address. and in that speech, the president cast a vision of a post-pandemic summer. >> i set a goal that many of you said was kind of way over the top. i said i intended to get 100 million shots in people's arms in my first 100 days in office. tonight i can say not only are we going to meet that goal, we're going to beat that goal because we're actually on track to reach this goal 1060 million shots in arms. tonight i will direct allstate®s, prescribes and territories to maybe all adults eligible to be vaccinated no later than may 1. >> if this pandemic is nearing its end, what is next on the administration's agenda. unity and bipartisanship were driving forces of his campaign. no republican in the house or the senate voted for the covid relief bill. that did not stop the bill because democrats used the budget reconciliation process to pass it, as long as they kept every single democrat in the senate onboard, they could pass a more sweeping, more progressive bill. but that tactic will not work for immigration reform or voting rights unless every democrat favors ending the filibuster. so far they don't. so they will need republican support to advance president biden's legislative agenda. one republican that senate democrats often turn to is maine senator susan collins. back in 2009 she worked across party lines to pass an economic stimulus during the financial meltdown. but listen to senate majority leader chuck schumer explain why he did not reach out to her this time. >> we made a big mistake in 2009 and '10. susan collins was part of that mistake. we cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years. what was offered by the republicans was so far away from what's needed, so far away from what biden proposed that he thought that they were not being serious in wanting to really negotiate. >> the urgency of covid relief makes this understandable. but the american rescue plan comes with expiration dates. and there are some serious poverty fighting measures that democrats will want to extend. take the child tax credit in the stimulus. democrats increased this year's credit to $3,000 for each child ages 6 to 17. for children under 6 it was raised to $3,600 annually. the credit can be paid out in monthly installments rather than a lump sum. here's the thing. some republicans are already shown interest in making an expanded child tax credit permanent. last month senator mitt romney of utah introduced the family security act. his bill would increase the credit above what the democrats passed in the covid package. but to fund that, senator romney wants to eliminate other family and child assistance programs. he says that his goal is to simplify income support for low-income families. this might not be what democrats would prefer to pass. still, they are not as far apart as they were on covid relief. unless senate democrats somehow unite on filibuster reform, they will need republicans sooner or later. otherwise, they could enter the midterms as a forty with only one major achievement, covid legislation and nothing else. joining us now to discuss it is peter baker, chief white house correspondent for the new york times and jason furman former chairman of the white house council of economic advisers during the obama administration. good to see you both. let me start with you with this child care tax credit and the housing crisis. talk about how much impact that will have forward fighting poverty in this country, especially poverty brought on by the pandemic. >> yeah. it will have an extraordinary impact. we will have less poverty in the united states in the year 2021 than we ever have in our country's history. poverty is going to fall particularly sharply, be cut in half for children in this country. that will be a combination of people getting jobs and the checks that they're getting from the government. and the key will be making sure that some of the key elements here are extended and made permanent so this isn't just one low year for poverty. this becomes something that is built on in the future. >> now, jason, contrast that with what the house minority leader kevin mccarthy said about this plan, the american rescue plan. take a listen. >> let me just point out three things which your hard working taxpayer money is going for. you will provide bonuses up to 25,000 to government employees and bureaucrats. if you are not part of the swamp, you get nothing. your money is going to pay for illegal immigrants' health care. your money also is being sent to san francisco city where your money will be spent giving alcohol and marijuana to the homeless. that is what that bill is doing. >> let's just be clear that at least one of the things that mr. mccarthy said is flat-out false when he said your money is going to pay for illegal immigrants' health care. one of the things that had been said, the money was going directly the illegal immigrants in the form of checks which is not true because they don't have social security numbers and you need a social security number to get those checks. what about the messages around this in terms of the aspects of the bill that are just designed to inflame and how that affects the administration's ability to message on this? >> yeah. the largest item in this bill is checks for american families. among the other largest items in this bill is money for children, support for the unemployed, assist tans for states so they're not cutting back on their budget. i think it is pretty easy to understand the american rescue plan and the evidence will be something we see in the economy as we see what i expect to see, which is, you know, rapid job growth over the rest of the course of the year. don't get me wrong, we will still have a high unemployment rate for many months to come, but i expect it will be coming down shortly and i don't think it is hard to explain, you know, connect the dots between what is happening. >> what is your sense of what's next for the administration. we learned that the dhs secretary has directed fema to help out with managing the flow of unaccompanied migrant children across the border. there is a 90 day federal effort to transfer unaccompanied migrant children. does this mean that immigration is the next big item on the administration's agenda, or is this one item on the list of things to do next? >> well, as with any president, there are the agenda items you choose and the agenda items that are chosen for you. this situation at the border is something president biden wouldn't want to have to deal with in his first 100 days in office. he would rather have a chance to get other things on the plate first. he would like to get to immigration legislation. but that is a pretty far stretch at this point. so, you know, possibly the better chance of getting to some sort of bipartisan agreement might be infrastructure, at least that's the hope because republicans and democrats have agreed over the last number of years that the country's roads and bridges and, you know, broad band and other, you know, necessary items for the growth of a country are woefully underfunded and in need of repair. whether the two sides could come together on a man to do that is a different question. it is another large ticket spending item that the republicans might decide is too much to go along with it. it might be in their interest to oppose it if they like some of the things in the bill because it will make the president look like a big spender which of course having passed a $1.9 trillion bill is the way he started his presidency. i think he's got a number of things on his agenda he wants to get done and then there are things like the border crisis that are things that will force themselves on to his agenda that he has to cope with. >> peter, how is this tour that he, the first lady, the vice president and the second daily are about to embark on. we have a map of places where they plan to be going over the next few days. you see the vice president will be heading to las vegas on monday, denver on tuesday. the president will be in delaware county, pennsylvania on tuesday. not the state of delaware. the first lady will be in burlington, new jersey. and the second gentleman will be in new mexico. what is the strategy in terms of why those places and what they will be saying there? >> well, conveniently enough, most of those places are either battleground states or states that democrats obviously want to hold on to four years from now and then of course the midterms in just two years. that's -- but what you heard a lot from jason's former colleagues is the one thing they didn't do enough of was to sell the economic stimulus and the benefits that they believe came from that in 2009, that the president then, president obama, didn't care enough or didn't spend enough time or invest enough energy anyway into convincing the public that this was a good thing, that it was going to result in good things in their lives and the things they saw in the economy that were turning around were the result of something that the president got. so president biden wants to avoid what he thinks is that mistake. whether that makes a difference or not will depend largely on the results of the package. if the package does what jason just talked about doing, it does propel the economy into higher growth and people feel it in their lives, they're more open to that kind of message. so the substance matters as much as the messages. but the biden administration plans to be aggressive about being out there and making sure to get credit where they can get it. >> before i have to let you go, jason, what do you think in terms of where the economy is going. i don't know whether it's wise right now for people to start making big economic decisions. it feels like things are going well, but there is so much uncertainty in the very short term partly based on vaccinations, who gets vaccinated and when. what is the economy looking like to you in the next, say, six to eight months? >> if you're asking about the next six weeks, yes, still a lot of uncertainty how much virus is out there. if you are asking me six months from now, i think we won't be quite all the way back to normal, but we'll be a lot of the way back to normal in our own lives. to have a successful economy, you need two things. one is people need to feel safe going into restaurants, traveling, doing all the things they love to do. and they need to be able to afford to do all of those things. the shots are one. cash in your bank account is number two. we are doing both of those right now. and i think it's going to work on the time horizon of six to eight months. >> briefly, peter, is that the economic outlook the administration is counting on right now? what are they expecting? >> i think they are expecting that. what you hear from some economists is a worry it might propel the economy too far. i don't know whether that's going to happen or not. that's something economists will debate. but that seems to be the bigger concern at this point. that's what you heard the president say. they would rather go big and take a chance on that than go too small and leave the economy suffering. thank you very much. still to come tonight, louisiana's cancer alley. residents there are fighting a plastics plant after growing concerns over high disease rates. up next, we'll take a look at why and where the former president is currently under investigation. plus -- ♪♪ >> the curtains could soon go up on broadway. and i cannot wait. broadway, take all my money. one of the stars of "jagged little pill," one of the ones i am dying to see, will share her story of surviving during the pandemic. that's all ahead when "the week" continues on msnbc. darrell's family uses gain flings now so their laundry smells more amazing than ever. isn't that the dog's towel? hey, me towel su towel. more gain scent plus oxi boost and febreze in 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let's discuss it with joyce vance, an msnbc contributor and former u.s. attorney. michael cohen has been asked back for an eighth interview. that was enough to make john dean, former white house counsel to president nixen say it is only a matter of days until vance indicts donald trump and others. what do you think of that? >> well, days may be optimistic, but michael cohen plays an important role for prosecutors who now have millions of pages of documents, the data that underlies trump taxes and other financial records. and it's such a help for them to have someone who can explain it. who better than the president's former lawyer, probably present for a lot of meetings and conversations, familiar with issues that get reflected in taxes. so it's no surprise that they have had cohen in so much. and it would seem to indicate that they're very interested in what's contained in the papers that they have finally received. >> what do you think of that call in georgia, the one that "the wall street journal" reported on? how does that affect the overall investigation, you think? >> you know, joshua, i have been thinking about these calls a lot, both of them. and obviously what's at stake here is solicitation of election fraud by the former president asking georgia officials to help. the defense would likely be that he really thought he won, that he didn't have the intent to solicit a crime, that he was acting in good faith. but you know what's really remarkable here and suggests he wasn't acting in good faith, if he believed he had really won the election, he would have left it up for the process to work, for recounts to happen and for any problems to come to light. the fact that he's personally making these phone calls to georgia officials who he doesn't know, the president of the united states, pressuring them to find them votes, pressuring them to find fraud, this, i think, is a strong indication that this is not the normal course of business. i look forward to see what comes out of georgia in the next few months. >> could you give us some context for what we might expect? i'm not a prosecutor, so i don't know how all this works. and i hear plenty of people cynically presume that there is no way this prosecution is going to go forward. it is donald trump. he's too teflon. georgia is not going to go after this guy. even if they did, there is no way they will make it. it is impossible for this to actually happen. i have heard tons of cynicism on this. then again, if there is a case to be made and they don't go after him, that would be pretty bad for those prosecutors. but what do you think about all of the peripheral aspects to these investigations other than just the facts of the case? >> there is enormous cynicism about the criminal justice system knowing that trump eluded what appears to be a responsibility for crimes. we don't know for sure, right? i mean, it is possible he was never prosecuted in the past because all of the evidence wasn't there. but there are appearances of long-term skates awfully close to the edge. so people are right to be cynical. now, though, we no longer have a justice department that's controlled by the former president and his cronies. and instead we have a prosecutor in new york cy vance who i always feel the need to remind people i am not related to who seems to be going after a lot of financial calculations. we have the elected district attorney in fullton county, georgia, an experienced prosecutor. i would expect these folks to examine the evidence. you have to have admissible evidence of guilt that will stand up beyond a reasonable doubt both with your jury and on appeal. and, so, it's really easy to be an armchair prosecutor and say, oh, there is plenty of evidence there. they should indict. it is really hard to be in the room looking at the evidence and making the decision, particularly with the defendant like the former president. but i think these prosecutors will be focussed and they will do the right thing if the evidence is there, they will indict. if they don't have the evidence they won't. >> and how do these other cases factor into this? eric swalwell, congressman from the california bay area has a lawsuit that he is pursuing related to the january 6th attack on the capitol. mississippi congressman and the naacp are suing the former president and his associates for their role in that. and you have a new piece in "the washington post" where you talk about how civil cases could kind of, as you put it, pry out the information that could lead to the former president being held more accountable. how does the whole network of all of these various cases lock together? >> the civil cases, there are at least ten of them, are very interesting. for one thing, on a combined level they have the potential to knock the former president out financially. we know he has a lot of debt. some of these cases include damages and punitive damages into the millions of dollars, so they could be very problematic for him on that level. but also is civil discovery proceeds as motions are argued and court hearings, it is very