Van Hollen on MSNBC: Must Address Sequester and Move Forward on Budget Conference Now

Washington, DC – Today Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen was interviewed on MSNBC’s Jansing & Co. about the sequester and the need to go to conference to move the budget process forward.  Highlights from and video of the interview are below:

On Sequester –

“Well look, there’s a lot of frustration about flight delays – there’s lots of frustration in other areas as sequester begins to impact other places, like the Food and Drug Administration.

“Look, the solution here is to replace the sequester – to have a piece of legislation that achieves the same amount of deficit reduction over a period of time, but in a targeted way.  And I’ve actually tried four times just this year to get a vote on a proposal that would replace the sequester in its entirety so that we’re not going at this in a band-aid fashion.

“If you fix one problem, you're just going to have another one pop up until we deal with the underlying cause, the underlying disease here. Let’s treat the underlying disease, not the symptoms alone as they pop up.”

On Budget Conference Committee –

“Well, I’m glad you asked that, because we now have a House budget – I don't agree with the House budget, but we have a House budget. We have a Senate Democratic budget. The next step in the process, what we call regular order, is to go to conference so we have a conversation about how to iron out the differences – try and have a negotiation.

“But right now the Speaker of the House has refused to send conferees to that conversation. I mean, and you can’t work this out if you don’t have people at the table.

“Which is why yesterday I submitted a bill calling upon the Speaker simply to appoint conferees to get that conversation going. I mean, the American people rightfully expect us to try and work out these differences. But if you’re going to block the next step in the process, in working out the differences, we can’t get there. So let’s go in right now and finalize a budget.”

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