Congressman Pat Ryan
speaker
72 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Congressman Pat Ryan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks for having me, Jess. I'm sorry, I'm choking on my coffee here. I apologize.
That's how excited I am to be on the show. I'm just like chugging coffee and got too excited. So I'm a huge fan of yours and appreciate the good fight that you continue to fight to actually say things that are truthful and authentic and honest on an important news channel that we all know is out there.
Yeah, and I think it's really important to center the American people and my constituents on what they're hearing and feeling, which is an unprecedented, we've got an unprecedented level of calls, emails, texts. Honestly, friends, I haven't talked to like a decade or texting me like, dude, what is going on? What can we do? And people are rightly deeply concerned about an unprecedented encroachment
on our privacy, on at least one, if not multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights. And I think that it calls for appropriate aggressive action. And I've tried to give all the new administration the benefit of the doubt, but it's very clear to me, Elon Musk is a villain and we have to talk in our The moment we're in, we have to have heroes and villains in our story as Democrats.
And Musk has now certainly earned that title. And we should hold him accountable, not only for getting all up in everybody's private data at Treasury and these other agencies, but also I'm going to start shining a light through my role in the Armed Services Committee.
in the potential, if not certain, corruption around all his defense contracts, where he stands to personally make an incredible billions of dollars with access to privilege, access to information and connections based on how much money his companies have already been paid before he was in this position. Forget about now.
So I think we're in a moment right now, more broadly, maybe talk about this more later, where
We have to be in just constant communication with, in my case, 800,000 constituents, with the American people, and without judgment, and certainly without any condescension, just describing what the real harmful impacts of this is and will be, the harmful impacts of the funding freeze, whether that's Head Starts in my district that still don't have funding to feed and care for kids, or 20 veteran inpatient beds at my local VA that I go to,
in the Hudson Valley of New York State that had to close because of Trump's hiring freeze on personnel. This is hurting people deeply, and we have to get back on our front foot and start talking about the impacts of these decisions. Even if you voted for President Trump, you should at least know and be an informed citizen about what the impacts are.
Well, I think... We should certainly start with the most egregious violator of our constitution, which is Elon Musk. Everything he's doing and increasingly things he stands for and says are just directly contrary to the oath that I took as an army officer, the oath I've taken as a member of Congress, the oath that all my colleagues, by the way, have taken regardless of party.
And the oath that even the president himself took. And Elon didn't take that oath. He is an unelected, unaccountable guy who, as I think you said recently, wasn't even an American until not that long ago.
Well, these are just facts. I mean, we just have to share the facts. And I think not getting in the place of I told you so or condescension or judgment, we just have to inform people.
And my goal is to speak less myself and more highlight the voices of my constituents, whether that's veterans in my district that now don't have a place to go if they're at a crisis of a drug overdose, for example, or parents who don't know where to drop off their five rule because their head start might
close or farmers who just learned that a bunch of USDA payments are still frozen and all screwed up. So we need to elevate those voices of the American people, center the American people as the heroes, and make clear that Musk is the villain. And there are others too, but he's certainly number one.
Yeah, this is this is my if I do one thing in however many years, I'm fortunate to have this job goal, which is to stop the direction where in our country where having an American flag at your home or
know loving our country is somehow belongs to one party we need two functioning healthy parties at least we need three branches of government that have checks and balances these are all the things that our founding fathers and mothers talked about wrote about the federalist papers and so on and i think we're at a moment in the country we we do need as leaders not just in politics but all leaders need to remind people
And sort of go back to our patriotic founding revolutionary roots, where we had a Monarch with all power and control unaccountable and unelected taking our money for their own gain. And, you know, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. I think we're at a moment where we need patriots without partisanship attached to rise up here again. and reassert that.
And my goal is, you know, from within the democratic party, largely, although I have my disagreements with the party to build that coalition out from there. Because if you look at the last eight years, the Democrats are the patriotic party. We stood for our constitution and against an insurrection. We stood, um,
to keep our government open multiple times in my first two years in Congress when the Republicans wanted to shut it down. And so we have to make that proactive case. And I think so much of the frustration I have with the Democratic Party is right now we've left a vacuum
for our opponents to define us, in many cases, not grounded in reality or focusing on sort of the loudest voices that represent the far extreme. And we need to make sure we're proactively putting out this patriotic vision, really, of where we think the country can and should go.
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