Video: On Face the Nation, Sen. Mark Warner Says the Trump Administration’s “doing damage to our flagship university…and frankly, if we don’t have some level of academic freedom, then what kind of country are we?”

See below for video and highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s appearance on Face the Nation this morning. BTW, Margaret Brennan’s pro-Republican framing, bias, etc. in this interview is REALLY pronounced; check it out.

• “You can put as much lipstick on this pig as you want; this will be a political albatross for the Republicans, because it takes 16 million Americans off of healthcare coverage, with cuts to Medicaid and cuts to the Obamacare marketplace. That will move us as a nation back to the same percentage of uninsured we had before Obamacare. And it’s not like these people are not going to get sick; they’re going to show up at the emergency room, rural hospitals are going to shut down – that has been evidenced across the nation; it also goes after food assistance. Are we really in such a place that we’re cutting in my state a couple hundred thousand people off of school lunches, school breakfasts. They even cut food banks – it’s cruel. They have also at the end of the day cutting 20,000 plus clean energy jobs. And for what? This was to make sure that the…most wealthy Americans can get an extra tax break. And as you just saw on your chiron there, it adds 4.5 trillion to the debt. I think many of my Republican friends know they’re they’re walking the plank on this, and we’ll see if those who’ve expressed quiet condemnation will actually have the courage of their convictions.”
• “It’s 16 million Americans off of health care. You know, Medicaid cuts. These numbers, they’re not my numbers, they’re all independent sources. And what the thing that I don’t think people have realized, people say well Medicaid, I’m not poor i maybe buy my health insurance through the marketplace. Your rates will go up $800 or $900 a month and that will trickle through the whole rest of the health care market, because if you suddenly take people out of the system, they show up at the emergency room in uncompensated care. The only way those costs get passed on is higher health insurance to all of us who have traditional coverage.”
• “I think we’ll see, even as recently as just an hour ago some of the special Medicaid provisions for certain states I think were disallowed because of the so-called Byrd rule. And you know, it’s not over till it’s over. I will give you, I will grant that President Trump has been able to hold his party in line in an unprecedented manner. At the other end, this bill will come back and bite them. This is going to do so much damage in terms of not only healthcare, food assistance, the whole notion that we are moving towards cleaner energy jobs, all on the chopping block, adding 4 trillion to the debt. Tell me, at the end of the day, how that is good for America? I don’t think you can make the case.”
• “This is the most outrageous action I think this crowd has taken on education. We have great public universities in Virginia. We have a very strong governance system, where we have an independent board of visitors appointed by the governor. Jim Ryan had done a very good job, just completed a major capital campaign. For him to be threatened, and literally there was indication that they received the letter that if he didn’t resign on a day last week by 5:00, all these cuts [would] take place. It was that explicit it was…You’re shocked that personal attacks are coming out of this administration? I thought the Republicans were about states’ rights, I thought the Republicans were about let’s transfer more power to the states. This federal DOE and Department of Justice should get their nose out of University of Virginia. They are doing damage to our flagship university. And if they can do it here, they’ll do it elsewhere. At the end of the day, I understand that with so many things at stake, that the idea and I think Jim Ryan laid it out, that he was going to make his personal job more important than these cuts. But boy oh boy that shouldn’t have been the choice.”
• “They want to make them like Harvard. They want to take on public universities the way they have now taken on the Ivies. End of the day, this is going to hurt our universities, chase away what worldclass talent. And frankly, if we don’t have some level of academic freedom, then what kind of country are we?”
• “I don’t think we have final assessments [on Iran’s nuclear program]. Let me first of all, we don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Secondly, the military performed an extraordinary mission and I think they affected a great deal of damage to Iran’s facilities. But the idea that the president of the United States with no data, two hours after the strike, is suddenly hitting the standard of saying ‘total obliteration’. That leads us to think that they are out of the game. And we don’t know that yet. And let’s just be clear, you can actually set back the major program where they were trying to create potentially – and there’d been no decision made by the Ayatollah to actually move towards weaponization – but where they could have a weaponized system with a dozen plus missiles that are nuclear armed. But what they don’t know is, they didn’t – and this was appropriate, I am not criticizing the administration – they didn’t go after the enriched uranium that was at Isfahan, at that base, because it’s buried so deeply. So the fact that they can have still enriched uranium, they may have some ability to still cascade that, means they could still move forward on something that might be not delivered by a missile but a bomb in a trunk of a car. And all I don’t want is the American people, or for that matter our allies in the region, to rely on a a term that was set by the president before he had any facts.“
• “We were on the verge of what could have been a much greater war in terms of Iran and Israel spreading to the whole region. Was there the imminent emergency that would trigger? Because lots of presidents have looked at taking this action. I think that’s very debatable. If at the end of the day we end up where this peace holds and Iran doesn’t strike back, hallelujah. But what we don’t know for example is Iran going to try to hit us on cyber, with this administration cutting literally half of our cybersecurity personnel in this country? So I just want to make sure that we we do this in a measured way. The military did great, we have set them back. But let’s not pretend that they don’t have any capabilities. And the only way we can get resolution on that… and Secretary Rubio acknowledged this in the brief, is if we have boots on the ground with inspectors. That means we’ve got to go to diplomacy. If America and Iran start negotiating this week face to face, that would be good.”