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TRANSPO - Things got heated during a recent conversation between out U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and CNBC Squawk Box host Joe Kernan.
During his appearance on the show, Buttigieg lamented that the American public is sick of seeing only negative coverage of what’s going on in Washington, D.C. He expressed the importance of paying attention to what’s wrong and highlighting what’s going right while ensuring Americans understand who is actually trying to solve the problems and who is using them to “score political points.”
“It was especially disappointing to see what happened with the border, right?” Buttigieg said. “Congressional GOP talked about the border every chance they got, so you would think they would be interested in addressing it, and yet when a bipartisan bill put together by one of the most conservative members of the Senate and Democrats working, negotiating, making tough, tough decisions that most of their respective bases were gonna have trouble with came and hammered that out, it looked like there was gonna be a chance to do something real with real resources at the border, only for Donald Trump — who’s not even an elected official — to come in and kill it with the chill that he put on.”
“We can either solve problems or we can have them be political footballs.”
Kernan proceeded to blame President Joe Biden for any issues at the border: “Every time we hear those talking points that suddenly it was Republicans who ruined the border, that’s why people get so frustrated. We know what President Biden said about inviting people in, we know that he got rid of all the things that were keeping the border closed that President Trump had put in. We know that he got rid of all those, so when you say it’s not his fault…”
“That’s literally not true,” Buttigieg interrupted as the pair began to fervently talk over one another.
As Kernan argued far fewer people crossed the border under Trump than have under Biden, Buttigieg stated, “Okay, he got rid of family separation. He got rid of the policy to tear children out of the arms of their parents, that’s true. But it is not true some of the other things that have been suggested.”
Buttigieg continued to speak as Kernan looked exasperated.
“Literally since the Reagan administration, there have been bipartisan efforts to get something done here. But I really believe we’ve gotten to the point where many congressional Republicans find it so useful as a cudgel that they would rather keep the problem going for political uses than solve the problem and risk the chance that the president gets a share in the credit for that.”
Kernan then claimed Democrats have become focused on telling people not to believe their “lying eyes,” to which Buttigieg responded that the GOP is the one living by that dogma.
“Is it my lying eyes that under Joe Biden we’ve had the most job creation in American history?” Buttigieg said. “Is it my lying eyes telling us that unemployment and inflation are both below 4% and have been that way for the longest time in who knows when? Is it reality or is it spin to point out the fact that manufacturing jobs are up under this president and were down under the last president? These are matters of simple fact.”
Kernan continued to argue, but Buttigieg emphasized that the “common sense position” among both moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans is “there ought to be more legal immigration and less illegal immigration.”
“And yet when there’s a chance to actually do that, that’s not what happened. The last administration cut legal immigration… and when there’s finally a bipartisan compromise… congressional Republicans couldn’t get it done because Donald Trump, who is not even in elected office, killed it. That is a fact.”
After that, Kernan was speechless and stammered out a thank you and goodbye to Buttigieg.
(Molly Sprayregen is the Deputy Editor of LGBTQ Nation where this article was first published.)
