Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees: Interview with Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC)
Interview
Yes, I am. I am just an optimist, I guess. I think that cooler heads will prevail in the final analysis.
If we have a shutdown. I don't think we will recover from it anytime soon.
We are talking about shutting down the government on the heels of a comeback from the worst health care crisis we've had in this country in over a hundred years.
And we know what that did to the economy. Kids are getting back in school. Now, settling back into normal routine. Businesses are back up and running again. We now have a lot of unhappy workers and we see strikes taking place because everybody is trying to get back on even keel, back to where we were before the pandemic.
And for us to shut the government down now, that will destroy everything that needs to be done in order to get our country back not just functioning, but flourishing again.
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Yes, it may indenture his speakership, but I'll tell you this, I do believe he has 150 to 160 solid Republicans in his conference, who will stay with him no matter what.
I do believe that he can find the other votes beyond the 150-160 he needs on the Democratic side. If he were to settle down and sit down with Hakeem Jeffries, and negotiate a way forward, I do believe that's possible.
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Well, I said, if you've got a hundred, the solid 160 or so people, why would you lose the speakership? You come out of your conference with the majority of the conference, and so he has around 221 to 222 people, 156 is certainly would be voting him out of the conference.
And then he gets to the floor, and that's when he sits down with Hakeem Jeffries, and see what he needs to do to get the other votes he needs on the Democratic side.
If they're going to put people above politics, then it is something like this would be the way to go.
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Unfortunately, he seems to have quite a bit of influence. And I don't understand, for the life of me. I've been around this earth for a long, long time. I've been in politics, all but 12 or 15 of those years and I've just never seen anything like this.
I don't know anybody who would want this man who seems to be controlling the Republican Party. They want their children to pattern their lives after this. It seems to me that we ought to be looking at the leader of this country in such a way that we can say to our children, that is somebody you can look up to.
With the record that he has, four indictments floating around; the kind of language that he uses, threatening people. This kind of bullying that we all teach our children not to do, he does it all, and they seem to be listening to him. I don't understand that.
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Yes, he was in Summerville, South Carolina today. my dad pastored in Summerville when I was growing up, and I'm very familiar with that community, and they are God-fearing people. They're good. People who live by the Judeo-Christian principles that we all were raised by.
I don't quite understand why they feel it is necessary for them to kowtow to a guy like this. He is not going to get elected president of the United States, even if he were to get their nomination and I don't think getting the nomination for him is a foregone conclusion.
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Thank you very much for having me.
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