WNYC "The Brian Lehrer Show" - Transcript: Call Your Senator: Sen. Gillibrand on COVID-19 Relief, Immigration Reform

Interview

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. Senator Gillibrand will join us in just a minute. Let me first play just a few soundbites from the last 24 hours that are stunning for their emotion and how they represent the change of government that we're still transitioning to here on day 35 of the Biden Presidency. This is Biden's attorney general nominee, Merrick Garland at his confirmation hearing yesterday. You can keep in mind as a point of reference the way William Barr attended to talk his content and his tone. Here's Judge Garland asked by Senator Cory Booker, why he wants to be Attorney General of the United States.

Merrick Garland: I come from a family where my grandparents fled antisemitism and persecution. The country took us in and protected us. I feel an obligation to the country to pay back and since the highest best use of my own set of skill is to pay back.

Brian: Merrick Garland, that's one contrast. As you all probably know, yesterday was the day the US officially hit 500,000 COVID deaths. A year ago today, there hadn't been even one yet, and now half a million lives have been lost to this disease. Former President Trump did not mention it in his public statements yesterday, focusing instead on what he called a witch hunt after the Supreme Court refused to shield his tax returns from the New York grand jury's tax fraud investigation. I guess Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are part of the witch hunt now, and he's allowed to defend himself, but not even a mention of the COVID milestone, but here was President Biden.

President Joe Biden: Today we mark a truly grim heartbreaking milestone, 500,071 dead. That's more Americans who've died in one year in this pandemic than in World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.

Brian: President Biden yesterday. One more, there will be a bi-partisan Senate hearing today on the security failures at the Capitol on January 6th. In advance of that, here is one Capitol police officer Harry Dunn on ABC yesterday stating a tragic and ultimate irony of what he experienced that day.

Harry Dunn: Is this America? They beat police officers with Blue Lives Matter flags.

Brian: "They beat police officers with Blue Lives Matter flags." That's how twisted that ideology is. With me now, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for her monthly Call Your Senator segment. New York listeners, you're invited to call your Senator with any questions. Others may call as well 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet a question @BrianLehrer. We'll watch our Twitter feed go by and hi Senator, welcome back to WNYC.

Senator Gillibrand: Thanks, Brian. It's a pleasure to be on.

Brian: Any thought about any of those clips?

Senator Gillibrand: Oh, my goodness. Where to start? I think the biggest issue for most Americans is the 500,000 COVID deaths. That number really shows the amount of pain and suffering that our country has faced and is still trying to overcome and still trying to prevent. It's something that consumes certainly everyone I know. It's something that really shows how important our families and our communities are and that the federal government truly does have a role to play in preventing these kinds of pandemics and this huge amount of deaths.

One that, unfortunately, President Trump did not take seriously. We now have to work very hard with the Biden administration to put in protections and get vaccines distributed more effectively, more efficiently than before.

Brian: Of course, it's not just the sheer numbers. It's when you look at our place in the world that we have 4% of the world's population and something like 20% of the deaths. That represents the extent of the failure. I don't think you're on these committees holding this hearing today about January 6th, but is there anything specific you're still hoping to learn about security failures that day?

Senator Gillibrand: Oh, absolutely. I think this investigation and hearing is extremely important and we are hoping to have a 9/11 style investigative body to also do a deep dive. One of the many challenges that I learned through the impeachment proceedings is that we did have a great deal of intelligence in advance about the nature of the people who wanted to come and the harm they wanted to do on lawmakers and on the Capitol itself.

We didn't use that information effectively to protect the people who work in the Capitol, to protect the Capitol police and people who are there including the members of Congress. I think it's important to continue to understand what we can do to the escalation of violence, particularly through social media. The fact that right-wing, white supremacist groups were organizing online for months in advance, and certainly the weeks leading up to this that we didn't have an appropriate way to shut that down.

We haven't under the Trump administration designated white supremacists as domestic terrorists, and we'll be so designated under the Biden administration. I think it is really important that we understand this threat is not over. It is still among us. There are groups and individuals who still want to do harm to lawmakers across the country as well as public servants who are committed to doing their jobs every day.

I'm grateful that we're having this hearing, but our work is just beginning. It was something that is plaguing us, not just amongst these particular writers, but as I sit as the chairwoman of the Personnel Subcommittee in the Armed Services, we now have evidence and there's been not only investigations, but there's been data developed that shows about a third of service members of color have experienced some kind of racism or retaliation or white supremacist words or actions against them. It's very important that I do my job there as well. This is something that we see in the military, in some police forces, and in society at large. It's part of our broader obligation to keep America safe.

Brian: The clip of that Capitol police officer referring to attacking police officers with a Blue Lives Matter flag. How do you even hold the two ends of that statement in your mind at the same time?

Senator Gillibrand: It's part of the radicalization of America and what's happening on the dark web. It's what's happening in various chat rooms and various internet groups. It is just pure hatred. Unfortunately, President Trump misled so many Americans to believe that their democracy was in jeopardy, that the election had been stolen and that they had to fight like hell to prevent that horrible thing from happening. President Trump lied to all those people. Those lies were then spurred on by other bad actors intent on whipping up a rebellion and that's how extremism thrives. It's how it can become so destructive.

Those people who participated, they had Trump flags, they had flags of the Confederacy. Now, I didn't know there was a Blue Lives Matter flag there, but again, using all of those objects and views to do harm on people whose duty was to protect our government and protect lawmakers. It's deeply disturbing, but this is a problem that is rotting at the core of this country that we must, must intentionally and quite aggressively confront and try to change.

Brian: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand with us. A first listener comment for you will come via Twitter. Listener writes HR 1 needs to be top priority, if we are to retain majority rule and a true democracy. All over the country, GOP legislatures are issuing bills to make voting harder. What is the plan? If the filibuster needs to go to make that happen, so be it. Can you explain to our listeners HR 1, which I think there's a corollary now in your house, which is Senate one?

Senator Gillibrand: HR 1 was a compilation of probably two dozen legislative ideas to protect voting rights. It included publicly-funded elections. It included protections for voting rights and restoring some of the aspects of the Voting Rights Act that have been undermined by the most recent Supreme Court decision.

It talked about getting money out of politics. It talked about ethics reform and we have the same set of ideals in the Senate that we hope to pass this year, but this is something I've been working on for a long time with former Congressman John Lewis, who obviously was our civil rights icon in the House who has passed, but we worked on the voter empowerment legislation for the last, I'd say five or six years.

We're hoping that each aspect of that legislation is included in the Senate bill and I'm going to work very hard to make sure we get a vote on it. I do support reforming the filibuster and I do believe that 51 votes threshold may well be necessary to even govern. We'll see how far we can go without it but if things like a COVID relief package can't be passed because of Republican obstructionism, then I would be open to that reform.

Brian: Is reforming the filibuster necessarily the same as abolishing the filibuster? You use the word reforming.

Senator Gillibrand: It's probably the same in meaning because what you're doing in the reform is changing the vote special from 60 to 51. Frankly, I thought that the change that Mitch McConnell made changing the threshold for Supreme Court justice from 60, 51 was very ill-advised. I thought that was such a shame because if you're going to give someone a lifetime appointment, you should be able to get 60 votes for it. That being said, that horse has left the barn long ago and so we are now going to be trying to restore the courts to make sure they are not as partisan as President Trump left them.

Brian: Another question via Twitter listener asks, "In your day-to-day interactions with GOP senators without naming names, are you seeing movement away from the extremes or is the 'Party of Trump' a real thing? Asking with hope for America.'" Writes that listener?

Senator Gillibrand: I think it's less of a real thing in the US Senate there's only a handful of diehard Trump supporters who believe he should continue to lead the party, but I think after January 6th, even some of those die-hards recognized that President Trump's leadership was exceedingly dangerous and I think they have stepped away from him in that regard.

I do believe that the Senate has a great deal of bipartisanship. I've always worked on a bipartisan basis and always been able to find common ground, which is why I've been able to pass big bills like the 9/11 health bill and Don't Ask Don't Tell Repeal, and the SOC Act, but those all started as bipartisan ideals. I think in this era we need to continue that effort.

I think it's really important to do our job of bringing the country back together again and trying to heal this divide that has grown so significantly under President Trump. People voted in the last election for change and we are going to deliver, we are going to pass good, common-sense legislation to help people from COVID and the crash of the economy, as well as beginning to rebuild the economy.

Brian: Another question from Twitter. Listener says, "Please thank Senator Gillibrand for her tireless efforts on behalf of exposing racism and sexism in the military. What else is she going to do because they really are stonewalling any changes?" Let me frame that listener's question with congratulations Senator on becoming chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, you're on the Armed Services Committee. Now you're chair of the Subcommittee on Personnel, I see.

I think anyone thinks that means some human resources bureaucracy. That means policy toward the actual men and women of the armed forces and their actual families. What do you hope to focus on as chair of that subcommittee and how do you answer that listener's question?

Senator Gillibrand: I'm very excited about this opportunity. I've been on the Armed Services Committee for over a decade now, and I have been on this committee for most of it. My opportunity is to begin to make the lives and well-being of those who serve our nation and make so many sacrifices on our behalf better. One of the issues that I have been working on for a long time is this problem of sexual violence in the military. Unfortunately, under Trump, it got even worse than it ever was. We had the highest number of sexual assaults ever reported in the last year.

We had a retaliation rate against those people that reported, left statistically unchanged from the last few years. We had the lowest conviction rate and the lowest prosecution rate since the time I've been working on this. Everything is going in the wrong direction and it is untenable. I'm hopeful that under President Biden, someone who has said he supports our Military Justice Improvement Act, which will take the decision of whether to go to trial out of the hands of a commander who may well be biased and it's almost always untrained out of his hands into the hands of a trained military prosecutor who will know whether there's enough evidence to prosecute.

Who will not have skin in the game and not be worried about losing some member of a unit that, that commander values more than the person who has come forward to report the violence. That is important. Second, racism has continued to grow within the military and so we have created a Title Seven legislation to extend civil rights to military members. Right now, if you are being discriminated against you can't file an EEOC complaint. You can't go through the normal process any other individual would in the civilian world and so we're trying to replicate that process in the military and so I've authored legislation to do that as well.

Then last, as I mentioned earlier, I think it's really important to root out white supremacy within the military because that is what ends up with the amount of racism that service members have to endure. I think that's going to be important, as well as the basic bread and butter stuff, Brian, people in the military have been forced to live in housing that had vermin and mold. Families have been put in substandard housing. Families who have to show up to work at 5:00 AM don't have childcare that's open at 5:00 AM.

I've been working on making sure the childcare centers are more responsive to the actual jobs of the service members. These are the very few challenges that I've wrestled with, but there's a lot. I'm excited to tackle these issues and have a partner in President Biden to actually get them done.

Brian: You can be the Senator who improves military families, living conditions, and the Senator who interrogates their beliefs to root out white supremacy at the same time?

Senator Gillibrand: Yes, what you do to do that is you have hearings. I'm entitled to have a handful of hearings every year. I will probably have a hearing on each one of those issues because we need to know the facts. Then, once we have the facts, we can start writing legislation to improve it, but even just the opportunity to speak out, to have people who have been affected by these challenges to tell their story, can change everything. It's how we repeal Don't ask, Don't tell, or we actually heard from service members who had been discriminated against and all the sacrifices they made.

It made their plight so much more understandable, and it created the willingness to do the reforms that were needed. That's what I'm going to do, start with hearings and then hope to push my colleagues to support the kinds of reform that is necessary to make the lives of these folks better. On all these things, there's a lot of momentum on both sides of the aisle, to the earlier question of bipartisanship.

Every one of the issues I've talked about, I have a huge amount of Republican support to get done. For example, I just created a dear colleague letter with Senator Grassley to talk about getting more people to vote for military justice improvement act this year so we can actually pass it, even if it has a 60-vote threshold

Brian: Sheree in Chelsea, you're on WNYC with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Hi, Sheree.

Sheree: Hi there, Senator, I wrote a couple of weeks ago to both you and Senator Schumer regarding the proposed QAnon influx into DC on March 4th, they are under the misconception that Trump is going to be inaugurated on that day and I am extremely concerned. I have read some reports that there are going to be 5,000 National Guardsmen in DC on the fourth but I want to know that there's going to be adequate security at this time because I'm afraid these people are going to show up at the Capitol building and be disappointed by a failure of the inauguration to take place and then it'd be another destruction of the Capitol building. Are you guys taking this seriously?

Senator Gillibrand: Yes, I think one lesson learned from January 6th, these kinds of threats are real. Right now, the Capitol still has a very significant military presence, we have service members, National Guardsmen specifically, deployed all across the Capitol grounds. We still have barriers set up, which isn't nice for people who work here, but also for the city of DC, because we're used to having open government in every way, but because of these threats, they've maintained the barriers around the Capitol grounds and the Supreme Court so that we can prevent this kind of attack, but I'm sure they will address this threat very differently than they addressed the last threat and I feel confident that they will protect the Capitol.

Brian: Sal in Syracuse. You're on WNYC with Senator Gillibrand. Hi, Sal.

Sal: Brian, I used to live in New York City, a long-time. Speaker and listener both. I appreciate for taking my phone call. I want to thank Senator for doing a good job. I voted for her, but next time I'm not doing it. Senator you're familiar with route 81, that goes between Binghamton all the way up to Burlington. I need you to travel through route 81, right on 30th street, 30th street.

You have a company that does business with the federal government and the state. They have a big sign Blue Lives Matters. You can do a Google on it. They have a Confederate flag. If you want to solve the racism, we need to consent it in your backyard. Where your father leads. They still sign, we see on that area on route 3 and route 81 that says the election was stolen.

These are the people living in New York, why are you not solving those problem? Why don't you do, get on the road, get on the bus and go to your father's neighborhood and other neighborhoods and ask them, "Why you still believe in Confederate flag? They lost the war." Why do we still find the Confederate flag. Racism exist in New York more than the Georgia. I go to [unintelligible 00:22:12]. I don't see these things in the backyard of Georgia.

Brian: Sal, thank you. Senator, are you familiar with displays of Confederate flags on route 81?

Senator Gillibrand: I'm very, very familiar with route 81. I have not seen those displays, but I don't doubt they're there. One of the things that I am working on specific to route 81, is New York, unfortunately, has a legacy of racism infrastructure. What that means is back in the Moses era, it was something where Robert Moses created highways that went straight through low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color and there was no regard to how those highways would affect those communities short-term or long-term. Route 81 is an example of a street that or a highway or a road that goes through and cut in half--

Brian: This is an interstate. We're talking about I-81 so a lot people in downstate who may not immediately hear what route 81? This is I-81, which maybe you've been on folks.

Senator Gillibrand: It's a highway near Syracuse that cuts right through-- And in Syracuse, that cuts right through low-income communities. I've created legislation called the Build Local Hire Local Act, which creates resources for States like New York and communities like Syracuse to rebuild infrastructure in a way that doesn't harm communities of color.

For New Yorkers, for example, let's look at the Bronx, all the highways intertwined and cut through the Bronx and as a result, the Bronx has the highest asthma rate in the entire state. It's because of all where these highways are placed. Places like the Bronx, people are cut off from the river, they're cut off from parks because of how highways were developed and so what this bill will do is give resources to rebuild these places, make them community-friendly.

Sometimes that will mean the highway will go underground. Sometimes it will mean it'll be moved entirely. Sometimes it will become a local route. Those are all ideas and what we've done is asked every local community who has this problem-- New York City has the problem, places like Buffalo has the problem, Rochester has the problem, to ask them to redo their city plans and that we would give the resources to rebuild.

We'd also hire local people to do the work so that if your community is being redeveloped or highways are being changed or moved, that people who live there actually can get the training and the jobs to help more people of color get not only good middle-class jobs, but careers, but to the question of the Confederate flag and a Trump sign. I will look into whether anyone is breaking any laws by having those materials there.

I think something like a Trump flag is absolutely freedom of speech because we put signs on our lawns for every candidate that we like. The Confederate flag, however, is deeply divisive and racist, so there may be a way to get that removed. I will look into this and I'm sorry that you've had to see it and witness it. I know that is traumatizing and infuriating and I will do whatever I can to try to fix it.

Brian: Senator, I know you've got to go in five minutes. I'm going to try to touch three topics briefly with you in that time. One is our next guest after you is state Senator Biaggi from the Bronx and Westchester on the nursing home scandal surrounding Governor Cuomo. My question for you on this is, you're on the aging committee in the us Senate, is there anything structurally that your committee is doing to take care of the underlying issues that helped COVID spread so rapidly in nursing homes, including in New York state where for-profit nursing homes are allowed, anything structural on that that you're working on?

Senator Gillibrand: Yes, we are. During this epidemic, the Aging Committee has been doing a lot of work they did an investigative deep dive in July and August and published a report, the cost of inaction, 11 deaths an hour. What that report found that persistent shortages of personal protective equipment and testing and staffing in nursing homes resulted in more than one resident was infected every minute and 11 residents died every hour. That was a national survey. This is an issue that hit the country extremely hard.

As a result, I'm working on at least three pieces of legislation. One was from before the COVID crisis was to make sure that people who are working in nursing homes can actually-- We can have background checks so we know that everyone that's working in a nursing home is qualified. The second thing that we've been working on is making sure that we have technical assistance strike teams, as it were to be deployed, HHS would train them and they would be deployed to help nursing homes to make sure that they can optimize best practices for PPE and anything else that they didn't do before.

We also want to have obviously more transparency. We want to make sure that we have the number of deaths recorded so there is no question and then last and perhaps most significantly we are working on a major bill that's going to be introduced today called The Continued Service for Seniors Act, that will build on all our previous efforts to get $1.4 billion into this community, including money, about $10 million for long-term ombudsman, which again, we need advocates for our seniors.

I listened to some reporting by the New York Times this morning and one of the worst things that have happened in nursing homes is that the people living there didn't have advocates that family members could not get information. Family members could not get data, they couldn't visit because of the lockdown and so there was no one advocating for these men and women who were being isolated and perhaps not getting the state-of-the-art care because of all the problems that got us to this place.

This bill, The Continued Services for Seniors Act will provide legal assistance. It'll provide language services. Every nursing home resident will be vaccinated, it will create just a way to be able to navigate these crises in the future for individuals living in a nursing home and their families that are trying to protect them.

Brian: Let me just touch the COVID relief bill. It looks like much of it will pass with extended unemployment in $1,400 relief checks and money for state and local governments, for example, but without much or any Republican support, let me play a short clip of house minority leader, Kevin McCarthy on Fox last night, complaining that the bill includes money for safely reopening schools with costly COVID protocols, but then doesn't require them to actually reopen.

Kevin McCarthy: They are putting money in here, but schools are still shut down. Biden has a plan to open the border, but not open our schools.

Brian: He took at immigration reform there, but on that question of allocating money for reopening of in-person schooling, but without a requirement that schools that receive the money actually reopen, is the money really not linked to reopening, and if not, why is that okay?

Gillibrand: Well, I share the frustration of the last speaker. I think schools need to be reopened safely and hopefully governors will use this money to guarantee that every teacher can be vaccinated, that every worker who works in a school environment can be vaccinated. We need to make sure that every school in the country has PPE and testing.

You really can't expect to open schools safely if you don't have every child tested, that should be the baseline norm. There's lots of tests going unused right now. One of the things that I've put forward as a health force, which President Biden supports, which would be hundreds of thousands of new workers trained by the CDC to be deployed to the states, to do the work that our doctors and nurses do not have time to do because they're still overwhelmed with COVID patients.

What that would do is would allow individuals to go to schools to be the tester. It would allow individuals to go to the schools to give the vaccinations, that would allow for schools to reopen safely. If the legislation doesn't require opening schools, which I will check because I'm not sure, the reason would be that education is the purview of states and the purview of governors, who set the regulation for curriculum and other basic parameters for education.

What I would love to really urge our governors to do is vaccinate every teacher. Make sure they're next in line, deploy the staff and the resources that's necessary to do that, so by September, our schools can all reopen safely and that is enough time to do it. We're giving them the resources to do it. There should be no excuses by then because we can do this. You can open a school community safely, but it requires testing, PPE, and vaccination

Brian: Senator Gillibrand, we always appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Gillibrand: God bless you. Take care, Brian.

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