CHRISTIE: I think these are state-by-state determinations.
CHRISTIE: I will highlight that we were wrong to cut back on the NSA's metadata collection and that its been destroying the morale of our intelligence officers. We need to rebuild that program. We need to support law enforcement, which this administration hasn't been doing. We need to do all those things first and foremost to protect the homeland, because the number one job of the president of the United States is to protect the safety and security of the American people. National security is not an option. It's a fundamental right. And that's what we will be focused on.
CHRISTIE: This is part of the problem with this administration. They're an imperial administration that just decides they're going to place people in individual states and not even inform the state of government of the fact that they have done it. And they're placing them through nongovernmental organizations and not giving any information to the state governments. We should set up a safe haven in Syria, so these folks don't have to leave their country in the first place. This is something that the president has created and now he wants the American people to absorb this crisis that he has created.
CHRISTIE: I don't think that's something we need to do. What I want to see is a nation that continues to say, we want you to practice your religion and practice it vigorously. And as long as you practice it peacefully, and you're not trying to impose your religious values on anyone else, then you should be able to practice it the way you want. I don't think we need another government agency, quite frankly. I don't think we need to add more layers of bureaucracy to this government and add more expense. And so, no, that's not something I would favor.
CHRISTIE: ISIS doesn't seem to be concerned about civilian casualties. We need to get real about this; we need to bring our allies together and revise rules of engagement to make sure that what we're doing is taking on ISIS in a significant, direct way that will be effective. So, this administration has no credibility in giving us any type of assessment of how this is going. We have the attacks in Mali now. Obama said al Qaeda was on the run. Obviously, that's wrong as well.
CHRISTIE: No, a few things. First off, more people are getting drug treatment today in New Jersey than ever before. We have 21 drug courts in all 21 of our counties. Secondly, I don't want this to be purely a government solution. By putting more money into our treatment budget we allow the private sector to come in to be able to provide this kind of treatment.
CHRISTIE: My larger point, is that this is a disease. People who are committing violent acts, who are dealing drugs, they need to go to prison. But for the addicts, the people who are small-time users, we need to give them treatment. Although, I'm opposed to drug legalization.
CHRISTIE: Interesting, the president is interested in global leadership, and the only thing he's interested in global leadership on is a radical environmental liberal policy, which is what he's doing. Did anybody think for the last seven years he was ever going to approve it? Despite the fact that the State Department said it won't have a big environmental impact, and so does the EPA administrator. This president is a radical environmental liberal. And when I'm president, we'll build the Keystone pipeline if the Canadians are still interested.
CHRISTIE: I don't trust this president to negotiate any deal. And that's what my answer was, to say I don't trust this president negotiating a deal. I wouldn't let this president buy me a car, that's how bad a negotiator he is. So, I will not support TPP as negotiated by this president, because I'm convinced it will be just as bad as the Iranian nuclear deal.
[plays clip] Q: would you support a shutdown?Q: Have you changed your heart on this? Should Republicans force defunding Planned Parenthood by threatening a shutdown?
A: I said that you shouldn't be throwing around threats--you should take action and that's what I have done as governor of New Jersey, to defund Planned Parenthood six years ago. You should put the defunding of Planned Parenthood on the president's desk. If he's going to veto it, let the American people see that he stands with the folds who believe that the systematic murder of children in the womb, in a way that preserves the body parts to be sold on the open market, is something that he stands for.
Christie: I think the Pope was wrong. I just believe that when you have a government that is harboring fugitives, murdering fugitives like Joanne Chesimard--who murdered a state policemen--that this president could extend diplomatic relations in that country without getting her returned so that she can serve the prison sentence, is outrageous
And the fact is that we spend $2.5 billion less than we used to. But here's the bigger thing. What they wanted was something in New Jersey who was going to finally stand up and say no to higher taxes, no to more spending, and more yes to parental involvement, parental choices. We've done all those things in New Jersey. And so anybody could pick out any kind of statistics they want. But in New Jersey, it's much better today than it was six years ago.
CHRISTIE: Well, I think that's why they're not working together. Because they want to burn Congress down because it doesn't do anything. I mean let's face it, I was out on the trails, you know, a lot in 2014, helping governors candidates and Senate candidates to get elected. What have these guys done, these Senate candidates, new senators, that they promised to do? We don't have tax reform on the President's desk. We don't have a repeal and a replacement of Obamacare on the desk. We don't have any of the things that they ran on, on the desk. Make the president veto them. This is why people can't stand Congress.
CHRISTIE: The same thing that I've been doing every day, both as US attorney and as governor for the last 13 years, hold myself to the highest standards, and if mistakes are made, to hold the people responsible who make those mistakes, and to discuss it with the public openly and transparently. And remember this; everything I said 18 months ago in a two hour press conference, after three investigations, not one thing has been contradicted that I said.
Q: So the long-term effect of BridgeGate?
CHRISTIE: People love to make a big deal about this stuff, but in the end it's how you react. And I wish Barack Obama might have reacted the right way to the IRS scandal and been more transparent. But he hasn't, and that's a failure of leadership. This President's allowed lawlessness. I'll enforce law and order in this country as president of the US.
But the unions continue to want more and more and more. And in a Democratic state like New Jersey, it's tough to get them to push even further. But think about this. What the last credit report said was if the pension problem were fixed, New Jersey would be in good fiscal condition. And that's because we cut spending $2.5 billion from 16, lower than where it was in fiscal year '08.
So this is not about not having enough revenue. The government was too big. We've made it smaller. And if the pension system continues to get better, we'll be fine.
CHRISTIE: In New Jersey, six years ago, I defunded Planned Parenthood. And I made it stick. We've viewed it 8 different times in New Jersey, and we've made that veto stick each and every time, despite veto override attempts.
Q: But here you've got a Democratic executive who would veto if Congress were somehow to pass a budget that defunded Planned Parenthood.
CHRISTIE: Maybe we should test the president, because in the end, we haven't done anything yet in Congress to test him. I think we should be putting it on his desk. I think we should be passing repeal and replacement of ObamaCare and putting it one his desk. Let the United States people see who is the real obstructionist in Washington DC.
CHRISTIE: Religious institutions should be able to decide how they conduct their religious activity. The rest of the folks in the United States need to follow the law. We need to enforce the law in this country in every respect, not just the laws we like, but all the laws. This way we won't have sanctuary cities in this country when I'm president of the United States, and we won't have people getting high on marijuana in Colorado and Washington if the federal law says you shouldn't.
CHRISTIE: I expanded Medicaid because it was right for New Jersey, because I had had three liberal Democratic governors before me, and so in expanding Medicaid we actually made money in New Jersey and lowered our costs in emergency rooms across the state.
CHRISTIE: They're not, my point was that this is again a situation where the private sector laps us in the government with the use of technology. Let's use the same type of technology to make sure that 40 percent of the 11 million people here illegally don't overstay their visas. If FedEx can do it, why can't we use the same technology? And we should bring in the folks from FedEx to use the technology to be able to do it. There's nothing wrong with that. And I don't mean people are packages.
CHRISTIE: They're not telling the truth. I guess the alternative could be, that they want a massive tax increase on the American people. If they want, that's fine. Here's my attitude about it, you have two choices--either get rid of some benefits for the very wealthiest in America who don't need a Social Security check, or you can give the government that's already lied to us and stolen from the trust fund more of your money. I don't want to give the government more of our money so they can lie more to us and steal more from us.
A: I think that there's a problem across the country with our citizens and our police force interacting with each other in a positive, constructive way. We need to engage in a different way. And you see what we have done in Camden. There we brought in an entirely new police force and we trained them in a different way in community policing.
Q: Recently Hillary Clinton said, "race still places a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind"; do you agree?
A: I think there's still racism in our society. And every leader in our country should be speaking out against that and should be doing everything we can to provide opportunity for everyone.
A: The national teachers union--because they're not for education of our children. They're for greater membership, greater benefits, and greater pay for their members. And they are the single most destructive force in public education in America. I have been saying that since 2009. I have got the scars to show it. But I'm never going to stop saying it, because they never change their stripes.
A: My first alternative and preferred alternative is to arm the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Emiratis and the Saudis to bring this fight to those folks. They need more help. They need better arms. They need more support from an intelligence perspective and they need to know that America's going to stand with them when the polls are up or down.
A: What he's doing is not going to work, to absolutely just cave in the Cubans. The fact is that we're now going to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to Cuba in tourist activity and economic activity and none of that is going to get to the people of Cuba.
A: There are not enough law enforcement officers, local, state and federal combined to forcibly deport 11 to 12 million people. This is like building a 2,000-mile wall across the border that Mexico is going to pay for. It sounds really good but the question is how? I think the way to do this is E-Verify. If folks new they weren't going to get jobs, they would not come.
Q: And what would you do with the 11 million who are here?
A: We're going to have to come up with a solution that's going to involve using E-Verify as well.
A: Let's talk the facts of the deal. We shouldn't be getting the hyperbole. The fact that we have to wait 24 days to inspect a site if the Iranians object is outrageous. That would be like me getting a search warrant, coming to somebody's house who I think is committing a crime and saying, here, I have got a search warrant, I will be back in 24 days to search.
Q: Well, if it was a radioactive crime, the inspectors say that they would be able to discern whether or not there was radioactive material there 24 days later.
A: The president promised any time anywhere. And you cannot tell me that, in 24 days, the Iranians cannot move the elements of cheating from one area to another.
So we need to reform these programs and we can do it and we can do it in a way that's not going to throw anybody off the cliff.
CHRISTIE: No. I don't think we should elect Supreme Court Justices. What we do in New Jersey, which I think is something that folks can consider is we appoint our justices for a seven-year term. And then after seven years, the governor has the opportunity to again consider whether to nominate them then for a lifetime tenure. I don't want to see judges raising money and running for election. I would, though, trust the executive after seven years, like we do in New Jersey, to decide whether or not to reappoint people. I'm the first governor in New Jersey's constitutional history to not reappoint two supreme court justices. I wanted to go in another direction. That can work. I've done it in New Jersey. But I don't believe we should be putting judges on the ballot. I just disagree with Senator Cruz.
CHRISTIE: I've had to review applications under the PATRIOT Act. I know what it's like to interact with the FISA court. We can do this and protect civil liberties. And, of course, we want to track terrorists' phone numbers. We're not listening to anybody's conversations. We're not looking at their emails without the type of search warrants that the court is talking about. What we're saying, though, is, if you're a known terrorist outside this country, and you're calling numbers inside this country, we'd like to know who those people are.
Q: What do you say to those that feel that their government may have them under attack?
CHRISTIE: We should engage in vigorous congressional oversight over our intelligence community, and our Justice Department should prosecute any intelligence officer who violates the law. We have those safeguards available to us.
Christie: To build a wall across our entire southern border, that's a simple politician's answer. My plan for the border would be multi-fold. First, it would be to use the [right] type of walling or fencing in certain areas. Second would be to use the type of electronic surveillance that we have available to us both through drones and through other electronic surveillance on the border. Third, of course, is to use Border Patrol officers to be able to do it. And fourth, and most important, is that require every employer in America to use E-Verify. Because these folks are coming to work. And if they're not able to be employed if they come here illegally, if every employer uses E-Verify and if they violate the law, there are fines that are so significant that the profit they make off hiring lower-wage workers and discriminating against American workers won't be worth their while. You'll see a real diminishment of anybody trying to come over the southern border
CHRISTIE: My alternative is we have to start to put market forces on these college costs. I pay for two college tuitions right now, and I can tell you that they're the most opaque bills you'll ever see in your life. If you got that bill for dinner with that little of that detail, you wouldn't pay it. You'd send it back. Yet for college, we pay it.
Q: What would you do as president?
CHRISTIE: Universities need to start telling us exactly what they're spending the money we give them on. And secondly, we need to unbundle those costs. So if a child doesn't want to pay for all of these different things in college, they should be able to select it. That will tell colleges what they don't need to provide and we shouldn't have to pay for. These ideas will help to contain costs, but the concept of free college for everybody -- there's nothing free in this world. We need to earn what we get.
"Secondly," he added, "we would pass a national energy policy, and one that takes full advantage of all of the resources that we have available to us to help grow our economy and make the world a more peaceful and stable place."
"And the third thing," he said, "is to reestablish American leadership around the world."
The New Jersey governor quickly clarified his position once the issue began grabbing national headlines in the U.S.: "To be clear: The Governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated," Christie's office said in a statement sent to reporters. "At the same time different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate."
Paul, however, doubled down on his view that the decision whether to vaccinate one's child is a matter of personal liberty: "The state doesn't own your children," Paul said. "Parents own the children."
The Senate bill (S998) would adopt regulations "prohibiting the confinement of any sow during gestation in a manner that prevents the sow from fully extending the limbs of the animal."
The bill, which Christie called "a solution in search of a problem," gained national notoriety not so much for the effect it would have on New Jersey's actual swine--there are only 9,000 in the state--but on Christie's political fortunes: Iowa is home to 20 million pigs.
Last year, Christie vetoed a similar bill (S1921) that would have banned the "cruel confinement" of a gestating sow.
CHRISTIE: Well, you have to remember what we inherited five years ago--an $11 billion deficit budget, 10 years of consecutive tax increases at the state level. This was an awful mess. And now, what have we done? We have five balanced budgets in a row. We had $2.3 billion in tax cuts to the businesses of New Jersey, 143,000 new private sector jobs and unemployment rate that's gone from 9.7% down to 6.5%. So, we still have work to do in NJ, no question. But we've gotten a lot of things done over the course of the last 5 years. I'm very proud of that record and I'm working every day to make that record even better as go forward. There will always be the naysayers. But I'm there getting the job done every day and I think that's what the people of NJ liked about us.
CHRISTIE: Of course we do. The CDC protocols have been a moving target. It was my conclusion we need to do this to protect the public health. Governor Cuomo [of NY] agreed. And now, Mayor Emanuel [of Chicago] agrees. I think the CDC eventually will come around to our point of view.
Q: The NIH says it's not good science to quarantine people when they're not symptomatic because they can't spread the disease in those situations.
CHRISTIE: They're counting on a voluntary system with folks who may or may not comply. When you're dealing with something as serious as this that we can count on a voluntary system. This is government's job. If anything else, the government job is to protect safety and health of our citizens. And so, we've taken this action and I absolutely have no second thoughts about it.
CHRISTIE: No, I'm really not, because I believe that folks who want to take that step and are willing to volunteer also understand that it's in their interest and the public health interest to have a 21-day period thereafter if they've been directed expose to people with the virus. Gov. Cuomo [D-NY] and I agree on this. I think this will become a national policy sooner rather than later.
(VIDEO CLIP) CHRISTIE: I'm tired of hearing about minimum wage. I don't think there's a mother or father sitting around a kitchen table tonight in America who are saying, "You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all our dreams would be realized."
Q: For people who are making $7.25 an hour, the minimum wage now, they say getting increase of $10 an hour would make a big difference in their lives and that you were being cavalier about it?
CHRISTIE: I'm saying it exactly as I see it. What we need to do in this country is not have debate over a higher minimum wage. We have to have a debate over creating better-paying middle class jobs in the country. If that somehow doesn't comport with what people in the political elite want, well, I'm sorry.
CHRISTIE: There was no climate in our administration that would ever permit that and the termination of folks who were involved I think proves that very clearly. [I focus instead on] our bipartisan record of having achieve property tax reform, pension and benefit reform, & tax cuts in New Jersey.
According to an audio recording of the event, he said Putin had taken the measure of Obama. "I don't believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgment," Christie said. "Let's leave it at that." One attendee described Christie's answer as disturbingly heavy on swagger and light on substance.
Christie places tremendous value on the personal projection of authority, as evidenced by his suggestion that Putin would think twice about challenging him. "Foreign policy, in my view, is about human relationships," Christie said at an American Enterprise Institute conference. "Men and women across the world judge each other," Christie said, "and they take a measure of the person based on your actions and your words." With Obama, he said mockingly, "words matter more to him than actions."
The pillars of the Christie worldview, as gleaned from about a dozen speeches and public appearances, tend to rise from a simple observation: A high-functioning America at home, liberated from partisan dysfunction, exerts greater influence abroad. "What we say and what we do here at home affects how others see us and in turn affects what it is they say and do," Christie said in 2011.
Still, he added, the issue is "settled" in New Jersey, unless there's an unexpected change in the state's solidly Democratic legislature. Christie, who opposes same-sex marriage, drew flak from conservatives for deciding to halt a court battle over the issue last year. He said that he made the call because he would have lost anyway: "When I know that I've been defeated, you don't bang your head against the wall anymore and spend taxpayer money to do it," said Christie. He said the issue should be left to the states, noting that "an overwhelming majority of states currently still ban same-sex marriage."
CHRISTIE: This report says that I had no knowledge of it before it happened, nor did I authorize it or have anything to do with it. Ask that's the truth.
Q: The report and the governor blame fired deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly, who released a statement calling the report venomous and offering to cooperate with the federal investigation if granted immunity.
Moments later, he seemed to disregard his own mantra, saying: "I do detect some confusion in the world about who we are and what we stand for. That needs to be clear."
Asked about the bridge controversy, Christie replied that large organizations are "inherently flawed because they are inhabited by human beings."
"Some people who worked for me made some significant mistakes in judgment," he said, leaving it at that.
Former Gov. Ted Strickland (D, OH) was on hand to ensure that the controversy was not cast off so tidily, saying he found it hard to swallow the claim that Christie was unaware of his administration's role in the lane closings: "Either the governor knew & he is lying or he is the most inept, incompetent chief executive imaginable.
Christie pooh-poohed the issue and its champions, Mr. de Blasio and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, predicting that they would never achieve the level of influence that the Tea Party had exerted in the Republican Party. "I don't think they are affecting the rest of the country all that much," he said.
The problem, he said, is that Americans do not want income equality, suggesting that it is antithetical to the country's abiding belief in "income opportunity" that rewards hard work and merit. "You want income equality? That is mediocrity," he said. "Everybody can have an equal, mediocre salary."
Christie has repeatedly denied he had any knowledge of or involvement in an alleged plot to cause massive traffic problems in Fort Lee, New Jersey, last year as a possible act of political retribution. He fired two of his top aides accused of orchestrating the incident, while a third resigned shortly before the story became national news. But now the issue is the subject of investigations by a state legislative committee and the Justice Department.
In a nearly 2-hour press conference last month, Christie defended his reputation as Democrats tried to characterize him as a spiteful leader. "I am not a bully," Christie said.
CHRISTIE: Anybody who has run anything in their lives could see this coming a mile away. And that's why we didn't do a state based health exchange. We didn't do it because we could see that this whole program was going to be a problem. So let's own up, tell the truth about what's going on. Then they can worry about working something out to fix the problem--not working out of a fantasy that these are not major problems. Lots of us have been saying all along about the fact that this was just too big for the government to handle.
Q: You didn't set up an exchange, but you did accept the expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare.
CHRISTIE: I do what's best for the people of New Jersey every day. And expanding Medicaid in N.J. was a relatively small expansion. It's going to benefit N.J.'s budget.
CHRISTIE: I think ObamaCare was a mistake. And I've said that right from the beginning. I think it's a failed policy. That's why we did not institute state-based exchanges. And you could see exactly why when you see the disaster that's happening right now. The fact of the matter is the president didn't tell folks the truth about what was going to happen with their own private insurance policies. And what I urged them to do, is tell people the truth. That's the thing they expect. And I think that's why we've gotten the support we've gotten in NJ. Because whether it's good news or bad news, I tell folks in NJ the hard truth they need to hear. And even when they disagree with me, they've come around to support me. Because they say at least this guy is looking us in the eye and telling us the truth. I think the president failed that test, unfortunately, on ObamaCare.
CHRISTIE: Nationally, they have to fix a broken system. People across the country look at what governors do, like in N.J., where we confront problems, we debate them, then we get to a table, we come to an agreement, we fix them and we move on. And in Washington, that seems to almost never happen.
Q: Do you think that national solution should include a path to citizenship?
CHRISTIE: The national solution has to be figured out by the people who are in charge of our national government. My job is to fix what's going on in N.J. But we're not going to be able to fix all the things we need in N.J. until national leaders set a national immigration policy. That's federal policy that needs to be fixed. It's a broken system, it's not working for the economy, it's not working for the individuals who are affected by it.
CHRISTIE: You know, I'm the governor of New Jersey. There a lot of people who are significantly better briefed on this than I am. And I think when guys like me start to shoot off on opinions about this kind of stuff, it's really ill-advised. So I'll leave it to Secretary Kerry and the folks that are in charge of this to make decisions about where we go. And then once they put something together, if they do, then I'll make a judgment on that. But it's just I'm not the right person to be asking that question to, with all due respect.
Q: But you're a national political figure. You're a leader in the Republican Party. You may someday run for president. Do you have a view about whether Iran should continue to enrich uranium?
CHRISTIE: Like I said, I think the folks who are involved in this on a day to day basis should be making those kind of opinions known publicly. I'm just not going to engage in that.
"While Christie doesn't support marriage equality, he does have a good record," said a spokesman from the gay conservative group GOProud. "He also does a good job of talking about how he's thought about how issues affect gay people."
As a Roman Catholic--and as someone who would have to work hard to earn conservatives' trust in a GOP primary--Christie is not likely to be the first to step out with a personal endorsement of gay marriage. But he could well be the first to argue that his personal opinion doesn't mean gays shouldn't be allowed to marry.
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The above quotations are from Sunday Political Talk Show interviews during 2013-2015, interviewing presidential hopefuls for 2016.
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