What actor should play you in your biopic?
I like how Rachel Dratch played me during the Kavanaugh hearing on ‘SNL.’
I like beer.
Ok, so I asked if you drank in high school and you said, ‘I like beer,’ 10 times.
She did an amazing job of capturing that moment in history that I will never forget.
I would not say that on TV.
There you go.
I remember once being on the Trevor Noah show
and explaining the ratios in the Senate, where
in fact we've had nearly 2,000 men and only 50 women.
And he said,
If that was a night club it would have been shut down a long time ago.
Totally, totally.
That is a bad ratio.
So here I am and I'm on the senators-only elevator.
I had two young staff members on either side and this door opened up.
This senator, who's no longer there, looks in the elevator and he says, ‘Hey, this
is a senators-only elevator.’
I'm thinking, are you kidding?
My staff member next to me says, ‘She is a senator.’
And he was so embarrassed by the whole moment that the elevator doors just closed and he
never got on that elevator.
There was this family, the Taylors, whose little girl Abigail was in a horrible pool
incident.
She was in a kiddie pool and the drain malfunctioned, and she lost a good part of her intestines.
It was a horrific thing.
I went and visited her in the hospital, and this little girl with this big smile— and
she was, I think, 7 or 8— and she said, I just want to make sure this never happens
to another kid again.
She went on to have surgery after surgery, lived for over a year, and then ended up dying.
Through the whole thing her parents were pushing for this pool safety bill that had been kicking
around Congress for years.
And I vowed to her and her parents that we would get it done.
And it was not easy.
There was a lot of lobbyists pushing against it.
And one of my proudest moments is when we got that bill passed.
Sometimes in the Senate, you do big things and sometimes you do small things.
But they’re not small to the people involved.
My first real job was as a dishwasher and a carhop at the A&W.
A&W tastes so fine sends a thrill up my spine.
Back then, A&W made you wear a t-shirt when you were a carhop that said, ‘Take home
a jug of fun.’
I guess they don't make you wear that anymore.
When our daughter was born, she was really sick.
She was in intensive care.
And back then, the insurance companies had a rule that you were kicked out in 24 hours
no matter what was going on.
And I remember thinking, I bet this wouldn't happen to the wife of the insurance company
CEO.
It made me realize, you know what, if you want to make change you've got to do it yourself.
I went to the legislature as a mom and got one of the first laws passed in the country
guaranteeing new moms and their babies a 48-hour hospital stay.
And what I most remember about that is people were saying they were for it, but they were
trying to delay the bill from taking effect.
So I brought 6 pregnant friends to the conference committee so they outnumbered the lobbyists
2 to 1.
And when the legislators said, when should this bill take effect, all of the pregnant
moms raised their hand and they’re like, ‘Now.’
And that's exactly what happened.
They moved up the effective date.
It became the law.
First of all, I love my staff.
There's some of them in this room right now who've been with me for years.
And we have incredibly strong staff or I would never have been able to, I think, a few years
ago, have the most bills passed of any Democrat where I’m the lead.
That is because of really great staff.
I do think it's important to get the facts right.
That being said, I think it is very important to have someone that holds themselves to high
standards, holds their staff to high standards, which I have always done, and hold our country
to high standards.
And I am someone that's blunt, that is very clear.
But I'm also someone that tells the truth.
And right now we have someone that's not telling the truth in the White House.
And I think that's going to be very important for a leader in this country to do.
Watch out for Minneapolis-St. Paul, it's coming back.
We lost Prince, and we loved him so much.
Everyone in Minnesota has some favorite Prince song.
But now my hottest pop culture take is that the music scene is coming back in the form
of Lizzo, as well as Dessa.
My walk-in song for events is Dessa’s song called ‘[The] Bullpen.’
And it's about being a female rapper in a male rapper world, and it kind of fits our
political scene.
I like that song ‘[What] a Wonderful World.’
That's kind of a nice song.
When you look in past elections, especially in 2018 where we brought in the most diverse
group of candidates ever to the House of Representatives
and all these women that won, I think it showed
that the voters are looking for a change, and they want to see more women in office.
And a number of us who have held tough jobs— myself, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren—
we have all weathered some attacks early on that either we were too tough or that we were
unlikable.
As I like to say, may the best woman win.
That would be the New York Times crossword puzzle app.
I like doing those mini puzzles.
I always try to make sure I do it in less than a minute.
And Maggie Hassan, the senator from New Hampshire, and I kind of have a contest, and
maybe it's true that every so often we've taken screenshots of the number of seconds
that we've gotten it done in and sent it to each other.
I was a DA for 8 years.
I ran the biggest prosecutor's office in Minnesota.
We did a lot of great things for justice, including working with the Innocence Project
about DNA reviews, including videotaping interrogations.
But one of the things as I look back at it, all of the DAs’ offices used a grand jury
when there was a police shooting.
And we did that actually because we thought, well that gives public input and so it won't
look like you're making a decision on your own.
And now, after years and years and seeing some of the horrific cases around the country,
I think sometimes you could use a grand jury to make that decision but sometimes you just
have to own that decision and explain it to the public.
And it's something that I would have changed if I had thought about it back then and instead
of just accepting the way we were doing it.
Well, usually it's about 6 hours.
What I have seen in terms of discrimination is really been ramped up in the last few years.
And it is, I believe, because of the mean-spirited rhetoric that you see out of the White House.
When you have a president that says there's two sides after Charlottesville— no, there's
not two sides when one side is the Ku Klux Klan.
Some of my constituents who are Somali, they went out to dinner— a man, a woman, and
their two little kids— and they're sitting at a restaurant and this guy walks by.
And he says, ‘You four go home, you go home to where you came from.’
And the little girl looks up at her mom and she says, ‘Mom, I don't want to go home
and eat tonight.
You said we could eat out tonight.’
You think of the words of that innocent child.
She only knows one home.
That's my state.
That's your state.
That's the United States of America.
Go back to your country.
Go back to Asia.
Go back where you came from.
That's what's happening right now in this country, and it is one of the major reasons
why we need a change in that White House.
Because we are America that stands stronger together.
We're an America where we look out for each other, where we believe that there's a cause
larger than ourselves.
And that's what we have to fight for.
I love my husband and our daughter.
They just bring joy to everything.
Yes.
Reading the news until very late at night.
In this era of Donald Trump, you kind of have to.
I wish I had more of a break, but I just feel like you have to keep on top of things.
When we're seeing horrific storms coming in, just record levels of flooding, and wildfires,
and tornadoes, I think it's very clear to Americans right now that the climate crisis
is not happening in 100 years.
It's happening right now.
Day one, I'd sign this back into the international climate change agreement.
And day two, bring back the clean power rules that the Trump administration just left on
the cutting room floor.
From there, you introduce sweeping legislation and work with Congress.
I just don't think we can wait.