Inside Douglas County with U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz | Government shutdown in D.C. [10:13-15:13]

Which I'm sorry, which date in November, are you talking about? Oh, you mentioned that the expiration of the clean CR. Well, the clean is not the 21st. I anticipate that it could, it could, but what would end up happening is as we've discussed it in our Republican conferences, we would bring either an amended CR or a new CR to the floor and pass it once again with a new date. And probably the date would be close to the end of the year. But the point is, if you give in to extortionary efforts such as the Democrats are engaging in, what are they going to ask for it next? That's why I said, if they get their 1.5 trillion, why wouldn't they ask for something else? Another crazy thing like the resignation of President Trump carried to his extreme. I'm making that up. They haven't asked for that. What I'm trying to say is that if you give in to someone that's holding a hostage, what does it end? And as you've been talking to other members of Congress, I don't know if you've had too many opportunities for conversations across the aisle since you've gotten back. But do you feel like a lot of at least the GOP is pretty much sharing what you've been sharing with us? I would say 99% is there's a few exceptions. Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying otherwise, but I'm going to say that she is a party of one at this point. So right now, everything's stalled out to talk about what you have been able to work on during this period of time. Well, my team and I made a list of the last couple of days or lists of all of the things that we have going right now. Of course, we're working on what might be the types of conversations that would occur after the government reopens in the healthcare space because there's lots of room for improvement in the healthcare space. And I mean it, whether we would focus on insurance or whether we would focus on the 50 billion dollars that we've included in our bill that the Democrats for whatever reason want to repeal the 50 billion that we go to rural hospitals is beyond me why they want to do that. But in their 1.5 trillion dollar repeal that they're asking for right now is a 50 billion that's supposed to go to rural hospitals. So we've been working on discussing those kinds of issues. I've been working on many different energy related issues because as I've mentioned in previous conversations in Oregon, we are extraordinarily close to having rolling blackouts. And that is because of some of the crazy energy policies that Salem has passed banning natural gas and banning other types of imported electricity generated by coal. These kinds of things have left Oregon in dire straits when it comes to energy. So I've been working on that issue. In fact, that was the meeting I was having when I was late for our discussion this afternoon. What's your level of concern? I mean, it sounds it's like it's pretty much near the top on this potential blackout situation. Well, so what's up when it's been the way it's been explained to me is that if we have another cold snap like we had two years ago, we are, we very likely will not have the ability to provide power to everybody at the same time. So we just have to hope that we don't end up with really, really cold weather, the so-called polar vortex. If that happens again, then we could literally end up with rolling blackouts depending upon how much water we have in the Columbia. If we have a drought, then we don't have enough water in the Columbia to generate power, then we're going to end up without enough of it. And this again takes us back to the fact that the Democrats' majority in Salem has banned the use of natural gas. And thus the readily available energy that we have, we can't seem to somehow build any of that kind of generation in Oregon. It makes absolutely no sense. And now what's happened is we have people wondering how in the world are going to pay their electric bills because the cost of electricity is going through the roof. And part of it is because you can't get any more natural gas. It's crazy. It's crazy, Kyle. But what's happening is many of these policies that are ill-fought out, ill-conceived and then passed are coming home to roost. And it's taking the form of higher and higher and higher electric electricity bills. About 30 seconds left, Congressman. What else would you like to share with folks in your district? Well, obviously there's been a great deal of concern expressed over on the eastern half of my district, or the eastern half of Oregon over the president's remarks regarding cattle and his attempt to drive down cattle prices.