Anderson Cooper Slams GOP Congressman: "You're Not on Fox News"
Having had his fill of Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) trying to mislead his Monday night viewers with bogus claims about Obamacare and the cooked-up reasons for why Republicans refuse to bring a clean continuing resolution up for a vote, Anderson Cooper to make good on his promise to "keep them honest."
"So basically your argument is you're nullifying two presidential elections and you're nullifying the vote of Congress because you don't like it," Cooper summarized.
"You're argument is that the election of the House of Representatives doesn't matter," Labrador responded.
"No," Cooper retorted, "my argument is the vote of the House of Representatives and the vote of the Senate does matter, and this is a law, and the Supreme Court and backed up this law, so at a certain point, why not just bring this to a vote, why not just bring this to a vote in the House right now?"
Labrador continued to equivocate before attempting to shift the uncooperative Cooper to an off-topic discussion on how "nobody in the media ever asked Nancy Pelosi to pass the prerogatives of the Republican party" when she was the Speaker of the House.
"All of a sudden," Rep. Labrador went on, "just because you don't like the fact that the Republicans are in control of the House, you want to make sure that the Republicans actually pass the Democrats'..."
"I don't have a stake in this," an interjecting Cooper informed the congressman. "You seem to," Labrador shot back.
And that's when Anderson let him have it:
This is the way it works in journalism. When you’re not on Fox News, you get contentious interviews. When you’re not on MSNBC and a liberal, you get contentious interviews. My job is to ask you questions that are different than you think.
Labrador then tried to insist that Cooper was being extra contentious with him, to which Cooper responded:
Just as my next guest, who is a Democrat, I'm going to ask the same kind of questions that push back on their side, that's what a journalist does. I'm not taking the side of the democrats here, and in a minute here you will see I'm not taking the side of the Republicans.
Indeed, as Politico reports, Cooper later asked Rep. Elijah Cummings why the President is seemingly unwilling to compromise with the Republicans.
For the record, despite Rep. Labrador's repeated claims to the contrary, there do appear to be enough votes to pass a clean CR.