was pretty bold during that testimony with his questions, his statements. what do you make, terry, of what we re watching today, the disarray for republicans in trying to find a person that is their leader? yeah, i think, quite frankly, that if there are any moderate republicans in the house, they have been completely cowed by the extremists. and it s a real shame. you know, there is nothing wrong with doing business with democrats. the republicans actually have the ability to do that. it s called parliamentary procedure. and if they just don t have the political courage to reject the most extremists in their midst, then i feel sorry for all of us in the united states. and by the way, if i may, back in the 2014 elections after which you had an even larger republican majority in the house, the reality is most americans voted for democrats in 2014. it was only because of the gerrymandering of congressional
moderate republicans, and he said what the majority of my colleagues, almost all of my colleagues on the democratic side agree with. that is that in order to make decisions, we need to work together. we need a governing majority of the house. the republicans need to reject passing legislation only with a majority of the republicans in congress. we can find common ground. we should reach across the aisle. in fact, with congressman dan webster, one of the candidates for speaker, he and i don t agree on almost anything but we have hosted bipartisan dinners and those have been designed to get to know one another across the aisle, to make assumptions that if you know a little bit more about somebody personally, you probably are going to have an easier time working with them. trying to work together and make sure that the my way or the highway politics that the pea partiers in congress have engaged in is set aside, has just been dealt a huge setback
because what we should be doing is democrats and republicans should be getting together, working on important legislation, getting the government running again and making sure that we create jobs and grow the economy. none of that is going to happen likely with any of these republican choices that keep being mentioned for speaker. when you take the train north and go home to your home district, the jersey shore, what are you hearing from people about your job, about our elected officials in general? well, they don t have a lot of faith in us because they see this chaos and they figure that we re not working to accomplish goals that are important to them. people still talk to me about jobs. people say they are unemployed or not making enough money, they are worried about make ends meet. obviously when you re at the shore they talk about things that impact the shore. but in general, it s the economy that people care about. they just don t see washington or congress addressing the con
economy. the stagnation with wages, the stagnation in the job market. look at all of the political candidates right now that are running for president. number one issue, national security. our standing in the world and the need to address foreign policy, the need to have an aggressive plan, and we feel congress needs to assert our role and our position in so many of these issues. we have seniors who are saying the issues of retirement security need to be brought to the table. tax reform, it needs to be brought to the table. repealing obamacare so people can afford insurance. that needs to be on the table. they are wanting to see us work a lot more aggressively and i know we ve got about 300 bills sitting here in the senate waiting for action, but the house republicans, the conservatives are continuing to push forward to deliver for what
in 2016. this is a renewed war on women, women view it as a renewed war on women, and people you know, i had an activist in oklahoma who was talking to me saying these guys going after planned parenthood, they re promoting policies that kill women because when women don t get reproductive health care maternal mortality and infant mortality rates go up sharply. so that is how women out in the united states are looking at these hearings. and i m glad we have champions on this committee. i think it s absolutely regretful that we have these committees going after women s reproductive health care. it s completely outrageous. you talk about a political storm. we all know republicans and democrats spent about five hours questioning cecile richards, the head of planned parenthood, the organization s political activities also calling into question her salary. representative jason chaffetz