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Rep. Blake Farenthold Interview about Obamacare, Government Shutdown; Navy Yard Shooter Went from Floor to Floor; Rep. Chris Van Hollen Interviewed about Democrat Strategy on Government Shutdown; Zuckerberg Heads to Capitol Hill; Why Kerry Washington is Emmys "It" Girl.

Aired September 19, 2013 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us now, Texas Republican Congressman Blake Farenthold.

Where do you stand, Congressman, on this issue? Are you with those who say, you know what, you don't have votes to defeat Obamacare, but you've got to keep the government open, or are you willing to see the government shutdown in order to try to kill Obamacare?

REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD (R), TEXAS: Listen, I haven't given up hope yet. We haven't passed a bill out of the House to go over to the Senate and you've got all these gloom and doom senators saying they can't do it. I've heard Ted Cruz on the campaign trail. If can't convince a couple of Democrats to do the right thing and defund Obamacare, I'm going to be a little disappointed.

BLITZER: But they don't have the votes in the Senate, as you well know. The Democrats have a majority. You control the House of Representatives but you need the Senate. And apparently these Republicans in the Senate, they see that they simply doesn't have votes. You passed these resolutions, bills in the House many times to kill Obamacare. It goes nowhere in the Senate.

FARENTHOLD: Let's get the Senate to act. Let's get the Senate to do something. Send it back. Go to conference. There's lots of ways to go. We're not anywhere near shutting down the government. It's not the intent of anybody to shut down the government.

The bill we're going to pass out of the House Saturday funds all of the government but Obamacare. I tried to get the leadership name it "The Everything-But-Obamacare Bill," #EBOC.

BLITZER: Did you read Karl Rove's article in the "Wall Street Journal" today?

FARENTHOLD: I have not read Karl's article yet.

BLITZER: He says, "It would be a huge blunder on the Republicans part to link funding to the government shutdown." Among other things, he says, "Going down that road would strengthen the president while alienating Independents. It's an ill-conceived tactic and Republicans should reject it." Do you want to respond? FARENTHOLD: I don't want to shut down the government. I don't think many of my Republican colleagues do. We want to give the Senate -- Ted Cruz, Lee, these guys have been asking for a bill, attached to the C.R., that would defund Obamacare. They asked for it, we gave it to them. Let's see them deliver.

BLITZER: If they don't, what are you going to do? What if they send you back legislation, most likely a continuing resolution that will fund the government, they send it back to the House of Representatives, but it doesn't defund Obamacare? What do you do then?

FARENTHOLD: I think we go to conference. Listen, this is one of the leverage points we have in a divided government. As the House, we control the purse strings. Use the leverage to get something. I think the American people want Obamacare defunded. That's what I heard at town hall meetings. Surveys are showing it. The president's giving exemptions to corporate friends. His friends are labor unions, saying, bad idea. But maybe there's compromise. Maybe don't defund it. Maybe postpone it for a year until we get it sorted out and give us time to do something else. Lots of options. We just need the Senate to act.

BLITZER: That would be fine if you had votes in the Senate. But the Democrats have that majority in the Senate. So it looks like the Democrats are not going to do it. But let's say they actually were to do it and it came back to the House and became passed by the House and the Senate, you know the president would then veto that legislation. And then you would need a two-thirds override in both the House and the Senate to get it enacted. You don't even have that two-thirds override vote in the House of Representatives, certainly, not in the Senate.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: So isn't this an uphill struggle for you?

FARENTHOLD: Of course, it's an uphill struggle. All good things require work. But if that happens, if it does pass the House, pass the Senate, president vetoes it, it's pretty clear who is shutting down the government. It's the president, not the House and Senate.

BLITZER: You're willing to take that chance.

All right. Blake Farenthold, from Texas, joining us. He says Republicans need to stand up as he is. We'll see if they do, including Ted Cruz from Texas.

Appreciate it, Congressman, for your coming in.

FARENTHOLD: Anytime, Wolf.

BLITZER: Thank you.

Our justice reporter, Evan Perez, is joining us on a different story. The FBI -- he was at a briefing with FBI sources on the Washington Navy Yard shooting.

What are you learning, Evan?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Wolf. The FBI director did a briefing with reporters, his first since the Washington Navy Yard shooting. And he's telling us new details of what went down in building 197. The suspect entered around 8:00, as we have heard before. The Remington .870 shotgun was sawed off, a new detail we didn't know before. We had previously had been told by sources and the FBI believed that he was standing on the fourth floor and shooting down at the atrium where many people were killed. It turns out, they've now determined, that when he came out of the bathroom with the shotgun, he immediately starting shooting randomly with no discernible pattern. There was nobody he was trying to hit per se. He shot people on the fourth floor. Went down to the third floor, down to the lobby, came back up and continued shooting. This lasted 30 minutes. At some point, he shot a guard and took his Beretta pistol, his handgun. And when he ran out of shotgun bullets, shells, he started using the pistol to kill more people. All of this went down, like we said, in 30 minutes, when the first officers arrived and started shooting at him. And he tried to hide and they had this running gun battle for a little while.

BLITZER: Evan Perez with the latest from the FBI. I'm sure we'll be getting more of it.

Even, thank you for that initial report with more details including a sawed-off shotgun that resulted in the deaths of so many people at the Washington Navy Yard.

So we just heard a little while ago, one Republican Congressman, his take on what needs to be done. What about the Democrats in the House of Representatives? What are they preparing to do? I'll ask one of the leading Democrats in the House. The Congressman, Chris van Hollen, he's standing by live. He joins me next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Another side of the spending fight that's under way. Only 11 days left before the government might shut down, running out of money. Democrats say they've been left out of the House negotiations on a possible shutdown. They are in the minority, as you know.

Chris van Hollen, of Maryland, joining us from Capitol Hill, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

Walk us through what you suspect is going to happen over the next 11 days. Will there be a government shutdown?

REP. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, (D), MARYLAND: Well, Wolf, I certainly hope not. But even by Washington, D.C., standards, by congressional standards, what you're seeing here in the House of Representatives really is outrageous. What the Republicans are doing, and what you're seeing is the Tea Party faction has taken over, speaker of the House has given the gavel over to the Tea Party faction, and they've said that they will shut down the government if they can't totally shut down the Affordable Care Act. By the way, if they don't succeed in those rounds, they'll shut down the full faith and credit of the United States if they can't shut down the Affordable Care Act a little later.

These are outrageous demands. They're not going to be successful. The problem is that, in the meantime, it's creating a lot of crisis in confidence and certainly it's going to hurt the economy if we ever got to a situation where on the debt ceiling they really brought us to the brink of default.

BLITZER: In order to keep the government operating full-funding for another year, some Republicans are offering this as a compromise, since the president says he's going to delay implementation of certain parts of Obamacare for a year. Why not delay the whole thing for a year and at least allow the government to operate fully funded?

VAN HOLLEN: Well, Wolf, a couple of things. First of all, much of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, is already in progress. It's in motion. Millions of Americans are already benefiting from it. You have seniors on Medicare who don't have to pay as much for their prescription drugs. They don't fall into the doughnut hole. You have kids with pre-existing conditions like diabetes or asthma who no longer can be discriminated against based on those conditions by insurance companies. So, all of those millions of Americans who are currently benefiting would no longer get the benefit.

Secondly, the exchanges, the supermarket where Americans can buy affordable health insurance are to start up October 1st.

And it's important to remember this was originally a conservative Republican idea. That's why Governor Romney used this approach in Massachusetts. It helped provide affordable care to people in Massachusetts. And it's just very unfortunate that our colleagues want to deny that kind of affordable health insurance to millions of Americans and to threaten to shut down the government if they don't get their way.

BLITZER: The president says repeatedly he's willing to negotiate with the Republicans in the House and the Senate over the full funding of the government, making sure there's no government shutdown by the end of the month. But he says he's not willing to negotiate with them at all on raising the debt ceiling. They have to raise the debt ceiling. He's not willing to make new concessions on that front. You've heard the House speaker, John Boehner, say Reagan made concessions to raise the debt ceiling, George W. Bush made concessions, Bill Clinton did, and even President Obama did a couple years ago. Should he negotiate at least with Republicans on raising the debt ceiling by mid-October when the treasury says the U.S. must do that?

VAN HOLLEN: No, and here's the reason why, Wolf. People think you raise the debt ceiling so you can start a bunch of new programs, new spending. That's not the case. We don't want to do that. What we want to do is make sure that the U.S. government pays its existing obligations on time. You can't get up one morning, I can't get up, the American people can't get up and say we're not going to pay our mortgage or our credit card bills. If the United States wakes up one morning, like October 15th of this year, and says it's no longer going to pay its bills, whether to our soldiers who are fighting, whether it's on social security, whether it's to people who have U.S. treasury bonds, that would be catastrophic. So what the president is saying is that he is not going to somehow give Republicans some -- into their radical demands in exchange for making sure we pay our bills on time.

In those other cases you mentioned, almost all of them, the debt ceiling was a vehicle for something else but it wasn't used as a bargaining chip. It wasn't taken as a hostage in order to get those other things done, with the exception of 2011 when the Republicans in the House did this, and it did hurt the economy. We don't want that to happen again.

BLITZER: The president did in 2011 been but you're saying that's the last time. You should never negotiate over raising the debt ceiling, even if there are reasonable demands? Let's say the Republicans come forward with some relatively modest spending cuts to go ahead and raise the debt ceiling? You say no negotiations whatsoever?

VAN HOLLEN: No, Wolf, we've said this -- let's be really clear. We're happy to discuss spending cuts. We're happy to discuss shutting down some tax loopholes like the ones for big oil companies. In fact, just last night, I asked for the eighth time to have a vote in the House on a proposal to replace the sequester with a proposal that would get the same amount of deficit reduction, even more deficit reduction, without the deep, immediate cuts caused by the sequester, which we know are dragging down the economy. Republicans wouldn't allow us a vote on that proposal.

So, let's be really clear. The president is more than happy to negotiate with Republicans on budget issues, on where to cut, whether to cut tax loopholes. Where he will not negotiate is on whether or not the United States pays its bills on time, whether or not we live up to the full faith and credit of the United States. And we all know that if the United States ever did default, it would send our economy into a big downward spiral, very quickly.

BLITZER: We've got to end it, unfortunately.

Congressman Chris van Hollen.

But you heard Boehner say the president's willing negotiate with Vladimir Putin but not willing to negotiate with Republicans. Those were stinging words from John Boehner, speaker of the House.

VAN HOLLEN: But what the president got was everything we asked for and more. We got the destruction of Syria's chemical weapon stockpile. Here, what the Republicans are calling for is to shut down the government or get rid of a law that's protecting millions of Americans. What if they said we're going to shut down the government unless you get rid of Medicare or the Clean Air Act? That's the kind of demand they're making. It's just unreasonable.

BLITZER: Chris van Hollen, Democratic Congressman from Maryland, thanks for joining us.

We'll take a quick break. More news right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn't made an official trip to Washington in three years but he's back, meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. One of the big topics, immigration reform. Just last month he discussed it with CNN's Chris Cuomo in a one-on-one interview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK ZUCKERBERG, FOUNDER & CEO, FACEBOOK: I can't really tell anyone how to legislate. I mean, that's -- you though they -- everyone understands this stuff way better than I do. So my goal in this is just to try to help support folks who care deeply about getting this done on both sides. And hopefully, we can make a difference.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Brian Todd joining us from Capitol Hill.

Brian, Zuckerberg was interviewed at a forum held by "The Atlantic" and raised serious eyebrows with comments about the NSA spying scandal, if you will. What did he say?

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: He did raise eyebrows, Wolf, at this forum with "The Atlantic" magazine. He was asked about the president's comments last month to Jay Leno when the president said, basically that the NSA surveillance program doesn't spy on Americans. And here's a quote from Zuckerberg last night responding to that. Quote, "Some of the government's statements have been profoundly unhelpful. 'Oh, we only spy on non-Americans.' Gee, thanks. We're trying to provide an international service and not get crushed in those places either."

That's not a not-so-veiled swipe at President Obama and the NSA surveillance program.

Now for some context, Wolf, as you know, Facebook is suing the federal government to try to gain the ability to disclose just how often the government has come to Facebook for data on its users, its billion- per-month users. That underlines some of the frustration Mark Zuckerberg has with the federal government over all this.

BLITZER: I know you'll have more on this in "The Situation Room."

Brian Todd, on Capitol Hill, thank you.

Her hit TV show is steamy. Her career, right now, red hot. Kerry Washington could make history at the Emmy awards this Sunday. Why the "Scandal" star is Emmy's "it" girl.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Kerry Washington could make history at the Emmys Sunday night. Our entertainment correspondent, Nischelle Turner, has more on Washington's red-hot career.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KERRY WASHINGTON, ACTRESS: Are you seriously going to stand here and suggest that divorcing your wife and moving me into the White House in the midst of an election is not a tiny bit of a problem in.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NISCHELLE TURNER, CNN ENTERTAINMENT CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's those jaw-dropping moments that have made "Scandal" one of the most buzzed about series on television --

(SHOUTING)

TURNER: -- and made star Kerry Washington one of the most in demand women in Hollywood.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I feel like watching her have this moment right now is so exciting. She's so deserving of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WASHINGTON: Governor.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TURNER: The actress is up for her very first Emmy for playing high- powered D.C. fixer and presidential mistress, Olivia Pope --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kerry Washington, "Scandal."

TURNER: -- marking the first time an African-American has been nominated for the lead actress in a drama series Emmy in 18 years.

MAGGIE FURLONG, WEST COAST EDITOR, HUFFPOST TV: It's really such a landmark to have an African-American female lead be acknowledges in this category. It has not happened in decades. This is a huge, huge milestone.

TURNER: The last contender was Cicely Tyson in 1995 for the short- lived "Sweet Justice."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CICELY TYSON, ACTRESS: What I really want to know is how --

(CROSSTALK)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TURNER: And if Washington wins, this will mark the first time a black female has won this award. Other celebrities are acknowledging what this means for diversity on TV.

PAULA PATTON, ACTRESS: It's a huge achievement. That means we're moving forward. Now, it may not be as fast as we all would like, but at least there's a forward movement.

SHONDA RHIMES, CREATOR/EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: It's disturbing. Isn't it? It feels really odd it's been that long.

TAYE DIGGS, ACTOR: You're caught between rejoicing and celebrating for the acknowledgment and then being reminded. One of the reasons we're so happy is it hasn't happened in so long.

TURNER: A scandalous oversight Washington is helping to change.

Will the star snag Emmy gold? Tune in Sunday to catch the ending to this cliffhanger.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WASHINGTON: Run and win.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TURNER: Nischelle Turner, CNN, Hollywood.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: Good luck, Kerry Washington, a former student at George Washington University in Washington.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Here's what's coming up later tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: CNN tonight, at 7:00, "Erin Burnett OutFront," The Navy Yard massacre. How can a man with a history of mental issues pass a security review?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Eight disciplinary actions that were just kind of swept under the rug. Sounds a little familiar to me. I mean, the political correctness.

ANNOUNCER: Then at 8:00 on "Anderson Cooper 360," money and diamonds, the real motivations of televangelist Pat Robertson's work in Africa. Robertson denies it but Anderson talks to the filmmakers behind the film "Mission Condo," about their explosive allegations.

And at 9:00 on "Piers Morgan Live," the Bill Ray Cyrus interview, guns, America, Miley.

It's all tonight on CNN, starting with "Erin Burnett OutFront" at 7:00, "Anderson Cooper 360" at 8:00, and "Piers Morgan Live" at 9:00 tonight on CNN.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: I'll be back, 5:00 p.m. eastern, in "The Situation Room." Thanks for watching.

Brooke Baldwin picks up our coverage right now.