Van Hollen on MSNBC: Sequester Will Cost 750,000 American Jobs This Year

“We have now been denied – four times in a row – the opportunity in the House of Representatives to present our plan to replace the sequester”

Washington, DC – Today Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee,  appeared on MSNBC to discuss the sequester and the House Democrats’ continued efforts to replace the meat-ax cuts with a sensible approach that won’t harm the economy. Video of the interview is available here and the transcript is below:

THOMAS ROBERTS, MSNBC: Joining me now is Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. He is the Ranking Member of the Budget Committee.

Sir, it’s good to have you here. And as you could hear Mitch McConnell right there, I want to get your reaction to that. And is it either this should be it is or the sentence should end with a question mark] basically because as I was pointing out earlier, Republican DNA is all over the sequester because the majority voted for it. Were they thinking it would be a President Romney and not a President Obama at this point?

REP. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: I think so, Thomas, because in addition to voting for it, Speaker Boehner, the leader of the House, said at the time that he got 98 percent of what he wanted, number one.

Number two, we have now been denied – four times in a row – the opportunity in the House of Representatives to present our plan to replace the sequester in a way that would not have the devastating economic impact that it will have. In fact, today, I’m going to go to the floor of the House to ask why we haven’t been able to have a vote on that plan. It would make sure the sequester does not take effect this year, but we would still get the same deficit reduction impact, Thomas, by eliminating excessive agriculture subsidies, applying the Buffett rule, getting rid of tax breaks for big oil companies.

That would mean that we would not see the loss of 750,000 jobs between March 1st and the end of this year. That’s not my number, that’s the head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 750,000 American jobs lost this year if we don’t find a way to replace the sequester.

ROBERTS: So the AP, though, is saying, sir, that the Senate Dems have come up with this plan: $3 billion to cut that as a year from the Pentagon; enact, as you brought up, the so-called Buffett rule that would require high-income earners to pay a minimum of 30 percent tax rates and it would save $120 billion over 10 years. So this is along those same lines, correct?

REP. VAN HOLLEN: That’s right. In fact, the Senate Democrats took some of the major provisions that we’d had in the House Democratic proposal. Both of our proposals would essentially replace the across the board cuts with an alternative and much smarter way to achieve the same amount of deficit reduction both are $120 billion over 10 years and both of them would ensure that we don’t see the loss of 750,000 jobs, plus all the disruptions to air traffic controllers, food and safety inspectors, medical researchers, folks who work in our veterans hospitals, all those disruptions and 750,000 jobs lost. We would avoid that if we would adopt either the plan we’re proposing in the House or the Senate Democrats are proposing.

ROBERTS: So the sequester we know is something has been coming. The gun violence debate is something that was not in the campaigns of either Mitt Romney or the president. This is new. There is a big debate going on, on the Hill. And I want to talk to you about the op-ed that Wayne LaPierre has put in The Daily Caller. And our Joe Scarborough went off this morning on that op-ed. Where LaPierre lays out his case for owning a gun, his reasons why. I want you to take a listen to Joe read that piece.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE SCARBOROUGH, MSNBC (quoting The Daily Caller): “If the country is broke, there likely won’t be enough money to pay for police protection. And the American people know it. Hurricanes, tornadoes, riots, terrorists, gangs, lone criminals - these are the perils we are sure to face. Not just maybe.”

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERTS: So Joe went on to say that this op-ed was laced with racist undertones and we all know that you had taken a mom who lost her son to gun violence to the State of the Union address as your plus one. So, how do you think Republican colleagues can stand behind the voice of the NRA continually when they seem to be on the fringe of the argument and the debate itself?

VAN HOLLEN: Well, Joe Scarborough had it exactly right this morning. What the NRA is doing is once again engaging in these scare tactics and trying to avoid focusing on the actual proposals that we’ve put before the Congress. You’re right, I took Carole Price to the State of the Union. She lost her son in a tragic accidental gun shooting a few years ago. And she and all the other moms and dads and brothers and sisters are simply asking Congress to vote on this proposal: Universal background checks so that criminals and folks who have been found mentally unstable cannot get a gun. Two, limit the size of these magazines so you can only have 10 rounds, and three, deal with the military-style assault weapons. And the NRA doesn’t want to talk about the specifics of most of those issues. Rather, they want to engage in these outrageous scare tactics, pretend that people are coming after them to take away all their guns, which is just not true. And hopefully, given the amount of public attention this issue’s getting now, those scare tactics and those total distortions and lies will no longer work.

ROBERTS: Congressman Chris Van Hollen, sir, thanks for making time for me today. I appreciate it.

VAN HOLLEN: It’s great to be with you. Thanks.