The NPR Politics Podcast - After A $500B Haircut, WH Infrastructure Plan Isn't Attracting More Republicans

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

The White House dropped half a trillion dollars in spending from Biden's infrastructure and stimulus proposal in an ongoing show of "bipartisanship," but the cuts weren't to the levels or areas that would improve the legislation's standing with conservatives. And: how Donald Trump has maintained his influence over Republicans.This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Kelly from New Jersey. Tomorrow, me and my family are going to Disney World, but my kids don't know yet. We're going to tell them in a few hours when my son gets off the bus from school, which is usually around the time this podcast is recorded, which today was at... 2.06 p.m. on Monday, May 24th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but my kids will probably still be screaming with excitement. Enjoy the show. Wow. Very exciting. That is very exciting. I would say that I bet that's great news for her kids. But I got to tell you, being at Disney World is still not very high on my list of places I want to be right now. Even in normal times, it just sounds hot and crowded. I took my kids to Disneyland once and when we were done and we went back to the car, I turned around and said to my daughter in

the backseat, that was a once in a lifetime experience. She said, oh, really? That's terrible. She totally got what I meant. That is some grade A parenting advice from Mara Lyson. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Mara Lyson, national political correspondent. And the Biden administration is lowering the price tag of its over $2 trillion infrastructure

and economic stimulus plan in an effort to maybe get Senate Republicans on board for a bipartisan deal. So, Ayesha, how low is the White House willing to go now? And what has the reception been like to the new offer? So what they are willing, they're willing to make a trim and the trim was about $550 billion. Which is a lot of money. It's a lot of money, but when you're talking about $2 trillion, you drop $550 billion. That is still, like, that is about the cost of the whole Republican plan that counter offers. So it is, it is, they did drop some, but it is still way more than what Republicans have said they're willing to spend.

Mara, do you see this as a good faith offer? Because I keep hearing your voice in my head when you say Biden's a president who keeps desperately trying to be caught acting bipartisan. So this might look like a concession, but how much of it is really a deal that they think Republicans are going to take? Well, I think good faith is in the eye of the beholder. And two things can be true at the same time. Biden can be perfectly sincere at wanting to have some parts of his infrastructure plan, whatever parts he can get, be bipartisan. But he also has said that he's not going to let bipartisanship be the enemy of getting something passed. And one of the things, you know, when people talk about negotiations between the

Congress and the White House being theater, this is what they're talking about. Because first of all, we're not even talking about apples and apples. The $568 billion-ish proposal that the Senate Republicans originally proposed is not the same thing as the $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan that Biden proposed because that $500 and something billion includes money that's already been appropriated, whereas the White House's plan was for new spending. So you could say that the Senate Republicans plan was like a tenth of what Biden wanted. Then you've got these three huge fundamental things that the White House and Congress and Republicans and Congress are just not on the same page on. And they are what is infrastructure?

Is it just roads and bridges, or does it include all these other things like universal broadband and high-tech manufacturing and human infrastructure? Then how much do you want to spend? As Ayesha just explained, they're super far apart on that. And then the third one, which is really important, is how do you pay for this? The White House has not budged off of its preferred pay-fors, which is raising taxes on people making more than $400,000 and on corporations. Republicans don't want to raise taxes at all. They would rather pay for this through user fees. But the White House says user fees means is the same thing as taxing middle class people, and they have ruled that out.

And we should point out that the White House did not compromise on any of the things that the Republicans find problematic. So they did not take out care for seniors or rebuilding all the VA hospitals or, you know, job training stuff. That's not what they took out. They took out research and development, which is actually the thing that Republicans like, and said, okay, we can do that in another bill. And that was a concession. And we'll cut down on what we'll spend on broadband because your proposal is lower.

So it wasn't even the very problematic issues that Mara is talking about were not touched on in this counteroffer. Do either of you have a sense of how much patience there still is to keep going with these bipartisan negotiations? Because if they don't produce an agreement, Democrats are looking at a very finite window here. Their alternative is to use the reconciliation process, which is special budget rules that would allow them to get it through the Senate without any Republican votes. But in order to do that, they have to do it by the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30th. And I know it's just before Memorial Day weekend. That might sound far away, but it's not that far away. I mean, the clock is ticking here to try to move this forward.

Well, that is the limits of their patience and the end of the reconciliation window are one and the same thing. I mean, they have to get this done by the end of the fiscal year, because otherwise they can't get it done with Democratic votes only, which they might have to do. Now, they might be able to break off some little chunks of this that can be passed with bipartisan votes, maybe universal broadband, maybe roads and bridges. But a lot of the things that are in that bill are not never going to get Republican support, and they're going to have to use reconciliation, which of course means keeping every single Senate Democrat on board. And that's a whole different type of negotiation. And that's going to be tough, right, to get all the Democrats on board. So reconciliation isn't like the easy route, right? You could argue it's easier to get Joe Manchin than 10 Republicans. Sure. But it's still not easy. Yeah, not easy. Yeah. Is failure an option here?

I mean, is the White House putting so much in this bill that something has to pass for his own political fortunes? I think something is going to pass. This is not, I think that if nothing passes, if he can't get some kind of infrastructure plan passed, that will be a huge, huge failure for the Biden administration. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a make or break moment. I mean, obviously, a lot of things will happen over the next four years. But if you want to set the tone in some legacy defining issues, this is where it's at. Like if you stumble out with this, if you stumble with this,

what else are you going to get done? Like, this is huge. All right, Mara, we're going to let you go because you have some other reporting to do. All right, I'll drop an upload. Goodbye. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about how former President Trump is communicating in a world where he can no longer tweet. What happens after a police officer shoots someone who's

unarmed? For decades in California, internal affairs investigations, how the police police themselves were secret. Until now. Listen to On Our Watch, a podcast from NPR and KQED. And we're back and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro is here. Hey, Domenico. Hey, just crashing a party. So you just had a piece out looking at how former President Trump is getting his message out. And, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious to say that the Twitter ban really has had an impact on his ability to drive the news cycle and, frankly, our podcast schedule. Maybe we can talk about the news judgment on all of that and how that's been a

lighter lift. But with Twitter taken away, he's been out of the spotlight somewhat, but his influence, I would call it a shadow influence currently on the Republican Party, which is why we should still pay attention. Yeah, and because his social media presence is down. But he does have this platform, which is basically just like an old school blog. But all it is is his tweets on a website, right? Like it's just his little short statements on a website. So in that way, he can still direct the Republican Party. He has really ramped up his messaging over the last two, three weeks, which I think is what's

important. And what we've seen is that a plurality of these messages have to do with the 2020 election and still relitigating his election loss. Yeah, I mean, he is certainly not letting that go. And he continues to spread endless amounts of misinformation or lies about what happened in the election. Absolutely. And I think you could argue that because of the influence he has on the Republican Party, if he were moving on, and you could see that say on his wherever it was he was talking, whether that's this blog-like platform or on other conservative leaning podcasts or whatever, that certainly the Republican Party would move on. So I think that's where his influence is strongest right now. And I think that's a reason to pay attention at least to

how it is, why it is that he's doing what he's doing and how Republicans are taking that message as elected officials and running with it, essentially. Because Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney was obviously excommunicated from leadership because she kept talking about January 6th and saying what former President Trump keeps saying about the election is a lie. It's not true. But the problem for the Republican Party or the problem for democracy is that Trump is not going to stop saying that the election was stolen and he is not going to let it go. He won in 2016 and he never let that go.

He never let it go. And he won. He lost in 2016 and he never let that go. He never let it go. And he won. He lost in 2020. He is never going to let that go. Well, to me, this is so interesting because right now, if you're trying to like analyze the future of the party and Trump, there seems to be these sort of two conflicting arguments. One is that Trump is waning influence. The Washington Post had a story recently

about how no one's really reading this blog, like it doesn't have anywhere near the reach or scope of his social media presence did before. But then, you know, I'd say even from my vantage point on the Hill, like, he seems to still have tremendous influence, you could argue even growing influence on the Republican Party over Liz Cheney, as Aisha noted, is a great example of that. But like Kevin McCarthy, the leader in the House, wants Trump out on the campaign trail. They all want his fundraising support. I mean, this is not somebody that is sort of like the George W. Bush model of you leave office and he's like doing watercolors quietly at his house in Mar-a-Lago. I mean, this is somebody who still clearly wants to be in the arena. You know, I do think that there that it remains to be seen how much influence former President Trump continues to have without the wider reach of some of those other social media platforms, especially as the 2022 midterm elections come along. I've talked to just sort of rank and file regular voters just anecdotally who were staunchly pro

Trump during his entirety of his presidency. And, you know, I don't like his tweets sometimes, but I love his policies and he's he's my president. And, you know, he's going to Washington to drain the swamp. Now, when I talk to them, they're sort of, you know, saying, look, you know, I never liked the guy. I don't really think like personality wise, he's somebody I agree with. I wouldn't want him as my neighbor. But, you know, I really liked his policies. And I see myself more as a Nikki Haley guy or Tim Scott guy or Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem guy.

So they're sort of starting to talk themselves. It seems some people are Republicans talk themselves into the ability to be able to vote for someone else that it doesn't necessarily need to be Trump, as long as they're sort of echoing that kind of culture message that Trump did. In many ways, he is beyond Twitter and social media, the need for it that he had before. Now, he may want it on a personal level. It may it certainly had meaning for him. But as far as, like you said, Domenico, he already has the ears of the people who he needs, and those people are very afraid that he will come out and say, you can't do this, or I'm against this, or if you don't do this, you're not with me. And look at what happened with the January 6th commission that is now on the ropes, because Trump came out against it.

And I also think we're seeing real time impacts of Trump's ongoing efforts to undermine the election. I mean, Republicans in states are using these doubts about the election to pass new voting laws. You look at the controversial recount happening in Arizona over doubts raised about the ballot there by Trump and his associates. And you have people in states running for office who believe that the election was fraudulent, who are also running on the state level now. I mean, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's not just what Trump's saying on his blog. It is continuing to affect our politics.

And I think it is something we have to keep paying attention to. I think that's a great point. All right. I think that's it for today. But we'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Rostow. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.