What A Day - All In A Hundred Days Work

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Impeachment is moving forward in the Senate despite a Republican effort to dismiss it yesterday, but a conviction next month doesn't seem likely.Meanwhile, Senate leaders finally came to an agreement on Monday on how the 50-50 chamber would run, with the filibuster intact. For many of President Biden’s larger goals, he will need Congress to cooperate. We spoke to Crooked Media’s Editor in Chief and host of Rubicon, Brian Beutler, about the new Congress and Biden’s first 100 days in office.And in headlines: Biden signs four executive orders targeted at fighting racial inequality, farmers continue to protest in India, and Putin and Biden get on the phone.Show Links:Subscribe to Rubicon: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rubicon-the-first-hundred-days-of-the-biden-presidency/id1485109198

It's Wednesday, January 27th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, where we are calling for Congress from five years ago to pass a $15 minimum wage so that maybe we can have it immediately. Yeah. And if you are doing anything else five years ago that maybe changes the direction of the country, I wouldn't complain. Yes. Pretty significant year. You could have been doing some stuff. A lot of things. A lot of things. On today's show, a conversation with Cricket Editor-in-Chief Brian Boitler about our favorite

legislative body, the U.S. Senate and President Biden's agenda. Then some headlines. But first, the U.S. Senate and President Biden's agenda. Then some headlines. But first, the latest. Do you solemnly swear that to all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, former president of the United States, now pending, that you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws. So help you God. I do. So help you God. That was the Senate swearing in for the upcoming impeachment trial of Trump that is set to begin on February 8th.

I just love that you always hear cell phone dings and sounds in the background of everything now. Yes. Silence your phones, guys. Jeez, you ruined our podcast. Well, yesterday, a Republican effort in the Senate, thank you Rand Paul of Kentucky, to dismiss the impeachment was actually defeated. But only five Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the trial to go forward. So it's not really looking

likely that the GOP is interested in accountability for the ex-president. Shock, surprise, their unity means not uniting against actual bad things. Yes, that is definitely how it seems. Well, aside from impeachment, the other work the Senate has been doing is confirming President Biden's cabinet appointments, like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who went through yesterday. But so far, much of the other work from the new administration has been done through executive orders, which makes sense at this point, given that we are just a week in. But looking ahead, Biden will need Congress for some of his bigger priorities, like passing COVID relief or immigration reform. And it's not quite clear how things will go with such a slim Democratic majority.

Yeah, and we've already seen some testing of the waters. So on Monday, Senate leaders finally came to an agreement on how the 50-50 chamber would run. Mitch McConnell had wanted Democrats to agree to keep the filibuster as part of the deal, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused. As a reminder, that's the requirement that most legislation needs a 60-vote supermajority to pass, which is why Congress never does anything. McConnell relented when a couple Democratic senators restated their commitment to the filibuster, so for now, the filibuster lives on. But it could get scrapped if all 50 Democratic senators decide to nuke it at some point. Here to talk about all of that and more is Crooked Media's editor-in-chief, Brian Boitler, who just launched a new season of his podcast, Rubicon, focused on Biden's first 100 days. Brian, hello, and thank you so much for being on the show today.

Thank you guys for having me. Yes, we appreciate it. And, you know, I guess we'll just jump right in. So before we get into a bunch of specifics about what's happening with Biden and Congress, we just want to start by asking about the first 100 days trope, right? So like, why is this so important? Does it really make or break a presidency? Is it the only blueprint? Like, why are we obsessed with the number 100? So the trope itself isn't so important. 100 days is just a number that everyone, it's round number, everyone gets it. But the idea that the early days of a presidency are critical to its overall success is definitely

true. Part of that is that presidents want to get the ball rolling with accomplishments and good press, get things snowballing, set a positive tone for four years. But the other part is that human events are contingent. So like the Trump administration in some ways never recovered from the fact that they fired their transition chief and junked the transition plans in November of 2016, right? And President Obama, on the other hand, who's like widely seen as a successful president still, like I think he and most democrats agree today that if he uh cleared a much larger stimulus plan recovery plan uh in his first weeks in office at the at the depths of the great recession the world might look radically different today and and for

the better um and so that's why you have chuck schumer, now majority leader, telling Rachel Maddow, which she did Tuesday night, that we're not going to make the same mistake with COVID. If Biden can get the country into a prosperous post-COVID recovery in his first 100 days or 150 days or 132 days or whatever, you know, short amount of time, it'll carry big political dividends for him and for the Democrats and for the country for a long time. Yes. And time doesn't really matter, especially now. As we've learned over the last year, I don't know what month or date is. So on the Senate side of this, from the jump McConnell, you know, was trying to get this commitment from Democrats to not nuke the filibuster before coming to this agreement on how to run the 50-50 Senate chamber. What do you think from that we learned about Schumer and how Democrats in the Senate are planning to approach this term? So I don't think we can actually see the full picture yet. We don't really know exactly why McConnell caved or what Schumer did to make him cave. And piecing

that together over the coming days will be important. And I think it's definitely good that Schumer didn't give McConnell anything, let alone this giant half. Yeah, ever, in any context. Yeah, I mean, we won the election, we get the gavels, you don't get anything for it.

I think that it was the appropriate line to draw, and anything else would have been a really bad omen for the future. But Schumer can't change the rules without the sense among Democrats being unanimous that what Mitch McConnell was trying to do was unacceptable and it'll be unacceptable if he tries to do it to the whole Biden agenda. And they're just not there yet. There's a handful of Democrats who are pretty dug in. And I think Schumer showed that even though he won the battle, he's not really sure how to square that circle with his members. Yeah. And to that point, we do have folks like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema talking about not wanting to end the filibuster, at least for the next two years. And that seems to be part of the calculus as to why

McConnell maybe was like, this is chill, we can go ahead. He's basically saying, you don't have the numbers to do that. We've heard at times, you know, Biden hasn't supported scrapping it either. What do you think it would actually take to change their minds on this? So my hunch is, it'll be more of a slow burn than a big single blow up. And I think the fact that those two senators, in particular, the ones you mentioned, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are so widely identified as the source of the gridlock, will bring a lot of pressure to bear on them just naturally. So I think if you assume Congress can pass one more tranche of COVID relief pretty quickly, we'll find that everything else afterwards keeps falling to the filibuster. And that will include things that matter to the people of Arizona and the people

of West Virginia. Meanwhile, Republican controlled state legislatures are going to like not be troubled with the filibuster and past draconian voter suppression laws. And perhaps you'll see the courts start pushing back on Biden's administrative agenda. And I think in that climate where, you know, the Republican world is moving on while the Democratic world in Washington is stuck in paralysis, that you'd expect those two senators to feel begin feeling pretty uncomfortable as being identified as the problem. And Joe Biden being, you know, starting to get pretty restless. Yeah, yeah, I think that's definitely a conceivable possibility. And the

reason that we're even having these conversations at this point is, there is obviously a 50-50 split in the Senate, obviously, with, you know, VP Harris, breaking that tie. But in the absence of getting rid of the filibuster, there's also been this conversation about budget reconciliation, that seems to be the thing everybody loves thinking about right now. Is that a more accomplishable goal when you talk about things like federal minimum wage or these other pieces of legislation than perhaps getting rid of the filibuster? Is that actually going to be the alternative that could potentially work. So in recent years, it's sort of become the one vehicle that both parties kind of know they can use to not rock the boat by abolishing the filibuster, but also cram some stuff through. In practice, the concession that senators have

made to themselves is that if they're going to use reconciliation as this workaround, they're going to hold fairly firmly to the rules of reconciliation. And they're fairly circumscribed, right? You're basically talking about things involving money and not just regular money for this government agency or that government agency, but for more permanent things like the tax code or standing programs that kind of pay out money automatically like Medicare. And so in theory, you can still do a lot through that. You can make healthcare reforms. You can relieve people with student loan debt of their debt. You can pass a new childcare program. There's even an argument, as you mentioned, Gideon, that you can pass a minimum wage increase through it, although I think that's a bit contested. But that leaves

out a ton of stuff that matters a lot, particularly in the post-Trump era, but that isn't principally about the federal budget. So democracy reforms, immigration reforms, anti-corruption, none of that stuff is going to fly. And also, you only get one or at most two reconciliation bills a year. So I think if they pass a COVID relief bill in reconciliation in the next few weeks, we're going to have a big void after that, where just paralysis reemerges. Yeah, for sure. The usual. Yeah, exactly. Back to how Congress operates. Well,

you know, just let's talk about Biden's, the Biden administration's agenda for the first 100 days. You know, what do you think is really important and realistic for, you know, not only Biden, but also the Democrats in Congress to get done in those first 100 days? And how should we actually be judging the process? Is it just like, he didn't do this today? Or like, why is it their new legislation immediately? Like, what is the correct way to feel? So I have come to think of three broad categories. And metaphorically speaking, these are low-hanging fruit, the elephant in the room, and then a murkier category of accountability. So the low-hanging fruit means just the stuff that Biden can do and actually has been doing on his own with the flick of a pen. Right. And these are things where if he didn't do them, we'd be scandalized. Right. Like, why isn't he rejoining the Paris Accords? Why isn't he repealing the transgender ban or the Muslim ban? And so those things are already happening. Then the elephant in the room is COVID, right? And I think Biden and congressional Democrats will pay pretty dearly if, say,

whether you want to call it 100 days or half a year or whatever, goes by and the checks he promised haven't gone out and vaccination rates are still, you know, where they are about now, a million a day. If it looks like we're gonna have to social distance through the summer or even the winter um that's going to that's going to create big political problems for him and the democrats and it will be because the country is suffering um and then lastly there's accountability which is sort of broader we're seeing some of it with the impeachment and the trial that's going to take place next month. But I think there's a big appetite among Democratic, like the rank and file for transparency about what happened during the Trump era and that there'd be consequences for it.

And so to me, that means a DOJ leadership that doesn't choose to ignore criminal conduct, you know, for the sake of healing or whatever. Yeah. Oversight committees in the House and Senate that work with the administration to essentially like audit the federal government and bring light to a lot of the bad deeds that Trump and his enablers basically have so far gotten away with. It's hard, you know, with COVID and with the low-hanging fruit, it's kind of easy to say if this doesn't get done or that doesn't get done, it's fair to kind of judge him badly for it. With accountability, it's a little murkier because we don't know what they're looking for. And exposure is part of the picture. Consequences are things that take longer.

They might have to wind their way through the courts. But I think we would know if the Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration were intent on kind of sweeping everything under the rug. We'll know within 100 days if that's their inclination. And if that's the way they go, then I think we'll all have a pretty fair bone to pick with them. Yeah, for sure. I mean, as you're speaking, I'm like, yeah, if we don't have some real concrete

action about, you know, the racial justice uprisings and like the way that black people are treated in this country, that's going to be something that we're going to have to talk about. So you're absolutely spot on. It's a little bit murkier, but it is like imperative. Well, a lot to think about and consider going forward, especially I'm sure there's been more news as we've been talking. But Brian, thank you so much for stopping by. And congrats again on starting season two of Rubicon. Yes. Thank you both. If you want to hear more from Brian, go subscribe to his pod. We've put a link in our show notes, but that is the latest for now.

It's Wednesday WOD Squad, and today we're talking about 007's most delayed mission yet, No Time to Die, a James Bond movie that was initially set to release in April 2020, but has now been pushed by the pandemic all the way back to October of this year. At this point, the delays are creating their own secondary delays. Sponsors of the movie, like Nokia and Omega, are reportedly annoyed because they gave Universal products to feature in the movie, but those products are now out of date. So the Universal team might have to do reshoots.

Daniel Craig will never get free. So Giddy, my question for you, do you expect No Time to Die to be worth the wait? I am genuinely concerned about what they're telling the actors that are involved in this movie. Like, is there actually an end date that has been promised? What are the emails looking like back and forth

to Craig and crew like hey you got to come back in and show off a new nokia like is he is he like that that sounds wonderful to me like is he still in like top james bond shape like they better be paying him to stay in shape this whole time i think right i think the inconsistencies are just going to breed more inconsistencies. Like people might have longer hair. People might have gotten the plastic surgery in the pandemic because they were really good at forethought. I don't know why they would have done that. But all I'm saying is, yeah, a lot of time has passed. Anything could happen. Yeah. So I think an easier fix. This doesn't answer the question. I'm going to watch the movie either way,

but they very clearly should bite the bullet and say, we're going to put this out. There's going to be an old phone and an old watch, and I'm sorry, but you just have to deal with it. At a certain point, we've paid, Billie Eilish got her money, Daniel Craig got his money, Rami Malek got his money,

all these people, and now we've got to move. Rami Malek got his money. Like all these people. And now we got to move on. Like there's, there's bigger fish to fry. Photoshop in an old Nokia brick phone. It'll be, it's a fun treat while we're watching it. Put it out.

That's, that's, that's my world on it. But same question. Is this movie going to be worth it? I mean, here's the thing. I think the movie will be worth it because like, there's only been like 10 movies that I've seen in the past year that were like new and exciting and

whatever else so it's like yes i'm excited to see a new movie and i think that we're gonna be like trying to play catch up to get content in the future just because we haven't had all the shooting time we typically have however i think it's really naive for them to think that we're not always going to think of this movie as tied to this time period. Right. Like, we all know why it would be an old phone. This movie has been like, it was the last person to host SNL before they went dark because of the pandemic. That's a great point.

We all remember this in this time frame. So it's like, it's weird for them to be like, no, no, no no guys, let's pretend that this is the future and it's stuff you can't have. And I'm like, get over it, get over it. We can't have anything. Like it doesn't matter. And embrace the challenge of being the COVID movie because Tenet was the

COVID movie before. And you know that you can beat that. So take, take that and run with it. Be, be the better movie that is the artifact of the time. Exactly. So take that and run with it. Be the better movie that is the artifact of the time and be happy about it.

Or just reshoot the whole damn thing and make Billie Eilish make another new song and just pay everyone again. Yes. And do it again in the future. But like, it's no one's benefit

to see a different phone and to go on set and risk their lives for like, you know, a short insert of a cell phone. Who cares? I think, yeah, I think everybody in the theater is going to point really animatedly when they

see the old Nokia and be like, I've been let down. I want my money back. Yeah, like, oh man, we all have that phone. Like, it's still a phone I don't have. Correct. I'll be impressed either way. Yeah. Well, just like that, we've checked our temps.

Stay safe. If you're making the decision on whether to release 007 or not and you listen to this podcast just listen to us release it release it just do it who cares and uh we'll be back after some ads Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. quality. One directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development to undo racially discriminatory housing practices like redlining by fully implementing the Fair Housing Act. Biden also took a first step towards reforming the country's deeply fraught incarceration system by ending the Department of Justice's use of private prisons, though some pointed out that the vast majority of people in federal private prisons are in immigrant detention and are under the jurisdiction

of the Department of Homeland Security, so they won't be affected by this order. Another Biden order aims to reaffirm the government's recognition of tribal sovereignty by requiring all federal agencies to strengthen their communications with Native tribes. And the final order of the four directs agencies to help prevent discrimination and hate crimes against Asian Americans, which have accelerated under Trump. Yeah, a busy first week. Protests in India escalated yesterday as thousands of farmers clashed with riot police at a historic fort in Delhi. Since November, farmers across the country have been peacefully protesting against new laws that would deregulate produce markets and inevitably put farmers at risk of losing their land. Critics say these

laws prioritize corporate interests over those of local farmers. After nine rounds of failed negotiations, the government offered to suspend the laws for 18 months last week. The farmers rejected that offer, saying they wouldn't settle for anything less than a complete repeal. Things took a turn yesterday when tens of thousands of farmers stormed a historic fort on horses and tractors, while riot police used tear gas and batons to violently disperse the crowds. A huge portion of the population in India is dependent on agricultural work. So this is one of the biggest challenges that President Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist government have faced so far. Russian President Vladimir Putin got on the phone with Biden yesterday, and not just in the sense of tapping the line using spy methods. Dark.

Per White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Biden used his first call with Putin to address Russia's aggression against Ukraine, interference in the 2020 election and the alleged assassination attempt on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The two leaders also discussed New Start, a nuclear arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia that is set to expire next week. Following this weekend's protests against Putin, the world's most toxic blonde man made a rare rebuttal of Navalny's claims against him. Specifically, Putin took issue with a Navalny video essay which said he has a billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea. Putin said, quote, nothing of what was indicated there as my property belongs either to me or my close relatives, which, funny enough, actually does not contradict

Navalny's claim that the residence formally belongs to Putin proxies. To add some realism, Putin went out of his way to slam the property, which is said to contain a hookah lounge with a stripper pole, an ice hockey rink, and a casino. He said, quote, of all I have seen there, I was interested in only one thing,

winemaking. It's a very good and noble activity. Okay, seems misguided to try and fight bad PR by coming out publicly is anti-fun. Yeah, what's going on, man? Look, if it's Dave and Buster's in the house, we're okay with that. That's not the problem. It's just that you have it. Anyway, more evidence that money is fake and wealth isn't real. Investors on a subreddit called WallStreetBets

made huge financial gains this week by coordinating to push GameStop stock as much as 145% higher on Monday and 132% higher yesterday. The Redditors were defying the wisdom of more traditional investment firms who were short selling GameStop in large numbers, meaning they were predicting the company's stock would fall and were positioned to make money if it did. By creating an artificial surge in demand for GameStop, some of the 2.5 million members of Wall Street Bets, aka the wolves of Web Street, pushed the company's value higher and forced short sellers to buy more stock to minimize their losses.

As a partial result of the campaign by r slash Wall Street Bets, GameStop short sellers appeared to have lost $3.3 billion to date. And the Redditors have run similar plays on BlackBerry and Express Inc. There's some fun in watching hedge funds lose, but if you're wondering whether it's good for markets

to transition into a model that's mostly driven by internet trolls, some people think it isn't. Michael Burry, the famous short seller who bet a billion against the housing market and was portrayed in the big short, tweeted and deleted, quote, what is going on now?

There should be legal and regulatory repercussions. This is unnatural, insane, and dangerous. He would know. Ooh, yeah. And those are the headlines. That is all for today. If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, watch the big short,

and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just Putin slamming his own house like me, well, today is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And don't short us, Wall Street bets.

I think that we have really great futures. So, bet on us in a different way. Stocks are looking up. Yeah, bet on us in an emotional way, you know. As friends. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tan is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein and our executive producers are Katie Long, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.