Sen. Robert Menendez on Meet The Press

06:32 PM Jul 19, 2010

Senator Robert Menendez, Chairman of the DSCC, appeared on Meet The Press with David Gregory on Sunday.

Highlights from the interview follow, and you can watch the interview here:

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On the current state of the economy:

Well, look, there's a lot of people hurting in this country, and we realize that, and that's why we've been working to try to change the economy that we inherited.  You know, but this will be a choice election because I know my Republican colleagues would like to have everybody forget that their candidates are on the ballot, but their candidates will be on the ballot.  And it's not just talking about President Bush, it's the policies that they espouse that are in essence Bush's policies.  Those led us to a 72 percent increase in the debt from $5.7 trillion to $9.8 trillion when Bush left.  It led us to a massive elimination of the surplus that Bill Clinton gave George Bush, and he had a $1.5 trillion deficit when he left office.  And so our Republican colleagues, who had their hands on the wheel and drove the car off the cliff into the Grand Canyon and the huge crater, don't want to take responsibility.  It's time that they did.

On the Republican aversion to letting the Bush tax cuts expire:

You know, when, when the number two Republican in the Senate, Jon Kyl, says, "We don't have to pay for that. We don't have to pay for it," you know, I am tired of listening to the lectures about spending and debt when they wracked up record debt, when they are willing to put $700 billion of debt on the next generation, and when you don't have to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country, but you can't help working Americans trying to get a job who presently are unemployed.

On the new health care law passed by Congress this year:

Well, I think, actually, when you look at the choice between where the president has taken the country from what he inherited vs. what our colleagues espouse, which is in essence the Bush voodoo economics, the reality is, in that choice, they have a very clear preference for the president's economic policies.  Let me answer the question that my dear friend John wouldn't.  Yes, they want to repeal health care, and they say replace.  Well, you'll have a whole host of issues that you enjoy today that won't be enjoyed anymore.  You won't see seniors closing that prescription drug gap that they have, you won't be able to have pre-existing conditions no longer be a bar to you getting insurance; you won't have a child born at birth who now will be able never--if they have a defect--to no longer be denied insurance.  And yes, we have cost controls in that bill.  On Wall Street reform, look, two weeks before, two weeks before the Wall Street reform bill was passed, you know, a hedge fund manager ultimately raised a million dollars for Republican candidates two weeks before the bill was being voted on, and they tried to stop us four times in the Senate before we got the Wall Street reform.  I think that people in America believe in a free market as we as Democrats do, but there's a difference between a free market and a free fall market.

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