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  • Let's bring in Senator Amy Klobuchar, now from Minnesota.

  • Senator Klobuchar.

  • Thank you for joining us in the scoring.

  • Let's start out there with the state of the economy right now.

  • What are you seeing in Minnesota?

  • I know your governor has started to open the state over the last couple of days.

  • Relaxed some of the guidelines.

  • Number one.

  • Do you support that?

  • And number two.

  • Do you see Minnesota emerging from the damage relatively quickly?

  • I support what our governors doing.

  • He's been very careful and listened to the doctors and the scientists, and we are still under a stay at home order.

  • But what's been going on is that for quite a while he's head garden stores, open and home, home repair stores, open hunting and fishing on.

  • That's been a positive thing for our state, but like every state in the country, George, we are suffering from one important thing, and that is a lack of national strategy.

  • You know, we can tune out this president's rants about shrugging bleach, but we can't tune out the fact that we have a lack of protective equipment, that we do not have enough testing that there is an absence of national leadership.

  • And so I enjoyed hearing Kevin in that he did acknowledge the seriousness of this.

  • But when he didn't bring up was a testing.

  • We need to be able to test people at double the rate so that our meat packing plants in Minnesota, the food processing plants in Minnesota and in the Midwest are able to reopen.

  • We're gonna have trouble with our food supply chain, George.

  • We're gonna have trouble in rural America.

  • And when I walk around my neighborhood just like everyone else, you see boarded up businesses.

  • Those are people's hopes and dreams.

  • And that's why Democrats have pushed hard for the testing as a key element toe opening up this economy and it should have happened months ago.

  • But it's pretty clear those center that you are gonna have a rougher road, that least on the front end of this.

  • It doesn't look like you have the same kind of bipartisanship as you all consider this next stimulus package, which would include state and local government funding.

  • Presuming Democrats have been pushing for more testing funding a swell.

  • It looks like this is slowed down.

  • Do you still expect the kind of bipartisan cooperation we've seen in the first few packages.

  • Well, there has to be some, but in each package you saw the Democratic Party pushing for the testing, pushing for hospitals, pushing at Mitch McConnell and just refusing to agree to something that just helped certain people and not the rest of this country.

  • I think you're going to see that again.

  • And then I also think you see this long term.

  • I just keep focusing on this lack of leadership in the president because of the fact that when you look back in history and you're a student of history out of the Great Depression because of the leadership of Roosevelt, we got Social Security and a safety net in long term changes out of the embarrassment of Russia and Sputnik.

  • What happened when John F.

  • Kennedy was president?

  • He got America to rally and to get the education we needed to put a man on the moon.

  • Well, this is this moment.

  • So you need to put someone in the White House and, you know, I've supported Vice President Biden and excited about his candidacy.

  • You need to put someone in the White House.

  • It's gonna have that long term vision and isn't going to spend day after day dividing people.

  • So I look at the short term.

  • Let's get the money out there for a state and local governments.

  • And then let's look at the long term of how we're going to make a steady economy so we can once again lead in the world.

  • And we're not going to do it with this president.

  • You mentioned Vice President Biden.

  • He suggested this week that President Trump might try to some way hold back of the election delay the election.

  • I know he's concerned about that.

  • Do you know why he's concerned?

  • Election Day is set by Congress, not the president.

  • Well, I think he's concerned because of what's been going on in some of the states and how the president pushes some of these governors, and he's concerned because of what just happened in Wisconsin.

  • So let's look at it.

  • While President Trump was in the White House ordering a mail in ballot to vote at home in the luxury of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in his slippers, I don't know if he had on slippers, but that's my image.

  • People in Wisconsin are standing in garbage bags with masks on their face, getting off of work at hospitals, standing in line, having to choose between their health and their right to vote.

  • And now nearly 20 of them are sick, including a poll worker off the Corona virus.

  • We can't let that happen.

  • In November, you heard Republican Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland just say he wants to go to vote by mail.

  • So do a number of Republicans across the country.

  • That's why Ron Wyden and I are pushing for our bill with the support of Michelle Obama, the civil rights groups, to keep pushing to make sure that we have both vote by mail and early voting as well as voting that day.

  • So we have a whole new generation of poll workers.

  • It's actually a really exciting thing.

  • Toe work on George.

  • It's about our very democracy.

  • People can't lose the right to vote.

  • President Trump's campaign managers said he thinks Minnesota could be in play and could go for the president November Is Minnesota in play?

  • I don't believe so, Not if I have anything to do with it.

  • I look at the fact that Minnesotans are hardworking, practical group and this president the way every day he rants and raised from the bully pulpit of that White House.

  • What we see hardworking people going to work in our hospitals every day, risking their lives, ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

  • I was just a za part of vice president Point Biden Soul of the nation.

  • We did public service yesterday, and I was at, ah, one of our food banks where you see people in line waiting for food and volunteers out there.

  • Young people.

  • No, I don't think Minnesota's and play because we want a really leader in the White House.

  • And I am, um, you know, the whole Midwest when you look at what's happening with our biofuel plants with our commodities, with what's happening with our poultry, this is not a good situation.

  • And the president, in my mind, has never done enough when it comes to rural America.

  • And now, as they would say, the chickens coming home to roost and you have seen off some real problems with people having to kill their chickens literally because of what is going on right now with our rural economy and you're seeing Corona virus come here not enough ventilators, Not enough hospitals.

  • Um, and we're gonna have to really focus on Rule America in the months to come.

  • Senator Klobuchar, Thanks for your time this morning.

  • Thanks, George.

  • It was great to be on.

  • And I'm glad you're feeling better.

  • And your wife ISS care.

  • Thanks very much.

  • John.

  • Hi, everyone.

  • George Stephanopoulos here.

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  • Thanks for watching.

Let's bring in Senator Amy Klobuchar, now from Minnesota.

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