Quarantine back in november. Because i had to do that back in november, i knew i could do this again so i just wheeled the whole setup back out again tonight. The roads are not fit for manor beast nor Cable News Hosts so, again, apologies for things looking a little higgledypiggledy. Ill be back in the studio tomorrow night. January 2009, when barack obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States with joe biden as his Vice President , in january 2009, over 800,000 americans had just lost their jobs. The Great Recession caused by insanity in the financial industry and the accompanying Wall Street Collapse. The economy had been Hemorrhaging Jobs for months at a rate not seen since the Great Depression when President Obama was inaugurated. Unemployment was headed for 10 . The Wall Street Collapse had wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth. People were hurting. People were very scared. And one of the reasons americans had just elected obama and biden by a nearly 10 millionvote margin, and also given democrats control of the house and the senate by huge margins, was that americans really desperately wanted the new government to dig the country out of the smoking, gaping, economic crater that had been left by the outgoing Republican Administration. And so right after the inauguration in january 2009, the new president and the new Democraticled Congress got to work right away. Not even one week in on President Obamas sixth day in office, democrats introduced a Stimulus Bill designed to pull the u. S. Back from the economic cliff that we were at that moment already plummeting over. The bill was designed to rescue the economy from the freefall that we were in, and it was designed to have broad bipartisan appeal while it was trying to accomplish that end. There was direct investment in Infrastructure Projects to get people back to work. There was aid to State Governments and local governments that were just reeling from the economic disaster. A whole third of the bill was tax cuts. Even though that was probably the least efficient part of the new bill in terms of how a stimulus would work on the economy in real life, a third of the bill was tax cuts because that was designed to make republicans happy. But when the new president , when President Obama sat down with Republican Leaders from congress to talk to them about their ideas for stimulus, they basically had just two ideas about the stimulus. Two. One is that they said the Stimulus Bill was too big, it should be smaller. The proposal for that bill was close to a trillion dollars. They said the number, 1 trillion, is so big, we cant possibly do that. Republican senator john thune from South Dakota Helpfully pointed out at the time if you stacked 100 bills on top of each other, by the time you got to a trillion dollars, that stack would be very, very tall. Or if you tied those bills end to end, which seems like a real waste of time, he said they would wrap around the earth a lot. It would be very large numbers of things. So that was their one idea. Such as it was. The bill should be smaller. If we make an imaginary stack of cash dollars to imagine the size of it, it should be a shorter imaginary stack. Economics. Their other idea was that instead of a full third of the bill being tax cuts, the whole thing should be tax cuts and there should be no Stimulus Spending in it at all. So President Obama and the Democraticled Congress in 2009, they had put together a Stimulus Bill with some things the democrats liked and some things that republicans liked. They were all aimed at rescuing the economy. They went to the republicans and said, okay, you know, this is designed to be a bipartisan package. This is a whole bunch of stuff in it that we know you like. How can we get your votes . How can we make this bill better . What would you like to see changed here so we can get some republican votes on board here . Shouldnt we all be pulling in the same direction . And the republicans said, you know, well, just give us the tax cuts, the thing we like, get rid of all the stuff that you like, and then maybe well think about giving you a deal. Now, to be clear, at the time the democrats didnt need any republican votes to pass this really important bill. This bill that the country really, really needed. They wanted republican votes because, in part, President Obama had run on restoring bipartisanship and compromise. But the republicans didnt give any constructive input on the bill. They just offered to scrap it and instead have their own bill. Which had nothing to do with anything the democrats had prioritized or anything that they want. That said, the Obama White House really, really didnt want President Obamas first major legislation to pass with only democratic votes so part of their strategy is that they turned to a republican senator from maine named Susan Collins. And Susan Collins said that her vote was in play. She would vote for that Stimulus Bill as long as the bill was shrunk below 800 billion. Why did she need it shrunk below 800 billion . Because she said at the time it was a, quote, fiscally responsible number. She didnt explain why that was the fiscally responsible number. She just liked the number better. In other words, senator collins didnt look out at the wreckage of the American Economy then and ask what amount of investment would be sort of best calibrated to fix the economy at that point, she just picked this number that sounded like the right sized number to her and she made the democrats shrink their bill below that number in order to get her vote. If they wanted her vote, thats what they would have to do. The Stimulus Bill passed the house with zero republican votes. It passed the senate with three Republican Senate votes including senator collins. One of those republicans that voted for it actually switched parties and became a democrat two months later. So how do you catalog that in terms of a bipartisan vote . But the recovery act that President Obama signed into law less than a month into his presidency, it did do a lot of good. It did rescue the u. S. From the brink of economic collapse, and it did start slowly bringing the economy back to health. From, again, the crisis at that point that was the worst since the Great Depression. But it started bringing the countrys economy back not just slowly but very, very slowly. What most economists and experts have determined now, looking back at that whole process, looking back at the recovery act and how it worked, but honestly, you dont need to be an economist to see, you need to be an american who lived through the painfully slow recovery. What is clear in retrospect is while the stimulus did some good it very obviously needed to be bigger. And we know because we lived through that time that it could have been bigger. It could have been bigger. That would have been better. And the economy could have roared back to life faster. There could have been less economic pain for americans. And americans, crucially, would have felt the power of government to do something good in their lives much more directly. If the Stimulus Bill hadnt been arbitrarily cut down to a pickitoutofahat number just to get a couple republican votes just to be able to claim bipartisanship. And then after that experience with the recovery act, the whole thing happened again with health care. President obama and Congressional Democrats spent a year negotiating with republicans in congress, which they didnt need to do, trying to find some kind of bill on Health Care Reform that could get republican votes. The white house agreed to put the whole Health Care Bill on hold while a Bipartisan Group of six senators worked on a compromise. How did that go . Well, in the middle of their months of negotiation, one of the republican senators went home to his constituents in wyoming and told them he had no intention of ever voting for any Health Care Bill, proudly bragging to them about how good he had been at holding up the process by negotiating in bad faith. Because that group of bipartisan senators told the white house to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, while they worked out on their compromise. He admitted to his constituents he had no intention of ever voting for it no matter what they agreed on to change the bill. He told his constituents, quote, its not where i get them to compromise, its what i get them to leave out. He said, if i hadnt been involved in this process for as long as i have and to the depth as i have, youd already have National Health care. Another of the republican negotiators that year was iowa senator chuck grassley. For months and months democrats had kept making changes to the Health Care Bill. That things that grassley was insisting on. Until President Obama finally called Senator Grassley to the white house and called his bluff. President obama writes in his memoir about that meeting. He says, i listened patiently as grassley ticked off five new reasons why he still had problems with the latest version of the bill. I said, finally, let me ask you a question, chuck. If we took every one of your latest suggestions, could you support the bill . Well are there any changes, any at all that would get your vote . The president writes, there was an awkward silence before grassley looked up and met my gaze. I guess not, mr. President. In the end, the final bill, final Affordable Care act, obamacare, that President Obama signed into law, it contained nearly 200 republican amendments. It was a marketbased system, almost entirely dependent on private health insurers. Its the kind of Health Care Reform republicans had championed for years and it was disappointing in all kinds of ways to democrats and to Health Care Reformers who wanted a more fundamental, more stable, change. But democrats had compromised. Again and again. Dozens of times. Actually, Hundreds Of Times In The Name of bipartisanship around that bill. And in the end, the Affordable Care act got zero republican votes in the United States senate. Got one republican vote in the house. And obamacare was a remarkable accomplishment. President s had tried and failed for generations to reform our screwed up Health Care System in this country. The aca has done an incredible amount of good. Its gotten millions of People Health insurance who werent able to get it before. And its only grown in popularity in the decade plus since it was passed. But you would be hard pressed to find a democrat involved in the process of getting it passed who doesnt regret how much better that might have been if they hadnt spent all that time appeasing republicans who were never going to vote for it, anyway, whose ideas didnt make the bill any better. Made it less ambitious, less successful, less stable, and they didnt vote for it, anyway, even when all those changes were made at their insistence. If you could get all that back, youd get the thing passed so much faster, it would be so much better. You wouldnt have wasted all that time, wasted all that political capital. You could have moved on and done other stuff. But after health care it was the same deal again on immigration. President obama brought back an Immigration Reform bill that a lot of republicans had supported just a few years before. Republicans told him they would negotiate a reform bill if President Obama worked with them on the matter and specifically if he agreed to prioritize improving Border Security as the first thing that happened. So, President Obama did that. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars on hightech fencing and he tripled the number of Intelligence Analysts who worked on the border and he deployed drones to surveil the border. He jacked up deportations to Hundreds Of Thousands Per year. All to the horror of many people in his own party. But thats what republicans said he needed to do if they wanted to be able to work with if he wanted to be able to work with them on an immigration bill. And so after he did all that, he turned to these republicans to show that he upheld his part of the bargain and then they killed the immigration bill, anyway. Even republicans who had voted for that exact same immigration proposal just years earlier, it was their own idea, voted against it. Once President Obama brought it up as president , even after he followed through on his part of the deal which is what they said he needed to do in order to get their buyin. They got him to do all that stuff then they walked away, anyway. And now here we are. That wasnt that long ago. It was, you know, several lifetimes ago if you go by all of our physical health and stress and how much weve aged since the end of the obama presidency. But it wasnt that long ago. Not ancient history. And now here we are. Democrats have taken control of the presidency in both houses of congress again. For the First Time Since they pulled it off in 2009. But there is something quite different this time. This time, the entire Democratic Party is basically singing the same tune from the white house, to the senate, to the House Of Representatives. They remember what happened the last time they were in this situation in 2009 and they are not going to let what happened under President Obama happen again this time. Look at 2008 where we spent a year and a half trying to get something good done, aca, obamacare, and we didnt do all the other things that had to be done. We will not repeat that mistake. We will not repeat that mistake. We will not repeat that mistake. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer here on this show just last week talking about the mistake that democrats made in trying to work with republicans on obamacare. We will not make that mistake again. Just yesterday he reiterated the point to New York Daily News talking about the 2009 stimulus, he said, we cannot do the mistake of 2009 where they whittled down the program so the amount of relief was so small that the recession lasted four or five years. This time around the head of the Budget Committee in the senate is senator Bernie Sanders of vermont. Budget committee is the Committee Hat will shepherd President Bidens covid relief bill through the United States senate. Bernie sanders was on chris hayes show last hour on msnbc and he, too, has been making this same point, getting a good bill passed, best possible bill passed. A bill that will help the economy. If republicans want to come along with that, great, but either way, we are moving forward. If they want to come along and help pass a good bill, fine. If they want to make the bill less good, then theyre not interested. In the republicans coming along to hurt the bill and make it less effective. Budget chairman senator sanders, Democratic Senate leader senator schumer, singing absolutely from the same hymnal. The number two democrat in the senate also appears to be on the same page telling reporters that hes willing to consider making changes to President Bidens Covid Relief Proposal if, and only if, republicans guarantee that they will vote for the bill if their ideas are incorporated into it. Illinois senator dick durbin, number two democrat in the senate now, saying, you can take the 1. 9 trillion package and identify elements within that might be subject to revision or amendment so long as republicans are telling us and with those changes we will support you. Meaning, we are not going to once again make all of these changes and waste all of this time while you make the bill worse saying thats what we need to do in order to get your votes, only to have you not give us your votes,