June 13, 2017 | Speaker Ryan Press Office | http://spkrryan.us/2s6njM8
This morning, Speaker Ryan called into The Hugh Hewitt Show with guest host Guy Benson. The two discussed the important VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and also talked about an underreported story.
Listen to the full interview, read the full transcript, or check out these excerpts:
“It’s just crazy”
“This is one of our most important promises that we made during the campaign, which is to clean up the crisis at the VA. As you probably remember, you have these waiting lists which we discovered first in Phoenix and then kind of all around the country where veterans were on these sort of secret waiting lists not getting the care that they deserved. People were dying on these waiting lists. And then when we dug into it, we created the new choice program. We gave veterans outlets out of these things. But we, because of the law, could not hold people accountable.
“I mean, VA, the new VA Secretary, who’s big in getting to the bottom of this, he was telling a story about how it took him over a month to fire a psychiatrist who was caught on camera, you know, watching pornography when he was supposed to be attending to veterans. It’s just crazy that they couldn’t fire people because of these civil service laws for, and hold them accountable, to hold them to accountability. So this protects whistleblowers who tell about these things. It protects the whistleblowers who uncover these scandals, and it gives us, the government, and the VA Secretary, the ability to fire people if they’re not doing their jobs. So it basically gives us the ability to hold the people of the VA accountable for doing their jobs and giving the veterans the service they deserve, and then protects the kind of transparency and whistleblower system we need so that we can make sure that this kind of scandal can’t be brushed under the rug again.”
Later in the conversation, the two had this exchange:
Guy Benson: “The Majority Leader’s office put out an infographic that showed actually a pretty high level, historically, of productivity. That’s kind of an underreported story”
Speaker Ryan: “I mean, how many people in this country know that last Thursday, as there was wall to wall coverage of Jim Comey talking in one committee in one half of Congress, that the House of Representatives repealed and replaced Dodd-Frank? I mean, so we are basically racking and stacking, getting our job done, fulfilling our promises, making good on the policies that we ran on. But like you said, it’s just not getting covered.”
