00:00Do you agree with President Trump that now is the time to get rid of the Senate filibuster?
00:03He's saying this has gone on too long. What is the nuclear option?
00:06So I talked to the President multiple times over the weekend, I mentioned, and of course the filibuster came up.
00:12This is a Senate matter. It has nothing to do with the House.
00:14Everybody wants to know what my opinion is. I mean, my opinion is irrelevant.
00:18I understand desperate times call for desperate measures.
00:21I also understand that traditionally we've seen that as an important safeguard.
00:25I mean, I've obviously shared my thoughts with the President on that.
00:29As much as I have wanted to blow up the filibuster sometime as a House member when we were not getting what we wanted done in our agenda,
00:36I hear my Senate Republican colleagues, some of the most conservative people in Congress, who say it's an important safeguard.
00:47It prevents us. It holds us back from the Democrats' worst impulses.
00:51What would the Democrats do if they had no filibuster impediment, no speed bump at all?
00:56Well, they've already told us. They would pack the Supreme Court.
00:59You'd go from 9 to 13 or 15 or 17 or however many liberals they could pack on the court.
01:03You would have D.C. and Puerto Rico be made into states, which would give four additional Democrat senators there in the count and make us a permanent minority.
01:12I guess that would be their calculation.
01:14You would see massive restriction of the Second Amendment rights.
01:18You'd see them federalize elections so they could take over and manipulate things in the red states.
01:23I mean, there's a lot of abuses that could come.
01:26And so that's the caveat. That's what they're working through.
01:28And I speak frankly and honestly with the President, and he's very passionate about this.
01:33We're all very passionate.
01:34And I think what you see in this debate we're having on our own side is a reflection of the anger that we feel, the real desperation that we feel.
01:42Because we want the government to be reopened.
01:44We want to serve the American people as best we can.
01:46And any hindrance to that is something that everybody's looking at very carefully.
01:50Again, not a House issue.
01:52It's a Senate issue, and we'll see how that's resolved.
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