In the State House today, the run-up to an important vote on Gov. Chris Christie’s anti-opioid agenda was punctuated by events in Washington. NJTV News Chief Political Correspondent Michael Aron discussed the happenings with Anchor Mary Alice Williams.
Williams: They say all politics is local. Today it was also national.
Aron: It was both. Let’s start with the Assembly. Gov. Christie wanted an anti-opioid bill within 30 days. Today he got it. The Assembly passed the bill the Senate had already passed that mandates six months of drug treatment that puts a five-day limit on prescriptions of pain pills. But simultaneous to that — and the governor signed that bill by the way immediately — but simultaneous to that, Republican leaders were complaining that Democrats were spending a lot of time passing anti-Trump resolutions as they did again today. Anti-opioids is one thing, anti- Trump is apparently another.
Williams: After the bill signing, he started fielding questions. And how did he answer the one about his luncheon yesterday at the White House?
Aron: He said they had an enjoyable time. He didn’t say much else about it except that he refuted the press reports that said that they talked about him taking on some kind of a roll in the Trump administration on the drug issue.
Christie: I had some very good discussions with the president yesterday about that. But let me be very clear. They did not include any discussion of me joining the Trump administration in some type of drug abuse role, whether it’s the drug czar or God forbid the surgeon general or something like that, OK? We had lots of discussions yesterday, the president and I. We talked about a lot of different things. This was one of the things we talked about. But we did not talk about any job directly related to or even indirectly related to the drug issue. I talked to him about what we were doing here. He was very interested in it. And we had a number of conversations that kind of flowed off of that and it was also a social visit. You know, the president and I hadn’t seen each other since the inaugural. He called and asked Mary Pat and I to come down for lunch and we did and we wound up spending about three hours in the White House with him. Between a bill signing and the lunch and the lunch ran long and then we had more conversations afterwards with them and it was a … we had a great day with our friend and we had a lot of conversations. Beyond that, except for the drug abuse issue, which the White House put out that we discussed, I’m not going to talk about anything else that I discussed with the president yesterday. But on the drug abuse issue, there was no discussion of a job that would necessitate me leaving the governorship.
Aron: Somehow, Mary Alice, that doesn’t sound like a man who’s about to quit his job in New Jersey and rush down to Washington D.C. to put out a fire and for what it’s worth, that luncheon was set up two weeks ago by the White House, so it’s not as if Christie got a quick emergency call.
Williams: OK, thank you Michael.
Aron: Thank you.