The Daily - How Democrats Will Govern (Now That Government Is Open)

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

For weeks, House Democrats have found their agenda overshadowed by the struggle to reopen the government. Now that it’s open, they have a plan. Guest: Nicholas Fandos, who covers Congress for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. For weeks, House Democrats, new to power, have found their agenda overshadowed by the struggle to reopen the government. Now that it's open, they have a plan. Now that it's open, they have a plan. It's Wednesday, January 30th.

The 116th Congress is here, and Democrats are eager to get moving on their goals for the next two years. When Democrats took control of the House at the beginning of the month, they came into office wanting to lay out what their priorities were, what they were all about, what they would do with power. So what is on their agenda? Well, the most pressing issue will be trying to end the government shutdown. Instead, they were greeted on day one with a government shutdown. Nick Fandos covers Congress for The Times. The longer the shutdown goes on, the worse it is for everybody, and certainly Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats want to go back to their agenda. They want to start their agenda. That's kind of crazy, the idea that anybody thinks that they should be doing anything right now other than opening the government.

Democrats have an agenda, whether you like it or not. They can't get that agenda going with the government shutdown. end of going with the government shutdowns. So it's only now, basically, that the shutdown ended last Friday, that we're kind of hitting reset in Congress. And they're getting a little bit of a do-over to introduce the kind of policies, the legislation, and the other things that are going to be priorities for this Democratic Congress and that they really want the American people to clue in on, hey, this is what Democrats are about.

at Congress and that they really want the American people to clue in on, hey, this is what Democrats are about. So what exactly are they doing? So Democrats are laying out a kind of two-pronged strategy. Today we have a new speaker and today we have a new majority. And today we're going to take decisive action, very decisive action. One is a set of bills that are long-held liberal priorities that are poll-tested or very popular with the American people, but are probably unlikely to become law. And these are bills that are basically messaging that they can tell the American people,

hey, if you give Democrats more power, these are the kind of policies that we're going to put in place that you say you want and we'll deliver. And we're here today because we know that American workers need a raise. The Raise the Wage Act will increase the pay and standard of living for nearly 40 million Americans across this country. There's a minimum wage bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024. Universal background checks for gun purchases. We say enough is enough by finally bringing common-sense bipartisan background check legislation

to the floor of the House. Isn't that exciting? A provision which is wildly popular with voters, but basically the Republican-controlled Senate has struggled to move any kind of legislation on this. And so, you know, the idea here is that rather than, say, pass an assault weapons ban, which would be a much more liberal policy proposal, you take a little bit more popular or moderate stance and basically dare

Mitch McConnell to not take it up. We carried a message of reform, of fighting corruption, of cleaning up Washington. We made a promise to the American people. The new members who've come made that promise and made it clear they wanted this to be the first order of business. Another example is a broad kind of good governance, anti-gerrymandering law that expands voting rights. It tries to add transparency to money in politics. It's basically a wish list of liberal priorities in the kind of voting and election space.

I mean, a lot of the newest Democrats who flipped districts from red to blue last fall were running on getting money out of politics, not accepting corporate money. You know, they found that this idea of cleaning up

what is widely viewed as a kind of corrupt pay-for-play system in Washington is popular politics. In return for you giving us the gavel, we are going to do everything we can every single day to give you your democracy back and make sure that this truly is a government of, by, and for the people. So thank you for being here today. So these are, by and large, bills that the Democrats think are quite popular with Americans,

but that for whatever reason, they know the Republican-controlled Senate won't pass. And that's part of the idea. That's right. Because the strategy that Speaker Pelosi is laying out here very consciously is that she can use now the platform of the House to basically give voters an example of what Democrats would do. Democrats are basically trying to send a message that...

— My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, unfortunately, are fighting for millionaires, billionaires, megacorporations, lobbyists, big donors, all to subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Republicans are owned and accountable to narrow moneyed interests that do not have the best interest of the people in mind and that they are, you know, essentially kind of for the one percent ruling class. We're fighting for working families, middle class folks, senior citizens, the poor, the sick, the afflicted, veterans, people in rural America, urban America, suburban America. Democrats are fighting for the people. It's another way of saying about the president, he might have convinced you that he and the

Republicans are for the little guy. And this is the Democrats saying, no, it's actually us. That's right. And, you know, this will sound, should sound pretty familiar to what they were talking about on the campaign trail. This legislative strategy is supposed to be generally a continuation of how they were running last fall. And they're trying to say, you know, if President Trump, who ran on some of these things and claims to be for them, won't sign these things, well, you know, how can you believe him on anything? He's not actually for these things. He was just selling you a bill of goods that was empty. And in that way, they can try and start, you know, rebuilding the Democratic brand nationally

as it relates to President Trump, something that obviously after the 2016 election, there was a whole lot of hand-wringing about, you know, the Democrats don't have a clear message. Voters don't know what the Democrats would do for them. These next two years are really important for Democrats as a party to be able to redefine that before running against President Trump in 2020. And the House is a huge part of that, maybe the biggest piece of it. Okay, so what's the second thing that House Democrats are trying to do? So the second part of House Democrats' plan involves putting forward legislation where they think maybe they actually could get a compromise with President Trump and with

Republicans. Ladies and gentlemen, and I say to the president, no more talk, no more tweet, to the president. No more talk, no more tweet, no more commotion, emotion, and motion and no results. The American people want action. They should not have to decide between paying their bills or paying for prescription drugs. These are issues which, again, they ran heavily on and were successful with last fall, particularly in some of the districts that they flipped from red to blue. Medications are too expensive and we must act boldly to lower prices. Things like prescription drug pricing. And instead of taking donations from pharmaceutical industry, we need to hold them accountable for taking advantage of the American people.

We've been talking about the kind of messaging element of this, of telling voters ahead of 2020 what they stand for. You know, a lot of their new members also have to try and come back with results. They were elected to be in Congress for these two years. And if they come back having accomplished very little or nothing legislatively, you know, that's a hard thing to sell the voters to. So if part one of the Democratic agenda is really about establishing what the party stands for, part two is kind of on behalf of these new members who convinced moderate voters to give them a chance. That's right. And, you know, if you listen to a lot of these freshmen who are newly arriving here in Washington,

their voters don't necessarily care about Democratic or Republican Party identity messages, et cetera. You know, they're paying way too much for prescription drugs, and they just want to see Congress take actions on these issues. They don't care if it's necessarily a liberal or conservative solution or tagged that way. And so a lot of these members are feeling a real itch to get to work on this stuff and bring something back to their voters and at least show, hey, we're trying. And ultimately, if President Trump backs away from the table or Senate Republicans do, or they can't meet somewhere in the middle, they can at least show we gave this a real run. I'm interested, Nick, in the fact that Democrats are looking

at prescription drug pricing as one of these pragmatic opportunities. We learned in the midterms that a lot of these moderates who flipped districts did so by running on protecting people's healthcare coverage. It was sort of a surprising development where voters who used to hate the Affordable Care Act have grown to love it and didn't want it taken away. Is the idea with prescription drug pricing to sort of expand on that discovery about voters

now that these moderates are in office? I would frame it a little bit differently. So Republicans and Democrats, I think for a long time, agree that prescription drug prices are going through the roof and voters of all kinds of political persuasions are fed up about this and want solutions. The difference this time has to do with a weird confluence of factors. Everyone involved in the broken system, the drug makers, insurance companies, distributors, pharmacy benefit managers, and many others contribute to the problem. You know, where Republicans and Democrats had very different approaches to this. Republicans were disinclined to have the government meddle too much in pharmaceutical industry. You now have a kind of unorthodox Republican in the White House and President Trump,

who one of his more populist impulses is to try and, you know, see if he could use the government to drive down drug prices. Government has also been part of the problem because previous leaders turned a blind eye to this incredible abuse. You have, at the same time, a new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. When it comes to drug prices, you should not need a Ph.D. in economics to understand how much your prescription costs. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who happens to, like Mr. Trump, be a little bit more populist on this issue than other Republicans in his party.

For some people on fixed income, sky-high drug prices are eating up every spare penny that they can scrape together to pay for their prescriptions. So it's time that we talk turkey to our friends at Big Pharma. Now, you know, somebody like Chuck Grassley and President Trump are not in the exact same position that Democrats are, but they think they're similar enough that they could come to the negotiating table and maybe come up with some sort of bill here. Mm-hmm. What's another interesting example of where the Democrats are looking for a chance to compromise?

So the other big example is infrastructure. This was an issue that President Trump really seized on in his 2016 campaign. We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports, and airports. That, believe me, folks, is what our country deserves. This is another issue where President Trump is a little bit out of step with probably congressional Republicans. Republicans tend to view infrastructure a little bit differently, or at least how to pay for it. They're in favor of more private money and spurring investment.

Democrats would prefer to pay for it with federal funding. And they think that they can essentially convince or may be able to convince President Trump, himself a builder, somebody who does not shy away from spending federal money, to maybe come over to their position. Last night, I had a conversation with President Trump about how we could work together. One of the issues that came up was part of our For the People agenda, building the infrastructure of America. And I hope that we can achieve that. And in that way, they could have leverage against Republicans and end up with a more liberal infrastructure plan than otherwise.

So the government shutdown has already delayed the timing of this two-part democratic strategy. How is it going to impact the politics and dynamics of the strategy? I think that's the biggest open question facing Washington right now. Is divided government going to be able to bear fruit or not? And the earliest test of that has been these negotiations over a wall at the southwest border. So far, at least they have not gone well. How many times you have called for, I will shut down the government if I don't get my wool. None of us have said it. You want to know something? You've said it. So far, at least, they have not gone well.

It certainly was a tale of two meetings, as you said, Heather, with Democratic leaders saying President Trump threw a temper tantrum, slammed his fist on the table. Meanwhile, Republicans, like Vice President Mike Pence, say that he kept his cool and even passed out candy. We now have a three-week clock ticking on finding a solution. And I think the outcome of this three-week period or of this wall debate will go a long way in determining whether or not there's going to be a model or the goodwill for Democrats to work with the president. This idea that Democrats are for open borders is gibberish. So the longest shutdown in U.S. history could logically be seen as a pretty bad start if we're looking for signs of compromise. But on the other hand, as best I can tell, we're now at this moment

where Democrats, Republicans, and the president all want border security. And they basically just need to find a way to claim victory on all sides. But they really do seem to agree on the terms, some fencing that the president can call a wall but really probably isn't a C2C wall, some technology, maybe some drones and so on. But there's a consensus that's emerging. technology, maybe some drones and so on. But there's a consensus that's emerging. What I'm confident is, is that Democrats are willing to sit down with Republicans. And I do believe that there is a like minded consensus among Republicans and Democrats that we can and we will strike a balance, a compromise on comprehensive border security. It's not grounded in a physical barrier. It could include some physical barrier.

And so kind of counterintuitively, if we find ourselves in a couple of weeks with Congress and the president reaching a compromise on something as intractable as border security and immigration, I wonder if that could lay the groundwork for a lot of these other compromises. Yeah, I think that one can see a scenario where they come up with an agreement that both sides can claim for semantic reasons, for tactical ones, where success for them, where President Trump comes out of it feeling good, where Democrats feel like they themselves won. And both sides have a kind of desire to replicate that experience and think, OK, we got ourselves out of this.

Democrats are thinking to themselves, well, Trump may have manufactured a crisis, but in the end we got the better of him. And Trump's thinking, well, I got money for my wall. I can work with these guys. And they start to look at these other issues and think, hey, all those interests we had in common, maybe we can find a way to come together on them. The alternative, of course, is that this goes poorly. We enter another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump are in a kind of feud that they can't get past, and we see none of this legislation come into law.

So what happens in these next couple of weeks in the border security negotiations seems to have the greatest implication for the second part of a democratic strategy, the compromise agenda, and less so, for the first part of a Democratic strategy, the compromise agenda, and less so for the first part, the symbolic agenda. Right. It's easy to move legislation on the House floor. And Democrats, despite the shutdown, already started advancing some of these bills. They've been rolling out one a week so far, starting to put them through hearings and on the House floor. They can do that regardless of President Trump. They'll never become law, but, you know, Nancy Pelosi can put her signature on them,

and candidates all over the country can go out and say, look, the House passed this legislation. But you're right, unless they can come out of this with some goodwill, or perhaps the president and Democrats can totally compartmentalize the wall fight, any other success that the government is going to have functioning, compromising to tackle a big issue is probably going to depend on the outcome of this. So if the shutdown negotiations go poorly, basically the Democrats are quite likely to abandon the second part of the strategy, the compromise part,

and double down on part one, passing these ideologically symbolic bills in the House and making the Republicans reject them. In a way. I mean, I think part two then becomes part 1B. I think they're going to go forward with Democratic ideas about infrastructure and prescription drugs and continue to try and dare President Trump to not meet them at the negotiating table. But at that point, then they become a message and it becomes a matter of politics. You can score points by saying Democrats are trying to address this big issue. President Trump won't meet us there. You really ought to

vote him out of office. That's kind of the extension of that message. The risk is that for the 20 or so new Democratic lawmakers who helped give them the majority but are in traditionally redder districts, they come back and have nothing really to show for their work. If instead this Democratic House becomes known for its aggressive subpoenas towards the Trump White House or a path to impeachment, and they have accomplished nothing legislatively or in a policy point of view, I think there's a big risk to Democrats that it looks like they got power and essentially used it for political retribution rather than trying to achieve results for average people. And then you're back to a place

that the Democratic Party worked really hard to get away from in the midterms. They're not showing everyday Americans that it's the Democratic Party that's actually working for them rather than Republicans. That's right. And that's what Democratic leaders

and I think new rank-and-file lawmakers are most fearful of. And to some extent, they obviously I think new rank and file lawmakers are most fearful of. And to some extent, they obviously can't control where President Trump is going to meet them. I think they feel like the best they can do is try and make a good faith effort to meet him. And if he won't meet them, they will go ahead and remind every voter of that, that they tried to address an issue and he wouldn't help them. he wouldn't help them and try and use it to reinforce their message that, look, in 2018, we ran promising these things and you rewarded Democrats with a branch of the Congress. But if we're really going to enact a lot of this legislation that we're talking about, you have to give us another lever of power. You have to give us the presidency or the Senate. And, you

know, ultimately, in the big picture, that's as much what this strategy is about as it is making law. It's about setting the party up for 2020 and continuing the kind of democratic clawback to power, not just in Washington, but in state houses and governorships all over the country where the brand became, at least for some people, quite toxic during the Obama era. Nick, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. I'd like to call this hearing to order. I'd like to welcome our witnesses today.

Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats. Director of Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel. Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Robert Ashley. In testimony on Tuesday before the Senate, the nation's most senior intelligence officials described the threats posed by North Korea, Iran, and the Islamic State in ways that directly contradict the policies of President Trump. We currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain its WMD capabilities

and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities because its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival. Under questioning, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, refuted the president's claim that North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat. Is Iran currently abiding by the terms of the JCPOA in terms of their nuclear activities? Senator King, I think the most recent information is the Iranians are considering taking steps.

CIA Director Gina Haspel acknowledged that Iran is complying with the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, despite Trump's decision to pull out of the agreement, because he argued the country was violating its terms. But since our departure from the deal, they have abided by the terms. You're saying they're considering, but at the current moment, they're... Yes, they're making some preparations that would increase their ability to take a step back if they make that decision. So at the moment, technically, they're in compliance.

And both Coats and Haspel said that ISIS, while weakened, was still a threat capable of attacking the U.S., contravening the president's claim that the Islamic State has been defeated. While we have defeated the caliphate, with a couple of little villages left, we should not underestimate the ability of terrorist groups, particularly ISIS and affiliated groups with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, that they are operating not simply on what takes place on the battlefield

that gives them strength or weakness, but they're operating on the basis of a theocracy, a theology, an ideology that we will continue to see for perhaps years ahead. Notably, for a hearing about the biggest threats against the U.S., none of the officials said there was a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S., none of the officials said there was a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, where the president has considered declaring a national emergency to build a wall. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.