Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

House GOP Forced to Defend or Rebuke Representative Greene in Vote Today; House Paves Path to Pass COVID Relief Deal with No GOP Votes; Biden Suggests He's Open to Shifting Income Thresholds for $1,400 Direct Stimulus Checks; CDC: Increasing Data Suggests U.K. Variant May Increase Mortality. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired February 04, 2021 - 09:00   ET

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

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Glad you're with us. I'm Poppy Harlow.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

Today, the full House will be voting on something the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, refused to do, and that is to strip the QAnon- promoting Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, including the Education Committee.

[09:00:05]

This morning we are no closer to understanding exactly where the party stands, what direction it's headed in.

Here's why. Republicans voted to keep Congresswoman Liz Cheney in her leadership spot, number three in the party in the House, even after she voted to impeach the former President Trump. And at the same time leaders in the party chose not to punish in any way a congresswoman who peddles a series of dangerous conspiracy theories.

And just a reminder here, here's a sampling. She denies that terrorists attacked the Pentagon. She claims that the Parkland School shooting in which children died was somehow faked. She has even shared the idea that a giant space laser caused the California wildfires. She is and remains a member, Poppy, of the House Education Committee.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: That's right. Cheney at times was berated. Cheney berated by her colleagues last night at the meeting for taking a vote of conscience on the former president. As for Greene, she was given a standing ovation by some.

We're live following all of it on Capitol Hill. Also where does the COVID relief bill stand and President Biden's first major foreign policy speech comes later today. Let's go to our colleague Lauren Fox on the hill.

Good morning to you, Lauren. The Republican leader punting and punting on punishing Marjorie Taylor Greene. Where do things stand this morning?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, exactly. He's essentially telling House Democrats to move ahead with their resolution. They will bring to the floor this afternoon that will force every single Republican member to make a stand on whether or not they think that their colleague should be able to stay on the committees that she serves on. That's the Education Committee and the Budget Committee.

Now this is really an unprecedented move that Democrats are going toward because they are arguing in traditional times, when there is a controversial member, it is up to that party's leadership to make a decision about that member's future. That's not what is going to happen today. But every member, every Republican, again, is going to have to walk the plank and make a decision about where they stand on Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And that was frustrating to a lot of Republicans that I was talking to yesterday. They're essentially arguing that McCarthy is having a dereliction of leadership here, a dereliction of duty, and forcing them to make a decision about their colleagues. So a lot of frustration. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene not showing any public remorse, despite the fact that McCarthy said she did speak out in her conference meeting and say she does not believe many of the social media posts that she was part of before she was a member of Congress.

And I want to read what she said to the "Washington Examiner" yesterday. She said, quote, "House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and all these leaders, the leadership and everyone is providing -- proving that they are all talk and not about action. They are all just doing business as usual in Washington. And so what's the difference between them and the Democrats? There isn't a difference."

That doesn't sound like an apology. That doesn't sound like any public remorse, and that is part of the problem for Republicans who are arguing that while they don't like the precedent that it sets for Democrats to vote to take her off of her committees, it does put them in a difficult spot today when they have to make a decision about their own colleague's future -- Jim and Poppy.

SCIUTTO: We did hear one Republican earlier this morning, Adam Kinzinger, say he will vote to remove her. We'll see how many others join him.

Lauren Fox on the hill, thanks very much.

So what does all this mean for the future of the Republican Party? What is a Republican Party?

Joining us now to discuss, CNN political commentators S.E. Cupp and Margaret Hoover.

Great to have you both on. S.E., I wonder if I could begin with you, you know, whenever I hear the phrase big tent in my experience, that sort of is actually an excuse not to make a decision, right? Because if the big tent holds here the party welcomes both liars, right, outright liars, including on the election, and folks who make a vote of conscience and recognize the truth. I mean, are those things actually compatible?

SE CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: No. The big tent is not meant to welcome like any old person, right? I mean, the conservative movement in the Republican Party used to have a set of principles. Tenets. You know, stuff that was in their party platform that you had to kind of believe in to get entree into the tent. And the stuff that Marjorie Taylor Greene spews regularly is not apologetic for -- you know, up until today -- is really not what conservatism stands for.

It is, however, what this current Republican Party stands for. And I think if you're looking at the current landscape, the word that comes to my mind is cowardice. When it comes to a secret ballot on the Liz Cheney's side, Republicans suddenly find their courage. They are able to stand up and say we stand for the rational wing of the party only in secret.

[09:05:06]

And then over on the Marjorie Taylor Greene side, you know, you have a leadership who is unwilling to denounce a crazy person. I mean, a kook. It should not be hard to say what Marjorie Taylor Greene believes in is wrong, it's not true, and it isn't who we are. There's no courage to do any of that and instead they are making Democrats force their hand.

HARLOW: Right. Margaret, I've got to imagine that for you, not only a member of the Republican Party, the Republican Party is in your family's bones and history, it's got to be sort of like gut twisting to see this happening. And especially compounded by the fact that 61 Republicans in the House, 30 percent of the House, voted to oust Liz Cheney from her leadership role simply for voting her conscience.

MARGARET HOOVER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: That's right. Poppy, I mean, you nailed it. And look, I think actually if anything, history can bring Republicans and people who have long identified with the conservative tradition in American politics. Not conservative populism, not the conservativism of today, but, I mean, go, if you want to go back to the modern American conservative movement.

You know what William F. Buckley did? He kicked out the conspiracy theorists, the kooks, the anti-Semites, and he made a good point of it. Look, the paranoid style in American politics is not new. What's new is it co-opting a party and a party not having a backbone to stand up to it. And I just want -- I want to point out that you're seeing a real difference between the base of the party that has been co-opted by this cult of personality around Donald Trump, the conspiracy theories around QAnon and conservative populist themes in the House versus in the Senate.

And it's no -- it's not an accident, right, that the founders designed that the Senate with six-year terms, with a little bit of space between them and the base to be able to make thoughtful, difficult decisions, and it's -- I mean, it should not be lost on anyone that Mitch McConnell is the one who came out in defense of Liz Cheney, right?

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HOOVER: And you know, I respect her leadership and I look forward to working with her in the future. So I think the real rift in the party is what you're going to see between the -- sort of the stature of the Senate and then just this sort of lost populist conspiracy theory base in the House.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Running in massively gerrymandered districts.

S.E., you know, let's be honest, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a proxy for someone else. I think I remember his name, former President Donald Trump. I mean, is she not? I mean, you know, all the talk about her wild conspiracy theories, lies about the election, all things the president has shared for years.

Is there any movement in the party after his loss? Any real movement away from Trump or does that remain, really, a minority insurgency within the party, right, like the 10 who voted to impeach?

CUPP: Well, I was on our air, I don't know, a couple of months ago. And Donald Trump had said Marjorie Taylor Greene was the future of the Republican Party, and I said at the time, I have no doubt she is. And, you know, fast forward a month or so, who is the leader of the Republican Party? Who is the face of it? Who are we talking about? Who is making the headlines?

I don't know who the leader is if not Donald Trump and the people who are still flying to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring or the people who are still supporting him. And so, you know, maybe she's a de facto face of the party, but Republicans in the House, to Margaret's point, seem very happy to let her be the face instead of denouncing her full throatedly.

And it wasn't that long ago, Jim, I'm sure you remember this name. It still haunts me today. Todd Akin. In 2012, he was running for Claire McCaskill's seat in the Senate. He was a Republican right as Mitt Romney was running for president. And he started talking about legitimate rape, right?

HARLOW: Right.

CUPP: This really offensive dumb idea that if a woman is actually legitimately raped her body shuts down and unwanted pregnancy. It was really stupid and gross, but it was so offensive to the party. The party did not want this albatross of Todd Akin around their neck as Mitt Romney was running for president. They called on him to resign from the leadership down. It wasn't hard to do. They were ashamed of him.

There is no shame in this party anymore of Donald Trump, of Roy Moore, of Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's no awareness. There's a coddling of this really small, whittled down fringe minority in the party of racists and kooks, and that's who they are catering to now.

[09:10:04]

HARLOW: So, Margaret, how do you save the party then?

HOOVER: I mean, look, it's -- whenever there is a party out of power, there is a full-on, you know, forgive the term civil war, but you have a bunch of sort of competing warlords who are competing for power. It's a bunch of different power centers is what I mean by that, right?

And so you do have -- you're going to have your, you know, the ex- president's faction. You're going to have the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and the folks in the base, and the part of the thing that Paul Ryan not fondly called the conservative military complex, right, or as a joke, right, that you have this sort of partisan economy built around the politics of the base.

But you also -- there are other factions as well. There are donors. There's the business community. There are, you know, various factions of moderates. And what you're going to see behind the scenes is people really fighting. I mean, the first battle in this war is going to be the primaries for 2022. Does Marjorie Taylor Greene get a primary? Does Kevin McCarthy get a primary? Does Liz Cheney beat her primary?

So, Poppy, nobody knows the answer to that, but I pray that we see some real moral courage in this party because the Republican Party is an institution, right? If we talk about a time where institutions are crumbling in our country, rebuilding some confidence in this institution, it has a long tradition of, frankly, you know, they can be storied and one can be proud of parts of it. No party is perfect. But moral courage in the Republican Party would be a welcomed return.

HARLOW: I think courage is the word of the day if not the week, for sure. It's so nice to have you both --

HOOVER: You know, God bless Liz Cheney for doing it, you know? And thank God she survived.

HARLOW: She said I'm not going anywhere right after she made the vote. And she said it again yesterday. And she came out on top in that one. Well, thank you, Margaret. Thank you, S.E.

We have a lot ahead this hour. The CDC director says the U.K. variant of COVID-19 may actually be deadlier than previously thought. That is a big development.

Also, jobless numbers just came out, and it shows a devastating 779,000 Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week. Congress remains, though, at odds over the next stimulus bill.

SCIUTTO: And some commercial airline pilots say, wait for this, they feel rusty on flights after unprecedented downtime due to the pandemic. That's leading to mid-air mistakes. What's being done about it?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:15:00] HARLOW: House lawmakers have now passed a budget resolution that

paves the way for Democrats to pass a COVID --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

HARLOW: Relief deal without any Republican support. President Biden is still pushing for bipartisan support, sending Senate Republicans two detailed memos addressing concerns they raised during that Oval Office meeting earlier this week about that $1.9 trillion plan. The White House, though, is still waiting for their response to that.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Jeremy Diamond joins us now from the White House. Jeremy, is there still a negotiation going on here? I mean, the president has indicated he could come down from $1.9 trillion, particularly on the scope of where the stimulus checks go to, and how many people, at what income level. Does that potentially bring in any GOP support?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim, I'm told the discussions are still ongoing at the staff level, even though we haven't -- Republicans haven't responded directly to that, those two memos from the White House on that $1.9 trillion plan. Just yesterday, we heard President Biden say that he believes that he can get some Republican lawmakers to vote for this package, but what is clear is that the White House is moving forward with this $1.9 trillion package.

At least, in terms of a framework, and they are not going to budge off of that number by hundreds of billions of dollars at this point. President Biden making very clear on a call with house Democrats just yesterday that he's not going to begin his administration by breaking his promises to the American people.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yet, we can't walk away from additional $1,400 from direct checks we proposed because people need it. Frankly, we promised it. Maybe we can -- I think we can better target the number. I'm OK with that, but we're going to start my -- I'm not going to start my administration by breaking the promise to the American people. I don't think the problem is that we're going to go too big to deal with this crisis. The problem is we're going to go too small.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DIAMOND: And you can hear there, going too big versus too small. That is what we have heard from White House officials over the last several days. President Biden making clear that he believes that this $1.9 trillion package takes care of all the needs, and, yes, they are open to doing some trimming, particularly on the stimulus checks is what we keep hearing over and over. But as far as anything more, any more cuts, it's not really clear where the room for compromise is, and it's very clear the Democrats --

SCIUTTO: Yes -- DIAMOND: Are moving forward. Jim, Poppy?

SCIUTTO: And particularly, not on state and local aid which Republicans didn't have in there, but it's a priority for Biden. Jeremy Diamond, thanks very much.

HARLOW: Well, the CDC director says more data suggests the COVID variant from the U.K. could actually be more deadly, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Yes, this is concerning news. Joining us now, Dr. Leana Wen; she's CNN medical analyst and former Baltimore health commissioner. OK, Dr. Wen, your first question is, how much more deadly and do the vaccines still -- are they still effective in keeping people from getting really sick with this variant?

[09:20:00]

LEANA WEN, EMERGENCY PHYSICIAN: So there's good news and bad news in this regard. The good news is that the vaccines do look like they are very effective still against the B-117 variant, the variant that came from the U.K., which is excellent. The bad news though is what you just mentioned about the increase --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

WEN: In lethality. It may be up to 30 percent more lethal. And by the way, just to say that, a variant that is already more contagious, it's going to be more deadly and by definition. Even if you have a 50 percent, let's say increase in transmissibility, that doesn't mean you're going to get a 50 percent increase in the number of cases.

You're actually going to get exponentially more cases which is what we've seen happening in the U.K. and Denmark and the Netherlands and other places where this variant has taken over. There has been an explosive surge of hospitalizations and deaths.

HARLOW: We heard the CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky say that vaccinating all teachers is not a prerequisite for schools opening safely. You disagree with her. Why?

WEN: Well, I first want to say that I really respect Dr. Walensky and the recommendations out of the CDC. This is one of the few instances where I disagree. And that's because the studies that have been done so far show that schools can safely reopen when there is relatively low community transmission, when mitigation measures are put into place.

The White House -- this White House says that 90 percent -- 95 percent of all counties are areas of sustained hot spots. And we know that many schools have not had the resources to properly dedensify and ensure that there are mask mandates and other things in place. And so, I think that if we as a society want to prioritize students returning for in-person instruction, the least we can do is to prioritize the health and safety of our teachers.

Just because you have studies now showing -- I think this is good. Studies are now showing that schools are not leading to significant --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

WEN: Super spreader events of the community. So that doesn't mean though that there isn't individual risk to the teachers and staff who are still there.

SCIUTTO: Dr. Fauci and others have said that having these new variants is a further spur to getting people vaccinated quickly because more of this thing is, you know, running around out there, the more chances it has to mutate and come up with these new -- you know, more difficult variants here. I'm watching that number on the side of the screen closely, 34 million Americans vaccinated. Are we going to soon see a pick-up in the rate of vaccination as Biden administration plans come into place?

WEN: I hope so, but I, along with many others have been saying that the Biden administration needs to be far more aggressive with their role. Basically, we need a man on the moon, a kind of moment where the Biden administration is asking the American people to do really hard things. They're asking Congress to do hard things. They need --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

WEN: To take this on themselves and also do the hard things as well, including aiming for not 1.5 million vaccinations a day, but 3 million vaccinations a day. It's something that we can potentially get to, even if they fail at reaching that goal, we should still be asking for the moon here. And --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

WEN: This race against the variants is one major reason as to why?

SCIUTTO: Yes, we need a moon shot. Dr. Leana Wen, thanks so much. Good to have you on.

WEN: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Well, from America first to restoring America's place in the world. President Biden set to give his first major foreign policy speech with one that's very different from his predecessor.

HARLOW: That's right. We're also moments away from the opening bell on Wall Street, stock futures are higher this morning a little bit. Three days of gains, futures tied to the S&P 500 ticked up less than 1 percent. Investors are really just watching Washington for signs on where the stimulus deal goes, and also closely monitoring the vaccine rollout.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:25:00]

SCIUTTO: Hours from now, President Biden will head to the State Department to give his first major foreign policy speech. His remarks today expected to focus on, quote, "restoring America's place in the world." A clear pivot away from President Trump's "America first" go- it-alone approach to foreign policy. Joining me now is David Tafuri; he's a former U.N. and State Department official who also advised the Obama campaign on foreign policy. David, thanks for joining us this morning.

DAVID TAFURI, FORMER OBAMA CAMPAIGN FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER: Thanks, Jim.

SCIUTTO: So, it strikes me that the big headline on the Biden versus Trump foreign policy is not so much the changes as what will not change, right? And I do want to get to what will change because there are significant things there, particularly with relations to alliances and multilateralism. But on big issues, let's pick one, China, is the Biden approach going to be that different from the Trump approach?

TAFURI: I think it will be different in the way it is implemented. But the approach in terms of taking a strong view of China and trying to contain China and trying to combat, you know, China's attacks on our economy, China's violations of intellectual property will be similar.

But what I think Biden will do is to try and use less tariffs and more using alliances with other countries in Europe and particularly in Asia, trying to rebuild those alliances with countries that also have concerns about China in order to contain it.