Congressman Pat Harrigan Backs OWTA

TMZ

Congressman Pat Harrigan has been keeping up with Harvey Levin's OWTA -- which stands for "Out With Their Asses" -- and he told us on TMZ Live he's on board.

Transcript

00:00I'm sick of hearing Democrats blaming this on the Republicans, and I'm sick of hearing the

00:08Republicans blaming it on the Democrats. For more than 200 years, this country has been able to

00:13operate because Congress has been able to compromise and negotiate. They can't do it now.

00:18My feeling now is we're calling it OWTA, out with their asses. Vote against every member of Congress

00:28in the primary coming up next year and tell the nation we're sick of representatives who cannot

00:38come together. I'm sick of hearing the blame game because it's both your faults. And I think we need

00:44a clean sweep, and I think we need new people, and we need to tell them, if you do this like they did

00:50that, you're out next time too. What do you think of that? Harvey, I've been tracking your OWTA

00:57initiative. And look, I think you're gaining some steam the longer this thing goes, right? Because

01:03the longer the shutdown goes, the more dominoes that end up falling, and the more consequential

01:08this is for the American people. I mean, look, I'm tired of saying the same things after 37 days too,

01:14just like everybody's tired of hearing it. The reality is, is nobody wins in a shutdown. It's not

01:20about, you know, is it the Democrats' fault? Is it the Republicans' fault? The only thing that's

01:24assured during a government shutdown is that the American people lose, and we're watching the

01:28American people lose in real time. So we're all incredibly frustrated. I share your exact same

01:33sentiments with respect to some of this is dangerous, right? The longer this goes on,

01:39the more that you've got that kind of little thought in the back of every air traffic controller's

01:44head while they're trying to handle a bunch of different things simultaneously and keep people

01:50safe in the air that I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills next week. That's not good for

01:55America. I think we can all have humanity and understand that that's the situation that we're

02:00in. And so I'm 100% on board with you. You all have to realize that the American people are at some

02:07point just going to say, it's all of your fault. And you're all going to get voted out. I mean,

02:14even if we didn't talk about this and start this OWTA, that's where it was going to go because

02:20eventually America's fed up. Yeah, no, I think you're right about that, Charles, right? You're

02:27holding everybody accountable and everybody is accountable for it at the end of the day.

02:30I think one of the biggest problems that we have in Congress is that we have almost a historically low

02:35percentage of men and women in Congress who are veterans compared to our history. And if you look

02:40back in the times after World War II, we were hovering 60, 70, even up into the 80 percentile.

02:45And actually just six years ago, we were at 9%. Today we're at 19%. One thing I'll tell you about

02:51veterans in Congress, and you probably didn't think I was going to take it this direction. I didn't

02:55either. But we really don't argue about reality. It doesn't matter whether we're conservative,

03:00whether we're liberal, Republican, Democrat, what have you. We actually understand the problems

03:06that America faces. And we don't argue over the problem statements. I think that's one of the

03:11greatest issues that we actually have in Congress right now is we don't agree on the problems.

03:15We've always had broad disagreement on the solutions to our problems in our country. That goes all the

03:20way back to the revolution. But we have rarely in our nation's history had disagreements on the

03:26problem statement. And that's where we are today. And that's why it's such a logjam.

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