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Biden: Climate Change "An Emergency & I Will Look At It That Way"; Biden Pressed To Declare Emergency As Manchin Tanks Bill. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired July 20, 2022 - 15:00   ET

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

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You don't get to turn it around and the world is counting on us as this is the United States of America. When we put our hearts and minds to it, there's not a single thing beyond our capacity, I mean it, when we act together.

And of all things we should be acting together on is climate. It's climate. And by the way, my dear mother, God rest her soul, say, "Joe, at everything bad, something good will come if you look hard enough." Look what's happening. We're going to be able to create as many or more good paying jobs. We're going to make environments and where people live safer. We're going to make the clean - the air safer, I really mean it.

We have an opportunity here. I'll bet you when you see what's happened here in this cable construction here - manufacturing - you go back and ask all the people who grew up in this beautiful place, what they'd rather had, they want the plant back with everything it had or what you're going to have?

I will be dumbfounded if you find anybody other than for pure sentimental reasons saying I'd rather have a coal plant. I'll end by telling you another quick story, when we move from Scranton, when coal died in Scranton, everything died in Scranton. And my dad wasn't a coal miner, my grand - my great grandfather was a mining engineering, but my dad was in sales and there were no work. So we left to go down to Delaware where I told you where those oil plants were.

But I remember driving home when you take the trolley in Scranton going out in North Washington and Adams Avenue. Within 15 blocks, we didn't live in the neighborhood among the most prestigious neighborhood, in the region, in the town where the Scranton and other good decent people live, there was a - you'd go by a wall that my recollection is somewhere between 15 and 18 feet tall and it went through the, essentially, a city block. And you can see the coal piled up to the very top of the wall from inside. It's a coal-fired plant, a coal-fired plant.

And all of that all - all of the negative impacts of breathing that coal, the dust, reflecting everybody. But it's a time when people didn't know it and there wasn't any alternative. Folks, we have no excuse now. We know it. There are answers for it. We can make things better, in terms of jobs. We can make things better in terms of the environment. We can make things better for families overall. So I'm looking forward to this movement. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. May God bless you all and may God protect our troops. Thank you.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: President Biden there at Brayton Point Power Plant in Somerset, Massachusetts making what he says will be the first of several announcements on executive actions to combat climate change. He announced today that he says he will not take no for an answer. But this comes after essentially getting a no or at least a not yet from Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia on his climate proposals.

Let's bring in now CNN Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny, CNN Climate Chief Correspondent Bill Weir and CNN Senior Political Correspondent Abby Phillip. Welcome to all of you.

Bill, before we get into what the president did not say today about an emergency cannot do because he doesn't have Congress on board. Talk about the significance of what he has announced what he is able to do that we've learned today.

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: It's a relative drop in the bucket of the challenges he really needs to be addressing a few billion dollars for new wind in the Gulf of Mexico, that's great. We are so far behind Europe and the rest of the world on offshore wind. There's going to be a boom there. Cooling centers, that's - he talked more about adaptation, dealing with the nightmare that's already here and people can literally feel it across the country today. That's good.

But he stopped short of declaring a national emergency and the others can weigh in on that. And when you got a coal man in the Senate in West Virginia that says no interest in helping out, you got a Supreme Court that seems ideologically opposed to any kind of regulation beyond reproductive rights, a lot of folks hoped he would who care about this very much, hoped he would throw everything he has on it. He basically said I think my lawyers are working on it.

But he started to get back into what I thought was the most intriguing pivot of his early campaign, which is talking about climate change means jobs. I'm working on a big special report on solutions, the most audacious sort of planet-saving solutions.

[15:05:05]

I'm just back from Iceland and Cambridge and there are so many incredible ideas out there, so much pent up energy in communities like Somerset, in Portland, Maine where they built the Liberty ships, they're dying to build kelp farms that can sequester carbon. People are going to get rich, this is going to happen.

And when it does, no president will have to go fist bump a murderous theocratic in order to get more sun or more wind or gravity or geothermal and local communities will have their own power sources around them that makes sense for them, indigenous energy. It's just a matter of how fast that happen and how much lives and blood and sweat and tears have to be spilled before we all get there.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Jeff, he didn't call it an emergency. I mean, I hate to parse words right now, we - this is an emergency, the planet is on fire as our meteorologists said yesterday. So the messaging I think should take a backseat to what the action is, but he did say this is an emergency and I will treat it as such. Is that a big distinction from calling it a national emergency? Jeff?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORREPONDENT: Look, the President did not - sorry, Alisyn, the President did not formally declare a national emergency. But you could hear there at the end, he is on the cusp of doing so. And his advisers point out this distinction.

Actually, declaring a national emergency allows a lot of funding to come through more than just saying so it also clears a lot of bureaucratic red tape to allow agencies to act in a different way. So one of the reasons that they have not done that formally yet, as Bill was saying, the lawyers are involved, the White House Counsel's Office is going through all of this and this does seem like that is something he is on the cusp of doing.

But I can say one other thing. This sounded much like a campaign speech that Mr. Biden would deliver on the campaign trail. But the difference is that the Senate majorities are so narrow, it is virtually impossible to see how this - anything like this would go through in the remaining three and a half months before the midterm election. So yes, the rhetoric is there, yes, the ideals are still there to do that. But simply the power is not there in Congress.

So yes, they will be taking smaller steps without question and some of these are significant. The White House is specifically pointing to that Gulf of Mexico wind energy farm, which the U.S. has never fully tapped into, which they said could provide power to up to 3 million homes and they are promising other executive actions as well. But as he has always said, executive actions are never as good as law, because the next president can simply erase them.

BLACKWELL: Abby, let's turn to the essential stalemate there in Congress in getting climate legislation passed. Is this an acknowledgment that waiting for Sen. Manchin is futile on behalf of the White House and that this is what they have to do, because they now know that they're not going to get more through Congress?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. It absolutely is an acknowledgement of that reality. I mean, the White House has been down this road with Sen. Manchin quite a few times now, so they understand that continuing to wait is really no longer a viable option on this particular issue. They've told their allies on Capitol Hill to move forward on other priorities specifically on prescription drug reform and also on Obamacare subsidies.

But on climate, the White House put out a statement after Manchin basically put the brakes on it and said we will do what we can from the executive side. So look, I think you would be naive to think that there was really anybody in Washington who wasn't at least a little bit skeptical that Joe Manchin would be the one to broker a major climate change legislation in Washington in this particular political environment. But they gave it a try, it's not going to happen right now with the

majorities where they are. They do need to do something on some other fronts. And Biden, by giving the speech, also is recognizing he has to address climate from a political perspective. There is a portion of the Democratic base, particularly younger voters for whom this is a huge issue. This is a big promise that he made to people and he needs to look like and act like somebody who is doing something - about something that he calls an emergency.

CAMEROTA: Hey, Bill, you had said that this is a drop in the bucket. What else could the President have announced today that would have made a bigger dent?

WEIR: Well, the War Powers Act. He's already used those to sort of nibble around the edges. Everything from when Putin invaded Ukraine, ramping up minerals for EVs, even to increasing production of fire hoses, because there's so many wildfires out west, what a tragic use of the War Powers Act there.

A lot of the people on the climate left says he can go all the way to stopping oil exports to stopping drilling on the continental shelf, to stop investments in all of those sorts of things.

[15:10:00]

Does he have the stomach for that to fight it out? He doesn't have any help from Congress there as well. I mean, it was just announced today that the U.S. Postal Service, Mike DeJoy (ph), the Postmaster General from the Trump holdover, he gave a little bit and now 40 percent of the U.S. Postal fleet will be electric.

Joe Biden even can't get our mail trucks to stop idling and new science is out there all the time that communities that have roundabouts instead of stoplights, infant mortality actually goes down, because people aren't sitting in idling. These little improvements that can be - that happen at every level.

And once communities began connecting those dots, I mean, it'd be amazing if he had the sort of coalition of the Green New Deal, that those were just really statements of values, which he's describing here, which is creating a new fair economy, an industrial revolution 2.0, where we build the oil industry in reverse, put the smokestacks back in the ground and everybody gets rich in a whole new way. But there's an awful lot of already rich people who have no interest in changing their business models and a lot of things in Washington.

PHILLIP: Alisyn and Victor, just to add to what Bill's saying, I mean, he just points out something that's really important to understand here about how President Biden is in such a political bind right now with inflation: where it is, where gas - with gas prices where it is, it is very hard for him to do the kinds of things that would be required to actually make a big dent in climate change, dealing with oil and gas, exports and production in the United States is more or less off the table because gas prices are already almost $5 a gallon. So it's a it's a political Catch-22 that he cannot necessarily will

his way out of, but that's just the reality of the situation that he faces and it will limit what he's able to do on an issue that is, obviously, we're dealing with it right now.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Well, we're about to talk a lot more about that. Jeff Zeleny, Bill Weir, Abby Phillip, thank you all very much.

BLACKWELL: All right. Joining us now is Mitch Landrieu, Senior Adviser to President Biden and the White House infrastructure implementation coordinator. Good to see you again. Let's start here with what we heard from the ...

MITCH LANDRIEU, SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hey, how are you doing?

BLACKWELL: ... doing well, thank you very much.

LANDRIEU: Good.

BLACKWELL: Let's start with what we heard from the President. Called this an emergency three times, says it's an emergency and I will look at it that way. He calls it emergency rhetorically, why not take the step to make this or declared a national climate emergency?

LANDRIEU: Well, first, a couple of things. I hope I look as cool as him one day. I thought he did great today and I thought his speech was very powerful. The President really doesn't have to describe to people in America what an emergency is, people can understand that and I'm from Louisiana; hurricanes, wildfires.

He - I mean, how much more has to happen for people to understand that this is an existential crisis as the President said, what the President illuminated today was not what he's going to do, but what he's done already and the bipartisan infrastructure law, there billions of dollars that are already in play to fight and to address this climate change from redoing the grid to a new clean energy crisis, to cleaning up the environment, to the investments that he talked about today, what's called in the BRIC program to actually help rebuild communities so that they're stronger and can withstand what it is that's coming our way.

So this isn't about what he wasn't able to do in Congress. This is about what's been done already. And he also said today, that He's not waiting on Congress anymore. Unfortunately, all of the Republicans in the Senate and one Democrat have basically stopped the second part of the agenda. But that doesn't mean the President has to stop and so he's going to use the power that is available to him.

As we said a little bit earlier, I think Bill alluded to this, the term a federal emergency is a legal declaration. The President alluded to it today. I think today is the first announcement. You can fully expect more are going to be coming because the President is going to take action and he's not waiting on Congress anymore.

CAMEROTA: Mayor, I want to ask you about Congress, because Senator Joe Manchin, obviously is, you know, key to all of this. And people - well, Joe Manchin himself has said that this is about inflation. He doesn't want to take any environmental action that would add to inflation. But he, of course, is not a disinterested neutral party. He has a coal company. I mean, it's a family company. He made half a million dollars, basically, for the past three years because of this company, as this liberal watchdog group Public Citizen, says Manchin is a walking conflict of interest and what makes it all the more troubling is he's the 50th Democratic senator, which gives him enormous sway over climate change policy. Is Sen. Manchin holding this hostage?

LANDRIEU: Well, let me just say this, that Sen. Manchin vote wouldn't be consequential if 50 Republicans haven't voted against every climate provision that's been produced by this particular president, so it's not Sen. Manchin alone. But be that as it may, the president, the United States said today he's not waiting on anybody. His doors always open if Congress wants to talk to him. He's here. He'll go there. He'll talk to them.

But in the meantime, he's going to use the full power of his presidency to deal with this existential crisis. If you talk to somebody ...

[15:15:00]

CAMEROTA: Yes, but - hold on one second ...

LANDRIEU: ... wait, but ...

CAMEROTA: ... but why are you giving Sen. Manchin a pass?

LANDRIEU: I'm not. I'm not.

CAMEROTA: I mean, he makes money from coal, why are you talking about it?

LANDRIEU: I'm not giving him - I'm sorry, I'm not giving Sen. Manchin a pass at all. All you did was talk about Sen. Manchin when I said he and 50 other Republicans who have voted against this and nobody seems to remember that. So I'd like to remind everybody that the entire Republican caucus has been against this from the beginning as well as Sen. Manchin has the doors always open.

The President simply said today that he's not waiting on Sen. Manchin, other Republicans in Congress to use the full extent of his executive power to make sure that we deal with this existential crisis. If you're living in the West and you're suffering from a potential wildfire or you're living in the South, where I'm from, and you're worrying about another hurricane coming or you're worrying about a drought, we have to get out because this is an existential crisis, number one. Number two, the President has already passed historic legislation, the biggest piece that's ever been passed to deal with the climate crisis and that's in the infrastructure bill.

And as we speak, that money is going out of the door and being invested in communities so they can deal with heat, they can deal with resilience, they can deal with a new energy grid, they can deal with EV charging stations. They can deal with abandoned mine lands, and orphan wells. They can deal with lead pipes, all of those things are in play and we're going to lean in a very aggressive way.

Today was just the first announcement that you saw from the President. And by the way, so that everybody can understand what it is that they saw. The President was standing on the spot of an old coal plant that is going to be transformed into a new economic opportunity and give people of the - that region of the country new hope and he's going to open up drilling. He's going to open up aspects for wind in the Gulf of Mexico. Critical announcement today, others coming. This was just the first step in a process that I think people are going to notice very soon.

CAMEROTA: Mitch Landrieu, we're told we have to let you go. You are a busy man, thank you very much for coming down and to talk with us.

LANDRIEU: Thanks for having me. Good talking to you. Thank you.

BLACKWELL: Thank you.

We're getting new information on what to expect during tomorrow's primetime January 6th hearing.

CAMEROTA: And a bipartisan group of senators just cut a deal to change election laws to make it harder to overturn results, we'll explain next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:21:24]

CAMEROTA: A new proposal on Capitol Hill may turn out to be the most significant legislative response to the January 6 attack on Capitol - on the Capitol.

BLACKWELL: And the bipartisan proposal would make clear what a vice president can and cannot do during a presidential election. You'll remember in 2020, Donald Trump's election deniers mistakenly hope then-Vice President Pence would be able to stop the certification of Joe Biden's win.

CAMEROTA: CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju joins us now from Capitol Hill. So Manu, tell us more about what this bipartisan group of senators wants to do.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, this is nine Republican senators, seven Democratic senators. They're hoping to get 60 votes total on this proposal that split up into two different legislative bills that would actually deal with overhauling the 1887 Electoral Count Act, essentially making it harder to do what Donald Trump wanted to do on January 6, 2021, which was to use that joint session of Congress and simply disregard the electoral results and also his pressure campaign on state officials, including that effort that we saw by Trump allies to provide fake electors to Capitol Hill to essentially disregard Joe Biden's electors and somehow hand Joe Biden - President Trump a second term in office.

What this group try is trying to do here is ensure that the Vice President's role is ministerial that that's only as a ceremonial role overseeing the election results, make it harder, raise the threshold for members of Congress themselves to object to election results and also making it essentially impossible for fraudulent electors to be sent to Capitol Hill in addition to increasing penalties to threats towards poll workers.

One of - all of this says Mark Warner one of the effort, one of the negotiators on this effort telling me that this is part of a push to make it harder to do what Trump tried to succeed at on January 6.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MARK WARNER (D-VA): It makes very clear that a sitting Vice President's role in an election - presidential election is simply a ministerial. Any future vice president cannot, should not, will not be able to overturn legitimate votes of Americans and their electors that states vote.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Now, there's still some time before this can actually become law. We expect this to be kind of a long slog through the legislative process. This will go through these two key committees and then eventually will have to be cobbled together on the Senate floor. All of which could take months to get together potentially wait until the end of the year after the election. So we'll see if they can get it together.

But the moment there are a significant optimism that this bill could get become law given that there's a bipartisan group in the Senate that has come together over this issue, hoping to get through both chambers before the end of the year, guys.

BLACKWELL: All right. Manu, let's look ahead to tomorrow night's hearing, the eighth for the January 6 Committee, maybe the final hearing on the Capitol attack. You've got some new details on what to expect, what do you know?

RAJU: Yes, 187 minutes, it's going to examine what Donald Trump did and did not do, really go through minute by minute as much as they can to explain his actions as the attack was unfolding. According to Committee aides, it will start at 1:10 pm on January 6th. That's when Trump spoke at the Ellipse. He told his supporters that he would go to the Capitol. He did not go to the Capitol, but he fired up the crowd. We saw what happened in the aftermath. It will go up until about 4:17 pm.

That's when Trump tweeted out a video to supporters, telling his supporters to leave the Capitol. And it will detail the press sure that he was under to make clear that the - to actually say something.

[15:25:05] And we expect to hear video testimony, live testimony as well as we

have seen in past hearings, this time detailing what Trump did and did not do as the attack was unfold.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Manu Raju, thank you very much.

Joining us now to talk about everything that's happening is Dave Aronberg, state attorney for Palm Beach County, Florida and CNN Political Commentator, Errol Louis, Spectrum News Political Anchor. Gentlemen, great to have both of you.

So Dave, about this minute by minute accounting of what was happening on - during those 187 minutes that President Trump was MIA, what will you be listening for?

DAVE ARONBERG, STATE ATTORNEY FOR PALM BEACH COUNTY, FLORIDA: Yes, Alisyn. I don't think we're going to get exactly the minute by minute. But I think you're going to get insight from Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews as to what the president was doing or not doing during that time. Pottinger was in the West Wing during all of this on January 6 and so he has unique insights. In fact, he was involved with the issue of deploying the National Guard. He went to the Oval Office to try to get something done and so he can really give some insights.

Also, Sarah Matthews can really be helpful, because she also was a loyal Trumper, just like Pottinger, who has no axe to grind. They didn't stay silent to try to write a book later and make money off this. And she has reportedly previously testified that Trump knew of the violence at the Capitol before he tweeted out that incendiary tweet about Mike Pence. She said that that tweet was like pouring gasoline on a fire.

And because both Pottinger and Matthews had high level jobs inside the administration, it's going to be really hard for Trump to dismiss them as the coffee boy and coffee girl.

BLACKWELL: Yes, Errol, this is a committee that has choreographed the presentation pretty tightly. They've held this topic for the final potential hearing. It's also in prime time. They placed a premium on what they're going to be presenting to the American people tomorrow night.

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: They hired a TV producer to make it seem like a television drama and if that's the case, this is the sort of the series finale, right? This is the grand finale where we see in real time what the president knew and we'll get testimony about what the president knew, what he could have done, what he didn't do and how lives were lost.

Because if you take that same 187 minutes, and you indicate where injuries were taking place, where officers were being ransacked, where lives were being threatened, when the scaffolding was being erected, when people were pleading with the president and with others in the administration to do something for God's sake, it's going to be very damning. And it'll - I think it will really sort of capture what they've been

trying to say all along, which is that this didn't have to happen and people have to be held accountable.

CAMEROTA: Errol, I have a different political question for you. The House has just passed legislation to protect marriage. So you can still get married based on - I mean, you can't be discriminated against - based on sex, on race. Forty-seven Republicans joined with Democrats ...

LOUIS: Yes.

CAMEROTA: ... to pass that. What does that mean for the Senate? Will we see something - will we see bipartisan - will this work in the Senate?

LOUIS: Well, in the short-term, it means that there's still some room and there's some hope for Congress, that there are people who are willing to cross lines, especially in an election year, right? Because what they cleverly did with that was it was not just about protecting same sex marriages, also about protecting interracial marriage.

So depending on what kind of a District you represent, you want to be a little bit wary of sort of lockstep voting against something like that protecting the rights of those who want to be part of an interracial marriage. I think the same logic will apply at the Senate level. They'll have to make a really hard decision about whether they want to alienate LGBTQ of voters, whether they want to alienate those who are really appalled at the thought, as Clarence Thomas suggested that we should maybe look back at some settled law and start taking away people's privacy rights, including the right to have same sex marriages and interracial marriage.

CAMEROTA: So they'll get 10 Republicans to that?

LOUIS: I - well, look, it would be nice to think that they'll at least be a conversation, they'll at least be a debate and they'll at least be a political logic that leads them to say we've got to put some of this crazy politics aside and make sure we're holding the society together. That's really what this bill was about trying to provide a bulwark against a future extreme reaction from the Supreme Court.

BLACKWELL: Okay. One more on this effort to overturn the 2020 election. We've learned from the Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, that the former president called him last week, asking him to decertify the 2020 results in Wisconsin. I mean, it's been, what, 18 months since the inauguration now ...

CAMEROTA: Oh, yes.

BLACKWELL: ... right?

CAMEROTA: And almost two years since the election.

BLACKWELL: And since the election, what does this from a prosecutor's perspective mean? Is there some value for people who are potentially putting together a case?

ARONBERG: Victor, I think it's the opposite. I think Trump may try to use this to say, look, I really believe the election was stolen. I have no criminal intent. I don't think it's going to work though, because criminal intent can be shown in a number of ways. For example, after all of your appeals in court had been exhausted as they were, you can't go and assemble a mob at the Capitol. You can't go pressure local government officials to find you a certain number of votes.

[15:30:03]

You can't tell DOJ just to declare fraud. So I don't think this is a strategy that will work.