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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and the House of Representatives has been in voting mode already this morning. It's one reaction to the election results that Democrats in Congress are trying to speed up the end game of their physical and human infrastructure bills, and make them as relevant as they can to as many voters' lives as they can in the final tweakings. For example, how speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Wednesday that four weeks of paid family leave, which had been negotiated out of the human infrastructure bill, was back in.

On Tuesday, even as election day was underway, they announced a deal on allowing Medicare to negotiate price with prescription drug companies. We're expecting votes in the house today on both the physical and human infrastructure bills by the time they're done, but it's not clear even now if the human infrastructure one will pass the Senate with its universal pre-K and childcare subsidies, more home health aids for the sick and elderly, plus a variety of climate provisions. One reason for the lingering doubt, Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, whose vote is needed, still opposes including that paid family leave.

Joe Manchin: I believe in family leave. I believe people should have that opportunity. Can't we find a better position for this and do this in a bipartisan and in a process that works?

Brian Lehrer: Joe Manchin yesterday. With us now, the Congress Editor for Politico, Elana Schor. Thanks for joining us, Elana. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elana Schor: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: First, can you tell us what's happening in the house right now after these months of internal debate on the two bills? Are they voting right as we speak?

Elana Schor: Not quite right as we speak. Republicans forced some procedural shenanigans on the house in a bid to sort of delay these talks, and they've cleared the first round of those, Brian, but the real issue here is that they don't yet have the votes to pass this social spending bill, what you would call the human infrastructure bill. This climate social safety net, health care paid leave measure, they're just short, and where they're short right now is with centrist, moderates, the more conservative Democrats who are demanding independent scoring estimates.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, for all the media has focused on Senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, is the individual roadblocks, the marquee roadblocks, there are also like a dozen house Democrats, right?

Elana Schor: Yes. Our team has been paying quite a lot of attention to the house folks, but yes, Manchin and Sinema do get the lion share of the attention. I would put it right now at between five and eight centrists after many more Progressives were the earlier obstacle. Between five and eight members are getting into speaker Pelosi's way, but she can only afford to lose three votes.

Brian Lehrer: With an eye on the listeners in our local area, are some of those moderate holdouts or centrist holdouts named Tom Suozzi, Kathleen Rice, Josh Gottheimer, or Tom Malinowski?

Elana Schor: [laughs] Well, let me go through those. Tom Suozzi actually came on board. His main issue was what's called the SALT deduction. That's a Trump-era limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted, which is a particularly huge issue in the tri-state area where I grew up. I'm just giving how incomes and things skew quite differently there. Suozzi got what he wanted. They got that deal. Rice is still kind of an issue, although her main problem was related to prescription drugs and may actually have reached a deal on that, but I would put her as more of a maybe yes than a yes. Your other names were Malinowski, who's kind of in the same boat as Rice, and Gottheimer who is at this point one of the leaders of the opposition.

Brian Lehrer: What does Gottheimer want?

Elana Schor: He wants that CBO score. Plain and simple. He is not satisfied with the numbers to actually project how much this bill will really cost the treasury.

Brian Lehrer: Explain what CBO score means in this context for our listeners.

Elana Schor: Yes. Apologies for the beltway acronym. It's Congressional Budget Office. Now, this is the non-partisan independent budget analysis shop that works for Congress, and their estimates of what bills costs and how much revenue they might raise within 10 years, that's the usual horizon, a decade, are considered the gold standard, and why Gottheimer is so insistent on this is actually a pretty substantive problem. He's worried that because there are specific Senate rules that govern that 10-year window and how things cost that allow this bill to avoid a filibuster. He's worried, Gottheimer is, that the centrists will walk the plank, vote for this bill, that senators will then strip for parks because it doesn't comply with the budgetarial requirements.

Brian Lehrer: On Suozzi, to come back to him for a minute, because you might've given us big news for the tri-state area here. From the north shore of Nassau County in Northeast Queens, Tom Suozzi, former Nassau County executive, eyeing a run for governor, and he had drawn a line in the sand, as you say, requiring restoration of the federal income tax deduction for all state and local taxes. It had gotten capped at 10,000 under Trump. Is that now in the bill that the Democrats are going to vote on later, the SALT deduction is fully restored?

Elana Schor: Fully restored, not quite. When I said he struck a deal, and we have an expert tax and centrist reporter, Sarah Ferris, who works for me, who I'm quoting. She tweeted at 11:54 PM, "I'm told Suozzi is a yes after locking down the SALT deal with Gottheimer, Malinowski, Sherrill, et cetera. That's a big yes from someone who's refused to publicly commit for months." Now, apologies. I am not as much of a tax wonk as Sarah, so I cannot verbatim relay this deal to you. It is not full restoration. It is delayed, but retroactive, pretty significant restoration.

Brian Lehrer: All right, and the Progressives in the house did not want to vote on physical infrastructure without a deal with the Senate on human infrastructure because they didn't trust that Manchin and Sinema would ever let human infrastructure pass on its own. Did the Progressives back down on that to enable today's house votes?

Elana Schor: Backing down might not be the word. They really stood firm for a while, Brian, but the issue here is that what I discussed about Gottheimer and his concerns about Senate rules. Essentially, Progressives realized they would have to hold this infrastructure bill for months and months longer. We literally might not see a house Senate agreement on the human infrastructure social policy bill until 2022.

As far as backing down and just sort of seeing reality, Progressives in the house scored big twice in September and October. The President of the United States came to the hill and did not try to force these guys to vote on infrastructure, and that was exactly what house progressives wanted, but at this point, they have to accept reality and realize, especially after Virginia, they need to put up a legislative win on the board, and infrastructure was just going to be ready sooner.

Brian Lehrer: Elena Schor with us, Politico's Congress editor. As the house of representatives is in voting mode this morning, a quick turn for Nancy Pelosi and her house democratic majority after Tuesday's election drubbing that the Democrats took in a variety of places. I mentioned at the beginning of the segment that one of the things that Pelosi did on Wednesday was to put back in the bill four weeks of paid family leave, which had previously been negotiated out, and we have on the line with us activist Debra Lancaster, executive director of the Center for Women and Work, who is an advocate for paid family leave in the United States.

Ms. Lancaster, thanks for joining us for a few minutes. Welcome to WNYC. Do we have Debra Lancaster? All right, we'll get her in a minute. On that paid family leave question, Elana, this morning's article on Politico noted that the election results included white female swing voters in the suburbs swinging wildly to Republicans. Is that a main reason that Pelosi put four weeks of paid family leave back in the bill on Wednesday?

Elana Schor: Yes, that is the main reason. The other main reason being, as our article explored, she's just plain frustrated. She has watched the house's goals and priorities get chipped away, and that's kind of a traditional house senate dynamic, but she figured, "Why not give my members to vote on something they fought for?" So she put it back.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I think we have Debra Lancaster, executive director of the Center for Women and Work. Hi, thanks for giving us a few minutes. What do you make as an advocate for paid family leave of that being negotiated out and then suddenly being put back in?

Debra Lancaster: I'm actually the director of Center for Women and Work, and we focus on research, but we are also proud advocates of paid family leave because it's an evidence-based policy, and I think that having it put back in is just demonstrative of how popular the paid family leave, the idea of paid family leave is, and also decades and decades of advocacy for paid family leave. States have led on this issue. It's been left to states to lead, and so I think there was a lot of pressure to put something in there as a starting place.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a take on the nature of the paid family leave that is in the bill? There are different ways to do it. It could be a straight federal government benefit. It could be that workers and employers contribute out of their payroll checks and then can draw on it. I think that Trump version had a deduction from your eventual social security draw for when you retire. What kind of paid family leave is this, and how much do you like it?

Debra Lancaster: I actually don't have the details on that. I could talk to you a lot about New Jersey's paid family leave program. I'm not even sure that they're all mapped out, but some of the states that have led with policies, there's about nine different states that have paid family leave. For example, with New Jersey, it's completely funded by employees.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play that Joe Manchin clip again from yesterday, Debra, and ask you, and then I'm going to ask Elana from Politico for a political reality check. This is why Joe Manchin does not support paid family leave in this bill.

Joe Manchin: I believe in family leave. I believe people should have that opportunity. Can't we find a better position for this and do this in a bipartisan and in a process that works?

Brian Lehrer: Debra, I don't know if you follow that kind of thing from your perch at Rutgers, but do you think there could be a bipartisan paid family leave in the United States Congress the way it is?

Debra Lancaster: I think my political colleague might have a better sense of that. I'm hopeful that we could have a paid family leave policy that was bipartisan. We're the only country, as it stands, the only wealthy country without one. It is something that's quite popular across the aisle. Everyone needs to care for a child or an aging parent at some point in their life. I think it's very much an issue that could be a political issue here. I am hopeful that there will be one in this country at some point.

Brian Lehrer: When did New Jersey get its state program? Was it under Chris Christie by any chance? Is it a bipartisan idea in New Jersey?

Debra Lancaster: It did pass under Corzine and began implementation largely under Chris Christie, but it was passed under the Corzine administration. That was enacted in 2009. It was expanded last year to being 12 weeks and wage replacement up to 85%. Because what we do know about these programs is that they are able to reach their full promise of supporting families when they are longer in duration and a relatively high wage replacement. That’s when it really benefits low-wage workers the most. That's, of course, who these policies help the most because they are the ones with the least access to employer-sponsored paid family leave.

Brian Lehrer: Passed under Corzine, expanded under Murphy. Debra Lancaster, executive director of the Rutgers Center for Women and Work. Thanks for a few minutes.

Debra Lancaster: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Brian Lehrer: Elana Schor, Congress editor for Politico. We're almost out of time, but let me throw that same question at you after the Joe Manchin clip. He doesn't want paid family leave in this bill, which is only going to be voted for by Democrats. He wants it separately in a bipartisan bill, but the Republicans vote 100% no on any Democratic social program bill about as far back as I can remember. Is there a real world in which Manchin's bipartisan paid family leave bill could exist?

Elana Schor: Yes and no. I'll start with the no, which is we're about to head into a midterm year. The political incentives are going to be to not work together. That's simply how the even midterm years work, unfortunately, in this country with their elections. As far as the yes, this was a major cause for Ivanka Trump, Marco Rubio, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski. I just listed off some Republicans who want to have substantive conversations about bipartisan legislation on this.

There's a reason that the former Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, was calling Republicans because some of them do want to have that conversation about this but not on this bill, obviously. If I had to guess, Brian, I would say the only climate in which that happens is Republicans take that part of Congress in 2022 when there's more incentive to get bipartisan on it in 2023.

Brian Lehrer: Elana Schor, Congress editor for Politico. Thank you for joining us. I know it was on short notice this morning, so double thank you. We really appreciate it.

Elana Schor: Happy to.

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