CNN "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees" - Transcript: Interview with Maine Independent Senator Angus King
Interview
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COOPER: Jim Acosta at the White House, thanks, Jim.
Joining us now, a senator whose state as a border and all that goes with it, Maine, independent Senator Angus King joins us now.
Thanks for being with us.
Is there -- do you believe there's a national security crisis on the border?
SEN. ANGUS KING (I), MAINE: No, I think there's a problem, not a crisis. Really interesting report. September of 2017 by DHS, President Trump, analyzing exactly what the situation is on the border. All the indexes are down.
COOPER: Right.
KING: Recidivisms, arrests, people coming across, all of those -- the graphs just go like this, and to say that it's a crisis would imply that something special is happening that hadn't happened before. In reality, it's a lot better than it was.
COOPER: All the trending is in the right direction.
KING: Yes. But I started by saying there is a problem.
And by the way, I've got to say at the outset, nobody in Congress is for open borders. I've never heard anybody say that. I've never heard anybody advocate it. Everybody on both sides of the aisle is for border security.
This question is really all about is the wall, a wall, which we don't even know what it is, we'll talk about that, is that the right answer in all cases? Along a 2,000-mile border? Of course, it isn't.
[20:10:01] And so, I think it's really important to frame the discussion. We don't even know what the president is proposing.
COOPER: Some of what the, you know, supporters of the president, folks in the White House have been saying, they've been pointing to the opioid epidemic, to the horrific death toll that's taken place over the last couple years and say the wall will stop heroin, fentanyl, from coming in. Truth is, most of that, heroin, fentanyl, comes in through legal points of entry.
KING: Fentanyl comes in through the mail.
COOPER: Through China.
KING: Through the mail. And the problem is, they come headlong into the facts that have been
established by their own administration. The DEA says most drugs come a across at points of entry hidden in trucks, hidden in cars, hidden in people.
COOPER: I think that's most -- I think marijuana still comes often carried over in bales, but, yes, but hard drugs, heroin.
KING: And here's an example of why this is a misplaced priority. We can only interdict one-fourth, 25 percent, of the boatloads of drugs that we know are coming by water from Latin America because of lack of resources. Only one in four of the boatloads we know about. That's what's so inexcusable about this.
We have the intelligence. Four boats leave, we can stop one of them. That's where we ought to be spending the money in terms of return on investment, as opposed to building a wall which may or may not be useful.
COOPER: In terms of just even getting more border agents, that takes a lot of time, and they are in general -- I mean, the numbers have been rising, but there's still a lot of border agents to hire.
KING: Sure.
COOPER: They have spots for.
KING: And, again, as I said at the beginning, one of the real problems here is as far as I know, we've never been presented with a plan of what the wall means. He wants a $5.5 billion -- by the way, that's a down payment. The real price is in the $20 billion or so. We don't know what that's for. It's a blank check.
And if -- if the mayor of Bangor came to the city council, said I want to build a new school but I'm not going to tell you how big it is, not going to tell you where it's going to be or what it's going to cost, the city council would laugh him out of the park. They ought to come in and say, OK, here's where we need wall, here's where we need fence, here's where we need technology, here's a plan for allocating these funds. Right now, it just -- it's not there.
COOPER: I want to bring in the rest of our folks. I know they have some questions for you as well.
GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Senator, is there anything the president can say tonight that you think would convince the country, which Anderson said, a majority is opposed to the wall? That could convince the country that, in fact, some kind of wall is need, particularly independent voters, you're an indent.
KING: Sure.
BORGER: Is there anything he can say, you think?
KING: Well, the problem is they've been saying it for months and it hasn't worked and as you pointed out, as Anderson pointed it out, a lot of it is misleading or flatly untrue. So what he will say to create a sense of urgency, I don't know. I think, and everybody's speculating now, one way out of this would be for him to declare a national emergency and say, I can do this without that pesky Congress, and we'll go ahead and so we can refund the government, we can start the government back up, and I'm going to do it through this national emergency --
BORGER: Wind up in court.
KING: Ten USC 2808 and wind up in court. At least then he can say, I'm continuing the fight, we're going to do this, but we're not going to deal with Congress on this.
The problem is this is a guy who's never had to answer to anybody. His corporation didn't have a board of directors, I don't think. It was a family-owned corporation. And I don't think he understands the way the government works, and that if you want to do something like this and spend $20 billion, according to the Constitution, it's got to come from the Congress. And you've got to persuade them or you have to cajole them or have to whatever.
But holding the government hostage --
COOPER: So is --
KING: -- is exactly what this is, is not, shouldn't be in the toolkit.
COOPER: Is that the only way you see out of this shutdown, him declaring an emergency in order to get cover to then let the government get back to work?
KING: The original bill that was in the Senate that came out of the appropriations committee unanimously had $1.6 billion in it. It had limitations. He could take that money and say we're going to use that to do border security improvements, and we're going to analyze where the wall would be and then we're going to come back and he could say we've got over a billion dollars, and we're embarked upon the process that may lead to a wall. I'm trying to give him --
COOPER: Cover.
DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right, but he had that opportunity 17 days ago.
KING: Yes.
BASH: And very overtly and in a very big way said he didn't want to take that.
So, you're a senator now, you were a governor. You're one of the grown-ups in the Senate right now. Putting that --
KING: You just got me in trouble with my colleagues.
[20:15:01] BASH: Sorry. Sorry about that. Putting that, you know, idea that didn't work aside, if you were to go
to the president and say, OK, let's make a deal, where do you think there is a deal to be made? Or is there one at all? Is there any give on border wall funding?
KING: Well, I think the president's so deeply dug in on the issue, and it's really --
BASH: Aren't Democrats dug in also?
KING: They are, but there's deeper issues here than the wall. This is about are we going to have to do this over and over? If he gets what he wants by holding the government hostage because he's got to sign all appropriations bills and budgets for at least the next two years, this is going to become a tactic.
BASH: So don't give an inch?
KING: I think that's -- I think that's part of the reason, and I can't speak for the Democrats, there has not been a caucus meeting on this. But for me, one of the problems is if the precedent is established that the president can hold the Congress and the government hostage to get some policy that he wants, then I don't know where it stops, and it will continue, and this is not what the framers intended. They intended there be checks and balances.
JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Who blinks? Who blinks? Will the president speak tonight? Will that fortify Republicans or will more Republicans say, you know what, Mr. President, we can't sell this back home? We have people who work for the federal government who are furloughed, who say they can't pay their mortgage, can't pay their tuition. Stop.
Or will the president just polarize people, bring the Republicans back over, leave this in this polarized environment, where Nancy Pelosi says, no, I'm the new Democratic speaker, you get nothing for the wall, and the president says I want $5.7 billion, and here we go. Eighteen days turns into a month or more.
KING: Well, he's demonstrated just in the last couple of days that he can turn on a dime. Syria is an example.
I think he can say, we're going to keep fighting for the wall and in the meantime, one out would be to allow the six bills that have been passed by Republicans and Democrats that fund most of the government, agriculture, treasury, the FBI, allow them to go through, sign them, hold out DHS which includes the wall, gives you another 30 days or whatever number to fight about this. But it gets us out of the majority of this -- of this shutdown scenario which is now, you know, injuring a lot of people across the country.
And we always talk about the 800,000 federal workers. There are tens, probably hundreds of thousands of contractors who service those workers, who serve those agencies who probably will never recover from this. Will never get their money back. So I think there is a way out by saying, OK, park rangers have nothing
to do with the wall. Food stamps have nothing to do with the wall. Let's fund those. We'll fight about it in the context of the DHS budget and, you know, we'll live to fight another day.
COOPER: Let's get one more --
KING: That would be one way to actually --
NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: Senator, you say that people feel like the president doesn't know what he's proposing. You don't know what the president is proposing but some people say they don't really know what Democrats are proposing, either. You talk about border security, it's sort of a vague term.
What are Democrats, and you obviously caucus with the Democrats, what are they proposing?
KING: In the appropriations bill that passed was $1.6 billion for border security and there were a lots of pieces of it. Anderson mentioned more border patrol people, technology, fencing. There may be, in fact, a wall could be part of it, a portion of it.
There's wall down there now. I've seen it. I've been to the border in Texas.
But to -- that's why I say I keep getting back to we don't really know what's proposing. The bill that passed has $1.6 b billion. The one that passed last year had $1.3 billion. You know, that's a lot of money and does specify a whole series of things but, again, part of the burden on the administration is to come forward and say these are where we think the money -- this is where we think the money could be most effectively spent to give the maximum protection to the American people including the American taxpayers.
COOPER: Senator King, always good to have you on. Thank you very much.
KING: Thanks, Anderson.
COOPER: Appreciate it.
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