The NPR Politics Podcast - What Will Survive Negotiations In Biden's Trillion-Plus Dollar Social Programs Bill?

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

The White House continues to negotiate with Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona over the president's social programs package. Core climate and community college provisions are on the chopping block, but the bill is still expected to come in at well over a trillion dollars.This episode: demographics and culture correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Anna. Anna Frayne, on the morning of our wedding. This podcast was recorded at 2.06 p.m. on Thursday, October 21st. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. But we'll finally be married after being engaged for five years. Okay, here's the show. Aww.

Aww. Congratulations, you two. That's so nice. Congratulations. Amazing. We have the best timestamps lately. Hello, this is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And today we are talking about the Democrats' big spending bill they're trying to pass. Now, we've talked in the past about why President Joe Biden wasn't more visible in the negotiations over this multi-trillion dollar package. But in the last few weeks, that has changed. Joe Biden has taken a much more

visible role in meeting with lawmakers. Now, as for what's in the package itself, the starting point was a $3.5 trillion bundle of policy programs, a whole mess of things. Since then, a lot has changed. And of course, it's worth saying that this is different, but of course, linked to the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate already this summer. That one was full of roads, bridges, that sort of traditional infrastructure. The bill we're talking about today is what some proponents have called the human infrastructure package. It contains things like higher education, child care, and also climate spending. Now, we're very shortly going to get into everything that's in it. But Mara, let's start with the politics of this. I mentioned Joe Biden getting involved.

Why is he suddenly a much more central player here? Well, I think he's been involved all along. The White House has been involved all along. But, you know, Joe Biden has said that in his mind, the secret to successful presidents is prioritizing and sequencing and timing. And I think he wanted to see how far Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer could get on their own before he got in there and started to bang heads together. I talked to some of the Democrats who met with the president in various groups earlier this week. He had some moderates in, he had some progressives in, he had one-on-ones with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. And what a lot of those Democrats said was that he had,

you know, paper. He was going through policies and numbers, like he was getting into the specifics in a way that he had not been engaged before. And they feel like he is getting down to business, as one of them said, and very determined to get a deal soon. Well, Deidre, let's talk about those specifics. The bill has changed quite a bit from that initial $3.5 trillion. So let's start with a few of the priorities that were in the package. Let's start with climate. So what has happened on the climate policies in here? The sort of centerpiece of that proposal that President Biden and Democrats non-starter with him, so it's being dropped.

Democrats on the Hill are saying, look, there are other ways to get to the targets that the president set. He wants to reduce greenhouse emissions by 50 percent by 2030. And they say the president restated that that remains still his position. So what they're trying to do now is figure out how to get there with other various proposals. But there really aren't a lot of details yet on how they're going to be able to do that. Let's run through a few of the other priorities that have been paired back from that bigger spending bill. We have a few. Let's start with a corporate tax hike. That was one potentially really big revenue raiser here. What does that look like right now?

It doesn't look like they're going to be able to do that plan. I mean, just stepping back, I mean, Democrats campaigned on the issue of making the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share, that when they took control of the White House and Congress, that they would roll back the 2017 Trump tax cuts. That was a centerpiece of paying for this package and key pieces of it, including some of these tax increases on wealthy Americans and corporations are now being opposed by Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. And so now they're sort of going back to the drawing board or what they say is a menu of options and trying to figure out other ways. One idea that's being batted around today in the Senate is a tax on billionaires, unrealized capital gains earnings, and how much

does that raise? So, you know, one senator I talked to, Senator Tim Kaine, was saying, look, we can get there. There is a menu of options and it's easier because the price tag is shrinking, right? They don't have to raise three and a half trillion dollars and they insist that the bill will be paid for, but we'll just have to see where else they get this revenue from. You know, and Teerja just pointed out something really important. Kyrsten Sinema is against these tax hikes, not Joe Manchin. And once again, you know, the Democrats are up against the wall that just one senator can stop, grind to a halt any part of this that they don't like, because the Democrats have a zero margin in the Senate. Every single Democrat has

to vote for this in order for it to pass. And this illustrates one of the problems with this entire package all the way along. If you want to do big LBJ or FDR style transformational change with minuscule or non-existent margins in Congress, you just can't. All right. Well, there are a lot of areas we don't have time to get into here, but things like the expanded child tax credit, the potential for free community college, those policy areas might be pared back. So we've run through a bunch of these potential cuts to this bill. What are the main centerpieces that remain then, Deirdre? What is really at the center of this bill as it stands at this point?

Well, Democrats insist that the child tax credit is still going to be a centerpiece of this bill as it stands at this point? Well, Democrats insist that the child tax credit is still going to be a centerpiece of the bill. At this point, it's expected to be extended for one year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today that was the agreement that the president made. She would like to make it permanent. Other Democrats would like to make it permanent, but it will be in the bill for one year. The two years of free community college is not expected to be in the bill. But some other things that are expected to remain in are things like universal pre-K, paid family leave. It's unclear how many weeks of paid family leave will be, but there'll be some version of that. There are housing programs that will still be in here that are important

for a lot of different communities. And those are expected to be in. Right. So we've talked a lot about things that were cut out of this, but there's still plenty there, more than one point five trillion worth potentially. So we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will talk more about what's still in the bill and the politics of it. And we are back now, Mara, let's talk about big picture politics. Biden ran in 2020 on two big messages that he could be a great unifier and help create transformational change. Now, the process behind these bills isn't over, but it seems like he's had a lot of trouble unifying both Dems and Republicans together and trouble even unifying his own party. So what are your takeaways behind this whole horse trading behind these bills? How has he done at unifying and creating change? Well, Democrats have to pass something, have to make sure people know they passed it,

and hopefully they have to get credit from voters for passing it. And all of those things are still question marks. You know, on one level, this process is normal. The Democratic Party is a broad coalition with very small margins, so they have to agree among themselves. But some of the other parts are mystifying. The fact that there was no simple messaging around this bill that made it easier for the president to sell. Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress decided that they would stuff everything on their wish list into one giant reconciliation bill. They'd only have one shot at this. And just the sheer weight of it has made passing it so difficult

and the fact that there wasn't a clear, simple message for him to sell it. Look how long it's been that we've been referring to this thing as the $3.5 trillion bill. Voters think of that and they think, ooh, a lot of spending. Sometimes it's referred to as the social safety net expansion bill. Well, most people don't want a social safety net. They think it's welfare. They want a job and they want help, you know, taking care of their elderly parents and putting their kids into preschool. And those things never came through. So I think on that, you know, the president hasn't done that well. But I think in the end, he gets everyone in the driveway in front of the White House saying we have a deal. He passes it and he can show some actual results pretty fast in people's lives. Then I think he comes out ahead. And Democrats on Capitol Hill admit that the messaging has been problematic. I mean, they admit that fighting over a number for months and months has really not shown the American people what they're trying to do. And you've seen just in the last few days, these Democrats that were in these negotiations with the president come back and try to talk

about the urgency and what this would mean for people, talk about the specific policies and how the child tax credit has already benefited the country by reducing poverty. And, for example, you know, the kinds of benefits people will get from paid family leave, from universal pre-K. Pelosi is talking a lot about mothers and families trying to relate these policies to people's real lives instead of what are we going to get for $3 trillion? Now they tell us. Where have they been? Wait, wait. But as far as the framing goes, way back when there was the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, are we saying that that was bad messaging or that they just didn't repeat it enough or both? Both. They, okay. They didn't repeat it. I haven't heard anybody refer to this

as the jobs plan or the family's plan in months. Have you, Deirdre? No, what you've heard is like, I will not vote for this package if it doesn't have X amount of money in it for my priority. There was just a lot of Democrats, you know, giving these red lines and not budging. And I think it took the president,

you know, sort of shuttle diplomacy, getting in rooms with different groups of Democrats and basically saying, like, here's what's doable, you know, and them sort of like internalizing, okay, now we're really at the point where we have to compromise. And so they really pulled back from a lot of the sort of threats that they've been making. And now, you know, are all trying to get around this proposal like we can get it done. We will pass both of these bills. But there are a lot of big details that they still haven't settled. You know, number one, how to pay for it and what it will ultimately cost. We know, you know, the priorities that

they want to still keep in it. But I think there's still going to be a lot, a lot more wrangling. That brings us to an interesting question here that, you know, we talk a heck of a lot about Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, about West Virginia's Joe Manchin. But let's talk about the progressives, because is there a danger that Biden will lose progressive senators in a watered down version of that $3.5 trillion bill. Yeah, I don't think that he's going to lose Senate votes. I don't think there's going to be progressive senators that vote against this in the end. What I wonder is, will the base be so demoralized? The leftist, the progressive base of the Democratic will be demoralized to the point they don't want to turn out in the midterm elections. Well, I think there is a little bit of spin on this issue going on up here. I mean,

there are some Democrats saying, look, you know, people aren't paying attention to the fight over the number. As soon as we get, you know, clarity on what's in the deal, we'll be able to sell the deal and people will understand how it relates to their lives. This is still a massive government spending bill with programs in it that potentially would have real life impacts on all kinds of families. We talked earlier about paid family leave. We talked about health care expansion. We talked about changes to climate policy. This would still, one of the largest domestic spending bills that Congress has passed since the New Deal, as Bernie Sanders likes to remind us. package, which on its own is a significant bill, these are two big accomplishments that President Biden and congressional Democrats could really tout to voters as they head into the midterm elections as things that they should get credit for and things that they are doing to address

problems in people's lives. Well, okay, let's get down to brass tacks then, because the timeline on this has all been pretty muddy. When do we expect to see a vote on this in the Senate? Well, they have yet another timeline that they've set, which is leaders on the Hill are saying that they want to get a quote unquote framework by the end of this week. But Senator Joe Manchin just told reporters not long ago that there's not going to be a deal anytime soon. So I think we're still in this. We could see some kind of framework for how long some of these proposals will be in place and sort of the top lines, but we're still a ways away from a final piece of legislation that both chambers are going to vote for. We'll leave it there for today. Until tomorrow, I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture.

I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.