The NPR Politics Podcast - How Much Is Biden Willing To Compromise On His Infrastructure Plan?

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

President Biden has touted his desire to bring transformational change to American society, but his pursuit of compromise might curb what's possible on infrastructure.This episode: political correspondent Juana Summers, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, 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

This is Sarah calling from Ogden, Utah. Today's my birthday, and it's also NPR's 50th birthday. This podcast was recorded at 2.07pm on Monday, May 3rd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Happy birthday, NPR. All right, here's the show. Happy birthday to you. This is a fun birthday celebration. I get to be here with you guys, so that's pretty cool. I wish we had cake. We need cake.

That's a note. We accept cake. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. President Biden is working to get his $2 trillion American jobs plan through Congress, and it's filled with a lot of the things you might traditionally think about as infrastructure, like bridges and roads. But there's also some newer stuff, like funding for home-based care

for older adults and people with disabilities. And there have been a lot of meetings with lawmakers of both parties who have been actively involved in these conversations. Kelsey, can you just get us up to speed on what's happening right now? Well, there's a lot of talking happening right now, but we don't know how much negotiating is happening in that talking. So we've been kind of looking to a few different sources to kind of get an idea of what level of engagement there is between the White House and Congress. One of the people that we're looking at is Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. She is the senator who is kind of leading the push on infrastructure for Republicans. And there's also White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who says that the White

House has had a conversation with Senator Capito this past week. And he also said that there will be a group of Republican senators going to the White House in the next couple of days. But it's also really important to remind people that they still haven't agreed on what the definition of infrastructure is. So we aren't really at a place right now where they're negotiating like the nitty gritty details of how much you should spend on roads and bridges. They're trying to decide, you know, what in addition to roads and bridges counts as infrastructure. And until they can get that agreement, they can't really move forward with the big rest of the stuff. Kelsey, it sounds like the Republican problems with the Biden plan are

really twofold. One is, as you said, they don't necessarily agree that all this other stuff is infrastructure, things like a whole bunch of climate change initiatives. And also, they don't like the way President Biden plans to pay for this. Yeah, that's right. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was at home in Kentucky, and he did an event there. And he was asked by somebody afterwards if he was willing to consider and negotiate something around $600 billion, going above and beyond what Republicans are proposing. And he basically said no. And he says it has to be about infrastructure. So going back to the debate about what should be included, and Republicans keep saying infrastructure is about physical investments in things that are traditionally thought of as infrastructure. Again, roads and bridges, but also things like water systems or ports, things that are the physical ways that the economy moves goods and services around.

And so, you know, that's still a really big challenge. And when it comes to the paying for it, Republicans say it needs to be paid for. Whatever they end up doing needs to be paid for. But they have completely rejected the idea that it should have anything to do with unwinding the tax cuts that Republicans passed under President Trump. And they are also opposed to raising any kind of taxes for corporations. Negotiations aren't just between the White House and Republicans. Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, another important West Virginia senator, who's kind of the center of gravity for anything that the Democrats want to pass with 51 votes in the Senate, he is skeptical about whether

taxes on corporations and individuals should be raised as much as they are in the initial Biden proposal. We've talked a lot about negotiations. And I guess one thing that comes to mind for me is, you know, Democrats now control both chambers of Congress and the White House. So a question that I have is why they are bothering to negotiate at all with Republicans. Because Joe Biden believes in bipartisanship. It's part of his brand. He says he's not going to wait around forever to get it. But this is part of what he ran on. It was a campaign promise. And there's been a big debate among Democrats about whether bipartisan support is something that's nice to have if you can get it, but you shouldn't wait

around too long or spend too much time looking for it? Or is it something that's politically necessary to keep the support of all those suburban women in particular who voted for Biden that in the past have voted for Republicans? Because they took him seriously and literally when he said he was going to try to bridge the gap between the two parties. There's also the question of the long-term viability of whatever they pass. Because, you know, people may remember that there was a real effort at doing something bipartisan on health care when they were originally negotiating the Affordable Care Act. That all fell apart. Democrats went it alone. And then Republicans spent the next many, many, many years campaigning on getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, attempting to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, ultimately failing at doing that, but bringing it to the Supreme Court. And, you know, that is a kind of threat that could face some sort of, you know, broader definition of infrastructure if Democrats move ahead, that it becomes just a huge campaign attack tool.

As Mara pointed out, the president said he is not going to wait for action. When might we have a sense of the timeline of all of this? Well, one of the things I think that we watch here is what the Senate floor and House floor look like. They've got a lot of stuff that Biden also says he wants to get done. That was like the big takeaway from the joint address last week was that Biden's got a long list. And a long list that has to go through Congress means it's going to take time. But if they want to use reconciliation to do any parts of this, if they want to try this new second bite at the apple reconciliation that we've talked about here, where they think they can do it more than once in a fiscal year, brand new interpretation

of that rule. But if they think they want to do that, they have to do it before the end of the fiscal year at the end of September. But there's no doubt that in terms of the timing of this, yes, they have to do it by the end of the fiscal year if they're going to take advantage of reconciliation. And you could argue that the Senate parliamentarian is right now the most important person in American politics, because she gave them the go ahead to do that. But also, this is slightly less urgent than the COVID relief plan, the American Rescue Plan, because they at least have a couple of months to see if bipartisanship is possible. Well, and Juana, you've been closely covering the policing reform bill. And that's another

thing that Biden says he wants to get done immediately. And that takes up floor time. Yeah, that's right. The president has given Congress a number of urgent deadlines that seem to all be converging at once in Washington. And there's a real question of which one of these things can cross the finish line first and which ones actually will. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we will talk more about this. A few years ago, a website popped up in Stockton, California, and conspiracy theories started ramping way up. And it's being funded by conservative movement underneath the table. And I was like, oh, my gosh, you guys, people really believe this. What happens when the local news outlet isn't fact-checking conspiracy theories, maybe encouraging them?

Listen now from NPR's Invisibilia podcast. And we're back. President Biden announced another plan last week, too, and we haven't had a chance to dig into it on this podcast yet. The White House is calling it the American Families Plan. Kelsey, can you tell us what that's all about? extending basically the federally provided education system two years to the beginning and two years to the end of the existing system so that there would be pre-K, free pre-K, and at least two years of a free community college education. Those are two of the big signposts of this legislation. And they want to extend tax cuts for families with children, and they want to make it easier for people to afford child care.

It strikes me that those are a lot of programs and areas of government that are really popular among Democrats and the type of folks who would probably voted for President Biden. But Mara, it doesn't sound to me when I look at what's in this plan, like there's a whole lot of common ground to be found with Republicans. What are you hearing? No, on this one, I don't see the common ground. This is an expansion of the social safety net. Democrats would say this is human infrastructure, that being able to have a highly educated workforce will make America more competitive with China. But Republicans don't see this as something they want to fund. And if the American

Families Plan is going to get through Congress, it probably is going to have to go through on reconciliation with Democrat vote, Democratic votes only. It's also not entirely clear to me, going back to what you said earlier, Mara, that this will have, you know, unanimous support among Democrats. We just don't know yet. And they haven't really had to confront that question so far. But it's certainly something that we should be keeping an eye on. We will be keeping an eye on. Right. And unlike the American Rescue Plan, the COVID relief plan, which passed almost almost exactly as it was proposed on the American Families Plan and the American Jobs Plan, we assume that it will not look, that the final product will not look exactly as Biden has proposed it,

even if it's passed with Democratic votes only. Kelsey, you mentioned kind of the logjam of big proposals that Congress is considering right now and how it could be complicated to make all those things happen at once, given the realities of the schedule, given the realities of Congress. I guess I'm curious why the White House is rolling out another huge proposal right now, given all of that. I mean, they have a lot of pressure from voters to make good on a lot of campaign promises. There's a lot of pressure for them to show that they are progressive, to show that they heard what they said was a mandate from voters. And rolling out

legislation is the best way for any administration to say that they're serious about something, whether or not that legislation becomes law, then becomes Congress's problem, you know, like, and, you know, Congress will have probably a lot of problems getting all of this legislation through. But the Biden administration made promises and putting legislation out and telling Congress to get to work is what presidents often do. And, you know, it's really important to remember this is what he promised. You know, Republicans, one of the talking points for Republicans is, oh, look, he campaigned as a centrist and now he's lurching to the left. Almost every single thing he's proposed is something that he ran on. And also in terms of

proposing all of these gigantic things, I think they add up to $6 trillion. The White House thinks it has a very narrow window before the next midterms. And if history is any guide, they might very well lose one or both houses of Congress. So Joe Biden is an old man in a hurry. And if he's going to get any of this done, he has to get it done now when he has majorities as slim as they are in Congress. Yeah, there's certainly a big political calculation for this White House too. And this proposal does seem like one that is very much pitched at those voters that got President Biden and Vice President Harrison to office.

Absolutely. All right, we are going to leave it there for today. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.