[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC STING] - Hi everyone.

Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with State Senator Holly Schepisi, the Republican conference leader in the Senate.

You are in an undisclosed location.

Is that true senator?

- (chuckles) That is correct.

- You got it.

And thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, listen, we are taping this program in mid toward the back end of November, but on November 7th, there was an election.

The Republicans lost seats in the senate and the assembly after winning legislative seats the last time the legislature was up.

What went wrong for the Republicans?

- I think it was a perfect storm of three factors.

This was the first time in the history of the state where solely the legislature up for election with a new vote-by-mail system that Democrats have embraced and Republicans and a lot of unaffiliated have not.

And so walking into election day, even in places like my district, where I won, I was, on paper, down by over 4,000 votes.

And I think until and unless we really get our own to embrace it, particularly the voters who may vote one in every four, two in every four election cycles, we'll continue to see these trends.

I think the second factor is the Republican Party has been very poor on reproductive rights.

And a lot of people, particularly women of all ages, have grave concerns because of the court overturning Roe v. Wade.

And I think that really did play against us.

And then the third was this improperly named Election Transparency Act, where we saw the most money ever flood into legislative races.

And you know, unions, the NJEA, Planned Parenthood, a whole host of special interest groups, pumped tens of millions of dollars into some of these races.

- Many of the Republicans in competitive districts focused on so-called culture wars.

Hey listen, don't parents have a right to know if their sixth grade child is talking to a school administrator and potentially discussing gender confusion or potential gender change?

Parents have a right to know.

what about books, banning books in certain schools?

Or excuse me, in schools having to do with certain LBGTQ plus issues.

Why run on those issues when affordability is the issue in New Jersey?

Taxes, can't afford to rent here.

Can't afford to buy here.

Why did so many Republicans get it so wrong on the so-called culture wars?

- I don't think they necessarily got it wrong.

I think we just didn't get enough people to turn out.

Nobody, and that's what's interesting too.

It's all about the messaging.

Nobody wants to ban books, and somehow this has been transformed into Republicans want to ban books.

There's a huge difference.

- Some of you do, Senator.

Senator, no disrespect.

But we had Senator Ed Durr, who's no longer a state senator because he lost his seat after winning the seat from former State Senate President Steve Sweeney.

There are books he wants to ban.

There are books he wants to ban that have to do with certain issues, dealing with homosexuality and transgender issues.

I'm not talking about you, but some of those, some of your Republican brethren see it very differently than you do.

- I never saw that interview.

At least the super majority of people who I speak to on my side of the aisle, we support libraries, we support the First Amendment, we support, you know, even things we wholeheartedly disagree with, to be able to have availability for people to read and have access.

I think the argument was really focused on age appropriateness.

And just because something merely may have an LGBTQIA theme in it doesn't mean that it has to be hypersexualized for inappropriate ages, and the nuances of that argument, it's just easier to go out and go, oh, Republicans wanna ban books rather than having a true intellectual discourse on the efficacy of a policy of allowing books that, you know, if they didn't have those themes and were available for kids that age, people would be up in arms.

And so, you know, but it's tough sometimes to articulate, particularly when you have tens of millions of dollars coming after you in some of these races, what a reasonable person, oftentimes, if not most of the time, would actually agree with.

- Senator, let me ask you this.

Orsted, after a billion dollar, potential billion dollar bailout that Governor Murphy had advocated along with other Democrats, bailed out, they're out of the wind industry.

As we tape this program, there's a huge question as to what wind energy will look like in the state.

When Orsted, the largest company, I believe, in the world, who is involved in wind energy, they're out.

Where do you believe Governor Murphy's wind energy, larger clean energy initiative is?

- I think in light of the election results, he's gonna double down.

He's too far into this.

His wife is now running for US Senate on kind of this platform.

He, regardless of whether or not it's something that is feasible, sustainable, or is even able to be done, I think he's gonna go all in on it, and.

- What does that mean?

What does it mean to go all in if the economics don't work for wind energy?

If Orsted said we can't make money on this deal, bailout, subsidy, give us, no, now we're out.

Where are the economics on this, A?

And B, if that doesn't happen, what happens to the clean energy program in the state?

- Well, I think the energy master plan, as it currently is, is untenable and not sustainable.

We still have not received from anybody in the administration any sort of real idea as to how many hundreds of billions of dollars it's gonna cost the taxpayers of the state.

And I think everybody can agree, particularly me as a mom, that we want a clean environment.

We want a future for our children, our grandchildren, but it's how we implement and how we do this.

In my other life, I'm a corporate attorney.

I represent an outside small municipal utility company, and the infrastructure upgrades that we are grappling with just for a small little utility, in order to even be able to service a small portion of EV and some of these new requirements, is in the tens of millions of dollars.

So you replicate that all over the state without a grid, without a current infrastructure able to handle it, with moving up timelines and goals that aren't realistic, you know, it's, outside of the cost factor, where transmission costs have already increased by two to 300% in the past couple of years alone, we're gonna be pricing people out of their homes while also collapsing the grid if we don't do this properly.

And I think right now there's too much at stake where it's we wanna be the leader in this that nobody's thinking about the practical implications of how we actually do it.

- Senator, let's do this.

I wanna talk to you about fentanyl.

We got real, time is tight here.

We'll have you back to talk more about this.

30 seconds on the fentanyl crisis, A and B, the role of the legislature in addressing it.

- Fentanyl is one of the biggest risks to our kids right now.

People don't understand that a large portion of fentanyl now is being put into counterfeit pills.

So people think, ah, you know, it's not heroin, it's not cocaine, it's not this, it's not that.

And think that they're getting a Valium or Ativan, or something like that on college campuses.

70% of those pills are counterfeit.

They're being manufactured in China, coming up through Mexico.

Our border is completely open.

And many if not most of those pills contain a lethal dosage of fentanyl.

- And the role of the legislature in dealing with it.

300 young people are dying every day in the United States from fentanyl.

Real quickly, the role of the legislature in this.

- Enhanced penalties coupled with enhanced education and more mental health resources across the state for our young who are struggling.

- Senator Holly Schepisi, the State Senate Republican Conference Leader.

Senator, thank you so much for joining us.

We look forward to talking to you next time.

Thank you.

- Thanks Steve.

- You got it.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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