MSNBC "All In With Chris Hayes" - Transcript: Interview with Amy Klobuchar
Interview
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KLOBUCHAR: Pretty good. Do remember, our goal was to at least get that even vote. What does that mean, Chris? We can bring that bill to the floor. Senator Schumer can. If we had lost a Democrat or hadn`t gotten everyone on board and then committee was incredible, including moderates like Angus King and Mark Warner who were on our committee, then we wouldn`t have been able to get it to the floor.
But we all stick together. We had a long, long markup, nearly 40 amendments. Senator Cruz dominated the day. And when you read that quote from Senator McConnell or played it, I did keep thinking the same thing. Yes, there`s a crisis when you have an insurrection. There`s a crisis when you have senators that basically said, oh, forget the electoral vote and believe the big lie. And there`s a crisis when you`ve got voters standing in line in garbage bags and homemade masks like they did in Milwaukee, or people that aren`t even able in Georgia now to get water if they`ve got along line, or when you basically say, we`re only going to have one drop box in a county of five million people, like happened in Texas last time and that`s Harris County. That would be like putting one drop box in the middle of my entire state.
So, that`s why this bill is so important to allow people to take back our democracy. And that means getting rid of the secret money. It means making sure there`s anti-corruption provisions in place. And it, of course, means minimal national standards for voting.
HAYES: Can I ask -- I don`t think you`re going to love this question. I`m going to ask it anyway.
KLOBUCHAR: I can take anything.
HAYES: OK.
KLOBUCHAR: After today with Ted Cruz, come on.
HAYES: It`s true. `
KLOBUCHAR: Go ahead.
HAYES: OK. I`m going to take it as a challenge. I`m going to ask about Ted Cruz in a second. So, I guess maybe it`s just there`s no path to it. But the -- what the Supreme Court technically struck out -- I mean, what I`m -- what I`m struck by in this whole fight is that we are having a fight over a thing, a problem we had solved.
I mean, the Voting Rights Act will literally solve this problem. Like, local administration of elections is important. It`s a principle we generally have. There`s reasons to have that. You need a federal check because it`s been abused in the past. Is there a way of just restoring the preclearance formula in a way that the court will like --
KLOBUCHAR: Yes.
HAYES: Can we just do that? It just seems like we`re trying to reinvent the wheel here a little bit for a thing that we have a solution to.
KLOBUCHAR: OK, let go -- let`s step back. Let`s step back. John Lewis Voting Rights Act, right? That`s a separate bill that`s in judiciary. That would go a long way toward restoring that. So, that is such an important bill. But it still doesn`t solve some of the problems of the dark money, right. That`s why we have the Disclose Act.
It doesn`t solve the problems that we have crazy situations where the Supreme Court of the United States has no ethics rules, even though Darrell Issa, I found out this week, did propose a bill that is similar to our bill to bring those in. And so, the point is that you need both. You need to restore the Voting Rights Act with the John Lewis Bill, and then you need this For the People Act, because it actually set some minimum standards and we`ll just make it a whole lot easier.
Because I think one thing we`ve learned in the last decade, as the Fourth Circuit once said, these guys are discriminating with surgical precision against African Americans, and they will do anything, so new problems keep emerging, like purging voters from the list as -- I think my best quote on that is Stacey Abrams when she said, you know what, when you don`t go to a meeting for a while, you don`t lose your right to assemble. But if you don`t go to church or mosque or synagogue, you don`t lose your right to religious liberty and you shouldn`t lose your right to vote.
HAYES: I want to do -- I do want to play the exchange. I mean, Ted Cruz is one of eight U.S. senators, if I`m recalling the number correctly, who voted to reject the electors, which essentially would have installed the loser Donald Trump over the winner Joe Biden in contravention of both the Electoral College and the national popular vote.
And when you talk about this today, he did his signature go-to move, one that I`ve seen before when boarding a plane on the way to Cancun amidst a weather crisis in Texas which is to look at his phone. Take a look.
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KLOBUCHAR: When in fact, you Senator Cruz, not all of your colleagues here today, you were contesting the Electoral College. You were leading -- one of the leaders on the effort to say that the election results were not correct. And so, you wonder why we want to make sure that people have the right to vote.
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HAYES: What was going on there?
KLOBUCHAR: Well, he made the claim that we didn`t need to put these provisions in place. And he went back of all ironies to 2016 and claimed that somehow Hillary Clinton was contesting the election when it`s you know, she conceded the Electoral College operated properly, and we sure didn`t have an insurrection like we did when he took the reins and claimed that the Electoral College was inaccurate and that we couldn`t count the people`s votes. That`s 2020.
So, I was making the comparison and then making the obvious argument that literally we had a group of white supremacists invade the Capitol, that people died, that we all remember the splintered glass and the spray painting on the walls. And for now, him to come and say, oh, hey, everything`s OK. No, not everything`s OK.
And as I said, on that inaugural stage, it is the moment where democracy picks itself up, brushes itself off, and move forward as we always do, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And how you do that is by making sure that people can retake their democracy and can vote.
And if his party can adjust, as I said today, adjust their views on issues so they bring in more voters, or adjust their messages or candidates, they can`t win by taking away people`s right to vote. That`s what they`re trying to do right now.
HAYES: Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is chair of that Senate Rules Committee, then, have the marked-up today on a Senate bill 1. Thank you very much.
KLOBUCHAR: Thank you, Chris.
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