The Coronavirus Response, with Senator Sherrod Brown

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover, and I am not in a studio.

Like many people, I'm hungry down at home.

So for now, I'm recording over our conference line, and that's why I sound a bit different.

And I appreciate you bearing with us as we continue to sort this out.

But let's talk about the interview this week.

My guest, Senator Sherrod Brown.

For two years, President Trump left us without the team that's supposed to manage pandemics.

Now, he is a prominent progressive senator from Ohio and has been outspoken on the coronavirus response from the Senate floor in recent days.

He faults the Trump administration for its failure to prepare for this pandemic.

He also faults Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for leaving Washington just as the Senate had to pass the stage of the coronavirus bill response on paid sick leave and unemployment insurance.

Today is another day we're wasting.

McConnell made it back to D.C.

and they passed the bill.

That was phase two.

Now there's phase three.

And this is one of the main reasons why we wanted to talk with Brown this week.

The Trump administration is talking about a $1 trillion stimulus.

That is a huge number.

The biggest piece of legislation Congress has taken on in years.

And it's happening just as the first members of Congress test positive for the virus themselves.

So I wanted to understand what this looks like from inside the halls of the Senate.

But also, this is a big moment when Americans are examining how they take care of one another, especially those of us facing sudden hardship with the pandemic response.

Sherrod Brown's been talking about these issues for his entire career.

Now he says, this is a moment when people are thinking deeply about the government's role in society.

A lot of it's been about how government failed, but he thinks this is a time when people see how essential the role of government is and what it can mean for people.

So, like everyone else these days, we connected with him on a conference line.

Brown is back in Cleveland.

He drove there after the Senate finished session on Wednesday.

We spoke just a few hours before the Republicans in Congress unveiled their proposal about a coronavirus response, which includes a lot of big corporate tax breaks.

That is not the kind of proposal that Sherrod Brown has about what should happen now.

Take a listen.

Hey, Senator Isaac DeVer, how are you?

Hey, Isaac, how are you?

Good, good.

Look forward to it.

You have expressed a lot of frustration with what is going on and what has been going on.

Let me just ask a simple question to start with, which is, do you think your colleagues in Congress are up to the task here?

I think it's a challenge that nobody expected of this severity and

I think nobody really was prepared for.

I've spent much of the last few days on conference calls, sort of town, sort of roundtable conference calls with public health and hospital and public transit and sort of service governments, writ large services in each in a community.

you know, they planned for disasters, but they didn't plan for any, nobody planned for anything this big.

So I think it's it's,

we'll see.

I look at, I mean, I make a contrast that I look at the governor of Ohio, a Republican, I'm a Democrat who has really stepped up, Governor DeWine, and done this right.

He's had experience and character.

And I think you contrast that with the president of the United States who had neither.

And while DeWine was doing his job in getting Ohio as prepared as you can for this to respond to it, both economics and health care, I'd put in the reverse order, healthcare and

the prospect of the economy.

The president was still calling it

a democratic plot or a fake news or a hoax or whatever.

And that caused us to be several weeks behind.

So the real challenge for the Congress is to make up for the president's

inability or unwillingness to address this crisis with the gravitas that any executive should.

And that's why I, in some ways, not to engage in too much political science here, but the fact that the governors of the states can move without the federal administration is limited in what it can do.

But in many states, they've done it absolutely right.

And Ohio is near the top of that list.

Yeah.

And I feel like it should be noted that Governor DeWine, before he was Governor DeWine, going back with Senator DeWine until you beat him, right?

You guys ran against each other

in 2006

and obviously both wanted to win.

You did.

Things have moved on in a lot of ways since then, but this is not about the usual political fights.

Yeah, I'm very critical of the president through this, not because he's a Republican.

I'm complimentary of DeWine as a Republican.

I just because of, I mean, you look back, and one of the heartbreaking things, but one of the places where I'm optimistic that I know we can do much better is until a decade ago, we had the best public health system in the in the probably in the history of the world.

The CDC, from the CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to the local county public health departments in your city, county, whatever it is in each state.

They've just did very good work on increasing our life expectancy and taking care of being a real safety net.

Those budget cuts a decade ago with the Republican House began to undermine this.

And then the president in 2018

eliminated, fired a whole section of his office.

Their title was something like the National Global Health Security Directorate, something like that.

And what their job was, the 40 people headed by a Rear Admiral Timothy Zemer, who had worked in both the Obama and the Bush administrations.

And his job was to surveil the world and look for potential epidemics in a country or a community and

the chances of those epidemics going beyond the borders or the region surging into a pandemic, if you will.

And his job is to look for those early.

When the president eliminated that, I wrote him a letter two years ago, please restore it and stop the budget cuts.

So we're ready.

This terrible pandemic, I hope the lesson is we build up that public health infrastructure.

It'll take billions of dollars, but what it saves, you know, prophylactically, if you will, what it saves is

immense in health and in dollars.

Is that

look?

Everywhere around the world is going through this.

And one of the questions that I think comes up is: there are things that clearly caught the Trump administration and President Trump himself completely unprepared and off guard about this.

And we're seeing

there are

reporting about the way the Obama administration going in the last couple of days of the transition tried to prep the Trump administration and of

studies that were being done within the Trump administration about a pandemic that could start in China that never made it up to the top levels of government here.

How much of this is just this is

nowhere in the the world got it right.

Is it right to put the

burden of this on the Trump administration?

No, I don't.

I don't, first of all, I don't want to dwell too much on the past.

I know I talked about it now as you did, but I'm fine with that.

The answer is yes, but the answer is it's obviously not one president's fault.

This president could have started doing a lot of the things he's now doing in December instead of

just dismissing it in a contemptuous sort of way and having all his media acolytes do the same.

You know, just that the polling numbers are dramatic, something like, as of last week, 70% of Republicans didn't believe this was very serious nationally.

And something like, I don't know, 20% of Democrats did not believe it was serious.

Whatever those numbers, they were dramatic.

But I think that the issue is, though, that this could not have been entirely prevented, of course.

But it's not just it hit every country.

When the U.S.

has

for, maybe not since World War II, maybe, I don't really know when it started, but the U.S.

has been the leader on dealing with global health issues and challenges.

We send doctors, we send nurses, we organize others, we help fund things.

Other countries have been part of it.

But we were, one of the great things about this country, we were a world leader in that.

And, you know, that's not Defense Department.

We do that too, but that's one really to be proud of.

And we've bungled that.

And so, granted, Italy didn't deal this this with this do this right south korea did it better but if we had had the kind of leadership where in november maybe dr ziemner could have gone to the president and said

dr zemer in the white house said look what we're seeing in china how do we mobilize the world to do something it didn't mean you close schools like governor dwine has done recently in ohio you don't do that early but you get public health officials involved you begin to prepare the personal

you get the testing testing going,

the personal protective equipment, you begin to scale up.

The Purel manufacture production, you start scaling all that up.

You start alerting people that this is a potential public health crisis.

Be more ready than we are.

Because we're not natural, no society is naturally ready for something like this.

That's what government's there for.

And

that's why I'm a guy that believes in...

the power of government really does make lives better.

I wear in my lapel a canary pin sent to me by a steel worker worker at a rally, at a worker safety rally.

It depicts to me how we live 25 years longer in the United States than we did 100 years ago because of public health fundamentally.

And

we have lost that mission.

It's not just Trump, of course, nor it's not even just conservative politicians who underfund it.

It's really all of us let it happen.

When you think back,

this is moving so quickly, the changes in our lives just in the last week are immense.

And And who knows what

and what the next week is going to hold, who knows.

When you think about

the conversations that you're having with your colleagues, those who have been moving somewhat slowly on this,

last weekend, the Senate went into recess rather than moving on any of the coronavirus legislation.

What do you say to your colleagues who have been saying, hey, we've got time to do this?

I mean, it does seem kind of crazy to think about it that since the Senate went into recess last weekend there have been uh at least 6 000 new cases reported yeah i i i i mean saying to somebody how could you have been so stupid is not really the best way to convince them whether i say that to a trump voter or i say that to somebody i'm trying to convince that may be moving anyway but um yeah i mean last last thursday i stood on the senate floor and senator mcconnell planned to leave and we pelosi was almost ready to do her deed to finish her deal with with um minutiae and it ended up taking another 24 hours or so in part because we had left and McConnell said we're leaving and McConnell it turns out went back to celebrate some judge that some very conservative young judge that had clerked for a Supreme Court justice and Justice Kavanaugh was coming out to be at the ceremony and understanding McConnell's on the ballot this week and wanted to trumpet how he pardoned my verb there trumpet um McConnell McConnell's role in selecting him i'm sure he wanted to do that so i and i i mean i didn't see much objection from my at least Republican colleagues.

And when you said how fast, you made me think, because

that day, it was either that day or the day before,

we all Congress, 75 at least, I don't, I didn't count, but most of the Senate, both parties sat in a hearing room, shoulder to shoulder, close to each other.

In front of the room, only four or five feet from the front row, sat seven or eight

public health most of them were doctors, some of the couple of them weren't, but they were all health people.

And we were in this room.

This was only two weeks.

It was like 10 days ago.

And that's how fast it's changed.

I mean, nobody stood up, including me, and said, what are we doing?

Sitting so close and talking to each other and, you know, and shaking hands.

I don't think we were shaking hands and we knew not to do that at that point.

But all these public health doctors, the same when you see the president do these news conferences shoulder to shoulder with six or seven doctors.

What are they thinking when they tell us how serious this is and not to talk, not to stand with people?

I didn't now,

just in the last couple of days, we're seeing that there are two members of the House who've tested positive for it, a congressman from Florida and a congressman from Utah, a Republican and Democrats.

I guess they're sort of proving that this is not in any way divided by the Congress.

Does that make you scared?

I mean, thinking about what you, you're going to go back to the Senate and people are standing further away from each other, but still, like, you're walking through that building there are a lot of other uh

of your colleagues of of aides of reporters who are around uh i mean you're and i don't mean this to uh in any you're 67 right like you're you're uh

right no i i i scared is the wrong word i'm concerned i my my daughter one of my daughters said the way to look at this is not to be afraid that you will get the virus.

The way to act is that you think you might have the virus and you might give it to others.

And I think that puts us all in a place of humanity and caution and correct behavior, if you will.

But yeah, I mean, we're all concerned about it.

We all think there's some inevitability to some

number of more prominent people in whatever their profession.

And my profession is one where we, you know, we work up close with each other.

As we negotiate

this next package, package number three,

on the rescue, the stimulus slash rescue slash public health bill.

I drove back to Cleveland last night.

It doesn't matter where I am.

I was in Washington by myself in my office most of the day, last three days.

All the negotiations we're doing are by phone or by email or some way where we're not seeing each other.

So we can operate that way.

I wish we had all started this earlier.

And I go back to, we came to, the president came to us extraordinarily late, came to this.

We came to it later than we should have, all of us.

You're back in Cleveland.

I know this is a tricky thing.

I don't want you to be in a position of revealing personal information about some of your constituents, but you are seeing some of the

impact of this beyond the health impact, the economic impact.

You're hearing about it from people you represent.

What does this look like on the ground from what you're seeing already?

Well,

much of how I educate myself about the public if i could say it that way there there's a wonderful lincoln line that his staff wanted to stay in the white house and win the war and free the slaves and preserve the union he said no i got to go out and get my public opinion bath

would do that regularly when and and um that's my job i mean i i think i do that i try to do it as often as i can i'm not doing it now of course but i the best way i always stop to do it was to to go to youngstown or to go to ashkabule or to go to toledo or manfield and sit with 15 people a cross-sectional community or a group of veterans or a group of teachers, whatever the subject was, and just listen to them for an hour and a half.

And I've been doing that by phone the last three days.

And I mean, everybody I talk to is so concerned about what's happened with the economy.

One guy runs a bunch of restaurants.

His revenues are down by 80 or 90%.

I mean, we're seeing that everywhere.

The goal here is to protect their workers, make sure they're not foreclosed on, make sure they get health care and they lose their jobs, make sure they have enough money directly from the federal government, if necessary and it is necessary, to that they can go on with their lives in an okay sort of way.

And then what do we do with businesses?

So when this gets better, they can scale up with much of the same workforce that's already trained and skillful at any level.

So those are the challenges, but we see the, I mean, this is the country's in a difficult place now.

We always rise to challenges.

I've never seen one quite like this in my career.

And for you, you've got a bunch of ideas that you've been thinking about and bills that you've been proposing.

And it seems like part of the issue here is how to prioritize among the priorities.

There's so much that needs to be done, but some of it is going to get done first.

And how do you pick the things to focus on?

Can you walk through how you approach that?

Yeah, I think you start with anything we do.

This is in 2008, 9, and 10 with a corporate bailout.

This is whatever relief package we do starts with the workers and making sure that they can go forward with their lives and raise their children and stay in their homes and have enough food and have an expanded Medicaid or whatever they need for regular health care, let alone the coronavirus.

So through that lens,

you pass a good, not an inadequate, which is all we could get out of the Trump administration on the first round or the second round, not an inadequate, but a good policy on family leave so that $12 an hour workers don't have to,

if she gets sick, she doesn't, she either goes to work and infects people or stays home and loses $100 income that she needs for her rent to make sure that all of those things are taken care of.

And that's kind of how you start.

And I see it all through the prism of the dignity of work, a term.

Actually,

first time I saw it was Pope Leo XIII, the labor pope.

I'm not Catholic, but I read a lot about him 120 years ago, but mostly popularized the theme of the dignity of work of Dr.

King.

And he sort of overlapped dignity of work with civil rights.

And so it's not just white male union workers at dignity of work.

It's people that prepare food and clean our offices and work construction.

And it's people taking care of children.

It's people working for tips.

It's people staying home and

caring for an aging parent.

All of those, that whole dignity of work theme to me is what I get up every day and think about and fight for.

We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, I asked Senator Brown about the specific solutions he wants to see and whether, as Congress debates an enormous intervention here, this is a moment when serious change could actually come about.

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You're part of a bill with Senator Booker from New Jersey and Senator Bender from Colorado

that would be a cash infusion.

And can you explain why you think that that's the right way to approach this?

It's one of the right ways.

A number of Republicans, including Secretary Mnuchin and then the president, and a handful of senators are saying the most important thing is a cash, just a cash, you called, we're infusion as good as any.

Started at 1,000.

We're mostly saying what Senators Booker and Bennett and I are saying is

make it 2,000 right now, then a second payment of $1,500 next quarter and $1,000 after that is still necessary

to protect people and to keep the economy going.

But

that, for some, particularly conservative politicians, that's sort of okay, we did that.

We're done with this.

Well, to us, it's not the most important component.

It's what we do now, but the most important components are scaling up unemployment insurance.

And that means getting it to people quicker and it needs to be more generous.

It's sort of decayed over the years.

UI benefits.

It means an earned income tax credit expansion.

It means having to look back on EITC in 2021 so people can get their, base their income on 2019 and get what they showed at EITC, all those kinds of things.

But keep it always in mind that it's all about that the great thing about unemployment insurance, like Medicare, like Social Security, is they're all part of social insurance.

That is, you pay into unemployment, you pay into UI, you pay into that insurance, you pay into Social Security, you pay into Medicare, you get benefits when you need them, sometimes before retirement, sometimes at retirement.

And

that's such an important social contract.

And Republicans and conservatives, and I will say it that way more than Republicans, have never really taken to social insurance, particularly they think that's too big a role of government.

That's what government's about to me.

And this public health, this terrible pandemic, is all about the government response.

And, you know, everybody's now realizing, oh,

government can actually do really good things for people to save them.

But it has to be not

a year from now, we're done.

We didn't learn anything.

We didn't do anything.

No, a year from now, we have an expanded UI.

We also unemployment.

We also have a better rebuilt and on the way to getting stronger public health infrastructure.

I mean, I've talked to a number of other progressives who see sort of an opportunity here to put in place a lot of things that progressives have been talking about for a long time

when it comes to some of the things you've been talking about or in a wider way.

You've got obviously Bernie Sanders saying that this makes the case for Medicare for all system, which is something that you were not for because

your position on Medicare for all was that it didn't take care of the immediate need of healthcare that people needed.

And it's better to work on getting health care to the people who need it rather than trying to start what would have been a long process to overhaul the system.

I mean, is this an opportunity for progressives to do something massive and making government reflect more the vision of it that you and people who by and large agree with you have?

Well, first of all, I think the public overwhelmingly agrees and sees more clearly now the role of government and how government is a positive force in people's lives.

And we don't make that case day in and day out.

It's not a progressive case.

It is a progressive case, but it's a proven historical case that people do well when

everybody does well when everybody does well.

I don't think you quite want to look at this as an opportunity because it looks a little seedy

to say, as

some have said, well, we've got to use this crisis as an opportunity to advance progressive causes.

I think that looks,

this doesn't sit well with the public.

But I think we, you know, show us what you believe, show us.

And as an old civil rights leader, don't tell me what you believe, show me what you do, I'll tell you what you believe.

And showing what UI does for people, showing what expanded Medicaid does, showing what earned income tax credit does, which rewards work, but also helps those who are unable to work or haven't found a job.

So all of those things, and you,

the word you is put in quotation marks.

use these days to prove that with what we've had in the past and what we can have in the future.

And I think you'll see the kind of structural change in our society that most of the country wants, even if they don't say it's now, an overwhelming percentage of the country will appreciate and benefit from it as the years go on.

To just take a moment and think about the last two crisis points that America has faced and things that happen in them after September 11th, there was the rush through the Patriot Act.

After the financial crisis in 2008, There was what happened with TARP.

One of the lessons that people took from the Patriot Act was slow down.

There were a lot of things that got stuck in that bill that people didn't really realize were there or that

only came

clear for what problems they brought up years later.

One of the lessons that people took from what happened with TARP was that Democrats kind of gave in too much and gave up too much and maybe should have tried to,

in effect,

slow it down then

and put more of their priorities in and fight back against what the Republicans were pushing on.

Do you see either of those as instructive cases when you think about the way that Congress has to approach what's ahead?

Oh, yeah, they're both both of them.

The mistakes Congress made, and I guess the White House made too,

were because of of fear, fear of terrorism, fear of what was next in the implosion of the economy in 2008.

And politicians don't make good decisions when it comes to fear.

Going into the Iraq war was clearly Bush, I was in the House then and voted against it.

And I remember Bush calling directly or indirectly, most of us on American or soft on terror.

I saw fear in the eyes of people during the impeachment.

They were fearful of what Trump might do to them.

And when you make decisions based on fear, you almost always make the wrong decision.

So I don't think it's a question of basing it on that now.

People are certainly fearful, but it's more of a, you know, we also watch

some of the most powerful players in society like the banks.

Every time there's a disaster of any kind, they find ways to get weaker regulation on them.

And we've got to caution against that now.

But I go back to the social insurance and how important that is.

And we make those decisions based on what we have seen work in the past.

And what we've seen work in the past, whether it was the Roosevelt years or the LBJ years, when you build the institutions of society, Medicare,

Social Security, unemployment insurance,

Head Start, you build some social insurance,

others just sort of a safety net, but providing opportunity to people that don't have it.

We all gain for generations from from it and we need to make that case better today as in any crisis like this.

Are you surprised at how fragile our whole situation was, whether it's what was happening

in government or our public health?

It just feels like the world has so radically changed in a couple of days and we are only at the very forefront of what this change is going to be.

I don't think anyone that I've talked to would have guessed that it would be possible for things to change this much this quickly.

And again, with much more to come.

Was it surprising?

That was a very thoughtful, this whole interview has been very thoughtful in the questions.

That was a really good question.

Well, thank you, Senator.

Well, yes.

And I think that we've been surprised, I can only speak for myself, but

I think I've been surprised by how fragile our democracy appears with the threat that this president has done, what he's done.

I mean, I don't think we've lost.

I think we're, one, I think we're going to beat Trump.

But second, I think our democracy is strong, but it's not nearly as strong as probably most of us thought.

And

we're not as immune from disaster.

You can't help thinking about climate change in that context, that

we all warn of it.

Many of us of many political stripes say it's the most important moral issue of our times.

And it is.

And

we're never,

I guess the human mind doesn't

prepare for the worst case very well, at least collectively as a government and as a society.

But

I was surprised.

I know our public health infrastructure is

much undermined by...

conservative budgets and Trump's incompetence and wanting to blame everybody else and never taking responsibility and inability.

And, you know, this was all about the stock market.

You didn't want to all the kinds of things there.

But even with that, I would have thought we would have been able to overcome this a little better than we have so far.

So I'm going to end it on, since you brought up how fragile our democracy is.

It's sort of stunning, but at this point, after the last couple of years, not that surprising to see how quickly we got to questions of whether President Trump would try to postpone the election or move in some kind of authoritarian way before that.

It's hard to predict anything at all at this point.

Are you confident that he will

not try to change things for saying that the election is on November 3rd?

I don't think he can.

I think he can try.

I think he will sow all those doubts in people.

It's pretty stunning how loyal his base is and how fearful Republican politicians are of him.

I mean, just we go back to the percentage of people who are self-identified Republicans and don't believe this virus, this coronavirus, this COVID-19 is that serious compared to the rest of the population.

So I understand that and I understand that once he's no longer president, he's going to continue in all likelihood to roll the waters and question everything.

But

we're a pretty resilient country.

And I think over time that

that falls on deafer and deafer, fewer and fewer ears.

But I think it's going to make governing much harder in 2021.

I do have belief that it will oil the waters and continue to undermine our faith in government, as he's done.

And that's maybe the worst thing he's done, that such a huge swath of people think the government is always ill-intentioned and you in the media are never to be trusted.

And that to me is perhaps the biggest concern of all this.

And that's why a decisive win in November is so very, very, very important to continue to roil the waters.

I don't have any doubt.

I can't tell if we're ending on a note of optimism or deep pessimism at this point, but that seems to be the life that we're in.

Yeah, I'll end on a note of optimism.

You said earlier that these Democratic candidates are talking about work and the dignity of work.

And that's such a universal, particularly coupled with civil rights, such a human rights, such a

universal equality of humankind.

And I think people are, most voters, most people are seeing the role of government, how important it is.

We have to remind people of that, that that's why the country.

after we come out of this, even without a vibrant economy, because it's going to take a while to rebuild that, that people are going to be optimistic about their future and how the role of government played

such an important

part of that.

All right, Senator, thanks for taking all this time to talk.

I really appreciate it and let you get back to the work of trying to figure this out.

All right.

Thanks.

Perfect.

Thanks.

That's this week's episode of The Ticket, Politics from the Atlantic, brought to you by Conference Line.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe out there, wash your hands, be well, and catch you next week.