New York Sen Gillibrand: ‘If We’re Not Helping People, We Should Go the F**k Home’

Gillibrand Seth Wenig AP
Seth Wenig/AP

New York’s Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand thinks politicians should “go the f**k home” if they aren’t willing to spend their time “helping people.”

Gillibrand made her remarks in an interview with New York Magazine in which she insisted that her view of a lawmaker’s role is similar to that of Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

“I know Susan’s worldview is similar to my worldview. Which is that we’re here to help people, and if we’re not helping people, we should go the f**k home,” Gillibrand exclaimed.

Indeed, the article notes that Sen. Collins said she would not be surprised if Gillibrand tries to run for president soon.

“She has enormous ability, she works extremely hard, she’s engaging, she’s young. And don’t take that as an endorsement, or I’ll be in even more trouble than I am now,” Collins said.

The magazine’s article aims at burnishing the New York Senator’s bonafides as the voice of “no” in the Senate and notes she has been a solid “no” vote for almost every nominee President Trump has put forward. Of her constant “no” votes, the article claims Gillibrand is “heroic,” that her votes “line up with her principles,” and she is not just an automatic “no” because she hates Trump.

“I look at each nominee,” the Sen. said. “If they suck, I vote against them. If they’re worthy, I vote for them.” The claim might ring a bit hollow when measuring her knee-jerk, automatic “no” votes against her claim to be casting a considered vote.

Her anti-Trump votes are especially telling in light of the original pro-gun, tough-on-immigration views she espoused when she was elevated to the U.S. Senate — views she quickly dumped as soon as she became a Senator.

The senator also showed she is an isolated partisan by noting that everyone she knew was “crushed” after Trump’s election. “Nobody was reaching out. Everybody was so crushed, like a sadness you couldn’t process,” she said of last year’s election.

And her hard partisan views are drawing raves from the far left. Ilyse Hogue, president of the extremist, pro-abortion group NARAL, praised Gillibrand’s sudden elevation as a progressive darling.

“Kirsten understands that going along to get along yielded nothing in terms of compromise. I think she’s set a great model for the rest of the caucus,” Hogue told the magazine.

Gillibrand also aims to be the Senate’s gender warrior, insisting that she thinks the upper chamber needs to be “51 percent female” to reflect the gender breakdown in the country at large. And with more women, Gillibrand imagines there would be “less bickering.” She said:

Just literally having 51 percent of women in Congress representing the diversity of our country: You would have different issues raised, different solutions being offered, you’d have less partisan bickering. Because our disposition is to help. When we do our legislation, we’re not trying to figure out how can I use this to run against you; we say, ‘How can we pass this bill to help both of our constituents?’ Our economy would be stronger, because we’d be dealing with things like paid leave and equal pay legitimately, as opposed to just using it as a talking point.

As the article wraps up, it speculates that the Senator’s “learning” to go from a “moderate” state legislator to a hard charging, left-wing activist in Washington is her scheme to launch a run for president in 2020.

“And like Sanders, she sees in left-wing populism — in affordable day care and paid leave and the expansion of Medicare as a means of addressing economic inequality — a path for red and blue America to come together,” New York writer Rebecca Traister concludes.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.

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