The NPR Politics Podcast - Congress To Work On Pandemic Relief

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

Lawmakers return to Capitol Hill this week with plans to tackle a long-awaited pandemic relief package. And a majority of Americans don't trust the president for information about the coronavirus. The White House says it plans to return to daily briefings anyway.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, 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 there, this is Cody from Nashville, Tennessee, currently watching the groundhog in my backyard come out from underneath the shed where he has apparently built a home. Many people have described their quarantine lives as Groundhog Day, but for me that is literally true. This podcast was recorded at 1.55 p.m. on Monday, July 20th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. All right, here's the show. That is a great timestamp.

Does that groundhog mean there's going to be six more months of pandemic? I was going to say it depends on what he does when he comes out of his hole. Did it see its shadow? What does the shadow mean in this context? It all depends on what happens with those vaccine trials, right? Fingers crossed. Yeah. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And Congress returns today from two weeks off. And the pandemic is much worse than when they left town. State budgets are a mess. It's not clear if it's safe for kids to return to school in the fall, expire at the end of this month if Congress doesn't act. So Sue, have they been negotiating? Is there something going on here?

You know, there's a lot of discussions going on, but no real bipartisan negotiations yet. House Democrats laid down a marker for what they want about two months ago. They've already passed a $3 trillion measure, very sweeping measure that would include a trillion dollars alone just in aid to state and local governments. Senate Republicans haven't put up their alternative yet, and they're expected to do this this week as early as Tuesday. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said his priorities, in his words, are jobs, kids and health care. And Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is expected to head up to Capitol Hill tomorrow and Republicans are going to put out what they think their vision should be. McConnell has said he expects it to be about a trillion dollars, so significantly less

than Democrats are willing to spend. But your point, Tam, is an important one, is that, you know, I think it was about two months ago that Congress passed their fourth and most recent coronavirus relief package. And at the time, McConnell said, let's take a wait and see approach. Maybe things will be better in the fall, and we won't need to do as much, and things aren't better. And I think the need for Congress to act is probably more urgent than they were hoping it was going to be a couple months ago. And really urgent because there's a big deadline. Those enhanced unemployment benefits run out at the end of the month. And in a lot of states, those bans on evictions run out really soon at the end of the month in many cases. So they really are operating under a deadline.

One really interesting thing I'm watching and I think many families are watching is what Congress is going to do about this issue of schools opening or doing remote learning or in-person learning. I know, Mara, the president has been really clear that he wants schools to get back in session regardless of sort of public health recommendations in some regards. And Mitch McConnell has said that he expects his proposal will have, in his words, a heavy emphasis on education funding. Republicans really want to get kids back in school in person and are willing to put some financial resources to that. I think that's going to be a huge political issue this fall. I mean, if one issue is at sort of the core of how we get back to normal life, it is getting kids back to school. McConnell has said that. He has said there's no such thing as normal until kids are back at school full time. What's so interesting is the president

has been adamant that kids go back to school in person. He doesn't want them online. He has threatened to withhold funding. The federal government provides about 8 to 10 percent of funding for K through 12 education. He said if you don't open schools, we're not going to give you any money. But he hasn't yet said that he was willing to provide funds for extra disinfecting, plexiglass, testing. But it sounds like the Congress is going to send him a bill for that. I was talking to a former Republican congressman about the politics of school reopening. And he said, yeah, parents absolutely want schools to reopen, comma, safely. And the challenge is that

the president isn't talking about the thing after the comma. It sounds like, Sue, Republicans in Congress are at least nodding at the idea that they need to address the thing after the comma. It sounds like, Sue, Republicans in Congress are at least nodding at the idea that they need to address the thing after the comma. Yeah, I mean, look, like, it's safe to say that the Republican Party is not in a good position politically right now. The president's approval ratings are down. Republican senators in tough races across the board are down. Republicans need a win right now. And they need a win on the handling of the pandemic. And if they are able to put forward a proposal that people have trust in, that they believe is going to get their kids back in school safely, there is a real opportunity here to do something that could be seen as rewarding, both, you know, in terms of real life policy impact, but politically too.

And I think there is a hunger among Republicans, more so than Democrats, because I think Democrats have been given higher measure. You know, people say they trust them more on the issue of the pandemic. There's a real hunger among Republicans to send a message that they're taking this seriously, and they have solutions on how to get your life back to normal. All right, we are going to take a quick break. But before we do, Sue, I think it's very important that we mark the passing of Atlantic congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis. The Democrat died on Friday night after a relatively brief fight with cancer. You know, Lewis was known as the conscience of the Congress.

He was probably one of the most popular figures to ever serve in Congress, certainly in the modern era. And I think not just for Democrats, for all lawmakers, but losing John Lewis in the same year period that Democrats also lost Elijah Cummings, another prominent Black Democrat from Maryland, has been heartbreaking and a big morale blow for a lot of Democrats. But I think that John Lewis, you know, I spoke to him a bunch over the years, and he was more than a lawmaker, right? He was like a spiritual leader. And if you saw him around people and the way he was drawn, people were drawn to him, it was a fascinating and a humbling thing to watch. And I would say personally, I am incredibly grateful that this year before the pandemic

really took hold, I was able to get out on the campaign trail because the trail brought me to Alabama with the Michael Bloomberg campaign. But I was able to walk the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis. And his last walk across the bridge, he came out, even though he'd been suffering from cancer. People still swarmed him and he still, you know, he didn't have a microphone, but he got up at the end of the bridge and he spoke to the crowd. And it was just this really profound moving moment that he had led pilgrimages there every year. And it was one of the things that I had on my bucket list of things I wanted to do in this beat and in my life. And I'm just really grateful that I got to do it with him one last time. I haven't covered Congress on a day-to-day basis for a long time, but I do live on Capitol Hill. So to be able to run into John Lewis at the

dry cleaner or see him walking around the neighborhood, it was kind of like having Nelson Mandela in your midst. You know, he was the youngest person and had been the last surviving speaker from Martin Luther King's March on Washington. Those who are said be patient and wait. We must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now. There will be, I think, renewed pressure from Democrats to bring back voting rights legislation that had been an important part of Lewis's work. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back,

President Trump's interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Don't miss the national conversation with me, Jen White, every weekday on NPR's 1A. News, views and insight for the relentlessly curious. A space for those willing to share what they know and ready to hear the other side of the story. Subscribe to 1A now and leave a review. And we are back. And nearly 4 million Americans have been diagnosed with the coronavirus. More than 140,000 people have died here in America. And hospitalizations that had been down are nearly back to where they were at the peak of the pandemic, or maybe we should say at the first peak of the pandemic.

Yesterday, President Trump, in this interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, it was a wide ranging interview, and we're not going to get all of it. But he really downplayed this latest outbreak, saying, you know, only that it's mainly young people who are getting it and it's minor cases, you know, just like the sniffles or something. You know, Mara, I feel like we've talked about this before. But throughout the course of this, there have been very few times where the president hasn't downplayed the severity of the pandemic. And this interview seems to have been a piece with that. Oh, absolutely. At one point, he said testing is the problem. And he disputed the death count.

He had a separate chart that the White House had made that purported to show that our death rate was actually better than Europe's. Of course, there's no evidence of that. As a matter of fact, the death rate in the United States looks a lot like countries without much health care resources in terms of the handling of the coronavirus. And, you know, the president has called himself a wartime president. And right now it looks like the enemy, the virus, is winning. But in this interview, he was adamant that the U.S. was doing a great job. He also seemed to not understand what

a positivity rate was. He kept on saying we do the most testing. But the fact is that even though our testing might be up 37 percent, our positive cases are up 194 percent. Yeah. At one point, Wallace was sort of pressing him on this idea that he keeps downplaying it or saying that it's just going to go away. And this is what the president said. I will be right eventually. You know, I said it's going to disappear. I'll say it again.

It's going to disappear. Does that discredit you? And I'll be right. I don't think so. Right. I don't think so. You know why it doesn't discredit me? Because I've been right probably more than anybody else. He did say at some point, everybody's made mistakes.

But, you know, he doesn't want to admit that he's wrong. And of course, the virus will eventually go away. He said, eventually, I'll be right. That reminds me of when I was a little kid and would sit at the window with my sister and we bet on if the next car was going to be mommy. And I'd always bet that it was going to be mommy because I knew eventually I would be right. The thing I just keep coming back to is, you know, sometimes politics is really complicated. And sometimes it's really simple. And I think right now our politics are really simple. We have a pandemic affecting basically every American life and every American household and many American jobs. And people don't think the president's doing a good job. And that is reflective in the handling. And I think comments like that speak to why. I mean, that's just not

saying things like it's just going to disappear and I'll be right eventually. I think the country's kind of tired of that kind of rhetoric because they don't actually see their lives getting better. And as we were talking about before, things like, you know, families confronting not being able to send their kids back to school in the fall and even things like sports being canceled. I mean, American life continues to be completely upended by this pandemic. And the president still does not give the people confidence that he's, you know, leading the charge to defeat it, which is why I'm a bit surprised that the White House seems to have announced that they're going to bring back the daily briefings or at least regular briefings that they were once doing in the beginning of the pandemic? In the beginning of the briefings, his numbers went up. People were hungry for some basic information. And there was the president standing there with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx.

But as time went on and he became less and less disciplined, talked about injecting bleach, made other comments, the briefings had to be stopped because they were hurting him. The question is which Donald Trump will show up at these new briefings? And will Dr. Fauci show up after weeks and weeks and weeks of the White House undercutting him or icing him out or generally not inviting him up on stage? Let's see if they're daily. Let's see if they're briefings. He has in recent, the last couple of weeks, basically started doing things he calls press conferences that are really just rallies at the White House because he can't get out on the road. So, you know, grain of salt. Let's see.

As he says, we'll see what happens. And there's a question of whether they continue to do these briefings or who is at them. And I know that there is many Republicans on the Hill for who for a long time were eager to just let the experts speak and not have the president be the one at the podium every day, because they didn't see that he was ultimately helping them. And that has, you know, that we've seen that play out in the polling data. Quinnipiac University had a poll out last Wednesday that showed only 30% of voters, 30% trust information from their president on the coronavirus. 67% did not trust President Trump. Compare that to Fauci, who's 65% of voters said they trusted

and that they trusted the CDC. And that means that there are Republicans who do not support what the president is saying as well. I mean, something like 70% of Republicans trust him. And there's a major partisan split here because only 4% of Democrats in that poll said that they trust the president. But when you have only 70% of your own party trusting you, that is a very low number. On something that is the most important issue of this moment. Right. That is the podcast for today. We will be back tomorrow. Until then, keep up with all the latest updates by heading to NPR.org, listening to your local public radio station. You can ask your smart speaker to play your public radio station

or on the NPR One app. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. 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.