- Good evening and welcome to the "Washington Week Extra". I'm Yamiche Alcindor. This week White House officials said they are running out of money for COVID efforts. This comes days after Congress stripped over $15 billion of COVID aid from the spending package it passed last week. Joining me tonight to discuss this and foreign policy issues, David Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for "The New York Times", and Rachel Scott, Congressional correspondent for "ABC News". David, I'm gonna start with you. You had this conversation where you scared us all, talking about nuclear weapons as a warning shot. I wanna, in some ways, let you scare us some more, which is talk a bit more about why a no-fly zone is something that is more violent than people often think of it as.
- Yeah, no-fly zone has this sort of sound of just an easy air cap you put on. Like there's one right over Washington, D.C. We don't want people flying over the White House and Congress, particularly after 9/11, but we had them even before then. In a war zone, it's a very different thing. Ukraine's a big country. The first time that a Russian pilot decides to go challenge the no-fly zone, of course the American or NATO flights have to be willing to intercept them, and if necessary, shoot them down. But it's worse than that. To really enforce a no-fly zone, you need to make sure that you take out the antiaircraft batteries that might threaten the people enforcing the no-fly zone. Well, in the case of Ukraine, those antiaircraft batteries are in Russia, so you would have to start by bombing Russian territory. That was not a long debate inside the White House or inside the Pentagon. Much harder issues, what to do about MiG fighters, whether or not you can provide antiaircraft, so forth, but no-fly zone was a pretty easy decision.
- And we've seen some lawmakers, some Senators, Republican Senators, come out saying that they would like to see a no-fly zone. What do you make of that? Is it the politics just sort of there, or is there something else going on?
- It sounds like an easy thing. It doesn't solve a huge number of problems for the Ukrainians. Most of the shelling they're getting is coming from the ground. It's not really coming from that. They do have about 50 aircraft left, some of that parked outside of the country. They're not flying a lot of those right now. Probably more useful to give them antitank and antiaircraft weapons.
- And Rachel, I wanna turn to you now, because there's a lot going on when it comes to the COVID front. We're still living through a pandemic. David and I are here by ourselves. We're not allowed to have as many people in the studio still because of how this virus is continuing to spread, even though things have gotten a lot better. Talk a bit about this COVID aid being stripped out of the spending package. How did it happen? What are the dynamics there?
- Yeah, this has really turned into a very big challenge for Democrats here. The White House is asking for more money to help with COVID relief. They say it's not just nice to have. It's really a need, a must-have, at this point. And so the White House has been pushing Democrats to try and figure out a plan to get this through Congress, Democrats and Republicans to come on-board. Almost every single Democrat that I talked to weeks ago envisioned that this would go into this much larger federal government spending plan. That has to be bipartisan. They believed that there was a way to sandwich that in there, and then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ended up having to strip that out of the package because of how some of the money was being offsetted, and because the plan was to claw back some of the unused money from states, and you had some vulnerable Democrats who are up for reelection in the midterms and they just really weren't happy about that. They were really not on-board with that plan. So now comes the issue with how to get this money through Congress. It's really tough because Democrats and Republicans are just at odds on how to pay for it, how the money should be offset, and at this point, there really isn't a very clear path on how Democrats and Republicans will come together to get this done.
- And Rachel, you told our producers that Nancy Pelosi in particular, you just said it now, talking about her, she wasn't very happy with her party, that this had to be taken out. What's her thinking there? Because of course she's someone who has really been known to get through what she needs to get through, what she wants to get through Congress.
- Yeah, she has really been able to strategize. I remember covering the infrastructure plan, when they were trying to get that through and we all didn't think that she had the votes, and somehow she was able to pull it off by the end of the night. This one is proving to be a challenge and sources were telling me that she did express a lot of frustration with some of those members who were not happy about how the money was being clawed back, who rejected that plan, ultimately leaving it being stripped out, and that Pelosi actually personally apologized to Biden administration officials who came to Capitol Hill saying that they need this money. She said, in so many words, "I'm sorry "that you have to come to the President's own party "to ask for your party to deliver "on needs that the President needs, "that the President wants, in the middle of a pandemic." And so she is definitely frustrated that this has become a big challenge, and she would like to just get this money delivered for the White House and for the Biden administration, but plan A definitely did not work out.
- I know you have your hand in the White House sometimes. Does the administration have a workaround? What's the likelihood that they'll get some money for COVID aid? There are some experts writing, even in the "Washington Post", Lena Huynh, a public health professor at George Washington, saying that this is really a mistake that needs to be fixed quickly.
- It is, and I think the White House is definitely feeling the pressure and they're going to be putting the pressure even more so on Congress, especially, we just looked back to the winter. I remember sitting with you in that White House, at the White House, with the President, as he was unveiling the new testing strategy as we were dealing with omicron. And this is an administration that does not wanna be caught flat-footed. When you have the press secretary, you have health officials coming out and essentially warning that some of these programs will be running out of funding in just a matter of weeks if Congress does not act, that's a dire situation, and the White House will take a lotta heat for that. And so right now I think they are working very closely with Democratic leadership, trying to figure out what the plan B is going to be. But at this point, they're going to need to get at least ten Republicans on-board in the Senate to get it through. The House, obviously Democrats have the majority and they would be able to do a workaround in order to push that legislation forward, but once it gets kicked over to the Senate, it's going to be very, very key for them to get the buy-in from Republicans on this.
- And David, the other big thing that's happening next week that, in some ways, is flying under the radar because there was so much news on Ukraine, is the Supreme Court nominee, the first Black woman nominated to be on the Supreme Court, she's gonna be sitting for confirmation hearings in the Senate. Talk a bit about how the White House is seeing these confirmation hearings. Are they confident that she'll be able to get through?
- First of all, a month ago, if we had said this wouldn't be the single biggest story, watching the judge go through all of this, I think we would've thought that was crazy. It tells you how much the world's been overturned. I think they're fairly confident she will get through. The opposition is coming from a lot of Republicans who voted for her in previous confirmation hearings.
- [Yamiche] Looking at you, Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina.
- That's right. And of course then Lindsey Graham suddenly has turned his view here now. That's gonna be hard for them to explain. Many of them are caught in a tough spot because they're either up for reelection or their constituents have been quite vocal. But boy, it sure does look like you are not exactly a profile in courage if you voted for her a year and a half ago and don't vote for her for the Supreme Court in this case. I don't hear significant angst in the White House that she's gonna be defeated, but there is a little concern that it is not going to be a wide vote.
- And Rachel, last question to you. I was talking about the college roommates of Ketanji Brown Jackson today and a Republican judge who endorsed her. Both of them said that they believe that Republicans, their claims about her being soft on crime, their claims that it was wrong that she was a Black woman who was nominated in part because President Biden wanted to make history, that all of that is a distraction. I wanna get from you, sort of, are lawmakers seeing it that way, and do we expect to see fireworks next week?
- I think there will definitely be a lot of tense moments in these confirmation hearings. A lotta tough questioning coming from some of those Republicans who are calling her soft on crime or other Republicans who see the President's pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the bench as offensive, or that he shouldn't have made that promise or pledge, even though we know that former President Donald Trump promised to put a woman on the bench, and President Reagan also campaigned on that when he was running for office. And so I do expect it to be extremely tense. It's gonna definitely be a long confirmation process, long days, especially on Tuesday, for the questioning. But the reality is is that Republicans know here that their hands are tied, and Senator Lindsey Graham even said it when the President first made this announcement. Elections have consequences, and the reality is is that Democrats have control of the Senate. They will be able to push through Judge Jackson on their own. The Vice President would cast the tie-breaking vote, if it came to that. The White House is certainly hoping for bipartisan support. I don't necessarily think that they're counting on it, but they still do have a few hold-outs, and I know that they have been really engaged with the handful of Senators, even Senator Mitt Romney, who didn't vote for her to be confirmed to the D.C. Circuit. But they may believe that he's keeping an open mind, when to comes to confirming her for the Supreme Court.
- It will surely be a historic moment and it will be definitely something to watch. So thank you so much. We'll have to leave it there tonight, but thank you to David and to Rachel for joining us and for sharing your reporting, and thank you all for watching us. I'm Yamiche Alcindor. Good night from Washington.
