Video: Sen. Mark Warner Decries Trump Politicizing the Military, Holding a Parade “that would be more appropriate for Moscow than Washington”; “Going over the governor” to Call in the National Guard and Marines…

See below for video and a few highlights (bolding added by me for emphasis) from Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability, which was – surprisingly, given how much is going on right now – relatively quiet, not a lot of questions for whatever reasons…

• “What is dominating the interest in the Senate is the continued focus on this big, I think awful, and in many ways just plain cruel Republican bill…the latest estimates are that about 300,000 Virginians will lose their health care, either by directly losing their Medicaid benefits, or won’t able to be able to pay for their ability to purchase health care through the open exchange that’s been set up since Obamacare. 300,000 Virginians losing their healthcare. And remember, in many rural communities, this will also mean a dramatic shutdown of services, because without those Medicaid patients, hospitals will have to shut down services, particularly OBGYN. And it’s going to be devastating. There’s just no question we’ve made huge progress on at least coverage on healthcare; now to take this giant step backwards would be a disaster.”
• “In addition, Virginia would see about 200,000 folks lose food assistance benefits, SNAP benefits. On top of that, there are estimates that the state costs of these programs will go up a couple hundred million dollars, minimum. So again a double whammy – do we really want to cut kids school breakfasts and school lunches? I mean, this bill is so cruel that it even goes in in another part and cuts assistance to food banks…You’re not going to balance the budget on cutting money to food banks at the same time that you’re cutting kids healthy breakfasts.”
• “I think much of the other activities from Trump is an effort to try to distract attention from this awful bill. And again, I think it’s cruel because in many ways what it does is it cuts these programs, it actually raises taxes for people who make minimum wage, and for those at the very top, the top tenth of 1%, they get about a $400,000 tax break. That’s just not the kind of sense of fairness that ought to be coming out of our government. And I think my Republican friends are doing everything they can to distract attention from from this piece of legislation; the more Virginiaians know about it, the more Americans know about it, the worse it appears.”
• “…we’ve got to make sure that traveling in the airspace of America is safe and secure, and right now people question that. We saw this challenges at National and then followed by challenges at Newark airport, and it is bad for the economy, bad for tourism, bad for people’s just plain mental psyche, if you don’t feel your air control and air traffic is safe. And I’ve had a lot of folks raise those concerns about flying out of National.”
• “I am very worried by the increasing politicization of our intelligence community. We’ve recently seen the FBI remove for political purposes senior FBI officers in Richmond and a senior officer in Norfolk. More particularly in the intelligence community, Director Gabbard recently without going through appropriate procedures, fired part of the support team for the inspector general – the inspector general is supposed to be independent – and ended up putting in her own choice as the deputy counsel to the inspector general. The whole notion of the inspector general is you’re supposed to be independent from the political appointees, like Director Gabbard. I think Director Gabbard is way over her head. I don’t think she’s qualified or has the judgment to have this position. This is, remember, the individual who couldn’t call…Snowden a traitor and is now directing our National Intelligence Service. And on top of that, recently her chief of staff who I’m trying to prevent from getting another position, literally we have evidence of him trying to convert and change an independent intelligence assessment, and then when the intelligence professional wouldn’t make those changes, was fired. And I’ve already been asked by some of our major intelligence partners around the world, hey what’s going on, what is happening to American intelligence? And we are made less safe by these actions, we are made less secure. We see those images at the same time we see Donald Trump trying to politicize the military, whether it be through the actions at that speech yesterday that was a campaign speech at Fort Bragg, or deploying the Marines to Los Angeles over the objection of the governor, or this parade this weekend in DC that’s going to probably cost the taxpayer about $45 million – a parade that would be more appropriate for Moscow than Washington. So this politization of the military, this denying the independence of the intelligence community, all these are are items that again make us less safe in this country.”
• “I think Americans, when they see some of these images of of people being grabbed off the street, I know the fear in the immigrant community in Northern Virginia right now is [palpable]. I’ve been meeting with faith leaders of a number of denominations to say ‘How do you make sure your congregations are safe?’ On the other hand, violence is never acceptable, and the scenes of burning cars or looting, it is appropriate that the mayor put a curfew in place in Los Angeles. And my fear though is that Trump is trying to be almost provocative on this issue. I was a governor, you know, I had to call up the National Guard a number of times  for emergencies. But the idea that you’re somehow doing it over not even consulting the governor or going over the governor, which is what Trump has done in the case of California, and then calling in literally the US military, the Marines, is extraordinarily concerning. I hope that we could see what Trump had promised was securing the border and then going after hardened criminals that had overstayed, that is different than what we’re seeing with some of these raids or literally folks going to school, folks going to get health care. And I fear for when if we start to see ICE agents, you know, start to go at churches or mosques or houses of worship, that is not I think what Americans signed up for.”
• “You may recall that my predecessor [Jim Gilmore] as governor got elected in many ways on going against the car tax. The problem was there was no mechanism to fill in the hole and Virginia was left, when I was governor, with you know close to a $6 billion shortfall – we had to close that. I understand that the car tax is a not a popular tax at all. But what whomever is elected governor, I hope it’s Abigail Spanberger, you got to wrestle through a way to deal with that that doesn’t leave the localities holding the bag. Because it’s localities who pick up most of the cost; for example, of your local police department or your local school divisions. So this has been a goal of lots of folks in Virginia for years – how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave your local county or local city or towns holding the fiscal bag is where you got to get the math right.”
• “I think most of the law enforcement I talk to feel that their job of law enforcement is very separate from the responsibilities of immigration enforcement. Matter of fact, law enforcement officials that I talk to are concerned often times if they get too affiliated with ICE that members of the community won’t trust them then, and you could actually see crime go up. But I’m not going to weigh in; you know, some communities where sheriffs have affirmatively decided not to work with other communities they have worked with, that is up to local law enforcement. My job at the federal level is to make sure that we oversee ICE, we oversee immigration procedures, we recognize – I’m all in on making sure that folks who’ve broken the law need to be deported, I have some real questions though about some of these sweeps where we’re finding literally folks kids on the way to school getting picked up and I’m not sure that’s what Americans signed up for.”