Consider This from NPR - $4 Trillion: How The Biden Administration's Legislative Successes Became Reality

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

President Biden had the narrowest possible Democratic Majority in the Senate when he took office. Yet the Biden administration's legislative successes continue to pile up.He signed the American Rescue Plan just a couple months after taking office, followed by a major infrastructure bill last fall. Most recently, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. These three legislative packages total up to around $4 trillion.NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with journalist Michael Grunwald, author of the book, "The New New Deal", about what it all means for the country. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org When President Biden took office, he had the narrowest possible Democratic majority in the Senate. So he faced a lot of questions about how he'd get his agenda through Congress. And he kept coming back to the same answer. I know the Senate and the House better than most of you know it. As I said, I served 36 years in the Senate. I know how hard it is

to pass major consequential legislation. It's true that Biden served in Congress for decades, and he had success as a legislator. In 1986, he introduced one of the Senate's first climate change bills, which led to the creation of a task force on global warming. He co-sponsored the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. Our bill is an ambitious undertaking. It is the first attempt to address violent crimes against women. That same year, he co-authored the controversial 1994 crime bill passed under Bill Clinton. One step is you must take back the streets.

And you take back the streets by more cops, more prisons, more physical protection for the people. And he successfully negotiated a 10-year ban on assault weapons. But I am suggesting there are laws we can pass if we had a national law that could keep these weapons out of the hands of many who have, in fact, and will, in fact, invoke and inflict carnage on the streets of America. Still, success as a member of Congress doesn't necessarily guarantee that someone will be able to move bills as a president. Passing bills under any circumstances has gotten harder over the years. Lawmakers have become more polarized. The filibuster is a hurdle

for most legislation. And the Democrats in the Senate cover a wide ideological range, from Bernie Sanders on the left to Joe Manchin on the right. So it's striking to look at what Biden has signed into law in less than two years. Three huge legislative packages. He signed the American Rescue Plan just a couple months after taking office. It's time that we build an economy that grows from the bottom up and the middle out. The middle out. And this bill shows that when you do that, everybody does better. The wealthy do better. Everybody does better across the board. That was followed by a major infrastructure bill last fall.

Both Trump and Obama tried and failed to pass infrastructure legislation. The bill I'm about to sign along is proof that despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results. And just this week, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. And now I'm going to take action that I've been looking forward to doing for 18 months. I'm going to sign the inflation reduction act. Now, some have argued that it's the lawmakers who should get the credit here,

not the man in the Oval Office. But consider this. Less than halfway through his four-year term, President Biden's legislative successes have piled up, despite the odds. Coming up, we'll take a closer look at how it happened. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Friday, August 19th. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR.

Let's dig into those three packages the Biden administration has gotten through Congress. First, the American Rescue Plan. It's nearly $2 trillion and passed with no Republican votes. The plan allocated money for vaccines, schools, small businesses, and anti-poverty programs. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described it this way. It's a remarkable, historic, transformative piece of legislation. Then there's the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It had the support of Senate and House Republicans. It adds up to $1 trillion. It had the support of Senate and House Republicans. It adds up to $1 trillion. It put money towards building better roads and bridges, broadband projects, public transit systems, airports.

It's the most federal money spent on roads and bridges since President Eisenhower. This is how Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg described it. The point of transportation is to connect. So if transportation was ever used to divide, we have a responsibility, a moral one, but also a very practical one, to fix it. And that brings us to this week's signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. This law that I'm about to sign

finally delivers on a promise that Washington has made for decades to the American people. Despite its name, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says this will have a negligible effect on inflation in the short term. It is a sweeping bill touching on many different areas. It allocates more than $300 billion to energy and climate, the largest federal clean energy investment in U.S. history. It also includes health care benefits, like a cap on prescription drug costs for Medicare. And it changes the tax code, creating a 15% minimum tax for corporations making more than a billion in income.

These three legislative packages total up to around $4 trillion. To put these accomplishments into context, I spoke to journalist Michael Grunwald. He's author of the book, The New New Deal. Well, we've already seen that the American Rescue Plan really did have a huge impact at a time when the economy was really quite moribund and COVID was really raging. It was really extraordinary the way it really reduced poverty. And not only didn't we have a depression, it was an incredibly short recession. So that really worked. And, you know, some people would argue it worked too well and it helped create some of the inflation sort of overheating the economy. The infrastructure

bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, I think, you know, the jury's still out. Those are 10-year bills. You know, we'll see how the implementation goes, but they certainly have the potential to really transform the American economy. And not a single Republican has supported it. So it turns out for all of our, you know, kind of digging into the details and having these arguments about how best to approach these things, it turned out to be a really partisan question. And the Democrats had the votes, and so they were able to do something. And if they had one fewer vote, they wouldn't have been able to do anything. We're talking about these three big legislative packages, but we should note there have also been lots of smaller accomplishments. Congress passed a law to manufacture computer chips in the U.S., one that expanded veterans benefits. There was

a gun regulation package. What do you think the secret is here? Look, I don't cover the day-to-day of politics the way I used to, but I did know Joe Biden really well, less so when he was in the Senate, but especially when he was a vice president. And he talked all the time about how he knows the Senate. He knows Washington. He knows how to get deals done. In the Obama administration, he was kind of the go-to negotiator. Mitch McConnell got tired of talking to everybody else. He wanted to talk to Biden because he thought they could do business together. And I think you'd have to say that at some level, he's been able to do business, even if largely on the Inflation Reduction Act, certainly, he kind of left it to the Senate to iron out the details.

But whatever he's doing, he's getting stuff done in a very difficult political environment. I remember some early press conferences soon after he took office when he was asked tough questions about how he'd accomplish his agenda. And he said, if there's one thing I know how to do, it's work with Congress, because that's what I spent most of my career doing. And it sounds like you're saying that wasn't just talk. Well, I will say I've had long talks with Vice President Biden, where I'm sure many reporters have, when he was talking about, oh, you know, he told stories about how Mike Mansfield used to teach him back, you know, 40 years ago that you should never question another politician's motives and you should always try to find common ground. And I've got to admit, I was sort of eye-rolling a little bit

when he was telling some of these stories about, you know, his relationships with racists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. But the fact is when Joe Manchin suddenly became the pariah of the left for killing this, you know, what was then Build Back Better and everybody was screaming at him and calling him a shill for the coal industry and, you know, he should be kicked out

of the Democratic Party and stripped of his committee chairmanships. You didn't really hear President Biden talking about that at all. And he kept very quiet and he's a believer in the backroom deal. And ultimately he got that backroom deal. And that's the difference between, you know, zero dollars for the climate and 370 billion. In a way, you've built your career as a journalist covering policy rather than politics. And it often feels like we endlessly cover the debate over whether a package like this will pass. And then as soon as it passes, we ignore it and don't pay any more attention to it.

Why do you think these sweeping, impactful legislative packages get so much more attention in the run-up than the implementation? Well, I think, and this is, of course, no offense to anyone in the media, but there's a sort of understandable, you know, we have this predilection for covering politics like a sport, right? There are winners and losers, and there's a narrative that makes it, I think, maybe easier for people to understand, especially as the country has become more polarized and we've become this800 billion piece of legislation, and it's just been covered as a big joke, you know, the big porculus. I wonder what it actually does. And I do think now we're talking about $4 trillion worth of legislation. More than four times bigger than what you wrote a book about. Exactly.

Yeah, I know. These are really – it's gigantic. And there could be books written about tiny little pieces of this, about the prescription drugs, about the geothermal industry, about electric battery storage. These are all giant, giant undertakings.

And we don't know how it's going to turn out. It'll be interesting to see whether anyone even pays attention. Journalist Mike Grunwald is author of The New New Deal, and he hosts the Climb of Wars podcast. Now, there is a counter-argument that Biden's role as president was not the deciding factor at all. Here's how NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith reported it after Democrats unveiled the Inflation Reduction Act. Well, the president wasn't involved at all, at least not directly. That's what Senator Joe Manchin told TalkLine in West Virginia. I was not going to bring the president in. I didn't think it

was fair to bring him in. And this thing could very well could not have happened at all. the Senate Democrats came up with a deal that happens to give him a vast majority of the things that he had been talking about in recent months, including these climate provisions, which pencil out at about two-thirds of what he had been asking for since the beginning. In other words, if the key factor here was the work of lawmakers rather than the president himself, the outcome is still the same. The president's ambitious agenda is moving forward. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.