The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: March 19th

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Civil rights groups have been meeting with the Biden administration about addressing the rise in violence toward Asian Americans. President Biden said he's willing to consider reforming the filibuster.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Juana Summers, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and senior political editor and correspondent Ryan Lucas.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

Real quick before we start the show, we want to check in with you about what you like about this show and what we can do better. We've got a short survey at npr.org slash politics survey. That is npr.org slash politics survey. It's all one word. It's all lowercase. We want to hear from our dedicated listeners and also our occasional listeners. So if you have a few minutes to take the survey, you're doing us a huge favor, and we really appreciate it. Thanks.

This is Shabnam calling from Miami, Florida. This podcast was recorded at... It is 1.20 Eastern Daylight Savings Time, which is a very controversial thing, this week on Friday, March 19th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be celebrating NoRu's Persian New Year that aligns with the spring equinox. NoRu's Mubarak. Love it. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy NoRu's. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And President Biden and Vice President Harris just landed in Atlanta as we're taping this podcast.

They're in Georgia today meeting with Asian American leaders following shootings earlier this week that killed eight people, including six Asian women. Authorities in Georgia are still investigating the motive, but the attack comes at a time when there has been a surge in anti-Asian racism. There's no question the impact of the shooting and this broader trend on the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has been profound. On Thursday, at a House hearing on all of this, New York Congresswoman Grace Meng was one of several people who said that former President Trump's use of phrases like China virus to describe COVID-19 has stoked these attacks. Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want, but you don't have to do it by putting a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids. Ryan, let's start with you and just what the numbers are on this.

You know, the reports of anti-Asian hate have been on the rise since the start of the pandemic. They really have. They've taken off. There's an off-sited report from Stop AAPI Hate, and it says that nearly 4,000 incidents have been reported to the group since last March. And the incidents really do run the gamut. We're talking about everything from kind of verbal harassment, being told things like go back to China on the street, to physical assault. We've seen videos of some of these things on social media. Some of them have shown up on the evening

news. And they're grim viewing. They're nasty things to see. Instances of older Asian Americans being pushed to the sidewalk, being hit. You have instances of people having their face cut. So this is very grim stuff. It's very disturbing. It is happening all over the country, but two states in particular have really seen a jump, and those are California and New York. Juana, you've been reporting on how the Biden administration is trying to respond to all of this and also what various Asian American leaders are saying and what they want to see the Biden administration do. What are you hearing as you make calls? Yeah, so there are a couple things

that we should point out. One is that this is something that the Biden administration was focused on even before the deadly shootings that we saw this week in the Atlanta area. At the beginning of March, the administration held a listening session with more than a dozen leaders of groups focused on Asian Americans, community leaders from across the country, with the purpose of hearing from them about what they think meaningful solutions might look like. There's also a meeting that was held at the Justice Department before Attorney General Merrick Garland was confirmed, and he has been having additional meetings with leaders this week. And I've been talking to folks who have participated in this meeting, and a couple of things have come up.

One is the fact that there are things, concrete things, that DOJ could be doing to stop this. One thing that came up in my conversation with John Yang of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and he's someone who testified at that House hearing that Congresswoman Ming spoke at, he made the point that the Justice Department could add more funding to its Community Relations Service, which was established as a part of the Civil Rights Act. And it's a part of DOJ that a lot of people aren't familiar with. It is something that provides communities who are dealing with racial or other sorts of tensions with professional mediators and other resources to help resolve conflicts. Most notably, you can think about these as the folks who were deployed in moments like the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the unrest after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody here in Baltimore. Another thing that has come up a lot is the fact that essentially the community is relying on outside data reporting from groups like Stop AAPI Hate to really shine a

spotlight on this. They want to see more robust data collection through the Department of Justice that reflects the diverse Asian community in this country. And I also spoke to one of the founders of Stop AAPI Hate. Her name is Cynthia Choi, and she made the point to me that there's also an issue of language here, that victims of hate incidents and crimes who aren't proficient in English sometimes can't read materials that they'd need to know how to grapple with what's happened to them. You can't be a multiracial democracy and not recognize the fact that, you know, there are lots of people whose primary language is not English. We do that with the census. We do that, you know, with other types of emergency services that we make sure that people can be served and get the information that they need to make informed decisions in language.

Ryan, those requests for how law enforcement handles things like that, how does that track with what the Department of Justice is doing or talking about doing? Well, one thing that I think that's important to bear in mind is that we just had a transition to a new administration. Certainly, researchers say that hate crimes and kind of prosecuting hate crimes, investigating them was not a priority for the previous administration, for the previous Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division. Rhetorically, at least, this is something that the Biden administration has said, as Wanda noted, that they take seriously and that they want to tackle. In terms of prosecuting these, a lot of times, hate crimes are not prosecuted at the federal level. A lot of this is dealt with at the state and local level. Interestingly, FBI Director Chris Wray was asked about the rise in hate crimes targeting the AAPI community when Wray testified earlier this month. trying to do now is do more public outreach with communities, with state and local law enforcement

as well, to do training with them, sometimes even bringing them together into the same room, to try to establish trust and help explain to people what to do when they encounter something that they believe is a hate crime. And Ray said that more than 60 liaison events or training sessions the FBI has had since March 2020 geared specifically toward the AAPI community. So it's something that they're aware of, but obviously the level of concern and fear at this point in time is something that events here and there are not going to tackle the issue the way that people would like to see. Scott, what Ryan said brought up one other thing, too, that I've heard when I spoke to a number of advocates.

It's the fact that, frankly, they want there to be a point person within the Justice Department whose job is to focus on these issues so that they can have a briefing every month, so that they can hear what kind of progress has been made on some of the things that justice has said that it wants to do, so that they can hear what kind of progress has been made on some of the things that justice has said that it wants to do so that they can ask questions. Because as one person pointed out to me, Georgia is in the news right now. And of course, there's focus on that. The president and vice president changed their travel plans to focus almost exclusively on this issue.

But there are folks in communities across the country who have the same fears and the same concerns about the surge of violence. And they need to be a part of these conversations too. So they're hoping that the administration will create a position that will focus on their issues and in stopping this unprecedented surge of violence and hate-related instances. And one of the last thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, we're talking about what law enforcement can do here. The people you're talking to this week, what do they say about just the message from the top, the fact that the president is speaking out against this trend line of racist attacks and hate? You know, he's flown to Atlanta to do that today. He's spoken out several times over the past week.

And obviously that is a very different tactic than what we saw from President Trump on this front. Yeah, you know, I don't think we can under emphasize the importance of the bully pulpit here or just how different of an approach this is from the previous administration. We heard President Trump repeatedly use racist terms to discuss the coronavirus and the origin of the coronavirus. And many of these people say that they believe that opened a door for the nearly 3,800 instances that Stop AAPI has said have occurred since last March when they began tracking this data. I was talking to one person, her name is Joanne Yu, she's from the Asian American Federation. And she told me, frankly, that it's just nice to meet with national leaders and be offered help, as opposed to being denigrated using racist language from

the highest office in the land. She pointed out the fact of how powerful it was to hear the president in his first primetime address to denounce these crimes and this harassment as un-American rather than to egg it on. There's no question that the rhetoric, the change in rhetoric has made a really big impact. Right. Ryan and Juana, you both have a lot more reporting to do, so I'll let you get back to that. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about something you've been asking for for a while, a deep dive on the filibuster. Support for NPR and the following message come from BetterHelp, offering online counseling. BetterHelp therapist Hesu Jo knows that lockdown has been hard on us as humans. We as people are hardwired to connect with others, which is why this whole time is so difficult. The connection that happens between people can be very powerful, and how healing it can be to have a healthy

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help you keep up with the news, we help you make sense of what's happening. Like what the case about George Floyd's killing means for the ongoing fight for racial justice, or how to best navigate a pandemic that's changed life for all of us. All of that in 15 minutes every weekday. Listen now to Consider This from NPR. And we're back with Domenico Montanaro and Kelsey Snell. Hello, hello. Hey, Scott. Hello. We are here to talk about one of my favorite topics, the filibuster. Everyone's favorite topic. It's what we do every time on this podcast. So here's the thing. We have talked a lot about the filibuster here and there. We're going to talk about it again today because it is getting a lot of attention right now in Washington. We'll talk about why that is,

but then we're going to take a step back and really get into the filibuster, which I know, actually, like I'm joking, but a lot of people have written in saying, can you please spend a lot of time talking about the filibuster? So you know what? That's what we're going to do. It's complicated stuff. It is. So let's start here, though. Why is this front and center again right now? Democrats have really been calling for changes to the filibuster, seeing what was on the horizon here since they won the Senate, frankly, or even before that, when they were seeing the possibility that they could win over the Senate.

But what we saw this week was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and President Biden both endorsed changes to it, which is really significant because they're probably the two most important men in Washington when it comes to this issue, because Manchin previously didn't budge on this subject. And Biden, longtime senator, had spoken out against changes in any way to the filibuster. Okay, so a lot of context here, and we're going to work through it one thing at a time. Kelsey, what would you say a filibuster is? So the filibuster is something that's really unique to the Senate. And it is a procedural hurdle that requires 60 votes to move ahead on any legislation, really. So they would need to get past this procedural thing called a cloture vote.

They need to get 60 votes and then they can move on to the simple majority vote that people know about for passage. So, Kelsey, you would think then that this would be a pretty straightforward thing. Democrats would say, well, we would like to pass the bills that we've run on. We have the votes to do that. If we change the Senate rules, let's just use our majority, change the Senate rules and move forward. Why has that not happened? And why is that actually unlikely to happen? A lot of Democrats agree with that. It isn't really just progressives anymore. There was a time when it was a pretty far left idea within the Democratic Party to get rid of the filibuster.

There were a lot of people who said that they needed to protect the integrity of the Senate. The Senate is supposed to kind of be the place where legislation comes to cool off and where, you know, partisanship can turn into bipartisan, bipartisan negotiations. That really hasn't been true in a long time. But there are still people who feel like they need to defend that idea of what the Senate is. And one of those people is Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He was talking to reporters in the halls of the Senate earlier this week and just simply said, you can't get rid of this filibuster, went on to talk about how it's very important to protect the Senate and to protect the ability of the minority to have input in legislation. But it's really also important to point out that Manchin isn't alone here. There are other people, many of whom are a little bit less vocal about it,

who are worried that if the filibuster goes away, that A, it can be used against Democrats in the future if Republicans take the majority, or B, that this idea of having an opportunity or a forced moment where people are forced to be bipartisan will go away. Now, there are a lot of arguments against whether or not that forced bipartisanship even happens right now. But this is what some of the defenders of the filibuster say when they're asked to defend it. Yeah, sure. But you know, it really hasn't forced a lot of bipartisanship over the years. And that's because we of the ideologies of the senators in both camps. I mean, one professor I talked to said that, you know, look, if we had a bell shaped curve of ideologies, in other words, a lot of moderates in the middle and, you know, very liberal and very conservative to the wings, to the far wings, you could,

you know, with small tweaks to legislation here and there, form some kind of compromise majority, or supermajority, as it would be here. But because what we have more is kind of like two mountain ranges with the moderates being a valley in the middle. You're not going to force any kind of bipartisanship. In fact, if you get bipartisanship, it usually winds up being something like 80 votes or more. Yeah. And one of the other arguments that people make in terms of defending the filibuster is that if it were to go away and that if it was total majority rule in Congress, you would see laws swaying dramatically from majority to majority. So if you take the example of healthcare, the argument that people

often make when they're talking about this is that you would have seen the Affordable Care Act pass and then be repealed and then pass and then be repealed, and that there wouldn't be any consistency to laws in the country. There are a lot of arguments against that particular interpretation, but that is one of the most common ways that defenders of the filibuster say, you know, that is a concrete example they give as to why it should be kept around. The sort of stability of the laws that could take place later with strong bipartisan legislation, certainly. You know, One piece of this that Democrats have been talking about is the racial history of the filibuster. We heard Elizabeth Warren, Senator from Massachusetts this week, say that the filibuster was designed, in fact, to give

the South the ability to veto civil rights legislation. Now, people who study this would quibble with that slightly, you know, and say that it really wasn't intended to help Southern segregationists, but that's in practice how it wound up being used. It was exploited by Southern segregationists to help them really take advantage of this, build a coalition that could block, you know, really civil rights measures for over 100 years, and we're able to weaponize this. I mean, and that is the argument that majority whip Jim Clyburn was using today on the House floor. I mean, he explicitly said that Republicans used the filibuster to kill civil rights legislation and to protect Jim Crow laws. And then he said that today, the Senate Republican leaders are using the same tactics to obstruct voting and civil rights.

And he says they're essentially trying to gain power by suppressing rights of minorities. And that is an argument you are going to hear Democrats return to over and over and over. It is no mistake that voting rights are among the first things that Democrats are trying to get done this year. They want to send a message about the differences in the party. And a lot of Democrats who are in favor of getting rid of the filibuster will point to this argument, to the argument about voting rights and the racist past and use of the filibuster as a reason, as a public reason, why they should get rid of the filibuster. They are in the process right now of building a PR campaign against the filibuster. That's essentially what's happening here. And as they build this public case, they will return to this.

So what happens, if anything, next? If there is growing momentum to change it in one way or another, what do those actual changes look like? When could they go in place? What would happen after that? Well, what they've been talking about this week, literally, is to restore sort of the talking filibuster, because right now Democrats are saying it's too easy to obstruct legislation. All you really have to do is have a staffer send an email for a senator and boom, there you go. You've held up any legislation for moving forward and then require 60 votes. Democrats, including Joe Manchin, said, let's make that a little more painful, quote unquote. And that might be literally true because you have to actually stay on the floor. And there's some physical limitations, shall we say, to, you know, having to do that and hold the floor for hours on end. So, you know, having that there, Democrats at least feel like that would make it less likely that Republicans would go all out

all the time. But there are limitations to the talking filibuster too, especially because Democrats don't have the votes to reduce the threshold to stop someone from talking from 60 votes to say 55 or 51. They just don't have the votes for that now. Yeah. And there I mean, there are also a lot of questions about how far people are willing to take filibusters when it comes to talking filibusters. There's just I think there's a lot of skepticism about how effective it would even be to move to a talking filibuster. There will be a lot of trial balloons floated, I think, in the process of figuring out what happens to the filibuster. But it's really hard to go just a little bit. It's really hard to kind of chip away at the edges of the filibuster without people starting to talk about, well, if you've already made this change, we should just go all out, go full nuclear,

send it all to the ground. Yeah, and that's something certainly, again, someone like Manchin is not in favor of. He's reiterated this week that he's not in favor of getting rid of the filibuster, which in his view is also that 60 vote threshold. And, you know, the talking filibuster itself is not the magic bullet that a lot of people think it might be. Because, again, you still have the 60 votes, but also, you know, and I don't know how far Republicans would really go with this, but they're threatening to make 50 votes necessary or 51 votes necessary for things that are usual business, like starting the Senate before noon, or even adjourning for the day. So if you had that kind of situation, you really would wind up having to have 51 senators

who are in favor of these minor regular business things in the Capitol at all times. All right, we're going to take a quick break and do Can't Let It Go in just a second. But first, a quick reminder, we have that short survey to help us improve the show. If you listen to the podcast, please take a few minutes to go take it. It's npr.org slash politics survey, npr.org slash politics survey, all one word, all lowercase. All right, time for a quick break. This message comes from NPR sponsor Sotva, the comfort company. Sotva luxury mattresses are made in America by expert craftsmen using the highest quality materials so that your mattress will provide comfortable sleep for years and years. Sotva mattresses are always delivered to your home and set up in the room of your choice.

They're never folded and never squeezed into a small box. Visit s-double-a-t-v-a-dot-com-slash-NPR, where NPR listeners save an additional $225. Sattva, The Comfort Company. Ariel Waldman spent weeks peering into the Antarctic ice through her microscope. It's really brimming with life. It's just that most of it is invisible to us. Traveling through the looking glass. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We are back and it is time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things we cannot stop talking about politics

or otherwise. Kelsey, you are first. You know what I can't let go of, Scott, is the definition of an astronaut. Now, this is a little bit trolling Scott directly. The newly chosen nominee for President Biden's NASA administrator is former Senator Bill Nelson of Florida. Now, he's been to space. There's no denying that this man has been to space. And we haven't. And we're jealous. We he's been to space. There's no denying that this man has been to space. And we haven't. And we're jealous. We have not been to space. But people like Scott and many others on the internet are very,

very upset that he's being called an astronaut because, in fact, he was not a person who went through the astronaut training program. I mean, Scott, you can tell me a little bit more about why someone who went to space is not an astronaut. Thank you for giving me this layup. So yes, Bill Nelson was a Florida House member, then a senator, obviously had a deep interest in the space program. It was a key part of his congressional district. He was a key member on the House and then Senate committees that oversee NASA. When he was on the House committee in 1986, he was selected to fly on a space shuttle mission. He went through the training.

He was an astronaut in a very technical sense. But let's be real. He was selected for that because he oversaw the purse strings for NASA. This was a brief window where NASA was experimenting with letting a lot more people up into space. It very quickly stopped because of the Challenger disaster, which was very shortly after Nelson went to space. But then for decades since, he has been referred to as an astronaut, former astronaut Bill Nelson. You know what? If you're talking about senator astronauts, you can talk about John Glenn.

You can talk about Mark Kelly, two people who had distinguished, amazing astronaut careers, then ran for office. I do not think you should count the dude who figured out a way to catch a ride. Right. I'm jealous. I would have done that, too. But here's the thing. He didn't just, like, walk out of the House chamber and onto, like, the space station. He was in space for six days. He okay, so I read this article today from the Tampa

Bay Times, which by the way, that the URL for it is how Bill Nelson became an astronaut, just putting that out there. But he was a payload specialist, and he was in orbit. And he had to do the full physical regimen of conditioning to, know to go to space um he flew an air for in an air force uh f-16 jet he had to do the things to go to space they didn't just like take him out of his suit and like put a space suit over it wait so you're saying i'm wrong i don't know i'm with i'm with scott on this one like tiger woods used to train with navy seals he is not a navy seal okay bill nelson i think we disagree on the definition but maybe we can agree that bill nelson constructed the greatest congressional trip in the

history of congress dominico what about you um i'm gonna keep things terrestrial here okay you know the thing i can't let go of this week and it's for the dogs, is literally a dog, Major Biden, who is President Biden's – one of President Biden's two German shepherds that he has at the White House with him. And there were reports that Major had bitten someone at the White House or been aggressive towards someone at the White House. And he was asked about it this week in that interview on ABC where he made news about some other things, but I was most interested in this. One final question. Is Major out of the doghouse? The answer is yes. Major was a rescue pup. Major did not bite someone and penetrate the skin. And the dog's being trained now, our trainer at home in Delaware.

He was going home. I didn't banish him to home. Bill was going to be away for four days. I was going to be away for two, so we took him home. But you turn a corner, and there's two people I don't know at all, and they move, and he moves to protect. I had two thoughts on this first of all as somebody who had a slightly protect not slightly very protective rescue dog i feel like it makes sense right like

these people in your house all of a sudden what are they doing like you're just doing your dog my second thought is my theory like most of the secret service dogs are german shepherds too and my theory is that they were like goading major like oh yeah you want to you want to act like a real german language well you know he's he's still he's still pretty young um and this is a new house for him there's lots of new and different kinds of people around uh jill biden actually told rachel ray that she's become kind of obsessed with trying to acclimate the dogs because champ is the older uh dog is like 13 and they got major to be um you know kind of a companion champ was there for the vp years so he's he's a seasoned pro he knows what's going on i mean if they had cats they would just pee everywhere that's how

those guys get acclimated you know i was wondering about that because that's the big question the the biden's promised that there was going to be a White House cat. Have we heard about the White House cat? This is a question we need answers to. I can work on that. I can work on that at the next press briefing, which brings me to my can't let it go, which was to stay really funny moment, brief moment at one of the briefings this week when Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marsha Fudge came and spoke.

You know, a lot of these briefings start off. A cabinet secretary comes and kind of gives an update on their department. So, you know, a lot of times reporters are on autopilot during these things, especially at the very beginning. And so here's what happened when Fudge walks up to the microphone. Thank you very much, Jen. Good afternoon. She now pauses, looks at them, and points to her ear. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon. Oh, thank you. I was wondering if I was in this room by myself. It was just like, you're not going to say good afternoon back to me? You know, Marsha Fudge is a fun person to cover. Having covered her in the house, she's is a fun person to cover. Having covered her in the house, she's just a fun person to cover. Yeah, this also reminded me that

when you travel with the president during the campaign, he did this and he still does this, he will always wave hello to the reporters and reporters are all carrying cameras and microphones and also being professional, so nobody ever waves back hello to him. And every once in a while I feel bad and I'll just give a very brief hello wave back.

But he's always like, hey, everybody! like everybody he of course doesn't come over and answer the questions that much but he's always very friendly waving hello nobody waves back all right uh that that is a wrap for today and for this week our executive producer is shirley henry our editors are mathani maturian eric mDaniel. Our producers are Barton Girdwood and Chloe Weiner. Thank you to Lexi Schpittle and Brad Carter. Our intern is Claire Obie. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.