Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

Senate Debating COVID Relief Bill Ahead of Vote-A-Ram; Mississippi Governor Defends Lifting Mask Mandate; U.S. Economy Adds 379,000 Jobs in February, Unemployment Slips to 6.2 Percent. Aired 10- 10:30a ET

Aired March 05, 2021 - 10:00   ET

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

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN NEWSROOM: Trillion dollar COVID relief package, as millions of Americans sit on the edge of a benefits cliff.

[10:00:07]

Democrats are racing to pass the bill with crucial unemployment and food stamp benefits set to expire in just days after GOP attempts to run out the clock, they fell short. Democrats are expected to pass the stimulus bill this weekend, and Republicans are first expected to force a series of votes designed to exploit divisions within the Democratic Party but they do seem to have the votes there among the Democrats.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): It is our job to hasten the day, when Americans can go back to work, our country can go back to normal, our economy can come roaring back. We can reduce that awfully high actual 10 percent unemployment. That is what the American rescue plan will do.

SEN. MITCH MCCONELL (R-KY): This isn't a pandemic rescue package. It is a parade of left-wing pet projects that are ramming through, they're ramming through during a pandemic.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Well, that deep divide comes as jobs report today offered some reason for optimism. The U.S. economy recovered 379,000 jobs last month as the unemployment rate inched down to 6.2 percent. It is a positive signal for the labor market but the nation is still in total down nearly 10 million jobs one year into the pandemic, those jobs have not come back.

Let's go to CNN's Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju on Capitol Hill. Manu, this dramatic reading of every word of the bill over hours last night didn't delay anything, right? It seems like Democrats outplayed Republicans here. It will actually be a shorter debate on all of this and get to a vote quicker.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Ron Johnson, if he wanted to, Jim, he could have forced votes to start late into the night tonight. But he did not object at 2:00 in the morning when after the reading of the 628-page bill that lasted more than ten hours at the request of Ron Johnson, Democrats had reached an agreement among themselves to actually begin voting at noon today.

Ron Johnson was not on the floor to object. So, as a result, we're going to start to see a marathon series of votes start quicker than what was initially anticipated. But the ultimate question is how long will it go. That is something that is just not known at the moment.

The first effort will be just in a matter of within the next couple of hours, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Senate Budget chairman, plans to push forward an effort to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. There he is on the floor arguing that right now. But that effort is almost certain to fail.

Now after that, that will begin the series of amendments that Republicans mostly are planning to push in an effort to gut the bill, to change the bill, to derail bill, potentially to try to get at least one Democrat to support their effort in order to change some of the elements here and upset that very delicate balance of Democrats who need to have to keep their moderates and progressives together and push the bill out of the chamber by a simple majority vote.

So a lot is ahead in the day in the law (ph) at stake, because this $1.9 trillion bill covers virtually all as aspects of the economy. It raises -- it would provides direct stimulus checks of $1,400 for individuals, provide money for schools, for vaccines, extend jobless benefits that will start expiring on March 14th. So, so much is riding here.

Republicans think this is unwieldy and too expensive and not necessary, but Democrats at the moment confident that they'll get this passed. But when will they do it and will anything change in the next day, big questions ahead, Jim.

SCIUTTO: And, Manu, it is amazing. As you watch that live picture from the Senate floor there, it was almost two months ago almost to the day you had insurrectionists in those seats there in the midst of it all. Manu Raju, thanks very much.

Well, in Mississippi now, that state seeing a slight uptick in new COVID-19 infections over the last four days, recording more than 400 new infections just yesterday. Despite that, the governor, Governor Tate Reeves, is defending his decision to immediately lift the state's mask mandate.

CNN's Ryan Young is in Jackson. Ryan, Dr. Anthony Fauci says we can't pull back the restrictions now until the number of cases falls far below where they are now. That is what the doctors say about this. I'm just curious, when you meet folks in Mississippi, do they support this and do say, they themselves, will continue to wear a mask? What are you hearing?

RYAN NOBLES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is really a mixed bag when you talk to folks. Because some people have been really hurt by this pandemic and they're hoping this sort of stimulates the economy, especially on main street.

Right now where we are, you could see this mass vaccination center here. The National Guard is actually helping to run this with the Mississippi Department of Health, and it just opened in the last five minutes or so. The lines have been longer than they have been. The people stay in their car, they get the shot and, of course, we've seen them then sit in the car to make sure they don't have allergic reactions.

But that is a good question that you asked, Jim.

[10:05:00]

We're going to walk this way to show you what people sort of have been dealing with when it comes to this pandemic, especially business owners. So we found a business owner who is here, who is just outside of this vaccination area. We're going to ask him about what business has been like since the pandemic started.

Look, a lot of conversation about Mississippi and no-mask rules. What is your business going to do in the next few days when it comes to people showing up?

CHRIS RENFROE, MISSISSIPPI BUSINESS OWNER: Well, we're going to require employees to still wear their mask. We're also going to ask that our patrons still wear their mask also. Anything you can do to cut down on the virus is -- is, you know, valuable to all of us.

So we're just blessed to be able to stay in business it started. Everything has changed. The procedures changed a little bit. But as far as everybody doing their part to help combat this is very important and that is what we're going to try to do also.

YOUNG: Let's forget politics for a quick second. I'm sure you have other friends who are in business like yourself. How tough has this year been for small business owners like yourself to deal with this pandemic?

RENFROE: There is a lot of businesses that aren't going to make it. As far as their concerned, their lives have changed forever. Again, like I said, we have been blessed to have been able to stay open since March of last year when everything started. Again, we cut out our dine-in and we've been takeout only. But, recently, we've started opening up to 20 and 50 percent of our capacity. So, again, we've been blessed to be able to keep moving.

YOUNG: I have got to leave you but I want people to know the name of your place. What's the name of this place.

RENFROE: This is Crawdad Hole in Jackson, Mississippi.

YOUNG: And what's the food?

RENFROE: We have crabs, we have crab legs, we have shrimp, a little bit of everything.

YOUNG: Perfect, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

So, obviously you could hear that they're going to make some changes, of course, with people with the mask. They have rides that go down the way here sometimes with people wanting to stand out here. But, again, they are worried about the idea that if people are not wearing masks or doing social distancing, it could affect their overall business if they were to have to shut down again if people are getting sick.

So, Jim, you understand, businesses are sort of caught in the middle.

SCIUTTO: I hear you. Well, now I want to get crawdads, Ryan. Not fair, but --

YOUNG: You know you will.

SCIUTTO: If you do it, do it safely. Thanks very much.

Well, some small businesses in Texas say it is too soon to drop the mask mandate. The Texas Restaurant Association is encouraging those who eat out to continue to wear a mask and show respect and patience.

CNN's Ed Lavendera has more.

ED LAVANDERA, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Jim, as business owners, especially small business owners here in Texas, are bracing for the end of the mask mandate next week and the full reopening of the Texas economy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott continues to defend his push, saying that this is a choice of personal responsibility and that it is time to lift all of these restrictions on the economy, because the hospitalization rate has dropped significantly, even though in Texas, it remains one of the highest rates in the country. The governor says it is time to do all of this.

But, essentially, from the small business owners that we've heard from in the recent days, they feel like the governor has abandoned leadership on this question and essentially put small business owners in the position of trying to control the spread of the coronavirus here in this state, as they're the ones that are left to decide whether or not there will be a mask mandate inside their individual stores.

So, because of that, many people that we have talked to say they are extremely concerned about what it is like next week to deal defiant customers who no longer want to wear a mask in their stores.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE NGUYEN, BUSINESS OWNER: What he's done is he's put the burden on the business now.

Instead of being a leader and uniting us and helping us get past this once and for all, he's created a vision.

LAVANDERA: Do you think mask wearing has kept the pandemic from getting worse? MISSY HERRING, BUSINESS OWNER: No. Everybody that I know who has been sick, they wore their mask faithfully, faithfully. I've never worn the mask. I don't have people come in my store wearing the mask. I'm not sick.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAVANDERA: As you heard there at the end, it is important to point out that the governor does have a great deal of support, people who believe that this is a question of individual responsibility. But as we've seen over the last few days, there is a great deal of concern, especially among local leaders in the big cities across the state who are now mostly Democrats, kind of feeling like they're fighting against a Republican governor here.

But a lot of the local officials are essentially urging people to ignore what the governor is issuing, this new executive order, and urging people to continue to follow the restrictions and to follow the health guidelines, including wearing a mask. Jim?

SCIUTTO: I mean, you really put the onus on the small business owners. Ed Lavendera, good to have that story.

Turning now to the latest controversy surrounding New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, his handling of COVID-19 deaths in the state's nursing homes.

[10:10:00]

According to reports in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, senior aides to the governor rewrote the July 2020 State Health Department report to downplay, decrease the reported number of COVID- 19 deaths in nursing homes and had already been concealing those numbers similarly for months.

CNN's Athena Jones has been following the story. So, Athena, tell us, how, what numbers did they downplay there and how is the governor's office explaining that?

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Jim. Look, the problems are piling on for Governor Cuomo. The New York Times spoke to six people with direct knowledge of this. This all started with the report last summer by the state's department of health focused on COVID-19 deaths in long-term care facilities.

Now, the original version of that report, which was not released to the public at that time, it listed the number of nursing home deaths at nearly 10,000. But The Times and The Wall Street Journal say senior aides to the governor rewrote the report cutting the number of deaths in those facilities nearly in half. Now, that meant the state was not counting nursing home patients whose conditions worsened, they were transferred to hospitals and died there.

Now, the tension over the death count goes back to last March when the governor issued an order that prevented long-term care facilities from turning away any patients who have been treated at hospitals for COVID-19. Critics say that that policy added or helped fuel the spread of the virus in those facilities.

Now, Cuomo has said that he was following federal guidelines and that long-term care facilities should have not received parents back if they were -- not equipped to handle them.

In response to these reports, the special council to Governor Cuomo said, the out of facility data was admitted after DOH, the Department of Health, could not confirm it had been adequately verified. This does not change the conclusion of the report which was and is that the March 25th order was not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities.

The state department of health is also responding saying, while early versions of the report included out of facility deaths, the COVID-19 task force was not satisfied that the data had been verified against hospital data, and so the final report used only data for in facility deaths, which was disclosed on the report.

They went on to say, DOH, was comfortable with the final report and believes fully in its conclusion that the primary driver that introduced COVID into the nursing homes was spread, brought in by staff.

Now, we know that in January, the state attorney general released a report saying that the administration has severely undercounted deaths in these facilities. That prompted Governor Cuomo to release the complete data just in the last few weeks.

And at that time, he claimed that it had been held, this data had been held back out of concerns about an investigation by the Trump administration.

And one last thing here, we know the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn are looking into how the Cuomo administration handled this data. Jim?

SCIUTTO: Okay. So as you well know, there is also now investigation into alleged sexual harassment by the governor. One of his accusers, there are three of them now, has described now in great detail her interactions with him. What have we learned that is new here?

JONES: Right. This is from Charlotte Bennett, his second accuser, a former aide. We know that she was not satisfied with the governor's apology on Wednesday. She has called his behavior predatory. She said more about that on CBS. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLOTTE BENNETT, GOV. ANDREW CUOMO ACCUSER: He is a textbook abuser. He lets his temper and his anger rule the office, but he was very sweet to me for a year in the hopes that maybe one day when he came on to me, I would think we were friends or that it was appropriate or that it was okay.

(END VIDEO CLIP) JONES: Now, when reached for a comment this morning, the governor's office said they won't have another statement. They referred us back to that Wednesday apology. And, of course, the question here is how much does this raise the stakes for the governor and will his other two accusers come forward with television interviews like this one. Jim?

SCIUTTO: Good to have you following that, Athena Jones, thanks very much.

Well, did members of Congress knowingly or unknowingly help insurrectionists on January 6th? Well, federal investigations are now looking into communications between lawmaker and rioters before and on that day.

Plus, the brother of George Floyd speaks with CNN days before jury selection gets underway in the trial of the former officer accused of killing Floyd. We're going to hear his brother in his own words.

And ever wonder what things will look like when every adult is eligible for the COVID vaccine? We're going to take you to one Arizona community where that is already a reality, those lucky folks.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:15:00]

SCIUTTO: Well, hiring surge last month as the U.S. saw a drop in COVID-19 infections, as well as increased vaccinations, above 2 million a day, the first monthly jobs report of the Biden administration shows the U.S. added 379,000 jobs in February, nearly twice what economists have forecast. The unemployment rate inched down very slightly to 6.2 percent.

That number, we should note, does not include people who have completely dropped out of the work force.

[10:20:01]

Joining me knew is Heather Boushey, she's a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Thanks for taking the time this morning.

HEATHER BOUSHEY, MEMBER, WHITE HOUSE COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS: My pleasure.

SCIUTTO: So, first, let's look at those numbers today. Listen, it is good news. It is higher than expected. And I'm not saying it solves all of the employment problems out there, but you have Republicans united and even a couple of Democrats who look to trim the full scale of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package. What do you say to folks who say, listen, things are getting better, this is much money to spend right now?

BOUSHEY: Well, so it is good news today that a lot of folks got a job. But we continue to see that we are down more jobs than in the darkest days of the great recession. So about 9.5 million jobs lower than where we were this time last year, and that is greater than the 8.7 million jobs we lost during the great recession in its darkest moments.

So, we remain in an economy that is still in trouble in terms of the labor market, so we're not out of the woods yet.

SCIUTTO: You have Wall Street already worried about the danger of inflation. You see some of that in the bond markets, et cetera, regardless, I mean, that is something to think about later in the year. What do you if you find yourself, after spending all of this money, the administration finds itself with an inflation problem by the end of this year?

BOUSHEY: Well, here is the thing. We have to get this pandemic under control and we need to make sure that we get -- continue to get money out to these families and businesses to weather this crisis in the meantime and that is going to take resources. That is what the American rescue plan is all about.

We have heard Chair Powell over at the Federal Reserve comment time and time again that the goal is to have a 2 percent inflation rate over time. And so if it bumps up a little bit, that will probably be okay. We'll be able to manage that. I mean, so these are issues that we need to watch.

But the crisis in front of us remains, the 4 million folks who have been out of work and searching for a job for at least six months, it remains the high unemployment that we see especially in communities of color. We need to pull our economy out of this challenge.

SCIUTTO: You have an ambitious agenda, next up, Pete Buttigieg is already talking about this, a big infrastructure plan. Again, we're talking in trillions of dollars. I just wonder, are you going to have the legislative muscle even among Democrats to get something that big passed after passing something this big?

BOUSHEY: Well, you know, time will tell. But we know, as President Biden likes to say, we need to just not build back but we need to build back better. So, addressing the crisis in front of us is step one, but then we need to make sure that we are those jobs of the future that are good jobs, that pay a middle class salary and the provide opportunity for folks all across our economy.

And on top of that, we have a lot of unmet need. 2020 has shown us in so many ways the fragilities across our economy and our society. And so what comes next will be focused on addressing those.

SCIUTTO: You mentioned good wage jobs, minimum wage did not make it into this bill, the Senate parliamentarian ruled against this. I just wonder, you got the House, you got the senate, you got the White House, Democrats do. Not clear how long you do. You haven't had that a while. Did you whiff on a minimum wage?

BOUSHEY: Whiff, interesting term. So I believe that it is going to come up again for a vote today as a part of the vote-a-rama that's happening in the Senate. Certainly, this remains an important priority for the president and raising the minimum wage could not be more important in a year after, which we've seen how essential so many millions minimum wage workers are to our economy and our society. Those are the workers that have been still out and those childcare centers and caring for kids and earning low wages or the grocery store clerks or the delivery folks, making sure that they earn a fair day's pay is an important national priority.

SCIUTTO: This is a rare issue where you have at least some potential bipartisan support, though at a lower rate. You have Mitt Romney, Tom Cotton proposing an increase to $10. You have Democrats like Joe Manchin saying they'd be willing to go down from that $15 figure. Would the Biden administration be willing to talk about a compromise on a minimum wage to get it, say, to $10 but not to $15?

BOUSHEY: Well, at this point, the president has remained steadfast in his commitment to the $15 minimum wage. That is what he campaigned on and it is very popular across the country in terms of what people want. You know, and the legislation that has been in front of Congress would have the minimum wage be raised over time. So it is not just going from $7.25 up to $15 overnight.

But it is important to recognize that having this national standard, this national floor for wages is a really important future of our economy. So time will tell where we go with it, but this remains an important commitment.

SCIUTTO: I guess I'm just asking it is the Congress you have, not the Congress you want.

[10:25:02]

And, yes, you would like it get it to $15, but if you can't get it $15, would he accept something lower?

BOUSHEY: Time will tell. I'm not going to negotiate that here for the president. But he has remained committed to this and he has said time and time again that the minimum wage is an incredibly important issue.

SCIUTTO: Heather Boushey, thanks so much for joining the broadcast this morning.

BOUSHEY: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Well, there is another major sign of the growing distrust of the lawmakers in the wake of the insurrection. It just dropped online. Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren released a report on social media post by her GOP colleagues, sitting lawmakers, who voted against certifying the election results, you'll remember, hours after the violent insurrection. We're going to have more on this, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:30:00]