MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

Interview

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Joining us now is Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. He sits on the budget committee. He is one of the 11 senators who had signed on to that letter, calling for the return of the public option through the magic of reconciliation.

Senator Sanders, it"s nice to have you back on the program. Thank you for your time.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: Good to be with you, Rachel.

MADDOW: Is the public option really alive again? Or is this premature resurrection here?

SANDERS: Now, we can do it, but you have to understand, it"s not just the public option. Through reconciliation, we now have the power to lower premiums that currently exist in the Senate bill. We can do better. We can fill and do away with the doughnut hole. We can do away with a tax on health care benefits, which I think is a bad policy decision.

So, we can make major improvements over what the Senate has done, get that to the House in reconciliation, and at the end of the day, we will have a reasonably good bill with just 50 votes.

MADDOW: If you were to take up the public option and those other measures that you just described under budget reconciliation, how long would it take before there could be a vote? How complicated is that process that you just described?

SANDERS: It"s not--we can move it--we can move that pretty quickly. And let me tell you something else: in addition to that, committees have instructions right now so that we can pass major education reform in the same bill and what we could do is substantially increase Pell grants to make college more affordable, put a hell of a lot of money into child care and school construction. You could do that right now under the instructions that we"re operating under for reconciliation.

MADDOW: So, you"re saying you could add expansion of Pell Grants, extensions--or expansions of child care help and school construction funds to the existing health reform bill? You could pass it all at once?

SANDERS: Yes, we can combine health care and education. That"s what reconciliation would allow us to do now. After we pass that, we can come back for reconciliation and we can deal with infrastructure, we can deal with the transformation of our energy system, away from fossil fuel energy and efficiency and sustainable energy, and we can create, over a period of years, millions of good-paying jobs. We can pay for that by doing away with immediately Bush"s tax breaks for the rich, take a hard look at unnecessary military expenditures, corporate welfare.

The only thing that you"ll have to do under budget reconciliation is at the end of the day, you"ve got to cut the deficit. You have to save taxpayers" money. So, that"s what we can do. That"s what we should do.

I think the American people are sick and tired of the inaction taking place in the Senate and Republican obstructionism.

MADDOW: I think that there is--there"s one obvious great risk to pursuing all of those things in the type of urgent time line that you"ve described, pursuing them off of reconciliation. And that risk is, of course, that Democrats would win a lot of elections in November and would energize their base. That, obviously, terrifying, of course, to these powers that be.

In terms of what you"re describing here, are you hearing mainstream support within your caucus in the Senate for moving forward that way?

SANDERS: Rachel, I think there is a growing understanding that the current strategy of keeping--reaching out to Republicans who really do not want to participate in a serious way in the process, continuing to appeal to the most conservative of the members of the Republican--of the Democratic Caucus just is not working. And I think people are understanding we have 50 votes to do something significant in health care, in education, in infrastructure, in energy--and in the process we can create, over a period of time, millions of good-paying jobs. I think people are catching on that that is what we have got to do.

MADDOW: Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont--thank you so much for joining us tonight, sir. It"s always a pleasure.

SANDERS: Good to be with you.

MADDOW: Thank you.

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