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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC good morning, everyone. Next week President Biden will hit his 100th day in office. He has surprised many people with how bold some of his economic proposals have been. The letters FDR and LBJ are being spoken a lot these days. Later in the show, we'll talk about his plan to move the country entirely away from gasoline-powered vehicles and create 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.

That's more charging stations than there currently are gas stations according to one article I read. That's coming up. On Friday, the president disappointed and frankly shocked many progressives by not proposing to raise the cap on the number of refugees allowed into the US in the next year from the historic low that President Trump had plunged it to just 15,000 people at a time of so many refugees in the world. Biden campaigned by sighting our recent history of taking in 125,000. Even 250,000 in a year. That was during cold war. In February his administration floated the number 62,500 refugees for this year.

Then Friday he announced he would keep the cap at Trump's 15,000, but the backlash from advocates, from refugees was so swift and so strong that on Saturday he flipped and said it would be more than 15,000, more than that after all. He explained the initial low number to reporters like this, he said, "Problem was the refugee part. Problem with the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up at the border with young people.

We couldn't do two things at once," but he said, "Now we're going to raise the number." Conservatives are seizing on the fact that he used the word crisis to describe the current situation at the border. Washington Post national correspondence Philip Bump sees the roots of the situation in the way Biden defines unity and we'll begin there as Washington Post national correspondence Philip Bump joins us now. Hi, Philip always great to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Philip Bump: Thank you very much.

Brian: You really make an interesting distinction that I think many people haven't thought about. Biden says he is striving for unity, we hear that all the time from him, but that's different than saying striving for bipartisanship. A lot of people conflate them. What's the difference as Biden sees it?

Philip: The difference is that he puts himself forward as being a president who is going to affect change that most Americans want to see. Bipartisanship we generally think about in terms of Democrats and Republicans coming together and what Biden has said essentially from the outset of his administration is that's not his goal necessarily. He wants to get that if he can, but his goal really is if most Democrats and Republicans who aren't working on Capitol Hill think that something should happen, he wants to make that happen. What that does then is it gives him the space to say, "Okay, we should do this COVID relief package or we should do this infrastructure bill because this has the approval of a majority of Americans."

Brian: That has worked to convince Biden to go big on some of his economic policies like COVID relief and infrastructure, but helped convince him to go small on refugees?

Philip: Yes, that's my assumption. One of the things that Biden is very cognizant of is that his hold on power in Washington is very tenuous. The house majority at this point is single digits, the Senate, obviously, is split with Vice President Harris being able to break ties. Biden knows that mid-term elections tend to go against incoming presidents and he wants to get as much done as he can while still positioning himself as well as possible for 2022.

When we see an issue like refugee resettlement, most Americans do not place at the top of their priority list as polling has shown. This is not something necessarily I think where the Biden administration wants to go big and really get out in front and draw a lot of flak, particularly given how much tension they're getting from the situation at the border. I think the administration is-- They're playing fast and loose when they conflate the two, but it seems pretty clear this is not a place where Biden was willing to step out front of where most Americans wanted him to be or were concerned about him being.

Brian: Now listeners, we can open up the phones right from the start here with Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump who follows a lot of things that take place in Washington and so we can open it up pretty broadly for a national politics Monday morning politics call in this morning certainly on the refugee issue. If you're connected with this, which developed so interestingly over the weekend if you didn't pay a lot of attention to the news over the weekend you might have missed this. Biden announcing this low refugee cap just around as our show was ending on Friday shocking a lot of people and then he went back on it in the way we've started to discuss by Saturday.

Any refugees, anyone connected to the refugee issue in any way you are welcome to call, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. We're going to get into guns as well. That issue seems to be developing in Washington even as it's always stalling in Washington maybe you saw some of the daily multiple-person shootings over the weekend as well. Unfortunately, it's not the underlying conditions, it's these individual events that so often drive news and drive policy when they make the news. That or other things if you want to bring them up, 646-435-7280. Our national politics call in to start the week 646-435-7280 with Washington Post national correspondent sorry, Philip Bump you can also tweet @BrianLehrer.

Staying on the refugees, you note that the polling popularity on refugee admissions for people fleeing violence in their home countries is lower than for creating a path to citizenship for the dreamers, the young adults who came of age in this country after being brought to this country illegally by their parents as children. Can you flush that comparison out for us a little bit and why you think that comparison might matter?

Philip: I think that comparison matters just to give a sense of context. I think there are a lot of people who understand the situation with the dreamers and understand that issue pretty well and who have fairly strong opinions on it. Obviously, people also understand the idea of people seeking refugee status in the United States or seeking asylum, but one of the things we notice is that it's not as prominent a concern for a lot of Americans.

There's a small group of people for whom this is a very very important issue, but for most Americans, it is a less important issue. Not to say it isn't important it just isn't as important in terms of the broader context of politics. It isn't as important as say the issue of getting citizenship for dreamers and so when Biden ran last year, he never positioned himself as being a president who was going to be out front on progressive issues and carrying the banner of the AOC wing of the party.

That was very much not what he was running as. I think that what we're seeing with this issue of refugee resettlement is a place where he doesn't necessarily want to use his political capital in that way on this issue right out of the gates. Of course, because there is a lot of Americans, particularly Americans who hold the office who do see this as a very important issue and is trying to drive this forward, that's why he met a lot of the blowback he did on Friday.

Brian: This even gets us to guns which we're not going to dive into right now. That'll be a little later in the segment, but the overall Biden approach it seems to me is this very organized pre-planned one where he's got these big priorities, COVID relief with all the many things that were packed into that, infrastructure with all the many things even that aren't traditionally considered infrastructure that are packed into that, and he doesn't want those things that are really big and that he feels he can succeed on to get derailed by news of the moment which drags him into things that are going to be less popular, and therefore, may be dragged down his whole agenda. He's trying to really go in this pre-planned way with his priorities, yes?

Philip: Yes. It's important for us to remember we're coming off of four years of an administration which planned almost nothing. We're sort of becoming re-accustomed to the idea that a presidential administration will be thoughtful and delivered in the way it does stuff, which is normally how presidents work, but we're going to have to let muscle memory kick in to some extent. What Biden is doing is smart. What he's doing is he's taking things that are very popular like big $1,400 stimulus cheques and throwing a bunch of other things in with it as it goes to Congress. He's doing the same thing with infrastructure.

Everyone wants to have more money for more roads and bridges. Not everyone, but you understand the point it's very, very popular. What he does is he packages it together and uses infrastructure as the thing to get it through Congress with as little static as he can. That's a smart political strategy, but you're right, other things come up and other things drive a lot of fear and outrage in the moment that people want to have addressed. I think any president not just Biden, I think Presidents Trump, Obama, Bush, all of them would rather not have to deal with things that are coming up in the moment and instead work on their policy agendas. Of course, none of them actually have the chance to do that all the time.

Brian: Who counts as a refugee under the numbers that we're talking about? Does that include the thousands who are coming to the border from Central America who we generally hear are seeking political asylum? That's the word in the news all the time. They're coming here seeking asylum because of the conditions in their country. Are they the same thing, refugee status, and asylum when it comes to this refugee cap?

Philip: No. Refugees and asylum seekers are considered differently by the federal government and actually track those numbers separately. The overlap here to which the Biden administration is pointing is that the Office of Refugee Resettlement also deals with children who come to the border and need to be placed somewhere. That is something that has been a struggle for the federal government for a while. The reason that the surge in migrants coming to the border has challenged administration is not the sheer number. You know that there were over 100,000, or whatever the number was.

People that came in March, so many of them were children and children need to be handled differently by the government. The Office of Refugee Resettlement handles that. A lot of refugee advocates are very quick to point out that the process for refugees coming as refugees from other countries is very different than the process for resettling child migrants who come to the border. That's where the overlap lies within the government.

Brian: Who are the refugees right now?

Philip: Broadly speaking?

Brian: Yes.

Philip: The cap that the Trump administration set had put very specific limits allowing people to come from particular countries, obviously, we know that President Trump's priority was to try and bring people to the country who weren't from certain parts of the world, who were predominantly Muslim countries, for example. One of the things that Biden said he would do when he revisits the cap on refugees, which he's promised to do by May 15th is he's going to shuffle around which countries we could allow refugees from.

There are refugees that want to come to the United States from all over the world, but there are only certain countries at this point in time from which they are actually allowed, certain countries from which they're not allowed and they line up with what one might expect in terms of the politics of the presidency.

Brian: The history, roughly, according to the statistics website Statista, that I looked at this morning, at the end of the Cold War when Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush were president, we took in around 125,000 refugees a year that gradually declined to only around 25,000, just after 911, 2001 but gradually rose again to around 85,000 in 2016, the end of the Obama administration, with the Syrian civil war and other humanitarian crises raging.

Then just before Trump was elected, largely as part of his interest, as you say, in reducing the number of Muslims and I would add Africans and Latin Americans entering the US, he dropped the number each year, down to last year's 15,000. That was the starting point for the policy decisions facing Biden. What happened between Friday and Saturday who got to him?

Philip: Well, the question of what happened between Friday and later Friday afternoon, the administration started to walk this back--

Brian: Was that past?

Philip: Oh, yes. What happened was very quickly, you had a lot of democratically elected officials speaking out in very, very stark terms. Really, really chastising the Biden administration. Look, it's very easy to see why from a moral standpoint one can say, "Hey, look, man, this was the wrong call." These are people who are trying to escape violence and danger in their own countries. Some of these people have already been cleared for resettlement in the United States but were blocked by the Trump administration.

He heard from a lot of allies both vocal progressive advocates and people on Capitol Hill who were saying, "This is the wrong call and this is not only the wrong call, but this is an immoral decision." The White House very quickly tried to spin it as, "Oh, no, there's just a misunderstanding about what we're doing. What we're actually doing is going to release this new number by May 15th." It seems pretty obvious that that was after the fact rationalization for what the announcement had been in the first place.

It also is a reminder that in politics volume counts and I don't mean volume in terms of numbers always. I mean volume in terms of loudness. The people who were being loud on Friday were people that President Biden listened to.

Brian: With Philip Bump, national correspondent for The Washington Post. Hassan, in Paterson, you're on WNYC. Hassan, thanks for calling in today.

Hassan: Brian, good morning, longtime listener. I am very upset at our sight. Are we forgetting about 2022? Who cares about refugees. We cannot give any excuse to Republicans to destroy the 2022 which we know we're going to take over Congress completely. We have 18 Senate seats, we have seats in Congress that we lost during Trump presidency, the second term. Also, in California. A bunch of guys in New York. Because Trump was on the ballot, people vote for those people.

Refugees should not be a concern, 2022 and President Biden should be concerned. These things can be resolved '23, '24. It's not the priority. We lose the Congress, we're done. Biden is doing one good thing, and I want to share this with you as a longtime listener. He's not making mistakes that President Obama did. We have a chance to change the course of this country to the righteous way. I appreciate it for taking my phone call and let you and your guest decide what I said. Have a great day and best wishes to both of you.

Brian: You too Hassan. Thank you very much. Well, Philip, what do you think? Are there a lot of Democrats who think like he does? Do you think as a political analyst that the refugee issue if he were to go from 15,000, up to the 62,000, that he originally wanted to go to, would that be such a salient issue for people to vote for members of Congress on in 2022, that it would be that risky?

Philip: I would say a couple of things. The first is that it is April of 2021 and there is a lot of time before the midterm elections. There's a lot that can change. Remember, I don't want to use this example because I don't want to bring something bad into the world. Things can change very quickly. September 2001, politics in America changed very, very much overnight. These things can happen, that massive events can occur, which reshape how we think about midterm election. A lot can happen between now and November of 2022. The second is I'm not sure that this is an issue on which President Biden or the democrats are going to lose votes.

There are no Republicans who are right now thinking, "Oh, I might vote for my Democrat, the Democratic candidate in the house, unless President Biden does this thing with the refugees." I don't know who that voter is or if this is the thing that pushes them from one party to the other, particularly when they're voting in November, thinking back, "Well, it's a toss-up, but then I go back to what happened in April 2021." We're a long way out and I think that at the end of the day, Republican opposition to President Biden and to Democrats is rooted a lot more deeply for the vast majority of voters than this particular issue might manage to sway people.

Brian: A lot to cover with Philip Bump and your call, stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we talk Monday morning national politics with Phillip Bump, national correspondent for The Washington Post. 646-435-7280. Before we get off the refugee and immigration question, another thing in the news this weekend was a flip flop on the Republican side. Some conservative House Republicans were apparently ready to form what they were going to call an America first caucus that had a document that said too much immigration threatened, "Anglo Saxon political traditions in this country." It also used the phrase "The progeny of European architecture."

Those things were widely criticized as racist and white supremacists, dog whistles or not even dog whistles, Philip, but actually saying the quiet point out loud about who they thought America was for, and by saying Anglo Saxon political traditions, it's almost like saying, Black and brown people and Asian people don't believe in democracy. We want white people, and that's how we see our country's grounding. Those Republicans went back on that by the end of the weekend. You haven't written an article on that explicitly that I see. Do you know what happened there?

Philip: Yes. Essentially, what happened is that people read the document, Marjorie Taylor Green, who stepped out to the front as being one of the more right-wing members of Congress, this is someone who had dallied with QAnon in the past as well, she was at the forefront of this caucus. This document came out she later said, "Oh, well, I hadn't actually seen the document before it was released and so they [unintelligible 00:19:40] their role. Sort of fascinating is the Matt Gaetz system balance, a Congress member from Florida, signed on to it even after he'd seen the document, which is telling in a lot of ways.

Yes, this is what was described at the outset when I was first reported by Punchbowl News, it was described as nakedly nativist, but it's not even nativist, it is hard to see something like that comment about Anglo-Saxon heritage is anything other than pretty explicit. I hate to use the term because it's such a strong term, but that is white and nationalism, you sort of put those two things together. Granted, there are always times when people sign on the political documents and they haven't really paid close attention to it, but this is the thing that you really want to make sure you're paying close attention to before this burst into the world.

Brian: Anglo-Saxon doesn't even include Italians, Jews, and Irish people.

Philip: It's very no nothing, exactly.

Brian: Jane, on Staten Island, you're on WNYC with Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump. Hi, Jane.

Jane: Hi, [chuckles] I'm surprised. Thank you. I wanted to call about the gun issue. Two things. One, why isn't the gun issue, the industry being treated like the cigarette industry was treated? Two, I just lost it. Two, regulation of automobiles saves lives. Why shouldn't a person who buys a gun have to insure it?

Brian: Jane, thank you very much and please call us again. I think this was a first-time call, right? Jane, am I right?

Jane: Yes. A very quick thing is who is selling guns to the Mexican cartels? I read somewhere that 75% of them come from this country.

Brian: Thank you very much. We'll deal with all those points, Jane. Interesting she brings up two different industries that we could compare gun regulation, gun industry regulation. Two, and I think it's important that Jane puts a focus on the industry rather than individuals who own guns. She compares it to the tobacco industry and the way that was regulated when the harm that tobacco was doing became evident and the extent of the harm and also to the automobile industry for the way that that's regulated. On multiple levels, we could go down that list. Do guns safety advocates who want to change the laws make those comparisons?

Philip: Yes, very much so. I think, obviously, those comparisons are apt in a nonpolitical context. It certainly is the case that there are a lot of people who are injured or killed by firearms in any given year, including suicides, which make up most of those deaths, but the overarching political factor here, which I think everyone recognizes is the Second Amendment. There is no even murky constitutional protection to sell cigarettes or own cigarettes or own a car or drive a car. There is, however, a Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which says that in order to have a well-regulated militia, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, which can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

The National Rifle Association and other groups were very effective for decades in presenting that as absolute in an absolute protection the right to bear arms and spent a lot of money on politicians, and they were able to be effective. Now it is the case that Democrats are operating both from a position where there are a lot of Americans that have firearms and there's not any real way to think.

It's hard to imagine a way in which those firearms go away. These are firearms that are owned by people, and obviously, trying to collect those firearms would be hugely problematic, but at the same time, you have a lot of elected officials who understand the political tension here and the role of the constitution and are wary of trying to figure out what the line is between those things.

Brian: Now, when it comes to cigarettes, some of what happened with cigarettes came through private lawsuits, not necessarily through government regulation, although that happened too requiring warning labels, things like that on the packs, but there was that big tobacco settlement after people went to court. There is an attempt, I think it started in Connecticut after Newtown, to try to hold gun manufacturers responsible for things that happen with their guns under certain circumstances. I don't know if you're following this. We're following Washington politics. This is more a private litigation case, but do you happen to know if that's going anywhere?

Philip: I don't actually know that off the top of my head. I know that there has been big push to try and hold manufacturers accountable, but I think one of the core differences here is that there is an established pattern of cigarette manufacturers trying to obfuscate the extent to which their product was deadly. There's no question. Guns are deadly. Everyone knows firearms are deadly. That's the entire point of a gun. [chuckles]

There is a difference between an industry which is trying to mask and sell its product to people without telling them that the product is killing them and people selling people a product which kills people. Not to put it into stark or grim terms, but I think that that disadvantages lawsuits simply because, yes, no kidding. [chuckles] That's obviously fundamentally the problem.

Brian: Right, and which can be used for self-defense, et cetera. If Biden does want to pursue unity as opposed to bipartisanship in the way we were talking about before, bipartisanship means getting Republican members of Congress on board. Unity means getting a majority of the American people on board. He could keep going after the lax gun laws in this country, as we do seem to be seeing things that are popular in the country, if not popular on the Republican side of the aisle in Congress. Basic controls like on the size of magazines, how many bullets you can shoot before you have to reload and universal background checks are very popular in the polls.

Even from what I read, over 50% popularity among NRA members, and we seem to be seeing some shooting of three or more people every day now and for those of you who haven't been watching the news this weekend or listening to it or reading it, at Austin, Kenosha and Indianapolis just since Friday's show. In the Indianapolis case, it's being reported that the shooter had already been flagged previously with mental health issues that should have prevented him from getting guns, but then he was approved to buy the weapon that he used legally. All of this could scramble the politics, but it doesn't seem to close that gap between public opinion generally and Republicans in Congress.

Philip: This actually brings us back to the point we're making about the refugee issue is that, yes, there is widespread support for broadly worded changes to gun laws, universal background checks, things along those lines. One of the things we've seen, lawmakers trying to instantiate those, they try and either pass state-level reforms as they did in Maine or if they try and expand universal background checks as they did in 2013 in the wake of Sandy Hook in Connecticut, that those things get bogged down. It's very easy because there is, yes, broad support, but there is very, very, very vocal opponents and supporters of changes to gun laws on either side that make themselves heard.

Yes, while most Americans do have this opinion, generally speaking, about background checks, in particular, coming up with legislation which can then weather the storm of outrage and opposition and doesn't get too bogged down in the details in terms of being able to pick out one or two things that allows the legislator to vote against it, that's proving incredibly difficult, and at the same time, there are real questions about which changes to gun laws would actually solve some of these problems, not only mass shooting incidents, which you referred to, but also day-to-day gun violence, which, of course, is also a problem.

One of the things I think is fascinating is underrecognized is a lot of the weapons that are traced by the federal government in a state come from other states, particularly in states with strong gun laws like New York, New Jersey, Illinois. Most of the guns in New York, for example, or New Jersey, they've found the gun scenes and traced back came from out of state, and so that's a challenge too. When a state has its own tough gun laws, what do you do about states where laws are more lax? That's one of the reasons that federal legislation would be useful, but again, that's a much higher level.

Brian: Let me take one more call on this, then we'll be out of time. By the way, standing by is New York City mayoral hopeful Ray McGuire. April is Ask The Mayor Tryouts month on The Brian Show, and we have Ray McGuire fresh off some very prominent endorsements coming up next. Alan in Waynesville, North Carolina, you're on WNYC with Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump. Hi, Alan. Thanks for calling in.

Alan: Good morning, I'll make this short. With all the rhetoric that's going on whether it's pro-gun, anti-gun, pro liability for the manufacturers, of mental illness, what the politicians are saying, and I don't mean to sound too much of a pessimist, but I am. I think the toothpaste is out of the tube. I think we have way too many guns in this country. It's my understanding, we have more guns than people.

That horse is out of the barn and he is way out there and he ain't coming back no matter what we say, no matter what we do because we can't control all of the guns out there, we can't control all of the individuals, unfortunately, that have mental illness and anyone that wants to pick up a gun whether it be a pistol or an automatic or semi-automatic, can do so and will do so. I don't think we're going to be able to do anything about it.

Brian: Alan, thank you for your call and listeners, the stuff that Alan refers to is one that I happened to have committed to memory. I've mentioned it a few times on the show recently after it was in a Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times not that long ago, the United States has 120 guns per 100 people. Alan, the caller is right. More guns than people in this country.

The next closest is Canada with 34 guns per 100 people think about the gap there. The US is in a league of its own in this respect, 120 guns per 100 people in this country. 34 guns per 100 people in Canada and that is the next closest. The other number that goes with that from Nick Kristof's column is gun murders per 100,000 people. It's 3.4 per a hundred thousand in the United States, about three people killed for every 100,000 people in the United States.

In Canada, the next nearest, again, it's 0.6. That's just to remind everybody how much the United States is in a class by itself with respect to both gun murders and gun prevalence. Philip, last question, the caller is so pessimistic because he says the toothpaste is out of the tube unless they go around and literally take guns away from people, which is not really, maybe except in the case of certain military-style weapons, not really the plan. There are so many guns out there that the saturation availability is going to be with us for a long, long time, no matter what they do, what the gun control advocates say about that?

Philip: Well, you're right. Those stats were obviously incontrovertible. I think the question here is twofold. The first is, to your point about the alleged shooter in Indianapolis, this was apparently a young man who was able to acquire a new firearm after it has been taken away. This is not a case of, "There were just a lot of guns out there and he stumbled onto one."

It was instead that this was a guy who had a record that should've-- Based on what we know, should have prevented him from getting a firearm who was able to get a firearm. That's point one, that seems addressable. The second is that, yes, there are a ton of guns in the United States, but it is also the case that they are disproportionately held by a small group of Americans. It is not the case obviously that every American has 1.2 guns in their home.

It is, however, the case a lot of Americans have a lot of guns whereas most Americans don't have a gun at all. That means as well that while there are a lot of guns in the United States, a lot of it is because a lot of people who own guns own a lot of guns themselves. The density, if you will, of gun ownership in the United States is not necessarily as broad as that stat would suggest.

Therefore, it does also suggest there are a lot of people who if you want to regulate its ownership, you can go out and figure out ways in which to make sure that those who are trying to buy guns, who don't currently have guns, that there's some regulatory aspect to what they do that doesn't necessarily exist at this point.

Brian: Really interesting analysis of that issue. Phillip Bump, Washington Post national correspondent, thanks a lot. We super appreciate it. Have a good day.

Philip: Of course, thanks.

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