Biden Agenda on The Line

(upbeat music) - The Biden agenda on the line.

- Bottom line, do you think you will get a deal?

- I do think I'll get a deal.

- [Yamiche] President Biden sounding optimistic as Democrats inch closer to an agreement on his slim down infrastructure plan.

- We must defend and strengthen the right that unlocks all other rights, the right to vote.

- [Yamiche] But Democrats face another setback in their effort to pass a voting rights bill.

- As long as Senate Democrats remain fixated on their radical agenda, this body will continue to do the job the framers assigned it and stop terrible ideas in their tracks.

- [Yamiche] As Senate Republicans blocked debate on their latest legislation, the move setting off another argument over the future of the filibuster plus.

- We need to make it clear that no person is above the law.

- The house votes to hold top Trump aide, Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress, next.

(upbeat music) - [Reporter] This is Washington Week.

Once again from Washington, moderator Yamiche Alcindor.

- Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

With the clock ticking this week, President Biden pushed hard to get his economic and social policy plans through Congress.

At the White House, he scrambled to unite his party to make a deal and met with key Democrats.

He also hit the road to promote his agenda and went to his birthplace of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

And then on Thursday in Baltimore, Maryland, he held a town hall with CNN.

He took questions from Anderson Cooper and voters.

- Hey, let's talk about compromise.

It's compromise become a dirty word, but its, bipartisanship and compromise still has to be possible.

I mean, everybody's been saying, well, that's crazy, you can't do it.

If we can't eventually unite this country, we're in deep trouble.

- But here's the key question.

How can the president sell his plan to the American people if he hasn't closed the deal with his own party?

And according to a recent CBS News poll, the majority of Americans say they don't know what is in the bill.

Now keep in mind, most lawmakers also aren't sure what will end up in the final bill either.

Plus on Thursday, the house voted to hold top Trump advisor, Steve Bannon in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena.

- The people who attacked this building have told us on video, on social media, and now before the federal courts, exactly what motivated them.

They believed what Donald Trump told them that the election was stolen and that they needed to take action.

- Joining me tonight to discuss all of this and more, Mike Memoli, NBC News, White House correspondent.

Seung Min Kim, White House reporter for the Washington Post.

Ryan J. Reilly, HuffPost senior justice reporter.

And Jake Sherman, founder of Punchbowl News, a political newsletter that we're all eaten up.

Jake, I'm going to come to you first.

Talk a little bit about what the latest is on where this bill is, what's in it.

And I also wonder if you could talk a bit about the reporting that you have, that the White House has been pushing Democrats to get a vote.

And not one, but both bills next week.

- Yeah, they need to count their lucky stars tonight or do some sort of wishing otherwise.

Seung Min and I have been hanging out on the hallways all week trying to figure out where this bill is, all month, three months.

So here's where I think it is.

I think that it seems according to the reporting at the Washington Post, great reporting this evening that they are about to settle on a tax on billionaires which is a new scheme, so to speak, to get revenue because Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat from Arizona, will not raise tax rates.

That's a little difficult this late in the game to say that you're not going to raise tax rates.

That's what Democrats have been planning for months.

Listen, the White House is pushing the democratic leadership for a victory before the White House goes to Rome and to Glasgow on a hardship assignment next week.

But I am skeptical.

I'm really skeptical that this will happen.

I think at an infrastructure vote, this is two pieces: Infrastructure and social spending.

Could get an infrastructure vote next week.

But I I'm skeptical of both 'cause I'm a natural skeptic.

- Well, one I'm really happy that both you and Seung Min are here because obviously the Capitol Hill reporters hanging in the hallways had all the information.

I want to ask you one other question, Jake.

How does your reporting square with this?

The president Biden said yesterday, when you're president of the United States, you have 50 Democrats in the Senate, every one of them is president.

What do you make of that?

And what does it say about who the power brokers are in DC right now?

- Every single Democrat has veto power over the president's agenda.

And I think I've been saying this since the beginning of this Congress, you have to work with the government you have, not the government you want.

The government Joe Biden wants is 60 Democrats that could pass anything.

The government that Seung Min and I cover every day is a very fractured democratic caucus among moderates and progressives and all range of progressive lawmakers.

And he's right, yet they have, he has to get them all on board.

He has no margin for error in a 50- 50 Senate, and three or four seat majority in the house.

- And it's incredible Seung Min to think about the power that all these Democrats have.

It's also interesting that when you have democratic leaders, someone like Terry McAuliffe who was running for governor of Virginia, really saying, we need to get something done as the democratic party.

I wonder what you're hearing about what the biggest disagreements are still with this bill.

And also talk a bit about the power brokers, especially Progressive's and Pramila Jayapal, who's a Congresswoman who's down showed up with a lot of power.

- Well, let's first talk about Pramila Jayapal 'cause she has really made herself into a power player in these negotiations.

And a lot of that comes from her knowing her where her nearly 100 member of progressive caucus block stands.

The way that that caucus is structured, it has changed a little bit in recent years so that the power is centralized, the chair.

They used to have like a co-chair relationship in the past.

But what Congressman Jayapal has really been able to do is to make almost a threat, but be able to back it up with actual votes, Because she has said publicly over and over and privately to speaker Pelosi to other leaders in Washington, that her members, enough of her members would not vote to advance or to pass this bipartisan infrastructure bill, unless there was actual movement and actual plan on this other social spending package.

And that was what's been really important to the progress.

Is because that encompasses almost nearly every other democratic party priority.

And in the standoff between her and moderates, she won.

So she's been able to really be that power broker and have a conversation.

I mean, she has spoken with Senator Sinema, one of the two key, our democratic holdouts in the house.

She has met several times and spoken several times to president Biden's speaker Pelosi.

So she's really someone to watch here.

- Mike, I want to come to you.

We're in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of President Biden.

- It must have happened a few times with Biden-- - I know you might love the fact that we still call you the Biden whisper.

And so I want to ask you in a bit about where the president's concerns lie when it comes to, whether or not this bill will get too watered down.

We see things coming out like key climate prohibitions, paid family leave going to possibly four weeks instead of 12 weeks, free community college, which is really big for the first lady.

You heard the president last night and at the TNN town hall, talk about possibly having to sleep in a different bedroom for taking out her out of the bill.

What's the president's thinking here?

- Well, we're so fascinating to be in Scranton because that was not just the president's hometown, but it was where he first laid out the planks of the build back better agenda.

And so this was sort of a full circle moment.

The White House was declining to sort of call it a closing argument type speech in part because they don't know how this really will end.

And there's a little bit of nervousness.

But my jaw really did drop when the president acknowledged that free community college was off the table because that's not just a priority of his from the last campaign.

It goes back to the time in the Obama White House and it was a signal from the president though, to the progressives, to the moderates, I'm giving up one of my sacred cows here.

We all have to make some very difficult choices at this point.

And I think the other message that we're seeing from the White House, we're hearing more about next time, what the next fight is.

Now we know the realities of Washington.

We know that an election year is going to be very hard to get more things done after doing an awful lot of legislating and big legislating this year.

But there is some hope.

And we heard the president express this last night that an idea like free community college, which by the way was modeled after a Republican governor's plan in Tennessee, it's the kind of thing that might have support down the road.

But the White House another senior officials said to me, you'll know we're getting really close to the finish line when you stop seeing all the leaks.

Well, if we're not there yet, as it would seem by all this.

- No, they're acrylics by the way, because the president confirmed a lot of the reporting that all of us were doing this week.

I want to also go to this idea that according to the Brennan Center for Justice in the past year, at least 19 states have passed laws that make it harder for Americans to vote.

Wednesday night Republicans voted to block a voting rights bill supported by Democrats.

In Baltimore, President Biden took a question that got to the heart of what many Democrats and other Americans are wondering.

- Now, many of us are disheartened.

As we watch up Congress fail to support police reform.

We watch our voting rights vanish before our very eyes.

(audience clapping) Mr. President, my question is what will you do over the next three years to rectify these atrocities, secure our democracy and ensure that freedoms and liberties that all Americans should be entitled to?

- My greatest regret is I had these three major pieces of legislation that are going to change the circumstances.

But what is done has prevented me from getting deeply up to my ears, which I'm going to do once this is done in dealing with police brutality, dealing with the whole notion of what are we going to do about voting rights.

- Ryan, I think about the time that I met you and our time in Ferguson together covering the story of policing, voting also is such an up there topic for people, especially African-Americans who were key to getting president Biden elected.

I wonder what you make of that exchange.

It was so powerful watching it in real time.

But also what's at stake for President Biden when you think about what Democrats and other Americans are looking at?

It's voting rights, it's policing reform.

These are things that really get to the heart of how people live and survive in America.

- Yeah, now that that's sort of fallen on the legislative branch side, this is really going to fall ultimately to the executive branch.

On the voting side, the justice department has actually doubled the number of lawyers they have working in their voting section of the civil rights division.

And are trying to expand there.

But because of that 2013 Supreme court decision that struck down a major provision of the voting rights act, that's been really difficult for them to actually stop any of these laws from going into effect before they actually are going to affect.

And what happens is you have to file these lawsuits and that litigation takes a very long amount of time.

So ultimately a lot of these laws are going to go into effect that are restricting voting.

I think on the police reform side, that's another thing that there's limited resources in the executive branch.

The justice department can only investigate through pattern and practice investigations such as we saw in Ferguson, a limited number of actual entities.

And in order to really bring about broader reform, you're going to need to take these sort of bigger swings and try to get ways of enacting police reform that isn't just individually fixing this police department and this police department and this police department.

We need something more systematic, we need something, you need a more universal approach.

And that's something that there's only so much of the executive branch can do with the laws on the books today.

- And Jake, you're nodding your head.

A key part of this of course, is the issue of the filibuster last night.

And what is this really newsy town hall?

President Biden said he might be open to having a loophole in the filibuster related to voting rights.

And many he said other issues.

What do you make of that?

What's your reporting tell you about how likely that it's actually happened?

- Seung Min and I could give this answer together in unison.

- (indistinct) (laughing loudly) - There are not 50 votes to do that.

I mean, Joe Manchin has gotten to telling us to just stop asking him about the filibuster.

He says, I'm not going to engage on this topic.

He's pro filibuster that's very difficult for Democrats to internalize and hear, but he is for the 60 vote threshold.

So Joe Biden could say, he's not for it, but he doesn't have a vote in the Senate anymore.

So he needs to get Joe Manchin on board.

And I find it very difficult to believe, to be honest with you that after this bruising legislative fight with Manchin and Sinema voting for a product that they're going to like, but it's going to be a stretch for them that they're then going to turn around and blow up the filibuster.

I just don't see it.

- And Seung Min, you could have given that answer with Jake.

I just want to ask you really quickly.

What's at stake here though, the legacy of President Biden, when you think about what happens if he doesn't get some of these big bills through voting rights and the issue of democracies somehow doesn't get resolved under his watch?

- Right?

I mean, President Biden came very ambitiously, promising a lot of things.

But clearly voting rights has been a central issue for democratic lawmakers, for civil rights activists, for so many voters in these key states, such as Georgia, that propelled him to victory.

I mean, this is something that voters definitely feel in those key states that president Biden owes them.

But because of this legislative role that president Biden has no control over, he himself has very little control over this debate.

Now, what president Biden can do is really use that bully pulpit to make the public case for getting rid of this rule that he has said is a Relic of the Jim Crow era.

And I think Jen Psaki previewed that earlier today when she said, "You will hear more from the president "in the coming weeks about what he means by that "and what he is going, "and sort of more laying out his thinking on the filibuster."

But Biden, it's not really his style to bully hard-headed senators into supporting what he wants.

- I should tell you, I hear that from the White House, when they say he remembers what it was like to be a senator and not be bullied.

Meanwhile, on Thursday though, nine Republicans joined House Democrats in voting to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.

Here's representative Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the house committee investigating the Capitol attack.

- What sort of precedent would it set for the House of Representatives if we allow a witness to ignore us flat out without facing any kind of consequences.

- Vice chair of the committee, GOP representative Liz Cheney spoke directly to members of her own party, but the threat of January six and the threat that it posed to our democracy.

- There are people in this chamber right now who were evacuated with me and with the rest of us on that day, during that attack.

People who now seem to have forgotten the danger of the moment, the assault on the constitution, the assault on our Congress.

- The department of justice and attorney general, Merrick Garland, will now decide what to do next with this case, Ryan, hopefully you knew I was coming to you because of the DOJ here.

What's attorney general Merrick Garland going to do, and how might that be impacted by the fact that President Biden walked back some statements this week where he said, "Yes, people who defy congressional subpoenas, "they should be prosecuted."

Then he said, actually it was inappropriate of him to say that.

- That was a really amazing moment, wasn't it?

'Cause imagine in the last administration, if that had happened?

- Great, I couldn't- I can't picture it, actually-- - No, but its actually the idea that the president is sort of saying, "Oh yes, I was wrong there.

"The justice department handles these matters, yes."

And that's sort of the way it should work.

We've had this sort of general political understanding since Watergate that the justice department is supposed to be a step removed.

And I think that Merrick Garland has been trying to really lay that out and make that clear because when these important decisions come down the line like whether to charge a Steve Bannon in contempt, he has to be able to show the justice department's independence and show that this was a decision that wasn't based on politics.

This was a decision based on the law.

And that's sort of what he's made it clear so far.

I think that the reason that congressional investigation is so important is because if you look at the FBI investigation, there's only so many answers that that's going to really bring us.

Right now we've had about, we've had 650 arrests from the FBI and the total universe of chargeable defendants, meaning people who entered the Capitol or assaulted law enforcement outside of the Capitol, according to citizens list, I've spoken with this around 2,500.

So you consider it's about, we're about a quarter of the way there in terms of criminal defendants.

This is going to have a very long tail.

But there's a lot of what happened in the lead up to January 6th and on January 6th itself.

That is in the category of awful, but lawful.

And I think that that's really.

- Awful, but lawful, right?

We're gonna into that term, maybe.

- And I think that that's really what is going to be an issue here because there's a lot that happened that there's not an obvious criminal charge that you could think.

And that's really what the FBI has to remain focused on.

- Well, Mike was all of that awful, but possibly lawful stuff that's going on.

I wonder what the balance is at the White House and really the calculation that president Biden has to make when he thinks about the fact that he wants to see this full investigation of January 6th, but he also doesn't want to be seen as getting in the way of the DOJ.

- Well, I thought we saw a very interesting line drawn a few weeks ago because in Washington we know it's often Democrats versus Republicans, but very oftentimes, it's executive versus legislative.

And the president made a very significant decision as it relates to executive privilege a few weeks ago, directing the National Archives to in fact cooperate with the committee's investigation, where they asked for an awful lot of documentation from the Trump administration.

And when I spoke to officials in the White House counsel's office about this, they said, sure, typically you would want to protect a former president's executive privilege because you don't want to set the precedent that might affect you in the future.

But in this case, President Biden believes very clearly that what happened on January 6th was not about a president's decision-making.

It was about a direct attack on the constitution.

And it was a very important signal from this president who was affected deeply as all of us were by what happened on January 6th, that he's going to cooperate in this case very clearly with Congress.

And that is a case in which he can speak to the values of this country without interfering in an independent investigation on the judiciary.

- And Seung Min talk just about the politics of all this.

Whether it's a peanut process that's gotten really politicized, especially during the Trump era, but there's also president Biden having to walk this back.

Talk a little bit about all that that's going on.

- So what House Republicans did was pretty effectively make the vote this week on holding Bannon in contempt, of basically a proxy loyalty vote for Donald Trump.

When in fact that is not the case.

You are trying to hold someone accountable for defying a lawful subpoena.

This is actually fundamentally a question about congressional oversight and its ability to exercise oversight, to keep the executive branch in check.

And I think, a handful of Republicans did acknowledge what that was about, but most of them didn't.

And so that is a kind of a microcosm of what has happened to these January six investigators.

I think in the immediate aftermath, the members who were in the Capitol, who were horrified at, in danger and personally affected, they saw the dangers that this posed on them personally and what it could cause.

But as time has faded, that has really faded from their memory.

And they're really out there defending the former president aligning behind him because they know that's their ticket back to the majority in 2022.

- Jake, I can read your body language.

You could jump in.

- This is a really simple issue.

Steve Bannon is, Kevin McCarthy who I've covered for a long time and know quite well has said, this is an illegitimate committee.

It's an illegitimate subpoena.

In his view, it's illegitimate because the subpoena doesn't have any legislative purpose.

That's not for him to decide, right?

If Bannon wants to make that case in a court, I'd defer to you on this.

But if he wants to make that case in court, he should go do that.

Kevin McCarthy should not be the person who is making that decision for him.

Mark Meadows was subpoenaed.

He is talking to the committee in some fashion.

Kash Patel was subpoenaed.

He's talking to the committee in some fashion.

Steve Bannon has decided to not, and that is contempt.

I mean, they did the right thing, according to almost everybody who says it privately.

- Yeah, and Ryan, and just quickly, what do you make of all this when you think about the DOJs role and what the position that they're in now?

- Yeah.

Well, I mean, imagine if Republicans do take back the house in 2022. they're not going to be able to use this against the Biden administration, which is really what they want.

They want to be able to hold the Biden administration to account.

And if they sort of gut this process and say, Nope, you don't have to comply with the congressional subpoena, how are they going to make that argument?

I mean, it won't stop them from making that argument They will make that argument but they'll look like hypocrites.

- Well, some smart foreshadowing there on your part.

Finally this week started with some sad news that general Colin Powell passed away.

He was the first black secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security advisor.

He helped shape the foreign policy of several Republican administrations.

Powell who was battling cancer and Parkinson's disease died on Monday due to COVID-19 complications.

He was 84.

In May, 1994, he delivered a commencement address to Howard University.

- [Colins VO] Never lose faith in America.

It's faults are yours to fix, not to curse.

America is a family, there may be differences and disputes within the family, but we must not allow the family to be broken into warring factions.

From the diversity of our people, let us draw strength and not see weakness.

- Our trailblazer, General Powell applied those principles to his life and his work, still his legacy was haunted by the U.S invasion of Iraq and his UN speech that used faulty intelligence to justify the war.

Mike, I want to come to you.

The president was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee when general Powell was confirmed as secretary of State.

I wonder what you make of general Powell's legacy given the times that we're living in.

- Well, think about Colin Powell as somebody who was recruited by Republicans to be a candidate for president against Bill Clinton in 1996.

And the significant and the historic role he played years later in endorsing Barack Obama for the presidency.

When we talk an awful lot about the state of the Republican party, and I didn't leave the party, the party left me, Colin Powell was a perfect example of that.

I also think of his endorsement of President Biden in the last campaign as well.

And Biden is somebody who we know delivers a eulogy.

Now we don't know the plans yet for the Colin Powell service exactly who is going to speak, but I would expect to potentially, if the president is one of those speakers, hear him speak to something he campaigned on, which is this idea of lowering the political temperature of service of the country above party of love self.

And that would be a potentially, really meaningful opportunity for the president to reflect on a true statement, a true giant of our time.

- Yeah.

And Jake, where did general Powell fit in today's GOP?

And could he have had the success that he had in today's GOP?

- No, I mean, I don't think so.

I mean, you saw what Donald Trump said about general Powell.

He said he was, it's not even worth repeating, but he was not praising of general Powell.

I mean, listen, I think that in this Republican party, you see a lot of Republicans not respect the military and its brass, as they did in the past.

I mean, I think that's just the reality of it.

It's an unfortunate reality, but I think that, yeah, I don't think he has any place in today's GOP to be honest with you.

- Yeah, I mean, it's such a smart analysis by you.

And I also think when I learned about his death, I think I thought about COVID.

I thought about the idea of him struggling and battling and still deciding to get vaccinated.

Seung Min, I want to come to you in the last sort of 30 seconds that we have here, just to talk a little bit more about sort of his place and his legacy in this party.

- That's exactly right.

And I think that he's such a respected hero of the country, but at the same time was increasingly out of step because the Republican party has turned into a party that is driven by personality.

And that personality is Donald Trump.

And not by a lot of the principles that General Powell stood by.

So that's why you see, I mean, there were statements from across the political structure from both parties praising him when he passed.

But if you were, in today's party, he doesn't have a place.

- Yeah, we'll never lose faith in America.

That is something that I'd definitely take to heart in thinking about him and thinking about the way forward with all the stories that we're covering.

That's it, that's all we have for tonight.

Thank you to Mike, Seung Min, Ryan and Jake for your reporting.

And thank you for joining us.

And tune in Monday to the PBS Newshour, they'll travel to Benton Harbor, Michigan, another predominantly black city exposed to dangerous levels of lead in that state.

We'll continue our conversation on the Washington Week extra.

Find it on our website, Facebook and YouTube.

This week's topic, the latest on the kidnapping of American missionaries in Haiti.

I'm Yamiche Alcindor, goodnight from Washington.

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