On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said regulations have made it so that “we’re not going to be a country that’s building things anymore, and that’s our problem.” And “if the Democratic Party is only defending the status quo and not figuring out how we can do things differently and better, we’re not going to be ever in a place where we can win back the majority in the Senate, we’re not going to be in the place we need to be.”
After host Bill Maher said it would take 29 years to build another mine for rare earth minerals in America, Smith stated, “But if it takes that long to build stuff, then we’re not going to be a country that’s building things anymore, and that’s our problem.”
She added, “This is a perfect example of where, if the Democratic Party is only defending the status quo and not figuring out how we can do things differently and better, we’re not going to be ever in a place where we can win back the majority in the Senate, we’re not going to be in the place we need to be. And, like, take housing as an example. We know that if we fixed zoning laws so that it’s easier to build housing, you can fix the housing supply problem, and then housing costs will go down. And that is a strategy that we should be working on, and that is — a lot of that’s at the local level, but we should be rewarding that at the federal level, that’s just one example. If we want to have a clean energy economy and it takes us forever to put the transmission lines up and the distribution lines to get power where people need it, then we’re never going to accomplish our goals. We’ve got to fix this.”
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