Evening Edition: Baseball, Bipartisanship And A Big, Beautiful Bill
17:25 Share

You can Venmo this, or you can Venmo that. Venmo this, or you can Venmo that.

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. I'm Todd Pyro. I'm Emily Campagno. I'm Ben Domenech, and this is the Fox News Rundown. Wednesday, June 11th, 2025. I'm Eben Brown. Members of Congress are putting aside their differences and lining up for their yearly ritual baseball game, and they're pretty serious about winning. They love to go to the Diamond and play against it.

each other. The Republicans have had the upper hand of late. They've won the last four ballgames prior to the pandemic. The Republicans didn't have quite as good a squad. The Democrats won four games in a row. But this is like a pendulum in politics. It swings back and forth. This is the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. ...

My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink. Then straight to the gym. Pre-K pickup, back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius, gotta keep the lights on. When the three alarm hits, I'm ready. Celsius. Live. Fit. Go. Grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now at Celsius.com.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress are walking off Capitol Hill and walking on to the baseball diamond at Nationals Park. It's their annual congressional baseball game, which is all for charity, and they raise a lot of money. And yes, the two parties play against each other. But while they're taking a break to slug out some home runs or maybe just some base hits, they're also playing a game of baseball.

They're still trying to bat in a run for President Trump and his one big beautiful bill. The House barely passed it. The Senate is probably making changes before they pass it. And just how much can they change it before it's too different? Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, he said that he was trying to protect the legislative product that the House passed out at the end of May. Fox's Chad Pergram is normally our congressional correspondent, but now tonight he gets to call the game, which you can watch on FS1 and Fox Nation.

But first, more about the one big beautiful bill. The reason if there's too many changes, it might be hard to get it back through the House of Representatives back when they start to play parliamentary ping pong here and bounce the bill back and forth between the House and the Senate. But something the House had to do, and they're doing this here in the next 24 hours or so, is there is a provision in the bill or several provisions in the bill that don't match up with Senate budget process.

and so they have to lop those off. The Senate has very strict rules. They're using this special process called reconciliation where they can avoid a filibuster, but in order to do that,

everything in the bill has to deal with numbers. You can't have policy in that. So there are some provisions in the bill that deal with policy. And so kind of a bit of parliamentary fancy footwork, the House isn't quite passing the bill again, but there's something called a technical corrections and they're embedding this into another measure and they'll approve that and then send that back to the Senate. But I tell you, the big things, do they change SALT, that state and local taxes? Does that get changed?

Very high likelihood there, that's the deduction there that was very important to get the votes of Republicans from New York. We had Nick Lota, who's a Republican representative from Eastern Long Island, who said, you know, right now it's at $40,000. He says if it goes down $1 even to $39,999, he said, I'm a no. We negotiated that. I would look at different people, depending on who you talk to. Look at the Medicaid cuts.

You talk to Josh Hawley from Missouri. You talk to Jim Justice from West Virginia. And they're very leery of that because they have high percentages of their population on Medicaid. And then you have other conservatives like Rick Scott and certainly Rand Paul and others, and they want deeper spending cuts. So, again, it's kind of getting a balance, but what that balance looks like, we're not sure just yet. Sure.

Well, putting all of that legislative work aside, today is a big day for Congress because they get to play their annual charity baseball game. You're at Nationals Park and getting ready to not just simply enjoy the game, but to be a part of it, to call the game. So I think for those of us that don't live our lives in the Beltway, it's very unique or it's rare maybe to see people

Members of Congress, both teams having a good time with one another. But can you explain it from your perspective? This is a very look forward to day every year, isn't it?

Absolutely. They love to go to the diamond and play against each other. The Republicans have had the upper hand of late. They've won the last four ballgames prior to the pandemic. The Republicans didn't have quite as good a squad. The Democrats won four games in a row. But this is like a pendulum in politics. It swings back and forth. The Democratic squad should be a little bit better this year. Linda Sanchez, who is the Democratic manager,

She is a diehard Los Angeles Dodgers fan. In fact, she will wear the Fernando Valenzuela jersey at the game tonight. You know, he died. Fernando mania, if you remember that back in the early 1980s, changed baseball when he won the Cy Young Award in 1981. He passed away in the past year. But, you know, she was a partisan of the Angels. And then when Nolan Ryan left...

and went to the Astros via free agency, she turned to the Dodgers. Of course, I wonder what it would have been like for Linda Sanchez had she been a New York Mets fan when they let him walk and go to the Angels, and Nolan Ryan was kind of an also-ran, and then he became Nolan Ryan. But anyway, she talks about the trash talk. There's a lot of that that goes on on the field. They do play hard. Morgan McGarvey will catch...

for the Democratic squad tonight. He was in left field last year and he broke his foot.

on the second batter up early in the first inning and had to come out. So that's a, you know, he's back, he's ready to play. You had the umpire Jerry Park get injured when there was a play at the plate and the catcher for the Republicans, Morgan Luttrell, turned and caught the umpire square in the face with the mask because he went to get the ball and he knocked him over and he fell over completely backwards and hit his head. I mean, to show you how rough the game is and how seriously they take it, Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House,

He banned the game back in the late 1950s, and they did not play the game. They started playing the game in 1909, and it was 1962 when they started again. They played every year since, except the pandemic in 2020.

Wow, that's amazing. And for those people listening to us right now, not only is Chad our prime congressional correspondent, he is our in-house baseball encyclopedia. If anyone has a baseball question here at Fox News, we're always turning to you, Chad. You're going to get to call the game, which is a bit of a different kind of broadcasting than what you normally do. I think you're

You're being joined by our own Kevin Cork. But tell me, what is it like to call a baseball game, especially this big one? I mean, this is different work.

Yeah, it's actually very hard. And one of the reasons is because it's not like we can talk about, you know, the players and say, OK, you know, they were 0 for 1 last week and the team goes to Miami to play the Marlins next week or something like that. There's none of that. This is one and out. So you have to do the research on your own and understand, you know, who is going to do what. One thing that helps a little bit is the Republicans, and this has just happened the past couple of years, is that they all wear the same uniform.

but they get to pick their own uniform number. So there's multiple people who wear the same number. The Democrats...

wear whatever uniform they want. It could be major league teams like Tom Suozzi from New York will wear a Mets jersey. Mike Levin from Southern California, he's a Padres fan, he'll wear a Padres jersey. And so telling who is who is very hard. They have this thing where you have these pinch runners. In fact, I wouldn't call them pinch runners, like Steve Scalise, who, as you know, was shot at the congressional baseball practice in 2017. He will hit and bat leadoff for the Republicans today.

And William Timmons, who is a Republican representative from South Carolina, he will get down in a track stance next to the batter's box. Oh, wow. And at the crack of the bat, he will take off. And so William Timmons has played for several years now. He's never had an at-bat. Do you know who Herb Washington is? Go ahead and explain. Herb Washington...

Herb Washington was a runner. He was a track star. In fact, had several track records. And Charlie Finley, who owned the old Oakland Athletics, brought him on board in 1974 and 75. The Athletics won the World Series in 74 and won the American League West in 75, but they'd won three World Series in a row. He played for basically two seasons in the bigs and never had a single at-bat, but they would bring him in to steal bases.

And he stole somewhere in the neighborhood of north of 30 bases over two seasons. He was pretty much just a designated runner. He never had an at-bat. So that's kind of the role of William Timmons of South Carolina.

Chad Pergram normally covers the Congress for us at Fox News. Tonight, he is calling the game at the Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. If you like what you're hearing, please like and subscribe. If you want to watch the game, you can do it on FS1 or Fox Nation. And we'll have more with Chad straight ahead on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition.

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited premium wireless. I bet you get 30, 30, I bet you get 30, I bet you get 20, 20, 20, I bet you get 20, 20, I bet you get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month. Sold! Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. I'm

You brought up the incident at the practice where Steve Scalise of Louisiana was shot and it was not just, it wasn't a grazing. He did have to fight for his life.

How's security at an event like this? Because let's face it, you have our, you know, so many of our Congress members are on a big open field. Yeah, it's something that's very concerning from a security standpoint. And in kind of a macabre way, the Scalise shooting elevated the prominence of this game. Right. People pay more attention to it now. They're expecting about 30,000 in the stands tonight. And that's a record for the congressional baseball game. And that's more than what you get, you know, at a big league game sometimes, you know, here at Nats Park.

But

You know, last year there were climate protesters on the field who actually got onto the field during the game. Oh, boy. And the Capitol Police and the other security officials take this very seriously. They finished the game, and this started about the second, third inning. In fact, I remember up in the booth we were interviewing Steve Scalise when this happened, and so we just kind of kept him up in the booth. But the Capitol Police, for the remainder of the ballgame, lined, standing nearly shoulder to shoulder, all around the outfield on the warning track, in fair territory, mind you.

for the rest of the game. That's how tough this is. And so you could imagine in the current political climate, would you have anti-Trump protesters? Would you have anti-ICE protesters?

Could you have, you know, anti-Israel, pro-Palestine protests? I mean, all those things are in the cards here because, you know, this is just moving Capitol Hill. And what happens almost every day at the Capitol, down the street a few blocks, Nats Park is literally walking distance from the Capitol. And so what happens at the Capitol? There's a lot of protests. You get a big group of people here, 30,000 people. Guess what? There's going to be protests. But that's why they are concerned about security. It's almost like, Eben,

A miniature political convention just for a day or just for a few hours. And that's why they are very strict with the rules up here. This is obviously a day or a night of fun for the members of Congress, but it's also for charity. Tell tell us about what they raise money for and how much and, you know, what are some of the records on that?

It's children's charities. There's about 40 to 45 children's charities in the D.C. area. And already they've set a record. I'm told that they're at two point seven five million and walk ups showing up to buy tickets for the ballgame tonight. They might get somewhere in the neighborhood of three million total. They got about two point two million last year. And so, you know, that's that's a lot of this, frankly.

And that's why they do it. You talk to the members, they're like, yeah, we want to beat the other squad. They take it seriously, but they come out here really to do this for charities. And it's kind of fun to see what happens in the stands, that each office, each congressional office, they sometimes bring a little cheering section and they have little, it's almost like a soccer game in Europe or South America. They have little things that they do and chants that they do or they wear their own special

jerseys or uniforms. A couple of real world things happening tonight. Alex Padilla, the Democratic senator from California, was supposed to play first base for the Democrats and maybe pitch. But he has decided to go back to California because of the riots there. And so he will not be available. And also Ruben Gallego, the Democratic senator from Arizona, he will be at the game. He's played in the game before. He's not starting.

unless he's put in for Padilla. We just don't know. I'm waiting to see what the lineup looks like here because we knew that Padilla was going to start at first base. But his wife is to be induced into labor tonight. Oh, wow. And so he's going to show up at the game, be there for a couple of hours, and go to Sibley Hospital here in D.C. and talking about adding to your starting rotation. That's what they'll have maybe by this time tomorrow. Well, it sounds like it'll be a lot of fun. Can everyone else watch this, listen to this somewhere? Sure.

Yes, this will be on FS1 and Fox Nation. It starts live at 7 o'clock Eastern time. And we've invited to the broadcast booth House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Majority Leader Steve Scalise, because, you know, he was shot several years ago at the practice in Alexandria, Virginia. And Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader who used to play as a serious baseball fan. He has a pick

picture of Jackie Robinson, you know, stealing home plate, the famous iconic shot in his office. It was funny. I was talking to Hakeem Jeffries a few days ago because since he's been the Democratic leader, they've never won.

And I said, and they've gotten dropped, by the way, especially the past two years. And that's why the pitching issue with Padilla being out might be a problem. They brought him in in relief last year. And I said, you know, during your time, you guys, you know, as the leader, you guys haven't done too well. And he said, well, but when I played, he used to play, he said we were 9-1.

Which is true, but his batting average in this contest was 167. So you are well below the Mendoza line there. He did steal seven bases, though. I will say that. Well, that's pretty good. He was three to a foot on the base pass. Yeah, look at that. Well, it sounds like you're ready for a fun night, and I hope it all goes well. Thank you so much. Fox's Chad Pergram at Nationals Park for the Congressional Baseball Game. Thanks for being with us on the Fox News Rundown. Thank you.

You've been listening to the Fox News Rundown. And now, stay up to date by subscribing to this podcast at foxnewspodcasts.com. Listen ad-free on Fox News Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts. And Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on Amazon Music. And for up-to-the-minute news, go to foxnews.com.

It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at the quiz.fox. Then come back here to see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz.