-Two centrist Democrats are blocking
the entire Democratic agenda
without saying what they actually want,
essentially threatening to detonate Joe Biden's presidency.
Meanwhile, Fox News is trying unsuccessfully
to make all the super popular stuff
in Biden's agenda sound scary.
For more on this, it's time for A Closer Look.
♪♪
It's hard to overstate
the stakes of what's happening right now --
basically the entire Democratic agenda,
the policies Joe Biden ran on
and promised voters he would pass
are on the line in negotiations over
the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
And you can tell how high the stakes are
from this shot of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
at the annual congressional baseball game last night.
-We have our first pinch hitter of the day.
It was Rodney Davis at the top of the lineup.
-Speaker no doubt happy about that play,
but she is known as a big sports fan
and often after dealing
with a lot of really difficult reporter questions
related to what's going on, she'll say,
"Oh, I stayed up and watched the game last night
and I didn't get to bed at a good time."
And then there she is at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning,
back at work, so...
That's true for members of both parties.
It's amazing what all of them do.
-Pelosi's working the phones like the Mets
just hired her as a scout.
[ As Nancy Pelosi ] "You're going to love this guy.
60 years old, throws in the mid-to-low 40s,
and we can get him for league minimum.
Yeah, I think we found our new deGrom."
But Pelosi had to work the phone instead of watching
what I'm sure was a terrible baseball game.
You think regular baseball is slow?
Imagine what it's like with these bozos.
Nancy Pelosi looking to make a pitching change,
but not sure she has the votes, which means they're going to
make the hot dogs race around the outfield yet again.
And oh, no. One of the hot dogs is dead.
That's how high the stakes are.
Democrats need to deliver on the promises they made,
not just to avoid the political consequences of failure,
which would be massive, but also to improve people's lives.
Now, I could tell you about
all the good this bill would do myself,
or you could just listen to a Fox News host
try to make it sound bad.
-Free universal pre-kindergarten.
Free community college.
Free 12 weeks of family leave.
They want to extend the temporary child care credit
with additional taxpayer subsidies for the rest of time.
This is really considered a foot in the door
for a minimum annual income that the government would pay people.
Think about where we're going with all this.
They want to expand Medicare
to include dental, vision, and hearing
and lower the age from 65 to 60.
What else does this bill do?
It funds the Green New Deal, retrofitting buildings,
subsidizing solar, wind,
environmental justice and environmental equity,
whatever the hell that means.
Electric government vehicles.
They want to subsidize low-income housing.
Gee, that's never been tried before.
They want to create sustainable housing, public transportation.
-If you want to know who Republicans are,
just look at what horrifies them.
"They want sustainable housing, these monsters!
And yet not one penny in the bill
for an army of Terminator robots at the border!
They're never going to learn to hurt us!"
He's talking about free education for children
with the same level of feigned outrage
as Nicole Kidman finding out her husband just murdered someone.
He should be walking through Central Park
at 2:00 a.m. in a $5,000 coat.
[ As Nicole Kidman] "My husband, the mysterious British doctor
who won't tell me about his childhood,
vanished in the middle of the night."
"Oh, okay, he probably murdered someone."
"He said he's at a medical convention."
"Okay, but I think he murdered someone."
"I found this bloody butcher knife hidden behind a rock.
Maybe it's from a surgery."
"Do you have someplace you can stay tonight?"
Fox host Brian Kilmeade tried the same thing this week
in an interview with Republican Senator John Kennedy.
Kilmeade was trying to ask Kennedy what Republicans
would do about the fact that the Democrats' agenda
is likely to be popular with voters
and came so close to realizing what he was actually admitting.
-Senator, here's what I fear, though.
If you tell someone, I'm giving you a free preschool,
if you tell someone, I'm giving you free junior college,
if you tell someone, I'm going to give you free school lunch,
if you tell someone free elder care --
Issues need to be addressed, yes,
but if you write all those people a check,
you've got their votes, and we're sitting there
and have to balance the books.
Doesn't that worry you?
-He's like the one employee at IKEA
who's worried that giving out free meatballs
will attract more customers.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa.
If we give these out, aren't more people
just going to come to the store?
Okay.
Just don't come to me when we run out of Fjallbo shelves."
The point is, polling has repeatedly shown
that these policies are popular with voters.
They're a big reason Democrats won the White House
and two Senate seats in Georgia runoffs
that gave them full control of Congress.
But now two centrist Democrats backed by corporate interests,
whether it's fossil fuels or big pharma,
are essentially threatening to blow all that up,
and they won't even say why.
Just name something in this bill you don't like --
universal pre-K, expanded Medicare benefits,
child care subsidies.
You don't think people want help with child care?
I think if you polled parents who were stuck at home
with their kids for the last year
if they're in favor of expanded child care programs,
the results would be 75% "yes,"
25% "my soul has been crushed into a fine powder
and I no longer have the ability to respond to pollsters."
As a parent who was stuck at home with my kids all year --
and, by the way, extremely privileged
to even have that option -- let me just say,
I will sign my life over to any politician
who makes it easier to get them the hell out of the house.
I'm so desperate for a few minutes of quiet,
I started taking them to the only daycare
I could find with any openings,
and it was called Igor's House of Knives and Broken Glass.
They have a great Russian language immersion program.
My kids can already say things like,
[ Speaking in Russian ]
which is "careful, glass" and
[ Speaking in Russian ]
which is, "he has a knife."
Yet Sinema will not tell anyone what she wants or doesn't want.
In fact, progressives have been openly begging her
to tell them what she wants, as Congressman Ro Khanna explains.
-I've never seen her do an interview.
It's like an oracle, an enigma.
I mean, she never comes on television.
She never answers journalism.
-What has she said that she wants, as far as you know?
-That's the question.
The president keeps begging her, "Tell us what you want.
Put a proposal forward."
I have no idea what she wants.
I don't think her colleagues know what she wants.
I don't think the president knows what she wants.
I don't think House moderates knows what she wants.
We've said, "Let's get in a room. Let's negotiate.
Let's come up with a deal."
And I just don't understand it.
-She made three trips to the White House Tuesday,
and people still don't know what she wants.
This is like the time I took my grandmother
to The Cheesecake Factory.
Really, Nana?
You can't find anything?
Because the menu's a [bleep] book.
Oh, watch my language, she says.
Like I haven't seen her play bridge.
I mean, seriously, Kyrsten Sinema.
What are you doing?
Everyone wants to know, what do you want?
Explain yourself.
You're not LeBron. This isn't "The Decision."
You don't get to keep it a secret
until you announce it live on ESPN with Jim Gray.
And by the way, this routine
isn't helping Sinema politically, either.
A recent poll found that about 56% of Democrats
in the state Ms. Sinema favorably,
compared with 80%
for Senator Mark Kelly, a fellow Democrat.
People are sick of these weird mind games.
You have the right to an opinion,
but the people who elected you
have a right to hear what that opinion is.
You're a United States senator. You don't get to play coy.
No one likes coy anyway, especially in politics.
It's not your job to be mysterious.
This isn't a perfume commercial.
No one's like, "Oh,
I hope she comes out from behind her folding fan
and tells us her secret."
People are just annoyed, like Congresswoman Katie Porter,
who had this to say last night about Manchin and Sinema.
-If they have concerns, if they have problems,
tell us what they are,
but we simply can't negotiate with ourselves
and away from what the American people want
if there are no meaningful competing concerns.
I was elected to represent the people of Orange County
and to fight for families, to stand up to corporate interests.
I was not elected to read the mind of Kyrsten Sinema.
Thank goodness, because I have no idea what she's thinking.
-Oh man, you better watch out.
If you piss off Katie Porter,
you might get the white board treatment.
Biden and Porter aren't the only ones mystified
by what Manchin and Sinema are doing.
After Manchin issued yet another grandstanding statement
last night proclaiming that he could not support
spending trillions of dollars,
again, without explaining what specifically he was against,
Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders
expressed his frustration to reporters, saying,
"Look, you can talk to Mr. Manchin.
I can't speak for Mr. Manchin. I'm not a psychologist."
Although I wish he were,
because I think he'd be great at it.
Bernie seems like he'd be a tough love kind of therapist.
[ As Bernie Sanders ] "Oh, you have a fear of intimacy?
Well, that's the first time I've ever heard that one.
Let me write that one down.
What a new phenomenon. You're really special.
I'm gonna write you a prescription
for one teddy bear."
And yet Sinema continues to engage in this
maddening little shtick where she refuses to explain herself
or make any specific requests.
Yesterday, a reporter finally caught up with her
and tried to ask her to respond to progressives
who are frustrated with her unwillingness to negotiate,
and she basically played word games.
-What do you say to progressives that are frustrated
that they don't know where you are?
-I'm in the Senate.
-There are progressives within the Senate
that are frustrated that
they don't know where you are, either.
-I'm, like, clearly right in front of the elevator.
-Ah, what fun. A little wordplay.
This is Congress, not vaudeville.
No one's interested in your Abbott & Costello act.
Not even Bernie. He saw them live.
His review is even quoted on the poster.
You guys are risking blowing up the Biden presidency
and handing power back to a movement
led by an insane person who's spent the last year
trying to unravel American democracy
and will absolutely follow through
next time he gets the chance.
One of his lawyers wrote an instruction manual for a coup.
One of his cronies at the Justice Department
had a plan to overthrow the election,
and on top of that, Trump keeps going around the country,
confessing to new crimes.
Like the time he told a rally crowd
he tried to bully the governor of Georgia
into overturning his state's results.
-Sure, we spoke to Governor Kemp.
Sure, he will not do anything on election integrity.
I said, "No, you're kidding. Just call him again.
You know, I mean, maybe he never got the message."
They come back the next day, "Sir,
Governor Kemp won't do anything on election integrity."
Remember, we wanted to call a special election
so that we could go -- Marjorie --
so we could go into election integrity?
What is wrong with that?
So when these guys,
they're young and nice guys, they came back,
they said, "He won't do it, sir."
I said, "Let me handle it. This is easy."
You know, I got this guy elected.
One thing has nothing to do with the other.
One thing has nothing -- there's no quid pro quo.
I said, "Brian, listen, you know,
you have a big election integrity problem in Georgia.
I hope you can help us out and call a special election,
and let's get to the bottom of it
for the good of the country.
Let's get to the bottom of it for the good of your state.
Let's go, election integrity. What could be better than that?"
"Sir, I'm sorry. I cannot do that."
I said, "Whoa."
-Why does he scream the word "integrity"
like George Costanza?
"Integrity, Jerry!
They said I don't have integrity!"
"You think you have integrity?"
"Oh, I got integrity, baby.
I got integrity up the wazoo."
Also, it looks like the "sir" stories are back,
which are even more ridiculous now
that he's no longer president.
He's just a retiree shanking drives at his golf course.
"They came to me, tears pouring out of their eyes
and they said, 'Sir, that was a beautiful shot, sir.
That honking from the parking lot
was probably about something else, sir.
Here's a hernia pillow for your golf cart, sir.
Inflated to your specifications, sir.'"
Trump and his cultists on Fox are trying to make things
like universal pre-K and sustainable housing
sound scary because in reality,
they know those items are popular with voters,
and even they will inadvertently admit that.
That's why Democrats need to get on with passing their agenda
and why Manchin and Sinema need to get out of the way.
Not only will it do a lot of good for a lot of people,
it will in large part determine
the course of Joe Biden's presidency.
If they fail, they could very well hand power back
to Trump and the GOP.
If they succeed, then voters will at least
have reason to believe them when they say they have --
-Integrity!
-This has been A Closer Look.
♪♪
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