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Hundreds of Thousands without Power for Fourth Straight Day in Texas; White House Announces Sweeping Immigration Reform Bill; 861,000 Filed First-Time Jobless Claims Last Week, More Than Expected. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired February 18, 2021 - 10:00   ET

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

POPPY HARLOW, CNN NEWSROOM: Dire critical situation unfolding, as millions face a fourth day of freezing temperatures across Texas.

[10:00:07]

More than 4 million people have been impacted by the state's electric crisis.

Over that time officials are warning these outages are going to continue likely for days to come. Right now, about half a million Texans still don't have electricity because the state's power grid has been overwhelmed by this freezing weather. Some are waiting in long gas lines for hours, forced to retreat to find warmth only in their car. Nearly 300 warming centers have been opened across the state for those that are still without power and the anger is palpable.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are freezing (BLEEP) temperature, we ain't got no (BLEEP) no water, no heat, it is nothing and now we ain't got (BLEEP), everything that we brought here, we don't have nothing, y'all.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The shelters are at capacity. There is no hotels anywhere, even if I wanted to take my kids somewhere to be warm, there is nothing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is stressful. It is very stressful to be in a cold house and if you're in a cold house you're definitely not eating any warm food. And then when you go out, you can't find food.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Wow. At least 37 people have die add cross eight states as a result of the this brutal weather.

So let's begin this hour with our colleague, Camila Bernal. She joins us outside of a power station in Dallas, Texas.

Can you help people watching understand how this is so far beyond winter weather that wasn't expected in the state of Texas? This has become a political fight, this has become finger-pointing that has resulted in very few answers for people who are suffering.

CAMILA BERNAL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Poppy. And people are waking up today, it is the fourth day that they're waking up cold, angry, upset and just looking for answers, because at the moment, so many of them still do not have power.

This is a neighborhood right outside of downtown Dallas. And it all looks like this. It is covered in snow. Even the road is still covered in snow. Here, they don't use salt. They don't have the snowplows that you see in other states. And so it is dangerous to drive in these conditions. But more than anything, it is the power not being available to all of these people.

So the difference between the neighborhoods is that some people have gone into their fourth day without any power, whatsoever. This neighborhood, for example, is having the rolling blackouts. So they're on for about three hours and off for about eight hours, and that is despite the fact that they're right next to one of the power sub plants. And so even though they're right next to it, they're still experiencing those blackouts.

And people are definitely frustrated because this is just ongoing and they're just cold. They're literally freezing. And so moving forward, they want this to be over and they want answers from the government and from the officials here in the state of Texas.

HARLOW: Yes, answers they certainly deserve as taxpayers into the system that is supposed to work for them. Camila, thank you very, very much.

My next guest says the dire situation in Texas is no longer just an emergency, she says it is, quote, clear that it is a disaster. Judge Lina Hidalgo, the highest ranking elected official in Harris County, that, of course, includes Houston. is with me. I'm sure you've been up pretty all night working around the clock. So thank you very much for being with us.

LINA HIDALGO (D), HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS JUDGE: Thank you.

HARLOW: Of course. What is at the crux of why people aren't getting the help they need now?

HIDALGO: At the core of the crisis, not just here in Harris County, but throughout the Texas, is the lack of power generation. So the Texas grid, as it is independent and it is run by ERCOT, we have learned really in a tragic way that ERCOT and the state had not prepared to have enough back-up power to have resilient power supply to face the historic weather that we all really knew was coming.

Unfortunately, this has also led to cascading effects. So, here in my county, folks have experienced now the fourth night without power. Things are beginning to look up on the power side, and I can talk about that. But we are now facing a water crisis, food issues, all sorts of secondary and tertiary impacts of this huge failure that has really led to tragic stories from millions and millions of folks. HARLOW: On top of this, you have told your community that this may not pass largely even when the weather passes. So even after Saturday, when it is expected to get a little bit warmer after that, they will still be facing some of this. Is that the case, and if so, why?

[10:05:00]

HIDALGO: We received reports from ERCOT, from the state on, every day this has been going on, right, Monday, Tuesday, yesterday, saying that generation, new power plants were coming online and that folks could expect to have the power back. Instead, what actually happened is more and more people lost power, consistently, we had about 1.3, 1.4 million homes, which is around 2.5 million people, half of our population here without power.

Now, overnight they finally showed us evidence that there, in fact, are some plants coming online and that power is beginning to be able to be distributed to the community. So right now, we're down to 46,000 homes here in Houston. Obviously, I can't speak for the rest of the state, but in this area of Houston and 33 other cities is roughly, we see that looking up.

The message though is, number one, the power is fragile because of the impacts throughout, and, number two, we now have water issues, hospitals have issues, we have water pressure issues, we're all on boil water notices and folks are having trouble accessing food. We're supporting the community as much as we can with this but we're going to continue feeling the impacts and, of course, we're heading into another night of a hard freeze tonight.

HARLOW: Are more residents in Harris County going to die because of lack of ability on all of those levels to help them?

HIDALGO: I hope not. But the truth of the matter is that we expect to see that death count rise as the fog of war sort of passes. The first responders that are here working with me, that have been working day and night all of these days, they've been too busy, overwhelmed, right? We even had facility lose power so we had to figure out -- a public health los power. So we had to figure out how to distribute and salvage those vaccines, which we were able to do. We've got impacts to industry, so many cascading impacts.

So I believe it is possible that we're going to find out more numbers of deaths. We've got carbon monoxide impacts from folks desperate to stay warm. I hope that is not the case. But it is certainly a possibility.

And you heard the desperation of some of the people here. I know it. The families of many folks who are working to keep people safe are under the same situation. I myself just got power back this morning at my home. We'll see how long that holds.

So if folks want to help, a way to do so is to support the Houston food bank. We know that food is about to become a big issue so I do want to mention that.

HARLOW: I'm glad you did. Judge Lina Hidalgo, good luck to all of the teams on the ground and thank you very much.

HIDALGO: Thank you.

HARLOW: So, this severe weather is obviously across Texas but not just across Texas, throughout the country, it is also causing delays, major delays in COVID-19 vaccine shipments. This as we're learning a new study suggests that Pfizer's vaccine can protect against these variants, including the one first discovered in South Africa. But the CDC director at the same time is warning the spread of the variants could jeopardize the progress we've made.

Let's go to our colleague, Elizabeth Cohen, our Senior Medical Correspondent, to help us understand. Are they saying, even though it's effective, we're likely to see another surge?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. So this gets very confusing, so let's try to break it down a bit. So what they're finding with -- let's take the vaccine first. What they're finding with the vaccine against the variant found in South Africa is that it works but it doesn't look like it works as well as the other variants that have been around. So it works, but not as well. But bottom -- or perhaps not as well.

The bottom line is if you can get a vaccine, get one, because the vaccine works so well against other variants and it does appear to have some efficacy against the variant found in South Africa. But there is not much of that here, so don't worry about it. Bottom line is get the vaccine if you can. Don't focus so much on these variants.

However, let's look at another aspect of this, Poppy, and that is how quickly do these variants spread. And the answer is there are some data suggesting that they really do spread more quickly. There has been data that we've talked for weeks about the U.K. variant and now data coming out about the South Africa variant. So the data is actually coming out of Zambia, because they also have the South African variant there.

Let's look at these numbers that I think really illustrate how fast this variant might be spreading there. So, December 1st through 10th in Zambia, they were seeing about 44 cases per day. On December 16th, that's when the variant was first spotted in South Africa, and January 1 through 10, they had 700 cases per day. So you can see that once that variant got into there, there was an increase in a number of cases.

And if you -- let's take look at this sort of in a graphic form. You had cases in October, November relatively low, and then once that variant was spotted, those numbers went way up.

[10:10:02]

And that is why Dr. Rochelle Walensky and others at the CDC are writing in an article this week saying, hey, these variants could lead to a rapid rise in the number of cases.

So we all have to do all of the things that we've been doing, masking, social distancing. I know there is COVID fatigue. But, unfortunately, these variants are a bit of a chapter two in this outbreak. Poppy?

HARLOW: Okay, Elizabeth, thank you for explaining it to us, we appreciate it very, very much.

Also this, this morning, there is a lot of news, the White House is looking to make big changes to America's immigration system. The Biden administration has introduced a pretty sweeping new immigration bill. It would create an eight-year path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants that are already in the country. Our White House Correspondent Jeremy Diamond joins me now.

They are clearly making this a priority. Past administrations have tried, really to no avail, in terms of comprehensive immigration reform. This is another shot at it. What is in the bill?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, no doubt. And this was a central promise from President Biden during the 2020 campaign, that he would try and tackle this intractable problem of comprehensive immigration reform. On day one, he announced a framework for this legislation. And, today, we will see the president's allies in Congress actually introduce this bill in the House of Representatives.

It is called the U.S. Citizenship Act. And what it does is it talks about an eight-year path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already living here in the United States. It would be faster track for some of those undocumented immigrants, including those who came to the U.S. when they were just children. They would be immediately able to apply for a green card. There is also more funding for immigration judges.

Now, what there isn't in this bill is substantial funding for border security, which is likely to be something that Republicans are going to push for. Instead, what we will see here is investments in Central American countries to try and address some of the root causes of the immigration that happens from those countries up towards the United States.

There are also some changes here to the legal immigration system in the United States, increases in the diversity visa lottery and also attempts to make it easier for spouses and children of legal resident in the United States to actually come and immigrate to the United States as well. There is also some changes in the language of the U.S. Code, stopping to refer to non-citizens as aliens and instead of referring to them simply as non-citizens.

But the bottom line here, Poppy, is that what the president is doing here today is making very clear that immigration reform is a top priority for him. But, ultimately, that is what this is. It is signaling that this is a priority but the likelihood of this getting through Congress with a narrow of narrowest majorities in the Senate for Democrats is going to be a very, very tough thing.

The president did though signal an openness to piecing this together into smaller pieces and passing it that way. We will have to see if that is the route that the White House and Democrats take. Poppy? HARLOW: Okay. We'll watch, Jeremy, thank you for the reporting.

We have a lot ahead, including a terrible jobless claims number just in. It paints an increasingly dark picture of how this pandemic is upending people's lives and their livelihoods. We're going to be joined by one of the key members of the Biden economic team to talk about that ahead.

And also a Democratic member of Congress is also a single mother of three is taking on Congress and her fellow Democrats over the child tax credit, why she says it is unfair to single parents and the changes she says needs to be made, ahead.

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[10:15:00]

HARLOW: Another 861,000 Americans filed for first time unemployment benefits last week. It is a tragic number. It is getting worse and this comes as Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to hold a roundtable next hour on the administration's coronavirus relief package.

Brian Deese is with me, the director of the National Economic Council. Brian, it is really good to have you especially on a morning like this. Thank you for joining me.

BRIAN DEESE, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: Happy to be here, Poppy.

HARLOW: You've got these numbers that keep getting worse and you couple that with more than 4 million Americans who are long-term unemployed and this new research from economist, Peter Ganong, out of the University of Chicago, that says, a lot of these unemployed folks are repeat unemployed.

And I say all of this because I'm wondering beyond direct stimulus checks or unemployment aid, is the Biden administration considering tying your help for unemployed folks directly to vaccination levels? Because what we know as the economy gets better when vaccines go up and then it gets worse when the pandemic gets worse. Is that something that you're thinking about?

DEESE: Well, it is definitely an issue that we're thinking about. As we think overall, we look at the situation and recognize this is a very precarious moment for the economy. And as you said, that unemployment insurance claim number, it is the 48th week in a row that we've seen unemployment insurance levels higher than any week than during the recession and the scarring that comes from people being out of the workforce not just a month or two months but six months or a year. We know the academic evidence says that those people have a much harder road to get back into the labor force.

So we're focused now on how do we provide the full package we need to really get this economy oriented in the right direction.

[10:20:03]

HARLOW: Yes.

DEESE: If we can do that, and we could think about how to transition those -- that support off as the economy and the virus improve, that is certainly something that we're open to. But right now, we need the kind of magnitude of support necessary to really change the trajectory of this economy.

HARLOW: i hear you. The problem is, according to another economist at the University of Chicago, Steven Davis, 42 percent of the jobs lost in this pandemic are never coming back. That is permanent job loss and that is detrimental beyond this year and beyond this pandemic.

What is the Biden administration plan to deal with those that come out of this permanently unemployed? Will you -- are you considering things, like training or education grants, not loans but literally helping people retool what provides their livelihood?

DEESE: We're thinking about this in terms of rescue and recovery, and both of those elements are important. Even as we think about the rescue and this package, the American rescue plan, we are very focused on targeting the particular crises of this pandemic-induced recession.

So, for example, as you say, there are a number of job categories that there may be permanent job loss. There's also the fact that women and parents are being hit particularly hard. So the issues of childcare, paid leave, support to get schools open, are really important to do even in rescue.

But then as we return to recovery elements, absolutely, the focus on making sure that we're not only growing jobs and better quality jobs, higher wage jobs but also training our workforce to be competitive for job categories that are going to be growing coming out of this pandemic because we know, structurally, some parts of the economy are going to grow a lot faster because of changes that we've seen, changes in the way that we work, changes in the way that we consume.

HARLOW: I'm really glad you brought up women, because you know the numbers. I don't have to tell you. 5.3 million American women are not in the jobs they had when this pandemic started. Many mothers have been forced to choose the impossible choice between staying home and taking care of their kids who aren't in school or going to work.

And when you look at those numbers, I know Senator Amy Klobuchar, a number of senators, sent you a letter a few weeks ago saying, what is your plan, and what are you specifically going to do for these women. And I have not heard a specific plan from the administration to get these women back to work. Do you have one?

DEESE: Absolutely. And I've had a chance to speak with Senator Klobuchar and a number of those senators and we couldn't agree more. We need to focus on the crisis we have for parents and for women. Number one, we need to get childcare centers the support they need to open safely, and schools, the resources they need to open safely so that we can get kids in school safely, so we can get parents back to work.

Number two, we need to provide paid leave. We know that paid leave not only reduces the incidents of disease because people would stay home at work, but it helps parents and particularly women stay in the workforce even when they have to take care.

And number three, as we come out of this recession, we need to focus on the skills and training and the job categories that parents and women in particular are overindexed in, and one of those are the care economy. We look at this economy and more than 70 percent of the caregivers, whether it is in childcare or elderly or home community- based care are women. We need to support that industry, which is going to grow in the future, and we need to make sure those are good jobs and high-wage jobs where people are paid the wages that they deserve.

HARLOW: Brian, I hear you and I understand and agree with a lot of what you said, but none of that gets at the crisis right now. Because even when you get their kids back in school and back in childcare centers, a lot of their jobs are gone. And women have made -- we've made so much progress in the last decade, particularly. And there is a lot of concern that we're going to lose all of that for good if there is nothing more specific done.

DEESE: Well, I would just say, very much, the evidence that we're looking at reinforces the core concern. It is not just a parent has to make that devastating choice between staying home and carrying for their kid or keeping their job. It's that when they make that choice, they could permanently set themselves back. Six months or a year out of the labor force means that, permanently, your lifetime wages may be set back.

I think the most immediate thing we can do right now is provide direct relief and get the resources we need to get kids back in school. If we do that right now, we can start to bend the trajectory of this economic recovery in the right direction. But, absolutely, we need to come quickly into the recovery phase and focus on jobs, in the care workforce, in rebuilding the infrastructure of this country, and in training our workers and parents for growing job categories in the future.

[10:25:12]

HARLOW: So, Brian, the American rescue plan, as it stands now from the Biden administration, still does include a $15 federal minimum wage. Does the Biden administration believe the analysis from the non- partisan Congressional Budget Office that doing that would cost 1.4 million American jobs by 2025 and they note that it would lift 900,000 people out of poverty? But do you believe that CBO analysis is correct? And if you do, can the U.S. economy afford that kind of job loss right now coming out of a pandemic?

DEESE: We've looked a lot at the evidence on the minimum wage and this is a place where there has actually been really careful, empirical economic evidence over the course of the last 25 years. And the most careful studies, the studies that really look when we see changes in the minimum wage, what they find is that what you do when you increase the minimum wage is you increase the wages of low-wage workers and there is really a di minimis impact on employment. And that's true even in periods where the minimum wage has gone up during periods of economic weakness.

HARLOW: I've seen those studies and I'm not saying they're wrong but I'm asking if you guys believe the CBO, which is the pre-eminent non- partisan experts who are meant to look at this and tell the American people that is what you're looking at. And they said, look, if you look at a $10 federal minimum wage, you're not going to have that kind of the job loss. But if you look at $15, that is what they estimate. Are you guys saying you think they're wrong?

DEESE: Well, two things. The first is what we believe is that the most careful and serious economic evidence shows that the job impact is di minimis. But, second, also, we have to look at what we're talking about here. The proposals that member of Congress have put forward that passed the House on a bipartisan basis phase in an increase in the minimum wage to get to $15 an hour across time.

And so there are ways that we can do this that make sense and there are ways that we can do this that the academic and empirical evidence show will actually be good for the economy and good for job growth over the long-term.

HARLOW: Brian Deese, I have many more questions, come back and we'll get to all of them. Thanks very much.

DEESE: Thank you.

HARLOW: Okay. Well, ahead for us, they were once political allies, that is over, apparently. Former President Trump is attacking Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Sources say the minority leader is laughing about it. But what does this feud mean for the bigger picture of the Republican Party, next.

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[10:30:00]