Pod Save America - “Humane immigration and salad vaccination.”

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

President Biden tries to unify Democrats around his economic plan, former White House domestic policy director Cecilia Muñoz joins to discuss what the Administration can do about the border and immigration, and Jon and Dan break down this week’s wildest right-wing conspiracy in a new segment called Shit Your Uncle’s Posting.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Republicans and Democratic centrists are causing a congressional clusterfuck for the ages. Former White House Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Munoz joins to talk about what Joe Biden can do about migration at the border and his immigration agenda. And we talk through this week's wildest right-wing conspiracy in a new segment we're calling Shit Your Uncle's Posting. right-wing conspiracy in a new segment we're calling Shit Your Uncle's Posting. Before we start, we just announced a brand new podcast from Gimlet, Crooked, and A24 called 544 Days. That's how long Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian was held hostage in Iran, where he was falsely accused of being an American spy. In this limited series, Jason will tell the

story of what it took to free him, all while navigating the high-stakes world of nuclear diplomacy. The 544 Days trailer is out now, and you can catch the first three episodes on September 28th. Listen for free only on Spotify. And don't miss Hysteria this week.

Erin and Alyssa talk to Congresswoman Cori Bush about her new legislation to help renters, and Dr. Heather Iribunda about the pervasive misinformation out there about COVID vaccines and fertility. New episodes of Hysteria drop every Thursday, so check it out. All right, let's get to the news. Joe Biden met with congressional Democrats at the White House on Wednesday after centrists threatened to tank the agenda he ran on, and Republicans threatened to shut down the government and blow up the economy. The meeting came ahead of a few hugely consequential deadlines.

Here they are. About a month from now, there will be a stock market crash and a massive recession if Congress doesn't lift the debt ceiling. A week from now, the federal government will shut down if Congress doesn't pass a bill to fund it. And on Monday, Nancy Pelosi has promised to vote on a bipartisan infrastructure bill that currently doesn't have enough support to pass. Progressives say they won't vote for it until Democratic centrists agree to pass Biden's Build Back Better bill. Centrists say the fully paid for economic plan costs too much money. And Republicans are threatening to oppose the Build Back Better bill, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the government funding bill, and the debt ceiling increase because they're assholes who would happily watch the country collapse if it meant that Joe Biden and the

Democrats would fail. Dan, let's start with what we've heard about this big White House meeting that took place on Wednesday. A bunch of people left the meeting, and of course they talked to reporters because that's what we do now. Joe Man of people left the meeting, and of course they talked to reporters because that's what we do now. Joe Manchin said that the president told him, give me a number and tell me what you can live with and what you can't. Stephanie Murphy, another centrist, said,

both sides agreed that both the infrastructure and the Build Back Better bills should pass. Bernie Sanders said, I think at the end of the day, we're going to be fine. And my favorite quote came from Nancy Pelosi herself. We're calm and everybody's good and our work's almost done. Does all that make you feel better? What do you think about, what kind of tea leaf, let's do some tea leaf reading from that meeting. I mean, this is going to run really counter to type, but.

Are you optimistic? Well. Does that mean I have to be pessimistic? No, I mean, you just, you live your truth, okay? I, looking at everything everyone said, it makes me relatively optimistic that the worst case scenario of both bills failing and nothing happening will not come to pass. There is a natural rhythm to these things. And this is something that you and I have watched Joe Biden do before. This is what he is very good at, which is getting people in a room and saying, enough with all the bullshit. What do you want? You say 3.5 is too much?

Give me a number. You don't like this policy? Give me a policy you do like. He's forcing people to put aside the posturing and make it be about policies. You can't actually make decisions because no one is being particularly specific about what it is they want and what it is they don't want. It's all just very generic, broad, ethereal posturing. And so if we're ever going to get to where we need to go, people have to say what they want and then negotiate because you can't negotiate between something and nothing. And so I have some optimism that we are getting to a place where some decisions can be made before too long. Because if we're hearing both the progressives and the centrists in the meeting speak relatively positively, not just about the meeting, but about the general agreement that both bills do need to pass and that they're all on board with both bills passing, then it seems like we're getting somewhere, of course. Devils in the details. The other piece of good news is this morning, right before we recorded, Schumer and Pelosi both said that the White House and Congress has agreed on a framework for how to pay for the bill with tax hikes on the rich.

Now, I heard that there's like basically a menu of revenue raising options, which means various tax hikes on the rich that they're going for. But I do think that that might be a good first step, because if you can get everyone to agree on, all right, how much money are we going to raise through taxes, knowing that the bill is fully paid for, then you can sort of back into an overall number because like, oh, well, we raise this much money in taxes that we've all agreed on. So now we can spend this much money. Yeah, that's that's definitely possible. I do want to temper my optimism in one way because I don't want us to look Pollyannish, which is I think something's going to get done.

Is what gets done what should get done or what needs to get done? Will it get done in a way that maximizes the policy and political opportunity before us? That's a different question. But I am moving away from the cliff of the idea that nothing will get done, which would be a disaster and squandered opportunity of truly epic proportions. So in addition to taxes, there are a bunch of other policy issues to figure out here, to say the least. I just want to talk about two big ones. One is healthcare. Something that came out of the reports about the meeting is that a lot of the centrists in the meeting said they were on Pelosi's side. Pelosi wants to really shore up the Affordable Care Act, bigger subsidies, more Medicaid expansion, all that kind of stuff.

Bernie and a lot of progressives want to expand Medicare to include vision, hearing, dental. dental. I do wonder if the centros end up making the Bernie Medicare expansion much tougher, especially since they have Pelosi on their side. Yeah, I think that that is going to be hard. I mean, it once again gets to the stupidity of this whole thing, which is why not both? We absolutely need to do both things. We should be able to do both. And if there wasn't some sort of fake posturing about money being spent that is not really adding to the deficit, then we could do both. But I think the bulk of the political will seems to be on the side of strengthening the Affordable Care Act, which is still completely insane to me that Medicare does not cover a program designed to

help the elderly, does not cover hearing program designed to help the elderly does not cover hearing it's insane it's insane yeah i mean bernie is 100 right on the substance it's not even a close i agree i agree and i mean again i i also think that we should expand medicaid in states that haven't done it and we should increase the subsidies in the affordable care x so people can buy health insurance so i again it's people have asked me like where do you fall on this one it's like it's hard to choose because all those things are incredibly important to do. The other big issue here is climate and particularly Joe Manchin's position on the climate provisions. He said that he's far apart from the president on some of this stuff, which is unfortunate.

That's not a piece of good news, I think. just so everyone knows the democrats plan on climate is to make big oil companies and corporate polluters pay more the more they pollute and then use that money to reward businesses and communities that are transitioning to clean energy which will create millions of jobs and you know make sure that our kids don't spend their lives dealing with wildfires and floods and droughts that are only going to get worse. Right now, we reward fossil fuel executives and companies for making our air and water dirtier. I don't know why we would keep doing that. What do you think, Ben? Joe Manchin was going to be the skunk of the garden party, no matter what. But I would say that putting the centrist senator from a coal state that

Donald Trump won by 40 points in charge of energy policy in the United States Senate was a short-sighted decision. And that is – this goes to the bigger point here, which is we're talking about all – the politics of this and the polling and what is a good number and what's a bad number and all of that. It is worth just stepping back for one second and just dealing with the fact that this is the best. This bill right here before us is the best and maybe the last chance for a very long time to do anything about climate change. Because if Republicans get control of one branch of government, then we will do nothing about climate change. And to think about the stakes here is that currently

Democrats are favored to lose the House. That doesn't mean it's going to happen, but history, gerrymandering, all these things are running against us. When Democrats lost the House in 1994, they didn't get it back for 12 years. We lost it in 2010. We didn't get back for eight years. That is not time we have on our hands in climate change.

And so it'd be great if everyone could put aside all the petty bullshit and like try to save the planet because that is actually the most important thing here. That keeps getting lost in some of these smaller policy fights. Does it take away the fact that we need Joe Manchin's vote? So this is not going to be what we want, but it does like sort of raise the stakes and speaks to what is at hand before us. Yeah. And when we had Ron Klain on, I asked him about this and he said he was optimistic that they could figure out a formula that works for everyone. And I think what he's referring to is

this sort of pay for performance plan or whatever it's being called right now. But this plan to basically say to corporate polluters, you pay and the money that you pay for polluting, we're going to use to help with clean energy transition. And of course, I'm sure Manchin has some issues there, probably with coal, but especially, I guess he wants natural gas included as a clean source of energy, which seems crazy to me, but maybe that's the place where you compromise. But that's going to, whatever that formula ends up being is going to be a very big deal. Politico says that the Monday vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill is a huge win for Democratic

moderates, which seems crazy to me if it doesn't pass. And if it doesn't pass, it's because progressives are going to do what they say they're going to do, which is vote against the bill, which I think they should do if they don't have a Build Back Better bill at that point. What do you think? Yeah, I agree. I think they should vote against it. The stakes are too high to give up your one piece of leverage over a tiny handful of moderates who are out of step with the bulk of the party. I mean, it's going to be painful when it happens and there's going to be, oh my God, Biden's bad August and his miserable September have gone into a terrible October. Progressive tank the bill. I'll disarray. Yeah,ay yeah no it's going to be if they end up voting the bill down again i think they should

for the reason you just said it's their only last piece of leverage and like like the the centrist have basically dared progressives to vote again they've forced them to vote against this bill because they've sent so many signals that um oh if the bill went down you know maybe they wouldn't or if there was no bipartisan you know if the bill went down they wouldn't support build back better or they might not support build back better at all um that like the only thing progressives have is the leverage on this bill so they kind of have to but if the if the vote goes forward and the bill goes down the headlines are going to be fucking brutal, which makes me think that as we get closer to Monday,

if the votes aren't there and there's not a larger agreement on Build Back Better, that Pelosi will not put that bill up for a vote. Yeah, I think that's right. Because to what, not putting it up would theoretically upset the nine,

10, I think it's 10 now, 10 centrist. Yeah, Josh, the Gottheimer gang. Yeah, the Gottheimer gang. But what possible upside do they have in the bill getting voted down? I think we will avoid, I hope we avoid that fate, but none of this is pretty and it's all more complicated than it needs to be. And I think there's one important point here that I think keeps getting lost with sort of the bias towards bipartisanship and moderation in Washington political coverage is the responsible people here are the progressives, right? Greg Sargent made this point, which they

have been specific about what they want, they've been specific about what they're willing to compromise on. They have put out a plan, andOC, the squad, liberals, particularly liberal women, like that is going to happen. But that is not how we got here, right? Well, how we got here is Josh Gottheimer, Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and the rest causing making this much more challenging it needs to be. The progressive position isn't just the responsible position, it's the politically shrewd position. There are times there are many times where i believe deeply uh in progressive policy and i'm on the i'm on i'm on their side with policy right and yet on the politics i get the constraints and i get some of the arguments that mainstream democrats make about the constraints the politics on it it on in this situation like centrists are threatening to tank a bill that includes some of the most popular provisions ever polled.

Allowing Medicare to negotiate for cheaper prescription drugs is one of the most popular things ever polled. Raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and big corporations, hugely fucking popular, expanding Medicare, hugely fucking popular. Go pull it. So I guess my final question on this is we have this extremely popular bill, hugely popular with Democratic voters, popular with independent voters, popular with like anywhere between, you know, a third and half of Republican voters. How is this? We have Democratic majorities in both houses. How is it so hard to get this done? This is like one of those problems where in political reporting and punditry, 90% of it's about strategy, right? Like, what's the right message? Why are we doing this when the problem here is structural, right? There are two things that I

think have put us in this position. I mean, you obviously remember this. Six months ago, when everyone was like, after the rescue plan passed, they were like, we have learned the lessons of 2009. There is no way we're going to end up in that situation again. We've got it all figured out. And lo and behold, here we are in a situation that's actually way stupider than the divisions over the Affordable Care Act. That was a tough vote. It was at best a 50-50 issue and it was underwater for most of the time. The Build Back Better agenda is one of the most popular pieces of legislation I've ever

seen, hands down. And so it's not that we learned all the lessons and then we forgot them in the last few months. And recognizing that people have a lot of pandemic brain, it's been hard, but that's not what happened. There are two issues going on here. I think one is sort of obvious, which is the fact the existence of the filibuster is making this so much harder. We are trying to jam every single thing we want to do for the next decade into one bill. And so now the trade-offs aren't

between this healthcare plan or that healthcare plan. It's between a healthcare plan and a climate change plan, healthcare plan and childcare. And that makes it so much harder. It also makes it so much harder to message. Like what is the narrative of here's everything, right? And then the second thing I think is really interesting. And I've been thinking a lot, I wrote about this today, but I think a lot about when Tommy interviewed Elizabeth Warren as part of our interviews with presidential candidates. And we asked her what her first bill would be. Would it be Medicare for all? Would it be her wealth tax? Would it be her Wall Street reform plan? And she said, no, it'd be my anti-corruption bill. Because all the things

I want to do take on special interests. So we have to reduce the influence of special interests first to make all that stuff easier. And the fact that we did not do those things, we have not done those things, are why you have a tiny handful of members who have received a ton of money from the pharmaceutical industry opposing this incredibly popular thing. And so those two things, I think, are why we're here. It's not everyone is stupid. It's no one can read politics. It's that the system is set up.

And if we don't fix those things, the filibuster and reforming politics, every time there's democratic control of government again, God willing that ever happens again, because that is not a given, we're going to end up right back in 2009. And so I think it's a little bigger than just like centrists don't understand politics or progressives are being too demanding. It's a structural problem. screaming about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. But I do wonder if it behooves him to pick a fight with some of these special interests that are standing in the way of passing this bill so he can have a fight out there and talk about how prescription drug companies and big oil companies and banks and billionaires that don't pay any taxes, which I know he's doing an event today about that, if hammering that as a message might sort of help build public support or at least build public pressure on Democrats

to get something done without directly attacking some of these Democrats, which would be satisfying, is satisfying to us, but probably would not lead them to then vote for the bill. Yeah, I agree with that. I also just think broadly message, he had a tweet today sort of laying out why the Build Back Better bill mattered. And I think getting him out there, maybe going to some of these swing states,

not necessarily targeting specific members. Like I'm not saying like go to West Virginia or Arizona to go after Cinnamon Mansion, but go to the states that are gonna matter in 2022. Give some speeches, do some events that just message why you're doing this and sort of get – try to lift some of – this is really hard in this news environment. But to lift the narrative a little bit out of like a really minuscule minutia of legislation to like what's this all about? Why does it matter?

What are we going to accomplish if we do these things? much if we do these things. And I think that, I don't know whether that'll help make passing the bill that much easier, but it will, I think, ensure that the final product is better understood by the public when the time comes. But like I said, border crisis, Afghanistan, Delta variant, very strange flap with the French. There's a lot of things sucking up coverage right now, so I'm not saying that's easy, but it's something to at least consider. So as I mentioned earlier, unless Congress gets their shit together it's not just the fate of joe biden's agenda at stake in the next few weeks but the fate of the whole federal government in the u.s economy uh republican senators from mitch mcconnell to mitt romney

have all said they will vote against raising the debt ceiling and then they will vote against a government funding bill if it includes an increase in the debt ceiling. Why are they doing this? What are they trying to achieve here? Mitt Romney, our hero. I knew, I just served this up to you. Look, I have really come around on Mitt Romney. He has done a lot of pretty admirable things,

but I still find a little joy in reminding people that Mitt Romney helped cause all the problems we currently have in this country. That's a topic for it's a much longer discussion for another podcast one day. But they are doing this because they want to make Democrats pay a political price and they do not care what happens to the country. They want to they do not want to vote. They want no Republicans to have to vote to lift the debt ceiling so they can then hammer Democrats for the deficit that they mostly created with their giant tax cut for corporations two years ago. It is pure, unadulterated cynicism for a very stupid reason in a very high stakes environment. So why are Democrats still pretending that Republicans might raise the debt ceiling? The House passed a bill to fund the government, include the debt ceiling increase. Now we're

going to go through this whole charade where the Republicans are going to filibuster even the motion to proceed to vote on this bill um and we're just going to go through this whole thing i guess it's part of this strategy we've talked about this before that they believe the republicans might pay a political price for holding the american economy hostage i certainly would love to believe that of course they should pay a political price for that. But I'm not sure that they will. And the clock's ticking and the U.S. economy is at stake here. So again, I never understood this strategy. Yeah, I am. Whenever I read about this, I think there must be something that I am missing because everyone involved here was intimately involved the last two times we dealt with this situation. Nancy Pelosi was the leader of the must be something that I am missing. Because everyone involved here was intimately involved

the last two times we dealt with this situation. Nancy Pelosi was the leader of the House both times. Senator Schumer was in the leadership. Joe Biden was in the White House. Large portions of the White House staff were in all those meetings with us, were part of all the decision-making of how we fought back on it, and have to know that this can't work. And so I like to believe this is an act one of a two-act play. I just, for the life of me, can't figure out what the second act is given how close we are getting to sort of the last moments here because the government shuts down in a week. And so if you haven't figured out the debt ceiling, are you going to decouple the government funding and the debt ceiling and now have to deal with the debt ceiling all by itself and taking even the tiny modicum of leverage you have over Republicans because it includes disaster aid and a shutdown is a more easily understood political argument? and alarmed, but I just, I, maybe I'm naive, but I like, I just want to believe that there is

some other plan here that is just waiting, is waiting, waiting to be dusted off or they're going to, you know, there's a, there's a play to run. I just don't know what it is. It seems to me like this is what's going to happen. Republicans are going to filibuster the debt ceiling. Democrats are going to say, uh, you're monsters. You held the economy hostage. Again, we're all going to be right. We're going to yell at reporters for not covering it like that. Again, we're going to be right. Reporters should cover the fact that Republicans want to hold the economy hostage just to score political points. And then Democrats are going to create a new reconciliation bill and another voterama. And they're going to pass government funding, pass all the extra aid that we need for disaster relief and everything else,

refugee resettlement in that government funding bill. And there's going to be a debt ceiling increase in there. And they're all going to vote for it. And they're going to be annoyed about it. And that's going to be that, right? But when are they going to do that? Yeah, probably pretty soon. Probably over the next couple of weeks.

I guess they have what? Well, government funding. Yeah, we got a week. We got a week. So they could do a clean CR, continuing resolution next week just to keep the government funded for a couple months

while the Democrats figure out the debt ceiling piece of it. And maybe the Republicans will vote for the clean CR because it doesn't have a debt ceiling increase. So that's how they buy themselves more time. Yeah, I mean, it is quite messy. But again, I will ask the question, um, why they could have done this at the beginning without going

through this whole fucking rigmarole. Yeah. I mean, we have made this argument before the best smartest thing Democrats could possibly do is eliminate the debt ceiling as a political weapon, because it's one that we will not use. We could have used it against Donald Trump. We did not. I feel better about us as human beings that we didn't. But we Democrats helped Donald Trump lift the debt ceiling to pay for all of his spending on all of his tax cuts. And now here we are. It's still Donald Trump's tax cuts we're paying for and Republicans won't help us. So I don't know why we would not just eliminate it, make it go away forever, and take this off the table, because it's too dangerous to have this set of mattresses lying around for a bunch of irresponsible babies on the Republican side to be in charge.

It just cannot happen. And if you're unwilling to just eliminate the mechanism, which you could do with a law that gets buried into a bill, is if we're going to pass something by ourselves, by reconciliation, whatever else, push the timeline so far out that President Joe Biden will not deal with this again in his first term, at least. Like that? Yeah. I mean, that is the thing. Now, I imagine – like this is a rocket science. I'm not telling anyone.

They don't know. I imagine there's a bunch of mealy-mouthed centrists who are like, oh, that seems bad. I'd rather deal with, I'd rather rip the Band-Aid off super fucking slowly than just fix the problem, which is why they picked the end of 2022, which is great. Let's set it up so that the first act of a Republican Congress, if that's what happens, is to hold Joe Biden hostage. We've talked about this before. What are they going to ask for? It's going to be insane. And we know this is a problem because that's exactly what happened to Obama. Because in 2010,

we had to lift the debt ceiling. A bunch of mealy-mouthed centrists got together with Republicans and said they would not lift the debt ceiling unless we appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission. That's how we got that. And then Mitch McConnell, who appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission. That's how we got that. And then Mitch McConnell, who supported the Simpson-Bowles Commission, then voted it down, flipped his vote, which then those same Democrats said, Obama, you promised us this. You have to do it by executive order. And we ended up crazily creating a long-running Morning Joe segment for four years. It's just like we know what's going to happen here is like let's fix the fucking problem and move on and do what we need to do instead of setting

ourselves up to just repeat a painful history all over again i shouldn't have i shouldn't have triggered you to start talking about simpson bowls and the debt ceiling again i gotta remind myself never do that but you're right if there is a there are two political parties in this country one is a responsible governing party that may screw up all the time you may disagree with them but there's only one responsible governing party the other is an extremist faction and if you leave a tool around that could destroy the global economy and there's an extremist faction as one political party they're gonna use it if they have the chance so you might as well get rid of it for fucking ever uh all right when we come back former domestic policy

director for barack obama cecilia muñoz joins us to discuss the influx of haitian immigrants at the border and whether democrats still have the ability to reform our immigration system. We've all seen the images last week of Haitian men, women, and children crowded at the U.S. border in Del Rio, Texas, trying to cross over, many of them getting physically beat back by Border Patrol agents on horseback who were shown on video chasing, yelling, and swearing at them. More than 14,000 migrants have arrived so far. And while thousands are being allowed to stay, the Biden administration is being criticized by elected Democrats and civil rights groups for mass deportations, just as the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Democrats couldn't include the president's immigration reform proposals in their budget. Here to walk us

through what can be done is a longtime immigration advocate who's been through quite a few of these challenges herself, our former colleague Cecilia Munoz, who ran the Domestic Policy Council for President Obama. Cecilia, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Can you walk people through what the challenge is facing the Biden administration right now? Because there are a lot of people who see these migrants trying desperately to come here and they ask, why not let all of them stay or at the very least stay while they apply for asylum or legal status? Yeah, I think it's

easiest to break down the challenge facing the administration into two big pieces by population. Challenge one is what's happening at the border. And challenge two is what happens to the people who have been living without immigration status in the U.S. for many years, right? Roughly 10 or 11 million people. To start with the border, really the essence of the challenge is that the administration is working with a really terrible set of tools that were not designed for the challenges that we're facing, right? All of the infrastructure at the border, from the physical facilities to like the border patrol stations, to the personnel and their training, to the laws and the policies, all of that was designed for the border we had 30 years

ago, which the challenge back then was single adults coming from Mexico. And that's not what we have now. What we have now is families coming from Central America. And as is the case this minute, also from Haiti through Latin America. The Haitians that have been coming to Del Rio didn't come straight from Haiti. They were living in Latin America previously. So we have a whole infrastructure that's designed for something different than what's happening now.

And the government's job is to sort out for anybody presenting themselves at the border, their job is to sort out who might have a legal basis to enter, right? So if you have a visa, you have a legal basis to enter. And if you might qualify for asylum because you have a visa, you have a legal basis to enter. And if you might qualify for asylum because you have a fear of being returned, you have a legal basis to enter. And so their job is to sort all of that out. It's easier to sort it out at the ports of entry. It's

really hard to sort it out in between the ports of entry, especially when there are large numbers of people coming. And, you know, the government, I think, has never done as humane a job as it could. And obviously, the Trump administration was, you know, did a lot of appalling things in dealing with this challenge. And obviously, this administration is doing some horrifying things as well. So it's a really daunting task, I have to say, as awful and horrifying as the events of this last week have been. I have some sympathy. I sat in the government chair as well. And the tools that you have when you want to do the right thing, you want to treat people with humanity and apply the law properly, which is your obligation.

The tools available to people in the government are awful, absolutely unequal to the task. Yeah. So I've been thinking about this too. And Dan and I were talking about this because obviously, you know, we've been there too. There's some things that I still can't figure out, like why fly these migrants back, or at least some of them, as is the case, back to Haiti, particularly as if, as you said, a lot of them are coming from South American countries that they've been living in for years, and now you're going to send them back to Haiti, which has been just wracked by earthquakes, political violence. It's a dangerous place, and I don't understand the reasoning there. Couldn't they at least either, if they have to deport them, send them back to the countries they came from, or have them in Mexico, or at least let

them wait if they're applying for asylum? So they should, if they are applying for asylum, they should be able to come to the United States. And, you know, I think it remains to be seen whether the administration is doing an effective enough job of letting those folks in. Those folks have a right to enter the U.S. and they should. I think the dilemma for the administration is in order to return people from the countries where they have been living rather than Haiti, you need an agreement with those countries to do that. They need to be willing to take them. And it begs the question of in the meantime, what happens to them? And unfortunately, the administration, I think feeling the pressure to do something urgently, you know, made some decisions and sent people back to Haiti.

And I've seen some scenes today of, unfortunately, people being let off of planes and their belongings having been thrown on the tarmac. It's not. Horrifying. We should be doing much, much better than this. Why do you think they're still using Title 42, which is a COVID-related public health rule that allows the administration to expel migrants quickly before they can apply for asylum? Honestly, you know, I don't know for sure.

But my guess is that they're struggling because the numbers are so high and because we're in a pandemic. And frankly, because the political pressure is what it is. We all know that the, I think of them as sort of the hounds of hell. Right. The governor of Texas, the Republicans in Congress are going to criticize anything you do and that the American public expects at least what happens at the border to be orderly and fair. And so there are those two things push against each other, right? The impulse to be generous and to let everybody in runs into some political obstacles. So the administration needs to be able to say, we're applying the law, imperfect as it is, meaning the folks who are eligible for asylum should be able to enter and everybody else is supposed to get expelled. And they have these

multiple imperatives, right? Try to do the humane thing and the lawful thing, but also try to send the message, you know, especially within the hemisphere, the door isn't open, right? You can't rush the border, right? There has to be a process and they're struggling to administer the process. And Title 42, like it or not, is a tool that helps them at least maintain some degree of control. And that's at the expense, of course, of the humanitarian obligation as well. Dan, Cecilia mentioned the political challenges. Can you talk a little bit more about what those challenges are for the administration? I just mentioned all the criticism the Biden folks are getting for deporting too many migrants. Of course, they're also getting hit from the right in Republican

politicians, Republican pundits for deporting too few. I mean, it's hard to sort of fathom a more complicated political issue than the situation at the border. Because normally, you know, someone would say like, these are bad politics because the place you never want to be in politics is with both sides being mad at you. And so you're in a bad political situation. So what do you do? Like, what is the approach? What's the best message? And there, and this is why I find this one so hard. I found it so hard when we were working with Cecilia, when this sort of spotted up again in Obama, when this happened in Obama's second term, sort of a surge in migrants heading to the border, is the political answer is solve the problem. But I've never seen a domestic policy challenge that is so insoluble

as this one. There is no obvious answer because you have so many competing substantive imperatives where it's like, yes, we need better facilities, but better facilities also help contribute to the message that you should come here. So how do you find the right way to make sure that people understand what's happening? You're not encouraging people, but then you are treating people humanly. I mean, the best you can do in this situation is try to do everything you can to communicate better and more transparently with everyone about what you're trying to do to solve or at least mitigate these huge logistical challenges you have. And then you are doing what you can to avoid, and this is so hard, avoid the scenes like the officers on horseback, right? Or the

luggage being thrown. And this is what comes so hard is that the culture within these immigration enforcement agencies is decades old. And the culture is that the people who come across the border are inherently a threat and they are to be treated as such. And so there's this dehumanizing effect to that that leads to these sort of situations. And it's not like anyone in the White House sat there and said, or someone who was in Cecilia's former job and said, you know what the way to handle this, to the extent you can do anything, it's better, more transparent communication and trying to do everything you possibly can to show that you are responding to the legitimate good faith criticism from people, from the advocates who are pushing for a better humanitarian response within the strictures of this really challenging situation.

If there were a pause button, if you could hit pause and kind of stop what was happening and then try to fix it, the solutions here are really long-term solutions, right? That's part of the problem is that you have to deal with this problem in real time when the essence of what's happening is that we have a refugee crisis in our hemisphere. And the tools you have at the border are never going to fix a refugee crisis. Like you actually have to be engaged deeply in Haiti, in Central America, in Venezuela, and the other places people are coming from in order to diminish the necessity to migrate. But you can't do that at the border. Like if, in some ways, if four years of the Trump administration taking people's babies did not deter migration, then there's nothing, there's no toughness you can do that will stop migration. It's being driven by something else. And the fix really is to deal with that something else, but that is not a quick fix.

I would love to talk about that fix, even though, as you said, it's not a quick fix because, you know, like you said, this is not, this is going to be happening now a lot, right? There's going to be climate refugees. A lot of these refugees are pandemic refugees because they came from Chile and Brazil where COVID has devastated those countries. And so we're going to be dealing with this for decades, migrants showing up at the border and it's going to, it's probably going to get worse. And if we had a system at the border that was not designed as it was for 30 years ago for for single people coming over from Mexico to find work, but for families and refugees, what would that more orderly system look like if you were unconstrained by politics, by legal issues, by by bureaucracy? What would it look like?

This is exactly the direction of the Biden administration is trying valiantly to go. And that is that we need to make decisions about who we think should be eligible for protection in the United States. Our asylum laws were built for the Cold War. And obviously, we're in a very different environment. We need to decide whether fleeing climate change, fleeing gang violence counts as grounds for asylum. So assuming that we reach a decision on who we think we should accept, then we need a system in which you demonstrate that you have a fear of being returned and you get an answer relatively, you get representation because these are, you know,

this is essentially a court process and you get an answer relatively quickly so that the government can effectively do its job of open the door to the people who the door should be open to. And then humanely addressing the conditions of the people who don't qualify, right? Working with the countries of origin, if you have to return people, to make sure that we're actually investing and returning people in a way that makes it survivable for them, right? And the frustrating thing is, none of that is impossible to do. The changes in the asylum process,

the Biden administration's putting forward regulations actually to get us to a place where the decision isn't made by an immigration court five years from now, but rather by a trained asylum court maybe two months from now. This is not impossible. These are actually not intractable problems. But of course, some of these changes require some political will by the Congress and the, you know, as you guys richly know, Congress doesn't work, doesn't like to work on this issue. And in a way,

the Republicans kind of have the Democrats by the throat here, right? They get, as long as they can keep from fixing the legal problems, the problems with the law and the policy, then the Republicans get to beat Democrats up for trying to manage manage it it's like the perfect crime yeah I mean let's let's turn to that because you know of course this is all happening well Democrats are trying to pass immigration reform in Congress which is tougher now that the Senate parliamentarian has ruled against their initial proposal um Dan do you still think Schumer should fire the parliamentarian and maybe replace her with someone like Cecilia? Who can be friendly to our immigration proposals? I know that was your proposal to fire the parliamentarian way back when.

That was a message box that you had. Cecilia's had a lot of very hard jobs in her life, and I wouldn't try to foist another one on her. If she were to want it, I would certainly serve as a reference for that position. But I mean, this all- Lovett volunteered for it, yes, on Monday. And I think that Cecilia will be far better than Lovett. So I'm just, I'm trying to- Does he recognize it's a low profile position?

You don't sit in the big chair. You sit on one of those little desks next to the pages, just so he's aware. I mean, the whole thing is so absurd, right? This is all about the party's unwillingness to eliminate the filibuster. Like we have a fake referee making fake rulings based on fake rules about what we can and can't do. And it's so stupid. Like my first choice would be fix the filibuster. I would love to fire the parliamentarian, but we still have the same problem, which is the same senators who don't want to fix the filibuster are not going to then turn

around and pass a bill passed by, you know, with ruled as Byrd rule eligible by John Lovett. Like that's not, I don't, I struggle to see Kyrsten Sinema signing off on said plan, but I think the fact that we can't get this done just like we can't get minimum wage done despite having unified control of Congress speaks to the problem of the filibuster and the whole set of fake rules that govern the Senate. Cecilia, where do Democrats go from here on immigration reform? What do you think about their plan B, which is they're probably working on another proposal that they believe could pass muster with the parliamentarian.

And if the parliamentarian rules against that, like what options do the White House and Democrats in Congress have left? The Democrats are right to go back to the parliamentarian with another plan. I think that's a smart thing to do. It's the right thing to do. I also am not feeling very optimistic because you read her decision. She there was an ample pathway to get to yes. There have been four times in the last 20 years that major immigration legislation has passed on a reconciliation bill. There was a clear pathway to yes for her, and she had to kind of turn back flips to get to no. And that being the case, I'm not sure, I'm not feeling hugely confident that plan B is going to be effective, although they should absolutely push and try for it.

Look, I think short of firing the parliamentarian, and I agree with Dan that that that that could blow up the whole thing and that, right, the you're not going to get every Democratic senator on board with that. But you can't you they could vote to reject this decision. with that. But you can't, they could vote to reject this decision. And in fact, we have the Democratic moderates in the Senate in support of the DREAM Act, which is what this provision is, essentially legalizing people who, you know, were 17 when the DREAM Act was first proposed in like 1991. They're now pushing 40. You know, it's long past time to get this done. Democrats are for getting this done. There still is a way to get it done, but they have to reject the parliamentarian's decision. And there's ample reason to do that. Failing that, you know, I fear Congress, the Senate won't pass the DREAM Act any longer. There used to be more than 60 votes for it, but a lot of the

Republicans have changed their minds. That means the ball is back in the administration's court. And I am very familiar with the administrative tools that are available to the president. And President Obama used the best ones already. And even then, we've been struggling in court to protect them. So the administration will have to do what they can to protect people from deportation. But I am here to tell you that those tools are also pretty terrible. The ability to protect DREAMers from deportation, give them the ability to work permanently in the United States, runs squarely through the Congress of the United States and nowhere else. All roads lead back to the filibuster.

Dan, whether or not Democrats want to talk about immigration in the midterms, Republicans will certainly spend a lot of time attacking Biden on the issue. How should the party respond? Well, I think it's important to recognize two things about how the Republicans approach this. One is they do not care about these people at the border. So when Greg Abbott goes down there, they're trying to have it both ways. They want to call these people criminals and terrorists and gang members and threats, and also then attack the Biden administration for not humanely treating these people that they dehumanize in their rhetoric. The second thing is that immigration is not an issue they care about. In either way, not too much immigration, too little immigration, fix it, don't fix it. It is a proxy for a larger

argument designed to scare white people. It's replacement theory. It's what Tucker Carlson talks about every night. It's what Elise Stefanik put in one of her ads. This is the idea that hordes of non-white people are coming to take the political power of white people. It's how they fire up their base. And so the way we deal with this is not by buying the premise of the argument where we get into some sort of bidding war with Republicans on border security. Because it's the speech Obama gave that I know Cecilia knows so well, where, you know, he said, I think it was back in like 2009 or 2010, where, you know, if Obama said he was for a wall, Republicans would say

he should build a moat. If Obama said he should build a moat, they put alligators in or whatever that is. I think this is a, did you write it? That was my line. Yeah, yeah. But Lovett wrote that. The speechwriter is also on the call as well. But I thought Lovett wrote that speech. Both of us. Yeah, we worked But Lovett wrote that. The speechwriter is also on the call as well. But I thought Lovett wrote that speech. Both of us. Yeah, we worked on that together. And Cecilia, all of us were involved in that one. Yes, yes.

See, there we go. And so you can't get in the bidding war. So it's to default back to the thing we always talk about, which is sort of the imperatives of the idea of the race class narrative, which is call out the Republicans for why they're trying to divide us. What are they trying to hide from? Who is helped by that division as opposed to accepting the premise of their argument on immigration?

Because that's not what they're really talking about. Yeah, Cecilia, you and I have talked about this before for the wilderness, which is like Democrats have to make the case here, right? You can't just assume that if because it's a divisive political issue, that if you just ignore immigration and don't talk about it, then you can somehow just make the race about the economy and everything will be fine. Yeah. I mean, Democrats have the opportunity to be the party that's about fixing a thing, which the vast majority of Americans want fixed. And frankly, Republicans have a vested interest in not fixing it, because if it's not fixed, then Tucker Carlson has something to talk about every

day. Yeah. Cecilia, before we let you go, you have a new position as co-chair of Welcome.us, which is a group helping to settle Afghan refugees. Can you tell us a little bit about that work and what people can do to help? Yeah. So Welcome.us is both

a campaign and a website. So I'd encourage people to look at it. We have an opportunity to help resettle the tens of thousands of people who escaped Afghanistan, who were coming to the United States. And while they will have needs in the moment of getting resettled, in a way, this is actually more about us, right? Being the same kind of country we

pride ourselves in having been and resettling people who need us right now and offering them welcome, making them welcome and helping them succeed. We've done this at many times through our history after World War II, after the Vietnam War. We have never regretted the times when we have said folks going through something hard right now, in this case, going through something hard because they helped us, need us, and we're going to make them welcome. This is an opportunity for anybody who wants to help. You can go on welcome.us and find a way either through contributing or through opening your home, whatever it is. Outstanding. Cecilia Munoz, thank you so much for joining us. It was good talking to you. Great to see you as always.

Thank you both. Before we go, we want to take you down the endless rabbit hole of the latest right wing conspiracies with a new segment we're calling Shit Your Uncle's Posting. Today's entry comes from the man who once held one of the most powerful and sensitive positions in the entire U.S. government, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Let's take a listen. You know, somebody sent me a thing this morning where they're talking about putting the vaccine into salad dressing or salads. Have you seen this? Yes. Dan, to what bizarro world do you think he's referring to here? Are we in the bizarro world? Is that where your Caesar dressing dressing is spiked with Moderna. Oh, silly, silly Michael Flynn. Liberals would never, ever put the vaccine in salads. Do you know why?

Because it's too obvious. Steak sauce. No, this is exactly. Don't tell Michael Flynn, but if and when we are sneaking the vaccine into things, it's going to be into those pseudoscience virility pills that are being sold on Alex Jones's website. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. That is how we're going to weaponize the male inadequacy of the mega base to get them vaccinated. I would just say I haven't, I don't usually turn into Michael Flynn's speeches

or his interviews, but I also found it funny for those of you who are watching on video. Michael Flynn is wearing a t-shirt with three stars on it that says General Flynn. With his, I guess he's a three, he was a three-star general. So then you wear a t-shirt

about how you were a three-star general. What the fuck? I realize that's a very small point in all of this. Look, Flynn is set to go on tour this summer with a bunch of anti-vax doctors who promoted horse dewormer maybe that's another idea put the vaccine in the horse dewormer yeah um and uh and also these doctors said that america's health problems were linked to alien dna and demon sperm This is all, this is real. Will Sommer at the Daily Beast just also just reported that Eric Trump, the other one, the other son,

Eric Trump will give the keynote at an anti-vax conference where QAnon supporters will be speaking. You think Democrats should maybe make note of all this as we hone our midterm message? I do. You know, we, you and I have talked about sort of this internal debate among sort of Democratic operatives about what is the right narrative

about Republicans. And there sort of were two choices, extremists or corporatists, right? And I originally was a little more focused on corporatists, but I've come around to the idea, I think, that our best, most compelling, most believable argument is the Republicans are too extreme and too dangerous to have power. And I think their very aggressive embrace of anti-vax disinformation and conspiracy theories is a way to do that that is easily understood by people. Because the overwhelming majority of Americans are vaccinated. Republicans have decided to make themselves the face of that unvaccinated minority. And so I think that if we want to paint them as extreme, painting,

using their support of the anti-vax movement is a way to do it that makes sense to people and is easily understood by people, and much more so than calling them like QOP or talking about this very esoteric, strange conspiracy theory. I think a more believable thing is they have been trying to keep people from getting vaccinated. And that is putting my children at risk, my life at risk, my school, my kid's school at risk, et cetera. And so, yeah, I think it should absolutely be a part of it. And there's a, we're not going to be short of data points to make that point over the next year and a half here. And it's also, it's not just extremism, it's like loony extremism, right? Which actually breaks through a lot more in the media cycle.

Like the idea that Michael Flynn thinks that the libs are putting vaccines in your salad dressing. That's something that people are going to remember. And that guy, and here's the scary part donald trump runs for president again michael flynn's on the team michael flynn's not sitting that one out he's going to be back on the team he could be the fucking running mate i don't know he'd be running the campaign like michael flynn is going to be part of that team and that guy thinks that we're putting vaccines in your fucking salad dressing it's so good it's so good it's so bad but It's so good. It's so bad, but it's still funny.

Oh man. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks again to Cecilia Munoz for joining us. Everyone have a great weekend and we will talk to you next week. Bye everyone. Pate of America is a Crooked Media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. And our associate producer is Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim,

Yale Freed, and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.