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***WATCH: VIDEO OF MURRAY’S INTERVIEW HERE***
Washington DC – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and senior member of the Senate Budget Committee, joined MSNBC’s Chris Jansing to discuss Speaker McCarthy’s dead-on-arrival MAGA proposal to hold our economy hostage by refusing to pay our nation’s bills unless Democrats agree to massive cuts to vital programs and services that families rely on and that are essential for our government to function and our economy to thrive. McCarthy’s proposal is a disaster for everyone. A nuevo análisis by Moody’s Analytics found that the proposal would cause hundreds of thousands of job losses and push our economy into a recession—in addition to pulling cops off our streets, kicking families out of their homes, laying off air traffic controllers, railroad safety inspectors, and other critical workers; ceding manufacturing ground to China, taking a wrecking ball to our fight against the opioid crisis, and more.
A transcript of the interview is as follows:
JANSING: I want to bring in the Democratic senator from Washington, Patty Murray, Chair of the Appropriations Committee, who was key to ending the critical debt ceiling showdown in 2013. So, it’s good to see you, and I wonder if there are lessons from 2013. Is the Republican side so different that the old rules don’t apply? And I guess a key question is, are there proactive conversations ongoing, Senator?
MURRAY: Well, let me just say, it’s important to understand what is at stake right now. Our country will default on its debt if Republicans don’t work to raise the debt ceiling—which simply means that we’re going to pay our bills. Every family pays their bills. Every business pays their bills. Republicans are saying: We’re not going to pay our bills. We’re going to let our country default and bring chaos to this country if you do not cut dramatically and undermine our ability to make the investments that we need to in our economy, in jobs, in our veterans’ housing, in school lunches for kids—in so many things that our country relies on to keep our economy moving.
That is crazy. This is asking us: do you want chaos, or do you want chaos? And the answer is no. And it doesn’t have to be this way. Simply pay our bills, do not default, and we will do what we do every year here in Congress and work between the Senate and the House to make sure that we decide what we want to invest in this country, and how we do our appropriations bills, and how we move forward. Holding us hostage to this debt ceiling crisis and the ability to make sure our economy doesn’t crash is not how you negotiate. It has never worked. It has not worked in the past. It has created just a disaster for every party who has tried to hold it hostage. And it will not work for the House Republicans now. So: get past this, work with us, pass the bill that we need to pass, and then, let’s of course work on our budget and our appropriations and our ability to make sure that our country moves forward in a positive way.
JANSING: There have been polls that suggest Americans are divided about this. I think it’s a complicated topic, right—having said that, there’s no doubt that Wall Street is nervous about the possibility that we could default… [which] would indeed push us into a recession. And I know you talked about what the implications are and what’s at stake, but is there a way to overstate this or if it is as serious as what you say, what a lot of folks on Wall Street say, how do you avoid it, Senator?
MURRAY: Well, we do not want our country to default. That will hurt everyone—absolutely everyone—in unimaginable ways, and our economy and the full faith and credit of this country for a long time to come. We have to do our job and make sure that doesn’t happen. Let’s get that done, we’ve done it before, we did it three times under Trump in a bipartisan way—no reason that we can’t do that. And of course, then we move to our conversations that we have every year—what are the investments that we agree on that we can make? How do we make sure that we are paying for things that are important to families today?
Look, the House Republican counteroffer right now is basically to cut 800,000 jobs, to stop us from building our manufacturing base, to cut out school lunches, and as I said, veterans’ services and homes. That’s not what our country wants. We’re in the middle of a time where everyone knows we need to deal with the opioid crisis and fentanyl—to stop paying for that, to stop making sure that we’re moving forward on that, is crazy. So, we need to get past this and pay our bills, do not default, and then work within our budget to have a bipartisan compromise—which is what we should be doing.
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