Monday Morning Politics: The State of the ‘Human Infrastructure’ Bill

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Immigration is back in the spotlight in Washington in two ways today, and one of them is bound up with President Biden's $3.5 trillion legislation for a new social safety net for children and the elderly plus the climate or what Biden calls his human infrastructure plan. One issue is what to do about a new wave of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border, but this time, they're not from Central America, they're from Haiti after the recent earthquake, hurricane, and political upheaval. The Biden administration is planning to send most of them back.

The other issue is the one that's part of the human infrastructure package or related to, remember budget bills like that in the senate are not subject to the filibuster, and the safety net bill includes a path to citizenship. Been talking about the path to citizenship debate forever, right? Well, it's in this bill for millions of undocumented immigrants, but the senate parliamentarian rule just over the weekend, that the immigration provisions are not budget items, so they cannot be included in that way. Democrats had argued that there are tax and spending implications to the immigration provisions, but the parliamentarian rejected the argument.

It's just the latest puzzle piece in the complicated politics of getting this potentially historic bill through Congress and accomplishing one of Biden's goals of being this generation's FDR, with economic inequality so rampant now and getting worse. It's also bound up politically with the additional trillion dollar bill for physical infrastructure, like roads and rails and broadband.

Now, some New York moderates, like Tom Suozzi and Kathleen Rice from Long Island may become key obstacles to part, or in Suozzi's case, may be all of the human infrastructure bill. President Biden met last week with senate moderates who might stand in the way, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Let's talk about all this now with Emily Cochrane, congressional correspondent for The New York Times. Thanks for coming on today, Emily. Welcome back to WNYC.

Emily Cochrane: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: There's so many pieces to this puzzle, I just laid out a few of them. Let's see if we can make it make some sense for the listeners. First, the newest part, the Senate parliamentarian rejecting a path to citizenship provision, and regardless of whether it's a good idea or not, whether people support the idea or not, how did the Democrats argue that it was a budget item, which would protect it from the filibuster?

Emily Cochrane: Their argument was by imposing a change to immigration law that could affect healthcare benefits, Medicaid spending, tax credits, and that was the budgetary cost. They had also estimated that this push for legalization would add about 1.5 trillion to the economy over the next decade, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Now, their proposal would have been limited to dreamers, immigrants who were granted temporary protective status for humanitarian safety reasons, farmworkers, and millions more who they considered essential workers.

Republicans argued that there was not enough of an impact on the budget. As you said, in order to avoid a filibuster on this massive piece of legislation, you have to adhere to these very strict rules, and the parliamentarian who offers guidance on whether or not certain provisions violate those rules said that this violated one of the most important rules governing this process, that the budgetary impact was not enough, that the policy changes far outweighed the budgetary impact. This is a budget process, it needs to have a specific effect on the budget.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, with a filibuster, you need 60 votes to get it through the Senate. Without, you only need 51, which the Democrats might have. Some Democrats and advocates are pointing out that the parliamentarian's ruling on this is not binding and arguing that Senate Democrats should ignore it and pass the immigration provisions anyway because they can. How unusual would that be to not follow the parliamentarian's decision on something?

Emily Cochrane: That would be incredibly unusual, and you would need to have all Senate Democrats, all 50 of them unite behind a formal vote to say we are going to ignore this guidance. It's unclear that they have the votes to formally do so. Given some of the reaction we saw from Democrats last night when the ruling became public, it seems like they are going to examine different ways of potentially enacting some version of this policy and still adhering to those rules.

Brian Lehrer: They'd be afraid. This is like the filibuster debate itself, I guess. There's concern about what kind of precedent it would set and how it could help or hurt either party in the long run, if the Democrats throughout the convention of adhering to the parliamentarian's ruling.

Emily Cochrane: Exactly. There's been instances in the past where the parliamentarian has actually been fired by the majority leader. There's no public indication that Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, plans to do that. That was actually part of her guidance, part of the reason why she offered guidance against this provision being included, the idea that it would be such a significant change to immigration law that could easily be done a few years from now if Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.

Brian Lehrer: Let's broaden our focus now. If you're just joining us, our guest is New York Times congressional correspondent, Emily Cochran, let's broaden our focus to the human infrastructure bill as a whole. Would you remind people of the biggest items in it because I think the media talks so much about the $3.5 trillion price tag over numerous years, that they neglect the central idea what the bill is designed to do for people and why President Biden thinks it's so important?

Emily Cochrane: This is the larger component of President Biden's $4 trillion economic agenda. As you mentioned earlier, the Senate has passed the $1 trillion bill that would just deal with your traditional infrastructure, roads, bridges, and highways. This is supposed to deal with what they've been calling the human infrastructure, support for workers, students, from cradle to grave, essentially. It would expand public education to give two years of free community college and free pre-k for children. It would expand health care benefits to cover dental, vision, and hearing. It would deal with climate change in a way that Democrats were unable to do in the bipartisan bill, establishing a climate corps, essentially, to help address the toll of climate change across the country.

It's hard to see a facet of American life that would not be impacted by this bill. Of course, the other key component of this is that it would largely be paid for with tax increases on wealthy people and wealthy corporations, that's something Democrats have been promising for quite some time. Having made this commitment to moderate lawmakers that this extraordinarily large bill would be fully paid for, that's really where they tend to get a lot of the financing from.

Brian Lehrer: I know one of your articles last week was explicitly about that, headlined how the Democrats would pay for $2.9 trillion of human infrastructure. I'm summarizing that headline, that wasn't the exact title. How would they pay for it?

Emily Cochrane: A lot of it is just basic tax increases. A lot of Democrats feel that wealthy corporations and wealthy people just have not, and to quote the President on this, paying their fair share. This is designed to fix that closing some of the loopholes in the tax code. It would bulk up IRS enforcement so that IRS would be able to further ensure that people were paying taxes as they would be. The wealthiest would see their taxes go up with raising the top tax rate on wealthy individuals. If you have an adjusted gross income of more than 5 million, you see an additional surtax, really technical things that would, in theory, bring in billions and billions of dollars.

Brian Lehrer: The underlying problem that Biden is trying to address, would you say put it accurately or not so much in the intro, that inequality in the United States is rampant and getting worse? Is that how Biden sees the underpinnings of the urgency for this?

Emily Cochrane: Yes, that's how a lot of Democrats see it. The pandemic really underscored how so much of the country is living very differently and has very different support and resources, and that can make all the difference for a family. This is their way of addressing that. Republicans would say this is just too much of an expansion of federal support, it's too much money, and the tax increases will hurt the economy, but Democrats are going forward with this.

Brian Lehrer: Last week, you also reported on Biden meeting with certain key members of Congress to try to move it forward. How speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, in one meeting, and then separately with a swing vote Senate centrists, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. What kind of diplomacy is the president engaged in on this?

Emily Cochrane: Well, it's, in essence, to save the scope and structure of his bill. These are two of the moderates who have repeatedly said they feel that the $3.5 trillion package, it's too much. It's too high of a price tag. On the other hand, you have progressives saying that that number is already a compromise. It's not enough. In the Senate where he cannot afford to lose any member of his party, he needs both of these senators on board.

Publicly, the two of them have not offered details on what specifically they oppose, but the price tag is a concern. Some of the tax increases are a concern for Senator Manchin who represents a coal state and does have interest in that industry. He is concerned with some of the climate portions, and the Democrats are really looking to the president to help bring the moderates on board and get a compromise if not the full $3.5 trillion package with their sign-off.

Brian Lehrer: If these tax increases were to be enacted, would it neutralize any impact of all that spending on the debt? Because looking beyond the obvious hypocrisy of Republicans not caring at all about the debt when Trump or Bush or Reagan policies exploded, but then crying that it's an existential crisis for the country when presidents who were Democrats do things that increase the federal deficit each year. What are the real implications as far as any experts just interested in the truth can tell?

Emily Cochrane: At this point, for Democrats, you can't separate the plans for tax increases from the plans of what they want to spend. They are bound by the rules of this process. They are bound by the process that the promises they have made to these moderates to get them on board, and it's going to be very difficult for them to back away from that after making these promises publicly and privately for so long.

Brian Lehrer: One of your articles last week was called Drug Plan Fails, Signaling Thorny Path for Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Bill. That was about their failure to get through one committee, a long-standing democratic priority to allow Medicare to negotiate price with pharmaceutical companies. We talked some about this on Friday's show, especially because of the key vote to kill the provision from one of our locals, Congresswoman Kathleen Rice of Nassau County on Long Island. What's your take on Kathleen Rice standing with Big Pharma on this? I'm sure that's not how she would put it. I'm with Big Pharma.

Emily Cochrane: I don't think that's how she would put it either, but that's certainly the narrative that is now being driven because she opposed this bill in the energy and commerce committee. It's worth noting that an identical provision did clear another committee. It's still currently in the bill, but I think it reflects not just the policy disputes. She's among the lawmakers who has endorsed a more moderate plan, but I think it reflects this other element where moderate lawmakers don't want to take votes on things that won't become law.

This provision, there are some concerns that it would violate these strict rules that we've been talking about, that it would not survive with the parliamentarian's guidance, but also that not enough moderates in the Senate would get on board with it either. Why vote on something that doesn't become law? Why walk that plank, if you will? It's really just this very difficult thorny mix of policy preference, but also sort of the political realities ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Another local, part of whose district is also in Nassau county, Tom Suozzi, who also represents part of Northeast Queens, is also an issue here. He is standing firm from what I see on his threat to vote no on the larger package unless it includes reinstatement of the federal tax deduction for all state and local taxes. Under Trump, that deduction was capped at $10,000 of state and local taxes that you can deduct from your federal income tax. Is Suozzi out by himself on that?

Emily Cochrane: No, I think there are many lawmakers from the New York, New Jersey, California delegations, the states that have really been impacted by that cap who really want to see in it. He is one of the few who has publicly said that he would not support the bill without that in there, but I think we do expect some form of that reform to be in there because it's so widespread. It's supported so much by people across the house and in the Senate, and even though it hasn't been formally included in the bill yet, and we have the chairman of the ways and means committee and Mr. Suozzi and Bill Pascrell of New Jersey say that they're committed to enacting a law that would bring that kind of relief. There's still a long legislative path for this bill and for that provision to make it in.

Brian Lehrer: I guess we could point out that there are others like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of course, who also has part of her district in Queens saying that if you pay more than $10,000 in state and local taxes in a year, you're pretty well off, and the way the law changed under Trump is actually progressive taxation. How widespread is that view?

Emily Cochrane: There are definitely some liberals who agree with her, and I feel like this would undercut what they are trying to do with these tax increases on the wealthy, but I think you do have a lot of pragmatic liberals, if you will, who are willing to consider a partial repeal of the cap to sort of address these concerns from people like Congressman Suozzi and still get their vote on board to ensure that it's a little more targeted to these middle-class folks that the Congressman keeps referencing.

Brian Lehrer: Joe Manchin, by the way, I see also came to yes, with the more mainstream Democrats on another bill. Do you know what's in and what's out of that version of voting rights that he agreed to? What do advocates think is protective of democracy that remains in this bill or how it might fall short in the Manchin version?

Emily Cochrane: It's definitely a pared-down version. I think the key thing to keep in mind here is that it still needs to meet that 60 vote threshold to overcome a filibuster, and regardless of what kind of compromise the senator has struck, it's unclear that they've gotten those votes that they need. Even as you continue to shift it and whittle it down, there's still no guarantee that you get these Republicans on board.

Brian Lehrer: It seems like care and feeding of Joe Manchin is like its own part-time job for democratic leaders. As a congressional reporter, how much would you say that's the case?

Emily Cochrane: I think there is a lot of investment in the leanings and the thoughts of not just the Senator from West Virginia, but the Senator from Arizona as well.

Brian Lehrer: Emily Cochrane covers Congress for the New York Times. Emily, thanks for coming on.

Emily Cochrane: Thanks for having me.

 

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