>> major funding for Chat Box with David Cruz is provided by the members of the New Jersey education Association, making public schools great for every child.

Promotional support for Chat Box with David Cruz is provided by insider NJ, a political intelligence network dedicated to New Jersey political news.

Insider NJ is committed to giving serious political players an interactive forum for ideas, discussion, and insight.

Online at insidernj.com.

♪ David: hey everybody.

Welcome to Chat Box.

It may seem like it's months away because it is.

The gubernatorial primaries are getting closer.

Our goal is to host in person group conversations with the candidates this spring.

As a kind of preview leading up to that, we are attempting to have individual chats with the candidates starting today with Republican John Bramnick and Democrat Steve Sweeney Pigot by random selection, we begin with attorney and state Senator John Bramnick.

Welcome back.

Good to see you as always.

>> good to see you.

David: we are about two months into the Trump administration.

You were the anti-Trump guy.

I guess the -- you still are.

You say you will praise him when he's right and criticize him when he's wrong.

So give us one thing that he's doing right and one thing that he's doing wrong so far.

>> sure.

Well he mentioned infrastructure.

I hope he does that.

I think he's been strong on border security.

There may be some issues on how to enforce the law.

I think most people in New Jersey, you want a border that is secure.

I think he is strong on that.

I'm not going to discuss each and every detail that he does right or wrong.

Pardoning the January 6 criminals, I disagreed with that.

There are certain people who were treated improperly, the sentence was unconscionable, that's fine.

If you say everyone is now pardoned, I didn't get that.

Look.

He's the president now.

My parents taught me you respect your office of the presidency.

And look, I'm the first one to say, you will help New Jersey and I will be with you.

But I think they want a governor.

People in New Jersey want to governor who will put New Jersey first.

Then if you see something coming out of Washington, you stand up and say it.

I will do it.

This is what I've always been like.

I will continue.

David: one of the things that has come into sharper focus this week is the administration's relationship, as it sees it, with the judicial branch.

Ignoring orders from the courts.

Calling for the impeachment of judges that make rulings that they don't agree with.

That can't be good.

>> Justice Roberts spoke out on that.

That's a Republican appointee to the Supreme Court.

You don't call for the impeachment of a judge on the federal bench because of a decision.

You appeal it.

Impeachment is really reserved for acts that are so inappropriate that Congress should then possibly remove a judge.

But not when you disagree with the law.

It will set up a pretty dangerous precedent.

We will see how that comes out.

I've got a lot of judges, I didn't like their opinion but I didn't go over to impeach them.

David: moving around here a little bit, so many millions of dollars are going to be raised in this election.

You got a pack.

Sweeney has a packed.

We will be talking to him in a bit.

How do you fix it so that there's less influence of money on these campaigns?

>> good luck.

I think the Supreme Court made a decision about that.

So packs are technically supposed to be idea packs.

They are not supposed to coordinate with the candidate.

I think they support a candidate.

But constitutionally so far, the Supreme Court said if you have an opinion and you want to throw your money behind it, as long as it doesn't violate what the state law is.

It looks like money will be in politics for a long time.

David: when people hear that, they say, these campaigns are not supposed to coordinate with these packs.

And then all these commercials all sound the same.

The candidates in the thing.

The ad from the pack.

The pack is run by the guys wife or his son.

I mean it's making us all look foolish, to say that we understand that and we agree that there's no ordination.

>> I think that the pack can watch what the candidate does without speaking to the candidate.

That's why the issues seem to be similar.

You are right.

It really is a pack that actually supports a candidate and that doesn't comply really with the basic idea behind the law where you are supposed to limit money.

I will tell you right now, it doesn't look legally like anyone will stop it based on the First Amendment.

David: we are hearing a lot about energy prices this year.

Electricity prices particularly.

How did we get here?

what can we do about it?

what are you going to do about it?

>> well, my friends across the aisle decided they would just follow-up path which is green energy.

With all due respect, there wasn't enough green energy to actually meet the needs of the state and we should have expanded our natural gas, expanded on nuclear.

Also look to green energy.

When you are so limited in terms of what your options are, it's going to cause an increase in cost because your supply is down.

I think Democrats went too far on that.

They should have moved.

They rejected all fossil fuels too early.

That's pretty much what happened.

One other thing.

The B.P.

you.

The legislature should be voting on these issues.

These are important issues whether you will spend million of dollars on windmills or you are going to spend millions of dollars or not spend millions of dollars on fossil fuels.

That should be the legislature, not B.P.

you.

David: are you saying that you agree with some calls from some Republicans to get rid of it?

>> I would like to see important issues voted on by the legislature.

An issue as to whether you spend a billion dollars on offshore wind.

Whether you expand energy with reserved fossil fuels, natural gas, nuclear.

Though should be big issues like that.

Small issues in terms of regulatory decisions on a specific company, that's fine for the BPU.

Not massive issues that affect every taxpayer in the state.

David: the budget, we just started budget hearings this week.

Over a billion dollars in structural deficit.

$2 billion in one shop funding sources.

1.5 in new taxes.

Threats of severe for -- federal cuts.

$58 billion.

This is unsustainable, no?

>> of course.

You can't look at it in one year or for one year.

This has been my spending problem with my friends across the aisle since Governor Murphy came in.

Now all of a sudden going, we better cut back.

We better change things.

That's what you are hearing from the Democrats now.

That would have been a good idea seven years ago when you had certain increases of 11%.

I think it's come home to roost.

My belief is, that's why I need balance in government.

That's why I need a Republican governor.

We are about to have a Democratic legislature in the Senate.

When you get compromise.

You don't get this kind of Christmas tree spending every year of the billion dollars that goes to specific districts who support the budget.

Those things happen.

That's why you need a Republican governor, to put balance down there.

I've got just the guy.

David: one of the things that will be different is that there won't be anymore Christmas tree items.

Is that what you're saying?

>> oh yes.

Absolutely.

I'd bring in the Senate president and the speaker who I like personally.

I also like Phil Mercy.

I will go, we are not giving you any special deals.

You are not getting any extra money because we don't have it.

We simply don't have that kind of money to spend.

If we are going to spend an extra billion dollars, let's give it back to the taxpayers.

David: what would you change about the process itself?

a lot of folks saying that the governor should introduce the budget earlier and that the final budget document should be completed with maybe a month to go before the end of the fiscal year so that people can look at it.

Instead of 11:55 p.m. on June 30.

>> you can speak to your other reporters and experts at NJPBS because they've had the same criticism.

That all of a sudden comes the night before we vote on the budget, these things are put in the budget.

You need at least a seven day waiting time so people can analyze it.

There's just not enough time when you write the budget on a Monday and pass it on a Tuesday.

It's not fair to the taxpayers and it's just not fair to the state of New Jersey without transparency.

David: so you support that?

a month or so to have the document ready.

>> yeah.

A week is fine.

You give people a week to look at the budget.

That's enough time.

I don't think you need to do it for a month.

David: the president among the many things that he's doing this week, he just signed an executive order to dismantle, get rid of the federal Department of Education.

What's the impact on New Jersey?

what does the administration do to combat that?

>> what I can do, which I believe in deeply, is this cool boards of education should be making local decisions on how they want their teachers to teach and what their priorities are.

I trust the local boards of education to make that decision as to where to put their priorities.

There's a school that's doing really well.

I don't think the state of New Jersey needs to start putting in mandates that don't really help the school or is induced -- disagreement with the policy of the Board of Education.

I can't stop a President Bush -- duh.

I don't know what President Trump might do.

I can make sure empowering boards of education and letting them make decisions if the school is doing well, that would be my focus.

David: 35 seconds for you to fix NJ transit.

Go.

>> A lot of federal money.

Every prior governor, and without a structural change in the tracks, without a structural change with the overhead wires, New Jersey can't fix the problems we've seen.

We can do things with personnel.

We can do things with more people, more engineers.

Without federal money, I will be on my hands and knees with our congressional representatives and with the president asking for real substantial change in infrastructure, focusing on New Jersey transit in the tunnels.

David: all right.

Good to see you.

Thanks for coming on with us.

>> thank you.

David: all right then.

Steve Sweeney is an ironworker, union official, former state Senate President, and the namesake of the Sweeney Center for Public policy at Rowan University.

It's a pleasure to welcome him back.

Good to see you.

>> good to see you.

David: are people missing the boat when they refer to you as the South Jersey candidate?

>> I'm a candidate for governor of New Jersey.

Not just South Jersey.

I live in southern New Jersey.

The state is funny at times.

North Jersey, central jersey.

We are New Jersey.

I live in the southern part of the state.

I was the Senate President for 12 years.

I couldn't have done that without having friends throughout the state.

David: you know, there is -- I don't want to belabor it.

There's a big cultural difference from the northern part of the state to the southern part.

You could really tell that you are in a different part of Jersey.

But that's what makes this state really a little more purple than people believe.

Right?

>> just because you have an accent, I don't hold that against you.

[LAUGHTER] You know?

listen, the state is a moderate state.

Everyone had this perception that this is a flaming blue state and it's not.

It's the blue-collar state.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have stopped talking about issues that the public really cares about.

Which is the economy.

That statement was correct in 1992.

It is correct now.

It will be correct 200 years from now.

Most people worry about having a job so they can take care of their families, they can afford their car payments, they can afford their mortgage payments.

That's the economy.

We need to be focusing on and talking about that.

The other piece is New Jersey affordability.

If I hadn't done the 2% property tax cap -- we had bad news this week saying that the average property tax goes over 10,000 now.

If we hadn't done the 2%, it would have been 15,000 now.

David: you made some news recently on a couple of issues of importance around the state.

Let me ask you about a couple of these.

One, now you are in favor of homegrown cannabis.

You were against it before.

But only for medical cases.

Can you explain the fine point?

it's OK if you have a doctors slip but not OK if you just want to chill?

>> no.

Listen.

I was never against -- what I was for was letting the industry get started.

Let's grow the industry.

No pun intended.

Let's grow this industry so that we can have it where it's creating a lot of jobs.

Again, we were in the infant stages.

As soon as we opened it up, let's get this thing under control first and make sure we are establishing creating jobs and economic opportunities.

Then we would look at this.

It's time to face it.

The medical piece.

I'm somebody who likes to take certain steps to make sure it works.

For now, we eliminated -- when we first rolled out medical, we taxed it.

Then we did away with the tax.

Now I'm saying you should be allowed to grow in your own home for medical.

It's the evolution that we always talked about we did the bill.

This is the baby.

He created this in New Jersey.

Again, we want to do it in a way that we create a lot of jobs but we get to a point where it can be affordable for people, especially with health care services.

David: do I hear you saying that the continuing evolution of the industry in New Jersey will eventually see a day when homegrown adult recreational cannabis will be OK?

>> at some point I think, yes.

David: you also made an interesting point at the expense of your opponent Mikey Cheryl this week on next --x.

You called her out for taking money from SpaceX, Elon Musk's company.

Now she's raising money with musk as the bogeyman.

>> you can't have it both ways.

You know?

she should return the money.

She didn't return the money.

She said she spent it.

I've returned money from people that we shouldn't have taken it from.

Every elected official has at one point or another.

You return the funds.

You don't have to say, these were those dollars.

They were in the campaign account.

There was a progress he to try to raise money on it when you've been supported by the person that you are now saying is the bogeyman.

David: are people being shortsighted when they say she's the front-runner?

>> listen, I haven't seen any point of this.

I haven't seen any.

Some people are saying she is.

There is six people in the race.

Six of us.

I think anyone of us has a chance to rent the race right now.

I'm the only one that knows where the lights in the bathroom are on day one.

That does matter.

Normally the learning curve for governor within two years, they finally figure it out.

Now they are running for reelection.

You can't do anything when you are running for reelection.

You have to be careful.

We are heading into some really difficult financial times.

I think I'm the best equipped.

I'm the one that's calling for the new budget process.

Changing the way we do things so that people aren't saying they didn't get to see the budget before they signed it.

So again, we want to come up with a better process.

David: just to stick with the budget theme for a second.

Brannick said about a weeks advance between the time that the document is finished and the time you vote on it.

That seems pretty good.

A week.

Are you OK with that?

>> I'm the one that came up with it.

If you remember -- David: I thought it was a month.

>> we started early so that people -- you guys loved that we would wait until June 30 to start doing the budget.

There was all the drama with it.

I asked, is there any reason we have to wait until June 30?

he said no.

Well then let's move the process up?

so that people have a chance to review it at the end of the day.

It's their money.

They should have a right to it.

David: it's a good year.

>> we have several years.

The budget was done 4, 5 days ahead of time.

I was proud of that.

It was moving away from the chaos into the sunlight I guess you would say.

David: so going back to this question about money.

So many millions of dollars is going to be spent in this campaign.

Not to mention the assembly races.

You got a pack.

How do you fix it so that there's less influence of money on campaigns?

he says, you can't really fix it.

Is he right?

>> he is.

Unfortunately.

What happened with the federal government and citizens United where they basically said, you can't stop it.

David: he made a speech.

>> yeah.

Unfortunately, those who have the most money normally win.

With the state the way the state is set up with matching funds, it gives you a fighting chance.

But realize, with Super PAC's, you see some of the money that's being spent right now.

For me, I haven't spent anything yet because I have to make sure I have the resources to hit the race when I need to hit it.

When I need to advertise and communicate.

David: we are hearing a lot about energy prices.

This month, this year really.

Electricity prices particularly.

How did we end up in the situation?

REMIC says it's the Democrats fall for relying on trying to do clean energy initiatives out there.

What can we do about it right now?

what are you going to do about it?

>> I'm going to bring gas back into the state because we need the gas to afford the clean energy.

I don't know where they get all the clean energy legislation.

But you always need gas in order to get to the other side of the bridge.

I call it a bridge fuel.

What happened in New Jersey is, energy production came down, not up as demand went through the roof with data centers and charging stations.

It's the old supply and demand story.

That's why someone like myself is the type of person that should be done with it.

I understand the details in this.

I never would've backed off of natural gas.

Until we have sufficient energy being produced to cover that.

If you remember, they tried to shut the nuclear plants down.

If not for me, the new ones would've been shut down.

That's 43% of our power in New Jersey.

You want to talk about energy prices.

Your bill will be three times what it's going to be.

David: Ripoll -- Republicans calling for the BPU to be abolished.

>> we need to put energy experts in this is not a knock on anyone serving there.

When you have people that are experienced with knowledge in the industries, you have a tendency to get better results.

You just have to look around the country.

I'm not ashamed to say, I will look around the country and see if there's a better business model.

Looking to introduce that model.

Doing away with the B.P.

you.

That's a bad idea.

David: we always talk about the lack of South Jersey transit.

If you become a governor, will you make that a priority?

>> absolutely.

Also making sure that it gets finished.

That's what happens in the state.

I learned this.

We like to pick regions against each other.

We have enough to do one.

Then everyone gets fighting.

My point is, let's find a way to get it done.

The light rail line is it's really important.

We should be able to do both.

Most important lake, we have a professional running New Jersey transit right now that is a transit expert.

We are doing much better right now.

Transportation needs to be in all regions of the state.

I have rural poverty.

My district was rural.

We were lucky to get a bus.

If you had a bus go through the county or the town, you were lucky.

David: on the national level, I have 45 seconds for this, your party has never seemed weaker.

What do you need to do to get your mojo back?

>> have to grow a spine.

We have to stop sitting back and waiting for Trump.

The most embarrassing thing I ever saw.

At the state of the union.

When they threw that congresswoman out, every single congressperson, demo your -- Senator should've gotten out and left that place.

You don't let your members get treated like that.

David: Steve Sweeney, great to see you.

Thanks for coming on with us.

>> great to see you again.

David: that's Chat Box for this week.

Thank you to John Bramnick for joining us.

We are on blue sky now.

You can follow us there.

Stay up-to-date with what the rest of the news team is doing by subscribing to the NJ Spotlight News YouTube channel.

For the entire crew here at Gateway Center in downtown Newark, we think you for watching and we will see you next week.

>> major funding for Chat Box with David Cruz is provided by the members of the New Jersey education Association.

Making public schools great for every child.

Promotional support for Chat Box with David Cruz is provided by insider NJ.

A political intelligence network dedicated to New Jersey political news.

Insider NJ is committed to giving serious political players an interactive forum for ideas, discussion, and insight.

Online at insidernj.com.

♪