Return to Transcripts main page
Inside Politics
FAA Staffing Problems Cause Major Delays In L.A. After Worst Weekend Since Start Of The Shutdown; Speaker Johnson: No House Session While Govt. Is Closed; A Feminist History Of Modern Russia, From Revolution To Autocracy; Dems Hope Races In NJ, VA Will Provide A Roadmap For 2026. Aired 12:30-1p ET
Aired October 27, 2025 - 12:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[12:30:00]
CHRIS WARREN, CNN METEOROLOGIST: -- salt water is coming up.
DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Wow, I mean, what an image or an analogy talking about driving from Miami to New York. That really tells you a lot about how long this is expected to be sitting over Jamaica.
Thank you so much for that, Chris. Appreciate it.
Up next, it has been weeks since House Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home for a fall break. Democrats say they're shirking their duty. What does Johnson say?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R), HOUSE SPEAKER: I can tell you, the House Republicans are doing some of the most meaningful work of their careers. They are in their districts, working around the clock. So I don't want to pull them away from that work right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BASH: OK. Well, we'll break that down when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[12:35:20]
BASH: Americans are squarely in the crosshairs of the government shutdown, and it seems like it's about to get worse. On Saturday, more than 40 million Americans, 40 million Americans will lose much-needed food assistance. Federal funding for early childhood education will stop, and air traffic controllers will get their first zero-dollar paycheck. It comes as the FAA warns these staffing issues are wreaking havoc on air travel, especially at Los Angeles International Airport, where officials had to implement a ground stop for nearly two hours yesterday.
My panel is back. Manu, the sound bite we played and the tease, I'm going to get to you because we have a lot to break down there with you in one second. But I do want to start with you, Seung Min, because as we said at the beginning of the show, the President is, like, literally halfway around the world.
SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right, right.
BASH: He's in Asia. Was there any discussion at all, even for like a second at the White House, about whether he should go? Like, you know, President Obama canceled his week-long trip to Asia in October of 2013, partly because of the shutdown back in 1995. President Clinton planned a trip to APEC. It wasn't a shutdown, but there were budget disputes here.
KIM: Right, right. And President Biden cut his trip short to also do Asia because of debt limit talks, if I recall correctly. I mean, if there had been a consideration for canceling the trip, there was no indication that that option was ever taken seriously because the President has been really focused on this trip.
He has talked repeatedly about his upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping. And we -- lest we forget, he also went to the Middle East for, you know, 36 hours or so earlier this month. He's been very much focused on the foreign policy part of his agenda.
In terms of a shutdown, he talks about it, but he's very much outsourced a lot of the day-to-day, you know, sort of operations and announcements of what goes down to Russ Vought, the director of Office of Management and Budget. You know, if -- once he returns from Asia, how much attention he turns to the shutdown, we shall watch. But administration officials say there's really nothing for him to do because what Democrats have to do is pass a clean CR.
BASH: Right.
KIM: They say Republicans have already done that. It's just Democrats who have to do their job. That's what they say.
BASH: But we know it is only one person, and that's the President of the United States --
KIM: Right.
BASH: -- who can fix this. Meanwhile, the House Speaker had a press conference this morning. You were there, of course. Let's watch the exchange, your question and his answer.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Why not bring them back and do the work they were elected to do?
JOHNSON: Yes. So we're evaluating this day by day. There cannot be a regular legislative session so long as the government has closed and Americans are feeling so much pain. We won't do that.
Now, in the meantime, Republicans, I don't know what the Democrats are doing other than publicity stunts, but I can tell you the House Republicans are doing some of the most meaningful work of their careers. They are in their districts. (END VIDEO CLIP)
BASH: I have so many questions. I mean, they're literally called representatives. They are elected by people not to stay in their districts, although they do, of course, meaningful work in their districts and their staff do as well, but they're elected to be representing their districts here --
RAJU: Yes.
BASH: -- in Washington.
RAJU: And this is going to be a harder position for the Speaker to maintain the longer that the shutdown drags out. Obviously, this is a very strategic decision to keep them out of session, trying to pressure Senate Democrats to pass the House's bill.
Senate Democrats are not budging amid their demands to extend these Obamacare subsidies. But the House has been out of session for more than five weeks, and they could do any number of things unrelated to the government shutdown --
BASH: Well, they could be preparing the spending bills --
RAJU: Yes.
BASH: -- as they're supposed to be, 12 or 13, as it's supposed to happen.
RAJU: Absolutely. And they could also -- committees could be any -- all the committees could be having hearings, they can have votes on bills. They can actually bring those bills to the floor that are not related to government funding, pass an agenda that kind of drives their messaging forward and then shows them not to do it.
BASH: They could swear in a Democrat who was just elected --
RAJU: Yes.
BASH: -- a month ago.
RAJU: And that's another question about why he's not doing it. But also, bringing those members back would take Johnson off message on this.
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Yes, and look, I mean, the Senate is in session. They're across the Capitol, right? They could be doing the same thing in the House. There's also, I think with Mike Johnson, maybe it's just in questions or answers to your questions, but he has a tell where he says they can't do something, we won't do something.
He said it about swearing in Grijalva (ph). He said it again about bringing people back into session. But look, this is -- negotiations are the way that this usually goes. It is literally true that Donald Trump negotiated with terrorists in Hamas more quickly than he negotiated with the Democrats over opening the government.
BASH: That's where we're going to leave this segment.
[12:40:00]
Julia is not going anywhere because up next, a fairy tale land of feminism. Julia is going to talk about her fascinating new book. It's called, "Motherland." Take a guess where that land was. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BASH: In 1917, women had the right to vote. They had paid maternity leave. In 1918, women were given free higher education, no fault divorce, and in 1920, the right to abortion, provided by a state for free -- the state, I should say.
Now, where did this happen, you might ask. The answer is Russia at the dawn of the Soviet era. A land that a century later is not exactly associated with female-focused policies.
[12:45:08]
Julia Ioffe is still here to share her new book, "Motherland, A Feminist History of Modern Russia from Revolution to Autocracy." It documents individual female stories from her own grandmothers to Lenin's lover and explores how the rise and fall of feminism and the experiment created by Russia happened. And I should mention, it is already a finalist for the National Book Award.
Congratulations on this book. It is so cool. And you've been working on it for seven years?
JULIA IOFFE, FOUNDING PARTNER & WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, PUCK: Yes, on and off.
BASH: OK. Well, it's very obvious how hard you worked. And I just want to start by talking about how deeply personal this is for you. You and I have talked many times about your family history. You were born in the then Soviet Union.
IOFFE: Yes.
BASH: And you came here as a refugee. And your own family is very much a part of the story. So I'll just start with some quotes from the book. "Two of our great grandmothers were doctors. Another was a PhD in chemistry who, in the 1930s, ran her own lab and published scientific papers at a time when her peers in the West still needed their husbands' permission to do much of anything.
Any American who hears this lineage assumes one thing, that the women in my family were extraordinary. That is because they measured them against American history and their own American families, even in educated families, most of my peers' grandmothers didn't attend college."
IOFFE: Yes. I mean, so it was trying to bridge this gap to explain to an American readership, to a Western readership really how it came to be that in the Soviet Union, their peers -- so our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers were doctors, engineers, architects, active -- soldiers in active combat, fighter pilots, snipers. And that history is extraordinary.
It's because in 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power and decided to emancipate women in their quest to create the new Soviet person. And they promised women fantastical things. They promised them and gave them free paid maternity leave, child support even for children born out of wedlock, no-fault civil divorce, permission to do whatever they wanted away -- like, that their husband --
BASH: Why? What was their reason?
IOFFE: Because their reasoning was that the building blocks of a capitalist society was the bourgeois family. And think about it, they're coming from the 19th century, where most women got married for economic reasons. They couldn't work themselves, or they couldn't keep working themselves. And they had to go from their father's house and their father who supported them to their husband's house.
And for them, that was anathema to what they were -- the kind of utopia they were trying to build when they seized power.
BASH: OK, so --
IOFFE: In theory.
BASH: So in theory. OK, so you write a lot about the women in your family and other women like Lenin's mistress, which is so fascinating. But also, it's not as if you're talking about the Soviet Union as this utopia --
IOFFE: Yes.
BASH: -- far from it.
IOFFE: No.
BASH: And you have a lot of pain in your family, just like most families who were in the Soviet Union. And you write the following. "Now, 90 years later, there blinks a flicker of doubt that verges on guilt that members of our family survived when so many didn't. It's the irrational fear that a relative survival may have been secured by some dishonorable act."
That quote, Julia, really struck me for lots of reasons. But I also -- because it's very much about your family and about people who survived all of the murders at the hands of the communist regime in the Soviet Union. But it could be about any refugee leaving any murderous regime --
IOFFE: Yes --
BASH: -- at any time.
IOFFE: Survivors. Survivors' guilt.
BASH: Yes.
IOFFE: But I think, you know, there I was specifically speaking about the great terror --
BASH: Right.
IOFFE: -- that Joseph Stalin unleashed on the country, and where he built up the gulag to the point where 20 million Soviets cycled through it before he died in 1953, and it was slowly dismantled. About 1 million Soviets were executed in secret in NKVD cellars.
And the way these arrests and executions happened were so crazy that people didn't know what they were guilty of. And so the point was to scare the innocent as much as the, quote unquote, "guilty." The fact that two or three generations later, people are like, did my grandfather survive, my great grandfather survive because he turned someone in or just because it was a total accident? I think that doubt, that fear is part of the terror and part of the point of the terror.
[12:50:02]
BASH: Now, when -- just quickly, when you write -- when wrote this, your grandmother, Emma, passed away. You're reconciling that and also the death of Alexei Navalny, who you knew and covered very closely.
IOFFE: I mean, my first thought when I heard that Alexei had been killed, and we know pretty much that he was killed, was that I was so glad that my grandmother, Emma, was not there to see it. She had died in December of 2020 of COVID.
And she had been such an ardent believer in a better future for Russia. She was part of the 60s generation in Russia that had witnessed the Khrushchev thaw, that had witnessed the Gorbachev thaw. She had been on the barricades in 1991. She had been on the barricades in 1993.
When I was living in Russia in my late 20s and going to the pro- democracy protests to cover them, she was going as a woman in her late 70s to protest. And she believed in Alexei Navalny. He -- I'm also glad that she was not here to see the war that Vladimir Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, which is where her parents are from.
BASH: Yes.
IOFFE: I think she would not have survived that.
BASH: Julia, it's just remarkable. And I just love the idea, and maybe it was implied in the way that we introduced this, and obviously in the title, "Motherland," that you talk about the history through the lens of the women --
IOFFE: Yes.
BASH: -- of Russia. Thank you.
IOFFE: Thank you for having me, Dana.
BASH: Appreciate it. I hope everybody gets this book.
Coming up, they were roommates on Capitol Hill. Now, Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger are looking to make history in New Jersey and Virginia and join a small club of female governors in America.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[12:56:28]
BASH: Eight days until Election Day. Early voting is already underway in Virginia and New Jersey and also New York City. Three races that will define this election year. And after last year's bruising losses, Democrats are desperate for a rebound.
Here's CNN's Jeff Zeleny.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ABIGAIL SPANBERGER (D), VIRGINIA GOV. CANDIDATE: Are you ready to win?
CROWD: Yes!
JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There's little doubt Democrats are ready to win. The more pressing question is how. As the party searches for a way back to power, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.
SPANBERGER: Not just vote against something, but we will vote for the policies that we believe in.
ZELENY (voice-over): And Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey.
REP. MIKIE SHERRILL (D), NEW JERSEY GOV. CANDIDATE: So as governor, I'm going to be accountable to all of you. You should demand nothing less.
ZELENY (voice-over): Are in the home stretch of their races for governor, which many Democrats hope could offer a roadmap for the way forward again.
It was 2018 when Spanberger and Sherrill were stars of a blue wave as Democrats swept control of the House and the party began to roar back, two years after President Trump's first election.
SPANBERGER: We brought respect and decency back to the political process.
SHERRILL: We know that in chaos lies opportunity.
ZELENY (voice-over): Back then, these Democrats won red seats through the power of their biographies. Sherrill, a Navy helicopter pilot, Spanberger, a federal agent and CIA officer. They forged a friendship, becoming roommates on Capitol Hill.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill.
ZELENY (voice-over): Their national security credentials are front and center again as they run for governor.
SHERRILL: The Navy taught me in a crisis, you either find a way or make one.
SPANBERGER: After 9/11, I walked the halls of CIA as a case officer working counterterrorism.
ZELENY: What is it like to be both in governor's races? You guys talk about that or compared notes?
SHERRILL: It's hard to believe. Here is somebody who comes from that national service background like I do. Someone who's a mom like I am. She has three kids, I have four. They're roughly the same ages.
Abigail and I, I don't think either of us thought we were going to run for office until in 2018. We felt called to serve again and have been in it ever since.
ZELENY (voice-over): Across the river in New York City, a far different approach for Democrats is unfolding in a mayor's race that has emerged as an epic generational and ideological clash between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI (D), NEW YORK MAYORAL CANDIDATE: It is the power of a movement that won the battle over the soul of the Democratic Party.
ZELENY (voice-over): But that battle for the party's soul may just be getting started. Bernie Sanders and the Progressive wing are all in for Mamdani, while most other big name Democrats are hitting the campaign trail in support of a far more moderate direction.
PETE BUTTIGIEG (D), FORMER TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY: Everything about her turns the GOP narrative about who Democrats are upside down.
ZELENY (voice-over): Barbara Lee is among the voters we met who is often frustrated by her fellow Democrats.
BARBARA LEE, VIRGINIA DEMOCRAT: Let me tell you about the Democrats.
ZELENY: Yes, tell me.
LEE: We just have too many to -- many people to please. That's why it's so hard for us. We are being attacked from all areas, not just Republicans, but from our own party. So let's get that out of the way and get going with the next.
ZELENY (voice-over): Jeff Zeleny, CNN, Charlottesville, Virginia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BASH: Thank you so much for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts right now.
