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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Chuck Schumer may be the Senate majority leader for the entire United States, but when the COVID relief bill passed the Senate this weekend, he didn't forget he is the senator from New York, as he listed ways that the $1.9 trillion package will specifically bring some needed relief home.

Chuck Schumer: To museums, to theaters, to restaurants, help is on the way. To our beleaguered subway system, help is on the way. To so many, to people who can't feed their kids or worry about being evicted from their homes, help is on the way.

Brian: Senator Chuck Schumer. Bill passed, as you've been hearing, on a purely party line vote, 50 to 49, 1 Republican was absent, raising the question of what comes next. This was a budget bill which made it exempt from the filibuster, but just about everything else in the Biden agenda, voting rights, police reform, expanding union rights and the minimum wage, comprehensive immigration reform, you name it, would be subject to the filibuster, meaning they would need at least 10 Republicans to vote Yes.

What happens to the Biden agenda, the day after the COVID relief bill gets firmly passed, which will be tomorrow? Is this the moment that Democrats vote to abolish the filibuster because nothing will happen if they don't, and they consider some of their bills so urgent at this moment in American history? With me now, NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Hi, Mara, always great to have you on WNYC. Thanks for doing a solo turn for just one of the hundreds of national public radio stations around the country. Welcome back to WYNC.

Mara Liasson: Happy to be here.

Brian: First, could you explain the Republican vote total in the House and Senate, exactly zero, for a bill that had a 62% approval in the latest Monmouth poll, just 34% disapproval? Aren't people hungry for this relief in the red states, in white working-class Republican districts, et cetera?

Mara: I think there are a couple of different reasons. First of all, they are defaulting to the position that they took in 2009. Remember, Barack Obama didn't get Republican support for his stimulus either, and the Republicans were very successful at running against it, and doing well in the next midterm. I think there are many Republicans who think that they can do the same thing here. There are Republicans who thought it was too big, thought the economy was already coming out of its slump, and didn't need this kind of stimulus.

Mostly, it's, I think, could be understood in the context when a party is deeply divided and having a kind of civil war, trying to figure out how it can be a big enough tent for Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the default position for the opposition party, the one thing they can unify around is being opposed. This is what they did. This is the one thing that they can unify around, is opposing this Biden stimulus bill. Now, going forward, we'll see if public opinion matters as much to Republicans as Democrats.

Don't forget, you say that the bill is very popular. That's true, but Republicans are insulated from majority public opinion because of all of the structural advantages they have, because of gerrymandering, because they come from rural red states. They don't have to be as sensitive to majority public opinion. They have to pay more attention to their base, but this bill is much more popular than the Obama stimulus ever was.

Brian: One thing that changed at the last minute that perhaps our listeners haven't heard about, because it was over the weekend, to get the vote of the most reluctant centrist Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, was a reduction in the expanded unemployment benefit from an extra $400 a week to an extra $300 a week. That'll be in effect through Labor Day, as pandemic unemployment is expected to remain high. Do you know why that specific thing would have been the deal-breaker for Joe Manchin? Why would he feel so strongly about something that sounds like a small difference in the scheme of things, but takes $100 a week out of the pockets of unemployed people?

Mara: Well, I can't get inside the head of Joe Manchin but I can tell you what he believes in. He believes in bipartisanship. He wanted the bill to be smaller. He hoped that he could get Republican buy-in. At one point he said, "There's a $1 trillion dollar bipartisan bill we can have today." That's what he said, and we never saw that bill. There wasn't a lot of effort really put in by the bipartisan group of senators to come up with a bipartisan alternative.

The Republicans had said, "We'll go for a $680 billion bill." Biden, of course, had a $1.9 trillion proposal, and it was just too big a gulf to bridge. I do think that Joe Manchin is the most important senator on Capitol Hill right now. He's the center of gravity. If Democrats want to pass something, they have to get Joe Manchin's approval. I think it's a small price to pay to have a Democrat representing West Virginia, because if he wasn't there, it would certainly be a Republican.

Brian: Now, as I said in my intro, as Biden hits the halfway mark in his first 100 days, Day 50 is Wednesday, there's a big question about just about everything else on his agenda because the COVID relief bill was exempt from the filibuster, just about everything else is not. Do you see-- Go ahead, you want to correct that?

Mara: Well, not everything else is not. Well, there are a lot of things. You're right, voting rights, the criminal justice reform, immigration reform, those things might need 60 votes, might be subject to a filibuster, but there are still a lot of things in the Biden Build Back Better agenda, the big infrastructure bill that he wants to pass, that could go on reconciliation, and among the many gifts that Donald Trump left to Joe Biden, one, of course, is a very low bar, but the other was a second bite at the apple of reconciliation because Donald Trump never passed a budget for 2020. Biden gets two chances to pass things with 50 votes, as long as they apply, they fit under the budget rule.

Brian: Just to be clear for our listeners, reconciliation is that process that applies only to budget bills, that can avoid the filibuster, and you can pass them with 51 votes. What other things? You mentioned infrastructure. Can you get more specific? What other things could be passed in a budget that could let the Democrats avoid the filibuster?

Mara: Well, anything. I think a lot of the things, a lot of the public investments that he wants to make, things that cost money, things that affect the budget. I don't know whether it would be universal broadband, a gigantic infrastructure bill with lots of climate aspects in it, maybe even some immigration. I'm not sure, but I can tell you a lot of the Build Back Better agenda could go in reconciliation. I think the fundamental question for Biden now is how hard does he want to try to get bipartisan buy-in? He didn't feel like he had enough time to try very hard this time, even though this is part of his brand. He ran on it. He said he wanted to work across the aisle. He believes in bipartisanship.

The question now is that he has a little bit more time, probably 'til the end of the year to pass the Build Back Better infrastructure bill. Does he get Republicans in on the ground floor, instead of coming up with a Democratic proposal and saying to Republicans, "Here it is. You want to talk?" Does he get them on the ground floor? Also, is he willing to break off bits of the Build Back Better agenda, things that maybe could be passed with 60 votes, maybe universal broadband?

I've even heard that a bill giving a path to citizenship for the DREAMers could pass with 60 votes. Maybe something on prescription drugs, and then leave the rest of the stuff to reconciliation, the things that you just can't get 60 votes for. It'll be really interesting to see how hard and long he's willing to try, and what kinds of negotiations or discussions he has with Republicans. Right now, based on the COVID relief bill, you'd have to say Republicans do not seem to want to work with him, but this is a different thing. Infrastructure is not only wildly popular with people, it's also necessary for cities and counties all across the country, many of whom are run by Republicans.

Brian: Now, the Democratic House under Nancy Pelosi, as you know, already passed two major bills last week that seem to be DOA in the Senate because of the filibuster, a police reform bill, and a voting rights bill, the famous H.R. 1 that would promise things like easier voter registration and mail-in voting. Donald Trump admitted this about voting in America during his campaign last year.

Donald Trump: The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if we ever agreed to, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.

Brian: Did Trump give away the game there, keep people from voting to keep Republicans in power through a minority rule?

Mara: This is a widely held belief among Republicans that the more people who vote, the worst they're going to do. That is at the heart of all of the voting restrictions that they have proposed in state legislatures all around the country. Now, that might not be true. Voting by mail, which now Republicans seem to think is a Democratic advantage, there's no hard evidence on that. There are states where voting by mail has been in place for quite a while and Republicans do very well, but there's no doubt that the current thinking in the Republican Party, is the more people who vote, the worse it is for them.

Now, as far as Democrats being willing to break the filibuster, get rid of the filibuster to pass something like voting rights, which is of existential importance to both parties. Democrats need more people to be able to vote and Republicans seem to think they want less. It's not so much a matter of blowing up the filibuster, the filibuster has been reformed many times and it can be reformed again. We used to need 67 votes, now we need 60. You just have to stand on their floor like Jimmy Stewart and talk for 100 hours at a time. Joe Manchin mentioned yesterday that maybe we should return that rule. In other words, make the filibuster harder than just raising your hand and saying, "I filibuster."

People have talked about carving out an exception for voting rights, just like exceptions have been carved down for reconciliation. Don't forget, reconciliation is an exception to the filibuster. We've already accepted Supreme Court nominees and cabinet nominations. The filibuster has been chipped away at over time, and I would be surprised if it's just thrown out the window. I think the more likely thing is that it's reformed.

Brian: Let me play that Joe Manchin clip from yesterday that you just referred to. He was on a number of the Sunday talk shows. The politics here are like the COVID relief bill. I guess they can pass it with 51 votes, but a few of the most centrist Democrats, including Joe Manchin, are not on board with a complete abolition of the filibuster. Manchin did say this on Meet the Press yesterday, about making it harder to filibuster every single bill.

Joe Manchin: If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk. I'm willing to look at any way we can, but I am not willing to take away the involvement of the minority.

Brian: Can you explain what, if anything, would change as far as you could tell, if they require senators to keep talking, to keep it going, which is one of the things that, as you say Manchin name checked there?

Mara: Hello?

Brian: Mara, can you hear me? Did I drop out to you for a second? I'm asking what would change if people had to filibuster by actually continuing to talk on the Senate floor.

Mara: If people had to talk on the Senate floor, the public would be educated about a filibuster. No one knows what a filibuster is. Maybe they know that certain bills need 60 votes. Maybe they know that Supreme Court justices who decide whether those bills are constitutional only need 51 votes, but most people do not. I think it would highlight the filibuster. If you were trying to craft a political strategy to reform the filibuster, you'd want people to have to talk on the floor, because that calls attention to it, and you can make your argument about the fairness or the unfairness of it.

Joe Manchin, I think has left a lot of hints, dropped a lot of breadcrumbs that he is not, even though he has said he would never vote to get rid of the filibuster, never never, he seems to be open to filibuster reform of some sort. He's someone that's worth listening to because you're not going to reform the filibuster or get rid of it without Joe Manchin on your side.

Brian: It gets back to this structural overrepresentation of Republicans in Congress that you mentioned a minute ago. I think this is really important, and a lot of people don't realize it, the difference between the popularity of the COVID relief bill and the percentage of Republicans in Washington, 62% approval ratings, but Republicans have half the Senate because small rural states get the same number of senators as highly populated states, plus the redistricting or gerrymandering of congressional districts in the House that took place in 2010 because Republicans controlled so many state legislatures. Can you talk more about the implications of that for governing America?

Mara: Sure. We're having a big debate in this country about the difference between minority rights and minority rule. Minority rights means the minority party should have some rights, that we just shouldn't have just the majority run roughshod over the minority. The founding fathers built in some minority rights protections. They never could have imagined that we would have a situation where we have a Senate that's 50/50, but the 50 Republicans represent 44 million fewer people than the 50 Democrats.

If the population and demographic trends continue as they are now by 2040, we're going to have 30% of Americans represented by 70 senators, and 70% of Americans represented by 30 senators. This is also because of what's called the big sort. Democrats are just massed inefficiently in California, New York, on the West and East Coasts, and Republican voters are sprinkled efficiently throughout the heartland where real estate gets an advantage, especially in the Senate.

What are the solutions to this? There's a whole reform agenda that's being discussed. Obviously, Democrats would like, at some point, to let Puerto Rico and D.C., make them states, maybe even the Virgin Islands. There's talk about expanding the House of Representatives. Why should a state like Wyoming have a congressional district that represents 400,000-odd people, but everybody else has districts that are 700-and-something odd people? There's a lot of talk about that. Voting rights is I think the civil rights issue of our time and partisan gerrymandering is something that the Supreme Court has said it's fine with, but that means that on a state level, it's going to have to be debated state by state.

Brian: NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Thanks so much, Mara.

Mara: Happy to be here.

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