0 us this hour, the speaker of the house of representatives is of course nancy pelosi. she has been speaker this time around since january of 2019. but this is not her first rodeo. this is her but this is not her first rodeo. this is her second turn in the speaker's job. the first time nancy pelosi became speaker of the house was in 2007. you might remember, george w. bush was still president. democrats did great in the midterms in 2006. pelosi got elevated to speaker. i mean, first it was just this huge historic moment, right, the first female speaker of the house in american history. next in line to the presidency after the vice president. just a huge history-making deal. so she's always been a big deal simply because of her breaking that glass ceiling but the other thing that very quickly became clear about nancy pelosi as speaker, nancy pelosi as the leader of the that branch of government was that she's just technically quite good at it. she is specifically unquestionably good at the math part. she can count votes like nobody's business. if a piece of legislation needed to get passed, nancy pelosi knows whether and how she can get the votes for it. and she never brings a bill to the floor unless she knows she can pass it. and i mean, i've said it before. i'll say it again. whether you are aligned with her politically or not, whether you love nancy pelosi or hate nancy pelosi, it doesn't matter. what you must appreciate is that she knows what she's doing. she's very technically skilled at the job she holds. and if you need proof of that, if you need evidence, you can do a little controlled experiment in recent history. look at what happened in the house in between her two stints as speaker because it was the first midterm elections of the barack obama presidency. the 2010 midterms when the democrats took what president obama called a shellacking, republicans won big everywhere in 2010, so in january of 2011 she had to hand over the comically ginormous speakers gavel to the republicans, and in so doing, the country was soon treated to a live high-stakes somewhat scientific demonstration of what it's like to try to run the house of representatives in this day and age if you don't have nancy pelosi's knack for it. here's a sample lead from beltway reporting around that time. just minutes from a roll call vote pushed by house speaker john boehner, republicans stunned the house by interrupting their own debate. while speaker boehner and his lieutenants tried to pressure reluctant conservatives into backing their plan. the house then went into a recess, and shortly before 11:00 p.m., the leadership announced that no vote would be held. oops. sorry. never mind. i thought we had the votes. i guess we didn't. we called for this thing to be happening. we're now calling for it not to be happening. we're going to deal with other stuff. let's go into recess. let's pretend this didn't happen. and that sort of thing didn't just happen once. it kept happening over and over again in the new not-led-by-nancy-pelosi house. now, this was a whole different vote. quote, speaker boehner had on the floor for several hours and retreated to a meeting in the basement of the nation's capitol. john boehner admitted defeat and sent lawmakers home for the holiday. the house republican leaders had unequivocally and wrongly predicted that the bill would pass. they were absolutely certain the bill would pass. this is definitely going to pass. before we go home for christmas, let's pass this bill. we can't pass this bill. let's go home for christmas and pretend this didn't happen. in 2013, even the farm bill went down to a shocking surprise defeat in the republican house in the sense that it was a shocking surprise to them that was trying to do it. they were trying to pass it. they were able to pass it with their own votes had they been organized enough to figure that out. they shocked themselves by not being able to get it done. and, yes, the farm bill is not the sort of thing that often makes much of a political ripple. it is consequential, it matters a lot, but it is one of those giant, really boring, hard to understood bills that gets passed routinely without much fanfare. before 2013, the farm bill hadn't been voted down in at least four decades, but then, whoops, we dropped it. and yet again, the problem with the leadership was that nobody knew it was going to fail until it actually failed on the floor. they got it all the way to a floor vote before they realized, oh, geez, we didn't actually do this right. the chaos in the house was so bad that the first republican speaker after nancy pelosi, john boehner, he just gave up. he quit. the next republican speaker, however, was no nancy pelosi either. under the next speaker, paul ryan, that farm bill that hadn't failed a house vote in 40 years until 2013, it failed again. and it was a surprise again. remember also just two months into donald trump's presidency, republicans had to pull their own bill to kill obamacare. this is a bill they had been talking about and promising for years. speaker paul ryan had to go to the white house personally with his proverbial tail between his legs to tell president trump that they hadn't actually been able to put together the votes. the votes just weren't there when they thought they were going to be there. they got it all the way to the floor, and then, whoops, oh, gee, we dropped it, we don't know what happened, but we've got to pull it. this kind of stuff does not happen under house speaker nancy pelosi. since pelosi retook the gavel in 2019, whatever else is going on in congress, whatever else is going on in the house, it is not chaotic. when speaker pelosi brings a bill to the floor and calls members of congress to call to the house floor to vote on it, that's because she has the votes to pass that bill, and she intends to pass it, and then she passes it. and that is what explains the drama that began unfolding on capitol hill today. it also explains something that i told you on friday night's show about what was going to happen today that proved to be wrong. friday night show, i said that on monday, today, there was going to be a vote in the house on this -- on the small bipartisan roads and bridges bill. this is a bill that has already passed the senate with a bipartisan vote. the thing to remember about this bill is that the only reason it exists is because of a couple conservative democrats in the senate, they really, really, really wanted to vote with republicans on something, so, like as a science experiment, they carved off this very small part of president biden's economic plan, the narrowly defined roads and bridges part of it. they put that in a separate bill because roads and bridges were the only part of biden's agenda that republicans might vote for. republicans in the house say they are going to vote against it, even though they said they would support it a few weeks ago. anyway, on friday, i said the house was going to vote on that bill today. but now that vote is not happening today, and that is because nancy pelosi can count, and right now today that bill does not have the votes to pass the house for a really interesting reason. but nancy pelosi can count. and she does not bring bills to the floor that do not have the votes to pass. and it is worth understanding the dynamics of play here, both because they're going to determine how the rest of this interesting week is going to play out, but also because they're going to potentially determine how the biden presidency turns out, whether or not he's i got to get done what he wants to do as president. it's really worth watching because the dynamics at play on capitol hill are new and different than they have been before. if you are a -- if you are someone who has been a long time watcher of democratic party politics in washington, then you are accustomed to things working themselves out or not working themselves out. things falling apart in certain predictable ways. this is not that. this is a departure from that well trod path. this is a new and different situation. as i said, this small bipartisan roads and bridges bill is a bit of a political science experiment. it came from a weird place. republicans who initially supported it won't support it now because they never wanted it in the first place. it's just a sliver of president biden's economic agenda. the bulk of president biden's economic agenda is contained in a different much larger bill, the build back better bill. that includes things like making the child tax credit a permanent thing, which will have a huge impact on child poverty and on working-class families in this country. almost hard to everstate. it will make pre-k and community college universal and free. it will create a family and medical leave benefit for all americans. it's a whole host of climate initiatives to transition the country to renewable fuels and electric vehicles -- more on that later -- and not only do the vast majority of elected democrats in the house and senate support that entire agenda, importantly, the vast majority of the american people support it too. every single poll shows broad support for pretty much every element of president biden's plan. this doesn't happen in nature, but it is happening with this bill. many of the proposals are popular, even among republican voters. so when those handful of conservative democrats in the senate, a tiny handful, more like a pinch, when they insisted on carving off this small piece of roads and bridges into a separate bipartisan bill, the white house and the rest of the democratic caucus on capitol hill said, you know, okay, we'll make you a deal, we will back this small bipartisan bill that you want as your little science experiment. we'll back that as long as we also get to pass the rest of the president's economic agenda too. that said, that's how we would like to do it. if any of this is going to pass because the democratic majorities in the house and senate is so small, getting any of this done means it's going require all of this to get done, and democrats and republicans agreeing to do this together. that's the deal until the last few weeks, tiny amount of democrats in the house started saying, why don't we pass the little one, the bipartisan roads and bridges bill, and then we'll get to the president's agenda, the bulk of it later. maybe if we feel like it, sometime down the road. well, that was the vote that was supposed to happen today. for the house to pass the small roads and bridges bill without the larger bill that contains the rest of president biden's agenda. and what we are seeing right now with that vote being called off is nancy pelosi counting and nancy pelosi realizing that that was not going to pass because house progressives have essentially gotten up on their hind legs and they're flexing their muscles and they're saying, you know what? actually we mean it. we are going to get president biden's full agenda passed. we are going to make it happen. even though there's this handful of conservative democrats who are expressing grave concern about the larger bill being larger because large is scary, even though the bill is totally paid for in part by taxes on corporations and the wealthy, taxes that are, in fact, the most wildly popular part of the bill, according to the polls, i mean, if you're the opposition, the republicans who aren't even part of this conversation because they're simply a unified wall of no, or if you're the sort of mealy-mouthed, afraid-of-their-own-shadow middle who doesn't have strong policy perspectives but is afraid to do anything big on any front, if you're contrary by impulse, right t best thing you could do is to try to delay action on the biggest part of the president's agenda, right? delay is the closest you can get to death for this wildly popular legislation. if you don't get it done, if there isn't momentum to get it done, it will be put off indefinitely and never get done, whatever your inscrutable reasons for wanting that to happen, delaying it means killing it. and progressives are saying no, we recognize time is the enemy, it's time to act. midterm elections are next year, we are going to get this done. the president was elected and a democratic house and senate were elected in order to pass the agenda president biden campaigned on. we have a way to do it that pays for itself. we're going to do it. why would we not do it. how would we keep our heads up and face our voters, again for the midterm elections next year, if with control of the white house, of the senate and the house and an agenda that's wildly popular that the president ran on that is stuff that the country needs, we just couldn't figure it out. progressives have decided, no, we're going to get it done, and so that is why plans changed today. that's why there was no vote today because the progressives are insistent that the president's whole agenda is going to pass. don't break off the little piece of it that you did as your experiment and then let the rest of it languish. no, we're going to do it all. the chair of the progressive caucus, told "the washington post" that the number of democrats in the house willing to vote against the small roads and bridges bill if it was on its own and not coupled with the rest of the president's agenda, she reported that the number was large but still growing. as of last night, she estimated she had 60 no-votes in her pocket. in a democratic caucus where the margin of error is three total votes in the house, if you've got 60 votes you speak for, that's the ball game. and i think there's -- there's one misconception that i think is worth addressing directly and dispensing with. it's not like the house progressive caucus is insisting on some plan that is more progressive than what president biden wants. it's not like they're insisting on some plan that's more left wing than what the president wants. they're not. this is not what has been kind of lazily described in the beltway press, forgive me, as a fight between the progressives and moderates on how lefty this economic legislation should be. the progressives are saying actually we just want to pass the president's agenda. our insistence as progressives is that we pass something rather than not pass it. the president's agenda has been clear from the beginning. it is a concrete set of measures. it has a price tag that is paid for. it is wildly popular with the american people. our insistence is that it gets done. and there are a handful of democrats for their own mysterious ever shifting set of reasons, they insist that the president's agenda just should wait. let's instead pass the small roads and bridges bill right now. we'll get to the rest of what we want to do later, maybe never. we're scared of big things. but the progressives are saying, no, let's do it. and that's what's driving things right now. we have always had progressive members of congress. we have never had them use their powers like this, not just to insist on their policies being more liberal but the agenda being effective. they are not changing the agenda and taking it over from the ostensible moderates and the centrists. instead they're pushing the timetable, pushing the calendar, insisting on anxious. and the calendar is why things get interesting this week and why washington is going to be a fascinating place as the center of the news universe this week. speaker pelosi may not have held the vote on the roads and bridges bill today because it wasn't going to pass, but she has committed to holding that vote sometime this week. >> let me just say we're going to pass the bill this week, but you know i'll never bring a bill to the floor that doesn't have the votes. >> oh, we know. oh, we know. so how is this going to work, especially because that's just one part of what congress has to get done this week. i mean, just in the next 72 hours or so, speaker pelosi says the house is going to vote on that small bipartisan roads and bridges plan on thursday. according on to the house progressive caucus, that bill is not going to pass without the rest of president biden's agenda, which would mean that much larger bill that contains that child care, and education and climate stuff, that would have to be hammered out with the senate and voted on and passed by all 50 democrats in the senate chamber, and if you're thinking, that sounds impossible, just this evening, the whole democratic and the house held a big meeting to try to hash out a way forward. we're going to talk to the progressive caucus leader, pramila jayapal about what went down in that meeting. republicans were busy killing a bill that would have simply kept the government open and running past the next 72 hours and raised the debt ceiling, avoiding a deliberate fault on the adult and economic calamity and the filibusters passed it. it would do nothing but keep the government open and avoid a self-inflicted financial calamity and the republicans filibustered it. which means the democrats in the senate and the house are now going to have to figure out how to pass legislation by thursday night keeping the government running at some point very soon they're going to have to figure out how to avoid the country deliberately defaulting on its debt. republicans have not just checked out on even the most basic tasks of governs, they're trying to stop democrats from doing it themselves. in a letter to her house colleagues as this intense week dawned, speaker pelosi wrote a letter to her colleagues that said -- spelled it out in blunt terms. she said, quiet t next two days will be a time of intensity. she is not kidding. and she knows of what she speaks. and not for nothing, the president's entire economic agenda, the entire economic agenda of the democratic party and what they got elected to do, and how they're going to run for reelection next year, all of that is riding on what happens the next few days. president biden likes to say his allies in congress have to prove that droc still works, that it can deliver practical policy that improves people's lives. this week is the stress test for that proposition. joining us now is congresswoman pramila jayapal, chair of the progressive caucus. congresswoman jayapal, you are at the center of this storm. thank you for being here. >> great to see you as always. rachel. >> what happened tonight in the democratic caucus meeting. i know you won't tell us all of it, but what can you tell us is the news out of that closed door session. >> i think it's important at those caucus meetings, people want to be heard. there's a lot of people saying how they feel, and i think that what i got out of it is we need to pass both bills just like you described, and it was really important when you said delay means death. i think this is something that people need to understand. we're already at the end of september. and if there is any piece of this reconciliation bill that isn't agreed to by the senate and the house and if that delay goes on and on as it does here when you don't have urgency, when you don't have a deadline, when you don't have a reason for momentum, this thing is dead. and, you know, and i think that is when we look at why we're doing what we're doing, and i just want to emphasize again, there are nine democrats or maybe ten in the house and two in the senate that have problems with this, but there were people in the most vulnerable districts who stood up and said we need to get both bills done. we need the reconciliation bill, and so this is a situation where the vast, vast, vast majority of democrats want to get the president's agenda done. i mean, it's a shocker. we're democrats, we want to get the democratic agenda done, and yet, we are being held from doing that by a few people, so we are in a place where i don't think there was anything necessarily n