Special: A Look at President-Elect Biden’s Future Cabinet

ROBERT COSTA: Welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I’m Robert Costa.

Let’s continue our conversation where we left off on the week’s most pressing issues. Joining me tonight are three top reporters: Molly Ball, national political correspondent for Time magazine; Errin Haines, editor-at-large for The 19th; and Philip Rucker, White House bureau chief for The Washington Post. Welcome, all.

Errin, begin with you. When you were talking about the Biden Cabinet during the show you said you spoke to Marcia Fudge, the Biden pick to run HUD – Housing and Urban Development – and you also mentioned that civil rights meeting with Biden earlier in the week. Inside the civil rights community, the Democratic Party, do they see this current slate, what we’ve seen nominated so far – the people we’ve seen nominated so far as sufficient? Is it enough?

ERRIN HAINES: They don’t see it as sufficient. They see it as a good start but not commensurate with what we know was the coalition that, you know, was girded by the Black voters who not only got Joe Biden the primary nomination and then also pushed him to nominate not just a woman but a Black woman, Kamala Harris, as his running mate, but really got him across the finish line in the midst of a pandemic that is disproportionately killing Black Americans across this country. And so, you know, they are looking for a return on their investment, what they say is, you know, to be valued not just for their output but for their input, and so they want that reflected not just in Kamala Harris, who is about to become the second most powerful person in the country, but in other of those decision-making roles that really have a chance to shape policy and to undo a lot of the systemic, institutional racism, frankly, that got a lot of them out into the streets to protest in the middle of this coronavirus crisis.

MR. COSTA: Errin, just a follow up: Where is Vice President-elect Harris in terms of her influence right now in Biden’s inner circle?

MS. HAINES: Well, she certainly had a seat at the table at that civil rights meeting. She was – you know, she joined President-elect Biden in hearing the concerns of those civil rights organizations, and she also has relationships, as does Joe Biden, with a lot of the heads of these legacy civil rights organizations. And so, you know, she is somebody who said, you know, when she accepted this role, that she wanted to be a full partner who was going to bring her lived experience as a woman of color, you know, as a Black woman, daughter of immigrants, to, you know, how she participates as vice president and as Joe Biden’s governing partner. And so, you know, I think that, you know, we are beginning to see that as this administration is starting to take shape.

MR. COSTA: Phil, inside of the White House we hear about President Trump – he’s raging against the election result – but we also saw Alyssa Farah, the communicators director, leave her job. Is there a mood inside of the White House that this is ending, it’s time to polish that resume?

PHILIP RUCKER: Oh yeah, Bob. You know, when you talk privately to people who work for President Trump in the White House, they realize what the reality is. They know that they’re going to be out of there on January 20th. Many of them are starting to think about their next career step. Some of them are more actively seeking future employment, others are sort of waiting their time, but they recognize that what the president is doing is very much sort of his own impulse, his own delusions about the election and not being able to accept the fact that he lost, and they see that there’s no possibility really of overturning these results. They know it’s over.

MR. COSTA: What about Vice President Pence, Phil? I was rifling through your book today and Pence is a character who’s always the enabler. Is he still the enabler inside of this White House?

MR. RUCKER: Well, I don’t know that I would quite call him in the enabler, but he certainly is loyally doing what he’s done for the last four years, which is to very carefully avoid crossing President Trump. I found it interesting when Pence was down in Georgia for a campaign rally a few weeks ago – or a few days ago, rather, he very artfully came up with a way to talk about the election where he didn’t totally buy into Trump’s argument that the election was rigged and that the results were wrong because of fraud, but instead he made it sound like there was sort of unfinished business and tried to rally the Trump troops down in Georgia, but making clear that he wasn’t going to fully accept the argument that the president and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis and some of these other characters have been making. He’s very careful about that, as you know as a longtime Pence watcher.

MR. COSTA: Speaking of artful, Phil, you did put it a better way. The loyalist is a much better way, perfect way of describing VP Pence, versus the enabler, so we’ll stick with the Rucker characterization.

MR. RUCKER: (Laughs.) OK.

MR. COSTA: But Molly Ball, in terms of bigtime people in American politics, no one usually is a bigger person than the person of the year in Time magazine, and I’ve heard through the grapevine you’ve had a hand in editing this latest issue that has President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris on the cover. What’s the significance behind the decision by Time?

MOLLY BALL: Thank you. It was, of course, a big team effort, as it always is for us at Time magazine, in unveiling our storied franchise since 1927. And I think it’s important – we always say this, but people don’t seem to hear it – to point out to people this isn’t an endorsement and it isn’t an award. It isn’t a recognition of any kind of merit; it’s a recognition of influence and history. And traditionally – not always, but traditionally – the newly elected president is usually named person of the year, and that includes President Trump in 2016, but in this case we felt, you know, 2020 has been such a year, right, so difficult, so exhausting, with so many different strands to it, but we felt that the – and this is the first time that we have honored the - not honored, but given person of the year to the entire presidential ticket, the president and vice president, in recognition of what their partnership represents – not only the historic first represented by Kamala Harris, the first woman president or vice president and the first Black woman and the first Indian American, first Asian American, but also the way that their campaign struck these themes of unity and healing and the way that their partnership embodies that, embodies the bridge that Joe Biden says he is trying to build to the future, to future generations, and the symbolism of two people with so many differences in their backgrounds, so many differences in their superficial characteristics still making a – making a statement about shared values and making a statement the differences between us on the surfaces do not have to divide us as a country. Because they really face a challenge, given how divided we are as a country, as much as they face a challenge in policy terms tackling the pandemic, the economic crisis, and everything else. Their biggest challenge is going to be to convince Americans that we still have a shared future as a country, all of us together.

MR. COSTA: Molly, in the House your book on Pelosi, Speaker Pelosi, called Pelosi, it really details her relationship over the years with presidents, including President Obama and Vice President Biden at that time. And when you think about her relationship with the incoming president-elect, how would you describe it?

MS. BALL: Well, they have known each other for decades, but they’ve never served together. And if you think about Joe Biden’s political career, he’s very much been a creature of the Senate. Went directly to the Senate when he came to Washington when he was elected in 1972 and stayed there until he became vice president. At which point, one of his main duties was being a sort of Senate-whisperer for President Obama. Now, part of that was that the House didn’t need any whispering. And in fact, when some of President Obama’s inner circle – notably his first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel – would sometimes try to work around Speaker Pelosi, she made it clear that that was not welcome and she would be in charge of the House, thank you very much.

Certainly expect that to continue. But as I detail in the book, a lot of the frustration that Speaker Pelosi sometimes had with President Obama and the Obama administration was what she perceived as a naivete born of inexperience with the congressional process specifically. And with the way that President Obama, having run as a Washington outsider, was sort of perpetually denigrating the sort of inside game that she is such a master of. So I think that she and Joe Biden, who is such an institutionalist and such a creature of Washington himself, they will probably see eye-to-eye on a lot of procedural matters. At the same time, the question is going to be: Is Joe Biden going to want to give Republicans more than she thinks they ought to get? Because that was also sometimes a source of conflict between her and the Obama administration.

MR. COSTA: Let’s wrap up tonight by going back to that first part of the discussion on the broadcast. We began with the news from the Supreme Court and their order on the Texas case. And they said they’re not going to move forward with considering the case. So, Phil, when you think about what’s next in Washington, you have the Supreme Court making their decision on Friday night. You have the Electoral College meeting on Monday. What’s going to be the state of play in Washington come Wednesday or Thursday of next week when all of that’s happened? Does President Trump just go to Mar-a-Lago and stew until the inauguration? What does he do?

MR. RUCKER: Well, Bob, the first thing I’m going to be looking for is after the Electoral College certifies that result on Monday – I’m not sure what time that will be – but at some point Monday, do we start to hear from more Republican senators and Republican House members issuing sort of pro forma statements acknowledging Joe Biden as the president-elect? It’s remarkable how few elected Republican members of the Congress have actually acknowledged publicly that Biden won the election. Our colleagues at the Washington Post did a survey of all of them a week or so ago and found that it was only 27, I believe, of the more than 200 Republicans in Congress who acknowledge that. So I want to see if the Electoral College certification is a changing of the tide for Republicans.

It may not be. And that will just be an indication of President Trump’s enduring political power over the Republican base. But I fully expect that Trump will continue to deny the result, continue to stew, continue to claim fraud that doesn’t exist, and refuse ultimately to concede. You know, where he spends his time, I’m not sure. It’s tradition, of course, that he would go down to Mar-a-Lago. That’s where he usually spends the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. There’s an expectation that he does that again this year, but that’s not certain. And there’s also a chance that he could change his mind and stay at the White House for one last – one last Christmas in the executive mansion.

MR. COSTA: Errin, how would you answer my question? And to bring up your home state of Georgia, does the Electoral College moving forward next week – does it change what’s going on in Georgia in terms of the Senate races?

MS. HAINES: Well, you know, I think to the extent that reinforcing the legitimacy of our elections is going to galvanize the Republican voters that they would need to send Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue back to the Senate, that that could mean something for Republican voters in Georgia. But again, what I’m hearing from the Black women who have been, you know, just vigorously organizing folks, registering them and trying to get them to turn out in the middle of this pandemic that is resurging in Georgia, is that there’s a lot of enthusiasm on the Democratic side for this. You have the first debate of this runoff season, where Jon Ossoff was debating a microphone and a podium and Kelly Loeffler was trying to frame the pastor of Martin Luther King’s church as radical and liberal.

So you know, I think that, you know, the – again transfer of power, peaceful or not, you’re going to have yet another step towards that come Monday. And I don’t know what that does to either – you know, it could dampen, you know, enthusiasm among Republicans, or it could, you know, make them even more determined to keep up that red wall in Georgia to, you know, control the stakes and the future of the Senate.

MR. COSTA: Molly, any final thoughts?

MS. BALL: No, I think – I think Errin hit the nail on the head, which is that we don’t know which way this is going to go. But it’s already starting. Ballots are about to be mailed to voters in Georgia. So this isn’t something that doesn’t happen until January. And you’re going to see already hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into these runoffs. Such high stakes, deciding the majority in the United States Senate. So I think our attention is going to be shifting to Georgia for the foreseeable future because both parties’ future, potentially the future of the next administration, is on the line there.

MR. COSTA: We’ll leave it there for tonight. Many thanks to Molly, Phil and Errin for your insights and your time. I really appreciate it. And thank you all for joining us. Make sure to sign up for our Washington Week newsletter on our website. We’ll keep giving you a behind-the-scenes look into all things Washington Week and you’ll also receive a weekly note from me.

I’m Robert Costa. Good night from Washington.