowing
down the ship in an era whill we go? All
these pullar politics a device, it's not in the constitution,

(30:04):
not a Senate rule, just a device that allows one
Senator to halt consideration of a nomination for any reason,
or even worse, for no reason, that undermines electoral accountability.
I don't care if you dislike Donald Trump. Donald Trump
got elected. He got elected with a majority of the

(30:28):
popular vote, a majority of the electoral College, the majority
of the voters in this count that voted said we
want this guy, and.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
With this guy comes his team.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
Now, if you have a legitimate objection to somebody in particular,
then have the colonies to stand up when the Senate
floor when that nomination comes forward, and try to convince
you other senators that you don't like that person.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
And then voters can.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Voters can judge a president's choices, and senators votes when
they get hearings and floor action, not when they exercise.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
A simple paper veto