Transcripts For CSPAN Newsmakers 20100926 : vimarsana.com

taking a look at suburban voters in the upcoming elections, danielle pletka. we will speak to david armor about northern virginians schools. enjoy the rest of your weekend, i hope that you have a great week. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010] . this week on wednesday, senate republicans unanimously elected him vice care of their conference following alaska senator s resignation from that post. also the senate republican s point person on health care. thank you. samuel is the new managing editor for congress. and national politics reporter for politico. we re going to start with you. congratulations on your leadership position. thank you. and let s get right to the question of the mid-terms and the expectations that republicans seem to have that this is going to be a good year for republicans. can you tell us a little bit about how you re either preparing for this or tamping down expectations which i have heard about whether republicans could take control of the senate? people all around the country are very concerned because washington hasn t been listening. and we have a government that spends too much, borrows too much and is growing bigger er day. in states all around the country, that is a message that is resonating back home and here. and i hear every every weekend in wyoming. i g home every weekend but if you look at some of these poll numbers, if those elections were today we would do very well. would the republicans take over the senate? i m not going make those kinds of predictions. you write about this er day. a number of toss-up races. but the enthusiasm and the energy is clearly on the side of people who have a conservative approach to things which in american just says let s li within our means. families have to do that, washington needs to do that and washington has gotten it wrong for the last two years. speaking of promises and health care, you re very involved in republicans are running on a platform to ry peel the health care law. until you have a republican in the white house it seems unlikely that republicans will be able to make a serious dent in the health care law. what can the g.o.p. really do in the next two years to make good on that promise given that the votes may not be there for you and you certainly don t have the white house on your side? what can you do on this front? i think your article today is as well as yesterday and the last couple days in politico was such that you got it right ft lots of promises made by the obama administration about what people would expect. or should expect. and those promises were not in any way fulfilled. that s why the american people overwhelmingly want to have this bill repealed and replaced. 61% of people in the rasmussen poll said repeal and replace. realistically, with the president in the white house, no matter how successful the republicans are this year, you re really talking about elections in 2010 as well as 2012. and the senate in 2012 in terms of who is up for running that year, you have many more democrats at risk seats. so i think 2012 has been the year that was supposed to be a big year for republicans. if that follows through, then barack obama will be a one-term president. then you can really have a president there who will sign the kind of things that we need to have signed. but i would expect the president to veto. but there are things specifically you can do right now to chip away at this piece by piece to strangle off this big health care takeover by the government. and we can specifically get into those if we d like. can you talk about the dynamics of the senate. now, there is a democratic president in the white house, the democrats have a huge majority in the senate. and still, we find that they ve had a lot of difficulty getting anything done. even if you do very well this year and you either take control and you have a narrow majority or, as a lot of expect, do very well and have much closer minority, does anything get done in this senate, in the kind of climate that we have in the washington? i d like to see things get done. when we have a 59-41 senate with the democrats in charge, the president in the white house, rather than working together with republicans to find common ground and to find solutions that will best work for the american people because we do need health care reform in this country. but on that and so many issues, harry reid and the democrats said if we can just pick off one, nobody would he was not looking for consensus. you take a look at the days when people would overwhelmingly get together, bills would pass with 80 senators supporting those bills, that s how it was when i was in the snate senate in wyoming. we found common ground. but this administration and under harry reid s leadership, his goal has always been let s see if i can pick off one. i m only looking to get to 60. and i want to go as far to the left as i can but as long as i can take one with me and get our 60, that was i think the approach that they took. which isn t good for america and it s not good for bipartisan coming together. so if you have a more balanced membership in the senate, republican democrat, you know, the hope is that then the president seems i ve got to move more to the middle so we can move the country ahead. how about the argument coming from democrats that you have democratic president, a huge democratic year in 2008, 59 democratic senators on some days, 60s, why was it not possible for them to the the things they did or promise that they would do given that they had such a huge majority and such backing? because the positions they took were so extreme. they went so far out of the mainstream. the founding fathers when they set this up, you know, wanted the senate to be the area to kind of let the coffee cool and to let things cool down so they wouldn t overreact. so there are all of the mechanisms set up in the senate. the senate is set to play defense, to stop bad ideas from happening. and that s a lot of what i see our role has been and mine specifically in the last year and a half, two years to stop bad ideas from becoming law. and that s how the senate structurally is set so that people ought to be working together for solutions in the best interest of the country. inside baseball and the dynamics of the senate. if you do take the majority do you support filibuster? whoever is in the minority supports the filibuster. this has been set up to say we need to have a way to slow things down. and i think the rules have worked well. this isn t something brand new. this is something that s been in place specifically the filibuster for a long long time. the modern has certainly changed and how it s applied in recrept years. do you think it s working for the senate and for the country? it used to be 67, now it s only 60. so it s the easiest right now. one of the differences is a number of years you had to go and talk. now they can have it without the long speeches. but that was quite a historic time. and mr. smith goes to washington, long phil busters. i d be willing to talk, though. some of your republican colleagues have suggested that if republicans do gain control, that government shutdown may be in the offing. specifically for health care reform this is being talked about, the idea of putting restrictions on appropriations funding for hhs or the i.r.s. to implement this law. is it worth shutting down the government over anything in the next two years in a republican-controlled congress? specifically over health care reform given how much it s disliked by members of your party. is a government shutdown something you would support? what i would like to do is see us choking off some of this money that s supposed to go to the internal revenue service. they re asking for $10 billion to fund hiring up to 16,000 new i.r.s. agents to implement what s in this health care law that says every individual needs to buy health insurance. and the i.r.s. is given the job of going out there and checking to make sure that each one of your viewers has health insurance. so they need i.r.s. agents to do that. if they don t have the money they re not going to be able to implement that. also business supply insurance. so you can limit money going to agencies. the same with health and human services budget. they need about $10 billion to go through the rules and regulations. i can think of ways to try to stop that money from going to those specific agencies, the internal revenue service, health and human services. but there are number of years that i would go after with the health care law in efforts to repeal and replace. look, called the class act has to do with long-term care within the first ten years of the bill give out no services, the whole goal is to bring in money. make what bernie madoff did look minimal. it s that bad. we ought to repeal that. i think states ought to be able to opt out of this. nancy pelosi said and in any given state, they can decide whether they want to be part of the rules and regulations or just eliminate that. nancy pelosi said you have to pass the bill first before you get to find out what s in it? well, think about that. people are finding out what s in it. this whole i.r.s. regulation that has to do with these 1099. all these small businesses, 40 million of them are going to have to fill out these additional 1099 forms to anybody out who they buy or sell from. it s going to cost billions of dollars in expenses. and nobody saw that coming until after the law was passed. would you sign a pledge? there s a group called defunded.org trying to get pledges from members of congress to agree to defund the health care law. i d have to take a look. staying on health care but on the politics which obviously has been driving so much of the discussion over the last couple of years. now, it s passed. after a very long and difficult process. why is it not then that the system worked in that situation as well? and can you i mean, you were working to the extent that it happened at all closely with the white house on that issue. what happened? i remember one event where you went to the white house, senate republicans, and came back completely upset and said you were being used as props. and that meeting said to me to signal a complete change in how that process went. what, why were you not able to work on an issue that was so important to the country and get it done when it seemed so clearly at the top of the list of priorities? i think that s a perfect question. and also, it brings to the question why is the public so upset? because all of this that the president said this will be shown on c spanch. he said these deliberations and discussions would be held on c-span. everything was done behind closed doors. you had the senate health committee bill come together, the finance committee. and then what did harry reid do? he took both of those bills into his office, closed the door, and he and just a couple of people including rahm emanuel came out with this 2,000 page health care bill. that left things out that had been to the finance committee that were in boats bills, the health committee bill and the finance, left them out completely. other thing that is were in neither bill came through. none of this was in public debate, none in open meetings. so then and the end you cram in things like the corn husker kickback, gater aide, the special carve out for people from florida, a $100 million for people. special deals to get their vote on this. they say don t watch the sausage being made. but one, the american people weren t able to see it made and they saw to a certain degree and they said no, don t pass this. so we had this incredible opportunity and you had the economy doing so poorly and the president saying he was going to focus on jobs and the economy didn t. he spent the first year on health care ignoring jobs, the economy, the debt, the spending. and the big promise is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it. now the government, washington regulations from the white house say 51% of people that get their health care through work aren t going to be able to keep what they have even if they like it. he said we were going to get the cost of care down. catteds lean seebluss said insurance premiums will drop 10 to 20% when this passes. we re seeing premiums go up. so on item after item. and he said this is going to help save money and cut the deficit. and now the new talking points say don t mention that because nobody believes it. the president making all these promises. the realities are very different. which is why the recent article in politico that even quoted bill clinton saying people will love this. now bill clinton said i was wrong. halfway through. did the president have any option, which is the claim they make all the time, that there was no negotiating option with republicans and hence the debate having to take place almost entirely within the democratic side of the i think there were lengthy discussions. the finance committee, senator grassley, senator hatch. senator snow was a part of these discussions and they ultimately voted against what was crammed into the bill. members of congress on the democrat side didn t even want to have to live under this plan. so, and then i kept calling for the president to please put somebody in charge of medicare and medicaid for the country. if you have a health care bill on the floor that cuts 500 billion from our seniors on medicare and puts 16 million more people on medicaid, there should be somebody who is the director of that program for the country who could then come to congress and answer some questions like, what is the impact going to bn on our medicare patients? what is the impact going to bn on people on medicaid and the people and health care providers if you cram 16 more people on to medicaid? president for a year refused to appoint anybody. he finally named somebody after this was signed into law and then does a recess appointment so that individual donald burwick has still never come to congress to explain to the american people his quotes about rationing care, about his love of the national health care system, the british health care system, and about a health care system designed to redistribute wealth. and i think the american people want to have answers to all of those things. and that s why this continues to be so unpopular. two of your republican colleague representatives, paul ryan and senator judd greg said wednesday in an interview with cnbc that reek consileation would be an effective tool to use to repeal parts of the law. they endorsed reconciliation but that s a tool that you can use to get around the votes. that s highly criticized by republicans during the health care debate. is that something that you can see using reconciliation to pull back elements of the health care law? i haven t looked into that aspect of it. but there are a number of different aspects that we ought to be taking out of the health care bill, looking at limiting the funds for the i.r.s., for health and human services. i d have to look and see. one specific question about insurance policy and health care law. there are aspects of it which seem to be popular with the public. portability, also the lifetime caps raised and preexisting conditions. how does the system fund those popular aspects without a universal mandate? well, in wyoming we ve had a state-run pool for high-risk people, people with preexisting conditions. it was more expensive than other insurance, but it was something that we could work with people when we had subsidies and it worked well in that state and 20-some states had something like that. now, this administration has come out with their plan that you say potentially popular part of this. but for people who have been doing it right all along with preexisting conditions as part of the state plans, they re not eligible. they re not eligible at all for what s come through this health care law. the only way you can be eligible for this is if you ve been without any insurance for six months. so if you have somebody that s been paying a higher rate because the new law says it has to be down at the rate of everyone else. if you have people who have been paying a higher rate scraping by, they get no benefit from the health care law. the only people that benefit are those who haven t been acting as what some might say is a responsible way of trying to get insurance and so they re going to keep paying up here and it s only for people who have had no insurance for six months that have gining to be helped by this. so there are huge inequities in this. and there are a number of things that kicked in just this past week. the president had a back yard meeting and talked about some of those wh are supposed to be the popular. this week, u.s.a. today had an article about what they were and said this is the popular part of it. and then underneath, long praffs called be aware. so the issue you talked about lifetime caps. be aware, it s very likely if you want to raise that, you know, limit lifetime amounts, or not limit it, then you re all going to pay more. so the all of the things in terms of the things that are even supposed to be the good things that are going into effect have lots of be aware with, and that s why still today 61% of american people want this health care law repealed and replaced. we have six minutes left. with we talk about the turmoil in your party? your leadership position is in some ways reflective of what happened in alaska where an incumbent senator has been beaten in a primary. we seem the primary results in delaware. what sit that is happening in the republican party that allows mike castle, with a long record, to lose to crist tin o donnell and how does that bode for the party going into the 112th congress when you guys return next year? there are a lot of energyized people across the country who are concerned with a country who spends too much, borrows too much and grows bigger every day. they don t blame your party for that. the anger on the republican side of the fence in this case is in some ways a reflection of people being upset at what happened during the bush years. clearly what s happening during the obama years. but are they taking this out on some of your party members in a way that you didn t expect? if you take a look at the voting record, mike castle voted for cap and trade, a lot of things. it s really an issue of what are we spending money on? how are we spending it? are people getting value for their dollars? people around the country don t believe they re getting vaul for their tax dollars. we are completely united behind the people in our party. we are working together and working for our nominees. in alaska that s joe miller. he s the nominee and has the full support of the republican conference. mike castle is the said to be pondering a write-in bid in delaware. would you encourage or discourage? the people of delaware have spoken in the republican primary and our nominee is there. that s who we will be supporting. there is on immigration reform, republican potential nominees for president in 2012. mitt rom any we ve reported that he has tried talking with some members of congress to say we need to get immigration reform tauf table by 2012 or else republicans could face trouble in the southwest. you can t win the white house without picking up nevada and some other, arizona potentially, florida. that it s the republican party continues running on a platform in which it s not views as amenable to what immigration advocates want, that could pose some problems for republican nominee in 2012. have you heard of that at all, that it will be a problem for republican candidates in 2012 if immigration reform is not dealt with? will that at all create a likelihood that republicans will want to take immigration reform off the table in the next two years to get it out of the election equation for republican candidates? i haven t heard that at all. when you talk about immigration reform, to me the issue that i hear about is illegal immigration. we re a nation of immigrants, people that have come here legally. the issue is people who come here illegally and how to deal with that. and now there s this memorandum from homeland security about ways to allow people that are here illegally to stay here. about an 11-page report that senator grassly from iowa was able to obtain and we need answers from that from this administration homeland security because it clearly vile yates the law. we need secure borders. i ve been to the border. the border is not secure. and that s a big problem right now and i think that s what s driving this debate and discussion is first we need to secure the border. then you can have the rest of the debate. senator, your recent election to the senate leadership is an indication of a certain rapidty of your ascent in the senate. can you talk a little bit about what you hope to do in this job given that you know how the senate works, you know that it is meant to play defense and not offense. and you have i think what will be a new class of people doing what new classes always do. they want to come, they want to change the world. what is your role in trying to help them navigate this very unfamiliar? i was the chief of staff at a hospital, the wyoming medical center and we had 100 doctors on the staff. and you have the different personalities, different eegoos, you have the pediatricians and the psychiatrists and the brain surgeons and heart surgeons and we re all different. but all of the doctors wanted to do a good job for patients. and i think all of the senators and the new ones coming in want to do a good job for this country. i was a surgeon, too. i m looking forward to working with all of them. but there is common success that we will have as well continue to talk about a message that is that this government and this administration spends too much, borrows too much, grows too big every day and we need to get the spending under control, we need to limit the spending. the american people get it. they re worried with this debt and this deficit. and you raised the issue of a previous administration. if you look at all the money, all the debt that is acaccumulated from the time george washington began as president to the time george w. bush left the white house, this president has doubled that debt in 5 years, tripling it in ten when you look at his budget. that s irresponsible, it is unsustainable. and i think what we re seeing all across the country is people are worried that this is actually irreversible. and they re saying we need our country back. we have to rein this in because we can t continue spending each year where 41 cents of every dollar we spend this year is borrowed from china. we are over time. but let me ask you, handi cap what you think will happen with the tax and debate. i think you should never raise taxes at the time of a recession. and that s going to be i know my position and that of my colleagues. we ll see if senator reid brings it to the senate. he is the majority leader. he gets to decide what comes to the senate floor. but i think you shouldn t raise taxes on anyone during a recession. one last issue. as you know i voted against it and it had to do with missile defense. i ve been to russia, been to moscow, st. petersberg. i have concerns, i agree with ronald reagan. trust but verify. there are parts that say we would not be able to continue to defend ourselves as a nation. to me the star treaty is supposed to be about how many we have, how many the russians have. now how we can defend ourselves. we have korea, iran. we need to defend ourselves against everybody, not just focus on the russians. so i don t think we should limit our defense and that s my concern and that s why i voted against it. thank you for being with us this week. thank you. and we are back on newsmakers . after a conversation with senator john brasso who is in the new leadership position with the republicans. it was interesting. you ve written a book about the senate and i heard a lot of dynamics. let me ask you both on national polling ticks. given the spoke scope scope of the problem is it better tactically for them to get closer but not take the majority for 2012 than to take over the senate outright right now? i would say probably yes. in that in the senate, as the senator said, it s much easier to play defense. the power to say no is the real