Video, Highlights: Sen. Mark Warner, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA10) Rappahannock Townhall (7/18)

See below for video and highlights from yesterday’s townhall, by the Rappahannock Democratic Committee , featuring Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA10). Oh, and thanks/shoutout to Rappahannock News for video’ing this and putting it up on YouTube – much appreciated!

• Rep. Subramanyam on the Iran war: ” I don’t know why they keep asking for more and more money for award with no end in sight…Congress should have been authorizing this war at this point. This war is illegal at this point in my mind and they should there should be a vote in Congress to continue the war or else end it.”
• Rep. Subramanyam on Trump’s speech Thursday night: “The second thing is that crazy speech this past week…No one’s surprised. This president when things are going bad he tries to distract…tries to make excuses for why they went bad…the person in charge in 2020 was Donald Trump. So, it makes absolutely no sense…even some Republicans are starting to understand that. But they will go off the deep end with him…will follow him to the ends of the earth because they feel like otherwise they’ll lose their jobs and they care more about their jobs right now than the American people…and the ones who are standing up to him a lot of them are standing up to retiring and so that’s the real reason why a retired Republican is the best Republican in my mind “
• Rep. Subramanyam on data centers: “70% of people now don’t want data centers in their community and it’s because the industry has been steamrolling communities. They’ve been going to the local government and offering them cash and then saying that the the locality is on board because the local government accepted that cash. They need to go to the people in that community. They need to have these types of meetings. I told them that and I’m pushing a lot of different solutions on that. One is is just trying to do siting better…Those power lines, those transmissions lines go through here, right?…Remember, we have  clean and renewable energy goals for Virginia. How are you going to meet them? Data centers are taking up a fourth of your power. So, we need to do better on that. I need shift  change. The public is changing and Congress needs to change with them.”
• Sen. Mark Warner: “You know, seven or eight years ago, nine years ago, Suhas was just another policy nerd. And then he went to the state level and now he’s going to Congress and this is a young man who’s got a great future. He needs to be reelected with record margins.”
• Sen. Warner: “I actually think the issue that is more significant than any this year is maintaining free and fair elections…everywhere I can I’ve been saying Donald Trump is going to try to rig these elections is going to not allow out a free and fair election…Nothing would be more devastating on our 250th anniversary…then [for Trump to] be successful in trying to corrupt the election process. And that’s what he’s trying to do.”
• Sen. Warner: “There is no Republican Party left in Washington. There is only a group of Trump sycophants and bootlickers and people that couldn’t get a job anywhere else…I want there to be a strong, rational Republican party that we can argue with disagree with, but still recognize that we’re at our core all Americans. And the best thing we can do to have a return of a traditional center-right conservative Republican party is this year kick their ass.”
• Sen. Warner: “I won’t go through chapter and verse…of all of the falsehoods that went on Thursday night. But I will say one thing I was I was proud of the fact that I got so angry. How many of you watched it? Well, thank goodness I had to watch it cuz I did a bunch of TV afterwards. One of the one of the networks made the mistake of inviting me on CBS. ABC didn’t cover it. NBC didn’t cover…Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite got to be rolling over in their ways at that proud heritage…  And frankly, I don’t think they were planning on covering it until this new ownership, which is a bunch of Trump lackeys…the only election he’s got a problem with is 2020. Who was in charge in 2020? Donald Trump…The intelligence community assessment of the 2020 elections. And interesting enough, the country that most tried to interfere, most tried to influence was Russia. Russia because without a doubt, Russia was trying to promote Trump just as they had in 2016. Iran had tried to do things to undermine Trump. China has the capacity, but they basically, as Suhas said, they wanted to just kind of mess with everything. But that report which was briefed to Donald Trump on January 7th of 2021 when he was still president found that there was no ability to influence or change a single vote. Was he awake? He might have still been recovering because the day before January 7th was a pretty important historic day as well. Somebody was up there. But it is frightening. This guy is a loser and he will do anything not to be a loser again. So we have to be willing to stand up and fight back. What he wants more than anything is discouraging us from thinking our votes count. You know the most important thing we can do is turn out in record numbers… Remember Franklin said after as our country was founded, you got a republic if you can keep it…[The SAVE Act] is geared particularly at trying to disenfranchise people of color…if we have a corrupted election this cycle, I don’t know how we ever put Humpty Dumpty fully back together again.”
• Sen. Warner: “Now, I’m all for Obamacare. I’m for expansion of Medicaid. I want to make sure we maintain the promise of Medicare, but I think our system is too fundamentally broken.  We have to move to universal healthare…it’s not only morally the right thing to do, but it’s also frankly financially the right thing to do…If we have universal health care, we can actually focus on cost containment and provide better quality care at a lower price because if we don’t, we’re going to bankrupt the whole system.”
• Sen. Warner: “If you want to spend another hour, I’ll take you through all the corruption opportunities that have taken place by this administration, which is jaw-dropping beyond belief. Just one little the most recent one, which you know, I was a finance guy. I was a tech guy. a lot of those things. But the idea that  going to press Wall Street and the securities firms and the big banks on this this week. Stay tuned on this one. If any of those firms sign up for the new Trump scam, which is if you pay Truth Social, his little fee money, he was going to give them advanced notice of what he was going to post. Well, guess what? There is more stock manipulation been going on by Trump’s use of Truth Social normally on a Sunday night before the markets open on Monday. If we turn our blind eye to that corruption that all of these things together …it is all up for grabs but if we don’t have a free and fair election we’re not going to get to any of these things.”
• Sen. Warner:  “I want to get rehired for my last time. I promise the last time I’m up I’m done after this because it is time for the next generation but I’m not going to give up the fight. When I think I’ve got value on technology and intelligence, I’m sure as hell not going to get the fight while this guy is president…the very heart of our democracy is at stake.“
• Sen. Warner:  “One of the things makes me crazy is…We got $62 billion in broadband under President Biden. We didn’t wire a mile of fiber from that money…we need to move quicker to get things done.”
• Rep. Subramanyam: “Behind the scenes when the cameras are off, I play pickle ball with Republicans. I’ll have coffee with them anytime. A lot of the bills that I’ve passed, they had to have Republican support because I go over the other side of the aisle. I spend a lot of my time on the other side of the aisle talking to committee chairs to get my bills passed to get my rap courthouse money passed, right? So that’s that’s not the issue is whether we’re getting along personally. The problem is when they go on the cameras, they say the most outlandish things, most hateful things. Sometimes it’s hard to continue working with them in good faith on smaller issues, but on the big issues, it’s really tough. But you got to put that aside for the community. But longer term, they are not going to change the way that they act in front of the cameras or on the on the issues that they run on until they lose and until they see that there is a punishment. Right now on the Republican side, the only punishment they’re seeing is that if you stray away from Donald Trump, you’ll endorse your opponent in a primary and you’ll lose your job. They see Thomas Massie as an example of that… Until we change that calculus this November, it’s not going to change on their side.”
• Sen. Warner:”I think [the SAVE Act is] dead and it’s dead not only because of of you know the unwillingness to break the filibuster but there are a number of Republicans who won’t vote for this…But I also believe that Donald Trump is a little bit like Dracula and he is going to keep trying because he knows in his heart if there are free and fair elections he is going to get whooped. And so he will try anything and everything, and whether it’s SAVE America or trying to you know interfere in our elections, whether it’s trying to blame something falsely and that’s where at some point the truth just has to win out, and the truth anymore is a lot harder to get out in such a fragmented society.”
• Rep. Subramanyam [in response to a question about Israel supposedly influencing our elections in 2016 and 2020]: “… the reality is that for a long time, Israel was and still is an ally and a strong ally...And we we thought of the Middle East as okay, if we keep Israel safe, that in and of itself is good, and then the rest of the region will stabilize as we continue to support their defense, right? Israel was a small country. They were the underdog as they had sort of neighbors that could attack them at any time. And that’s still somewhat the case that if Hamas and Hezbollah still as threats, but it’s starting to eutralize. But to me, a big part of why I supported funding for Israel is because it would also keep us out of wars in the Middle East. And unfortunately, what’s happening is we’re in a war in the Middle East now. And the amount of money we spend every year in srael, it’s about $4 billion on their defense, right? That’s how much we spend in three or four days now on this Iran war. And so now we have to really look at next year we have anou with them that’s up. We have to really look critically at what we’re going to do at that point. I think at that point we have to make some hard decisions with them and have a hard conversation because right now it doesn’t seem like the return on investment is there.”
• Sen. Warner [in response to that same question]: “You know, a lot of us in this room or my vintage we grew up with the Israel of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan…and it was a guess it’s going to be a Jewish state but it had more democracy than anywhere else in the region and I think about my own children I’m heartbroken that the only Israel they’ve seen is the Israel of Bibi Netanyahu. A nd I just urge us to sometimes separate our frustration with Israel and point it at the government. I also need to say very very explicitly that I will not countenance our country moving in any kind of anti-Semitic [direction]. I also will also was the only United States senator to go on the floor as a major speech against anti-Muslim bias in our country as well.”
• Sen. Warner: “I actually still have faith. I have faith that our military will remain true to the Constitution. [groans from the audience]. And I pray that I’m not wrong, but I, you know, I don’t have that faith in ICE…I am probably most concerned about taking a factoid or non-factoid out the whole nature of intelligence…I am fearful, I’ve been talking about this for a long time, that people who have been speaking truth to power in this administration get fired for telling the truth…It’s why I’m spending so much time trying to get people that are respected to speak out… We have to stay vigilant. I got to get out. But I am up to my eyeballs in trying to make sure that we stay on the media…I keep appealing to journalists. Journalists are the only people who frankly have those full first amendment rights of freedom of the press. If they get cowed, then we can be in a bad place, But I think we will meet this challenge.”