The NPR Politics Podcast - Biden Passed The Recovery Plan. Now What?

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

Infrastructure could be the next big focus, if an influx of children and teens at the U.S. souther border doesn't force action on immigration legislation. But without filibuster reform, the chance of passing legislation on racial justice or voting rights are low.This episode: political reporter Juana Summers, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.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

Hi, NPR. This is Dalton in Brooklyn, New York. I'm back on my morning walks listening to the NPR Politics Podcast now that the spring weather has finally arrived. This podcast was recorded at 2.05 p.m. on Monday, March 15th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will still hopefully be on another walk tomorrow morning listening to this podcast. All right. Enjoy the show. I like those birds. listening to this podcast. All'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. President Biden had two really big moments at the end of last week. He signed the COVID rescue plan,

and then he gave us all a little bit of hope when he floated the possibility that things in the United States maybe might be more or less back to normal by the 4th of July. Now the question is, what comes next? Mara, I was reading your profile of Ron Klain, the president's chief of staff, and you talked about two big lessons that Klain brought to the fight over this relief bill. And one of them is to take a victory lap so that the American people know exactly what kind of help they're getting from their government. That's right. You know, this is a kind of do-over for a lot of people in the Biden administration, including Biden. They were in office in the White House just five years ago. So what they learned was that President Obama passed his stimulus bill. And it's not really that he didn't take a victory lap. He just moved on so quickly to health care that he never spent

a whole lot of time telling Americans exactly what kind of help they got from their government. He also structured it so that the stimulus payments would be dribbled out in people's paychecks as opposed to sending them individual checks. And I think short of giving every eligible American a gigantic publisher's clearinghouse size check, the Biden administration is going to do everything in its power so people know that they got help. I can't imagine what it would look like to see that big check coming in from the U.S. Postal Service. It would be pretty funny. But I think the other thing that's worth remembering, and we know this from the experience of the Obama stimulus, too, is that the rollout is also so important and it makes up so much of how people will think about this. That's right.

Like, are the vaccinators actually going to show up? Are people going to get vaccinated? Are schools going to be able to open thanks to the extra money they're getting for, you know, building plexiglass barriers and things like that. And that is something that Ron Klain has a lot of experience with because he and Joe Biden were in charge of executing, implementing the Obama stimulus. I was pretty amazed by the fact that so many people, just friends or people I know through social media, have already been posting that their $1,400 checks have cleared. And I think that's a good sign for the administration if things are going to move that smoothly with this rescue package, that they don't get caught up in stories about delayed

checks or rollout problems. Those are good things because it increases the idea that the public will look at this bill as something that was well run, well done, and is helping them. You know, when we covered the Biden campaign, one thing that we heard him and Kamala Harris talk about constantly is all of these big issues that if they were elected, they were going to take on on behalf of the American people. I'm thinking of things like infrastructure, voting rights, the minimum wage, climate change, gun laws even. If they were operating in a vacuum and they could do whatever they wanted next, do you have a sense of what you think the White House would try to prioritize? You mean if there were no Republicans?

I think there's a lot of skepticism among Democrats right now that there's any good faith among Republicans to work with them. But I think what they're doing right now on the Hill is trying to test that theory a little bit. The House is working through, they've already started and for the next coming weeks, are working through legislation that has a lot of popular support in the country, that in the past has drawn bipartisan support in the House, although sometimes just single digits here and there, but they can at least lay the claim to bipartisanship. And they want to see if any of this stuff can move in the Senate. Things like universal background checks for gun purchases that has very high approval rating in the public and in the past has drawn some measure of Republican Senate support. And I think these are test cases. Can they, on single issue bills, cobble together a coalition that can advance anything? And if they can, that might be the

path forward. And if they can't, I think we're going to continue to see this pressure campaign building on Senate Democrats to try to blow up the rules of the Senate so they don't need Republicans anymore to pass legislation and can do it with their own votes. I want to ask you guys really briefly about immigration, because I feel like we can't let that go here. There's this influx of people, many of whom are kids and teenagers at the U.S. border with Mexico, and they're seeking entry into this country. And I just recall Biden campaigning, saying that immigration overhaul was going to be a day one priority for him. And it feels like there's just a ton of pressure on him to act and to act right now. What I hear is that a big comprehensive bill is the wrong approach. Democrats and Republicans both say that. But

maybe some piece of the immigration puzzle like the DREAMers, you know, the bill to provide a path to citizenship for people who were brought here when they were very young children, could get bipartisan support. You know, I think it's possible, although frankly, that's a strategy that we've heard through the past several administrations. We heard about that in the Trump administration. Maybe they could just do the D administrations. We heard about that in the Trump administration. Maybe they could just do the dreamers. We heard about that in the Obama administration, just carve out the dreamers. I think the challenge that Biden's going to find, which past presidents have found, especially in a really, you know, they have Democratic majorities, but they're very narrow. The dreamer component is very popular.

But when you have these big complex issues like immigration, legislators tend to be pretty reluctant to carve out the popular easy part because it's the carrot that goes into the pile of legislation that has a whole bunch of sticks in it. In other words, the Dreamer legislation is the incentive to get people on board for a more complicated immigration package. to go that route, which is possible if they just say, look, like, let's just fix this one problem and maybe we can move on. I think the criticism they're going to find and the conflict you'll find there is it's kind of a recognition that no one's going to even attempt comprehensive immigration legislation for the rest of the Biden presidency. If you break off the DREAMers, you eliminate the entire incentive to do the more complicated knots around the immigration bill. And I think that's why DREAMers for the past almost 30 years has been a pretty popular concept, but has never been able to get over the finish line for that very reason, that it's the anchor pulling the boat over the finish line, and they

just are reluctant to give it away. All right, so let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we will talk about what else Congress might try to act on. On NPR's Consider This podcast, we don't just help you keep up with the news, we help you make sense of what's happening. Like what the case about George Floyd's killing means for the ongoing fight for racial justice, or how to best navigate a pandemic that's changed life for all of us. All of that in 15 minutes every weekday. Listen now to Consider This from NPR. And we're back. Mara, we've talked about some of the reasons why there is perhaps some urgency and some pressure on Biden to tackle the issue of immigration. But I just remember when Biden was campaigning, he brought up so many big issues that he and Kamala Harris hoped to take on if voters elected

them. I mean, it's a long list, things like infrastructure, voting rights, minimum wage, climate change, gun laws. If they, let's just say for hypothetical sake here, if they were operating in a vacuum, what do you think the White House would move to next if they could do whatever the heck they wanted? Well, I think they do all of them. But I think they'd probably do infrastructure, which is climate change, because so much of climate change is in the infrastructure approach. This is Biden's build back better agenda. If the COVID relief bill was kind of the emergency bill, first, you had to put out the fire before you could rebuild the house. Well, this is rebuilding the house. This is his transformational legacy agenda. And I think that's what they want to do. It has a infrastructure has

a historically bipartisan history. Everybody likes infrastructure. And, you know, I think it's the place where the White House thinks it has probably the best chance, they might have no chance at all, but the best chance to get some bipartisan buy-in. But Sue, this has been a historically bipartisan issue, and yet no one has really been able to get a meaningful infrastructure package accomplished. Why is that? And just to put a finer point on it, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about a comprehensive package? You know, right, is it going to be infrastructure week all through the Biden administration the way it was in the Trump administration? The never-ending infrastructure week into the future?

That's a great question about what goes in an infrastructure package, right? Like, that's a very broad term. The hard, complex answer is anything you want, Juana. I mean, infrastructure bills could be designed in so many ways. In the most simplistic form, I think people think of roads and bridges and buildings, right? Those are just building up the country's infrastructure, better airports, better highway systems, things that allow commerce to move more swiftly and fastly. Infrastructure can also be new schools, new government buildings. And for Democrats, I think as Mara noted,

big priority here is climate change. How do you make more green energy solutions? How do you shift the energy economy away from fossil fuels? I mean, that's going to be a huge fight for Democrats. One thing that I think is different this time that's going to be really important to watch in this Congress, and I say, I sometimes I call these BBIs, boring but important, because they don't mean much to the average person. But it's the issue of earmarks. Earmarks are sort of pet projects that lawmakers can insert into big spending bills. They used to be rampant in infrastructure and highway bills.

And basically, for the better part of the past 10 years, they've been verboten in Congress. Members couldn't do them. Democrats are trying to bring them back. And if they succeed in that, the chances of getting more votes for an infrastructure package, I think, go up exponentially because it's a lot harder for lawmakers to vote against a bill if they have their own personal projects in there that they know for certain are going to benefit their local politics, their local issues, and are things they can run for re-election on. That's a huge argument for why they want to bring earmarks back is that lawmakers have more say in where that

money goes, and it benefits their districts more directly, especially in the House. So if they do that, you know, I think we can have a conversation about can they move legislation through Congress. Earmarks are probably the best procedural tool to try to grease the skids. If that doesn't happen, we might just be living in infrastructure week in perpet to grease the skids. If that doesn't happen, we might just be living in infrastructure week in perpetuity for the same reason. Well, they also can pass an infrastructure bill on reconciliation with 51 votes. I think in the end they probably get something. But don't forget, this is the compete with China bill. It's not just roads and bridges. It's all sorts of futuristic technology like 5G. There's already

a bipartisan American Chips Act, like we should make our own semiconductor chips so we don't have to rely on China for those. That's already bipartisan and Biden has already blessed it. There's universal broadband, which is something that has bipartisan support because it's really important for rural America, where in some places there's no broadband. And it's really important for urban America because we just saw dozens or thousands of kids in inner city areas have to go to a McDonald's parking lot to get Wi-Fi so they could go to remote school. So, you know, there are pieces of infrastructure that have some potential. I think the big question for the Biden administration is how much time do they want to spend looking for

bipartisan support? How important is it? When you talk to people at the White House, they say, well, people, the voters want to see that he tried. You know, it's not a necessity. It's something that he believes in. They want to see that he tried to get bipartisan support. Other Democrats say, if you want to do well in the midterms, you have to like infrastructure, historically bipartisan, earmarks may help find some Republican support. But there are a lot of things that candidate Biden talked about on the campaign trail that he said were big priorities for his administration that will need to go through Congress where there might not be a lot of Republican support to find. I'm talking about things like voting rights or the minimum wage or some sort of policing reform. What do you all think will happen with that? Is there any chance of there

being any progress on these kinds of issues? Not without filibuster reform. I think if there's one issue that's really going to pressure test the filibuster, I think it's voting rights. And I think especially because the filibuster has a legacy of being used as a blockade to civil rights legislation. I think it's increasingly something that the black community is focused on. We've heard former President Barack Obama talk about it. Jim Clyburn, who is one of the top black lawmakers in Congress and a very close Biden ally. And you see the shift in that conversation becoming one about civil rights and about racial justice. And I think that those communities have a profound influence on Biden and the Biden administration and, frankly, Democratic leaders in Congress. And voting rights legislation, again, tends to be pretty popular broadly in the country, if not in the Congress. And Democrats I talk to, if they think there's going to be an issue that really puts the pressure to bear on the filibuster, voting rights seems to be the most likely issue that would do that. Yeah, I agree with that. All right, let's leave it there for today. I'm Juana Summers. I

cover politics. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.