The NPR Politics Podcast - Congress Has A LOT To Do, But Can They Stop Fighting For Long Enough To Do It?

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Congress and, in particular, congressional Democrats have a long to-do list before the end of the year. But inter- and intra-party disputes threaten any kind of action. So what are the disagreements, and when push comes to shove can they get the job done?This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, 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, I'm Kendra. I'm Sasha. I'm Delphinium. And I'm Azalea from the Bronx. I'm seven years old, and I just got my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. In two weeks, our entire family will be fully vaccinated! This podcast was recorded at... at. Congratulations to all of you. It is 2.06 Eastern on Tuesday, November 30th, which happens to be my mom's birthday. Happy birthday, mom. Oh, happy birthday, Scott's mom. Happy birthday. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Okay, so you know how for the last few months we have said that Congress kept putting a lot

of things on its to-do plate for the end of the year? It is now that time of year. Congress has a lot to do as it returns, including but not limited to raising the debt ceiling by December 15th, dealing with government funding, which runs out at the end of the week, trying to pass a generational bill that would do all sorts of different major changes to the social safety net. Too many changes, you could argue, which is why it's taken so long to pass. Here we are. And as all of this happens, there is a lot of personal tension in the House of Representatives, especially.

So Deirdre, Mara, can we get into all of this stuff? Of course. Sure. Let's start, Deirdre, with Build Back Better. Last seen passing the House of Representatives. Now it's in front of the Senate. Really, essentially, it's in front of one man, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. What has happened over the last few weeks? What happens next? Well, obviously, it was a tricky path to get it to where it is now. It passed the House.

And now we're looking at the Senate, what they're going to do with it. As you mentioned, West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is continuing to be the big story in terms of what happens next. He has said that he opposes the four weeks of paid family leave that's in the House bill. And he wants to see that issue handled separately. He thinks it should be done in a bipartisan bill. He's also raised concerns about the climate and energy provisions in the bill. And as we've talked about before, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer needs all 50 Senate Democrats to vote yes. So he can't really move forward without Manchin's support. Mara, let me ask you about that, especially when it comes to a lawmaker bucking a president of his or her own party. Approval rating and the state of

politics matter so much. Biden, of course, is very unpopular right now, really bad approval ratings. But the White House will tell you over and over again, especially in those briefings we sit through, how popular all of the individual pieces in this legislation are, which matters more when it comes to a Joe Manchin of the world saying, do I buck my own president or not? Well, that's a really good question, because there are people who believe that policies are only as popular as the president who proposes them. In other words, sure, you can kind of pluck out a policy in isolation and test it in a poll and find out that it's popular. But the Build Back Better bill,

the entire thing, however it looks at the end of these negotiations, is only going to be as popular as Joe Biden. That is one theory. But in terms of Joe Manchin, I think that even before Joe Biden's numbers tanked, Joe Manchin is in a very unusual position. He is the only Democratic senator in a state where Joe Biden lost by something like 30 points. So he's a very conservative Democrat. His state is very red. Although one of the things that I always find interesting about him is West Virginia has some of the oldest, poorest people in the country, people who really could use vision and dental benefits in their Medicare. But he has been very steadfast against adding anything to the social safety net. And it really shows you how divorced politics is from bread and butter issues. In other words,

it doesn't really matter if somebody offers you something to help your daily life. It matters whose tribe you belong to. We can talk a lot more about Build Back Better in the coming weeks, maybe months, maybe years, who knows how long it'll take. But let's go to another topic that could definitely blow up the strange halting economic recovery, and that is the debt limit. There was a punting maneuver this fall to move this deadline forward. The Treasury Secretary now says December 15th is the day that the country would run out of money to pay the bills with a Z. What happens next? And will we see as big of a standoff as we saw in September? Well, I mean, Yellen was on the Hill today, again, warning about the impact of a potential default. I

mean, she said it could, quote, eviscerate the economic recovery, it could cause, quote, a deep recession. So she's continuing to put the pressure on Congress. I mean, I guess the good news is that there are some bipartisan talks on this issue. Last time, it took a bit of a standoff to get to that point. Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are talking, but we still don't know what the plan is to avoid a default. And, you know, we're only a couple of weeks away. There is some discussion about getting some sort of agreement to have sort of a separate reconciliation process just to do the debt limit where Republicans would not throw up sort of the typical roadblocks they would do in that process and allow it to go through in time to avoid a default,

which would make Democrats have to be the ones to pass it on their own just with the simple majority. But it's unclear whether Democrats want to do that or if that's what will end up happening. The thing that's so interesting about this debt limit fight is in the past, when Barack Obama was president, the Republicans would hold the debt limit hostage and say, well, we'll vote for this, but we're going to have to get some concessions like spending cuts. This time, there's no talk of that. This is a purely political exercise. Republicans want the Democrats to vote for it all by themselves so they can run ads accusing Democrats of increasing the debt. This has nothing to do with policy. It doesn't. And it's just another example of how

polarized this issue has become. Last deadline question. What is the plan? Is there a path forward on the government funding deadline, which comes at the end of this week? We only have a couple few days to get to the midnight Friday deadline end of this week. Everybody agrees no one wants a shutdown. But nobody has agreed in terms of what the short-term stopgap funding bill will look like. Right now, both the House and Senate are talking about a stopgap bill that would go through late January or early February. The House could vote on it as soon as tomorrow and then send it to the Senate, and we would expect that those votes would go pretty quickly and get it to the president's desk in time. But look, you know, it's an annual holiday tradition on Capitol

Hill. You know, they leave things like this until the very last minute. And the deadline is really, you know, the thing that gets them moving. Wait a minute, Deirdre, are you saying this is bipartisan? It's going to be a bipartisan bill that funds the government? It could. I mean, there are, it's a short term bill, Mara. So it's just a bipartisan agreement. It's going to be a bipartisan bill that funds the government? It could. I mean, there are... It's a short-term bill, Mara, so it's just a bipartisan agreement to avoid... It's the exception that proves the rule, yeah. Yeah, to avoid a shutdown. All of these complicated things are happening at a time of, unless you go back to the Civil War, really unprecedented tension on Capitol Hill.

We're going to talk all about that and how it affects the policies after we take a quick break. Okay, we are back. There is a lot of infighting happening right now. Deirdre, you were saying before we taped that you have never seen things this toxic in Congress, particularly the House. We're going to talk about all of those dynamics, why they matter for policy. Deirdre, let's start in the Senate. We have talked about this all year, but now it's coming to a head where you have the vast majority of the Senate Democratic caucus wanting to do one thing and a few outliers wanting to do the others, but they have the power to really get almost all of what they want in policy.

I mean, how is that tenable going forward, particularly on the Build Back Better bill? I think we're starting to see some frustration from Senate Democrats. The number two Senate Democratic leader, Dick Durbin, today didn't really hide his frustration with Joe Manchin, saying basically, you know, close the deal, Joe. You know, we have a deadline and we need to keep this Christmas deadline to get the Build Back Better agenda through. I mean, mostly, Democrats have been saying, no, we're talking to Manchin, we'll work out the differences. But I think there is starting to get to be some frustration and some concern that we're getting towards the end of the year, which is really the window to get major legislation

through the Senate. So I think that, you know, they want to not pressure Manchin too much, because they are worried he could tank the bill. But at the same time, they want him to get to yes, and they're sort of at the end of their ropes in terms of giving him the space that he says he wants. I want to talk about the House now. On one hand, there are so many signs that show House Republicans are really on, you know, if the election were today, which of course it's not, it's about a year away, on a glide path to retaking the majority of the House of Representatives. At the same time, there is really toxic infighting. There are, you know, kind of the MAGA wing of the party is

getting louder and louder and more and more forceful. And you're seeing at times some real ugliness, some racist attacks that Republicans have responded to and led to just a whole lot of infighting in the House Republican caucus, which Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy seems unwilling or uninterested or unable to deal with. I mean, how bad are things, particularly on the House Republican side right now? I mean, I've covered Congress for a long time, and I've never really seen the House in such a toxic, dysfunctional state. I mean, clearly there's a polarization between the parties, just the level of distrust between the parties, the fact that the top leaders

don't even really talk to each other and sometimes call each other names publicly. But on the Republican side lately, there's been really just a lot of ugliness and open divisions between, you know, the right sort of fringe members of the Republican conference who have become sort of social media stars and have, you know, said some pretty racist, controversial things about Democrats. And then, you know, some of the mainstream Democrats or, you know, rank and file House Republicans who call them out and say, you know, this is wrong and get into sort of social media fights with them just shows you how divided the party is. And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been unable

to do anything about it. I mean, he's sort of hamstrung because he needs to get all their support if he's to become speaker. You know, if and when they take control of the House after the 2022 midterms. But it just shows you just how low the bar is in terms of just general member relationships in the House. And it's a bad sign for our political system. Yeah, that's for sure. And look, Kevin McCarthy might be extremely confident about taking back the majority, but he doesn't sound extremely confident about becoming Speaker if and when they do. And a lot of this, you know, we haven't mentioned Donald Trump today, but Donald Trump could be the deciding vote for Speaker of the House, because if he thinks Kevin McCarthy hasn't been loyal enough,

he could probably squash his prospects. Or, as you reported, I mean, there are, we could talk more about this later, but I mean, there are a few members of the House Republican caucus who say, why not just make Donald Trump speaker? Yeah, that's a whole other subject discussion. But I do think that the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman bank bencher who has been removed from her committees, can basically be the kingmaker potentially in a House speaker election, that's amazing. And that's because she speaks for Donald Trump, or at least that's how she's presented herself. And Donald Trump hasn't contradicted that. Yeah, I mean, we've spent so much time talking about the internal divisions between progressives and moderate Democrats. But, you know, going forward, if McCarthy wants to lead his conference and

become speaker, or they take over and they have their own agenda, I mean, it's an open question about whether he could get things passed, because there's deep divisions, just in terms of how he runs the conference and what committees people can be on, let alone how to pass a bill. Yeah, but the divisions in the Republican Party aren't ideological the way they are in the Democratic Party. The divisions in the Republican Party is how loyal are you to Donald Trump? Are you willing to say falsely that he was the real winner of the last election? These are very different divisions with much more negative consequences for American democracy. When you talk about tensions being high in the House, I don't think a single thing we've said over the course of this podcast gives any indication that will calm down any time in the near future. Nope. Unfortunately not. More to

come on this topic. Cool. All right. Well, on that cheerful note, that is all we have for today's NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. We'll be back in your feed tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.