The NPR Politics Podcast - What Does Federal Court Ruling Mean For DACA Program?

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

President Joe Biden's primary policy initiatives, his trillion-dollar infrastructure and economic plans, face their first test in the Senate this week. And does a federal court ruling limiting the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, increase the urgency around immigration in Congress?This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional reporter 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, this is Julia calling from Puerto Rico. I'm sitting on a balcony listening to the tiny frogs make their nightly calls. This podcast was recorded at... It is 2.09 Eastern on Monday, July 19th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll still be sitting on the balcony listening to the frogs. Sue and Mara, DC cicadas or Puerto Rican frogs? Which sounds better? Puerto Rican frogs. The frogs.

I think so. Yeah, I like those. That was soothing. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Okay, so this week, we expect to see some of the first concrete actions taken in the Senate on President Biden's big infrastructure plan. This is a central policy push of his first term. It's something we've talked about a lot on this podcast. Sue, can you explain what is happening this week and also explain why, given how long ago he came out of the White House and said, we have a deal, like, what's taken so long? What is going on here? Well, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is pushing for some confrontation this

week, both with Republicans and with the Democrats in his own party. He set up a pretty ambitious timeline to get moving on both the infrastructure package and Biden's essentially his American Families Plan, his big economic plan, before they adjourn for the August recess. Not to complete them, but to at least get the ball moving. And so the first thing he's going to do is try to force a procedural vote on Wednesday to get the Senate to agree to take up the bipartisan infrastructure plan. The trick here, Scott, is they don't actually have a bill yet. So Schumer is trying to get the Senate to agree to start debate on the bill, and they basically finished writing it on the floor. Not everyone's really happy about this tactic. Senators are a grumpy sort, and they're especially Republicans who don't like to feel the pressure of the majority to try

to get them on the bill. But that's one big vote we're going to see this week. And internally, Schumer has also set a deadline for the same day, Wednesday, to have all 50 Democrats on board for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan. That's not going to require a vote out in public. It's more of the inside the room, everybody on board here agreement that they can move forward on that. Mara, there are a lot of high wire acts going on at once here, it sounds like. Yes, a lot of high wire acts going on at once. And it's because President Biden has an incredibly ambitious agenda, and an incredibly tiny majority in the Senate. So it's kind of like he's trying to push a gigantic antelope through the python. And it's really, really hard. He wants to get the ball moving. And so he's going to say, this is Fisher cut bait.

We're going to see if we have the 10 Republican votes we need to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill or not. This is a big test of Joe Biden's belief that bipartisan compromise is still possible in Washington. We're going to find out this week if it is or not. And let's just set aside for the rest of this conversation that $3.5 trillion reconciliation proposal, which of course, you know, is closely related to the infrastructure plan. These are both complicated and high stakes enough. Let's just talk about the infrastructure plan here. This is the one, of course, that does have the buy-in of at least some Senate Republicans. I guess, Sue, let's back up a little bit. You mentioned they're going to vote on something before the text is written in public. Is that, how normal or strange is that? You know, in the modern Senate, it's pretty normal. I think that it's hard to get agreement

in the Senate unless there is a deadline or some kind of pressure point. Schumer, this is maybe his first big power play as majority leader to try to get the Senate to do something he wants. He's dealing with a couple of problems here. Like I said, Republicans not exactly thrilled with moving forward without having a bill written. They're still sort of negotiating and hashing out how they want to pay for it. And there's also some Democrats who don't necessarily feel great about being pushed towards a conclusion, mainly Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona who's been the lead Democrat that helped negotiate this deal. She would not speak at all to reporters last week who were repeatedly asking her if she was on board for this plan and thinks it could

be ready. But Schumer is basically saying, look, if we just need to agree to start debating on the bill, we basically know the framework, right? Like they've already announced it. The big negotiating hash out is how they're going to pay for it and whether they can fully pay for it. But he thinks they can get there over the next week or so. The Senate has done this before. Most famously, I think people will recall Mitch McConnell tried to do it a couple of years back with the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. It was basically making the same argument to Republicans, let's get on the bill,

and then we'll figure out the details. Former Senator John McCain of Arizona famously downed that whole strategy, and it blew up in McConnell's face. But Republicans have embraced this type of strategy before. So you're going to hear a lot of criticism from Republicans when Democrats do it, but it's basically just the party in the majority tends to use this as a tactic to move the ball forward. One of the things that's been interesting about this bipartisan negotiation is that it has survived. And there are so many Republicans who have indicated they would be willing to vote for this. If Mitch McConnell's stated priority is to stop President Biden's agenda. Why is he letting this go forward?

I think this bill, the trillion dollar infrastructure bill, is really popular. There's a lot of policies in here that Republicans support, that Mitch McConnell supports. I think you're going to see him, and already has, trained his opposition on the $3.5 trillion plan. He's already promised that no Republican will vote for that bill. That one is a much bigger, more structural change of the federal government. Frankly, this infrastructure plan is a lot of ideas and policies that already exist out in the world. They're just more funding towards them, more expansive. And a lot of Republicans want to vote for this because it's good for their own politics, right? Like it's good to go home and say you helped deliver X million

or billion dollars for your state. And infrastructure is like an issue that everybody, every member of Congress has an issue in their district or their state that needs money, that needs attention. So there is certainly a bipartisan, self-serving interest to getting infrastructure done. I think where the Republican resistance has started to come in is they are increasingly politically seeing this bill as the gateway to allowing Democrats to pass this bigger, more expansive federal government, you know, this bigger, more expansive bill that would expand the federal government. And some of them are thinking of talking about opposing the infrastructure bill as more of a political protest against that bill,

not about the infrastructure bill itself. Right. And we should point out that that big, gigantic $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill can be passed with Democratic votes only, but they need to keep every single Democrat on board because they only have 50. Yeah, I mean, that goes back to your point about the High Wire Act, like what Schumer is trying to do this week is very tricky, is both force bipartisanship to move forward in the Senate and in the same day enact very strict party discipline on another matter. So it's going to be a big test. I don't think if they don't get the votes they need from Republicans this week, I don't think it means it's over. The negotiations will continue. But I think it's going to be a sign that it's going to be a lot harder to get that big bipartisan vote that Joe

Biden's been hoping for. All right. So the first of many, it sounds like, make or break moments happening on the legislative agenda on Wednesday, the first of these test votes, we will come back and talk about how that goes later in the week. We're going to take a quick break now, though. When we get back, we will talk about a new federal court ruling and what that means for the Biden administration and Congress's immigration agenda. There is no denying that there is a lot going on in the economy right now. So far in 2021, about 3,600 retail stores have closed. You know, China has banned Bitcoin many times before, but

this time it's looking pretty serious. Understanding this stuff, it is kind of our thing here at The Indicator. It's how we like to spend our free time. Every day we explain something that is going on in the economy. Listen and follow The Indicator from Planet Money on NPR. And we're back and we're going to talk now about a new federal court ruling and what it means for the future of DACA. That is the Obama era program that protects those who are illegally brought to the U.S. as children from deportation. Unlike the Trump administration, of course, the Biden administration is fully committed to keeping it in place. But now we have this new ruling. Mara, what happened? What happened was that a federal judge in Texas said that the program

was illegal, but he didn't throw it out entirely. He merely blocked new applicants for this deportation protection. These are people, as you said, brought to the U.S. as children. They have to either be students, veterans, or high school graduates to apply for this kind of deportation protection. So that means that either the Biden administration has to appeal this, they say they will, or Congress has to pass a law to rectify the situation. There has been a dreamers bill in Congress for the last 20 years, and it's been a bipartisan effort at some points. Lindsey Graham used to be the Republican co-sponsor of this. The dreamers are very popular. The idea of giving deportation protection to the dreamers is very popular. But it's one of those

things where it looks like it should be bipartisan, but bipartisanship on this issue is really hard to find in Congress. And Sue, I feel like I know the answer to this question. But there are, are there any indications that any immigration legislation has a pathway right now in Congress, despite democratic control? You know, this is normally the place of the podcast where I say, No, Scott, of course, Congress hasn't been able to advance anything on immigration in a generation. Yes. And that is still true. But what's interesting about the timing of this ruling is there is a lot of talk among Democrats of trying to include some elements of immigration reform or rewriting progressives in their own party, to go as big as possible in the reconciliation bill on immigration measures. Now, that's going to be a really tricky path because in budget reconciliation, there are very strict rules for what can and cannot be included.

But I've talked to a lot of Democrats who think that some elements of immigration reform could be included in a budget bill. And that is one thing we are going to watch very closely as Democrats start to cobble together what this package is going to be. And, you know, today, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, was asked during the briefing whether Biden wanted a broad path to citizenship in the reconciliation package. In other words, for all undocumented workers, or does he want a narrow one just for dreamers? And of course, she said, she'll let the Senate decide. Well, what's interesting about immigration, and so often when we talk about immigration, we talk about it as a social issue, right? But in the context of the budget reconciliation, Democrats are looking at it as a revenue issue. If you take

people living in the country illegally and create a pathway to citizenship, you create more tax paying citizens, although obviously people who are not citizens do pay taxes in some regard, but you increase the workforce and it's a revenue source. And the big conversation around this reconciliation bill is going to be how to pay for it. And they have made promises that it's going to be fully paid for. So if you could point to some immigration measures that would drive hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over the long term into the US economy, you look at immigration as an economic stimulus policy, and not just a social one. And that is potentially a pathway to put it into a budget bill. So we're talking about this question of whether or not it would fit into the bill,

which will, of course, be a decision made by the Senate parliamentarian. There's probably also going to be a huge decision on whether or not this reconciliation bill can include something called a clean energy standard that would really set hard mandates on energy going forward that would be a big deal in climate circles. These are two high stakes rulings coming from this person. Do we have any sense how far down the line these key decisions could be made? Is this something that likely would not happen until the fall? Oh, I think we're months and months away from having a final bill. And the big question here is how mind bogglingly politically difficult do Democrats want to make for themselves, especially

when you have a 50-50 Senate and like a three or four vote margin in the House to get this through. You're exactly right, Scott. Immigration alone is really tough to do. Climate change alone is really tough to do. You put this all into one huge behemoth and keep party unity because we don't know, but we're pretty certain they're not going to get a single Republican vote for any of this. That is going to be incredibly difficult. So, and everybody's got something they want in that bill, and not everything's going to be able to get in there. And how the administration decides whose hearts to break with this bill is going to be a huge fight that I think is going to carry through the rest of the year. And, you know, I just want to

revise and amend my previous metaphor. This is like forcing an elephant through the python. I mean, this, even without immigration... Wait, is there still just one python? Or do we also have multiple pythons eating different things at this point? Well, no, this is the ultimate python. Because even if you put immigration aside, the $3.5 trillion reconciliation is already the biggest expansion of the social safety net since the Johnson administration. So it's already the biggest spending bill in history. Feels like a lot of Congress-focused podcasts over the next few months. I hate to break it to you. All right.

Well, until the next time we focus in on this, I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.