Congressman Tom Suozzi on Bipartisanship in the Trump Era

32m
Congressman Tom Suozzi joins Jessica for a candid conversation about what it really means to work across the aisle in today’s political climate. They dive into bipartisanship, whether Trump might actually cut a deal on Dreamers, and how Democrats can win back moderates and young voters. Plus, which Republicans does he think he can actually get things done with?

Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.
Follow Congressman Tom Suozzi, @RepTomSuozzi.

Editor's Note: Tom Suozzi voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, but has voiced concerns about whether transgender students should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
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Transcript

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm very excited to have Congressman Tom Swasey with us today.

He represents New York's 3rd congressional district and is known for walking the bipartisan tightrope, something we don't see a lot these days and that we need much more of.

He has been vocal about finding common ground with Republicans during Trump's new administration, even suggesting that Democrats dial back some of the resistance to Trump's policies to work towards what he calls true democracy.

Tom, you've made headlines recently, not just for your takes on bipartisanship, but for some controversial stances, like your vote against letting transgender athletes participate in girls' high school sports and your willingness to collaborate with Trump on border control.

So, let's dive right in.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I want to start with the basics.

You're in Washington, front row seat to all of this.

What has stuck out to you so far?

And what do you feel is different from Trump 1.0?

Well, Trump is different in that he's got a lot more experience and he's really set himself up to hit the ground running.

And I really think that he was surprised when he won the first time and

surrounded himself with people.

Weren't we all?

Yeah, right.

He surrounded himself with people that, uh, the first time, I think, that were seen as being, you know, Washington experts and people have been around, but they weren't necessarily

his team per se.

And now he's got a lot more people around him that are just totally pro-Trump and, you know, which is a little scary in a way, and

that are going to go along with him.

I've been thinking about, you know, he lost so many people from his cabinet the first time.

Who's going to be the person with an independent mindset that says, Mr.

President, I really don't think this is a good way to go and you should consider doing it this way.

So I think only like Rubio is a person who's like an independent person.

He's got his own view of the world.

You know, he wants to be the president or he ran for president previously.

But, you know, so far, he's he's going along with President Trump.

Everybody else is kind of like they're just part of the MAGDA movement.

And

I don't know that they're going to have the

temerity to stand up and say, hey, I don't think we're doing this the right way, Mr.

President.

But we'll see.

We have, you know, we have, we have, there's so much happening right now.

It's just come, you know, I just last night realized it's only been a week.

I know.

And it's hard to imagine.

Trump is really good at, you know, saying, hey, look over here, look over here.

And, you know, he's doing 50 things over there.

So when he does Greenland and the Panama Canal and the Gulf of America, you know, what happened to let's reduce prices, let's end the Ukrainian war in one day,

let's get some of these other things done that he said would be so easy to do, get the price of eggs down, get gasoline prices down.

So he's a master of distraction to get you all, and everybody takes the bait, gets all excited, you know, talking about these things, and he's really doing 10 other things off to the side.

And something's very serious.

Something's very serious indeed.

Think of it as the manufactured chaos of everything.

And you just touched on a theme that I wanted to talk to you about, which is what do you pay attention to and what do you let slide?

Or not slide per se, but just you don't have enough time to

outrage everything.

You can't, you know, you can't, you know, blow up at everything.

So when he gave his inaugural address,

he said a lot of things that I would disagree with that I and some things that I thought were totally inappropriate.

But I'm choosing to say, okay, let's focus on the things we can agree upon.

I agree that we need to secure the border.

I agree that we should deport criminals.

I support you when you say that we should rapidly reduce prices.

He said something about, you know, chronic disease and helping young people.

Yeah, let's do that stuff.

So let's, you know,

we've got to pick and choose, you know, what we can work on.

And then some things, well, of all the 50 things that gets you maybe a little exercised, you have to pick the one or two things that you want to focus on.

So, for example,

you know,

the pardons, okay, that's a pretty big deal because he did a blanket pardon for 1,600 people.

And I focus on one case that really just, when I read about it, just really blows me away.

There's a guy named Daniel Rodriguez.

On January 6th, they were beating up a Capitol police officer.

He was on the ground.

People were yelling and kicking and punching, and people were saying, kill him, kill him.

And Daniel Rodriguez takes a taser and sticks it in the police officer's neck.

And the police officer has a heart attack and has traumatic brain injury as a result of this assault.

The guy, Daniel Rodriguez, sent a text out to his buddies that were uncovered as part of his prosecution.

And he said, You wouldn't believe this SH I just did, and I got away.

And I just tased the you-know-what out of the blue.

Now, this guy pleads guilty, gets a 12-year sentence, and he's one of the people who was pardoned.

I mean,

how can you say, you know, like, I'm pro-law enforcement, I'm pro-cops?

You know, in New York, where I'm from, you know, there's a big thing about people assaulting police officers and then getting out, which is upsetting.

I'm upset by that.

How can you pardon a guy like that?

And there's not, he's not just one example.

There's lots of examples, but that's the one that just really stood out to me.

Hundreds of people that, you know, did violent assaults against law enforcement.

So

I totally agree with you and thought mistakenly that J.D.

Vance was correct or had talked to Trump about their strategy vis-a-vis the pardon saying, okay, the people who are non-violent, who were actually just walking around taking pictures, we can all agree to let them go.

But if you had assaulted a police officer, you would stay in prison.

But Trump decided, as per the reporting, F it, right?

Let them all out.

But my question building off of that then is, how do you make that stick to Trump?

Because that has been true that he isn't supportive of law enforcement in actual terms versus standing up there and saying, I love the cops, right?

You know, our military isn't getting enough support.

The Democrats are anti-American and people buy that.

They believe that the Republican Party is the party that supports law and order.

So right now, I'm not focused on making it stick.

Okay.

Right now, I'm focused on

where can we find common ground?

Where can we get stuff done?

Where can we solve problems and make our country a better place?

And, you know, as we get closer to the 2026 elections and then ultimately the 2028 elections, well, then let's, you know,

let's use

our platforms to point out, you know, these, these egregious examples.

And, you know,

we have to do something about the border.

And the Democrats, you know,

are behind the eight ball in this.

We've lost the plot.

And we have got to, we can't say we're against deporting criminals, okay?

No, we have to deport criminals.

And I can guarantee you that they're going to make mistakes as they go.

I've been in government a long time.

I was the mayor of my hometown for eight years.

I was the county executive of a big county for eight years.

I was in Congress for six years.

I left to run for governor, got my ass kicked in a Democratic primary.

George Santos won my seat.

So then they got rid of him.

Everybody said,

please come back.

So I've been in government a long time.

So

government doesn't always do things right.

They make mistakes.

And they're going to make a lot of mistakes when it comes to these deportations.

You know, say we're going after criminals and we agree, let's go after criminals.

Well, what happens when you target a criminal, you go to break down the door to go get him, and he moved.

And now there's an innocent family living there.

And these kids are terrorized.

What's going to happen when you start taking mommy and daddy away from their kids?

Or, you know, so

let's work together

to try and address the issues and then save our fire for the more egregious things that we can agree on as a, as, as, as people that want to save our country that we need to highlight because it's just way beyond the pale.

Well, that brings me to the Lake and Riley Act, which you supported and were very vocal of, even though you admitted that the bill is, quote, not perfect.

It sends a clear message that we think criminals should be deported.

So can you talk a bit about the bill?

And then also there has been significant Democratic pushback on it because it does have provisions in it that we don't generally like, no protections for minors, for dreamers.

People who have just been charged with a crime could be deported versus convicted.

So can you talk about how you arrived at being such a strong supporter of it?

how you think it's going to be implemented and hopefully change the face of immigration in the country for the better?

You know, I thought because it was the first thing out of the box and it was mainly targeted towards criminals,

that we had no choice but to support it.

And we had supported it,

I think 30 or 40 of us had supported.

Democrats had supported it last year as well.

And, you know, if I was in law school and I was debating this bill when I was in law school, I would have been like, hmm, I have a problem with this and I have a problem with that and I don't like this thing.

And, you know, I would tell you what everything's wrong with it.

But I think that, you know, we have to accept the fact that America's Americans want us to do something about this, and we have to move forward.

And if there are imperfections as we see

that will arise, we need to try and correct that as we go along.

I mean, you know, one thing I always like to point out is like, when you pass a bill, that's not the end of the story.

I mean, there's things that happen, the government doesn't stop functioning.

And so a lot of this is going to be how they implement it and what they do

and what, you know, what can they do under existing law that

this is just a repeat of.

So I think it was very important for us to say that we are on board with the idea of securing our border, of making our country safer.

And

we are behind on this issue.

And listen, we've been fighting this for 30 years and we still haven't protected the Dreamers completely.

And we still haven't protected the TPS recipients, temporary protective status.

People that we invited to America after an earthquake or a war or a famine and said, come to America, you'll be safe here.

They've been here for 20 or 30 years, a lot of these folks, and they still don't have any sort of status.

And,

you know, farm workers, 50% of our farm workers in America are probably undocumented, meatpacking plants.

So when I talk about immigration, what I want to get to is I want to secure the border.

I want to fix the broken asylum system.

And I'd like to talk about that if you have time to talk about that.

I'd love to.

And I'd like to

save these dreamers, kids, you know, that have been here 20, 30 years, that are now young adults, that are either working, going to college, or join the military, and give them status here in America.

So they have to stop looking over their shoulder.

Let them travel freely.

Let them work and pay taxes.

Same thing with TPS.

So we have to do all three, secure the border, fix asylum, and treat people like human beings and address some of these longstanding issues.

So

can I talk about asylum?

Yeah, I would would love that because I, you know, over the weekend, Tom Homan made some news in an interview talking about how they've gotten rid of the CBP One app and they're saying just go to the ports of entry when that was exactly what they told us they didn't want people to do.

So, you have tens of thousands of people who've been waiting in Mexico, some over a year for their appointments.

And to my mind, they're trying to get rid of the asylum system, generally speaking.

So, please let us know what you think about that.

Okay, so the asylum law was first passed in 1980.

Now, I'm 62 years old.

So, in the 1980s, we loved asylum.

It was the Soviet, a Soviet, someone from the Soviet Union defecting to America.

There was a movie with Robin Williams called Moscow on the Hudson.

And it was like, when someone defected from the Soviet Union, we were like, yes, asylum, come to America.

We're better.

They're the bad guys.

We're the good guys.

Come here.

It's wonderful.

We love asylum.

You know, people are defecting from Cuba.

We loved asylum.

Now, what's happening is cartels and coyotes and organized crime is making billions of dollars, billions of dollars by charging people $10,000 a person to take them on this awful trek to get to our southern border, subjecting them to sexual and other physical violence, robbery, even death, human trafficking.

And they say, we'll get you to the southern border.

And this is what you do when you get there to claim asylum.

Now,

they're gaming the system.

Most of the people trying to come to America to claim asylum are coming for economic reasons.

You can't claim asylum for that.

You have to have a credible threat that you're being persecuted in your country because of your political beliefs or something like that.

And 85% of the people that claim asylum in America, 85%

are denied asylum.

The problem is, is because the system is so overwhelmed, it takes six, seven, eight, nine years for that case to be adjudicated where you're actually denied.

And the system is broken and it's outdated and it hasn't been updated for 30 years.

So we need to fix the broken asylum system.

I don't think, and I have a lot of smart people that I've been talking to, including progressives as well as conservatives, that we should not be accepting asylum applications at the southern border.

We should be setting up

what I'm calling foreign and remote application centers.

So that's far, like far away.

You can apply in Colombia.

You can apply in Guatemala.

You can apply in Africa.

You can apply in Europe, you can apply elsewhere in the world to seek asylum at a safe location, and we'll adjudicate your case while you are there in that safe location.

Remain in Mexico is a terrible policy because we're saying come to the southern border, apply, and remain in Mexico while you get abused in Mexico, where people exploit you, where people take advantage of you.

We shouldn't be encouraging people to come to the southern border to apply for asylum.

Apply in these other locations throughout the world.

reduce the volume in doing so, and adjudicate the cases.

And while your case is being adjudicated, you stay where you are.

You don't remain in Mexico.

You remain south of Mexico, eastern Mexico, western Mexico.

And you,

if you're accepted, you come to America.

If you're not accepted, you don't come to America.

But we have to stop this whole stream of people and we have to stop incentivizing these organized criminals who are making billions, again, billions of dollars off this system.

And they think they're going to keep on making money even under the Trump administration.

They're going to game the system.

So let's do the stuff that was in the Senate bill to secure the border, the bipartisan Senate deal that Trump killed during the election.

Let's fix the broken asylum system.

And Trump said he wants to make a deal on the Dreamers.

Let's do that.

Let's make a deal on the Dreamers.

Let's make a deal on the Dreamers and the TPS recipients and the farm workers and some other groups.

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Do you feel like the fact that Trump is a bit of an ideological wildcard means that he actually might do a Dreamers NTPS deal with the Democrats?

I think so.

You know,

we can't just rely on his good faith, obviously.

We have to be strategic about it.

We have to think of things that he needs from us and make that part of the negotiation.

And then politically, say, listen, well, you said you want to secure the border.

We got a way to secure the border for real, not just an executive order, but for real.

You say you want to make a deal on the Dreamers.

We're ready to make a deal on the Dreamers.

We're ready to do all the stuff to fix this problem you put your money where your mouth is instead of just talking about it let's do it for real because right now

i you know if they want to do a lot of stuff through reconciliation now for people who may not understand reconciliation is just a budget bill you can't change policy you can't change the laws you can change the financing of things so you could get more money for border agents and you could get more money for immigration judges and you could get more money for the wall and you know you could get more money for certain things detention beds you can get more money for those things but you can't change the rules regarding asylum you can't change you know saying we need to stop asylum applications in between the ports of entry of the southern border uh you can't fix the dreamer issue you can't fix tps you can't fix foreign you know what trump wants to do between tariffs

and deportation of so many people will be very inflationary.

And his biggest problem is to rapidly reduce prices.

I'm pretty much willing to predict right now that come two years and four years from now, prices will be either the same or higher because of his policies.

It's going to be very hard for him to lower prices, especially with his policies of tariffs and deportation.

Yeah.

I understood, obviously, why a bunch of the Democratic senators supported Scott Bessant for Treasury Secretary, but I didn't hear anything out of that committee hearing or what he said that sounds like we're going to be successful in lowering prices with the way the economy is set up right now.

And that is what voters were interested in and why they picked the other team for this.

And I want to shift gears a little bit to talk about where the Democrats are and this feeling and is borne out by the data that we've really lost touch with working class voters, that that used to be our coalition and now we're a coalition backed by people who are more like me, you know, college educated, liberal women, and a lot of them white.

What do you think Democrats can do to build that coalition back and make sure as well that we keep in a lot of the moderate Republicans and independents, people who think like you and came over to the Democratic side for electing Joe Biden and then certainly post-January 6th have stuck with us?

So I think the biggest problem the Democrats face is that we've lost the working class.

And that's, you know, the reason I'm a Democrat is because I believe that, you know, for America to be successful, we have to have a strong middle class in our country.

And that's not going to happen on its own in our system.

Government has to play a role in helping to foster the creation of a middle class.

And

Democrats need to start talking about, you know, Republicans are trying to say they're for the working class.

Well, the minimum wage in America is $7.25 an hour in 20 states.

Democrats are in favor of increasing the minimum wage.

Republicans are not in favor of increasing the minimum wage.

Democrats are in favor of unions and promoting the PRO Act, which is a way to encourage more union membership in America.

Republicans are against the PRO Act.

Democrats are in favor of giving more teeth to the National Labor Relations Board.

Republicans are afraid of giving more power to the National Labor Relations Board.

So first we have to understand what happened in our country.

So in the 1980s,

America was terrified that the Japanese and the German car companies were crushing America's big three automakers.

And we were worried they were going to take over all manufacturing in our country.

And we freaked out.

And a guy named Milton Friedman, a famous economist, wrote a paper and he said, listen,

stop worrying about the employees.

Stop worrying about the communities that you operate in and focus on the shareholder.

If you focus on the shareholder, We will succeed.

We will beat this global threat of globalization and we will win.

And we did.

We focused on the shareholders to the exclusion of the employees and the communities we're in.

And we made a lot of money.

We were very successful.

The Dow Jones has got up 2,500%.

The GDP has gone up 1,500%.

But workers' wages have gone up by less than 30%.

And it's best manifest in a couple of movies.

One is the movie Wall Street.

You know the movie Wall Street with Michael Duncan?

Of course.

Gordon Gecko says, greed is good.

And the idea is, you know, we're going to do whatever it takes to stop this fat company from

that's not changing with the times to be more efficient.

And in the movie Pretty Woman, you remember Pretty Woman with Richard Gere?

I cited it yesterday.

I said slippery little suckers.

It's the best.

Yeah.

So

Richard Gere and Jason

Alexander from Seinfeld, you know, was his sidekick.

Yeah.

And they're going to buy up this old guy's company and chop it up for parts.

What's that?

And chop it up for parts.

And chop it up for parts and sell off the shipbuilding.

Guy says, the older man man says, but thousands of people will lose their jobs and this town will be decimated.

He says, yeah, but we're going to make a lot of money.

And that's what happened in America is we got rid of a lot of these factory towns.

People lost their union jobs, left behind a polluted property.

People now, instead of, you know, making 70 or 80 or $90,000 a year and having health insurance and a pension, don't have that anymore.

They're working for $10.

If you make $10 an hour and you work 40 hours a week and you work 50 weeks a year and you have two weeks vacation, you're only making $20,000 a year.

If you make $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that's $30,000 a year.

You're not going to be able to buy a house, educate your kids, pay for health insurance and retire one day without being scared on $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 a year.

It's impossible.

So we got all these people in these hollowed out communities throughout the country that are pissed off because

they're working hard.

They're not making enough money.

They don't have health insurance.

They're getting bankrupt by their debt.

Their churches are empty.

There's no more Elks Club.

Their kids are doing methamphetamine or fentanyl or getting dying from overdoses.

People are losing their teeth.

And it's like, what happened to my town?

You know, what happened to my life?

And they're pissed off and they're looking for a savior and they fell for Donald Trump's line.

Joe Biden actually did a lot of great stuff

with the Infrastructure Act, Act, with the CHIPS Act, with promoting unions to try and rebuild the middle class.

He always said, he's just, unfortunately, President Biden was not the greatest communicator in the world.

He always said, we want to build from the bottom up and from the middle out.

That's what we need to do in America.

We need to rebuild the middle class and people who aspire to the middle class so that they make enough money so that they can afford.

to have a house, educate their kids, pay for health insurance, and retire without being scared.

Until we start talking talking about that as our main issues to people again, we're going to keep on losing the working class.

As long as we're focused on some of the cultural issues and some of the things that, like, you know, why are you so worried about this guy who came here is undocumented and committed a crime?

And I, and I'm not making enough money to take care of my family.

I don't have a health, I don't have a health insurance or a pension anymore.

What about me?

What are you doing about me?

So, we got to get back to

the basics.

One last thing.

When Trump was first elected in 2016, I went to a big meeting at the

Driple C.

People were sitting around a table, 50 people.

And one union guy says, the Democrats used to show up at church picnics and at the bars, and they would talk to you.

They don't do that anymore.

And that's the problem.

When I first started talking about the border in my special election to take the seat that George Santos was kicked out of, And I was talking about the border.

Everybody's like, why are you talking about the border?

That's a Republican issue.

I was like, this is what everybody's talking about.

We have to stop listening to the consultants and start listening to the people that we represent again.

Do you think that the people are still open to us if we change course and start showing up at the picnics and at church?

Yeah.

I mean,

politics, you know, goes in waves.

And, you know, right now we're on the downswing of our wave.

We got our brands out in trouble.

We have to get back to talking about what people care about and talking to the people.

Okay.

I would love that.

I was curious, as an extension of what you were just saying, how you think that we can address our problem with younger voters, because that is now an issue that I don't think, you know, I'm an elder millennial, grew up in the Obama era.

I never envisioned a world in which the Democratic Party would be so wildly uncool with young people.

So what do you think we can do about that?

I think that's more of a tactical thing.

You know, the media is fractured now.

That's why I'm on your show quite a few.

Yeah, we're thrilled to have you.

And I hope you'll come on Fox too a lot as well.

I mean, the bottom line is the media, we have the, there's five parts of the media now.

Traditional media, which is your local daily newspaper and your local channels and your cable news and, you know, the New York Times and the New York Post for me and, you know, other traditional media.

Weekly papers, very important.

Anybody anybody reads a weekly paper your local paper they're definitely voting i always say my my voters are not on social media they're on social security you have traditional media then you have social media and that's about organizing people that are there not it's not about saying extreme crazy stuff which i'll never end up doing that it's about organizing people that think the way you do to get them to repost your stuff it's like it's like any kind of field organizing of a campaign you have to figure out how to get other people working with you on the message you're trying to sell.

Then you have podcasts and

the thing that Trump did so effectively by reaching out to different groups, especially young men, which is his target, and spending time doing that.

And we need to do a better job of that as Democrats.

Then you have ethnic media and then you have the national media.

So

it takes a lot of work.

First, you got to figure out

who's paying attention.

in your district and beyond your district to sell the message.

And then you have to do the hard work of spending time in each of these different silos.

Because when I came up in politics, you know, you did a press release and the paper's covered.

It was maybe you got lucky to get on TV and that was good enough.

Now you have to do a lot of work and spend a lot of time in each of these different silos.

Now you got to hang out with people like me.

And I'm learning a lot from this.

And I love the longer format anyway.

Yeah, it's great.

And it's a great medium for you.

So, one last thing: what issue is most exciting or animating for you to work on?

And who are some Republicans or even one that you feel like you have a good relationship with and that you're going to be able to get stuff done with?

Okay, well, I have to work on the border.

That's my big thing.

That's your big thing.

Secure the border, fix the broken asylum system, dreamers, TPS recipients, farm workers.

I'm working with a conservative Republican from Texas named Morgan Luttrell, former Nav CEO, young guy, has a lot of 30,000 dreamers in his district from a border state.

Seems like he wants to get this done.

He's worried about getting out too far in front of Trump.

But, you know, we've, and we're building a coalition of others.

But I'm also the new co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

My Democratic colleague selected me as the Democratic co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

Brian Fitzpatrick is the Republican co-chair.

He and I work together.

And

like you asked a very important question: who do you have a good relationship with?

You have to constantly work at building relationships.

And I try to do that through the problem solvers.

I go to the prayer breakfast meetings.

I go to a bipartisan workout class.

Wherever I can get a way to hang out with people to understand where they're coming from and so they can understand where I'm coming from, we can find common ground.

I love it.

And I'm sure people are also thankful that you have gotten George Santos out of their hair.

Though he was great comedy.

Congressman, thank you so much for your time.

I hope that we will see you again.

Everyone should also read your op-ed in the New York Times from January 1st.

It was a nice New Year's Day read about a lot of the themes we talked about here, bipartisanship, where you have to push back, where you can hold the line and also work together.

And thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much, Jess.

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