This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by Congressman Ro Khanna of California. Congressman, welcome.
Representative Ro Khanna: Good to be back on.
Bacon: And I want to start with you just to ask the big news of the day. What do you think about the Senate Democrats—eight of them—joining the Republicans in this apparent deal to end the government shutdown?
Representative Khanna: It’s such a moral surrender. You know, yesterday I was at an airport. A young man came up to me and said, “Congressman Khanna, Congressman Khanna.” I thought he wanted a selfie. And no—he showed me on his phone that his father, who’s in Arizona, a taxi driver, is going to have his premium go up from $44 a month to $2,600 a month.
His father is fighting cancer. The deductible is going to go up to $6,000 a year. These are real lives. And it was a total surrender that was not needed. We could have at least gotten a year-long extension. And that’s why I became the first member of Congress to call for Chuck Schumer to step down and be replaced as the minority leader.
Bacon: Explain that. Why should Schumer step down?
Representative Khanna: Well, first of all, some of the senators who voted “yes” were asked explicitly today, “Was leadership consulted, or did you do this rogue?” And they all said leadership was consulted. So he gave the green light for this deal.
And anyone who’s covered Congress or has been part of one of these bodies knows how this stuff works. If Schumer really didn’t want this to happen, he could have at least come out publicly and said, These folks are defying what I want. But he didn’t do that. He was basically orchestrating a deal.
And look, I respect Senator Schumer’s role in the Biden administration. He was critical on the CHIPS Act—he and I co-led that together in the House and the Senate. He was critical on the Inflation Reduction Act. He was critical on infrastructure. This is not taking away from him. But he’s just not up for the fight that we have right now.
And it’s time for him to retire.
Bacon: Is there some better person there? I don’t know. Senator Schatz? Senator Murray? Do you want to give a name here?
Representative Khanna: Look, it’s up to them. But I like [Maryland Senator Chris] Van Hollen. If you ask me—not that my voice on this is going to matter for what some senators pick—but I’ve been impressed with Van Hollen’s moral clarity on key issues.
Bacon: So talk to me about, somebody—so many of the comments noted Chris Murphy [as] another person who …
Representative Khanna: I like Chris. I like Brian Schatz. I’m not—I guess my call was that Schumer should be replaced.
Now what’s so surprising to me is there haven’t been other—this hasn’t been a chorus yet. Some of the candidates running, like Graham Platner and [Massachusetts Representative] Seth Moulton and all, have. But it seems so obvious that Schumer is out of touch with the base. I mean, here’s someone who championed the Iraq War.
He’s someone who championed a blank check to Netanyahu, someone who didn’t campaign for Zohran Mamdani, someone who basically caved in the first shutdown, and now he’s caving again. And like I said, it’s not personal—I recognize where he has made contributions—but it is time.
Bacon: Let me go through and just give the argument.
I hear what you say, but the argument that this deal was necessary—I think they would say SNAP benefits stop, airplanes getting delayed. No sense the Republicans … like the ACA premiums are going up, but there’s no sense the Republicans are going to move on that, as far as I can tell.
So their view, the members have come out—I think they’ve said something logical, which is like the stakes were individuals in America were getting worse from this shutdown, and there was no sense that the Republicans were going to change policy. So even if we were sort of winning in the polls, there was nothing … we couldn’t really win the policy. So let’s move on.
And that, that seems like a … how do you respond to the argument?
Representative Khanna: First of all, I think that they were moving the Republicans. You had [New York Representative] Michael Lawler, a Republican, saying, “Let’s do a one-year extension.”
So I agree that the permanent extension may have been very hard, but we could have gotten some relief for a year. Secondly, if you didn’t think Republicans were going to move on this, then why did you make this the issue of the shutdown in the first place? Obviously, there was some sense that the Republicans would move on this, or it was a total tactical miscalculation to make this the issue.
And then third, Trump was floundering. He was saying, Look, this is why we lost the election. And I would’ve been fine if he had said, OK, we’re going to get rid of the filibuster. At least that would’ve been something that would’ve been an advance for democracy to do.
But we ended up just caving. We ended up not helping people. And then the question is—then what did we achieve to improve people’s lives?
Bacon: And the answer you say is almost nothing.
Representative Khanna: Well, look, I think we clarified for folks, that the Affordable Care Act is important and that the Republicans have no interest in lowering their costs and that their premiums are going to go up because of the Republican callousness.
We’ve clarified that the insurance process is broken. This is the time to argue for Medicare for All. Many people are saying, if you’re not for Medicare for All now, then you’re not part of the understanding of where people’s struggles are. By the way, Perry, you and I talk to folks who are working class, and many of them will say that the biggest fear is health care, right?
They can deal with a lot of other stuff, but if they get into a car accident, if they have an accident at work, the amount of people who then have to get a GoFundMe page because of the deductibles or the cost, that’s the single biggest issue of someone falling from a normal life to not having a decent life and so we need to be making case for Medicare for All at this moment.
Bacon: There was a great election on Tuesday that your party really did well, and so it’s sort of weird to see—if you doubted where the public was—we had people running outta their houses to vote in New Jersey and Virginia to signal they don’t like Trump in a lot of ways.
I’m sort of stunned by this capitulation so quickly after the election. Are you?
Representative Khanna: I am, not from a matter of politics, but we just had people affirm for us that they wanted us to stand up to the lawlessness. They wanted us to stand up to the cruelty of this president. Part of the cruelty of this president is taking away people’s health care, and they said, we have your back.
You know, we know we don’t love the Democratic Party. We have your back. We’re going to come out in record numbers to vote for you because we’re on the streets and we don’t like what this president’s doing. And I think that should have given us the confidence to continue to fight. Now, I understand people are going without SNAP benefits.
I was stuck at an airport for seven hours yesterday in Fort Worth to get my flight. I get that this is not easy with Thanksgiving coming up. I’m not indifferent to the suffering. But if we had held our moral ground, I believe we could have addressed that suffering while getting some relief on the Affordable Care Act premiums, or having Donald Trump say, we’re going to get rid of the filibuster.
And instead, why is it that the Democrats always seem like we’re the ones that fold? I guess the answer they say is, well, we’re the adults in the room. But the point is, in this case, the adults in the room are defending a status quo that isn’t working. That’s been part of the problem—why we’ve gotten Donald Trump—because we’ve kind of said, let’s just keep the institutions running. And the American people are saying, these institutions have been shafting us. We don’t want the same institutions.
And I think that’s the fundamental disconnect between some of the folks in the establishment and some of the younger folks, like Zohran and progressives and others, who are saying, no, we need change.
Bacon: Real last question is, does—I hate to say this—but does this help the people who are trying to change the parties, Zohran and Graham Platner, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna? Does it help you make that case that Schumer is discrediting himself?
Representative Khanna: Well look, I obviously, I was much more excited on Tuesday night when I could celebrate Zohran, Abigail, and Mikey.
Yeah. And I thought, OK, here the party is finally coming together. And I don’t like the fact that, that, that I put out a tweet on Wi-Fi on my airplane ‘cause I was still in the airports and it gets four million views and is going viral. But I was surprised ‘cause I was ready to be hit the way I was hit when I endorsed Graham Platner and the way I was hit when I have taken stances on calling what happened in Gaza genocide because the ICJ found that.
I thought, OK, here it comes, I’m going to get hit again. And to my surprise, a lot of Democrats, even not progressives, agreed with me and said, you know what, Ro, you’re, you’re right about this one. And so I just think that this is a moment where the Democratic Party is realizing more broadly—they may disagree with me on Medicare for All, they may disagree with me on Gaza, but they agree with me that we need a new generation of leadership.
Bacon: On that note. Congressman, thanks for joining me. Great to see you.
Representative Khanna: Thank you.
