US House Speaker: Fourth time’s the charm

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘US House Speaker — Fourth time’s the charm’

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Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, October 26th. And this is your FT News Briefing. Republicans have finally elected a new speaker of the US House of Representatives after weeks of gridlock. Plus, we’re launching a special three-part series about foreign investment in America. Today, we’re going to Albany, New York, one of the places where money from outside the US is trying to cash in on the green transition. 

Joshua Chaffin
I think you guys put a show on for us . . . all of these activities . . . 

Megan Daly
We did . . . We did . . . Called up everybody really early this morning. 

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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It took Republicans weeks to replace Kevin McCarthy after they voted to remove him from his post. But yesterday, the party elected a new House Speaker, congressman Mike Johnson, who was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The hope is, now with Johnson in charge, the House can once again focus on legislation. Here to talk about it is the FT’s deputy Washington bureau chief Lauren Fedor. Hi, Lauren. 

Lauren Fedor
Hi, Marc. 

Marc Filippino
So, Lauren, three speaker nominees have come and three speaker nominees have gone and House Republicans have finally landed on Mike Johnson. I think the big question on everybody’s mind is: who is Mike Johnson? 

Lauren Fedor
That’s a good question, Marc, and it’s a question a lot of people in Washington are asking themselves. He was a pretty, you know, little-known backbencher in the Republican conference. He’s a member of Congress from Louisiana. He’s a trained lawyer, and now he is the Speaker of the House, second in line in the presidential line of succession behind the vice-president. And he’s got a pretty long to-do list. 

Marc Filippino
So, Lauren, why did it take so long to get here? 

Lauren Fedor
Well, it’s complicated, but the short answer is that there are pretty sharp divides within the Republican House conference. And those divides were laid bare over and over again as several candidates struggled to unite the party behind them. You know, we had at one point moderates saying that they couldn’t get behind Trump loyalists. At other points, we had really kind of hardline Trump loyal conservatives saying that they couldn’t back candidates who were deemed too moderate. Mike Johnson somehow managed to square the circle here. 

Marc Filippino
Does Johnson’s victory here solve any of the problems in the Republican caucus? Like, can he actually unite the party? 

Lauren Fedor
Well, he did unite the party in terms of the floor vote that got him elected. He was elected with the support of every single Republican. That’s not something that McCarthy could have claimed back in January when he was elected. And it was something that obviously these other three candidates were not able to do either. In the medium term, in the long term, he’s gonna face a lot of difficult decisions, though, and votes. There are several things in his in-tray. One is obviously war in the Middle East. Joe Biden has asked for a huge national security package with billions of dollars, not only for Israel, but also for Ukraine. On top of that, closer to home, all of this speaker mess started when Kevin McCarthy struck a deal with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. Well, the threat of a government shutdown is looming once again, that deal was only a stop-gap measure and only funded the government through mid-November. So now the new Speaker, Mike Johnson, has only a matter of weeks to figure out some way forward to avoid a shutdown next month. 

Marc Filippino
He certainly has his work cut out for him. Lauren Fedor is the FT’s deputy Washington bureau chief. Thanks, Lauren. 

Lauren Fedor
Thanks, Marc. 

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Marc Filippino
US president Joe Biden has been on a mission to rebuild America with green technology. Maybe you’ve heard of Build Back Better or the Inflation Reduction Act. These are all things that make up his wider economic priorities, which are broadly labelled the Bidenomics. Now, Bidenomics encompasses a lot of things. And one of those things is encouraging investment from foreign companies, which is what we’re focusing on today and for the next few weeks — foreign investment in America. It’s part of a larger series about what American cities are doing with the money they get from abroad and how it all fits into Bidenomics. 

Joshua Chaffin
We are driving along the Hudson River. It looks like we are coming up to the entrance to the Port of Albany. 

Marc Filippino
In Part One, we’re visiting the country’s oldest commercial waterway a few hours north of New York City. 

Joshua Chaffin
It is rows of large, kind of, oil tanks, very industrial-seeming, big trucks . . .  

Marc Filippino
Josh Chaffin is the FT’s New York correspondent, and he recently drove up to Albany to see what’s going on. Hey, Josh. 

Joshua Chaffin
Hey, how you doing, Marc? 

Marc Filippino
I’m doing all right. So what exactly is going on at the port? 

Joshua Chaffin
Well, Marc, the port is bustling because they are gearing up to manufacture tall towers that are part of the turbines for offshore wind farms. Two and a half years ago, the Port of Albany was designated as the first site in America to create this enormous factory where these towers will be made and then eventually floated down the Hudson River to a terminal in Brooklyn, where they’ll be staged and assembled and prepared and then eventually taken off shore to a wind farm off the north-east coast. 

Marc Filippino
Josh, how is this offshore wind project being funded? 

Joshua Chaffin
Well, it’s being funded with state and federal grants. And then there are also investments coming from the private sector. And a lot of these are coming from European companies that have built a big offshore wind industry in Europe. And they’re now trying to participate in America’s effort to build kind of the equivalent over here. 

Marc Filippino
Now, who did you meet at the Port of Albany, and what was it like there? 

Megan Daly
Hi. I’m Megan. Really nice to meet you in person. 

Joshua Chaffin
We met with Megan Daly, who is the chief commercial officer at the port.

They are gonna record . . .  

Megan Daly
Oh, good to know. 

Joshua Chaffin
The port is a place where there is a lot of work going on. There are roads being built, and this is the place where, if all goes well, there will be four very large factories there that will handle each of the processes of creating these enormous offshore wind towers. 

Megan Daly
The Port of Albany has been in operations for 90 years. It has a history of moving things that are big, either heavy or hard to move otherwise. 

Marc Filippino
Josh, what exactly would happen at these sites when things eventually do get off the ground? 

Joshua Chaffin
Well, as Megan was walking me through it, the first step is to actually bring the steel into the port. Then the steel is rolled in one facility, it’s welded. It moves to another facility where it’s finished and treated so that it can handle this difficult offshore environment. And then eventually they will move these towers in pieces on to the barges. 

Megan Daly
Imagine there’ll be three to four of them on a barge going down. And we expect that they would be going pretty rapidly, meaning that it would be one after the other after the other to fulfil the project when construction is happening in the ocean. So every day, every week. 

Joshua Chaffin
So a 450-foot tower would probably float down the Hudson in sections on a barge bound for Brooklyn. 

Marc Filippino
Wow. That is quite the visual. But are there any challenges that the Port of Albany is facing? 

Joshua Chaffin
Well, the biggest challenge that they’re facing is they and their partners applied for this before the pandemic. And the estimate that they had had for the cost to build this factory was about $350mn. And it has since doubled. 

Megan Daly
The increase in the cost of the project did create a challenge for making sure that this project’s future is, in fact, cemented. So what we’re doing now is proceeding in a phased approach to the project. 

Joshua Chaffin
It’s not clear how that’s gonna be worked out. I think there’s a lot of nervousness. Everybody is watching to see how state authorities respond. 

Marc Filippino
Yes. So tell me, what would this project mean for the community? I mean, how important is this for the Port of Albany and the wider region? 

Joshua Chaffin
Well, you know, the companies that are gonna operate this factory, Marmen Welcon — they’re two companies from Quebec and Denmark that have partnered — have estimated that it would amount to 550 jobs. But it really is potentially a much bigger boon to the region. 

Megan Daly
They said we would commit for 30 years. And to us, that was huge because of the stability to the site and the activity and also because of the opportunity for the jobs and for the region. 

Joshua Chaffin
Meghan called it generational. 

Megan Daly
Part of this we saw as opportunities for those communities. If you calculate out the jobs, this could be the job for the rest of my life if I wanted to. This could be my job and the neighbour . . . I could bring my neighbour or my cousin. 

Joshua Chaffin
Which is, you know, the kind of thing in America that I think people often think that that’s a thing of the past. 

Marc Filippino
Given the transformational nature of the project, I have to assume that there is a ton of pressure for this to get off the ground and to succeed. 

Joshua Chaffin
I think that’s right. So I think, as an example of kind of Bidenomics in action, this would potentially be a very powerful thing. I think this cost issue is very complicated, but it feels like there is a lot invested in it already and a lot of determination to make sure that it works. 

Megan Daly
I think we knew this was a big deal from the beginning, and that’s why we felt so driven to take first steps on this. But I think if I’m honest, I don’t think we even knew just how big or how complex it was. And I think that statement could probably be echoed throughout what the United States is doing right now. 

Marc Filippino
Josh Chaffin is the FT’s New York correspondent. Thanks, Josh. 

Joshua Chaffin
Thank you. 

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Marc Filippino
Special thanks to Kasia Broussalian for reporting and producing this piece, and to our engineer, Sam Giovinco. Next week, our Investing in America series goes to South Carolina, where a battle is under way for the future of the country’s auto industry. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news. 

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