only scares you is only bad if he s scared of it and he said he s not scared of it. we ve seen how it s wielded in the past. he should be scared of it. the reality is the concessions he s making will make him weaker and there s no way around that very crucial fact. not even talking about this vote to oust a potential speaker but also the fact that all of a sudden he has to put freedom caucus aligned members on committees like budget like appropriations, like the rules committee. those kinds of concessions really make a strong difference in how you can govern, legislate. the rules speaker is supposed to be the speaker s committee, they dictate how the bills come up. so he is looking at a weaker speakership if he can pull this off. manu said at the end, you ve been trying for two months to get the votes. i think it speaks to why wasn t there a bigger push like this a month ago to avoid a scene like this on the floor. i think it s remarkable he went to the floor k
possible. here we are two years out and now this is what we have in washington, kaitlan. yeah, it s remarkable to see this playing out on the two-year anniversary. we ll see president biden speaking today, don, obviously happening on capitol hill, lawmakers are going to resume with still no speaker in place and without a speaker, the house cannot convene and cannot begin official business. that means among other things that no classified briefings for lawmakers who oversee the nation s national security agencies and there are some of them who are raising concerns about what that means for the period of time that we re in right now. technically, i don t have a clearance. i m a member of the intel committee, i m on the armed services committee, and i can t meet in the skiff to conduct essential business. my point is, we have work to do. that we couldn t do right now. one of our three branchs of
fact remains that huge pushback in 2009, that first time lawmakers had a long break at home in august 2009, the first time they had a long break at home after obama was elected president, that huge pushback, that roiling opposition in their home districts, that set the tone for the rapid opposition, the intransigent opposition that obamacare engendered for years after. that was 2009. that was the first august recess when president obama was president. fast-forward to now, we ve just had the first august recess of president biden being president. and this time it s not obamacare, this time it s not the affordable care act that s the proposal on the table, this time it s way bigger. this time the new democratic president is proposing a $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill, which is way, way bigger than obamacare was. but it s funny, you know? not really a peep at home.
we shall see. i think by the end of this week, we should know a lot more as to whether or not it s going to happen. and, of course, it s happening at the same time that a lot of other things are on the boil. on covid, the administration is making some new moves as well. the president today directing that $600 payments should be made to individual farmworkers and people who work in meat packing plants to compensate them for the extraordinary risk and thank them for the extraordinary service they provided the country during the covid pandemic. earlier agricultural aid and food supply chain aid had basically gone to the owners of those businesses, not to the low-level workers. biden had said 600 there are checks should go to low-level workers in those fields. as of this week we re back up to a steady stream of more than 1500 deaths every day from covid, which is impossible to swallow. and some states, states with lower vaccination rates, are having it even harder than
it premieres tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. right here, and on peacock. thank you for personal thanks to my friends and we go she and we see a menendez for allowing me to sneak away on behalf of all of our colleagues here at the networks of nbc news, goodnight. i m happy to have you here today. president biden was in new york in new jersey, where the death toll is 45 now, from the remnants of hurricane ida, in just those two to states. the extreme flash flooding, that tore through the most populated part of the country last wednesday night. president biden today meeting with local officials and local residents, about the ongoing cleanup efforts there. president biden was in louisiana on friday. we re 400,000 americans are now