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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Vaccine Rollout Going Slowly; Interview With Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA); Kamala Harris Receives First Dose of Vaccine; Will Senate Republicans Block $2,000 Stimulus Checks?. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired December 29, 2020 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[15:00:00]

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's very possible this officer could face criminal charges. Brooke.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: Stay on it for us.

Brynn Gingras, thank you

And thank you all for being with me. I'm Brooke Baldwin here in New York.

Let's go to Washington. "THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER starts right now.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: And welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We start with breaking news in our politics lead.

Just moments ago, President Trump putting more pressure on Senate Republicans to go along with his wishes, tweeting -- quote -- "Unless Republicans have a death wish -- and it is also the right thing to do -- they must approve the $2,000 payments as soon as possible; $600 is not enough."

The question, of course, is President Trump willing to do anything more than tweets? Is he working the phones? Is he putting as much energy into getting more money for the American people who need it as he is for, say, overturning the results of the election?

We got no clarity today on whether he is doing more than tweeting or whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will go along with the president's demands and allow an up-or-down vote on the House bill, which would increase stimulus checks for millions of Americans from $600 to $2,000.

McConnell did promise a vote tomorrow on overriding the president's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, which McConnell urged the Senate to pass. Both issues, of course, put Republicans in the precarious position of potentially having to cross President Trump.

CNN's Phil Mattingly joins us now live from Capitol Hill. And, Phil, let's start with the stimulus checks.

Why is this such a tough call from McConnell? You have not only President Trump, but other Republican senators, including Josh Hawley, plus the two Senate Republicans in the run-off, all coming out in favor of $2,000. Why not just put it on the floor for a vote?

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, because five Republican senators who support the $2,000 means that there's 47 Republican senators who are conspicuously quiet right now.

And the reason for that is the vast majority of them are opposed to this policy, Jake. If you track back just a couple of weeks ago, when the debate over what became the COVID relief package was in play, the vast majority of Republican senators made clear they were opposed to any additional stimulus payments, the $600 level or above.

If you look over at the House vote that occurred just yesterday, 130 Republicans voted against the $2,000. When it comes to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a good way to gauge where he is or how he's operating is, does it allow him to protect his conference, and especially the majority of his conference, which, at this point in time, is not supportive of that policy?

The wild card, though, Jake, you mentioned it. It's those two Georgia senators in a crucial run-off one week from today, both backing the proposal. I'm told right now, it's not clear that any proposal that would extend the payments up to $2,000 will ever reach the Senate floor in a substantive way.

But if those two Georgia senators join with President Trump and demand that action, given what's at stake, and that would be the majority leadership for Mitch McConnell, perhaps that changes things, Jake.

TAPPER: And, Phil, what are Democrats planning to do?

MATTINGLY: Just increase pressure. There's no question about it, increase pressure both publicly and on the Senate floor.

Chuck Schumer already went to the floor today, tried to get this House bill passed by unanimous consent. They knew that was a long shot. They knew any of the 100 senators could oppose that. But they want to keep bringing attention to this.

And that's going to include Senator Bernie Sanders as well. Obviously, he was crucial along, with Republican Senator Josh Hawley, in pushing for those $2,000 checks, getting the president on board with this issue. He is saying he is going to delay that vote on the National Defense Authorization Act until he gets an up-or-down vote on those checks.

The problem, he can only delay for so long. That vote is coming no matter what. It's just a matter of when, not if -- Jake.

TAPPER: And McConnell is also urging his members to vote to override the president's veto of the defense bill today. What do you make of that?

MATTINGLY: McConnell's never hedged when it comes to defense issues and the president.

Look, he's obviously kept his words very tight when it comes to critiquing the president or critiquing any policies of the president over the course of the last four years. But one area he has consistently split from the president on has been foreign policy.

And on this issue in particular, as you noted, 59 consecutive years, this bill has been signed into law, always with wide bipartisan margins, once again, this the 60th year, wide bipartisan margins in the Senate; 84 of the 100 senators voted for it. Mitch McConnell has set up this process to override this veto.

He did it a week ago. He was always planning to. Expect another big vote and another big rebuke of the president on this specific issue, obviously, a number of other issues hanging out there. But when it comes to defense, Republicans at least now willing to split with a president who won't be in office in just a couple of weeks, Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Phil Mattingly on Capitol Hill, thanks so much.

So, right after President Trump left the golf course this afternoon in Florida, he went back to tweeting, including that rather threatening death wish tweet directed at his own party over the $2,000 stimulus checks.

CNN's Boris Sanchez joins me now. He covers President Trump. He's in Florida.

Boris, has President Trump made any effort to speak to McConnell about this directly today? He could be doing a lot more than tweeting. I mean, the business of legislation is -- tends to be a little bit more complicated than that.

[15:05:08]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: And you would expect as much from someone who fancies himself a dealmaker, right?

So far, we have gotten no indication that President Trump is personally trying to lobby Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or other Republican senators to come around to this idea of $2,000 stimulus checks for Americans.

Instead, our cameras actually captured the president for another consecutive day while he's here in Florida on the golf course, despite the fact that the press office for the White House continues to insist that the president is working tirelessly on behalf of Americans.

At this point, Jake, this is kind of a theme of the Trump presidency, a signature. This entire legislative process, he's contradicted his negotiators. He's opted to attack lawmakers on Twitter, to dictate via Twitter, instead of actually sitting down and personally having conversations about what kind of deals could be made to get Republicans, in this case, over to his side

We saw this in the 2018 shutdown on the border wall, other major legislative issues. But these tweets, they really stand out. He's calling Republican leaders weak, ineffective, essentially saying that there needs to be new leadership among the Republican Party.

But the thing I found most notable about all of this, none of these tweets actually mentioned Mitch McConnell by name, Jake.

TAPPER: Interesting.

And the outgoing president is still obviously putting his energy towards contesting the results of the election that he lost more than seven weeks ago decisively. And he's lost it since then in courts, in the Electoral College as well.

SANCHEZ: Yes, again, the president tweeting out some falsehoods about election fraud.

It's not worth fact-checking at this point, because it amounts to absolute nonsense yet again. This is what I think is at the core of this rift between Trump and Republicans. If you watch his tweets closely, the president started making statements about the Republican leadership soon after Mitch McConnell came out and essentially admitted that Joe Biden is the president-elect, after the Electoral College certified his win.

I suspect that we're going to continue to see more of this from the president, because we should point out he's not only making these false claims; he's also fund-raising, getting donations from supporters who believe that he may still have a chance of somehow overturning the election result -- Jake.

TAPPER: Yes, hundreds of millions of dollars that -- most of which he can spend almost any way he wants.

Boris Sanchez, thank you so much.

Later this hour, president-elect Joe Biden is expected to come forward and speak and criticize the Trump administration for the slower-than- expected rollout of the coronavirus vaccine.

According to a Biden transition official, president-elect Biden will lay out his plan for speeding up the administering of those shots.

Speaking of shots, vice president-elect Kamala Harris got her first dose of the vaccine live on television today. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, was also vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, we're told.

As the vice presidential nominee, Harris said she would not trust a vaccine solely based on President Trump's word, but would be first in line if experts such as Dr. Fauci recommended it.

CNN's Joe Johns is live for us in Wilmington, Delaware, covering the Biden transition team. And Biden is going to speak soon. We will bring that to you live. Joe, vice president-elect Harris had a clear message for Americans skeptical of this vaccine, especially those in the black community. But she was something of a skeptic a few months ago.

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely. That's very true, something of a skeptic. And now she's all about it.

But the fact of the matter is, first and foremost, the shot is a continuity-of-government issue for Kamala Harris, but it's more than that. It's, if you will, a very big moment, a pass-the-torch moment for both her and Joe Biden, who has already gotten the shot.

The two of them on January 20, are going to end up inheriting the push to try to get people all over the country vaccinated. Kamala Harris speaks to a very important demographic, African-Americans, who are also skeptical about it. And the research shows, number one, that something like four in 10 African-Americans have said they're going to get the vaccine.

Number two, African-Americans are very hard-hit by COVID-19. So, Kamala Harris today all about it. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA), VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT: We have hospitals and medical centers and clinics like this all over the country who are staffed by people who understand the community, who often come from the community, and who administer all year round trusted health care.

And so I want to remind people that right in your community is where you can take the vaccine, where you will receive the vaccine by folks you may know.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHNS: The current surgeon general, as you know, has also been pushing messages of the same sort and also trying to push back against concerns about things like the Tuskegee syphilis study, which created a lot of skepticism in the African-American community -- Jake.

[15:10:07]

TAPPER: Understandably so.

And, Joe, president-elect Biden is going to speak there in Wilmington in a few minutes. We're going to bring that to our viewers live.

Besides criticizing the Trump administration for the failure to roll out the vaccine administration as quickly as possible, what else are we expecting to hear from him?

JOHNS: Well, probably most importantly, we're expecting him to roll out his own plan for speeding up the process.

And he's talked about getting 100 million people vaccinated in the first 100 days. Of course, it is a real logistical challenge. We're also expecting, for the most part, some type of a pandemic update, if you will, from the president-elect.

TAPPER: All right, Joe Johns in Wilmington, Delaware, thank you so much for that report. Appreciate it.

Will enough Republican senators push Mitch McConnell to hold a vote on those $2,000 stimulus checks? We're going to talk to Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey next about that.

Plus: what first lady Melania Trump did at Mar-a-Lago that a source says upset President Trump.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:15:30]

TAPPER: In our politics today: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, is embracing uncertainty today, as lawmakers try to navigate a tricky set of votes that could force many Republicans to cross President Trump.

Republican Senator Pat Toomey from the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania joins me now live.

Senator, thanks so much for joining us and merry Christmas.

I want to get your reaction to the president's latest tweet. He said: "Unless Republicans have a death wish -- and it is also the right thing to do -- they must approve the $2,000 payments ASAP; $600 is not enough."

What do you think? What's your response? I noticed you're in the -- there are five Republican senators that have come out in favor of increasing the payment from $600 to $2,000. But you are among the -- that's five Republican senators. You're among the 47 Republican senators that have not.

SEN. PAT TOOMEY (R-PA): Well, that's right, Jake. And I'm not going to, because I think it's a very bad idea.

I mean, let's be clear about what we're talking about here. We're talking about sending checks, the vast majority of which will be going to people who've had no loss of income whatsoever. That's just the fact.

Why would -- how and why does that make any sense at all? Oh, and, by the way, when you bring this direct payment up to $2,000, the total cost is almost two-thirds of a trillion dollars. It's over $600 billion, most of which, I mean, the vast majority of which will go to people who had no lost income whatsoever.

This makes no sense. We're in a very different place today than we were back in March. And it was a dubious merit back in March. But then at least you could make the case that we actually had no economy. We had so completely shut down the economy that we were looking to send money as a substitute for the economy.

Now we have got a very different situation. The economy grew at 33 percent last quarter. We have got very acute problems within certain employment groups, right, people who work for restaurants and hotels and travel and entertainment devastated.

But we do not have a global macroeconomic depression under way at all. So, it makes no sense to be sending this out to everybody who has a pulse. Oh, by the way, you actually don't need a pulse. Anyone who died this year, dead people are going to get the checks too.

I wonder if it's enough stimulus for them. I mean, that's how ridiculous this is.

TAPPER: Well, let me -- I guess I have a couple questions for you, one in policy and one procedure.

On the policy level, you would agree that there are still millions of Americans suffering, people who have lost their jobs, who have lost income, who do need help.

TOOMEY: Yes.

TAPPER: What would be a better way to help those people? I mean, you have seen the lines at the food banks all over Pennsylvania, I'm sure.

TOOMEY: So, Jake, that's where we should be targeting.

And so a lot of the bill that we voted for overwhelmingly does, in fact, target those very people. It's PPP loans, right, which are really grants to small businesses, provided that they keep their work force employed.

So, people would continue to have a job because of that money who would otherwise not have a job. There's a plus-up in unemployment benefits for people who are actually unemployed. There's an expansion of the eligibility for unemployment benefits to include people like the self-employed and gig workers who've historically not qualified.

Those kinds of things make a lot of sense. And we could have a debate and a discussion about whether we should do even more for those things. But when you're talking about the two-income couple who, let's say they both happen to work for the federal government among the two million people who do. They have never had even an interruption in their income.

They have had no lost income at all. And if they have got two kids, we're going to send them $8,000 of money we don't have? That just doesn't make sense.

TAPPER: OK, so that's the policy question.

The procedure question is, do you think Senate Majority Leader McConnell should offer a clean up-or-down bill, up-or-down vote on this issue of $600 to $2,000? I suspect that he might be thinking about other ways to kill it,

because I think he agrees with you, such as adding that -- the provision to get rid of Section 230, which provides immunity to social media companies from posts that other people put on their sites.

I mean, wouldn't a clean up-or-down vote be the better way to at least legislate this, even if you vote no?

[15:20:02]

TOOMEY: So, I don't think so, Jake.

And the reason is because, I think it makes much, much more sense and there would be much broader support if this is actually targeted to people who need it. As I said, we don't have this money lying on the shelf. We're either going to print this money or we're going to borrow it from overseas.

And either way, we ought to think long and hard about how we're doing this. This -- when you know for a fact that the vast majority of it is going to go to people who've had no loss of income, I think that's indefensible.

And so, if we're -- if there's a will to do more, then we ought to talk about how you do that in a sensible fashion, where the money goes to people who actually need it. And we're not going to figure that out on a up-or-down vote that gets jammed in sometime this week.

TAPPER: So, obviously, President Trump says that your position is a death wish and the wrong thing to do.

(LAUGHTER)

TAPPER: He also has been lashing out at Republican leaders for the vote to override the defense bill, calling House Republican leadership weak and tired.

Now, a senior Republican told CNN that these rants are -- quote -- "the ravings of a deposed king."

How do you see these attacks on Republicans?

TOOMEY: Look, I'm not very surprised about tweets that are critical of people who are overriding the president's veto. He doesn't like that prospect. I understand that.

But I think that the defense authorization bill, which we have passed for 59 consecutive years, I don't think anyone ever considers it perfect. It is the result of a legislative process, which, by the way, this administration was involved in.

And the president's big objection seemed to be the provision that is going to require renaming of military facilities that are named after Confederates. And, look, I think that amendment probably goes too far in the dynamic, but I don't have a problem with renaming military bases against people who did not commit treason and take up arms against the United States. So, I don't object to that idea.

And the idea that Section 230 should be repealed, look, I think that's an important, complicated issue. But that legal liability protection that we granted to these Internet companies years ago really enabled the spectacular growth in a whole new industry that has done so much for our economy.

Is it being abused in some cases? I think it is, actually. But I don't think you just decide one day to throw it all out. I think we have got to think through, what are the unintended consequences of that? How might we treat this in a more nuanced way than just completely repealing Section 230?

TAPPER: Before you go, sir, a few weeks ago, you briefly held up the relief bill over concerns you had about a program at the Federal Reserve that you saw as the Fed doing the job of legislators and also allowing members of Congress to sit back and not make tough decisions, let the Fed handle it.

As a principle, I understand that. And it seems to be a big problem for Congress, especially when it comes to sending troops abroad, this idea of Congress outsourcing tough decisions to the Fed or the Pentagon.

What do you think?

TOOMEY: Well, so, there's no question in my mind that, for decades now, Congress has been gradually, but seemingly systematically, transferring the authority of the Constitution and the responsibility the Constitution assigns to us, transferring that mostly to the executive branch.

And I think that's a huge mistake. It diminishes the accountability of these actions. And it diminishes the say of the American people.

I do think you can make that case that that has happened in the foreign policy realm and with respect to the deployment of our military, but you have to acknowledge that at least you get into a gray area because the president does have significant powers as the commander in chief.

TAPPER: Sure.

TOOMEY: You can't say that about just generic government spending, right?

And, in fact, our Democratic colleagues wanted to hijack the Fed's emergency lending program, which was always meant to be temporary, and use it as a way to provide direct bailouts to municipalities and states.

If we're going to do that, bailing out municipalities and states, that absolutely should be a congressional decision. And the American people ought to be able to hold Congress accountable for whatever decision we make.

It does not belong in the realm of the Federal Reserve.

TAPPER: Yes, Senator Pat Toomey, thank you so much for your time. Merry Christmas and happy new year. Good to see you, sir.

TOOMEY: Thanks for having me, Jake. Same to you.

TAPPER: Dr. Fauci now says things are likely to get worse -- why the problem is just not a matter of adding more hospital beds.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:29:29]

TAPPER: Turning to our health lead now and the dire crisis facing the country, as we head into the new year.

COVID hospitalizations are currently at an all-time high, more than 121,000, with medical experts warning the situation is only going to get worse. And while more than two million Americans have been vaccinated, the rollout is going much slower than promised, as CNN's Athena Jones reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): As coronavirus infections spike, America faces a bleak winter.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NIAID DIRECTOR: I think we just have to assume that it's going to get worse.

DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, DEPARTMENT OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE CHAIRMAN, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY: We clearly all anticipate all across the country a surge upon a surge upon a surge.