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So we spoke earlier.
A Trump second impeachment trial is over.
He's been acquitted exactly as we predicted.
I was expecting five Republicans to vote guilty.
We got seven.
That's something, but still not the sixty seven that were required to convict.
Now, with impeachment out of the way and not that this should have delayed covid relief
anyway, but now with impeachment out of the way, no more excuses.
It's time to get covid relief done.
Now, I am already to be very clear, I think Joe Biden's been doing a good job so far.
I like how much he's gotten done and how quickly he has got it done.
Joe Biden did say checks going out right away when I'm sworn in.
If we have the two Senate seats, Democrats have the two Senate seats, we're getting close
to a month and we're still dealing with how exactly is this stimulus bill going to pass?
It is increasingly and abundantly clear that at least in the lead up, Republicans aren't
going to play ball.
Now, I've said before, I think that the political risk of voting no on the stimulus bill is
too great for all Republicans to vote no.
I believe that if Democrats move forward with passing the covid stimulus package, one point
nine dollars billion via budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority, meaning
they can do it with fifty senators.
And Kamala Harris is a tie breaking vote votes.
I believe that if that's the way to do it, they should do it.
This is too important.
And it was Joe Biden's promise, after all.
But I think he will get some Republicans who go who go for it because many of the same
Republicans who voted guilty for Trump in the second impeachment trial have more moderate
constituencies and or don't care so much about being seen as sticking with the Republicans
and being on the team.
I think it's quite plausible Mitt Romney would go for it.
Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Pat Toomey, a lot of the same people who voted
guilty on Saturday for Donald Trump, I think ultimately will come around because they realize
that this is actually what their constituents want.
So there's a New York Times article which says the Biden agenda now with now with impeachment
out of the way, the Biden agenda takes center stage and that the order, the priorities will
be passing the one point nine trillion dollar stimulus bill and then doing green infrastructure
and then doing immigration and then doing climate change and starting to go through
this list.
Now, that's probably 18 months of stuff.
We have to be realistic about how quickly, you know, maybe a year.
It's not clear, but we just have to get the covid relief bill done.
It's very clear that that is the next step.
It's very clear that Joe Biden is now risking failing on a major campaign promise.
You can you can argue that he already failed in the sense that he said it would happen
right away.
And it's been a month since he initially said it'd be two thousand dollar checks.
Then it was well, it'll be fourteen hundred to get to the total of two thousand.
OK, some are defending that.
Some are not.
Some are saying it's a flip flop.
Regardless, we're almost a month in.
It's time to do it.
And so the report from The New York Times says that this is now the priority and that
Joe Biden and Democrats are willing to go it alone.
What has changed over the last two weeks?
Nothing.
Joe Biden brought Republicans to the White House.
They wanted a plan.
That was it was humiliatingly small.
It was a micro plan, I would call it, and it was less than one third the size of what
Joe Biden and Democrats want.
You're negotiating with people who are negotiating in bad faith.
They're negotiating down down to something that's pathetic.
It's peanuts for what we need.
Just do it.
It's time to get it done.
And we will we will soon see whether Joe Biden understands the limits of so-called unity
and the limits of bipartisanship.
And as Jen Psaki Psaki now I know, as Jen Psaki said many times now, bipartisanship
doesn't mean that you unite Republicans and Democrats into one party.
Democrats say one point nine trillion.
And it includes the you know, it includes the payments that we've outlined before in
terms of payments to individuals, payments for children, business stimulus, enhanced
unemployment, money for vaccine, all these different things.
Republicans want something so dramatically different that there's really no way to negotiate
to anything that would make sense.
The American people are overwhelmingly on the side of Joe Biden and Democrats, not everybody
but Signior.
Support for the one point nine dollars billion package, so it's just time to pass it and
this would be a major accomplishment for Joe Biden.
My expectation would be that as high as Joe Biden's approval rating is right now and it's
the highest initial job approval of any president since Bill Clinton in 1993, over twenty eight
years.
Right now, this is the highest initial approval rating of any president dating back 28 years.
I think it goes higher if Joe Biden is able to get this done in the next 10 days.
And if not, it will start to be a drag on him politically.
Politics aside, we need to do it for the economy.
We need to do it for people.
And I remain cautiously optimistic that in the next seven to 10 days, there will be progress.
We'll see what is said about it at this week's press briefings with Jen Psaki, which, of
course, we'll be covering on YouTube, Twitch and Faceboo