The NPR Politics Podcast - With Biden's Legacy Teetering, Democrats Struggle To Overcome Divisions

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Democratic Party discord threatens what amounts to nearly all of President Biden's domestic agenda, from childcare to climate. Compounding the challenge: looming government funding and debt deadlines.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, acting congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, 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 Mary. I'm calling from the Joseph R. Biden train station, also known as Wilmington Station. I'm taking the Amtrak train back home to New York City from Wilmington, Delaware. This episode was recorded at... I respect the natural sound background of recording that right when the train pulled up. That was impressive. It is 2 205 Eastern on Monday, September 27th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but my train is here. Okay, enjoy the show. Perfect for an infrastructure discussion. That's right.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsrow. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So the week in Congress, I think you can technically refer to it as bananas, which I believe is spelled B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Is that accurate? That's how you spell it. Other people have more colorful descriptions of it, Scott. That's as colorful as we can get for now on the podcast. We'll see how the week develops,

though. But I say that, and other people say that, because not even including everything, we've got a government funding deadline, a looming debt ceiling, and two massive bills that together encompass just about every single item of President Biden's domestic political agenda. And all of these things are really up in the air right now. So, Mara, let's start with this. The last couple months have been pretty rocky for Biden. We've talked a lot about that. What are the stakes for him and for Democrats in general this week? Well, the stakes couldn't be higher.

Obviously, they have to pass a bill to fund the government. And obviously, they, since Republicans won't help them, are going to have to raise the debt ceiling. And we'll talk about that a little later in the program so that the United States doesn't default. But the Biden agenda is also hanging in the balance. He and the Democrats have to negotiate among themselves and come to a compromise so they can pass two big pieces of legislation. One is a hard infrastructure bill, roads and bridges. The other is an even bigger, what you could call soft infrastructure, human infrastructure, expanding the social safety net, climate, education, healthcare, that bill. If they fail to pass those bills, they will be in effect driving a stake through the heart of the Biden presidency and going into the next two election cycles as the party that believed that government could help people but failed to deliver.

And I think they would be really sealing their fate. And I think they'd lose the next two elections if they don't pass these bills. Deirdre, do you agree with Mara? Because that is some high stakes. I do agree. I mean, I've talked to Democrats on the Hill and they over and over say failure is not an option. And they do believe that it will trigger

midterm losses for them and potentially a loss for Biden for a reelection in 2024. So I think that everybody knows what the stakes are here. The problem is that nobody sort of moved past the political discussion and done the sort of hard work of negotiating the details of the broader bill that Mara mentioned, the $3.5 trillion package. And we're going to talk about some of those specifics, but just to stick to this point

for a minute, because, you know, one or two bills making or breaking everything sounds extreme. It's really not, though, because first of all, this is just about everything he campaigned on in one piece of legislation. But secondly, Mara, you made the point this is the party that ran on the premise of the party that's able to govern. Yeah, and look, there's a reason they stuffed everything into this bill. Democrats have not had complete control of government for very many years in the last generation. And they got bipartisan support for the hard infrastructure roads and bridges bill. But for everything else they wanted, they realize that they have a very short window. You know, we have this phenomenon in American politics called the two-year presidency. Presidents have

about two years to pass their agenda. Then they usually lose one house or both of Congress and they no longer can legislate. Democrats decided they'd put their pent up wish list of things they think the country needs into this big reconciliation bill. Reconciliation is a legislative maneuver that allows them to pass this with Democrats' votes only in the Senate, 51 votes. It's a carve-out to the filibuster. Reconciliation bills can't be filibustered. So they put everything in there. And the problem for Democrats is that they cannot, they don't have the votes to pass a $3.5 trillion bill with everything in it. They're going to have to slim it down and take things out. And right now, they're in this very messy, contentious

intra-party negotiations trying to figure out what they can pass. They have no room for error. They have a gigantic agenda and a minuscule majority. It's like pushing, we've said this before, it's like pushing an elephant through a python. And they're going to have to figure out what they're going to give up or else they will go home empty-handed and I think the consequences will be terrible for them. I guess that's the thing I'm so confused about now because we've talked about what the stakes are politically. This is this tricky, complicated situation where house moderates want this one bill to pass and are saying they're not going to support the broader measure. Progressives are pushing for that broader measure and say they're not going to support the broader measure. Progressives are pushing for that broader measure and say they're not going to support this current infrastructure plan.

All of this depends on a handful of Democrats in the Senate because they need every single vote. You loop all these things together. Mara, it's kind of surprising that at least outwardly, you do not see really aggressive negotiating and phone working from this president who spent decades and decades on Capitol Hill. No, and you have to assume that it's about to happen because bringing people together is part of Joe Biden's brand. He did it with Republicans and Democrats on infrastructure.

Why wouldn't he do it inside his own party on the reconciliation bill and the timing of the two votes. So that's been a little bit of a mystery. But I do think that if Biden doesn't get down into the nitty gritty and negotiate with his own party, the moderates and progressives in his own party, he won't get this done. And one of the questions I had for Deirdre is, you're used to hearing about how little trust there is between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. It's kind of a toxic environment. But what really surprised me is the fact that progressives don't believe that moderates will actually vote for the reconciliation bill, the soft infrastructure bill, if progressives go ahead and vote for the hard infrastructure bill. In other words, how much appetite is there from both wings of the Democratic Party to vote for the other guy's top priority? In other words,

do moderates wish that the big reconciliation bill just wouldn't happen at all? And are progressives really happy to not have the hard infrastructure bill passed? Well, I think moderates are saying that they want to work on the framework for the broader bill, but they are very much focused on getting an accomplishment signed into law. They say we can do both. We're optimistic. We can do both policies. But since we've already passed it in the Senate, we know it can pass. Like, let's all get together as a party and move the one thing that we agree on already to the president's desk. But you're right. The trust between moderates and progressives is really not there. There are a lot of progressives

who are very angry with a couple of Senate moderates. We can name them West Virginia Senators Joe Manchin, Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. And over and over, you hear them say, like, we need an ironclad, on the record agreement from the moderate senators who have been holding this thing up. And without that, we're not going to vote for the bill that they negotiated, this bipartisan infrastructure bill that's far more targeted. And I think the thing that I'm coming back to is this question that Scott raised, you know, is Joe Biden picking up the phone and calling Manchin and Sinema? Because we can talk a lot about the fight in the House between moderates and progressives, and they could try to pass a bill, but it's a waste of time if it cannot get 50 votes in the

Senate. So I think that there's a lot of angling and wrangling going on in the House around this, you know, setup this week about the debate starting on the infrastructure process here. But I think the real hard decisions are really being made between Manchin, Sinema, the president, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, more about this and a little more detail about that government funding deadline that's just days away. Okay, we are back.

We talked about this a little bit on Friday. We mentioned it at the top of the show. Let's get back to that. Deirdre, among the many votes happening today is a vote in the Senate that is tied to the debt ceiling, which will hit its limit sometime soon. That Senate vote is expected to fail. Deirdre, could you remind us what exactly the debt ceiling problem is, why the Senate is holding this vote, why we're already talking about it like it's a done deal failure, and what happens next?

So Democrats decided to tie the funding bill to extend government funding through December and avoid a shutdown, which would happen at midnight on Thursday if Congress doesn't pass a bill and send it to the president. They decided to tie the government funding question to a provision to raise the debt limit. The debt limit is basically the government's borrowing authority. Congress has to pass a bill so that the Treasury Department can continue to borrow money to pay its bills. And these are bills on things it's already spent money on, like the tax cuts that were enacted in 2017 under then President Trump. So Republicans on Capitol Hill made the calculation that they were going to unite against voting to raise the debt ceiling.

In the past, these have been bipartisan votes. But this time around, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is making the argument that because Democrats are moving forward with these spending bills that will add trillions to the debt, the Republicans are not going to help them raise the debt ceiling. And they say, Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House. It's all on them. Well, except for Democrats would say, no, we're not adding trillion dollars to the debt. Our bills are paid for. To me, the debt ceiling fight is a really good example of why voters are cynical and why they think Washington is filled with irresponsible, hypocritical politicians. Because it's like you have a credit card. You

have charged things way over your credit limit, your debt limit. So you want to go to the bank or your credit card company and ask them to raise the debt limit, the credit limit. But guess what? The credit card company is you. You get to charge stuff on your credit card and decide if you're going to raise your own credit limit. And that's what's happening. As Deirdre said, this spending has already happened. They have to raise the debt limit for money they've already spent. And the reason that Republicans don't want to vote for this, even though it's been bipartisan in the past, is they want to weaponize the debt ceiling vote and they want to say Democrats voted for more debt. They want to be able to run political ads accusing Democrats of doing this.

I mean, this is why voters hate Washington. But Mara, I'm not discounting your argument that it is a cynical practice here and not quite tied to the reality, but given that they're making this play at a point when Democrats want to spend, you know, in a combined $4 trillion in new spending, more than about double the cost of a two-decade war, is that possibly a more relevant and powerful political weapon? Oh, I think it's a powerful political weapon. I just think that the idea that you should be able to charge stuff on your credit card and then retroactively raise the debt ceiling is crazy. There have been efforts in the past to do away with the debt ceiling. Deirdre can tell us about them. To say, when the budget is passed,

the debt ceiling is just automatically raised to whatever spending bills Congress passes. But no, that failed mostly because the debt ceiling is a political weapon. In the past, it was a weapon used by Republicans to force Democrats like Barack Obama to make concessions about spending. Now it's just being used so that Republicans have a weapon to use politically against Democrats in the next election. adds another deadline to their efforts to pass this big spending package because the Treasury Department is saying they think that they will need this raised by sometime in mid-October. And if we creep up to that deadline, you know, people could be worried about potentially getting higher interest rates on things like student loans or cars. All right. I have a sneaking

suspicion there will be other episodes about Congress this week, but I think we have packed enough incredibly large, complicated topics into one show for today. So we will wind things up. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. 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.