--:-- Shamita Basu: Hey there, it's Shamita. I've got a quick request for you. If Apple News Today is an essential part of your morning routine, follow the show in Apple Podcasts. And if you have another 30 seconds, leave us a rating and a review too. It helps other people find our show and it helps us know what you like about it. Thanks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, December 6th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, why Bitcoin's wild surge in price might not be good for the greater economy. Notre Dame reopens five years after a devastating fire. And Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras tour winds down this weekend. But first, House Republicans will have their smallest majority in history when the next Congress gets sworn in in January. That's 220 Republican seats to Democrats 215. But because President-elect Trump has tapped some House members for cabinet roles and Congressman Matt Gaetz has resigned, there will be a few vacant seats. So the margin will be even smaller for some period of time, which is why Washington Post congressional reporter Mariana Sotomayor told us if the party wants to advance legislation without Democrats, there's practically no wiggle room.
--:-- Mariana Sotomayor: If they have a three-seat majority when everybody is present, they know that it's going to be really difficult for them to find agreement amongst each other on a number of policies that President-elect Donald Trump wants to get done.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the top of Republicans' to-do list is a border security bill and an economic package to reauthorize tax cuts from Trump's first term. Lawmakers and congressional aides told Sotomayor there's already enough disagreement on those two bills that they might wait until April when those vacant seats get filled.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Still, navigating such a slim margin will be familiar territory for House Speaker Mike Johnson. The House Republican majority was already very narrow with five seats. There were days that there were actually more Democrats voting on the House floor than Republicans at certain points in time. There were, as we all recall, a number of Republicans who resigned early from Congress. So literally, Johnson had to manage for several months a one-vote majority.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Johnson will be judged by how well he's able to navigate the serious ideological divides within his own party. As much as Republicans may try and may ultimately be able to agree on something, it's going to be bruising. It's going to be painful. Plus, as we learned from Trump's first term, the president is likely going to apply a lot of pressure on his party in Congress. The message being support this legislation or risk ending up on Trump's bad side. A lot of them lived under the first Trump administration and remembered just how much Trump himself really did twist arms. A lot of Republicans are hoping that that pressure doesn't really get exerted on the most vulnerable Republicans – the ones who need to win reelection in swing districts so that Republicans can continue to keep the majority past the midterms in the next couple of cycles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What are the most vulnerable Republicans in the next couple of cycles?
--:-- Shamita Basu: The cryptocurrency market is notoriously volatile, but this week, Bitcoin reached a milestone never before seen in the digital currency world. For the first time, it traded above $100,000. Since Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election, Bitcoin has been on a pretty remarkable rally, surging 40% in value over the course of a month. Trump has made a complete 180 on crypto since his first term. Back then, he called it a disaster waiting to happen. But these days, the Trump family is selling their own cryptocurrency token. And Trump is promising to support deregulation, which has investors looking forward to him being back in the White House.
--:-- Alexander Osipovich: Bitcoin definitely has a history of crashing in spectacular fashion after hitting records.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Wall Street Journal reporter Alexander Osipovich, who covers the crypto market. And he told us a crash wouldn't just hurt the people who invest in digital currency. It could hurt all of us. If cryptocurrencies become part of the financial system and banks hold them and asset managers hold them and it becomes part of kind of regular financial interactions, that if there is an abrupt sudden crash, that could unleash a giant financial crisis that would have ripple effects into the broader economy. Much the same way that the crash of housing in 2008 led to a broad economic slowdown really around the world.
--:-- Alexander Osipovich: Ossipovich says that's why regulators are wary of allowing crypto to become part of the mainstream financial system. But that's exactly what Trump says he wants to do to make it easier to connect various financial products to cryptocurrencies. Potentially, they might even do some things that would bolster the price of Bitcoin.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is talk of having a strategic Bitcoin reserve where the U.S. government would hold on to a stash of Bitcoin, much the same way we have a strategic petroleum reserve. Some of Osipovich's sources told him there's a lot of irony here. After all, when Bitcoin was first created almost 16 years ago, the goal was to create as much distance as possible from government influence. And, you know, to a large degree, that's still the case. You have this weird situation where crypto is now close to the apex of political power and deriving benefits from that, which begins to sound a lot like other industries that we have in America.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Congress is also on the verge of becoming more crypto-friendly. According to Osipovich, voters elected 298 representatives and senators who've expressed pro-crypto views compared to 134 who have not. Meanwhile, Donald Trump this week nominated Paul Atkins to run the SEC. He's a former SEC commissioner who's been critical of efforts to crack down on crypto firms. He'll replace Gary Gensler, a crypto critic who says he'll step down the day Trump is inaugurated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This weekend Taylor Swift will perform the final shows of the Eras Tour, which started in March of last year and has become the highest-grossing music tour ever. For fans, it is so much more than just a concert. It's three hours of Taylor Swift singing her biggest hits, deep cuts, nodding at times to her new relationship and dropping Easter eggs all over the stage. Swift has called it the best experience of her life. And the massive turnout and revenue it's generated are just some of the many records Swift has set during her career so far.
--:-- Rob Sheffield: Taylor is really, really fond of taking up impossible challenges that any rational, sane, sensible person would talk her out of, but she's just determined to do them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Rob Sheffield, contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He's written lots of books about the greatest artists of all time, and his latest is about Taylor Swift. The last couple of books are about David Bowie and the Beatles, and some people have trouble with the idea of her being in that pantheon, but to me, she's right in that lineage.
--:-- Rob Sheffield: Sheffield has been reporting on Swift since the beginning of her career. And we should say he is a massive fan himself. He says Swift has transformed the music industry in ways that most people don't appreciate. For example, she writes or co-writes all of her songs, even two decades ago when she was first starting out as a teenager. That was totally unheard of at the time when young female artists mostly performed songs written by male producers.
--:-- Rob Sheffield: She broke the mold and set the stage for what's happening today. You look at what's popular in music in 2024, and it's all Taylor Swift's. You've got Sabrina Carpenter, you've got Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chapel Roan, you've got Charlie. It's this wide range of women who don't sound like each other, and none of them are copying Taylor Swift, but they're all operating in territory that she opened up.
--:-- Rob Sheffield: And she has, of course, totally changed the game when it comes to artists owning their own master recordings. In 2019, Swift famously embarked on a journey to re-record all her music so that she would own her masters. Sheffield was at first skeptical of this move, but it's turned out to be a massive success. I think it's shown artists how much they can get away with, and it's made artists evaluate the value of their songbook and the value of their songwriting and their publishing.
--:-- Rob Sheffield: But for Taylor to adopt such an extreme artists' rights platform, and she did that before the re-records, she was always talking about streaming and streaming revenues. And she was making that an issue years before that became a popular thing for stars to do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To hear more of my conversation with Rob Sheffield, check out this week's episode of Apple News In Conversation. We talk about so much more including what makes Swift such a gifted songwriter so uniquely accessible to her fans and Sheffield's favorite backstage moment with the pop star. And yes, we touch on a lot of the eras and play a lot of Taylor Swift music along the way.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the News app, that episode is queued up to play for you next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app. It's been five years since a raging fire brought down Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. And finally, this weekend, its doors reopen to the public. Resurrecting the 860-year-old church and restoring its roof, murals, and iconic Gothic gargoyles was a massive undertaking, involving hundreds of highly skilled artisans, scientists, and architects.
--:-- French President Emmanuel Macron: The decision to rebuild Notre Dame was about our capacity to save, restore, sometimes reinvent what we are by preserving where we come from. This is a message of achievement. The reopening is a bit of bright news following a week of political upheaval in France.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Macron this week saw his handpicked prime minister forced to resign by French lawmakers. Macron himself has said he is not stepping down.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a big weekend in soccer with the MLS Cup final between the New York Red Bulls and the LA Galaxy.
--:-- Sasha Kleschen: I think it's a massive opportunity for both clubs in different ways. The LA Galaxy, first and foremost, haven't been to MLS Cup in 10 years exactly. They are the flag bearer, the standard of Major League Soccer, the winningest team in MLS history with five cups already. But in the last 10 years, let's be honest, it's been mediocre.
--:-- Sasha Kleschen: The New York Red Bulls, I mean, this is a team that many people said for a very long time was cursed. They've only been in MLS Cup one time. That was in 2008, where they played the game in L.A. and lost 3-1 to the Columbus crew.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The match is being played in Los Angeles and kicks off tomorrow at 4 p.m. Eastern.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, sake, the traditional Japanese rice wine, is now officially on UNESCO's list of things that represent intangible cultural heritage. The drink is made in mountaintop breweries that are hundreds of years old and involves a months-long labor-intensive process.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And like I mentioned, if you're listening in the app right now, stick around for that Apple News In Conversation episode about Taylor Swift's dominance in the music industry. That's queued up for you next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Enjoy the weekend, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
