Audio:

10-12hhs-braun

Transcript:

HH: In about two hours, Amy Coney Barrett, Judge Barrett of the 7th Circuit, will sit down before the Senate Judiciary Committee gaveled into order by Chairman Graham, and I believe will be introduced by Senators Mike Braun and Todd Young of Indiana. Senator Mike Braun joins me now. Good morning, Senator. I’m sorry that my Browns had to turn Myles Garrett loose on Philip Rivers yesterday.

MB: Well, I watched the entirety of it, recorded it, and was disappointed. Our Colts are looking good, but the Browns got us yesterday. So, yeah.

HH: Oh, Myles Garrett is a force of nature, Senator. You know this. We’ve waited a long time. It’s been 26 years since the Browns opened up at 4-1, so we’ve been waiting a long time.

MB: Yeah, I love comebacks and underdogs, and it’s hard to not root for a team like the Browns other than when your home team is playing against them. So I’ll be keeping an eye on them.

HH: Thank you. Now I mentioned it is traditional, I don’t know if they’re doing it this year, for the home state senators of a nominee like Judge Barrett to the Supreme Court, to introduce her to their colleagues. Is this going to happen this year in the era of the virus?

MB: Well, unless something would change at the last moment, yes. I’ll be doing it virtually from my home town of Jasper, Indiana. And I’m guessing Todd is probably doing the same thing. Of course, we were sent back to kind of hunker down to make sure all of us are going to be healthy for the vote that we anticipate on the floor in late October. And yeah, I think everything so far has gone according to plan. And that should include Todd and I, along with a professor emerita from Notre Dame as well. So and that, I think, is supposed to happen around Noon-1:00. So we’re on call for that.

HH: So what do you, what do you plan on telling the committee about Judge Barrett?

MB: You know, I met her, I think it was the Wednesday, second day of the meetings with various senators. And I’m going to talk about how she is eminently qualified for basically how she’s led her life. She’d be one of the few Midwesterners in terms of career and so forth that would be on the bench. And she represents the values that I think drive the heartland in America – faith, family, community. And she’s going to be one that is a Constitutionalists and originalist and not make the Supreme Court a third chamber of Congress. So basically, it’s going to be in and around that, and I think she’s going to be, you know, excoriated in a manner similar to the Kavanaugh proceedings, but I think they learned their lesson there as well in that that turned into a circus. But I think they’ll still do everything procedurally and to what they can get by with during the hearings to try to derail it. But I think it’s going to be tough to do, because she’s so well-rounded and well-qualified for the job.

HH: Now Senator, I’m from Ohio, you’re from Indiana.

MB: Yeah.

HH: I went to Michigan Law, Judge Barrett went to Notre Dame Law. But there is something to what you say about the Midwestern approach to things, which is kind of calm, Jerry Ford, open-handed, open-faced, not excitable. Is that what you took away from your meeting with Judge Barrett?

MB: I did, and I think that represents many of us that serve in Congress as well in terms of our approach, our demeanor. And my goodness, I think that a dose of that in any part of the federal government, especially on the bench, is important. And if that, it would be different if she didn’t have impeccable credentials when it comes to her intelligence and her opinions. And she is an understudy of Antonin Scalia, and I think that’s important. We certainly need that kind of steadfastness. So often, you see people that come in with conservative credentials for the bench, and they almost immediately start drifting to the middle or away from where their opinions were at a lower level of being a jurist. And I sense that she will not do that. And I think for most of us, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts has been an example of that on many of the things that we believe the Court has moved too far to the middle or the left on. I don’t see that happening with Amy.

HH: You know, I worked for a year with the Chief Justice when we were both young lawyers in the White House in the Reagan years. And I learned then he’s from Indiana. He’s really a Hoosier, and therefore, there’s, it’s going to be a second Hoosier on the Court. And they do have that demeanor. Let me ask you a little bit about the ability of Democrats to procedurally delay. Senator Cruz was on Meet the Press before I was on yesterday, and he mentioned he expects Democrats to try everything they possibly can. Have you heard from Leader McConnell whether there’s any way they can prevent a vote from occurring? I don’t know that she’s going to win the vote, but I want that vote before the election, because I think if it doesn’t happen, the Republicans will get wiped out.

MB: I think if it doesn’t happen before, politically, that would be, along with, I mean, I’ve been here a little under two years. And you look at what happened when I got in. The government was shut down for a record period. We’ve had about six months of what I thought the Senate was about. Then, you had the Mueller report, and you had impeachment that blocked out about three to four months. COVID, civil unrest, and all of this has worked against the greatest economy in the history of my paying attention to it, which would be 37 years running a little business that turned into a national company. But it’s been blurred. And the economy is still up there, but the Dems have really conducted a masterpiece to try to derail the Trump agenda. So if we do not get Amy across the finish line, I there’ll be that feeling of hey, we’re down and out, and it will have political ramifications. It’s going to be a tight election. I think it’s even tighter than what it is, was back in 2016. So yes, it’s important. McConnell, his forte is not being derailed, using the system to stay on point. And then we’ve all got to stay healthy a senators so that we’re in a position, we don’t have a lot of room for error on the floor especially, or the committee to get this across the finish line.

HH: So Senator, in terms of the economy, because people really care about COVID and they care about the economy. Do you see jobs coming back? We were at 3.5% unemployment, the historic low in January. Then, we had to shutter the economy voluntarily and by order of the government in some places. We’re down back below 8%. We’d gone up to like 15%. Will those jobs be back soon?

MB: Okay, so in a nutshell, we are down to a V-shaped recovery without some certain sectors participating – airlines, hospitality, large venue entertainment and sports and some restaurants that run into the fact that they had close quarters before have not been able to grow bumping into the six foot distancing rule and other things. But let’s take my home county, Dubois County here in Indiana. We were in that neighborhood, if not lower than 3.5. We’re down to 4.5, and that’s because we have none of those sectors impacting our local economy. But you’ve got to be able to define it. You’ve got to be able to make the argument. The Dems’ forte, Rahm Emanuel is the expert at saying how they roll. Don’t waste a crisis. They’ve got all of mainstream media that spins in their direction, and the economy is there. We’re not going to get those sectors back until we get the Coronavirus in the rearview mirror. But you’ve got to be able to articulate it in a way that separates the disease from the economy. And the other side has done a masterful job as obfuscating to where you can’t see it clearly. And I don’t know whether we can do that in the next three weeks. That’s what we ought to be paying attention to.

HH: Now in places like Maine…

MB: Yeah.

HH: …where your colleague, Susan Collins is running, she saved, I think, 8,000 Maine businesses by coming up with the PPP. And she is perhaps the most influential senator in the entire body because she sits right in the middle of it. Do voters hear that? Do they, you know, I’m on Portland. People listen to me. Do they hear, do they know that Susan Collins matters more than any other senator? Do they get what seniority means?

MB: Well, above the din of the mainstream media and the people that she would need to communicate that through, even with a well-run campaign, it’s difficult. I look at my race. Citizens United, their sanctimonious approach of not liking it? Well, heck, they outspend us 2-1 using it. They’re outraising us to where you get that message out there to where you can hear it on a grassroots basis by a factor of even more 2-1. So we play from behind, and they control the dialogue. They’re good at, I remember when I stepped out defending the impeachment process to where I got Chuck Schumer within six inches behind me when we finally started using the microphone to get our point of view out there. They are good at it. They’re persistent at it. And I hope the citizens of Maine pay attention to what she does do, that she’s pivotal. She did a lot of good work with the PPP. But I don’t know. I think it’s that close. I think the silent majority better be immense out there. It’s putting two and two together. And please articulate how good the economy was pre-COVID, because if any of their crazy ideas take hold, Hugh, you’re going to see something not only as bad as, it’ll be worse than the Obama-Biden economy.

HH: Senator Mike Braun, good to talk to you. Thank you, Senator from Indiana.

End of interview.