The NPR Politics Podcast - New Peril Of Local Office? Death Threats.

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

We talk through the apparent details of a pending COVID relief deal. And, local officials across the country are being rattled by threats of violence.READ: Congressional Leaders Near Deal On Roughly $900 Billion COVID-19 Relief BillREAD: From Congress To Local Health Boards, Public Officials Suffer Threats And HarassmentThis episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben.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, this is Paula calling from Maywood, Illinois, where I'm about to get my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. This podcast was recorded at 2.05 p.m. on Thursday, December 17th. Things may have changed by the time you listen, but even after I'm fully vaccinated, I'll still be wearing a mask and maintaining distance from other people to keep my community safe. All right, here's the show. Love to hear people getting vaccinated. Man, I am jealous. That is awesome. I am ready for that vaccine. Stick it in my veins. I know. I know exactly where Maywood is, and that's very exciting. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress.

I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the White House. And congressional leaders are nearing an agreement on a roughly $900 billion COVID-19 relief package. Negotiations, again, are ongoing and nothing is final. But leaders say they're feeling pretty optimistic. So, Kelsey, what do we know about what's likely to be in this deal? We do know that the package is supposed to look a lot like a bipartisan proposal that came out earlier this week. We've talked about a little bit here, but that includes things like more money for the Paycheck Protection Program, extended unemployment insurance,

that federal weekly benefit that expired back at the end of July. They want to bring back some of it. We don't know exactly how much right now. That is still up for debate. An extended ban on evictions and a continued pause on federal student loan payments. Most interesting thing I think here is that they are talking about adding checks, new stimulus checks. It'll be less than what went out in the original round of checks that people may have gotten. They're talking about something more like half of the $1,200 maximum check that went out earlier this year, maybe $600 to $700 instead. That push for stimulus checks has put together, I think, maybe the most unexpected political alliance of the year for me, which is Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, a very conservative member, and Bernie Sanders from Vermont, you know, probably the most liberal member in the Senate, both out there really calling for those checks and saying they didn't want to support a bill that didn't have them in it. Yeah, and I think it's notable that Bernie Sanders hasn't said for sure that he is going to sign on and vote for this bill. But he says it's progress that they're including any checks at all.

He doesn't think that it's sufficient for it to be half the amount that people got before because he says the need is not half of what it was then. But in some ways, it is a win for him to get it in there at all, with the expectation that Democrats have that they will try to do more next year. They will try to do more next year. Franco, obviously, you know, nothing is done until President Trump actually signs a bill. Do you get the sense that the White House is on board for this? Is the president happy with it? Yeah, I mean, we, you know, reporters tried to ask that of Kayleigh McEnany yesterday. She's obviously the press secretary at the White House.

And she was, you know, hesitant to say whether the president would sign off on the deal. You know, he actually hasn't been that involved as of late. But, you know, she did say that he was eager to get, that the president was eager to get the American people help. So I think the anticipation is if Republicans and Democrats can get on the same page, that, you know, that likely that he would sign it. But again, you know, you know, that's always an open question with President Trump. Kelsey, there's been this interesting political dynamic with this round of negotiations, because we should remind people that this has been months since Congress could agree to anything. Nancy Pelosi, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have repeatedly failed to come up with a deal on

their own. And there's something about this deal that's different that you mentioned. It's a little bit of a centrist uprising that helped get it done. Yeah, it is really interesting to see something come together out of, you know, one of these groups or gangs, as we sometimes call them in Congress, where people get together and try to come up with their own alternative and bring it to leadership. It happens all the time. And they normally get run over. Yeah. Leadership's usually like, thanks for the work. Goodbye. Nice pat on the head. Thank you for coming.

Right. You did a nice job, Senators. But, you know, this time they just basically picked up this bill and said, you know, we'll tweak around the edges. Thanks for doing the actual work. That never happens. And I think part of what's what's driving the train here is that these centrists can deliver votes. And it's become really, really hard to get any major spending through Congress right now, in part because they've already spent a lot of money. And there really is no consensus about how much more should be spent, how it should be spent, and whether, you know, any spending really needs to happen at all. For a long time, Republicans said that they needed to wait and see to make sure that it was actually worthwhile to keep sending out, you know, federal money. Yeah, there's this weird pressure now on

leaders to get it done. I saw that Dean Phillips, who's a Democrat from Minnesota, said he wouldn't vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker unless and until they got this bill signed into law. So just some interesting pressure dynamics going on with all of this. Franco, we know this probably isn't going to be the last of the money that needs to go out the door. President-elect Joe Biden has already said his team's looking at more. Do we get the sense that how much more appetite there's going to be to get more spending out the door? I mean, it's going to be I think it's going to be tough. I mean, this was already tough as it is. You know, President-elect Biden called this a down payment.

And he said, ultimately, you know, more will need to be done early next year. But, you know, as Kelsey said earlier, they're going to try to do that. And, you know, there's a big runoff election come January 5th that will play a role in that as well. I mean, this has been so difficult already. And you got to wonder, you know, we're already hearing inklings and you guys would know this, uh, better than I from Republicans who are kind of like going back and kind of bringing in some of their deficit hawk, uh, talk, you know, after, you know, supporting so much of President Trump's spending. Uh, now, you know, we're kind of seeing a little bit hearing at least a little bit about of a pullback. So I'm going to choose to be optimistic here. It might be my Christmas spirit getting in the way. Um, I'm, I'm going to choose to believe that they're going to get this wrapped up by Christmas. How confident are you, Kelsey, that they can get this done in the next few days?

Well, it's kind of funny. Steny Hoyer, who is the majority leader in the House, was out and about speaking a little bit of truth about Capitol Hill yesterday. And he told the pool of reporters who are covering the Capitol and sharing quotes with all the other reporters, he said that it takes so long because we procrastinate and we pretend just one more day and we'll get a better deal. Which is so true. I think that it is almost certain that they're going to have to pass an extension of the short term spending bill that they passed to give themselves more time to negotiate just to even get this thing passed. They need more time to put a bill together, put it out the door and then actually go through the motions of voting. That could bring them up until the middle of next week. But people are going to start getting pretty antsy in the next day here. So

it's possible that they get it done before Christmas, though, you know, it takes a while to get things through the Senate if there isn't unanimous agreement. And I do not think there will be unanimous agreement on this. Yeah. All right, Kelsey, well, you need to go find out how much those stimulus checks are going to be. So we'll talk to you again soon. Talk to you later. And we'll take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll bring in Danielle Kurtzleben to talk about threats of violence that public officials have had to face this year. Abigail Disney says if she ran the family company, she'd deal with the current economic crisis very differently. A CEO should be like a ship's captain. You know, if other people

are drowning, you're the last one off the ship. Ideas about the history and future of finding financial stability. That's on the history and future of finding financial stability. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. And we're back, and Danielle Kurtzleben is back, too. Hello, my friend. How are you? Oh, you know, about as well as we're all doing right now. We're grading on a curve. Well, I'm happy to have you with us regardless.

You've done some really interesting reporting this week, maybe a little troubling reporting this week about increased anecdotal violence towards public officials. Tell me more about it. Sure. Yeah, it's definitely troubling. I mean, what we have is it seems to be a rash of threats, harassment, violence, whatever you want to call it, all sorts of things across that spectrum toward public officials. And it's public officials across the spectrum, right? It's electors in different states, all the way down to the local level. I spoke to a woman from a district board of health in Idaho who had protesters outside of her house that really frightened her children while the board of Health was considering some mask mandates, for example, an anti-coronavirus restriction. So it's about elections. It's about

coronavirus. It's all sorts of things. But a lot of it is tied to misinformation. And yes, it's very troubling. Yeah, I think maybe the most high profile and maybe there's others, but the one I think of is the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. And of course, as our listeners might remember, that was shortly before the election this year. In 2018 and again in 2019, Capitol Hill law enforcement reported to Congress that, yes, threats against members of Congress were increasing. And yes, again, you know, we keep hearing these anecdotal reports as well. For example, just this week, there was news that the mayor of a city, Dodge City in Kansas, resigned after she received many threats, including death threats, over her city's coronavirus restrictions. This is certain. It's a lot of smaller incidents, but you add them all up

and it is quite troubling. Yeah, I guess to me, I think maybe the difference is we're sort of accustomed to a certain amount of threats towards people in the public view, the president, members of Congress. I mean, it's kind of standard for members of Congress to have threats towards them. It happens all the time. But it's this sort of like low level official, the public health official, the local election monitor that it seems like it has been much more widespread and pervasive that people feel like no one can be trusted right now. Yes, this is tied to distrust. We know that distrust of government, distrust of government officials has been growing. It's also tied to misinformation. I mean,

a lot of these threats that I'm talking about related to election misinformation, related to coronavirus misinformation. These threats are not all against Democrats. Some are against Republicans as well. They are aimed bipartisanly at officials, but many of them seem to be coming from the far right and related to misinformation that circulates heavily about coronavirus and the election on the far right. So those things are definitely happening. Franco, I want to be careful about how I ask this, because I think violent behavior is the responsibility of the people who conduct it, right? But President Trump has been different than other presidents. We say that in many ways, in that he has at times seemed to encourage

violence, or at times at least not use the power of the office to tamp it down or to try to work against it. And that is seems like it could be one of those contributing factors to the atmosphere of the moment, especially when you think of all the efforts the president has undertaken in recent months to question the integrity of the election. Yeah, it's a tough thing. I mean, the president certainly has a history of kind of like fanning those flames. No question. You know, he has not, in many cases, condemned the kind of violence that Danielle is speaking about. I mean, I mean, everybody will remember when President Trump said things like when the looting starts, the shooting starts. You know, he talks, you know, Danielle, and you were talking about

Michigan governor. You guys were talking about Michigan Governor Whitmore. You know, it was back, you know, this is not a new thing. Some of these protests were happening in the spring. When this protester has kind of breached the state capitol in Michigan, you know, President Trump didn't say, don't stop that. I mean, he wrote on Twitter that the governor of Michigan should give a little and put out the fire. He wrote that these are very good people, but they are angry and they want their lives back.

Danielle, any of the experts or people you talk to, do they have any insight on how to sort of change this? Is there something that can be done to lower the temperature or is it really just incumbent upon sort of public officials to be better? I mean, this is such a depressing question to answer because it's it's not just hard. It seems very hard to put this genie back in the bottle. One thing that Rachel Kleinfeld told me, she is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She told me that, look, it is very easy for a country in its political culture to become sort of inured to this sort of thing, that past violence tends to beget future violence. Yeah. And also, I think a lot about President-elect Joe Biden. I mean, this sort of thing, that past violence tends to beget future violence. Yeah.

And also, I think a lot about President-elect Joe Biden. I mean, this kind of tone and tenor of politics is something that he campaigned on a lot and promised to change. So I think it's another thing we're going to have to watch. I mean, it's going to take time, right? This stuff doesn't happen quick and it doesn't end quick. But the rhetoric change is something to watch in the coming year. The language of the last four years have just heated up so much where this kind of first, it was the talk was acceptable, you know, and hopefully not the physical violence.

All right. I think that's it for today. But we'll be back tomorrow with our weekly roundup. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Franco Ordonez. I cover the White House.

And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.