cheaper. so that s giving people hope that inflation is peaking. the lead with jake tapper starts right now. senator joe manchin at it again. the lead starts right now. president biden this afternoon pushing his economic plans with a price tag in the trillions. but will his fellow democrats get in the way? then, a massive new vaccine mandate for teachers and staff in california, and the biden administration wants others to follow their lead. plus, could kabul fall? a new intelligence assessment warning afghanistan s capital could be isolated by the taliban within just 30 days. we are live on the ground there.
president ran for office, he said he was a moderate so i was looking for some evidence of it. and we finally found it. is that snark or a compliment? i think it s snark. [ laughter ] it is hard to tell. but, again, i think you were the one who said it. we have to give kudos to both sides for doing this. but now moving forward is disdi disbonab is going to be the big question. they said they are going to spend millions of dollars against democrats who are about to vote for this big $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. everything that s in the 3.5 trillion reconciliation bill might not be bipartisan in washington but it s bipartisan across the country. well, the bit that democrats are making, just to pick up on amanda s point, is that they are going to be arguing that since they are putting money into the pocketbooks and getting women back into the workforce and eldercare and childcare and that they re going to do paid family
piece from matt bennett with the center left group third way. he said hope will spring eternal with moderates on both sides to try to keep the magic going. but no one has the faintest idea if they can produce anything beyond this bill. there are nuts that are too tough to crack. is he right? third way, a moderate group, said that, which wants bipartisanship when they can get it, shows even moderates across the democratic party aren t necessarily holding their breath thinking that they re going to get a big bipartisan deal on something else after this. could there be maybe a few other deals between republicans and democrats along the way? yes, when it comes to china s competitiveness, potentially on the aumf, the authorization for the use of military force. but on voting rights, immigration, no one really sees that ability to work with republicans and republicans to work with democrats. so i do think that this big win for biden is going to be just
i just said on that point. [ laughter ] listen, this is washington. republicans and democrats always find a way to come together and spend money. there was not a lot of drama associated with this. it took a long time, but we should not lose sight of the fact this is $3.5 trillion. if you don t think this is going to come back to bite democrats in the midterms, you re kidding yourself. that s reconciliation. but there s going to be a tremendous amount of money on top of the 5 trillion that biden and trump spent together for covid rest nu. there is so much money churning through the system. i can see why president biden wanted to check the box, i got my bipartisan bill done, but if they think this is going to win over republican voters later, and a lot of people are going to care about the fact that you spent all this money on roads and internet, i think they re kidding themselves because of the culture war that is happening on the right is alive and well, and a lot of those voters
senator bob menendez, the senate foreign relations chairman, said i thought a contingency would ve stemmed the tide. the president has to consider whether what is happening is what he envisioned. do afghans feel frankly left behind and without a backup plan? i think there are a lot of people here who feel that this could have been handled differently. they understand that the u.s. had to leave, that this couldn t be a forever war, that there was a sort of plateau in terms of what the u.s. was able to achieve. but they feel that the withdrawal has been chaotic, that it s been hasty. and most crucially, they feel that essentially the u.s. was beguiled by the taliban, that they didn t understand when they were negotiating with the taliban that ultimately the taliban was going to do whatever it wanted to. and now a u.s. representative sits down in doha and tries to get the two sides at the