CNN "Anderson Cooper 360" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Steve Cohen

Interview

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COOPER: Ryan Nobles, I appreciate it. I want to get some perspective now from Tennessee Democrat Congressman, Steve Cohen.

Congressman, thanks for joining us. When we spoke about this last month, you said that Marjorie Taylor Greene didn't understand history and has got a, quote, "real problem" with Jewish people. Did anything she said tonight change your opinion?

REP. STEVE COHEN (D-TN): Not really. I mean, I do think it was good that she did apologize and she went to the Holocaust Museum, and she might have learned something. But she didn't learn a lot.

The National Socialist Party is nothing at all like the Democratic Party. The National Socialist Party, the Nazis were about anti- Semitism. They were about killing all the Jewish people. They were about prejudice. And that's not anything the Democratic Party is for.

She didn't learn much about really the experience of the Holocaust. She sounded like she had some phrases that she saw, maybe someone that told her about the worst genocide ever or something that will never happened again, or never forget. But it didn't sound like it came from the heart, and to go on an attack against Ilhan Omar's wrong, too.

There are two extremes -- extremes in each party, the Democrats, the Republicans -- and people grasp on to that and use that to attack either party. That's not what we need now. We need to come together. We need to realize that the enemy is not the Democrats, it is not the Republicans. It's the people who try to bring about an insurrection and turn our government over on January the 6th.

That's something that Miss Green and most of the Republicans, not all, can't get their arms around and their heads around that this was a revolution. This was an insurrection that cut out proper processing, a rule in processing of the transfer power and Joe Biden's election.

And that's what Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republicans need to tell their people is that Joe Biden won the election. It was honest, it was clean, one of the most honest and clean, if not the most ever. And that Joe Biden is the President and he won in a landslide, and to get over this stuff and the fact and the idea that Donald Trump is the President. Donald Trump is not the President. He is a golfer.

COOPER: You know, the -- I don't know how we step back. I mean, I'm talking about all of us, step back from this brink, where people who have a different point of view and you know, serving in Congress now seem emboldened to view somebody with a different point of view as not just somebody with a different way of looking at something, but you know, an American patriot, whatever. But they look at it as an enemy.

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COOPER: There are a lot of people in this country now who view somebody on the other side of the political aisle as an enemy, as un- American, as unpatriotic, and I don't know how we move forward as a country when that is the go-to position for so many people now.

COHEN: It's very difficult because that is what's going on, Anderson. It makes it difficult to serve in Congress to see people -- mostly the extreme. Most of the Republican members are good men and women and they're friends of mine, and we get along great.

But there's a handful that find every opportunity to try to compare Democrats to something that's just off the wall. The claim that Democrats as a party are for defunding the police, which is not true; which has called the Democrats the Socialist Party of America, which is not true.

I saw one of my friends, Dana Rohrabacher who is a friend of mine, still is, I consider him a friend. I saw him on TV in December speaking at Huntington Beach saying that the Nazis and the communists were taking the vote and taking it away, and it was a steal the vote situation. NAZIS and communists, they were doing it and implying that there were Nazis and communists in Congress that were doing it.

That does not help. People listen to that. They hear it from a Congress person, they tend to believe it. It makes things worse.

COOPER: Yes.

COHEN: I have had some people telling me, it was Antifa that did the January 6th insurrection. They were dressed as Trump people and it was all a scam. These people believe it.

We need -- the Republicans need to come straight and let their people know that Joe Biden is president and the election was clean and get over it and we need a commission to study what happened on January 6th and how the police were attacked, and called all kinds of names, and over a hundred of them were injured and several died and we need to come to grips with that. That's the most important thing we've got right now.

And all this stuff about the Holocaust is just, I think, it is ignorance on the part of some people who don't understand what happened. The Holocaust was horrific. Being Jewish, of course, I think about it.

My ancestors came from an area that is now Poland and had been Poland that had been Austrian and Hungarian Empire. I think that many might have died in Auschwitz and it is just is horrifying to me to think that somebody would minimize the Holocaust and I understand she said the Christians died in the Holocaust. But the Christians weren't part of a Holocaust that killed all Christians. The Nazis were Christians.

COOPER: Now, Congressman Cohen, I appreciate your time tonight. Thank you.

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