Coronavirus Report: The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Sen. Joe Manchin

The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

Steve Clemons: Welcome, Senator Manchin. Thanks for joining us on this very important topic. And let me just start out and ask you just point blank: What has the Congress gotten right in responding to the COVID crisis and what has it gotten not right?

Senator Joe Manchin: Oh, boy. Well, I think the early action, basically trying to put finances in place that would help people, that has been good. Even though it’s been slow sometimes. The PPP didn’t work the way we thought it should work. We told him from day one, you don’t understand rural areas. You don’t understand poverty. You don’t understand Appalachia. You’ve got to have set-asides for these rural areas, for the underserved areas, for the poverty-stricken areas. If you don’t, they get nothing. So even though we talk a good game up here, Steve, and everyone has a big heart and is wanting to help people who are on the low end of socioeconomic ladder, when the plan comes out, it’s usually a Wall Street plan. And I told Mitch McConnell — we had an argument on the floor, little debate on the floor, when the CARES Act came out — the first two acts that came out, totally bipartisan. Unanimous consent. Totally bipartisan. The third bill, when it got to be $2 trillion, when it became real money, Steve, then you had a situation where Mitch did it all himself, on the Republican side. He just did a bill. And when I looked at the bill, I said, Senator with all due respect, this bill was written by Wall Street, not for Main Street. There’s nothing set aside for the smaller areas, for small businesses, for rural areas. There was nothing set aside for the states. They weren’t going to be able to maintain the services that people depend on, and we took an extra two or three days debating to finally get that to be a bipartisan bill. Then you had the 3.5, which was the fourth bill. Now you have a big proposal of 1800 pages and $3 trillion ,which, we’re going through that and we haven’t seen it all yet. But it’s a heavy lift.

Clemons: When you say the words $3 trillion, I can kind of feel the stress in your voice. Is this a time to be thinking about fiscal responsibility when you have this big a challenge in the country? Or do we just need to blow through this, put money in every corner of the country and move along? Because I’ve seen some Republicans say with a straight face that this is the time we need fiscal responsibility and we can’t blow the bank?

Manchin: Yeah, they’ve never thought about that before. When it came time to bail out the banks and bail out — and the tax cuts for the corporations, they didn’t even hesitate on that. There was no fiscal responsibility there. And the bottom line is, is that everyone’s guilty, everyone’s thrown caution to the wind. Let me tell you what bothers me more than anything. How much do you actually hear the discussion going on? What have we done for the National Institute of Health, NIH? What have we done to invest in the CDC and to our research and technology labs? They’ve been eviscerated over the years. The budget has been cut. What have we done to build them back up to make sure that we find a cure and hopefully accelerate a vaccine? And next of all, prepare for the next pandemic so that we don’t be caught like we have? What have we done basically to try to pass any type of a corporate responsibility on manufacturing back in the United States, such as medical devices? How did we get cut so short? Why are we dependent on so many foreign countries for the defense of our country and the medical defense of our country? Those are things we’re not talking about and we’re not looking at how much money or investment needs to be made there. We’re looking at the socio side, economics, trying to keep people from falling through the cracks, Steve, which is our responsibility, but it has to be balanced

Clemons: You just brought a lot of things up in this conversation, you know, supply chains, medical devices, active agents in drugs and also investing in the science ecosystem to get these drugs. So, let me just ask you honestly, you’re on a lot of committees there, is there anything going on that’s credible right now that begins to look at these as strategic deficits in the country that need to be addressed?

Manchin: Well you would think that after we spent $3 trillion, and we’ve been here — the Senate’s been here for two weeks. Mitch called us back last week. This is the second week we’re here without the House being here. So someone says, well, now they want to hit the pause button. I said that Mitch McConnell, leading the Senate Republicans, has already hit the pause button. We just didn’t do anything. We should have been having virtual meetings or real meetings, if you will, to evaluate every aspect of the money that we put out. Call in [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin. Call in some of the people basically on the front lines that were making the decision to how much money needed to go in what direction to help the economy and help basically stave off a depression. We didn’t have any accountability there, we don’t know, really, except for what we hear from our front lines in West Virginia, what worked, what didn’t work, what money got to where it got to, and didn’t get to, what they’re still waiting on. Give you a perfect example: The PPP eight-week process. Remember that? If you go ahead and you keep all the employees, 75 percent of the money you borrow go towards your employees, keeping them on the payroll, 25 percent can go for your expenses. You’re supposed to keep everything ready to go back into business when it’s opened up. So, you keep them on the payroll. There’s no business because we told you to shut down. So you’re shut down, Steve, and as things start gradually opening up now, your eight weeks come due. Well, your eight weeks come due and basically you want your loan forgiven. OK, now you have not enough business to keep everybody that you kept on the payroll when you had the loan. So, we said, extend that to 16 weeks. We did unemployment for 16 weeks, doesn’t it make sense to give a person a chance to keep all those people working as they build their business back up? Little things, those are not big cost items, just commonsense items. That’s what we’re trying to get through. And we’re not having any meetings trying to find a solution and trying to fix maybe what didn’t work, money that we basically — maybe there was abuse and fraud that we could stop and make sure that we’re able to keep people so they’re able to survive.

Clemons: Well, you know, we’ve had two days of just horrible news. Yesterday, Jay Powell, Chairman of the Fed, said that 40 percent of families with a home income of less than $40,000 are out of jobs. And today, we saw the numbers, 3 million more people, 36 million, 36 and a half million people officially unemployed at this moment, probably more when you look at hybrid jobs and gig jobs and partially employed. So, I guess the question is, what are your colleagues missing and understanding that the burden of this time is extraordinary for that low-income bracket, which is a giant footprint in the country? 

Manchin: Yeah, the low-income bracket always gets hit the hardest and gets hit first and takes the longest to recover. It always has been through history. With that, I always felt that the people that lost their job because they were told to close down and the people that had to shut their business should have been kept whole. So, they should have gotten their full payroll for whatever time it took us til we were able to ask people to come back to, where we had enough test to make sure  —You’re asking a person to go back to work. And you’re saying, OK, we want you to go back to work. You have to report back. We’re opening back up. They’re going to say, fine, has everybody been tested? I want to be tested and I want every one of my colleagues to be tested. I don’t want to go back into an environment that I don’t know is virus-free. And on top of that, I want to make sure that I have the necessary equipment to be safe, whether it be the gloves, whether be the gowns, whether it be the face mask, or whether it be the face shields. That should be all made available if you’re asking people to go back into harm’s way. Now we’ve talked about heroes pay. What about the people who we’re asking to go back to work and they’re not protected? Aren’t they heroes too? So, you know, it doesn’t make any sense, Steve. And then in West Virginia, we’ve done 67,000 tests. We have a million 800,000 people. In the United States of America we’ve done about nine and a half million tests out of 328 million people. That’s nowhere near. And we don’t have the capacity to basically make sure that we’re keeping availability to where we can identify a hot spot, be able to have a whole army of tracers to trace everybody who had contact, to make sure all of them were tested so we can shut down and quarantine an area that needs to be so that the spread doesn’t grow again. We’re not doing any of that. And why we cannot get the president to do the Defense Production Act, I don’t know Steve. Makes no sense to me at all. The Defense Production Act, everybody in this country, every manufacturer has the ability to make PPE’s, every ability to make the tests and be able to do that should be mandated by the federal government to do it. And the government should have total acceptability for this and access to it so they can distribute it in the states. I have a state that has the highest vulnerability of elderly and underlying conditions, health conditions. If it hits my state, it will be like a tsunami. The bottom line that saves us: It’s a very rural state. We don’t have one town or one city over 50,000 population. So, we already have social distancing. It’s our only saving grace. But let me say one thing. Steve, you and I have talked about this before. When you take a poverty-stricken or underprivileged area or poverty- stricken and challenged area, the thing those people have is social gatherings. That’s what fulfills their life, with their families, with their friends, with their church, church meetings, church gatherings. All of those have been discontinued. There’s very little for someone who is socially challenged, economically challenged in an area that has been hard hit to begin with before the pandemic, to have any type of a quality of life unless we get the testing that can allow them to start moving around, unless we can get to protection, unless we find a cure and a vaccine that protects them.  

Clemons: So, when you hear from the President of the United States, we’ve got more than enough tests out there. Anybody who wants a test can get a test. What’s your answer?

Manchin: He’s totally wrong. He is absolutely wrong. You ask people — I’ve had poor people, people all over West Virginia call me, say Joe, I need a test, I want to get a test. They said, well, bring your insurance card and get your doctor’s referral. These are people that use emergency rooms, they don’t have a family physician, and you want them to get a doctor’s referral before you’ll test them? Come on. And we’ve put so much money towards this and now they’re saying that. So, I’m telling everybody, you go on get tested. If they refuse you, you call me immediately. Call my office. We have all of our staff totally, readily available, we’re working in all 55 counties. This is a bunch of crock, and we’re just — we’ve got to get through this, and I’ve got a governor that still sitting on $1.25 billion that we make available for every state, the smallest states, 21 states, got the minimum 1.25, OK? Some of those states are still sitting on it. Ours still sitting on it. They’re hoping they’re going to get relief to where they can use part of it. I want them to have flexibility to be able to balance their shortfalls. But the other 500 or $600 million could go out to all the counties and all the municipalities that are having extreme difficulties in keeping all their services up: first responders, health care, basically police protection, sanitation, all these things. So, they better get on the ball here and get things moving.

Clemons: Senator, just in our last minute or so. I know that you’re in the middle of the tug of war between those that are concerned about the safety of the workplace, returning to work, getting back to those social gatherings and then the other side of it, which is reopening the economy. And we heard Dr. Fauci testifying in the Senate yesterday and saying, hey, we’ve got problems out there. We’ve got to open very cautiously. We need better health protocols and standards to begin doing this. He worries about universities and schools, and the president came out and sort of whacked him. Said that he disagrees strongly with what Fauci testified. So how is this tension playing out in West Virginia? How do you think we can resolve it?

Manchin: I tell everybody that I speak to, do not pay attention to any of us in the political arena. We do not know what we’re talking about when it comes to science, unless someone is a scientist or a medical doctor that happens to be serving in a political position. So that’s the first advice I can give any human being: believe the professionals, the doctors, the scientists. And that’s what Dr Fauci is talking about. What we’re saying is that we’re fine. We want to start partially opening, and we know it’s going to be a slow roll, Steve. But with that, we have to be testing as we slow roll, we have to be protecting as we slow roll. If we see a spike from an area where we have an opening, then we have to be able to test and trace and then test again to make sure it hasn’t spread. That’s only common sense. If you’re not prepared to do that, then you better be prepared, as Dr Fauci says, to have a relapse. I don’t know how else to explain and tell people other than commonsense. I don’t know if, someone’s coming into my place of business, if we told a restaurant to open, I got the beauty shops open. Now we have tanning salons. I really don’t know. But if we’re testing people that are operating there and we see a spike and somebody gets it who’s the proprietor or working there, and then we test and trace the people, their clients and customers, and then we make sure it hasn’t spread. That’s the way we can. If it does, we can contain it. We’re not prepared to do that because we don’t have the testing capability and everyone’s bragging about, well I’m less than 3 percent. We’ve tested 60,000 people out of a million eight. You haven’t really gone into the poor communities. Finally, we got the National Guard to go and start testing in our minority communities in the poor neighborhoods. Steve, that’s the only way they are going to get tested.