- The COVID-19 pandemic is taking its toll on American's health and the economy, from vaccine development and deployment to supply chain bottlenecks and rising inflation.

We talk with the former chairman of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce about that along with the future of the infrastructure bill and the debt ceiling debate on "Newsmakers".

Thank you for joining us on "Newsmakers" US representative Fred Upton has served Michigan's sixth congressional district since 1993.

A top Republican, he served as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and currently is the ranking Republican, chairman of the house subcommittee on energy.

Congressman Upton, thank you so much for joining us.

- Always a pleasure to be here with you.

- Before we get to that laundry list that we outlined at the show open, the week got off to a sad start with the news of Colin Powell's passing.

He was 84.

Powell was the first African American to serve as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and secretary of state.

We learned he died from COVID-19 complications.

The family says Powell had been fully vaccinated.

Fred, you've known Colin over the years.

- I did, he appeared in countless briefings that we had before Republican and democratic colleagues, four star general, he believed in diplomacy, his word was his bond, he was as honest as the day is long.

And I guess the one word that really spells him out is r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

He had great respect and really loved, just would note that when we vote for speaker of the house at the beginning of every congressional term, some of my colleagues, and you don't have to be a member of Congress, actually voted for Colin Powell, knowing that no one would really criticize them for voting for an American hero.

He was exactly that.

- And there was a time where I think a number of conservatives, moderates, independents, looked at him as a potential presidential candidate along the way.

- Well, they did, they did.

He served in Republican administration, but he had to be nonpolitical at least when he was at the Pentagon.

Obviously, he was a Republican secretary of state, but at the end I would note that as I recall he endorsed both Hillary Clinton as well as Joe Biden for president.

So he put the interests of the country first.

- It's always about those leadership qualities that we think about.

You've been in office for, boy, Fred, how many years?

I can't do the math.

- I want you to say not long enough, my man.

- Not long enough.

We appreciate all the times that you spend with us here on the program.

Speaking of Colin Powell's passing and passing from complications to COVID-19, your district was a part of producing COVID-19 vaccines and in record time.

- Well, we are, and actually if you look back at what I did when I was chairman of energy and commerce, we passed this bill called "21st Century Cures", many viewed as the most significant piece of legislation enacted in that Congress.

It was bi-partisan.

It was the last bill that President Obama signed into law.

It passed 392 to 26, but what it did was it expedited, sped up, the approval of drugs and devices.

It was coupled with $45 billion more in health research.

We listened, particularly here, locally, the Van Andel Center and others, just a wealth of information that helped us write this bill to find these cures that impact every single American.

But what it did was at the end of the day as we get into this pandemic called COVID, it allowed for the approval of a vaccine maybe as much as a year ahead of what it otherwise would have been.

And it just so happens in my congressional district, Kalamazoo is my big city, that's where Pfizer's largest worldwide facility is and that's where they produce it.

And I can remember when they got the FDA's EUA, the emergency use authorization back in December of last year, the country watched the trucks leave and going to Grand Rapids and other places to deliver the vaccine to be put on the FedEx and UPS planes.

It saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and you they still produce it today.

It's amazing, one of these freezers, and I was there a few weeks ago again, holds literally 350,000 doses.

But in addition to Pfizer, obviously we've seen Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca, they've all been able to get approvals.

And now that the Pfizer booster shot is available, we're seeing that now come along with J&J as well as Moderna too.

So good news, it just happened it was our district.

But at the end of the day, we've got find cures, not only COVID, but Alzheimer's, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, all those things, huge advances because of what we did back in 2016.

We're working on the next version 2.0, which the same partner, Diana Degette, a Democrat from Denver, she and I plan to introduce the next version, the next update, this week.

- The speed at which the vaccine was brought to market is one of those issues that folks who don't want to get the vaccine point to.

When you talk about removing some of the regulation, that doesn't mean the safety measures were taken out of this.

So how can you reach out to some of the viewers out there who might be skeptics when it comes to the speed at which the vaccine came to market?

- Very good point.

And that's one of the things we worked on when we did cures back in 2016.

It took a couple of years to get it done, but we wanted no shortcuts.

We wanted no shortcuts on safety.

So we did a number of really good thing.

First, we listened to the industry, we listened to disease groups.

We listened to the FDA and the NIH asking them to tell us what roadblocks they saw so we could get these faster.

We also knew that just because of roadblocks here in the United States, we saw a number of companies looking overseas to get approvals.

And of course when that happens, guess what?

They produce them overseas.

So not only do we lose the science, we lose the production, the employees actually making it.

So a big turnaround, in fact, venture capital by 50% was beginning to go overseas instead of here in this country.

So a couple of things that we're gonna do in 2.0, looking what lessons have we learned.

One of which was there probably wasn't, there wasn't, not probably, there wasn't enough diversity in the trials.

You know they still required 30,000 people to be in trials, all demographics, but particularly of with folks of color, African-Americans, they weren't as well-represented as they should have been.

And of course, thinking back to the days before you and me, Tuskegee, all those different things, that had to change.

That changes now in what we do with our bill that we're introducing this week called 2.0, we're gonna have more diversity so that in fact from the start, from the get-go, people are gonna know that in fact their class, particularly people of color, are gonna be more represented and shouldn't have those safety concerns.

But as we look back, no shortcuts.

We did allow, one of the things that we did allow with cures was by getting an emergency use authorization, and that's what happened in December of last year, that allowed Pfizer and Moderna and J&J to actually produce it, store it, in Pfizer's case, it had to be held at 70 degrees below zero centigrade, it allowed them to produce it before the approval so that when the approval came, bingo, out the door it went, literally immediately.

And so that was a big change.

And of course, now that EUA, that emergency use authorization, has, I don't want to say expired, but the full blown approval was there in early September, as we've seen with other companies as well.

So that's really good news, but tragically, just earlier this week now, I saw some statistics from some of my hospital, my health providers.

We're seeing that spike come up again in Michigan.

And I see a daily report of my counties in Southwest Michigan and we've still got a couple of counties that are under 40% vaccinated.

Here we are more than a year, and of course, we're reminded of the news of Colin Powell, but we all know people that have died of COVID.

I'm sure you do, I do.

I've got family members that have got it, thank God they didn't die from it, but it's a terrible thing.

And we also, of course, don't know the long-term ramifications of COVID in terms of those long haulers, those that get it, still have a loss of balance, issues with smell and other things, even just a whole number of different issues that don't go away.

So we know that vaccinations work, they're not 100%, but they're well over 90%.

We also know that the conditions are better for yourself if you get that vaccination.

And you probably need the booster depending upon your age and watch the FDA.

- And parents are watching those numbers with you.

So now there is word that we may get authorization for that five to 11 year old cohort.

You know better than anybody else is that dosage waiting and ready in storage to be rolled out?

- Oh it is.

It's the same.

So the difference is it's gonna be a smaller dose.

So the samples, the trials, are measuring different size of the dose, and as I, this may not be exactly accurate, but I think the Pfizer one, as it looks for likely approval, I think it's a third of the dose of what an adult would take.

Don't hold me to that number, but it's a smaller dose because you've got lower body weight, et cetera.

But we're anticipating that to be out and approved soon.

- Right so it's been produced and ready to go?

- Yeah, well, they got it.

They just have to change.

That's something that you and I could do, let alone a trained technician.

- You are in favor of the infrastructure bill, but now it comes down to size, right?

We're seeing that- - Remember, there's a couple different bills.

- Okay, let's go through those.

- So I'm part of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

So here locally, Peter Meyer is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

We have five members from Michigan.

It's a bi-partisan 58 member caucus, five from Michigan.

So a number of us met with the Governor Larry Hogan, he's a Republican governor in Maryland last spring.

He brought in a number of governors, Republicans and Democrats, Joe Mansion, number of senators, Republican and Democrat, and a number of House members all in the Problem Solvers.

And we discussed back in April, we need an infrastructure bill, what should it look like, what should the scope be?

And we defined it as being roads and bridges, broadband, energy security, water lines, and of course, that's always been an issue here at least for some time here in Michigan.

But let's focus on that and then also, how are we gonna pay for it?

We're not gonna just add it to the debt.

How are we gonna pay for it?

We had some leading experts, Larry Summers from Harvard, but a former White House guy, a top economic guy in the country by every standard.

We developed the blueprint and that blueprint was the one that passed the Senate in a bipartisan way back in August, 69 to 30, overwhelmingly bipartisan.

Speaker Pelosi called us back and I was one that weighed in with the White House and said, you can't let this thing hold out until September, who knows beyond that because you lose votes, people pick it part, you can't do that.

But that's exactly what happened.

Speaker Pelosi promised, we actually passed a bill.

We would vote and debate on it by September 27th.

Well, here we are getting to mid October and it's not gonna be this week, it still hasn't been done yet.

In the meantime, President Biden, and this is where you have to really get in with what is the infrastructure bill, has a much larger bill, three and a half trillion dollars, you name it, it's in it.

I mean it is a massive bill.

And how does it pay for it?

Well it undoes the tax cuts that were enacted enacted back in 2017 in large part.

So there is not a Republican out there, House or Senate, that supports this three and a half trillion dollar bill.

But in the meantime, because the bipartisan bill which passed the Senate is being held up in the House, you've got a lot of frayed nerves, we needed a time out.

That's why I've been home until this week.

Congress adjourned for, I guess two weeks, depending on if you're in the House or the Senate, but we'll see what happens when we come back.

For me, I think it's gonna be very difficult for the administration to put something together that's actually gonna pass the test to get through a narrow majorities.

You remember it's 50/50 in the Senate, Speaker Pelosi can only lose three votes in the House.

So with other issues like the debt ceiling, with the continuing resolution, which keeps the government funded, because none of the appropriation bills have passed, it's gonna be a very busy couple of weeks and I'm not sure where infrastructure is gonna fall.

Literally no progress has been made since the Senate passed their bill, their bipartisan bill in mid-August.

- Well, and of course there are politics involved.

Joe Biden needs a win at some point here.

He's dealing with a border crisis, what happened with Afghanistan, something needs to happen as we approach the midterms.

So if you were the strategist, what would your advice be?

- Well, my advice was pass the bipartisan bill that he allegedly supported and ended up pulling the plug on to try and get the larger bill, which was not gonna happen in the house, it just wasn't.

So they may rue the day at the end that they didn't pass the smaller bill that had bipartisan support really from last spring.

So time will tell what'll happen, but in the meantime, you've got these midterm elections.

Virginia's a big state and they have a one term for governor and Terry McAuliffe was a former, the Democrat nominee, is a former governor and they can't have consecutive terms.

So he's running again.

He had a wide lead when things started, it's now neck and neck and that decision was made that first week in November.

And it's in large part because it's a spill over from the national politics, particularly Democrats and Republicans.

How come nothing's getting done?

How come some of these bipartisan bills aren't getting done?

Instead, you're relying on partisanship and that is taking away votes now from where the Democrat Terry McAuliffe is as he runs against this fellow by the name of Youngkin.

- I know that there are parts of the bill that address climate change.

That's something that you have been taking- - Yeah, that's in the three and a half trillion.

There's not climate change in the smaller, in the bipartisan.

- Okay, this is where it kind of gets a little messy, right?

Because we've got the infrastructure and there's some things that could be in the bigger bill- - Yeah, they're both called infrastructure.

So that's why we run things with acronyms.

So the bipartisan is actually called the BIF.

Nothing that I know of, not even, I'm not gonna go there, nothing is named the BIF, but the bipartisan plan is the one that passed the Senate.

It does not have the climate change.

And of course this last weekend, what you had was the progressives, led by Bernie Sanders and others, they pounded the hell out of Joe Mansion, another fellow Democrat, but he's West Virginia.

So he's a coal state and they're trying to embarrass Mansion to support this bill, but it backfired big time and Mansion really blew up.

And of course, they have to have his vote to get anything done and he did vote for the BIF, but he's a major player in the larger bill, but I think the rug gets pulled out, which wouldn't hurt the feelings of any of the Republicans who don't support that larger bill for lots of reasons, but it shouldn't necessarily be part of an infrastructure bill.

- But all of this adds more debt.

And we talk about the debt ceiling and now we've extended that until December.

How do you view the debt ceiling?

There are those who say it's artificial, it's something that you aspire to be, I guess, to control our spending.

But in your mind, how should we be addressing this?

Because we've had tax breaks, we've had all these different things that both parties use when they're in power, what should the bottom line be or how should we address debt in this country for both parties, and to be fair for both parties?

- Right, if I were king, that's your question?

- Yes, if you were king.

- How would I do this?

Actually, there was a way that they did it a long time ago that somehow got reversed by somebody, and not me, but the way that I would do it, so what is the debt ceiling?

It's like your MasterCard bill.

You can only spend so much and all of a sudden when they get you, wherever you go, they'll say, "Sorry, you've reached your credit limit.

You can't use that card."

That's what the debt ceiling is.

It's an artificial cap on spending in essence and that cap has to be raised.

And until we get a balanced budget, and it's gonna be awhile, that then has to be continually raised.

How would I deal with this?

I would say that if you pass a budget, that budget and the dictates that come about would automatically raise the debt ceiling to what that prescribed level would be.

You can't raise it without passing the budget.

So that goes back to the premise of you've got to pass a budget.

And we have passed budgets virtually every year until the last two or three years we haven't passed one.

And that is a problem.

I mean can you imagine a company or a state or your TV station not having a budget?

But we don't have one.

And so this would force us to reckon to pass a budget and just would note that, little inside baseball, budget does not have to be signed into law.

So the president doesn't veto or sign it into law.

So you can't say, well, you got to have a two-thirds vote if he vetoes or whatever, you just have to pass it.

We've not been able to do that.

So that would force us, Congress, to pass a budget.

And when that happens, bingo, the debt ceiling goes up to whatever level that would be versus are we gonna have a default and what's it gonna do to the market, all these different things.

Now, at the end of the day, we extended, as you know, to December 3rd, as you said.

Nothing's happened the last two weeks.

I'm not sure nothing is gonna, I think nothing is gonna happen the next two weeks.

We'll get up to right to December 3rd again, and people are gonna say, "Oh my goodness, December 3rd's right around the corner.

What are we gonna do?"

There is a way out.

Schumer doesn't want to do it, the majority leader in the Senate, but I think McConnell is gonna force him to do it, to raise it, and we'll see what happens.

- You've been in Washington for decades.

And who knows for how long?

What is the state of affairs?

I think for a number of Americans, politics has become so tribal.

What is it like working in Washington?

Are the mechanisms working?

Are the gears turning or are there just stalemates?

How would you describe the mood?

- You know, I've never seen a worse time in Congress to try and get things done.

We talked briefly at the beginning, I'm a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, bipartisan, we have rules within our caucus that I think are really good.

We meet very regularly, a couple hours a week actually, but I've never seen things so toxic and it's really unfortunate.

COVID has a little bit of a hand to play here because you and I, right now, we're doing this on Zoom.

I've often been in the studio.

I know you have a green room right across the hallway, talk before we go on the air, we sort of know what's going on and we're ready and we have that relationship and we still do, but I tell you, when you do a Zoom hearing, as I did last Friday, or a Zoom markup, and knowing that we have 56 members on the Energy and Commerce Committee, most important committee I think that there is with jurisdiction and I'm looking at Hollywood squares, I'm looking across my screen and literally postage stamps of colleagues and they don't know quite sure where that mute button or who's talking or how are they dressed.

I mean how do you interact getting bipartisan amendments?

Whereas before you could just go over and the lower dais or whatever, I'm on the upper dais and you just talk, you communicate, you walk to vote.

I mean even votes on the house floor, the rules are such that, they've always been you've got to be present to vote, not anymore.

In fact, the week before we left, the last vote that we had on the debt ceiling, 197 of my colleagues voted by proxy.

They're not even there.

You lose that relationships.

You get to be known for something, finding cures for healthcare, energy independence, honest as the day is long, your spouse is involved because we all have families.

I mean you build those relationships and when you take that away and you're off all around the country, even the times of the hearings change because we've got people on three hours time difference.

So when we had a markup, it went 40 hours and, oh, man, it went Eastern time with two, three, four in the morning, Western districts, it's midnight, but they can't start at eight or nine in the morning, they got to start at, it's wholly different.

And that has been a cause actually I think of the dysfunction of the pounding of each other, but it's sad, it really is unfortunate and much more difficult to try and legislate knowing that these issues aren't going away, they just aren't.

- About one minute, Fred, just the state of the GOP right now and what has been taking place and still the influence of the former president in the state of affairs?

- Well, that's a big question to answer in 60 seconds, I don't think that I can, but both sides, Republicans and Democrat, you've got your wings, small margins in both the House and the Senate, we're a polarized country.

I mean look at the 50/50 Senate, pretty close.

In our delegation, seven republicans, seven democrats and we're fighting redistricting.

We lose a seat, who knows where that's gonna come out of.

So it's just, it's more intense than ever before and we'll see what happens not only next year in '22, but also in '24.

- All right, do you see some change?

Do you see the pendulum swinging back the other way in the next?

- I don't know.

My crystal ball, I don't know, it's foggy.

- Good enough.

Fred Upton, Congressman Fred Upton, St. Joseph.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- You bet.

- And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

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