CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: "Interview with Rep. Don Beyer"

Interview

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BLITZER: Yes, they are. Jim Acosta, thank you for that report.

Let's turn back to shooting massacres in Dayton and El Paso. Joining us now Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia. He joined top House Democrats in speaking out today about the push for gun control.

You've been a leader on these issues, Congressman. Thanks very much for coming in.

REP. DON BEYER (D-VA): Thank you, Wolf, very much.

BLITZER: So you've heard of the aftermath of these two mass shootings. The president says Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and other Republicans want to do background checks. Do you buy that?

BEYER: I'd love to buy that because this is something -- we passed HR-8 in the House, which has universal background checks. Has the support, I read today, of 95 percent of Americans. And I think we have a good chance of passing it in the Senate if Mitch McConnell will allow it to come to the floor.

What we fear is that they will do some watered-down version or something that doesn't make a real difference. But this is something that the American people should embrace. And, you know, I don't agree with President Trump on much but if he's willing to embrace universal background checks we should celebrate that.

BLITZER: Let me show you a clip, a picture of the gun and the clip that killed all these people. There you see it right there, 100 rounds potentially within 32 seconds, kills nine people that quickly. That kind of gun, should it be available legally to be purchased in the United States?

BEYER: Absolutely not. And it was illegal for about 10 years. That law unfortunately had a sunset clause on it but one of the things we'll have to do between now and the end of the year is ban assault weapons. You know, somebody said today well, we give them to young men in the military but they're under very close supervision with lots of training and regulated ammunition. We don't give them to kids in their neighborhoods in the streets.

BLITZER: But you say the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, you need -- probably you're going to need 60 votes in the Senate to get anything through. He's just waiting, you say, for the outrage to die down as it always does after every one of these mass shootings.

BEYER: Well, going all the way back, as far back as I can remember, but at least to the Connecticut shootings, we always thought well, now is the time, the fierce urgency of now, and yet McConnell has been able to postpone, postpone, and then people focus on something else, on Hong Kong, or on immigration, on the Statue of Liberty, you know.

BLITZER: The House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler's committee, they're all coming back to work on gun control. But what's the point if it's not going anywhere in the Senate?

BEYER: You know, we've been in this -- I think we've passed 400 bills in the House this year that are sitting on Mitch McConnell's desk. It's the great frustration for us. One man has basically stopped our democracy from working. And I guess the best thing we can do right now is keep fighting, keep pushing it forward, keep describing to the American public what America could look like if we would get a Republican leader in the Senate that would allow us to have debate and votes on these bills.

BLITZER: Let's go to the protest in Hong Kong. You saw the video. Very dramatic what's going on right. Very significant. You said this, your message to the protesters earlier, "To those standing up for freedom and human rights in Hong Kong we are with you in the fight against oppression."

[18:15:06] Are you satisfied with what you're hearing from President Trump?

BEYER: Not at all. I was very disappointed by Trump's comments. That he said, I hope they can work it out. I hope it's good for China, too. You know, this is a really interesting experiment where we have one country in two different forms of government. People in Hong Kong have been a democracy for a long time. They obviously are very reluctant to give up the extradition rights. People tried back in mainland China. And to give up their democracy. These are not domestic terrorists. These are people fighting for freedom. Now we should be standing with them.

BLITZER: On another sensitive issue, immigration, right now. I want to get your reaction to the comments from Ken Cuccinelli, who's the acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, a man you know. He updated the very famous Emma Lazarus quote on the Statue of Liberty, and he said it should read like this, "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and it will not become a public charge."

What's your reaction to that?

BEYER: I mean, it's just horror struck. There's a reason we didn't elect Ken Cuccinelli governor of Virginia. We went to the same Jesuit high school and I just can't imagine our Christian Jesuit background saying this is what you do to the poor. We're supposed to be lifting people up.

And this notion that if a person is just deemed to be possibly on food stamps or Medicaid they're no longer eligible for a green card or for a visa, you know, you look at so many Americans across, the thing they're going to have a bad spate in their life for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, and here you deny them citizenship. It's the opposite of what -- of the strong country we've become.

BLITZER: Because we're talking about people who are working and living here with their families legally right now.

BEYER: Legally. Exactly.

BLITZER: We're not talking about undocumented immigrants, we're talking about legal immigrants, so what's the potential impact of this new regulation that the Trump administration wants to put forward?

BEYER: You know, Wolf, one of the things we've seen the last couple of years is the people coming to domestic violence shelters and emergency rooms has been way down because they're afraid they're going to get turned in. Those are people without papers.

This just extends it to people that are here legally. They're going to be afraid to access the services of government, including legal services, for fear that they would no longer be able to become a citizen.

BLITZER: I want to get your reaction, your thoughts, yesterday we marked the two-year anniversary of Heather Heyer's death in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her mother is now pushing for legislation that you have introduced to improve federal hate crime statistics. Explain what your No Hate Act would actually do.

BEYER: Well, as Heather Heyer, and then same anniversary, Khalid Jabara, who was shot to death on his doorstep in Oklahoma, both were clearly hate crimes, neither were rated hate crimes by their local police department nor in the FBI records. I believe there's 3300 police departments around the country that don't report any hate crimes at all.

So, I'm a businessman, you can't manage what you don't measure. So the No Hate Crimes bill puts really strong incentives for every police department to keep good records on the hate crimes so that we know the challenge that we have before us.

BLITZER: It's important legislation. Thanks very much, Congressman, for coming in.

BEYER: Thanks, Wolf, very much.

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