I have loved this woman ever since she interrupted treatment for Stage Four kidney cancer to fly all the way from her constituency of Hawaii to DC to vote on repealing Obamacare back in the summer of 2017. Everyone was lauding John McCain for heroically getting there despite his late-stage cancer… but that time he voted yes to repeal. She, on behalf of people like herself in need of life-saving healthcare, but less fortunate, voted no.
A year and half later she’s still fighting, still doing her job and, in a calm, motherly sort of voice, calling out T***p for his tit-for-tat cancellation of Nancy Pelosi’s trip to visit the troops in Afghanistan and reassure NATO leaders in Brussels.
Very bluntly.
My annotated transcript:
Hirono: I agree with Adam Schiff that the president is acting like a fifth-grader, although that insults fifth-graders. But clearly we do not have an adult in the White House. So let’s not forget who started this trainwreck of a shutdown that is hurting 800,000 families, and the ripple effect. It is the president who began the shutdown, he has the power to end it, but he won’t end it because he’s a child, which insults children, so I’m sorry about that.
Thanks, Senator; my inner child was starting to get offended.
Next she joins AOC and the #WheresMitch crew in the great turtle hunt...
So the other person who can end the shutdown, as I’ve been saying for a while now is Mitch McConnell. He has the power to bring these House-passed bills to the floor, and that’s why more and more people are coming and saying “Where are you, Mitch?” And I know that there are billboards going up in his state, asking “Where are you, Mitch?” And that’s the question.
...then seizes the opportunity to smack McConnell for his kiss-autocratic-ass leanings:
Wolf Blitzer: He says he won’t bring anything up on the Senate floor that the president won’t support—
Hirono: You know what, that’s almost like saying “What do we need the Senate for? We can just have a president.”
Blitzer asks her, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, if there was any legit security reason to cancel Pelosi’s trip:
Mazie: No. It’s very clearly the president being in a snit and I’m sure he’s very proud of himself because he’s very childlike in his view of the world. It’s all about him.
Oh snnnnnaaaap! How to nail a narcissist.
She easily spots the narcissistic trait of projection:
So certainly I have gone on congressional delegations to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to China, to all of these places, and this, as Barbara says, is serious business. It takes a lot of work to put these trips together, and when the president just calls it a PR event, that’s because that’s how he views this kind of trip.
Next my favourite Senator notes that the “adults in the room” in the House and Senate—at least most of them—do not support leaving NATO because it’s important to American national security. Blitzer asks if she’s concerned that congressional trips might be used in the future as bargaining chips in political disagreements:
Hirono: I think it’s a very bad move, but one hopes that whoever is the next President is not a child and will act responsibly.
I think there’s a reasonable chance she’ll be a grownup.
That is my hope. But I have no expectation of that sort from this president and this is why the adults in the room, which would be, right now, since the House already did their job to keep government running, the adults in the room are the senators, starting with Mitch McConnell... Where are you, Mitch McConnell? Do your job, use your powers, to end the suffering of 800,000 people and their families and all of the contractors.
It’s inexplicable, really.
Yaassss.
Apparently kidney surgery cured Sen. Hirono’s kidney cancer, but she’s still battling thyroid cancer. However, this didn’t stop her from campaigning for re-election in November, winning in a landslide and returning to DC to be her wonderful self.
Like I said, I love this woman.
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