"The Ed Schultz Show" Transcript: Van Hollen: Government Shutdown "A Real Danger Right Now"
Interview
"This is a real danger right now. I remember two years ago, when Speaker Boehner -- at just this time of year -- said that he was going to stop the Tea Party Republicans from shutting down the government. He wasn't able to do it. Ted Cruz and the Tea Party crew said that they wanted to shut down the government in order to shut down the Affordable Care Act -- and they did it for 16 days, at great cost to the country. Now these same people, Ted Cruz and the Tea Party, are saying they're going to shut down the government in order to defund Planned Parenthood, in order to hurt women's health programs. And once again, you hear people like Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell say we're not going to let this happen. But we heard that before, and, at the end of the day, the Tea Party folks have an awful lot of power in both the House and the Senate. So we've got a fight on our hands."
"Two years ago, we had the spectacle of Senator Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham on the floor of the Senate. Now, you've got a whole host of Republican Senators who are running for president who want to use the Senate as their personal stage in their presidential ambitions. So it looks like they may well be putting their own campaigns, their own politics, ahead of the country. So we need to be ready. We need to let the public know what's going on so that this tactic will backfire."
"We're not going to let the Republicans use the threat of a government shutdown to defund women's health, just like we prevented them from using this tactic to shut down the Affordable Care Act."
"I will help lead the fight against this government shutdown effort. I remember two years ago, we had to use a lot of parliamentary procedures to expose the folly of what the Republicans were doing. We put an end to it after 16 days, but we don't even want to get it started this time."
In 2013, a video of Congressman Van Hollen exposing the parliamentarian tricks Republicans used to suspend democracy and shut down the government went viral, garnering over 3.6 million views on YouTube.
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