Call Your Senator: Sen Gillibrand on 'Abraham Accords' Trip; Military Spending; and More

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now our monthly call your senator segment with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. New Yorkers, call your senator. If you have a question about federal government policy that she's involved with or anything else relevant, 212-433-WNYC. Non-New Yorkers may call too across state lines. 212-433-9692 or tweet a question for Senator Gillibrand @BrianLehrer.

Some topics we may get to touch on include things the Senator is interested in that might still be possible, even with a newly divided Congress this year. Maybe a paid family leave bill. Plus what the Senator calls an aging master plan and a few other things. Also, the debt ceiling battle already underway, including over the defense budget. Senator Gillibrand is on the Armed Services Committee. She was recently on a bipartisan trip to Arab countries and Israel and the Middle East. On the political side, Senator Gillibrand recently announced officially that she is running for reelection next year. Again, our phone number to call your senator, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Senator, always good of you to join us. Welcome back to WNYC for the first time in 2023.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Thank you, Brian.

Brian: If you're running for reelection, does that mean you're ruling out running for president again, even in the unlikely event that President Biden doesn't run for reelection?

Senator Gillibrand: I am definitely running for the Senate. I support President Biden's reelection, so I do not have any presidential run on my mind right now.

Brian: All right. I guess if he decides not to run, then we'll have another conversation. As you know, Democrats just lost several House seats in New York in November, largely over the issue of crime, even though crime is mostly a state and local government issue not federal and that gave Governor Hochul a closer call as well, and even Senator Schumer only won by 14 points against Republican Joe Pinion who nobody ever heard of. Do you have a crime policy that can stand up to Republican attacks?

Senator Gillibrand: I do. I think public safety is vitally important, and I think people from around the state thought that public safety needed to be invested in and needed to be a priority. One of the bills that just passed a few months ago will help to solve some of these stresses and concerns. We passed the first federal anti-gun trafficking bill and the ATF literally just used that legislation to prosecute [inaudible 00:02:44] and took 50 weapons off the streets of Brooklyn, which is going to save lives. The bill actually worked. The bill also had a lot of money in for violence disruptors, for mental health.

I've been talking to [unintelligible 00:02:59] leaders around the state, our not-for-profits around the state to urge them to apply for this money, so that we can stop shooters so that we can prevent kids from joining gangs, and that money is now ready to be applied for. If we can get more money into these communities that we [unintelligible 00:03:16] and created, this is an opportunity to really [unintelligible 00:03:21] safety in its root keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and violent people and keeping violent people and mentally ill people who should not have access to guns, getting them the treatment and the [unintelligible 00:03:31] they need, so they don't become criminals.

Brian: All right. Your phone is breaking up a bit, Senator. Listeners, it's not your radios or other devices. I don't know if you can try to stabilize it where you are, otherwise, we could take a break and try to call you back. Let's try one more question before we do that and see how it goes. As a candidate for reelection, there's so much money in politics these days, are there any industries that you won't take campaign donations from?

Senator Gillibrand: I don't take any corporate PAC money, and I don't take any lobbyists' money. Those are two things that I put in place several years ago to just emphasize that everyday people's voices should not be drowned out by the big dollars of large corporate interests. One of my goals has been to actually get money out of politics, to actually have publicly financed elections, so that people can participate and not be drowned out by the uber-wealthy or the uber-well-connected. That's one of my long-term ambitions, and it was one of the cornerstones of my presidential run, was a pledge and an ambition to get money out of politics.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Mary in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Senator Gillibrand. Hi, Mary.

Mary: Hello, hello. I'm calling today for an issue that's very close to my heart. It's a Tree-SMART Trade. Dr. Gary Lovett from Cary Institute worked very hard on this, putting together these bills. I know Senator Gillibrand is a supporter of this, but I just wanted to encourage her to look at the issues around Tree-SMART Trade. It's preventing invasive species from coming in on pallets. These pests are ruining our forests. This is an ecological issue that I would like brought up.

Brian: Mary, thank you very much. Are you familiar with that, Senator, the Tree-SMART Trade bill?

Senator Gillibrand: I'm not specifically knowledgeable about the bill she's referencing, but I know the issue very well. I am on legislation to prevent invasive species from coming into our country through pallets and also through boats. Sometimes the bilge water that's in a shipping boat, they will release that bilge water when they're in the Great Lakes, and it's often filled with invasive species. We have two real challenges. We have so many invasive species, especially in places like the Adirondacks and in our waterways. We have milfoil in our lakes, we have the ash borer beetle, we have so many very, very destructive species from other countries, often from Asia, and that when they get into the United States, they displace the natural species that would normally live there. They can create massive pollution in our lakes.

When you have milfoil, it clogs and creates algae and other horrible things. It harms the fish and fisheries. When you have these beetles and other types of insects, they destroy crops, they destroy forests, they destroy ecosystems, and so I take these issues very, very seriously. We may have opportunities in the farm bill this year to put in some resources for research, development, and action plans. I'm hopeful that we can attack this head-on.

Brian: All right. Rob in Astoria, you're on WNYC with Senator Gillibrand. Hi, Rob.

Rob: Hi, Brian. Hi, Senator. Brian, thanks for taking my call. I'd like to ask Senator Gillibrand her stance on potentially passing a law that would punish politicians for knowingly misleading or lying to voters. I'm thinking about George Santos's issue and election deniers. We have laws that punish individuals in the private sector that knowingly mislead investors, I'm thinking about Elon Musk, so why can't we have a similar law targeting politicians?

Senator Gillibrand: I share your concern about George Santos and how much he lied to the voters. There are laws that apply to him. There are issues of fraud, there's issues of campaign finance violations, if he lied about where his money came from, and it came from a foreign source, those are all violations of campaign finance laws. There are laws that we can use, in this instance, to give law enforcement the tools they need to actually prosecute a case against him for various lies and various efforts of fraud. If he's convicted, that will affect him deeply. He doesn't have to step down from office unless he's actually convicted, I think. In the interim, the ethics committee could do an investigation, but under this House of Representatives, I don't think they're going to do any investigations.

The real recourse for voters on Long Island is just to vote him out in the next election. It's only a year and a half away. We have a very short time to organize around a candidate who's honest, who represents the values of that district and try to unseat him. The only way that he would be leaving office, I think, is if he is convicted. I don't even know that you have to leave office to be convicted, but I think it becomes such a headwind that members of Congress have resigned in that situation. I think short of a conviction, he's the congressman for now. You're talking specifically about changing laws. I'd really have to look at it to figure out what part of the fraud laws aren't covering his actions, because normally, in a political context, the solution is you vote them out.

Brian: Kind of a follow-up listener, tweets, "Does the Senator support replacing Jay? Jacobs as head of the New York Democratic Party, given the recent disastrous election result?" I guess that could be taken to include the failure to vet George Santos enough to publicize this stuff in advance and defeat them and save that seat.

Senator Gillibrand: I don't know that you can say that the George Santos problem was because of Jay Jacobs. In fact, opposition research should be done by the candidates. It should be done by the DCCC. It should be done by a whole host of political apparatus up and down. So those are mistakes, I think that were made. Also, the press didn't cover it. To the extent they were aware that he was lying about stuff, they didn't cover it. There's a lot of finger-pointing to blame.

Brian: Also to the caller's question, the larger loss of seats in the House in New York State.

Senator Gillibrand: The larger loss of seats is something I care deeply about, and I'm actually going to try to raise resources into the state party to help fund a coordinated campaign to actually work with the candidates, to do mailers, to do robocalls, to do lawn signs, to do lit drops for door-to-door. Because if you do a coordinated campaign, you tend to have a stronger message. I'm the only state-wide candidate in '24. If we want to win back this House majority, the way we do it is run a better campaign and really do the coordinated campaign and raise resources to fund more fields, more door-to-door, more grassroots advocacy.

I'm really excited about that. That's the kind of campaign I'm going to run for my reelection. I'm hoping I can help the five candidates win back these five House seats because if we can deliver five out of New York, we only need to get four or five from somewhere else. Oh, only one? There's only six short? Okay. We only need one from somewhere else, which is pretty great. We could really deliver if New York focuses on this election cycle very intensely, which I intend to do.

Brian: Sherry in Manhattan. You're on WNYC with Senator Gillibrand? Hi, Sherry.

Sherry: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I am a Jewish New Yorker and I am very concerned by the size of a military budget which is ridiculously large when we have so many other needs, and in particular by the continued allocation of $3.8 billion to Israel when there is this ongoing extra-judicial murder of Palestinians and this new government, which is more and more committed to destroying Palestinian villages, to the chance of killing all Arabs. What are we doing sending our money to this government that includes some Jewish extremists who actually call themselves fascists?

Brian: Sherry, thank you very much. Two issues there really, the size of the US defense budget and our policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Just for a little more context for our listeners, I know you were in a bi-partisan delegation to Israel and several Arab countries that are signatories to what's known as the Abraham Accords. You were quoted on Jewishinsider.com saying you've never been more optimistic about the region. What makes you optimistic and what do you say to Sherry's concerns?

Senator Gillibrand: Well, first of all, thank you, Sherry, for your concerns. We have to do much more to help the Palestinian people. What I'll talk about a little bit is what I learned in this trip that I just took to the Arab world and Israel to talk of Abraham Accords. You might not know much about that, but on the last year of the Trump administration, they were able to put together an international agreement between six countries. We visited five of them, and it was Morocco [unintelligible 00:14:44]

Brian: You're starting to break up a lot again. Is it positioning? Is it something you can stabilize again? Because you seem to be able to do it before.

Senator Gillibrand: Let me look, I'm on a landline, so it's a little frustrating. Let me just see if it's a plug that's not plugged in well.

Brian: Suddenly it got better again just now. So [unintelligible 00:15:00] [cross talk]

Senator Gillibrand: Is that better?

Brian: I think so. I want to try to just continue.

Senator Gillibrand: Just stop me if you can't hear me. Okay. We went to Morocco, Bahrain, UAE, and Israel. We didn't go to Sudan because it wasn't safe. The purpose of the Abraham Accords is to say to have Middle East peace, you need to engage the Arab world directly with Israel so that you can have a much more collaborative relationship as a mechanism for several things. One, economic growth in the region. Two, a regional security plan, missile defense system, and three, to help the Palestinians. What I saw on this trip is that Morocco, Bahrain, and UAE are very excited and very dedicated to the Abraham Accords.

They want to have a deeper relationship with Israel. They want to have a broader relationship with Israel and the United States to build a much more regional economic security plan and national security plan. Morocco, for example, not only are they preserving Jewish cemeteries, they are now going to teach Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the Jewish cultural impact. It's how Morocco-- because there's a lot of Jewish Moroccans and so they are committed to it to create peace between Arabs and Jews. In UAE, they just put together the Abraham-- It's like three religious sites.

It's a church, it's a mosque, and it's a synagogue. They're beautiful. They're almost open. It's called the Abrahamic Family Center. It is stunningly beautiful. It's all about lifting up these three faiths so that people can begin to stop hating Jewish people for their faith and for who they are.

Brian: Senator, I'm sorry, to could jump in on such a poignant note, but the line is continuing to deteriorate. Here's what we're going to do. I know my producer has your cell phone number, so we're going to call you back on that line [crosstalk]

Senator Gillibrand: Just call my cell and I'll do it on the cell. Okay. Call my cell. Thank you.

Brian: We are going to call you back on the cell. In the meantime, listeners, we'll take a break and we'll continue and pick up where we left off with Senator Gillibrand talking about the Middle East right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for another few minutes. I guess we've reached that point in history where a cell phone can have better audio quality than a landline [laughs]. Took us a long time to get to this point in history, but I guess we're there. Senator, to follow up on what you were just saying, The Jewish Insider-- [crosstalk] Did you want to finish the thought? Go ahead if you would like to.

Senator Gillibrand: I just wanted to finish the thought. Each of the countries was focused on what they can do to teach the people that Jews are not their enemies, which is so important. If we could broaden this agreement and we could ask these Arab countries, we will enter into much more economic ties between the United States, Israel, and you. We will invest in your defense, your joint defense, F-35 missile defense systems. In exchange, you have to help us rebuild the Palestinian Authority. For example, each one should take water infrastructure.

Somebody could take sanitation, somebody could take education infrastructure, somebody could take health care system, and they could invest billions of dollars every year to rebuild that country. We met with the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, and I specifically asked, "If we convinced the Arab world to make these real investments, would you be willing to partner with the UAE or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, or Morocco to rebuild your water infrastructure, to rebuild your roads and sewers, to rebuild your hospitals?" They said, "Absolutely."

This is a possibility of a regional Middle East peace plan that can help and support the Palestinians to create a path for peace and to have the ability to protect the region from Iran. The real problem right now is Iran and its proxies are waging a war in the whole region. UAE was just bombed by the Houthis, which is an Iranian proxy. Morocco is worried about Hezbollah and Hamas. They're all worried about Iran and these proxies. If you can create a regional defense system and try to de-escalate this drumbeat towards war that Iran has, that's a good thing. More people will be protected, more lives will be saved.

In exchange, what we should ask from the Arab world, which is extremely wealthy, is investment in the Palestinians. I'm optimistic that that's possible. That's why my trip was so optimistic and why I feel hopeful.

Brian: To the caller's concern, are you soft-pedaling some of the things that the Israeli government is doing right now? For example, there's the Netanyahu government trying to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court to make it so that Parliament could overturn Supreme Court decisions that would have implications for constitutional protections for Palestinian rights critics say as well as for Israel's democracy itself. Imagine if congress in this country could just cancel Supreme Court rulings they don't like. Do you have a position on that issue?

Senator Gillibrand: Yes, I do not support those decisions by the government. I think they are extremely problematic for many reasons. I don't agree with the members of Prime Minister Netanyahu's government, but when we did meet with him which is something we must do as our responsibility to focus on the Abraham Accords and regional peace he said, despite these concerns that many New Yorkers have and many Americans have, that his views are the only relevant views when it comes to those issues. We are not going to agree with Prime Minister Netanyahu on these issues. My goal is to find solutions that I can work with the government to implement to help the Palestinian people. I can't control elections in Israel. I can't control the positions of various politicians, but I believe there are civil society organizations within Israel and with the Arab world who very much want to have a path to peace and want to help the Palestinians.

Again, I'm optimistic because this is an opportunity that we've never had. The Arab world does not invest in Palestine, does not invest in the Palestinian Authority, does not invest in the Palestinian people. We using our leverage of this request to invest economically and in national regional security this can be our request. That could result in billions of dollars flowing to help Palestinians get clean water, to have electricity that is reliable, to have better roads and sewer systems, to have sanitation, a plan to have hospitals and schools that work, that should be the result of the Abraham Accords. That's one of the many things that I think we can do.

Brian: To the caller's other question just about the US defense budget and its size, as you know one of the things that some Republicans want to cut in order to agree to raise the debt ceiling is the $80 billion or so that Congress added to the defense budget last year over what President Biden requested. There seems to be a strange bedfellow's left-right coalition forming on this. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who some people think might primary you tweeted to put this $857 billion number into perspective, it would cost $90 billion a year to cut child poverty in half. What do you say to the Republicans on the right to members of your party on the left who think the defense budget was too big? I think you supported that number that got passed.

Senator Gillibrand: Yes, and I feel very confident that it is essential that we invest in our national security. I sit on the intelligence committee and I sit on the Armed Services Committee, and we because of our investments have subverted over two dozen terrorist attacks since 9/11. Part of that is supporting allies around the world. Part of that is making sure we can win a war on more than two fronts at any given time. We have Iran who wants to unfortunately start a nuclear war. They're moving towards nuclear capability through missile technology right now. That is shockingly concerning. We have China who has an ambition to defeat America in a world war over Taiwan and we don't know when that will happen. Could be certainly within this decade. We have terrorism that continues to grow.

We can't we cannot stop investing in our national security because when we do, it means we can't stand up to Putin when they invade Ukraine. We have sent the Ukrainians so many different types of military technology. Different guns different ammunition, different missile launchers, different types of defensive weaponry to protect millions of lives. We could not do that if we had not been investing every year since. NATO chose not to invest. They chose not to spend 2% a year of their GDP on defense. They were largely defenseless when Russia decided to invade Ukraine. They have enormous national security risks because they're not prepared. They assumed we are in a post world war era. They didn't believe that any state would be so belligerent as to invade another state without cause. We're living it right now and I can promise you that whatever Putin does and whatever America does in response, China is watching very intensely about how much will America defend other places.

Can we invade Taiwan a democracy anytime we want and no one will do a thing? That's not something I'm willing to agree to. We do need to invest in our defense. It doesn't mean we also don't need to invest in child poverty. I've always been of the view whatever we spend on defense we should be spending on domestic priorities as well. The Republican party disagrees. They do not want to spend any amount of money on a lot of these priorities. They want to cut the budget. They want to continue to give tax cuts to the most wealthy so that they don't have to invest in schools and hospitals and roads and bridges and healthcare and food security, and all the things that keep our community safe. Unfortunately, we don't have the house majority right now. We have lost the house majority and we need to win that back.

Because with that majority we can invest in the many ways we have. When we created the child's tax credit and we tried to make it permanent, it cut child poverty in half. It worked. It actually worked. The money we put into the COVID recovery bills to invest in our hospitals, to invest in our small businesses, to invest in our first responders. That money worked. It kept our economy surviving during the last three years. We need a Democratic majority to really do these things. I don't think the answer is cutting the defense budget. You can definitely criticize where in the defense budget different dollars are spent and that's something we do in the committee all the time. I would not-- it's such a simplistic solution and it's so ill-informed and you don't have access to the same information that I do on these two committees about our defense and our intelligence for national security. We need those resources that help the Ukrainian people immeasurably, and those are the resources that we're investing in satellite technology, in AI, in supercomputing, in semiconductors. All of that will go towards protecting America from an attack by China someday.

Brian: Let me do my legal ID here and then I'm going to ask one quick follow-up question and then we're out of time. This is WNYC FM, HD, AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1. Trenton WNJP 88.5. Sussex, WNJY 89.3. Netcom and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming@wnyc.org. Senator Gillibrand just in our last 30 seconds or so on those domestic issues that you have championed I know we've talked before about your interest in a paid family leave bill for the US one of very few western countries that doesn't have one and that polls very well. Is there a possibility of a standalone bill? I know it got cut out of Biden's larger Build Back Better bill. Is this something you think is potentially a wedge issue that Democrats could pursue in the current Congress or you think not so much?

Senator Gillibrand: It doesn't have to be a wedge issue. It could actually be a bipartisan issue. I have a working group with Republicans right now led by Bill Cassidy. I reached out to Republicans on the House side, Elise Stefanik. We are going to work as hard as we possibly can over the next few months to see if there is any common ground. The Republicans are much more in favor of lots of tax cuts to make it easier for businesses to offer paid leave. They don't support my vision for paid leave which is a universal system where everyone invests in it like social security so that the money is there for them when they need it matched by employers. That's the ideal paid leave plan for all life events for up to three months. There are some ideas about maybe covering paid leave for the lowest income workers and that maybe that will be acceptable to the Republicans. The good news is we all seem to agree it should be 12 weeks for all life events all people

Brian: One way or another. Did you say Elise Stefanik is interested in working with you on this?

Senator Gillibrand: Yes. Apparently, she's open to it now that she's a mom, she begins to see why these things really affect working people. Paid leave is overwhelmingly bipartisan for the American people, and politicians are the ones who have been lagging. If we can inspire a few more people to care about this because their constituents care about it maybe we could get a bipartisan bill together. I'm just going to keep fighting for it as long and hard as I can. I will work on it even when the Republicans control the House. If I can put together at least a good first step towards paid leave, I will. That's my ambition right now to try to get that done.

Brian: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. We always appreciate when you come on. Thank you so much.

Senator Gillibrand: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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