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Inside Politics

Manchin Kills Dems' Dream of Nuking Filibuster; VP Harris Makes First Trip Abroad Amid Immigration Crisis; Trump Returns With Same 2020 Election Lies. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired June 07, 2021 - 12:00   ET

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

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ANNOUNCER: INSIDE POLITICS with John King next on CNN.

[12:00:00]

JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everybody and welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King in Washington.

Donald Trump returns to the big stage and goes all in on his big lie. Liz Cheney likens it to Chinese Communist propaganda. But most Republican leaders are, sadly, silent.

Plus, the first foreign trip for the Vice President Kamala Harris and an incredibly difficult challenge. Right now, she's in Guatemala to address the migrant surge at the Southern border.

And the Democrats Senator no stalls to Biden agenda. Joe Manchin says he will not vote for big elections changes. He will not eliminate the filibuster. Progressives are furious.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN (D-NY): Joe Manchin has become the new Mitch McConnell. He is doing the work of the Republican Party by being an obstructionist just like they've been since the beginning of Biden's presidency.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: With us today to share their reporting and their insights. Kaitlan Collins, our CNN Chief White House correspondent; Olivier Knox, National Political Correspondent for The Washington Post; Brittany Shepherd, White House Correspondent for Yahoo News, and Melanie Zanona, Congressional Reporter for Politico.

And Melanie Zanona, let me start with you. Joe Manchin, over the weekend, making clear a, lot of people in this town have thought what's his play, what is he waiting for, when will he give? It appears he won't.

You don't write an op-ed in the hometown newspaper, "The Charleston Gazette," "I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening vines of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act. Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster." Pretty crystal clear there.

MELANIE ZANONA, CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER, POLITICO: Yes, not a big surprise, still a big blow for Biden's agenda for voting rights. And I would say, more broadly, this is a crusade against the idea of partisanship. And so that should be a red warning sign to Biden and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill that he's not going to just go along necessarily on an infrastructure bill that doesn't have Republican buy-in.

So, this is obviously starting to fuel some tensions inside of the Democratic Party right now that had been near boiling point, but I expect we'll start to see it boil over even more.

KING: And so, Kaitlan Collins, you can put up the list - voting rights, the minimum wage, student loan relief, Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, immigration, scope of infrastructure, gun background checks, that's just part of the list of the tensions within the Democratic family.

The President has had a strategy, I'm going to do COVID relief, I'm going to do a vaccine rollout. I'm going to go one at a time. And I'm going to let all these other things play out over there. At what point does he have to say I'm the leader of the party, this is what we're going to do.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I think that's the big question that everyone is looking at, because of course, the question inside the White House and the frustration that they have with Manchin, and some of the other moderate Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema is that this is really potentially imperiling a major part of their agenda, and what is this going to look like?

And, when it comes to the infrastructure talks that are happening right now or not really happening, they're basically on the verge of collapse, that's like a big thing for the White House because they thought this is something they were going to able to get a cohesive group around.

But also, when it comes to voting rights, you saw President Biden make those impassioned pleas from the White House talking about this, and the idea that it's not going anywhere, it's essentially dead on arrival, has been kind of a known quantity for months now.

Manchin has made clear what his position on this is. But I think everyone kind of thought, Well, if it became dire enough, maybe he would change his mind. He's obviously making very clear it's not going to change.

BRITTANY SHEPHERD, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, YAHOO NEWS: Well, Kaitlan - I'm sorry, that punch line (ph) comes a little bit because they're also thinking about the midterm elections. Look at West Virginia, Trump wins by something odd of 40 points. In 2018, Manchin win by three or four points. And Biden knows that we are 50-50 right now. You lose one seat progressive ideas are done for at least two to four more years. So it's how much can the White House be willing to give up now to save later down the line, and they're really hard pressed to figure out where they go from here.

KING: And look, it's a hard thing to manage, so let's not understate the challenge. You've got four or five votes margin in the House of Representatives, largely progressives, but some vulnerable seats there as well. You come over to 50-50. Senate. So whether you like Joe Manchin or not, he has this power.

So the President, I said, is tried to walk a fine line. Essentially saying, I know there's these - all these disagreements, but we'll figure it out eventually.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm a fairly practical guy. I want to get things done. I want to get them done consistent with what we promised the American people.

I'm prepared to negotiate. When I ran I said I wasn't going to be a Democratic President. I'm going to be a President for all Americans. And what the bottom line here is, we're going to see whether we can reach some consensus on a compromise.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: He gets the math Olivier and he gets the calendar. He lived through the Obama years where essentially President Obama had two years to govern. Then the Republicans took back the House, in the first midterm they took back the Senate after he was reelected in the midterm after that. So how does he manage this?

OLIVIER KNOX, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, WASHINGTON POST: Well, especially because progressive anger really is bubbling over and spilling over on several fronts. It's not just impatience with the infrastructure talks where they think that the Biden administration is falling back into 2009 trap of talking with the Republican Party that doesn't really actually really want to reach a deal.

[12:05:00]

They actually got really ticked off, mostly behind the scenes, with Biden for not embracing the voting rights stuff much earlier in his administration. The nationwide - the coast to coast Republican effort to rollback, to add new restrictions to the voting practices that they blame for Trump's defeat in November, that's been going on since just after the election.

A lot of progressives are very unhappy that Biden didn't come out and make those impassioned comments about voting rights, but he didn't wait too late. So you're seeing all these progressives publicly attack Joe Manchin, not a big surprise. He's - Manchin has embraced the lightning rod rule, but it does complicate the math for the White House.

What do they go with next? Do they throw a progressive to SOP, knowing that it'll go down? I don't know that they've resolved that that question.

KING: And the Biden reflex is to have another conversation today with Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia. Now, again, a lot of progressive say, why are you wasting your time? This is what they did to Obama. They're just running out the clock, sir, please give this up.

But the President would say, if I'm in the end, going to bring Joe Manchin in the room and try to twist his arm, I need to be able to convince him I did everything I could to try to work with the Republicans and they weren't willing. Right?

COLLINS: That will be the issue. Is that, just because they decided to go it alone with only Democrats, they don't definitely have Joe Manchin on board. And so, I do think that is part of the calculus here when you see Steve Ricchetti and Biden's other top aides meeting and talking to these Republicans is they know it's what Manchin wants to see. And the question is, how long does he want to see this go on for.

But I think you can get the sense that the White House is becoming impatient. They're basically saying it publicly in the comments that they had yesterday. But that readout of the conversation with Shelley Moore Capito on Friday, they basically said, thank you, but no, thank you to this latest offer. We're moving on from this.

So they're talking again today. But this idea that she's going to magically come up to a trillion dollars seems very farfetched.

KING: And so how do you settle this is the question. In the old Washington - I was joking with this with Olivier beforehand - I'm old enough to remember, they still cut deals back in those days. But sometimes you actually brought things to the floor, and you voted, and you had amendments, and you saw who had the vote.

So we could put the screen back up again. Voting rights, minimum wage, student loan debt - Democrats wanted to use executive powers there - health care issues, climate change issues, immigration issues. If the president can't sell this all himself and he can't, because of the narrowness of the divides in his party and the narrow majorities, what does Senator Schumer, for example, do?

Does he bring something to the floor to prove, we don't have the votes for the giant house sweeping elections reform? Let's prove it now can we scale it back?

ZANONA: Right. And that could have a couple benefits. Actually, number one, it could potentially cool some of the tensions among the progressive flank, if they see we tried everything, we're putting these on the floor, we just don't have the votes.

It could also help them politically in the sense that they need to have a strategy for walking away from these negotiations. No one wants to be left holding the bag. They can potentially turn this into, see, GOP is obstructionist. This is what we would do if we had more Democrats in the Senate. So they're also looking to the midterm race.

KING: You raised, I think, the critical question, though, do they have a strategy is the question. And again, I don't say it lightly and it's not to pick on the President, pick on anyone. This is hard. This is hard. You have a divided family. You have progressives who say we have two years, who cares, we have a narrow majority. Bring things to the floor let's vote, let's go big, let's go bold.

And the progressive say rightly so, the Republicans would do it if they had the same math, they would still bring things to the floor and vote. In "The National Review" this week. Matthew Continetti raises this important point. "Democrats agree on one thing alone. They oppose Donald Trump. They're happy he's not president. They don't want him to be president again.

Beyond Trump, however, Democrats are all over the place. The Senate filibuster isn't the Democrats chief obstacle, coherence is. Biden is pretending he has 60 votes on the liberal wish list. In reality, he doesn't have 50."

Now, that's a conservative perspective on the Democrats problem, but they did lose seats. Even though Biden won the presidency, they lost seats in the House. And only because of the Georgia miracle, the Democrats have the 50-50 Senate. They don't have anything to give. And they have a complicated family.

SHEPHERD: And Democrats on the ground are really stressed about this. Talk about progressive get out the vote activists in places like Georgia or in places like Tennessee, where they've realized that they're already hard cap, in incumbent year Democrats are still dancing on the back foot. And they're wondering if the Democrats have a messaging problem writ large. They kind of - voters are kind of scrambling for figuring out what identifies Democrats as Democrats.

There's a recent poll that came out and a recent study that showed that Black and Latino voters felt like they were treated like a monolith by Democrats just in 2020 and are actually not as liberal as people think, more moderate and conservative who see what happens in the south. And because Democrats messages, I would say, not even on point, there's no points to be had, folks in the ground are saying White House you give us something or else we will lose a lot more than four or five, six seats.

KING: And so the point is, and again, you could put the list back up again, on these issues. voting rights is a defining issue for Democrats. Immigration, a defining issue for the country for 25 plus years. The Green New Deal, big for progressives. When do we get the President - does the President who was a Senator and then a Vice President, he's never really been the CEO. When does he say this is how I want to sequence this or does he leave it up to Congress?

KNOX: Sure. That's a great question. I don't know necessarily that we're going to get a lot of Democratic messaging come 2022 about immigration. I don't know we're going - I think what we're going to get is what Biden has done thus far, right. He's going to come out whatever state we are in relate to the pandemic and the economy. Those are the top two issues.

[12:10:00]

You talk to White House aides about any other topic, and they get pretty impatient with you. You ask them about him not doing press conferences, and you hear like, well, we're beating COVID. You ask them about ambassadors, and they're like, we're bringing the economy back.

So you get the sense that they are - that they think - and this may be entirely correct that come 2022 voters will be deciding based on do I have a job, am I making money? And do I - do I need to wear a mask or not.

KING: And a lot of these places, though, Democratic groups would say, we agree with you on those. But if our people can't vote, if they've made it harder for our people to vote, so if that's the one I would look at for the voting rights to see if the President will come up.

Everyone's going to stay with us. Up next, the Vice President's first international trip is a tricky assignment, solve the problem at the root of the border crisis.

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[12:15:00]

KING: An important new look for the United States on the world stage today. Vice President Kamala Harris is in Guatemala, meeting right now with its president to talk about migration, security, and the rule of law.

Vice President Harris arriving in Guatemala City last night literally to a red-carpet welcome. Let's walk through some of the big issues on this trip. Number one, where is she going? America's first woman, first woman of color as Vice President in Guatemala City today, off to Mexico City tomorrow. As she visits these countries, this is one of the big issues.

In the so-called Northern Triangle trying to convince countries slow the route of migration to the U.S. border. These are encounters in April - just in April, more than 178,000 migrants encountered at the border. And if you look at this through recent fiscal years, 2019 is blue 2020 is green, you see 2021 an increasing problem at the border.

So the Vice President trying to ask the countries in the Northern Triangle look 44 percent of the people encountered at the border are coming from your countries, can we please do something? Let's work together to slow this flow. Let's slow this flow. And among the issues, of course, children crossing as well. 10 percent of the unaccompanied minor children coming up as well.

Let's bring into the conversation now our CNN Immigration Reporter Priscilla Alvarez. And our White House Correspondent Jeremy Diamond, who is traveling with the Vice President, is in Guatemala City.

Jeremy, this is a difficult issue. The Vice President's first foray on the global stage. What is she expecting to bring back from this trip - deliverables, progress, if you will?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, so far, the Vice President's team have told us that there will be deliverables out of this meeting here in Guatemala, what they are so far, not exactly clear.

We know that there is expected to be some kind of announcement on the corruption fighting front, and also something perhaps related to a program for Central American minor children and their attempts to come to the United States. But this is the Vice President's first major diplomatic test as Vice President - her first foreign trip, her first foray in - on the onto the world stage.

And it is important, because she came into this office with very little foreign policy experience, but very much looking to burnish her resume on this front. And this trip does indeed present that opportunity.

It also presents a lot of challenges, not only because of the - a ream of problems that count as these kind of root causes of migration, whether it is hunger, climate change, crime, poverty, there's a range of issues, but also because of how she's going to have to deftly address some of those issues while here in country in Guatemala.

Namely, on the issue of corruption there is a huge difference between how the Vice President and her team approach this issue, believing that corruption is one of the root causes of migration to the United States, versus how the Guatemalan governments and it's President Alejandro Giammattei, how they view this issue of corruption.

In recent weeks, before the Vice President came here, there have been all these issues as it relates to rolling back some of these anti- corruption measures. And so they certainly do not see eye to eye on this.

KING: And so Priscilla, help us understand what immigration officials hope that people who do this every day, in the sense that we're showing the unaccompanied children - you'll get the bigger numbers here. Children in CBP - Customs and Border Patrol custody, children in HHS Care, the urgent numbers for the administration standpoint. When you talk to the experts who do this day to day, what do they think the Vice President needs to do to change things in these Northern Triangle countries?

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN IMMIGRATION REPORTER: I think first and foremost, John, it's how do you build up asylum capacity. Over the last few years we've seen this trend from single adults from Mexico to now families and children from the Northern Triangle and Guatemala.

In fact, those numbers that you pointed to, as far as minors in April, half of those children who came unaccompanied were from Guatemala. So immigration officials say how do we build out asylum capacity in these countries so that they can find that refuge in country - at least apply for it in country to come to the United States and then how do you replicate that across Honduras, and El Salvador.

Because, as Jeremy mentioned, they are looking at that Central American Minors program. Again, that is to find a way to have people apply in country before coming to the U.S. and instead of journeying to the U.S. So, John, this is a big issue for officials. We saw it play out in March when many unaccompanied minors came and overwhelmed border facilities.

KING: And so, Jeremy, how does the Vice President and her team handle the politics of this? This is a very important policy issue, but she understands the dicey politics. She also understands - and you can listen to a bit here. If you live in a right-wing media silo, Kamala Harris is supposed to solve the border crisis and the right wing says not so far, listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: President Biden, Vice President Harris have abdicated their responsibilities to keep Americans safe.

MARK MORGAN, FORMER ACTING CBP CHIEF: Look, I've been retired and I've been in the border three times yet our Vice President, the anointed czar for this this mess that we have on southwest border still refuses to go.

REP. STEVE SCALISE (R-LA): If she's the Vice President United States and the President put her in charge of this, Vice President Harris needs to go down to the border and see this for herself, because maybe she would then encourage President Biden to reverse his policies that have failed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: As I said the policy is hard enough, but Jeremy, how do they deal with the politics?

[12:20:00]

DIAMOND: Yes, well this trip certainly isn't happening in a vacuum, John. I mean, the criticism that she has faced from Republicans on this, who have sought to conflate her role in dealing with the root causes with the situation happening directly at the border, that is all very much top of mind for the Vice President and her team.

They have fought over the last several weeks to try and change that perception, and really emphasize that she is focused on those root causes. The trouble with that is that there's not going to be an immediate impact to a lot of what she is trying to do in country here.

A lot of these root causes are long-term systemic issues. And so while they are looking for some short term wins here, a lot of this is going to happen in the long run. And that, frankly, isn't going to do much to stop the kind of criticism and this firehose of attacks that you've been hearing from Republicans who very much see this issue of immigration and migration at the Southern border as a key political issue heading into the midterms.

KING: And Priscilla, to that point, if you follow it up, these are just some of the headlines from this trip. Biden puts Harris in charge of, not just the trip, but the issue. Biden taps VP Harris. Biden taps Harris to handle border crisis. Biden makes Harris the point person on immigration issues amid border surge.

As you deal with people back in the Trump Administration - we could go back to the Obama Administration before that, many of these issues have been with us for years and years and years. Number one, you would think great, somebody high profile and ambitious being tasked for at least a slice of this issue. On the other hand, does that complicate it again, making it all political?

ALVAREZ: Well, the administration has appointed several people in the administration who are looking at this special envoy, Ricardo Zuniga is one of them. But you're right, I mean this - but part of this is political. This is a Vice President who is going to have to talk to these governments to set up some sort of longevity.

So in addressing these root causes, there needs to be government buy- in and that's what administration officials have told us. But also what Vice President Harris is doing here is relying too on her past, and she is bringing in private sector and leaning on civil society. And again, the bottom line reason for that is how do you create longevity?

Administrations change every four years. We saw the Trump Administration take sort of an aggressive, strong arm approach. We have Vice President Harris coming in and offering aid as well as leaning on the civil society groups. So at the end of the day, how do you create a plan that stays in place for more than just the four years of the Biden Administration?

KING: Right. And can you? I think, in the end, can you at least start to change these graphics and the numbers, that's the big challenge for the Vice President right now. Jeremy Diamond, Priscilla Alvarez grateful for reporting.

Up next for us. Back to politics, Donald Trump is back. His big lie too.

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[12:25:00]

KING: Donald Trump is back with the big lie that never went away.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, 45TH U.S. PRESIDENT: That election, the 2020 Presidential Election was by far the most corrupt election in the history of our country. That election will go down as the crime of the century and our country is being destroyed by people who perhaps have no right to destroy it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: The crime here is that the former president keeps lying and that his party keeps enabling him to tell those lies.

The North Carolina Republican Party gave the former president that keynote slot at its big state convention dinner over the weekend. Other party organizations also raised money using Trump's name, which is one of the big reasons they are reluctant to call out his 2020 election fantasies.

Take this tepid answer from the Republican Senator Rick Scott, who heads the fundraising committee for senators, on the question of if Mr. Trump will have a role in the country's biggest Senate election contest. "We both want to take back the majority in 2022," Senator Scott says. "I tell him what I'm doing, and I'd love to get his support."

Joining our conversation Republican Strategist (inaudible); and former Republican Congresswoman from Utah, Mia Love. Congresswoman, let me start with you, and help me, if you can. And that I would like to ignore what he says when he lies, because he's just spewing information that is, A, dishonest and not factual; and B, undermines our democracy when you have somebody with his standing.

But he's doing this at an official party event. The state party is raising money off him, national party organizations raise money off him. What - at any business in the world, if your CEO was running around lying, wouldn't the Board do something about it?

MIA LOVE (R) FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, UTAH: Yes, of course, the Board would do something about it. But this is, of course, politics. I was watching this speech and I got a little bit of PTSD. It was like all of the same anxieties. It was all about Donald Trump and all about how things happened to him and how he was wronged.

Where you could see any former president would out - be out there helping, talking about the future, saying this is what needs to happen. But it was all about him and it was all about how we need to go back and write the wrongs, and it was absolutely just ridiculous. And I really wish - I really believe that the Republicans would do so much better if they just took him out of the picture.

However, I think they're scared, and I think, to be on the wrong side of Donald Trump and his wrath, and I also think that they are doing everything they can to hold on to his supporters. I don't think it's going to bode well for the Republican Party.

KING: It's the supporters' part that they're especially afraid about, because they need them to turn out in the 2022 midterms. You've been through a midterm cycle, you know the ups and downs of off your election turnouts.

But, again, you would like - if you were talking to the portraits at Mar-a-Lago or by himself, you would ignore the things he says, because they are lies and you wouldn't repeat them.

[12:30:00]