pandemic. >> it's the most significant change for middle class people, for poor people, people trying to get into the middle class, in decades, in a very long time. and it has amazing things in it. >> this is a critical moment. this is a moment where we have to make sure that the american people know what's in this plan. they understand what's in this plan. >> and by the way, this bill is 90 some percent coronavirus centric. this is similar to the bill that we wrote in may, the heroes act, some of which was implemented in december, much of it now. >> so in a moment i'm going to talk to democratic congresswoman jackie speier about covid and what is next for her party. while democrats are focusing on covid relief, the republican party has hoped to find the issue they hope will blunt that, immigration. kevin mccarthy about to lead a fact finding mission to the border as republicans step up the rhetoric on the issue. >> is the biden open border policies that are inviting even more illegal immigration and actually have created this humanitarian crisis. >> when people think they can get in, they begin sending their unaccompanied child on a train ride across mexico where she may be kidnapped and trafficked on the hope that they're going to be waved through at the border. this policy is leading to this surge, that is unmistakable. >> they're children today but they could easily be terrorists tomorrow. as pain. as it can be for the biden administration, they need to understand what trump did on the border worked. >> all right. i do want to start this hour not with the politics but with the facts of just what's in the covid relief bill. just one part of it that represents a monumental change for millions of americans, the nearly $2 trillion relief package also represents one of the largest federal efforts to reduce american poverty in the last 50 years, expanding the child tax credit to roughly 27 million kids and low income families across this country. my colleague hallie jackson has the details on this. >> reporter: this is the most consequential legislation that the speaker has been a part of since obamacare. >> to go big on covid relief. >> reporter: the headlines focused on the top line. >> the senate passed the $1.9 trillion covid relief bill. >> reporter: but tucked inside one of the 600 pages. new covid relief law, a little paragraph, a life-changing one for millions of families. thousands of dollars for a child tax credit in 2021. >> run as fast as you can. >> reporter: think of it as a guaranteed income for families with children like the foxes. mom, savannah, is an emt, spending much of the last year in the back of an ambulance with covid patients. she knows what it's like to need a little help after leaving an abusive marriage several years ago. >> i ended up being homeless. being homeless with five kids was definitely something that i had never imagined. >> reporter: with the new credit, parents can spend the money on whatever they need most. starting in july, the checks will be dispersed periodically, most likely monthly, up to $300 a month for kids 5 and under and $250 a month for each school age child 6 and up. the rest comes at tax time. the foxes will get just over $15,000 in the next year, huge for savannah, now in a home of her own with a savings buffer and working three jobs. >> that can help with groceries, that can be added help for bills. it can also allow me money to put aside for their future. >> reporter: the ripple effect expected to be enormous. by signing this bill into law, president biden with the stroke of a pen is projected to cut child poverty by nearly half according to a study by columbia university, with estimates suggesting it will help nine of every ten kids in this country. >> this is more than just stimulus checks. >> reporter: michael bennet has been working on this for years. >> we're one of the new countries in the industrialized world that doesn't have a policy like this. being poor is really tough for a kid and it's very tough for our country. childhood poverty costs america a trillion dollars a year. >> reporter: some conservative groups argue the money could incentivize people not to work. >> i think we all agree that we should be doing something but what we should not be doing is using the pandemic as an excuse to put through a wish list of all kinds of programs that have nothing to do with helping people related to the pandemic. >> reporter: but fox says the real value of this money for her family is priceless. >> i definitely think that this package will help me and my children for sure, get us to the goals that we need to get to in order to succeed. >> a personal anecdote of how this relief bill is actually going to help. thank you to hallie for that. joining me to discuss this, the latest relief bill and the road ahead for her party is democratic congresswoman from california jackie speier. congresswoman, thanks for joining us on this. really appreciate it. i mean it is astounding, right, to see anecdotally how this could feasibly work for a within with children who really just needs an extra boost, extra help, someone who is working, who's helping save people's lives every single day, especially during this pandemic. this has been a major success, this relief bill, $1.9 trillion for the democratic party. how are democrats, how is your party planning to build on this momentum? >> we're going to build on this momentum first and foremost by making sure that every american knows that 85% of this money is going to the american people. and savannah's story is really a wonderful depiction of that. it is transformational in that we are for once looking at the kids in america and not the wealthiest. and that's where we have spent a lot of our time during the trump administration is focused on the very wealthy, where that tax cut was really the 1% received 80% of that tax cut. so now we're giving back the money that taxpayers give to the u.s. treasury, we're giving it back to them during this really monumental opportunity that we have because people are hurting so much and we owe it to them to do just that. we've got 18 million people right now who are on unemployment. we have restaurants that are suffering. there's $28 billion to assist restaurants. we have the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world. slipped into this bill is money to keep young mothers on medicaid for a year so that they survive. so it's -- i can't tell you how happy it makes me that finally we've done something to help those who are the workers in this country. >> so let's talk about how this is going to affect getting things through, though, in washington. we understand this was a bipartisan bill in that a majority of americans supported this bill, two in five republicans as well supported this relief bill. but with that, the passage of this bill was in fact not bipartisan in that not one single republican voted in favor of it. is this what's going to happen going forward? is this how things are going to have to get through going forward considering the backlash that we're seeing from so many republicans across the board that are digging their feet at this point into the sand? you had mitch mcconnell saying, listen, even if there is economic recovery in this country, it's going to have nothing to do with this relief bill. >> well, it's just false. most economists in this country will say to you and to all of us that in fact we desperately need this right now. you put money in people's pockets and it gets back into the economy. it opens up more jobs. it's going to open up more businesses. so the fact that we had to do it by reconciliation is not surprising. we had to do the affordable care act by that as well. and i think that what we realize in this country, the reason why there's such dissatisfaction with congress is because we hardly get important things done in a timely fashion. for once, because of this horrific pandemic, we're in a position where we can and we did. >> it's always last minute, i have to say that, congresswoman. it always seems the vote is happening on the 11th hour before something runs out, it always happens. i do want to talk about what's next on the president's agenda and that's infrastructure. we've heard a lot about what the president's priorities are and the fact that he wants a huge, infrastructure bill, maybe bigger than this bill. we've heard from centrist democrats who said we have to figure out a way for americans to pay for this thing. we're not willing to pass a huge bill like this during a time when we're suffering economically and just passed this $1.9 trillion bill. what are your expectations on getting an infrastructure bill passed. the former president touted infrastructure quite often and never got anything done about it but certainly talked about it a lot. >> right. well, president trump did that. he had so many infrastructure weeks that ended up turning into zeros. we're not going to let that happen again. we have crumbling bridges and potholed highways that have to be repaired. so i think that we will do it one way or the other. there should be ways that we can finance it. putting a small fee on stock transactions is one way of doing it. there's also looking at capital gains, looking at corporate tax. you know, the corporate tax cut that we provided that was supposed to create all these jobs clearly did not. what we saw happen is all these companies bought back their stock, so it didn't trickle down. so all the talk that republicans give us about trickle down economy programs don't work. so we're going to have to find a way to do it, but we owe it to the american people. this is about making sure that the average american gets their fair share of the tax dollars. >> congresswoman jackie speier, thank you so much. great to see you on this sunday afternoon. appreciate you joining us. >> thank you. >> i do want to bring in hans nichols, elise jordan, former aide to the bush white house and state departments and eddie glaude, msnbc contributor and chair of the department of african-american studies at princeton university. welcome to you all, guys. great to see you. hans, i'll start with you. i kind of want to pick up on where the congresswoman left off, where i left off with her shall i say. it's kind of this momentum the democrats are trying to build on after this huge success after the passage of this $1.9 trillion bill. are they going to run into a wall with centrist democrats saying, look, if we want to pass bigger legislation here, we're going to have to figure out a way for americans to pay for it. >> yeah, potentially. especially as you mentioned on the tax front. i just heard the congresswoman talking about raising the corporate tax rate. senator manchin has given some indication that he's comfortable with 21%. i don't want to get too much in the numbers but manchin is in the 25, 26% range. that could raise 500 to $600 billion over ten years. so there are ways to pay for some of it there might be bipartisan consensus for. by that i mean one or two republicans would cause over. the broader question the biden administration is asking themselves and frankly are probably debating right now is how big are they going to go. is this going to be incrementalism. are they going to try to get a couple of big packages across the line? by incrementalism, i'm talking about in the trillion rain. are they going to do all of build back better, what the unions are calling for, $4 trillion. >> and it seems as if so far from what we've seen, democrats have essentially said we're not going to make the same mistakes we made back in 2009, we're going big, we're not going to go small and we saw that with the passage of this relief bill. elise, give me the answer if there's one or two republicans that could get onboard. again, no one single republican voted in favor of the passage of this relief bill. what's the likelihood that republicans will get on board with any legislation, considering the rhetoric we're hearing from the republican party right now. >> yasmin, i really think it's just going to depend. the biden administration had an opportunity to, say, bring along the moderate republicans if they had wanted to concede the size and scope of this bill by about a third of what it ended up being is what republicans like susan collins was proposing. so it's going to just, i think, come down to what the actual policy and the payouts are going to be in these initiatives going forward and whether you can get any republican support, it's going to be among that small faction of more moderate republicans who are willing to entertain conversations with the administration. >> eddie, let's talk immigration here, right. so we now see the new attack line for republicans is the way in which the biden administration is dealing with immigration and a lot of folks that are rushing to the border. i mean you've got to talk about some of the numbers and they're pretty astounding. 3200 plus unaccompanied migrant kids detained by border patrol as of last week. an over 50% spike in february. there certainly is a problem and has been for quite some time at the border. the republicans are seizing on this and making field trips it seems to the border to make sure everybody sees what's happening there. it's interesting, listening to lindsey graham as we were coming in saying it's time for biden to admit trump was doing something right. we all remember the images from the trump administration about what they were doing with immigration and that was certainly not the right thing to do either. but what do you make of this new attack line from the republicans? >> well, it's not new at all, yasmin. it seems to me very clear, yasmin, that it's just simply the latest play in the republican playbook of appealing to fears and hatreds. there is a sense in which there's always been this undertow to the immigration debate about, you know, the threat of the barbarians at the gate, quote unquote. so this is, again, just simply part of this politics of fear that is in some ways been so central to the republican party over the last four, five, six, 12 years, right? and so this particular play isn't that unusual, at least to me, it's not a surprise that they would make this move. not only are they going to play to fear, they're going to play the political correctness argument because there's no real agenda. they're a know nothing party. so they're not going to put forward alternatives. instead they're going to play to folks' fears. >> i do want to read, hans, from a piece that you wrote for axios about this. you write the former president started immigration language pledging to have mexico pay for a while. now unaccompanied children are flooding across the border and the biden administration is struggling to respond. so once again this goes back to former president trump. >> look, trump in some ways, he framed the issue for his party. now, the conversation taking place in the democratic party is how much of the debate should be anchored into the old conversation or how much should it be moved forward. the moving forward part is what biden is trying to do on the hill. he's got his immigration proposal. but you do have a situation at the border, the biden administration even before they won, they anticipated there could be a potential humanitarian crisis. they are changing the signaling on this, saying there's going to be some hope, a slightly different approach to letting in migrants. unclear what their initial plan was on title 42. so you're starting to see a lot of pressure building up down there. the three to four people i'm really watching closely on this are the democrats along the rio grande valley. democratic congressmen and woman in one case that have a good sense of what's happening at the border. listen to what those four have to say. there's a republican down there as well. apologies if i messed up the name of the gonzalezes. there are two of them and they have adjacent districts, i meant no disrespect. but listen to what those five say. they're all talking to people on the front lines. >> so two things i want to hit before i let you guys go. one is ron johnson and what he had to say about january 6th let's play that and elise, i'm coming to you on it. >> i knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law. and so i wasn't concerned. now, had the tables been turned and president trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of black lives matter and antifa protesters, i might have been a little concerned. >> i've got to say, elise, i honestly -- i don't know what is going on. i don't know how it is -- it seems as if some of these guys -- senator johnson, for instance, feeling empowered to say these racist kind of things, using racist rhetoric. what is going on here that they feel as if they can say this and this is actually happening inside of their heads? they are actually saying, i keep saying this over and over again, the quiet part out loud? >> exactly. and, yasmin, what kills me about that particular interview is that ron johnson says, joe, this might get me in trouble. he knows that he is saying something that he should not say. he knows what is about to come out of his mouth is racist. and so he goes forward with it, completely empowered by the last occupant of the white house, donald trump, who really was just such a trail blazer for bringing back so much racist rhetoric to the surface that had perhaps been brushed aside or republicans were more careful to hide that it was so core to their party and to the identity of the party and to the tactics that the party had used to gain political power. >> so eddie, they feel as if they can say these things because this is what trump supporters think, after having seen took place on january 6th. but this is exactly what we were saying on january 7th is that had these been black protesters at the capitol, things would have looked much different. senator ron johnson confirmed that for all of us. >> oh, absolutely. i mean i think we need to stop being surprised. there is a clear constituency within the republican party who are playing the game, or they're just simply committed to these principles or these ideas of white grievance, white fear and white hatred. they're doing it. that's an explicit appeal. there's an explicit appeal in ron johnson's words that there's a different conception of citizenship. for those who happen to be white, they're patriotic, they're loyal. those who are not, they need to shut up and just be grateful, otherwise they're dangers and threats to the country. it's very clear. when we look at what they're doing, they have no answer to the american rescue plan, they have no answer to the question of health care, they have no answer to the suffering that's happening throughout the country. so what is the republican party doing? because they have no ideological way to respond, they're appealing to hatred and fear. that's not a dog whistle, that's a fog horn and we need to understand it for what it is. >> we certainly do. hans, elise, eddie, thank you all, guys. great to see you on this unders. thanks for joining me. california is loosening restrictions after hitting a vaccination milestone. the state is about to allow some indoor activities to begin once again. plus we're following jury selection resuming tomorrow in the trial of derek chauvin, the man charged with killing george floyd. chuck rosenberg is joining me next on the significance of the reintroduction of a third-degree murder charge. we'll be right back. we'll be right back. . i want a sugar cookie... wait... i want a bucket of chicken... i want... ♪♪ it's the easiest because it's the cheesiest. kraft. for the win win. for skin that never holds you back 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