GOP Senators Propose Smaller COVID Relief Bill, Will Joe Biden and Dems Make a Compromise?

The first test of unity and bipartisanship in Congress has presented itself. President Joe Biden has supported a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill that could be passed without Republican support, but 10 GOP senators have presented their own slimmed down bill in an effort to get something passed. Will a compromise be made? Also, a week out from Trump's impeachment trial, the legal team has not been set. A weekend shakeup has left the former president with no defense team as of yet. Ginger Gibson, deputy Washington digital editor at NBC News, joins us for this and how Congress intends to look into the Gamestop buying frenzy on Wall Street.

Next, childhood obesity is an ongoing problem that has only been made worse by the pandemic. The huge disruptions to the regular school year has impacted the amount of movement schools kids are engaging in as well as their diets, and it could have a lasting effect on their health. Kids tend to gain weight over summer when there is no school and for many, the pandemic has been similar to a 10-month summer break. Furthermore, some of the most nutritious meals many kids were eating were in school settings. Sam Bloch, staff writer at The Counter, joins us for more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Monday, February one. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles,
and this is the Daily Dive, the first test of
unity and bipartisanship, and Congress has presented itself. President Joe
Biden has supported a one point nine trillion dollar COVID
relief bill that could be passed without Republican support, but

(00:21):
ten GOP senators have presented their own slim down bill
in an effort to get something passed. Will a compromise
be made? Also, a week out from Trump's impeachment trial,
the legal team has not been set. A weekend shake
up has left the former president with no defense team
as of yet. Gender Gibson, Deputy Washington Digital editor at
NBC News, joins us for this and how Congress intends

(00:44):
to look into the game stop buying Frenzy on Wall
Street next. Childhood obesity is an ongoing problem that has
only been made worse by the pandemic. The huge disruptions
to the regular school year has impacted the amount of
movement school kids are engaging in as well as their diets,
and it could to have a lasting effect on their health.
Kids tend to gain weight over the summer when there's
no school, and for many the pandemic has been similar

(01:07):
to a ten month summer break. Furthermore, some of the
most nutritious meals many kids were eating we're in school settings.
Sam Block, staff writer at the Counter, joins us for more.
It's news without the noise. Let's dive in. I support
passing Cobra relief with support from Republicans if we can

(01:29):
get it. But the co relief passed to pass. There's
no joining us now is Ginger Gibson, Deputy Washington Digital
editor at NBC News. Thanks for joining us, Ginger, Thanks
for having me. President Biden has his one point nine
trillion dollar COVID relief bill floating out there. He wants
it to get past. He wants to it to get
done really quickly as well. But we just saw ten

(01:51):
GOP senators come out with their own plan. This is
somewhere in the range of six hundred billion dollars. You know,
it's got money for VEX scenes continuing this three unemployment
benefits one thousand dollar direct payments to Americans instead of
fourteen hundred dollars. You know, this is going to be
an interesting moment. Joe Biden has been calling for unity,

(02:12):
for bipartisanship. Will Democrats want to work to get something
smaller done? Yeah? This is going to be a big
test of what links Democrats are willing to go to
to be bipartisan. This is not everything that they want.
You just detailed some of the things that are missing
in this bill that had been in bidens. And the
big question I think is going to be what do

(02:34):
Democrats in the Senate do. There's this route they could
take where they do it alone and they don't include Republicans.
It's sort of this archaic process known as budget reconciliation.
It's the same process that Republicans used a few years
ago to pass their tax cuts without any Democratic support.
Or they could try to find some bipartisan agreement. There's

(02:56):
a lot of a lord to that one. They can
say it's bipartisans and they can go to voters and say, look,
we did something and to that's sort of like trick
to get around needing Republican support. Could be used for
something else. They could save it for another issue that
they know they're not going to get any more public. Right,
you know, we've been passing these bills kind of regularly.

(03:16):
Let's say we don't know how much longer the pandemic
will go. It seems like it's still gonna be some time,
So maybe this could be the right call. Do something
a little smaller, more targeted, as Republicans have said that
they want to do, and then do something again later.
It's gonna be a tough one. I know Joe Biden
had said he wanted those four stimulus payments. It's just
not all gonna be there. But with ten Republicans on board,

(03:40):
maybe that can just push it over the edge. I
do think that if they do something smaller, it doesn't
sort of close the book on ever getting anything else done.
Congress appropriates money every year. There's gonna be opportunities every
year for them to continue to fund things or even
passing separate bills. And I do think that there's a
lot of the law, including the Biden to have this
be backpartisans. So I would not be surprised if they

(04:02):
take that route. If the votes are there. If they
can't come to a deal, well it came quick, so
let's see how this first big test goes on that front.
The other thing, obviously the Biden administration trying to wrap
their heads around the vaccines, boosting up distribution, boosting up production.
It's been a tough go. There's reports that they're trying
to locate twenty million vaccines that were sent out. It

(04:24):
doesn't mean that they're lost completely or anything, they just
haven't gotten reporting that those have been administered. So they're
having a tough go at the distribution so far. You know,
they were warning people before the Biden took office that
they didn't have a really great idea of what the
plan was, and then when they got in that they
didn't think the plan was very good. And we're seeing
that and them trying to adjust and make changes to

(04:46):
try to get the plan in place that they think
will best distribute these vaccines. I mean, Trump was criticized
really from day one from how he was handling the
virus and its response, and I think we're just seeing
the end of that. I think the it's going to
be a really short window before people start blaming Biden
for this, and they're aware of that and they're trying
to get ahead of it. And I think that the

(05:07):
big question for Americans. There was always going to be
a window I think between when the vaccine was created
and approved and when people were able to get it,
and I think that people were always going to be
frustrated in that window. The question is does that window
close in February or is that when you still open
in May. I mean, the ball is in his court,
he campaigned on it. He really has to get it

(05:28):
under control. That's all the things that he said he
was going to do. So, yeah, you're right, there is
a window. But how long that window remains open is
the big question, and they really do have to get
it done. Moving on, wanted to talk a little bit
about the Trump impeachment trial. It's set to start on
February eight, but a week out. Basically, the Trump legal

(05:49):
team hasn't really seemed to be fully formed. Last week
there was a few people, a few lawyers that they
were throwing out there that we're gonna be part of
the team. Now we're hearing that anywhere from three to
five main lawyers that they were going to use are
not part of the team. Now, you know, it's kind
of this one of these weird things that Sor said
that this whole thing is unconstitutional. So it doesn't seem
like he will be convicted, but he still doesn't have

(06:11):
that legal team set up. Even if you went into
a trial knowing that the votes on the jury weren't
there to convict you, you'd want a legal team to
make a legal argument because you never know that it's
going to happen at the end of the day. And
we really, as you saw, the former president's legal team
sort of imploded over the weekend. They all left. It's

(06:32):
unclear really who's left of his legal team. There seems
to be some division over strategy. Some reports that Trump
wanted them to argue that the election really was stolen
and they didn't want to do that. That would seem
to not help him in this process. If he did so,
I think we're gonna see it all over the place.
And there was talk among him and his aids about

(06:55):
him writing a letter to defend himself to be read
on the Senate floor. I really think that this is
going to be one of those things that his campaign
used to say they were building the plan as they
landed it when he ran for president. That might be
the way that this impeachment defense goes as well. And
the last thing I wanted to bring up a game stop.
The buying Friends on Wall Street was the story of

(07:15):
the week last week. It's definitely spilling over into this week.
You know, it's kind of this uh story of big
Wall Street hotshots fighting against Reddit small investors and Congress.
There was this moment of bipartisanship also when Alexandria Acasio
Cortez and Ted Cruz were agreeing that robin Hood the
investment apps shouldn't have closed down trading on game stop

(07:36):
in other ones. So now Democrats want hearings on this.
What can we expect from this? Yeah, we've seen Chairwoman
Maxine Waters has already called a hearing to try to
get more information about what happened, I mean, the whole thing.
How some Reddit posters were able to really drive a
stock like that? Could this be done again? Could it

(07:57):
be done to harm a stock instead of how being it?
And then like you said, why robin Hood cut off
that trading, Why the decision was made, what it should?
There be rules about how platforms like that, firms like
that can do that. So this is not an issue
that's going away anytime soon. And you're right, this was
like one of those bipartisan moments. We're sort of the

(08:18):
populous wings of both parties joined together and and it's
actually kind of surprising. We don't see that more often,
but this was one of those times that they were
a bit unified. Yeah, and how they go about fixing
this where they want to fix it will be different.
You know. The left it's big Wall Street is the enemy.
The right, it's putting limits on on the free market,
things like that. So the way this will play out

(08:40):
is going to be different. But it's just an interesting, uh,
you know, a point of commonality there. So we'll see
how it goes. This is going to be the story
of the week again, I can assure you, So we'll
see what happens. Ginger Gibson, Deputy Washington Digital editor in
BC News, Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks
for having me. Another one told me they had patients

(09:07):
who are going into the percentile where you're clinically overweight,
intent or you're clinically obese. Some we're telling me they
saw kids who are putting on ten or twenty pounds
since the pandemic started in March. I spoke to one
you said that she had a patient, an eleven year
old girl I believe, who put on forty pounds. Joining
us now with Sam Block, staff writer at the Counter.

(09:27):
Thanks for joining us. Sam, Yeah, thanks for having me.
I wanted to bring you on to talk about child
obesity crisis that started before the pandemic has been made
much worse over this time. It's kind of one of
these things where one healthcare crisis is exacerbating another. And
we're hearing a lot from pediatricians saying that a lot
of their patients kids, obviously are coming in and their

(09:50):
charts are increasingly pushing them into the obesity category. And
a lot of this is can be tied to schools,
kids being out of school, school lunch programs, which are
super important in all of this. So Sam, tell us
a little bit about this. You mentioned the childhood obesity
crisis was a problem before the pandemic. According to the

(10:10):
most recent data that the federal government has, a little
over nine of school aged children are obese, and there
are some predictions that that will rise, the extent to
which is not known yet. But I spoke with a
researcher who studies summerweight game. He looks into what happens
when kids are out of school, and he figured that

(10:33):
if kids were out of school for five months this year,
the national obesity rate would rise by another four percent.
So that's just five months of typical out of school activity,
and that's related mostly to uh, poor diet because kids
aren't getting the healthy, nutritious foods that they normally during

(10:54):
the school year, and also surprisingly sedentary activity. I think
a lot of people tend to think of summer as
a time when we're running around at the beach or
playing sports, but kids actually spend more time in front
of screens when they're out of school. So between the
inferior diet and the sedentary activity, the summer has a
lot of similarities to the pandemic. And again, this prediction

(11:17):
that the obesity rate is going up for it's just
a prediction. No one really knows what's going to happen.
But that's just for five months out of school. We've
now been out of school for ten months, and we
have these extenuating circumstances like um rising, food and security,
and poverty. So pediatricians, public health experts, even some dieticians
I spoke to form my story are afraid that this

(11:38):
could get really bad. Start me off with some of
the pediatricians and dietitians you've talked to and tell me
about what they're seeing in their patients. So I spoke
to pediatricians in the Bay Area. I spoke to one
in Portland's book to one in Minneapolis. Their stories were
very similar. They have patients who are coming in who are,
you know, as young as say five seven years old,

(12:01):
who used to be in the twenty percentile for their
body mass index. So that's a way of gauging your
relative height and weight. And they went from the twenty
five percentile too in a matter of months to seventy
five percentile. Now being in the seventy percentile isn't itself
a problem, But when you gain that much weight over
such a short period of time, that worries them. That's

(12:21):
one pediatrician. Another one told me they had patients who
are going into the eighty five percentile, where you're clinically overweight,
into the ninety percentile where you're clinically obese. Some we're
telling me they saw kids who are putting on ten
or twenty pounds since the pandemic started. In March. I
spoke to one who said that she had a patient,
an eleven year old girl I believe, who put on
forty pounds during the pandemic. As kids are growing, they

(12:41):
should be gaining weight, but when you're gaining that much
weight so quickly, pediatricians worry that that that could have
adverse health effects and that they're not going to lose
that weight as they get older. We've been hearing about
coverage about this throughout the pandemic, the quarantine fifteen. You know,
people were kind of jokingly giving it that name. You know,
but if that's happened with normal adults, people who can

(13:02):
take care of themselves, etcetera, etcetera, it's also happening to
our children, and it's diet is part of that. And
this is kind of where a lot of school lunch
programs really come into focus and how important it is
both on you know, kids actually getting meals, but also
the nutritional part of it. I think this is what
drew me to the story, was just hearing from people
who are concerned not so much about quote unquote empty bellies,

(13:26):
but the quality of the food that kids were eating.
In America, starvation usually isn't the consequence of poverty, it's obesity.
And part of the reason why people are so concerned
about kids missing school meals is that for I think
twenty two million school children who live near the poverty line.

(13:48):
School lunch is actually some of the healthiest food that
they can get. Now, you and I, we probably grew
up at a time when school lunch wasn't so healthy.
We're probably thinking about sloppy Joe's and you know, batty, Yeah, exactly.
But but that's changed during the Obama administration. And at
the time, you know, I think there were a lot
of jokes, a lot of thanks Michelle Obama about school

(14:11):
food that look pretty unappetising. But the fact is, these
school lunch changes have impacted child health for the better.
Kids who eat school lunch have to eat a certain
amount of fruit every day, a range of vegetables from
leafy greens to lagumes. They have to eat breads, pastas,
and muffins and other grains that are made with at
least fifty whole grain flour, which is richer in dietary fibers,

(14:33):
so it helps the body um it helps keep down
body weight. School lunches also had to cut back on
saturated fats and conform to age specific limits on calories
and sodium. That's part of an effort to drive down
hypertension and teenagers. And again, all of these changes the
evidence is suggesting that this has impacted child health to
the better. Kids who eat school meals every day consume

(14:53):
more fruits and vegetables, fewer fats and sugars, have better diets,
lower weight, lower rates of unhealthy weight. And as an
epidemiologist told me, it's not just that school lunch is
healthier than it used to be. It's healthier than a
bag lunch brought from home. And now enter the pandemic
remote learning. You know, how do you even feed kids
that are not going to school? And on the other

(15:14):
side of things, cafeteria workers and whatnot, they're not actually
cooking a lot of these mills anymore because of the
way these rules have changed. So now they're doing a
lot of prepackaged, processed foods, which could be worse for
these diets. And it's important to remember that the cafeteria
workers who have been putting together these meals for kids
who aren't even in classrooms a lot of the time,

(15:35):
they deserve a lot of credit and they deserve a
lot of praise for being on the front lines to
help these children. That said, there are some very real
changes to the way they're able to put together these meals.
You know, staffing is down. There were a lot of
rules initially that were about the safety of even cooking
in the first place. It was thought that, you know,
packaged meals wrapped in plastic, we're going to be safer

(15:58):
to transmit and safer to distribute. And as a result
of a lot of these feteral waivers that have just
made it easier for cafeteria staff to put bag lunches
together to go on routes and delivering meals. You don't
have the hot, nutritious, scratch cooked meals that kids normally
have in the cafeteria. You don't have the salad bars,
which a few dieticians told me made them really sad.

(16:20):
You know that for years they had spent time working
on kids, kind of training and convincing them to get
into leafy greens and dumes and vegetables they wouldn't normally
like like giving them the option of going salad bars.
That's all gone. Now you have a lot of frozen foods.
You have a lot of shelf stable foods, processed foods,
frozen burritos, salty snacks, chips, fruit juice, vegetable juice, things

(16:41):
that aren't bad per se. But if that's in place
of the healthy, nutritious meal that you used to eat.
Kids are missing out on a lot of nutrients this
year and again this change was made to make it
easier to feed kids. So what are the challenges going forward?
I mean, there's a lot of long term consequences because
of this um You know, what are those consequences? And

(17:03):
what are health officials? What are schools trying to do
to remedy that the long term consequences? I think you
know the dietitians that I spoke to who worked on
revamping school meals after the Obama reforms. One long term
consequence might be that kids are going to lose their
taste for vegetables and they're just going to sort of
revert back to starchy potatoes and salty snacks and and

(17:25):
uncrustables and pop tarts. The other is the more serious
consequence of childhood obesity, because sixty seven percent of kids
who are obese at five years old will be obese
at fifty and ovies adolescents will remain obese adults. And
when you become an obvios adult, you have higher risk
for conditions like diabetes and hypertension, potentially fatal medical events.

(17:47):
Like heart attacks and strokes. So this all just kind
of adds up, and we worry. And when I say we,
I mean the public health experts and the epidemiologists I
talked to worry about the long term health consequences of this.
I guess generation of pandemic kids. In terms of what
we can do about that, obesity has so many causes.
There's no one silver bullet. Yes, the changes to school meals,

(18:08):
and yes, the fact that kids are missing these school
meals and eating other food at home. It's contributing to it.
It's not the only thing that's contributing to it. But
if we do want to attack and work on the
diet piece, I heard over and over again that the
main thing that schools have to do is return to
these Obama era standards for nutrition and for what goes
in meals. Your listeners may know that at the very

(18:29):
end of his administration, Donald Trump was able to push
through rules to roll back I'm sorry, he pushed through
rules that rolled back restrictions on UM, on whole grains
and sodium and flavored milk. People want those all to return.
They want meals to be healthier again. UM And when
kids do return to school. I kept hearing from people.

(18:51):
It's going to be more important than ever to realize
that school is a place of learning, but it's also
a place where bodies grow, and we need to recenter
and think about kids health as part of what what
they gain and what they and what they lose when
they're out of school. The big disruptor of our lives
right now the pandemic. So we're gonna be studying this
for some time to come. We're gonna learn from it,
and I hope that we get better policies out of it,

(19:14):
because you know, we've always had this child obesity crisis,
especially uh you know, more recently, and and for this
to kind of make it worse, uh, you know, just
keep setting us back. So hopefully we can get a
handle on all of that. Sam Block, staff writer at
the Counter, Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks
so much for having me. That's it for today. Join

(19:40):
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your podcast. This episode of The Daily Divers produced by
Victor Wright and engineered by Tony Sarrantino. I'm Oscar Ramirez.
This was her daily Dot