The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: April 23rd

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

In a 94-to-1 vote, the Senate passed a bill aimed at reducing hate crimes directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. And more than half of American adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine; reaching the rest will be harder.This episode: White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and congressional reporter Claudia Grisales.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 Claire from Berkeley, Michigan, where I am currently planning my 2022 wedding that was supposed to be a 2021 wedding that was supposed to be a 2020 wedding. This podcast was recorded at... It is 1.29 p.m. on April 23rd. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully I won't have to change my wedding plans again. Enjoy the show. Aww. Congrats. So sweet. That's tough, though, having to change over and over again. But at

least everybody will be safe and healthy whenever they do have this great shindig of a wedding. Exactly. Right. It's a catch-up year. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. The Senate approved legislation Thursday to ramp up law enforcement efforts to better protect the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, AAPI, to protect them from hate crimes. It's expected to be passed by the House soon. Claudia, what is in this bill? It's called a hate crimes bill, but there's already like federal legislation for hate crimes. This does something a little bit different, right? Yes, this is going to incentivize police to better track these kinds of hate crimes and deter instances of

violence. They'll do it through grant programs, better awareness. It also calls on the Justice Department to initiate a review of these cases of these hate crimes across the country. We've heard from lawmakers and others who've studied this issue. They've seen more than 3,000 of these instances in about a one-year period ending in February. And they also want to expand public awareness campaigns and online reporting requirements. And there's also a bipartisan provision in there. It was authored by Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Kansas GOP Senator Jerry Moran. It will let defendants serve community service in neighborhoods

that were harmed by their action. So it's going to give prosecutors another tool when it comes to these kinds of hate crimes. Yeah, I mean, these crimes, there have been a lot of instances that have gotten a lot of attention recently, and just absolutely appalling videos of people of Asian descent or Asian Americans being attacked on the street. And of course, there was also that shooting, series of shootings in Georgia. Is that why they were able to actually get consensus on something? This was a 94 to 1 vote. That just doesn't happen very often in the Senate these days. Exactly. You could even hear it in lawmakers' voices, including Maisie Hirono. This is a Democrat for Hawaii who sponsored the bill. She was the lead author on this. And you could hear

the shock in her voice when lawmakers talk to reporters after this vote. Just that doesn't happen very often. But there was so much passion. You mentioned the shooting in March, President Biden spoke after that event and urged action on hate crimes legislation. And so this really fueled momentum for Congress. And we heard some really passionate pleas from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. This includes Tammy Duckworth. She is an Illinois Democrat, also a combat veteran. Let's take a listen. And I've had that happen to me while wearing the uniform of this nation with her flag on my shoulder and asked, where are you from really? Yeah, your dad has been here since before the revolution, but where are you from?

This tells the AAPI community, we see you, and we will stand with you, and we will protect you. So that was the kind of passion we heard from members on both sides of the aisle. This even includes Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who is married to former cabinet official Elaine Chao, who talked about this being a real problem, you know, that really signaled to his caucus to move forward with this and come to a bipartisan deal with lawmakers to pass it by this huge margin. This was a very specific issue that didn't seem to have a lot of pushback. Who was the one vote against it? That would be Missouri Republican Josh Hawley. And as we know, he's a contender. He's looking at running for president in 2024.

So this is not the first time he stands out in this way. He said the legislation was too broad, but he has been making a statement after statement. This goes back to even the challenge to the election results in January. And so this is something that was in some ways expected for Holly. I mean, to be the one guy, the one guy, he's going to be the one guy. He's the one guy. And I think he kind of likes that role of being the one guy because he wants to be the one guy in the Oval Office one day. So this is kind of part of the script that he's playing right now. Does this portend possible coming together on other issues? It would seem to me like this is a special case and that likely this bipartisanship

won't pass on to other things, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a pessimist. I think that you have a lot of company in that area, because a lot of people have a hard time seeing more bipartisanship, at least at this scale. That said, you know, after the passage of this legislation, we did hear from senators, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and others saying that there's potential to work on other bills. There is one piece of legislation to boost US.S. competitiveness with China that's going to come up in the next few weeks in the Senate. And that has very broad bipartisan support. So we could see this happen again. But there's a very tall order

on other pieces of critical legislation, police reform, gun legislation, immigration, infrastructure. So it's really tough. But you could say they ended on a positive note yesterday. And perhaps this will fuel into other work that they could look at. But it's really, really tough to say that that's going to happen, especially because it has been so bitter and partisan in recent months and in the wake of the insurrection, especially. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, more on the White House's efforts to distribute vaccines. I'm Yoé Shaw. I'm Kia Miyakunatis.

We're the hosts of the NPR podcast, Invisibilia. You can think of Invisibilia kind of like a sonic blacklight. When you switch us on, you will hear surprising and intimate stories. Stories that help you notice things in your world that maybe you didn't see before. Listen to the Invisibilia podcast from NPR. And we're back. Tam, the Biden administration is now working on the next phase of distributing vaccines. But before we talk about where they're headed, let's talk about where we are right now. Yeah. And really where we are is that we're at this inflection point where

we are going from a situation where demand far outpaced supply to a point where demand will not outpace supply, where there will be plenty of vaccine supply and it will be more about persuasion. But right now, more than 50% of U.S. adults have gotten at least their first shot of a COVID vaccine and 66%, two thirds of people over 65 years old are fully vaccinated. And the reason that's so important is because older people have been more susceptible to the disease. That's where more of the deaths have been. So even though now the US has about 60,000 new cases every single day, the deaths are not nearly as high as they were before. And part of that is because older people have gotten this vaccine. So who are these people that are being left behind, Tam?

I think it's important to note that not all older Americans have been reached, and that's an especially important population to get to. and it may be people who are homebound people who haven't had time who haven't had the technology. I mean, we we all have had the experience of sitting at a computer, refresh, refresh, refresh, trying to get our loved ones, vaccine appointments. In fact, Claudia, you called me at, I don't remember, was it like 6am on a Saturday to say there's appointments available? We traded calls because I checked with you. I said, is it okay if I call you at some weird times? You were like, yes. Because you were a master at this, Claudia. You have special expertise in the CVS website. She was a pro. Yes. I got obsessed with

CVS and refreshing on my cell phone and multiple browsers up and the special times of checking at midnight or between 6am and 8am. Those were like the sweet spots. And so yeah, it's this obsession that propelled so many of us then to get parents, elderly neighbors, what have you booked and then now for us that we're eligible. So it works out, but it's tough. It's like there is a, it's tough because it's narrowed to folks who are, you know, willing to go through all this trouble and stay as obsessed as, you know, they are to get these appointments. Right. And so I talked to Dr. Ashish Jha at Brown University, who's sort of the one of the top voices in the pandemic response in this country. And I was like, OK, so who is left? Who's this somewhat less than 50 percent of Americans? It seems like demand is slowing down. Should we be worried about hesitancy and vaccine resistance? And he said, we may be misunderstanding the moment.

And here's how he explains where we are. The people who are really, really desperate for a vaccine, those people have all pretty much gotten a shot at this point. And I sort of think of it as like the people who stay up all night in line waiting for that new iPhone to come out. That crowd has been served. The problem is that I'm worried we're going to start labeling everybody else as somebody who's hesitant or a resistor. And that's hugely problematic because I don't think they are.

And I think actually there are lots of people who are perfectly happy to get a vaccine, but aren't desperate for it, aren't convinced that they need it badly. And we still make it too hard for many people. There's some share of people who just aren't going to jump through hoops. And there's another share of people who have questions and need those questions answered. And just being told you should get a vaccine doesn't work for them. And we should say that people of color, black and brown people are, even in that older age group, are disproportionately among the older Americans who are not vaccinated yet. So some of those people may be the ones that just don't know how to do, they know how to get, may know how to get on a website, but they don't know how to refresh a million times.

And, you know, they're working. They got other things going on. And so if you don't make it easy or accessible, then you really have people that will fall through the cracks, will get sick, and will be in the hospital. But besides those people, there are people that are, I guess, hesitant or harder to reach. Does the White House have a strategy for reaching those folks, Tam? of color in rural America too. But there are issues with transportation. There are just a lot of logistical and other challenges. You don't want to drive two hours to a mass vaccination site if you don't know if you're actually going to be able to get a vaccine. So there are sort of two tracks here. One is a persuasion track. The other track is an availability track and just working to make it easier to get vaccines. So trying to get them into doctor's offices or, you know, more pharmacies where

you literally could just walk in to buy stale peeps left over from Easter and say, oh, look, I could get my COVID shot. Cool. Let's do it. I mean, everybody just goes to the pharmacy for old peeps, right? Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I think of I had my my grandparents were in the country, they had bookmobiles, right? They would have I remember growing up, they would bring the library to the house to my grandmother's house. So why can't they have a vaccine mobile where they just go around and say you want it? Yeah. So I think I think the phase that we're in and is is absolutely that the White House, the Biden administration knows that they're not going to be the best messenger for all of

these folks. And and they also know that they can't manufacture a program that's going to work for every single community from the top down. And so they are working with local groups. They're working with individual volunteers. They're trying to share best practices. And it doesn't look like a uniformed program, I guess, is the best way to say it. They have this thing called the COVID Community Corps. And different people are doing different things in different places. And absolutely some places

they are driving vaccines to people's houses. In other places, yeah, I talked to some folks in West Virginia where they have in their county, they have never let a single dose go to waste. But one day, that meant that they packed up the leftover vaccines from the clinic and drove them over to a restaurant and vaccinated all of the workers at the restaurant. There is a story about a potato farmer in Idaho who set up a vaccine clinic at his potato farm and they vaccinated 350 people in a couple of hours. So I think that there are going to be more and more of these sort of small stories. You know, the individual doctor vaccinating their patients, convincing people who are on the fence. It's not going to be the thousands of people standing in line to get an iPhone or see the Star Wars movie when it comes out the first night, it's going to be sort of this slower process. It's going to be more one-on-one,

man coverage instead of zone coverage. I don't know. I'm struggling with my analogies here. That's really good man coverage. I think part of it is just building the trust. It sounds like some people just listening to your reporting, they're worried about going to Walmart for this kind of a shot or CVS or what have you, their local pharmacy. They want to see their doctor, someone they know, or maybe it's a friend at their farm that they feel more comfortable. So yeah, it does feel like we're going from zone defense to man on man right now because they need that individual kind of attention and trust to take that next step and say, well, maybe I should do this vaccine thing after all. Well, friends helping friends, person to person.

Little things just like you guys did helping me get an appointment for my parents. Exactly. We're a microcosm of it. Exactly. All right. Well, I think that's enough of the news. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, it's time for Can't Let It Go. In stressful times, you want to spend your time checking out not just what's best, but what's best for you. We know you care about what you watch, what you read, and what you listen to. NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast is with you five days a week to make sure that time is well spent.

Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. And we're back. Tam, before we do Can't Let It Go, you and I are going to be a part of a big shindig next week, a virtual live show Tuesday night. So we need everybody to register for that, right? Yeah. So you go to nprpresents.org to sign up. We're going to be on the Zoom, but I promise it's going to be fun. This is NPR Politics

After Dark. It's 8.30 to 9.30. I am trying to figure out what to wear. Oh, yes. Last time she showed out. She showed out, so now I got to do Rent the Runway. I'm trying to, I got to start thinking about it because

last time Tam showed out, so now I have to figure out how can I how can I even live up to this standard you know I don't have anything in my closet and the thing is I can't wear the same thing twice no so I gotta the pressure is on you might have to rent the runway too. I might have to. What if we show up in the same dress? Oh no. It could happen. It could. Oh, I'm going to sign in just for that.

Let's hope we don't end up in the same outfit. But it's from 8.30 to 9.30. And in addition to us two, because of course you want, you know, me and Tam, there's also Susan Davis, Ron Elving,

and Franco Ordonez.ez yep and we are going to take questions from you all um which is always the best part all right so now it's time to end the show like we do every week with can't let it go this is the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop talking about politics or otherwise, we are going to start with Claudia. What can't you let go of? Well, it's funny you should ask. My obsession is kind of related to my dog who is staring at me right now. I'm on edge right now because I don't want her to freak out. She's a 14-pound Chiweenie. So she's in a rescue and a mix of a chihuahua uh dotson and so she kind of runs our household and so my can't let it go is related to another chihuahua rescue out there his name is

prancer i heard about him through a viral tweet two weeks ago do you know pr No, what is this? Prancer is a 13 pound rage machine, according to his foster mom. And she is exhausted with Prancer. She tried to make him sound palatable, but she just couldn't. She wrote a very long venting kind of Facebook post, got shared on Twitter, went viral. Now Prancer's been on Inside Edition and other programs. There's questions if Prancer's the worst dog in America. And she says, if you own a Chihuahua, you know what I'm talking about. And so Prancer came to her obese, wearing a cashmere sweater with a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich stuffed in his crate. And he's a neurotic mess. He hates men, dogs, cats, children. And really, you're better off if you have no neighbors, because he's going to lock onto their ankles if you do.

So she's begging for help. This is through the Second Chance Pet Adoption League in New Jersey. And they're hoping for somebody local. They are getting so many inquiries. Just today, they launched t-shirts with Prancer's face on it. So, yes. So Prancer is a celebrity now, and I'm just obsessed with him. So he's a little high maintenance. A little bit. Like, okay, he's worth it, right? I think so.

I think so. I told my family, I'm like, we may have to split up because I really like Prancer a lot. I have to move to New Jersey. So I don't know. I'm thinking it over right now. You're thinking it over? Yeah. Yes.

How does your Trewini feel about it? She's giving me dirty looks right now as I speak. I'm nervous. Oh my goodness. Don't talk about the other dog. But so this would be a great dog for someone with no family, just by themselves, and they could just cater to each other. Or really the person could cater to each other or really the person exactly to prancer exactly maybe on a deserted island they might be better off yes oh boy Aisha what can't you let go of okay so the thing that I can't let go of we're all married here um and we we were talking about wedding planning earlier so this is very appropriate um so you plan your wedding

right and you send out invitations you're going to have you know a beautiful um wedding then a red carpet cocktail hour then dancing till midnight um and then the next day you're going to have a sunday brunch and this is all going to be at an expansive mansion, like amazing mega mansion, right? That sounds a move. I never understood the brunch part, but whatever. Okay, moving, yeah. Well, you know, so that is not the only question to have about this

because these people, they made this plan, but the problem is they did not own the mansion where they were going to have all of this activity. They don't own it. It's not a friend of theirs. It's just a house that they said that God had told them this was going to be the place where they got married. And they showed up and this happened in Florida so this helps explain oh it's in Florida they showed up at the house with like their wedding supplies and they were trying to have a wedding and they didn't

know that so the house is for sale so they like viewed it, like I guess pretending that they could buy it. And then they asked the owner, could they use the house for their wedding? And the owner was like, no, you cannot. But they were undeterred. And they didn't realize that even though it was for sale, the owner lived in another house on the estate. And so they thought they were just going to go there and like the house would be empty and they would have. But my thing is just the audacity not to just be like, OK, we're going to have a quick little way. We're going to be in and out. They plan extravaganza.

Oh, my gosh. They plan to extravaganza. Oh my gosh. They plan to somehow not be thrown out by the next morning. By the next, they said they were going to do dance till midnight and then they're going to have a four hour brunch the next day. Wow. I mean, they sent out invitations and

everything. I just, I just, I can't. Wow. Yeah. It's just, and so the guy like called, the owner like calls 911. He's like, these people are here.

I don't know what they're doing here. They're saying they're having a wedding and it's God's message. I don't know what's going on. All I want is for it to stop. This is the owner to 911. I-1. Oh, my gosh. I want to hear those 9-1-1 tapes. Me, too. Wedding in progress.

Hopefully, get them here. Oh, my gosh. I mean, it was just crazy. Like, it's just wild. There's an audacity there and a confidence there that I almost respect. Mm-hmm. Right. You have to channel that sometimes, right? But okay, Tam, what can you let go of this week? So what I cannot let go of

is something that has made the rounds on TikTok and is super viral. And so I guess this is our second week in a row of not being able to let go of TikTok. But this guy, Scott Seiss, and I'm probably mispronouncing his name. He is a comedian and former employee of Ikea. Oh, yes, yes. I'm so glad you chose this. Oh, I love that. I know what you're talking about. Oh, yes.

I love it. And so he posted a series of videos where he like recounts somebody's threat complaint like you know let me talk to your manager or i'll never shop here again do you have any idea how much money i spend here do you know who i am um and then like the music comes on and this is like a tiktok thing um the music comes on and he says what he's really thinking do you know how much money i spend here more than you should meatballs ain't that good save your money and my time it doesn't matter how much you spend here we don't thank our donors this isn't pbs this isn't pbs that's the best part of course the best one was the one where

they the person's like i know the sale ended last week but can i still get the discount and he's like i know the sale ended last week but can i still get a discount do you hear yourself we can't go backwards time marches on You want the sale from 15 years ago too? When's it end, Diane? You want that price? You're going to have to go through the quantum realm with Ant-Man. With Ant-Man. Ant-Man.

You can't get the sale. And that killed me. He's funny. He should be on his way. Sice, who actually handles social media for a PBS affiliate in New York as his day job. Wow. Says his co-workers have begun to notice the videos. We don't thank our donors like PBS.

That's great. Well, we thank our donors very much. We do. Thank you all. We appreciate them. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you.

You will not get that type of service at NPR. Not at all. Always with a smile. All right. You will not get that type of service at NPR. Not at all. Always with a smile. All right. That's a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Shirley Henry. Our editors are Mathani Motturi and Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Barton Girdwood and Chloe Weiner. Thanks to Lexi Shapiro and Brandon Carter. Our intern is Claire Obie. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and I cover the White House.

I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.