Washington Gridlock Raises Questions About Bipartisanship and Legislative Reform

0:00 Speaker 1 Calling in now is Senator Kevin Cramer from the great state of North Dakota. And well, a lot of hardworking, honest people up there in North Dakota, Senator Cramer.

0:12 Speaker 2 Nearly all of them, near as I can tell. They’re hardworking, common sense people that just want a government to stay out of their hair and do no harm. But anyway, we’re trying to do, we’re doing our best for that.

0:23 Speaker 1 Tell us what you have on your mind on a Sunday morning.

0:27 Speaker 2 Yeah, so it’s, One of the things that’s on my mind a little bit is I regret that last week Democrats prevented us from proceeding to a measure that would ban insider trading by public officials. Can you imagine? That bill passed the House 417 to 3, and every Senate Democrat, I think maybe three or four may have voted for it.

0:51 I don’t know, but they prevented us from getting to 60 votes. to ban insider trading by government officials and, of course, to require photo ID to vote. Incredible.

1:04 Speaker 2 They also blocked a bill, if you can imagine, they blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act. That’s the bill. I’m sorry, the Ratepayer Protection Act is one that was 417 to 3 in the House. And they blocked it. And all that would have done is it would have, you know.

1:19 Speaker 1 Well, if it voted for 17 to 3, how do you block it?

1:23 Speaker 2 Well, you block it in the Senate by not letting us get to 60 votes. And I think the problem with that is that it was a bill that was introduced by Senator John Husted, who, of course, is in a targeted Senate race in Ohio against former Senator Sherrod Brown.

1:39 And they’d rather have Sherrod Brown have a talking point than John Husted have a talking point. Now, I don’t know how you brag about stopping the Ratepayer Protection Act. Again, overwhelmingly supported by both the electorate and by the House of Representatives. But that’s their problem. They’re so warped, John, that these DSA folks that are running the Democratic Party,

2:02 these Democratic socialists, they’re so warped that they’d rather see the country fail than see another Republican senator win re-election.

2:10 Speaker 1 I mean, it’s gotten too political, Senator. I’ve been around politics for 30, 40 years. I’ve never seen it so political before.

2:19 Speaker 2 Yeah, it’s an interesting point, isn’t it? You live there in New York, of course, and right in the heart of the Democrat socialist agenda, and they’re trying to take over the city, which they’ve sort of done with Mayor Mamdani and, of course, AOC, who’s one of the most famous socialists of all time. Bernie Sanders, of course, remains

2:37 socialist royalty. But, yeah, I don’t know what’s happening to the deterioration here that’s allowed this hyper-partisanship. See, and that’s the part I think that disappoints me, John. I have a lot of good friends, including some from New York, that are Democratic members of the House and the Senate.

2:54 And they’re doing their best to sort of stand up against this, but it’s just overwhelming their party. And so when partisanship takes over, you can’t get common sense things done like stop insider trading. Now, the good news is we did last week also pass the Protection for College Sports Act. So at least that got done and We

3:17 provided some guardrails for college sports, which, as you know.

3:21 Speaker 1 Are they scared to vote sanely, some of the Democrats?

3:27 Speaker 2 So that’s a great question. Are they scared? I think they are afraid of some of their leadership. I think in the case of Chuck Schumer, who’s the Democratic leader in the Senate, he’s afraid of AOC and Mamdani. And so once transactional chairs... A majority leader, minority leader, depending on who’s at the majority, he’s no longer transactional. He’s

3:50 just scared. And so he takes his fear and he translates it into the rest of the caucus and threatens them with whatever a leader can threaten them with to make sure they don’t help us pass something important like, you know, voter ID or ratepayer protection or, you know, you name the common sense. So anyway, it’s frustrating. It’s discouraging.

4:14 Speaker 1 Well, the other day the president had some event on AI. They had a trillion dollars worth of, I guess, businessmen in the office. Probably two trillion or three trillion. What did you make out about this whole AI thing?

4:34 Speaker 2 Well, I think it’s interesting that the president— First of all, remember, the big announcement was he’s officially changing it from AI to SI for the executive branch. So it’s super intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Now, you know, I’ve heard the term supercomputing, of course, and I’ve heard super artificial intelligence, but super intelligence, I think I kind of like it in a way.

4:56 I think it’s the president acknowledging that this is in fact super. It’s not just artificial. My only little personal, maybe it’s doctrinal problem with it is it does imply that somehow these machines are smarter than people. And while we count on that to some degree, remember they are invented by people. They are programmed by people.

5:20 Speaker 1 I put out a cat’s corner out on it, and I said it’s only as good as the programmers and only as good as the companies they work for, but because... I programmed computers in my company 70 years ago, 50 years ago, and they’re only as good as the programmers and only as good as the company that owns the programmers.

5:43 Speaker 2 Yeah.

5:44 Speaker 1 No, that’s true.

5:44 Speaker 2 And, of course, the other information that they glean off the Internet and stuff, and God knows there’s plenty in the Internet that’s not true. So, anyway, all of that, it was fascinating. I do think this, John. You know, there’s all this talk about slowing down the progress and the...

6:04 growth of AI and the processing of it and whatnot, the development of it. And I think that’s silly talk, quite honestly. I think you need to be smart, but I don’t think you need to be slow. Because if we slow down AI development in the United States, it’s going to go other places. And China’s doing it already.

6:21 And we don’t want them to beat us at it. But I do think we need, and this is the benefit of North Dakota, when you talk about hardworking people, Coming from a state of 780,000 people, where I know about half of them personally, or at least they all have my cell number, we’re able to have family discussions

6:37 about these things. And that’s why when you look at data centers in North Dakota, data centers in North Dakota have actually helped bring electricity rates down because we have common sense application to it. We don’t get in the way of the development. We just fashion it in a way that’s good for everybody. And so... I think that

6:56 a little bit of that’s gotten lost at the national level. Panic has sort of set in. The Chinese bots have polluted our inboxes a little bit. We need to slow that part of it down and talk about it in a more sane and civil way. But we need to be the leader in AI, plain and simply.

7:15 Speaker 1 We have to take the leadership, but we also have to acknowledge the dangers of it. And I think we have to proceed... Proceed with caution, but we have to proceed.

7:27 Speaker 2 That’s exactly right. Very well said. Anyway, North Dakota is much like the rest of America in that we are forward-leaning thinkers. We’re innovators. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t have survived this long. We don’t want to do anything that stifles that, but we also don’t want to lose that moral compass, the ethical base that our country is founded

7:51 on and based on, While we do these big things, I don’t care if you’re doing space travel or you’re doing super intelligence or artificial intelligence. You want to do it in an ethical and moral way that puts people first.

8:04 And we can do that. We just need to have more family discussions about it.

8:09 Speaker 1 Senator Kramer, thank you so much for calling in to the CATS roundtable on Sunday morning. And we’ll talk again real soon.

8:16 Speaker 2 I always look forward to it. Thank you.