'Special Report' All-Star Panel on Sen. Manchin Build Back Better bombshell

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Suggesting Manchin was alone in his views of Build Back Better is ‘inaccurate’: Domenech

‘Special Report’ All-Star panel reacts to the Democratic senator’s decision to reject $2 trillion social spending package.

This is a rush transcript from "Special Report," December 20, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

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SEN. JOE MANCHIN, (D-WV): I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can't. I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there.

BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: You're done? This is a no?

MANCHIN: This is a no.

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We all knew that Senator Manchin couldn't be trusted. The excuses that he just made, I think, are complete bull--

REP. JOHN YARMUTH, (D-KY) HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: And 222 Democrats in the House and 49 Democrats in the Senate have been working in good faith for six months or longer trying to get this very important piece of legislation done. I think there's a bit of arrogance on the part of Senator Manchin who thinks that he should have total say as to what gets passed.

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BAIER: Well, I knew he was going to make news, but I didn't know Senator Manchin was going to make that news. I had about 10 more questions about the specifics of Build Back Better he said no, it's a no.

The White House came out with this really scathing statement, Jen Psaki writing "Senator Manchin promised to continue conversations in the days ahead to work with us to reach that common ground. If his comment on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position and a breach of his commitments to the president and the Senator's colleagues in the House and Senate. Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word." Well, the senator reacted to that.

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SEN. JOE MANCHIN, (D-WV): It's staff. It's staff-driven. I understand staff. This is not the president. This is staff. And they drove some things, and they put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable. They know what it is, and that's it.

I knew that we could not change. It was never going to change. It never could change with that many people.

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BAIER: So, where are we? Let's bring in our panel, Ben Domenech, publisher of "The Federalist," Morgan Ortagus, former State Department spokesperson, and Juan Williams is a FOX News analyst. Ben, what's your reaction and the fallout from it?

BEN DOMENECH, PUBLISHER, "THE FEDERALIST": Well, first off, I have to react to the way that the White House staff responded to this situation. Look, I think that anyone who was paying attention to what Senator Manchin really wanted, his priorities and everything that was going into this, has known for a long time the amount of movement that would have to happen in order for him to consider voting for this bill. He has been very clear about that, since the summer and even earlier, if you were paying attention, about what his criteria looked like.

And for the staff of the White House to respond to this situation by basically just trying to bully him and calling him essentially a liar, saying that this was a situation where he was not someone that they could respect going forward because they couldn't trust his views, suggesting that he is someone who has been all over the map on this when, from my perspective, he has been very consistent sips the beginning was just completely out of bounds.

And as a former staffer myself, I just can't imagine that this was the kind of thing that they viewed as being a professional response to the situation.

The senator himself, I think, has been telegraphing this for a long time, and to suggest that he is the only senator who has these views about this measure is, I think, also inaccurate. I think there are a lot of other senators who would have been with him on this if it was not something that would have been dangerous for them politically. And I think he was actually speaking for a lot of people when he said this thing is dead. We couldn't find a way to move it forward, and it's time to move on.

BAIER: Yes. Juan, they still need his vote, and if Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, is going to put back the Build Back Better bill as written and make everybody vote on it, Ben may be right. There may be other senators who have a problem with it, senators who may be vulnerable in elections to come.

But Steve Clemons, who is a friend of Manchin's, wrote in an op-ed in "The Hill" this, "White House incivility is what lost Joe Manchin. In my view, the control had shifted from Biden, who had said don't support this unless you can really get behind it, to a White House that wanted to play the blame game. This is not the way Biden usually operates. He doesn't blame either side in a negotiation. He usually works it through detail by detail, resolving problem after problem. When temperatures cool after the holidays, perhaps the White House will see with Manchin temperament matters." Juan?

JUAN WILLIAMS, FOX NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think Democrats are in shock. Today, you can't talk to any Democrat in on the Hill today, and I'm talking about people who are liberal, progressives, from Ilhan Omar, that we just saw, to Abigail Spanberger, and, of course, people at the White House, and they are all in shock. They had no idea that Joe Manchin was going to unilaterally call an end to the negotiations.

And part of this, I think for them is now the question is, is this a negotiation ploy, Bret, or is this really the end? And I think that's what you are referring to in that "Hill" piece is that people saying, well, maybe it's the White House attitude, and if that attitude shifts, maybe then Joe Manchin will reenter talks with Joe Biden as opposed to anything that happened with the staff.

But I think what you've got to focus on here, and I think -- I think from the Chuck Schumer point of view, from the White House point of view, just last week Joe Manchin handed the White House a draft of an outline, if you will, of what was acceptable to him, like a point of negotiation. He did the same thing back in July with the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

So, I think that there are lots of people who do feel betrayed and feel like, wait, we were negotiating. We were open to you. The infrastructure bill was passed, separated from this social safety net bill. And the elements of the bill are so popular with the American people. Economists say it will not add to inflation. And, yet, you hear Joe Manchin saying this is going to restructure American society. That doesn't sound sincere.

BAIER: The economists, there are different economists who say it would affect inflation, and obviously inflation is real, and Manchin is worried about that, Juan.

And Morgan, Manchin has said time and time again don't put programs in there that you know are supposed to last 10 years and only list them as one year in this bill. Don't do the gimmick stuff, and let's make priorities. Is there a way possibly forward? Yes, but maybe not the way they are treating him. Here is Mitch McConnell on Guy Benson's radio show late this afternoon.

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SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, (R-KY) SENATE MINORITY LEADER: I never get angry about losing a vote because the most important vote is always the next vote. So I was shocked at the vitriol, and basically seemed to me they were calling Senator Manchin a liar. I think that was not smart. This is a 50-50 Senate. It's going to be 50-50 for another year. And believe me, that's not the way I would have handled a disappointing vote like this.

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BAIER: And Morgan, the underlying message there is he is there with open arms if Manchin wants to come to the Republican side.

MORGAN ORTAGUS, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON: Well, and it's not just Manchin broke the news. He broke the news on FOX, which is an original sin for the progressives and the party. Congratulations on that, Bret. By the way, I think we were all stopped in our tracks for our Sunday brunch whenever had you that interview.

But listen, I want to go back to something that Ben said that I think is really important, and that's the staffing question. And this is what Steve Clemons wrote about in "The Hill" that you referenced earlier. For our viewers, why does it matter what the staff are doing and what they are communicating? I think it's crucially important, because as staffing the secretary of state, there was not a statement that I put out that he did not sign off on, that he did not agree to.

So, you have Joe Biden, who is supposed to be bringing everyone together, who is Manchin's buddy and his friend, and his staff are beating up on him.

So there's one of two things happening. One, Joe Biden is approving all of this and is playing buddy-buddy to Manchin in private, but is fully letting his staff beat up on him. Or two, his staff is running amok, are issuing statements even before the one that the White House issued yesterday, the one that really set him off was a few weeks ago -- or excuse me, a few days ago.

So there is an issue here that either Joe Biden is allowing his staff to do this or his staff is doing things that he doesn't know about, issuing statements that are really upending the policy and political debates in D.C., and I think that's concerning.

BAIER: All right, panel, stand by.

Up next, the Omicron variant surging you, the coronavirus surge, what does it mean heading into the holiday?

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JOE BIDEN, (D) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's not going to be quick, but I think by next Christmas we'll be close to normal.

For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: We're in for a world of trouble, I'm afraid, in the next month or two.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF MEDICAL ADVISER: We are going to see a significant stress in some regions of the country on the hospital system. This virus is extraordinary. It has a doubling time of anywhere from two to three days. Right now, in certain regions of the country, 50 percent of the isolates are Omicron, which means it's going to take over.

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BAIER: The CDC said tonight that it did take over the number of cases in the U.S., three quarters are now Omicron. The vice president was asked about these variants and told "The L.A. Times" Friday "We didn't see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not, upon whose advice and direction we have relied didn't see Delta coming. We didn't see Omicron coming. And that's what the nature of what this awful virus has been, which as it turns out has mutations and variants."

Dr. Fauci was asked about that this weekend.

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DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF MEDICAL ADVISER: I think that the vice president's statement was taken a bit out of context. I believe she was referring to the fact of the extraordinary number of mutations and amino acid substitutions, particularly with Omicron, no one had expected it that much. But we were well-prepared and expected that we were going to see variants.

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BAIER: Not sure, Ben, if she was taken out of context. But the bottom line, there are a lot of questions ahead of this president's statement tomorrow, whatever that speech is going to be.

DOMENECH: The Pope of science has graduated to interpreting the vice president's language, I see. The remarks tomorrow are not going to change anything fundamentally. At this point I think what we can recognize about the way that Americans are livings their lives is that a significant portion of them have really tuned out. They have tuned out the words that they are hearing from this White House and from media figures like Anthony Fauci. They have decided to live their lives according to their own priorities, and they are not as squared of this Omicron variant. They're looking at the kind of news, they're reading the same kind of stories. But they're also deciding to live their holidays the way that they will.

And I think that requires a shift on the part of the White House's messaging in going forward in order to try to get them to do what they would like them to do, which is get vaccinated.

BAIER: Juan, there was a lot of criticism to the Trump administration. Now, will that criticism go to the Biden administration if you can't get a fast test if there are all kinds of questions about this outbreak and things start to shut down?

WILLIAMS: It could. We have to watch and see what happens. The politics of this are tiresome and puzzling that it has become politicized because it's a threat to the whole country, all of us, regardless of party. I think tomorrow you're going to hear the president speak in dire terms about what is coming in the next few weeks or next two months, which is a contrast to, of course, people who downplayed the impact initially.

The other thing is hospitals, we have to really pay attention to the doctors, the nurses, and hospitalization rates. It's overwhelming them.

BAIER: That's a big number. Morgan?

ORTAGUS: I think the most encouraging thing is that President Trump talked about the fact that he has taken the COVID vaccine, I believe he said the booster as well. He also talked about how his administration produced the vaccines that are out today through the public-private partnership of Operation Warp Speed. And I think that that is a statement that everybody needs to hear.

BAIER: Panel, thanks so much. Merry Christmas.

When we come back, a special observance.

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