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Vaccine Urgency in Latinx Community; Chicago Schools Reach Tentative Deal; Yellen Comments on Stimulus Package; Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) is Interviewed about Impeachment. Aired 9:30-10a ET.

Aired February 08, 2021 - 09:30   ET

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

[09:30:00]

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Even as her husband and son became sick with COVID-19 last summer.

SILVIA TREJO, SHE AND HER FAMILY CONTRACTED COVID-19 (through translator): It was me who took care of them.

JIMENEZ: And even after their battle with COVID, they weren't sure if getting the vaccine was the right move.

She says there are a range of concerns about vaccines in her circle, including fears about having a chip inserted. Just one example of the false information that gets shared widely online.

She lives in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, where the vast majority is residents are Hispanic. Once within the zip code hardest hit by COVID in the state of Illinois.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: All right. Should we applaud? I think so.

JIMENEZ: Dr. Mariana Del Rios was the first person in Chicago to get a dose of the vaccine and fears some of the same factors that devastated the Hispanic community here will return as barriers.

DR. MARINA DEL RIOS, EMERGENCY PHYSICIAN, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS HOSPITAL: This vaccine distribution process is like playing "The Hunger Games." So if you're not tied already to a medical home, which is a reality for a lot of Latinos who are documented or uninsured, then, you know, your chances of getting vaccinated any time soon are slim to none.

JIMENEZ: Since March, 2020, the Latinx communities, many of them essential workers, has had a higher number of confirmed cases than any other demographic tract by the city of Chicago. And the total number of cases almost double that of white non-Latinx people.

CDC data shows nationwide, Hispanic or Latino residents contracted COVID at nearly twice the rate of white, non-Hispanic people and were hospitalized at a rate more than four times higher. The biggest gap amongst any racial ethnic demographic.

And then looking at vaccinations. Of the data available, those Hispanic residents represent more than 18 percent of the U.S. population, the CDC reports just under 12 percent of those vaccinated in the first month were from that community.

That's where people like Fahida Martinez come in. At least in Chicago.

She's what's known as a (INAUDIBLE), or a community health worker. Fresh off her first dose of the vaccine, she helps bridge the divide between the idea of a vaccine and its reality, mostly just being a guiding hand, she says.

I would like, for example, the clinics, or locations where they're giving the vaccine to have lots of hours in the morning, just like in the evening, to give people the opportunity, even Saturdays and Sundays when people don't have to leave their workday.

I went educating myself in that. The reason is important. I discussed it with my son and my husband. You know what, we're going to get it.

Making the experiences of those who have gone before her even more significant.

DEL RIOS: If it's safe enough for me and it's something that I would recommend to my family, then hopefully that will convince also more hearts and minds.

JIMENEZ: I feel privileged, she says, really of being selected to get the vaccine because I can say I got the vaccine and I'm OK.

Omar Jimenez, CNN, Chicago.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Also in Chicago, the city and the Chicago Teachers Union may have reached a deal that would allow students to go back into classrooms over the next several weeks. It's been a long time coming.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: A long time.

Let's go to our colleague Adrianne Broaddus. She joins us now.

Good morning to you, Adrianne.

Where exactly do things stand? Like, is this fragile? Could it fall apart or will kids be in classrooms starting in the next two or three weeks?

ADRIANNE BROADDUS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, what, Poppy, anything is possible. As it stands right now, the Chicago Teachers Union house of delegates still has to review this proposed plan and vote on the plan.

Meanwhile, this time last week, the disagreement was whether or not students and staff should return to in-person learning. Now the debate is over whether or not there's a deal.

Sunday, Chicago's mayor, Lori Lightfoot, announced they'd reached a tentative agreement. But before her announcement, the Chicago Teachers Union posted on its Twitter page that they hadn't reached an agreement. And even after the mayor made an announcement, the teachers union underscored that same message.

Meanwhile, if the deal is accepted, students could return to the classroom as early as Thursday.

Let's take a look and see what this proposed plan outlines. Here's the framework. As we mentioned, students would be back in the classroom starting on Thursday. This framework of the deal also expands vaccination opportunities for school staff and it also has new specific metrics for pausing in-person learning.

So, for example, let's say the positivity rate for COVID-19 spiked here in Chicago, in-person learning would be put on pause again. And staff who are higher risk or primary care givers may request telework. And, finally, unvaccinated staff may take unpaid leave with full benefits.

Listen in so you can hear what the mayor had to say.

[09:35:04]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR LORI LIGHTFOOT (D-CHICAGO-IL): I am confident, confident, that the measures that we have and will put in place will make our schools even safer than they already are and will be a model for other systems in Illinois and throughout the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROADDUS: So, again, it's important to underscore, this is not final. The Chicago Teachers Inion house of delegates still has to vote on this plan. That could happen today. But as it stand right now, we do not have the exact timeline.

Jim and Poppy.

HARLOW: OK. We'll watch closely for it.

Adrianne, thank you very much for that reporting out of Chicago.

Ahead, President Biden says that millions of women are dropping out of the workforce during the pandemic, calling it a, quote, national emergency. We're going to take a closer look at the numbers and the impact, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:40:13]

SCIUTTO: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says that Congress must pass President Biden's COVID relief plan quickly or risk a much slower economic rebound.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANET YELLEN, TREASURY SECRETARY: There's absolutely no reason why we should suffer through a long, slow recovery.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Do you have a timeline, though, for full -- for full reemployment?

YELLEN: Well, I would expect that if this package is passed, that you would get back to full employment next year.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: That's quite a goal. Yellen also warned that without the president's proposed $1.9 trillion in federal stimulus, the country's likely rate is likely to remain elevated over the next three -- few years.

Let's bring in our chief business correspondent Christine Romans.

Good morning to you, Christine.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

HARLOW: Full employment. Explain to people what that actually means because it doesn't mean no one is out of a job.

ROMANS: Right.

HARLOW: And what's interesting to me is it -- I mean that is -- that is just a huge bet to say that they're going to get there next year. And it sounds like she's saying it has to be this exact package.

ROMANS: And they're on the record here. And so they're saying, look, we have, in recent memory, these are fresh -- these scars are fresh when we didn't pass enough and it took eight or nine years to get back to pre-employment levels. So she's talking about matching all the workers who need work with all the employers who need -- who need employees and getting back down to where we were before the pandemic, something closer to like 4 percent unemployment.

When you look at the hole we're in, there's a big distance between the jobs that we created since the bottom of this mess and where we were when we started. We're still in the deficit of about 10 million jobs. So she's saying, if you can get this $1.9 trillion into the fire hose, this fiscal fire hose, and spread it on this fire, that we could be back to something like full employment next summer.

They're on the record here, so this is a goal that they're trying to convince Congress to help them achieve.

SCIUTTO: OK, so a big part of the Democratic stimulus plan is this enhanced child tax credit that Democrats plan to unveil, that portion of the larger plan today.

ROMANS: Yes.

SCIUTTO: I mean this is about pandemic economic impact, but also a larger issue, is it not, kind of a continuing one here of child poverty.

ROMANS: Yes. Yes, you can see where this virus has just -- and the effect on the economy has just devastated families with children. And this is an enhanced child tax credit that would essentially get $300 a month right into the bank accounts of people who have a child under six and $250 a month for the age of seven to -- say 6 to 17.

These will be monthly payments for a year. So instead of like a tax credit when you pay your taxes, this would be actual cash in your bank account every month. That helps you buy groceries and make the rent.

Now, there are Democrats who would like this to be permanent. They are hoping that they can get this in here and this can be kind of a way to permanently address child poverty in this country. And the Supporters say you would cut child poverty almost in half if you did this.

HARLOW: Yes.

ROMANS: If you got money every month into the bank accounts of people who are living right there on the edge.

HARLOW: Yes.

And that was analysis from Colombia University.

ROMANS: Yes.

HARLOW: I mean it wasn't partisan analysis.

ROMANS: Yes.

HARLOW: There was an important moment in the president's interview last night with Norah O'Donnell.

Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NORAH O'DONNELL, CBS NEWS: About 20 million American children have not been in the classroom for nearly a year. There's a mental health crisis happening.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There really is.

O'DONNELL: Women are dropping out of the workforce.

Is this a national emergency?

BIDEN: It is a national emergency. It genuinely is a national emergency.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HARLOW: Christine, you wrote about this in a really important piece on Friday. And it seems like people, including the president now, really are find -- and Yellen talked about this, really finally starting to talk about the extraordinary number of women who are out of the workforce because of this pandemic.

ROMANS: I'm really worried that a generation of job market gains for women and for the people who employ women are being eroded here. When you look at this, there -- women are down more than 5 million jobs since the pandemic began. And we can see that 2.5 million women have simply dropped out of the labor market.

What this tells us is that our economy is built on an army -- a small army of women who are working multiple part-time jobs and are still the primary responsibility for the family, for elderly family members and for young children, who, 20 million of them are at home right now, and just how fragile that whole construct was for women to begin with. And it has been revealed, the virus has laid bare just sort of this weakness, this underlying structural weakness in the American economy, women dropping out like this.

You know, I got a press release last week from an outplacement firm that was concerned, telling companies, you need to be worried about this because you're not going to be able to grow and bounce back after this virus is beaten if you don't have these women in your ranks.

[09:45:01]

You need to be thinking now about how to get these women back.

SCIUTTO: Christine Romans, it's so important to highlight that. Thanks very much.

ROMANS: You're welcome.

SCIUTTO: Well, the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, no president's ever faced two, begins tomorrow. What advice does a House impeachment manager who worked the first trial have for the incoming team? We're going to ask one of them next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: In just minutes, attorneys for former President Trump are due to file their pre-trial brief before the start of his second, you heard that right, secondary impeachment trial tomorrow. His legal team plans to argue that the ex-president did not incite the attack on the U.S. Capitol, that his baseless claims of election fraud, repeated over months, are protected speech and that the trial itself, they will say, is unconstitutional.

[09:50:14]

For their part, House impeachment managers have compiled hours of video both of the president's statements and the violence that followed to recreate the terror of the day, what led up to it. Joining me now is discuss, Colorado Democrat, Rep. Jason Crow. He was

an impeachment manager during President Trump's first impeachment trial.

Congressman, thanks for taking the time this morning.

REP. JASON CROW (D-CO): Hi. Good morning, Jim. Thanks for having me.

SCIUTTO: So there was a conventional wisdom in Washington that the outcome of this trial is already set. That there's no way you're going to get the Republican votes necessary to convict. That's it. You do have unlikely voices, such as Liz Cheney, making the argument that the president may very well be guilty.

And I just wonder, is the conventional wisdom wrong? Can Democrats, in your view, convinced a sufficient number of Republicans to convict?

CROW: Well, Jim, I learned a long time ago that you can't control whether or not other people decide to uphold their oath and do their duty as a leader.

The only thing you can do is decide to uphold yours and do your duty. I mean that's what we're doing and that's why it's important. You know, we have to make sure that we're holding people accountable, that we're embracing the truth and telling the story of what happened in order to fix what happened.

So I'm not interested in punishing anybody here, but I'm interested in doing this (INAUDIBLE).

SCIUTTO: OK, I get the motivation there. And just wonder, and I understand the political dynamics here, right, that no one seems to want a long trial. The focus seems to be on staying away from witnesses and going with video. Given the fight while you were a House manager in the first impeachment trial to get witnesses to testify, why not this time? I mean at a minimum to get into the president's thinking and decision making on the day of January 6th.

CROW: Well, this is an extraordinary situation in that you actually have a trial that's being held at the crime scene with jurors that were victims of the crime, being prosecuted by victims of the crime. There's really no precedent for this. So you have in Jamie Raskin, you know, a constitutional scholar, a lawyer really without equal in the United States Congress whose looking at, what is the best way to bring this case and tell this story.

And it's important that we not sit here and, you know, tell the story to the senators that they already know. We have to provide context. we have to provide background information. We have to make the case as to why it's important that we move forward for reconciliation and unity in the country. And that can be done in a lot of different ways.

SCIUTTO: But let me ask you this. We know what happened on January 6th. I get that. You, your Republican colleagues were witnesses to the violence. But to convict, you need to convince a significant number -- a sufficient number, rather, of Republicans that the president's directly responsible for that. So how do you do that without speaking to folks who work for the president, or instance on questions of what he did or did not do on that day to get law enforcement, the military to respond.

CROW: Well, these senators lived through this. They understand what happened. You know, a lot of them have acknowledged privately and even publicly the president's role in this. So we have to appeal to their duty, their sense of duty and obligation. You know, never is there a circumstance, never is there an analogy where you don't do something because you think there's a chance that you might fail. That is not duty. That's not accountability. That's not fulfilling your oath.

We have an obligation here to the American people. We have an obligation to address the white nationalism and the white supremacy that has been swept under the rug for too long in American history, to address this and address it head on. And that's what we are starting to do today. To move forward, we have to address that accountability. And that's what we have to do to appeal to the obligation and sense of duty to those senators.

SCIUTTO: Now, we're going to see the president's defense teams pre- trial brief in moments, but there's some reporting that they intend to argue that, well, look at Democratic run cities and the violence, and protests that took place there. If you're going to convict the president for this, then everybody's guilty in effect for, you know, politicians who said things that you could make an argument might have paved the way for that kind of violence.

What's your response to that argument?

CROW: Well, these are -- false equivalencies are completely without merit and they're absurd. This is one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated upon a democracy in the United States Congress by a president. And, you know, I understand why some of the supporters of the president don't want to talk about the facts.

They don't want to talk about what happened. They don't want to talk about January 6th because it's so horrific, it's so egregious, they would rather talk about anything else. You know, whether it's something in the past, whether it's about their meritless constitutional arguments, they don't want to address this (INAUDIBLE) Because it's really bad for them.

But we're not going to sweep that under the rug. We're going to talk about it and we're going to put it on full display for the Senate and for the American people.

[09:55:04]

SCIUTTO: Before we go, I just want to show a picture of you comforting Congresswoman Susan Wild while taking cover as protesters stormed the Capitol. With this in mind, and this moment in mind, what do you say to Republicans who say now's the time to move on, that this trial does not serve the cause of unity?

CROW: Well, you know, we've been moving on from the legacy of our original sin and from white supremacy and white nationalism and symbols of hate and, you know, just outright violence for over 200 years in this country. I'm not interested in punishing folks. What I'm interested in is making sure this never happens again.

We have an opportunity now to address this issue, to address what happened on the 6th. But even more importantly, what led up to it? You know, what are the conditions that brought us to the 6th? That is the opportunity we have. You know, we have to move forward as a country, but unity requires proof (ph) and progress requires accountability. And that's what today is about.

SCIUTTO: Congressman Jason Crow, it's good to have you on this morning. Thanks very much.

CROW: Thank you, Jim.

SCIUTTO: And we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)