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Nearly two years after he left the U.S. House of Representatives in a failed bid to oust Kathy Hochul as New York governor, Tom Suozzi returned to his old job in Washington on Wednesday, as he was sworn in to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional district. The saga of George Santos may be over, but the disfunction on Capitol Hill is still there, and Suozzi chose to address that chaos in his first speech on the floor. In his first interview since being sworn in, Suozzi appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to address why he challenged his fellow representatives to stop bickering and start working together.
“I’ve been down in Congress now for 36 hours, 48 hours, and I’ve been talking to a lot of my colleagues, and they’re so discouraged,” Suozzi told Berman and Riedel. “My whole message was, I know you’re good people. We’ve got to stop letting ourselves be bullied by our bases and start doing what the people want us to do, which is work together. They’re sick of this. We have all these issues with cost of living, with the border crisis, with Israel, with Gaza, with Ukraine. We have all of these issues, and what are we doing? I mean, it’s like, this is real life, and the people are like, what about me?”
Congressional cooperation, however, feels like an oxymoron to many cynics, and with the Republican House majority now just 219-213, the spirit of bipartisanship may be nearly impossible to attain. Still, Suozzi feels optimism is the best course. “You get the bulk of the people, which are the 80% in the middle to work together. You’re not going to get 80%, but if you can get 52% of those people that genuinely want to get something done… you’ve got to cut a deal. You only need 218 people to pass something, and you’ve got to find common ground to work together.”
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