NBC "Meet the Press" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Michael Bennet
Interview
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SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
Thanks Chuck.
CHUCK TODD:
-- means you're cancer free. I want to get that -- so that is good news, as well.
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
Well, I really appreciate your having me back. We -- The last time I saw you, I had had the diagnosis but not the operation.
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
Now, I know I'm cancer free, and we're moving ahead.
CHUCK TODD:
All right. Let me ask, first, about your candidacy. You're the 18th major candidate into this race. You're the 11th white male. You're the seventh U.S. senator. You're not even the first Coloradoan in the race. You're the second Coloradoan. You look around this field, what was missing? What is missing that you're providing to this race?
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
I think that this -- I think we need somebody who's going to level with the American people about why our system doesn't seem to work for them, why it, why it seems to be getting worse and worse and worse. I've had two tough elections in a swing state, out in the middle of the country, where I think we feel pretty ignored by what people on the coasts are saying. And third, I've got a record, in the Senate, of a lot of bipartisan results. But I've been there long enough to know how to get some things done but also long enough to know why things don't get done in Washington and what needs to be able -- what needs to be fixed. My conclusion, Chuck, was that, if we continue down the road we're going down, politically, and that's even before Donald Trump was president --
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
-- over the next ten years, we will be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us. And I feel like it's my responsibility, as it is every American's, not to accept that outcome.
CHUCK TODD:
Pragmatic idealist, okay? It -- Some might say that's an oxymoron. You can't be both. Give me an example of where you think you've got to be a bit more pragmatic in your idealism. One of your opponents in this race, Jay Inslee, he's the governor of Washington, he's proposing to get rid of, I think, all coal-fired power plants within a ten-year period. Is that too idealistic? Is that not pragmatic? Is that an example of what you're trying to say is pragmatic idealism?
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
I think, I think that -- I think that might actually be really possible. And I think there's a lot of merit in his proposals. I think my -- my suggestion on Medicare X that creates a true public option, administered by Medicare, rather than threatening to take away insurance from 180 million people, 80% of whom like it, all the unions in America that have negotiated for their healthcare plans. I mean, I think that the American people have waited long enough for universal healthcare.
CHUCK TODD:
Okay.
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
I'd say, on the idealism side of it, it's because I actually genuinely believe that the best, that the best, the best form of government is self-government. And I, and I believe that the freest kind of government is self-government, and that we have an obligation to preserve the democratic institutions that 230 years of Americans have preserved for us, and that our children are going to need to resolve their differences, but we seem to be so cavalier about destroying. And you know, the idea that we're going to run down the rathole that the Freedom Caucus has taken us down over the last ten years, in their tyrannical way, I think would be a huge mistake.
CHUCK TODD:
Let me --
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
I don't think it's -- By the way, I think it's a disgrace that we lost to Donald Trump to begin with, you know? And now, it seems to me that we need to approach this work in a way that's not going to give him a second term.
CHUCK TODD:
Well, and let's talk about this institution. It seems as if congressional Democrats, you're one of them, you would be a potential juror, if there were some sort of successful impeachment of the president in the House. But it seems to be that this is the debate in the Democratic Party. There's a pragmatic streak in Speaker Pelosi, who essentially seems to be more focused on 2020 than impeachment. Then there is other congressional Democrats who say, sort of making a similar argument that you're making about the institutions are wearing away, at some point, Congress has to stand up to these things on accountability. Where do you fall on this impeachment question? And where do you think the party should fall on it?
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
You know, I think, based on the polling that you just cited, where, where the majority of people say that the House should continue to investigate, and then we should make a decision, down the road, about whether to impeach or not and then, obviously, to convict or not in the Senate, I think that's exactly right. And that's what we should do. You know, Mueller should testify. We should have the full, unredacted report. He obvious -- I mean, to me, it seems fairly clear, from the evidence, that he has committed impeachable offenses. But we need to go through a process here and see if the American people can be convinced that that's actually the right outcome --
CHUCK TODD:
Okay but --
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
-- so that we don't --
CHUCK TODD:
Go ahead.
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
-- so we don't unnecessarily divide the people that we need to fig -- that we -- whose support we ultimately need, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, to change healthcare for the American people, to build infrastructure for the American people, to have an approach to climate --
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
-- that actually builds on the 70% of American people that say climate change is real. Humans are contributing to it. That is what, that is what the broad view is among the American people. Yet, we keep losing to climate deniers. We keep losing to people who are taking healthcare away from the American people, losing to people who are cutting tax cuts for wealthy people and blowing up the deficit. We should ask ourselves, why are we losing to people that are adopting policies that are so antithetical to what the American people want? And a big reason for that is that we're not talking to the middle of America. We're just -- We've got a bicoastal bias that, that's unconstructive.
CHUCK TODD:
Well, let's talk abou -- You talk about something called the Trump trap. And it seems to me, when it comes to congressional oversight, he may be setting a trap, which is, you say, "No," to everything. You stonewall on everything. And it's going to jam congressional Democrats. And it is, perhaps, setting up a no-win situation. It's sort of, if you want to hold him accountable, you have to start impeachment. If you don't, you go down this line. How do you avoid that trap? What do Democrats do tomorrow, if Bill Barr does not agree to testify, if Mueller, if they withhold Mueller? What do you expect the Democrats to do?
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
Well, I agree, first of all, with the Democrats that you quoted earlier in the program, that Mueller ought to resign. It's disgraceful, what he's done, how he's behaved --
CHUCK TODD:
You mean Mueller or Barr? You mean Barr, right?
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
I'm sorry, Barr, Barr. He's behaved like, you know, Trump's criminal defense lawyer instead of the attorney general of the United States. It's just -- And by the way, well, just this week, the kinds of things Trump has gotten away with or his attorney general has gotten away with, if Barack Obama had done one of them, you know, they'd be calling for his head. The fact that they're willing to do that doesn't mean we should go down that rathole. I think we should see whether or not-- pressure will build for the Mueller testimony. Pressure will build to get the Mueller report out. And I think that we should do all we can to beat those drums and make sure he does have to come testify to Congress and tell us what he found and explain why Bill Barr's summary of the work that he did, a guy who is admired, at least in the old days, was admired by everybody, you know, no matter what party they were in. The work he did over two years that demonstrates, conclusively, that he could not clear the president of committing the crime of - of conspir -- of, of obstruction. You know, he said, "I can't indict a president. So I'm not going to say that he committed a crime. But based on the evidence that I've seen, I can't clear him for this crime." That means that Congress has to do its oversight.
CHUCK TODD:
All right, let me move to, if you run against Donald Trump. Because I want to show you these economic numbers: 3.6% unemployment, 263,000 jobs created in April, 3.2% wages, are, 3.2% wage increase. Consumer confidence is fairly high. Look, there are a lot of voters out there who say, "All right, I don't like Donald Trump's character. But the economy is humming. And I vote pocketbook." What do you talk -- How do you convince that voter not to vote their pocketbook, if they like this economy?
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
So I'd say -- No, people will, people will vote their pocketbook. But Chuck, we're in the tenth year of a recovery that started in 2009, when Barack Obama was president. If you look at the job-creation numbers along that trajectory, over that ten years, it goes just like this. So Donald Trump is elected in the last two years. And I will confess, even he couldn't screw up the momentum that we had been going on for the eight years that he got elected. The difficulty is that, when you're in a state like mine, Colorado, which has one of the most-dynamic economies in the world, not just in America, people still -- most people can't afford housing. They can't afford healthcare. They can't afford higher education. They can't afford early childhood education. They can't afford a middle-class lifestyle. And Donald Trump has done nothing to help with that, nothing to help with that. Second point I would make is, even if you feel like he's done the right thing by cutting taxes, which I don't, because he cut taxes on the wealthiest people in America, mostly, even if you feel like he's done the right thing in a regulatory way or taken on China in a way you like, the fact that he has built his entire political career on dividing Americans, not uniting Americans, on destroying our institutions, on going after the free press, on violating the rule of law and being proud of that, on playing patsy to dictators, like Putin and the North Korea dictator just this week. I mean, here, he's saying, "I'm with him." He says, "I'm with him. I know he wouldn't do anything to hurt his economy." North Koreans are starving, because of what he and his father have done to their economy. So we got to keep our eye -- There are many, many ways that Donald Trump's threadbare record is available to us to beat him in November 2020. It would be a disaster, if we lost to him again.
CHUCK TODD:
One of the knocks, perhaps, that will be used against you in a Democratic primary is that, perhaps, you haven't been a hardcore Democratic activist, as a United States senator. I want to put up a report card from a judicial -- a liberal judicial group called Demand Justice. And it's the seven U.S. senators running for president up here. I know you can't see this screen. They give letter grades, A through F. You and Senator Klobuchar got Fs. And you got Fs --
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
Yeah.
CHUCK TODD:
-- because you didn't vote, essentially, you didn't vote to filibuster Neil Gorsuch, that you went ahead, you voted against Gorsuch in confirmation, but you didn't vote to filibuster him. Is that, that'll be used as saying you're not fighting the system enough. What do you say?
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's what I would say. I have clearly said, and it doesn't fill me with any pleasure to say this, I have clearly said that I have not agreed with the Democratic strategy, when it comes to judges. And I think the proof is in the pudding. Donald Trump, as a result of what we have done and as a result of what Mitch McConnell has done, has been able to appoint more circuit court judges than any -- and he's got two Supreme Court justices, than any president in the history of our country, because he's working with a 51-vote threshold and the destruction of the Senate's responsibility to advise and consent. The people behind that Super PAC that are attacking me for an F, they deserve an F, because they helped conceive that strategy. And they continue to conceive it. The reason I said we shouldn't filibuster Gorsuch was very simple. Gorsuch was a trade of Scalia for Gorsuch. And we allowed Mitch McConnell to invoke -- not only allowed him, gave him every opportunity to use the nuclear option on Gorsuch, instead of waiting for it -- forcing him to wait, for Kavanaugh. And my argument was, it's going -- that's going to be when Roe versus Wade is at stake. That's going to be when the president's going to be even more popular. That's going to be when the Russian investigation's going to have taken up. We didn't have the discipline, unlike Mitch McConnell. We didn't have the discipline to play it strategically. We were non-strategic. And as a result, when Kavanaugh got there, Democrats could do nothing except pretend to our base that we were fighting. I think our base wants -- deserves to have results from us. More important than that, I think that the American people deserve for us -- to have results from us. So you know what? At least I've gone to the floor of the Senate to apologize for my small contribution to those failures. But those who conceived of the strategy, continue to advocate it, and continue to attack other Democrats that disagree with them, I think they deserve an F.
CHUCK TODD:
Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat from Colorado, newest entrant into this field, you are proving that it's going to be a lively debate, as we move forward. Senator, thanks for coming on today.
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
It should be.
CHUCK TODD:
Stay safe on the trail.
SEN. MICHAEL BENNET:
Thanks Chuck. Thanks for having me.
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