The political dynamics in Washington right now are a little strange. There's intraparty drama as Republicans oust a member of their own leadership for her disloyalty to former President Trump. You can't have the Republican conference chair, the Republican Party spokesperson, consistently attacking the leader of the party who 74 million Americans voted for. Tensions are still simmering after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently said his 100% focus is on stopping President Biden. What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition.
to what the new Biden administration is trying to do to this country. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are grappling with their own set of fraught internal dynamics that are limiting Biden's options as he tries to move forward with his ambitious agenda. And all of this isn't exactly the bipartisan Washington that Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail. Biden, though, is trying to turn some of the discord into an opportunity to highlight his own attempts to govern in a way that unites stakeholders. He held a bipartisan meeting with governors about the coronavirus on Tuesday, a session with GOP senators on infrastructure on Thursday, and he even convened the top four party leaders from the House and Senate for the first time at the White House on Wednesday. But is any of this working? Are the divisions within the Republican Party causing real problems for Biden's goals? And if he's forced to move his agenda forward with only the help of his own party, how might factions among the Democrats make that pursuit more difficult?
This is Can He Do That, a podcast that explores the powers and limitations of American government in a time of deep division. I'm Alison Michaels. To get a sense of what's been happening inside the Republican Party this week, I turned to the Post's congressional correspondent and author of the Power Up newsletter, Jackie Alamini. On the campaign trail, Biden often said that Republicans' loyalty to Trump would fade away if Biden were to become president. He claimed that things would return to what he calls normal. I asked Jackie whether Biden's prediction has actually come true. Absolutely not. And this was a huge topic of conversation at the beginning of the Democratic primary. I think a lot of the reasons why progressives were always so skeptical of Biden was because they disagreed with...
the premise of his run for the presidency. His thinking was that, one, Trump was an anomaly, an outlier, not indicative of the state of the Republican Party, and that his quest for the presidency was going to eradicate Trumpism altogether. We are seeing now, in very clear terms, that that's very clearly not the case with this week Liz Cheney's ousting for calling out. the former president for his unsubstantiated lies about election fraud that are really being cemented, that if you are not sufficiently pro-Trump in the modern-day Republican Party, you cannot be a leader in this GOP. You say that many Democrats have been saying this for a year and a half or have realized for a year and a half that Trump was unlikely to go anywhere. But it does seem like Biden is sort of having this epiphany for the first time in a lot of ways right now, accepting that Republicans aren't really going to break from Trump. Have we seen evidence of that from Biden acknowledging that that's a reality for him? Yeah, and it was always sort of a confounding premise of his campaign to begin with, because this was someone who was vice president to Barack Obama, who...
saw extreme partisanship and unwillingness from Republicans to work with him, even in the midst of the financial crisis and when the country really needed government support and intervention. We have not seen Biden explicitly say that he's had a come to on bipartisanship and his ideas on bipartisanship, but I think he sort of facitly acknowledged it with the way he's been handling some legislation. He did support getting the COVID relief package through via budget reconciliation, which meant without any Republican support. He has gone into infrastructure a little bit more optimistically. And his staff has signaled to reporters that they are trying to make more compromises on infrastructure spending. And Biden is still maintaining that he's going to get everything done within the bounds of everyone agreeing. But there's still a very big chasm between where Republicans stand on infrastructure spending versus where Democrats stand. So I want to talk a little bit more about what we saw with Liz Cheney and how that is this example that Republicans are really at a point of sort of complete litmus testing when it comes to loyalty to Trump.
Do we have an understanding as to why Republicans were almost unanimous in this move to get rid of Liz Cheney for refusing to comply with a lie that the election was stolen? What we have heard time and time again is the acknowledgement and the rationale that Liz Cheney can hold whatever beliefs she wants, but in a leadership position, she is a distraction by refusing to stay quiet about Donald Trump's election lies. The argument is that it's a distraction from getting policy made. She's supposed to be a fundraiser for the party, head of messaging, and she can't do that when she is not in line with. the party's messaging. And then there's this talking point that a lot of the Republicans keep referencing, which is that we're supposed to be talking about policies and the future of the party, and she's talking about the past. But what Republicans fail to acknowledge in that reasoning is that the former president continues to relitigate the past over and over and over again, even as there has been no evidence found of election fraud and his claims remain unsubstantiated. And, you know, even now, what we're seeing is the little policy that is being done and made by the Republican Party right now is being...
driven by these false claims as well. A big push that you're seeing by Republican-controlled legislatures across the country are implementing voter suppression laws. And that's coming out of the falsehoods this former president continues to peddle. Is it a testament to Trump's remaining influence that we saw Cheney voted to be removed from leadership today? But you have somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, though she has in the past been productive for committee assignments, she also isn't really loudly being condemned by members of her own party. And in fact, when she tried to form an America First caucus that had some racist beliefs written into the details of that plan.
She hasn't received the backlash that you might expect, and yet we see somebody like Liz Cheney merely advocating for something truthful that has really earned her much backlash from within her own party. Yeah, and even when we look at the outcome of today's situation, there was an expectation that Elise Stefanik would sort of immediately take Cheney's post in the number three position in the party. And Marjorie Taylor Greene's the one who called out Stefanik for not being sufficiently conservative and said that Republican members deserved an opportunity to vote on other potential options and hash this out rather than coronate Stefanik. I don't think we can understate the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene has really become a leading MAGA voice and one of the most... prominent figures of the House GOP conference. Even when we're looking at the first vote that Cheney faced to oust her, there were Republican sources who told us we're familiar with leadership's thinking at the time that Cheney was actually protected by Taylor Greene because at the same time, she was under fire for her resurfaced social media posts that propagated anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and politically violent language. And Democrats were trying to strip Greene of her committee assignments, and McCarthy made the calculus then and there to make a big tent gamble and keep Greene.
on these committees and not kowtow to Democrats' demands. So there was a recognition that from an optics perspective, it would be a toxic look to get rid of Cheney for not being in line with the Republican Party, but to protect Green. So they both were saved that day. I mean, Green ultimately was stripped of her committee assignments, but that was done by Democrats, not by Republicans. And now this time around, you've seen Cheney not survive this vote, but Taylor Greene is still thriving in this party. Are there concerns among Republicans that this...
tilt back or sort of never having left Trumpism and Trumpian politics could be politically damaging for them in 2022? Do they see this as a potential risk? Well, that's the other layer to Cheney's argument. It's not just about keeping these falsehoods out of the bloodstream of American democracy, but it's also about, I think, the thinking that this is a losing strategy, that Trumpism is alienating people. And while...
Some Republicans make the argument that Trump has accelerated the expansion of the GOP to working class voters. You have people like Cheney who are looking at the data and are seeing that it's really hurting Republicans, especially with the swingy, moderate, suburban white women whose support they really rely on. Those are the people that vote in midterms. Those are the people that actually are perhaps the most civically engaged out of the Republican Party's constituency because there are people concerned with getting their kids back to school and they're the ones who are really dialed in and taking care of their families. And the reality is nobody inside the GOP or outside the GOP really knows what the right answer is here in terms of getting more votes, right? I mean...
We have polling, which we now have learned is flawed in various ways. And actually knowing what the right political approach here seems to be an extreme challenge. Right. And I have to point us to this fascinating anecdote that our colleagues Josh Dossi and Michael Shearer pulled out about one of the reasons why Cheney really had come to. It was that one of the party's campaign arms was actively hiding data that made Trump look bad from lawmakers during briefings.
Trump's unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in core districts, according to the full polling results, which at the time was not shown to lawmakers by the National Republican Congressional Committee. They left out a key finding about Trump's weaknesses. And what do we know about why they left that out? We don't know much. We know that Cheney was very alarmed. She let that be known to Republican campaign officials, who had also left out bad Trump polling at a March retreat for ranking committee chairs. Cheney's conclusion, though, according to Dawsey and Scherer, was that party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members in order to avoid...
confronting the damage that Trump could do to Republican House members. It's completely fascinating that a body of people would choose to continue to do something that might actually harm their end results or at least their own goals. How does this loyalty to Trump affect what Biden can actually accomplish? What does fealty to Trump among the GOP mean for Biden's agenda? That we are still seeing play out at this moment when there are weeks like this week going on.
I think the Democratic Party embraces it because they're still figuring out the contours of the infrastructure plan and all of our attention is all on sort of Republicans in disarray rather than the Democrats in disarray narrative that I think the GOP always likes to resort to. That being said, it is a distraction. And instead of the Republican Party working on policy, they are instead debating issues like these. They're spending their time going on cable news shows and talking about inter-party drama rather than actually working on policy. That being said, I think the more that potentially...
The Biden White House sees just how dysfunctional and partisan and polarized these parties might be. It might make them reassess the way that they'll go about getting infrastructure done. There's been a lot of back and forth on whether or not this package will be done through budget reconciliation again, and the White House is trying to get it done in a bipartisan manner. But I think the more and more these dysfunctional episodes pop up while the administration is on such a tight timeline to get so much policy done, that calculus might change. When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI. Trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.
And the reality is, Biden is trying to get a lot of policy done. Up to this point, he's had quite a bit of success relying solely on his own party to move things forward. I asked White House reporter Sean Sullivan if that compliance from Democrats in Congress is at risk of changing anytime soon. Is that unity and enthusiasm fizzling? Well, we have seen it start to fizzle in a number of different ways. While the party generally has remained unified around Biden's legislative agenda when it comes to combating COVID, when it comes to infrastructure, and it's important to point out that within those issues, there are still some pretty serious disagreements among Democrats, but they have largely lined up behind.
Biden's broader aim. So while that's happening, these primaries that we're seeing pop up across the country show how many of the divisions that predated the Biden presidency have come roaring back with more urgency, more intensity and more passion than ever before. So while the party does remain generally unified around the ideas that Biden campaigned on and is now spearheading as president, there are some serious disagreements about who should be the face of the party in the future, what those people should be running on, what they should be saying, how they should be running in future elections. And we're already seeing that play out right now across the country. Yeah, let's focus on the what they should be running on piece of this story. What issues are really most divisive for the Democratic Party at this particular moment as they try to navigate not only their control now, but what they're looking towards in the 2022 election? Well, to begin with, you have policy disagreements among Democrats that I think we're going to see play out in a lot of these primaries. You have differences on health care.
which we have seen debated in the party for a while now. On one side, you have a lot of Democrats who say they want a Medicare for all system, a single payer health care system. On the other side, you have Democrats like the president who say that's not the way we should address that. We should expand the Affordable Care Act. You see differences on climate change in terms of how aggressive to combat climate change. You see differences on the economy and taxes. But in these primaries, perhaps the biggest difference is in the message that candidates want to try to send voters and in who should be the representative of that Democratic.
party message. And that's where we see some of the biggest disagreements right now. Do Democrats want candidates who are more experienced, who are seen by many as more traditional, who tend to be from the political establishment? That's one option. A lot of Democrats see them as safe and tested. A lot of those candidates tend to be white men because white men have been around politics for a longer period of time. But there are a lot of Democrats who see that approach as flawed, as bad. And they want to see women. They want to see women of color. They want to see LGBTQ candidates. They want to see candidates from different backgrounds, younger candidates, millennials. So there's a big debate happening right now about who should carry that Democratic banner and who would be best positioned for...
Democratic victories in 2022 and 2024. That debate is largely unresolved right now in the party. And you've reported on this specifically in the case of an election in Pennsylvania. Can you tell me about sort of the three different kinds of candidates we're seeing in Pennsylvania and how they fit into the broader National Democratic Party? Pennsylvania is a really fascinating microcosm of this debate that we're talking about that's really playing out all across the country. This is a state that is a purple state, a state that Donald Trump won in 2016. It's a state that...
President Biden won in 2020, and you're going to have an open Senate race in 2022 that is going to be yet another test of which party is better positioned to win in the state. And it's a state where you have a lot of rural areas with rural white voters. It's a state where you have a lot of urban and suburban areas with a more diverse population. You have a lot of union voters in the state. You have a lot of different kinds of Democratic voters. And already we're seeing different candidates emerge that are trying to sort of make very different pitches to the electorate. So you have John Fetterman, who is the lieutenant governor.
He is the former mayor of Braddock, which is an old industrial town. And he is somebody who in recent years has been seen as a rising star in the state. And he's got, in the view of a lot of Democrats, a really compelling story to tell. And they see him as a good messenger. He's this tall six foot.
eight-inch guy. He's got a goatee. He's got tattoos. He's seen as somebody who speaks his mind about issues. He's somebody who, in the past, has been a supporter of Bernie Sanders and somebody who prides himself on his ability to speak to workers and even Trump voters. If you don't support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, you should live and work for $7.25 an hour so you can demonstrate how you survive, let alone feed a family on that, because it's just a mathematical impossibility. So I don't know why we're pretending that leaving that alone at $7.25 is okay. I mean, it's great to give stimulus checks. So that's the candidate right now that is seen in the state of Fetterman as the early frontrunner.
But you also have a very different candidate named Malcolm Kenyatta. Malcolm Kenyatta was an early Biden supporter. He is a young African-American, openly gay state legislator. He's talked very, very openly about the economic struggles his family experienced when he was younger. People in Pennsylvania need a fighter for working people. They need somebody who's going to bring energy and clear vision to the inaction that we so often see in Washington as it relates to what working families need. And he's running in this race as well and hopes to spring an upset here.
And then you have a candidate who's not even in the race right now who could really shake things up. And that's Conor Lamb, a congressman who won a pretty closely watched special election during the Trump administration. He's a valid moderate. You know, he's the kind of Democrat that does not like things like the Green New Deal or defund the police. You know, you've got to fight for people's jobs. And it means that although the national democratic consensus, for example, might be.
against doing things like building new gas pipelines to supply energy to power plants in people's homes. Around here, a lot of people get jobs from that kind of work. And if you're really trying to represent the people that live near you, you take the time to learn about them and their job and what it's like. He campaigned very closely for Joe Biden as a candidate last year. He's a former prosecutor, a former Marine. People see him in many cases in the Democratic Party as somebody who is the best bet. So you have different candidates who will likely bring with them very different coalitions in the Democratic Party. And you see three very, very different options that Democratic voters in this quintessential swing state are going to have before them.
year. And yet Fetterman and Kenyatta, the two candidates officially running so far, they've said that they haven't thought out the endorsement of President Biden. What does that say about sort of Biden's influence on the Democratic Party? Well, it's interesting. When I talked to Fetterman, he made very clear that he embraces the Biden agenda, that he's happy to run against the backdrop of the Biden presidency.
That's a refrain I think we hear from a lot of candidates all across the board who are running for the Senate right now, a lot of Democratic candidates. At least they like to run with Biden in the background. But the White House is being very careful right now not to wade into these races. And they understand that there's a lot of sensitivity surrounding these choices that voters have. And I think some of these candidates understand that sensitivity, too. And while they're embracing the Biden banner, they don't want to be out there aggressively trying to bring national Democrats into this race right now. Now, in 2020, different parts of the Democratic Party were able to, let's say, set aside their differences and give Biden these big wins in states like Pennsylvania.
But it seems like things might be a little bit more divisive heading into 2022. Are we seeing fractures in the party really at the state level beyond what we've discussed in Pennsylvania? Is this something that's a problem around the country? Yeah, it is something that is an emerging problem that Democrats are going to have to resolve around the country. We see this pop up in North Carolina, where there's also an open Senate race that Democrats are closely watching. You see this pop up in Florida, where there's a really interesting governor's primary shaping up down there. You have Charlie Crist, who is a Democratic congressman, used to be a Republican, who's entered the race. But there are a lot of Democrats who say, well, hold on a second. We want to see a more diverse field. We want to see a woman, a woman of color. They point to Congresswoman Val Demings as somebody they hope will enter this race.
So it's not just Pennsylvania. We're seeing nationally right now for the Democrats that they're going to have to sort out a lot of these really, really strong disagreements. And the big uniter, the glue for the Democratic Party in 2020 was President Trump. A lot of them said that and openly acknowledged that he united the party in a way that nothing really has in recent years. They put aside their differences because they wanted to defeat Trump. Well, Trump's not around anymore, at least not in an official capacity. And so the question is.
what will happen to the Democratic Party now that they're not united around that common goal. We're talking a lot about electoral politics here and how these divisions in the Democratic Party might play out for 2022. But I'm curious how these divisions and how these sort of battles among Democrats have held up or potentially slowed down the president's agenda up to this point. Well, it's been a challenge for this White House to navigate the disagreements in the Democratic Party, mainly because they don't have a very big margin for error. If you look at the Senate right now, it is literally split down the middle, 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans. The Democrats have the majority.
by virtue of the fact that Vice President Harris gets to cast tie-breaking votes. But it shows you that if even one Democrat disagrees or votes against the White House agenda, assuming every Republican does too, that throws everything off base for Biden and that creates a lot of difficulty in the House. When it comes to the big pieces of legislation, the White House has been able so far to get done what they've wanted to get done. They passed a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill. They didn't get a single Republican to vote for this, but they got their party.
in line behind it, and they were able to pass that. Now they're trying to pass a big infrastructure bill. We're already seeing disagreements emerge among some Democrats. And in the House, you have still a vocal part of the Democratic caucus that is very liberal. It's a challenge for this administration, not just in terms of elections, but in terms of their agenda. So far, I think they feel pretty good that they've been able to work through these differences. But the question is what happens in the months ahead. And somewhat ironically, given Biden's push for bipartisanship on the campaign trail, and since he's taken office, you and I have spoken almost entirely about whether or not he can pass some things only with the Democrats that he has on his side. We haven't even addressed the fact that Republicans are also an option in Congress, and yet he doesn't really seem to be making any headway there. So how has the obstructionism of Republicans affected Biden's approach to his own party, really? It's had a couple of different effects. In a way, it has had a bit of a rallying.
effect, where Democrats see the obstruction on the other side. And many of them say, look, we've got to stick together because of these very narrow majorities that we have, because of the very limited time that we have to pass these things. But at the same time, it's given some Democrats more leverage than they would otherwise have. You look at somebody like Joe Manchin, moderate centrist, Democratic senator from West Virginia, who has become... one of the most influential Democrats because they know that they need his vote. And that has enabled him to make a lot of demands, to speak his mind on certain things, because just one vote could be a difference maker for Biden. So it's kind of been a double-edged sword for the Democrats in that it has rallied the party. It has given some urgency to their task of sticking together. But I think some individual Democrats realize, well, hold on a second. If Biden doesn't get my vote, he's not going to be able to get done what he wants. So I have some leverage here. I can speak out. I can demand things. I can hold out for things. So that's another interesting dynamic that we've seen happen, both on the left and in the center of the Democratic Party right now.
So then, Sean, my last question to you is, how does Biden see his own Democratic Party right now? What does he want to see reflected there? And how does he want to help them prioritize the pieces of his agenda? Well, I think that's one of the most fascinating questions that we're going to see answered in the months ahead as we move toward the midterms. One really interesting development right now is I think that Democratic leaders in Washington are not fully sure yet how to win these races, which one of these candidates is their best bet. And I think that speaks to how wide open this field is, that we're seeing these fields, I should say, all across the country. And why they're so wide open is because.
The coalition that President Biden brought with him was a pretty broad coalition of different democratic factions who said, look, we're not going to fight with each other the way we did in 2016, the way we did in the past. We're going to put those things aside. What happens when they don't put those things aside? What happens when they're not always fighting together against the other side, but fighting against one another? And it's something that Biden is going to have to confront. Right now, what we're seeing from him is a very clear inclination to stay out, at least publicly right now, to not interfere in these races, a recognition that if he does, that could have a significant effect.
As some Democrats have pointed out, it could even backfire. So the thing to watch as time goes on is, does that change? Are we having the same conversation in six months or nine months? Or are we having a conversation about a president who says, look, I've got to wade into this race because we need this candidate to be our nominee or we need to make sure that candidate is not our nominee. And it's not totally clear yet to them what the best recipe for success is here. All right, Sean, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Allison. This has been another episode of Can He Do That? Thanks so much for listening. Can He Do That is a team effort here at The Post. It's produced by Arjun Singh and Sharla Freeland with local art from Greg Matterfold and theme music by Ted Muldoon.
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