Transcripts For CSPAN Newsmakers 20120624 : vimarsana.com

the debate is over how to pay for it. i think that we re now in the position of needing the senate to actually do something so we can have a real negotiation. how important is it that the house and senate meet the june 30 deadline. what happens if this is not extended in the next several days? the rates would go up by law. they would jump up to 6.8%. if you put it in terms of perspective, it is not a big hit. right up front. this comes out to $7 a month. the so, i think we have time to get this right, but there is no reason to drag it out. that is where the frustration is. we are to pass legislation in the house. we have offered other alternatives. we are ready to take action and we are not getting much real cooperation out of either the senate or the president for a real solution. you have a lot of experience in washington. you are chairman of a committee. before you came to congress, you work working in the white house as a marine. you know your way around. why is this bill taking this long to get resolved? should this have been easy to do? this is an election year. i am sure that these not a surprise. that always complicates issues. the u.s. house of representatives in the senate are fairly closely divided. the positions are being taken by governor romney and president obama and those of us in the house and senate. it ought not to be this difficult. as you mentioned in years past, different republicans and democrats in the white house were able to get things done. this ought to be manageable. again, it is frustrating to have passed legislation to fix this in to have offered some alternatives in out and to have offered some alternatives to pay for it. i do not know how much more detailed i can get in the answer. we just need the senate to pick up the answer. are republicans in danger of taking a hit on this because president obama has been trying to link himself to the student loan issue? could your party the the one to take the political fall? i suppose my party could. his party could. he could, personally. this is a fair debate. i continue to make the point that house republicans have recognized that even though the democrats put this automatic hike into place, we are not only prepared, but are taking action to keep the interest rate at 3.4%. we have passed such legislation. we could have just dug in and said we passed it. good luck. we did not do that. we came forward with alternative proposals in a formal letter from the speaker in the majority leader to the president. you have already suggested these, we said. i am perfectly happy to have that debate. there is another piece on the whole student loan issue, which i find to be very annoying. all of this is a one-year fix. the president has made no proposal for what he wants to do next year. if we keep it at 3.4% for the next academic year, it is only one year. we have had no proposals from the department or the white house of what to do the next year. i believe that we have been working on a longer-term solution. these interest rates used to be set by the market. a durable rate. that was done away with when we put the 6.8 decrease to 3.4% and then going back to 620% if we had that interest rate, the student loan rates would be 2.5%. we cannot be in this business of congress and the white house trying to decide what the right interest rate is. some people have said that a variable interest rate makes things more unpredictable for students. is that a fair argument? this is unpredictable for students. what you have is a political decision. you have members of congress in the white house trying to decide what the right interest rate is. we should let the market to that. we will come back to education and i know but the race and other topics. immigration. the president had a proposal he has offered in recent days. when can we expect to cure for house republicans? what alternatives should they be offering to the proposal of the president about young immigrants who were here illegally? many of us are very concerned. we do not believe the president has the authority to bypass congress and make such a determination. he has a different view. that is very concerning to me into many of my colleagues. chairman lamarr smith came out with a statement saying that he did not believe that the president had the authority to do that. he expressed a concern, which is very fair, that we have americans who are unemployed and looking for jobs. why would the president do this? there have been proposals out there. senator rubio had one and we are still talking to romney about what he wants to do. we need to have this debate. i think the president overreached by taking this action. education and the work force? what would be the impact on the work force of the president s proposal? i have not calculated that to tell you what that might be. i will pick up on what lamar smith said. it would have an impact on job here because you have just made persons who are here illegally legal. that makes them more eligible for employment. i frankly did not expect the president to bypass congress and to take this action because he already said he did not have the authority to do this. it is a little bit concerning. i will say this is not the first time that the president has taken action to bypass congress that he does not have the power to do. i do not want to go back to education. when we get back there, i will mention examples. conditional waivers that the administration is granting to states when they fail to meet their standards under no child left behind. other sectors of education have granted waivers to the law all. this administration and secretary is granting conditional waverers. if you make the reform that i want you to make, i will grant you a waiver to the law. i do not believe that he has the power to do that. i have said so publicly. i have probably said it to you on the number of occasions. it is bypassing congress in making our job more difficult. into making our job more difficult. almost everybody around the country knows that no child left behind has to be fixed. there are major flaws in the law. i cannot go to any school and talk to any superintendent that does not say you have to do something about this. we are not yet to fix this. my colleagu you have to fix t. my colleagues tell me the same thing. we are trying to fix this law. by the president granting these conditional waivers, he has made it harder for us to get this done. i have a couple of questions to follow up on that. do you have any plans to hold oversight hearings on the waivers? i do not have one schedule. there are always going to be problems when you have additional waivers because one of the issues is you can grant it or not grant it or you can take away. take it away. i do not think he should be doing this. i have been pretty clear on that. we should move forward to change the law. we have passed legislation through the committee that would make some really important changes in how we deal with teachers and accountability. eliminate the ayp issues which people find onerous. it would be good to continue that process and granting these additional waivers has made it more difficult. [laughter] that is the trick when does the bill go to the floor? we are in an ever more compressed schedule. when do we break because the urge to get back to the district gets higher and higher. the majority leader is trying to get legislation through the floor. i have suggested there are many members would like to have the opportunity to vote on this. it is not scheduled. those discussions continue. we are in the same sort of situation with the workforce investment improvement act. we have passed it through committee. we are looking for foretime. you raised worker training, can you follow up? the bill the committee approved a couple of weeks ago. how would that affect the worker who is out of a job or want to step up in what he is doing he or she is doing? we are trying to actually do some of the things president obama said he wanted done. he wanted to clear up the maze. he said in a state of the union that there should be one program. we agree. if you are out of work and trying to find where to go to get the necessary skills, you do have a maze. our legislation eliminates 37 programs and creates a new workforce investment fund. something like 29 of those were identified in the general accountability office s report. how would that affect unemployed workers? make it easier. make it easier. you know where to go. you are going to go to workforce investment board that would have the two-thirds majority of employers who have the jobs. we have eliminated 19 mandates on these workforce investment board s that makes. we are trying to make it easier. this is one of those times where sitting on the floor of the house and listening to the president every head in the place was nodding. it ought to be simpler. it turns out that a lot of those programs have mom s or dad s or. it is too cumbersome and it is not responsive. there is another law that your committee wrote. the affordable care act the supreme court will rule in the next few days on the constitutionality of it. we know that house republicans, starting with speaker boehner, has said the whole lot should be repealed. what do you do after that? what other positive forward- looking steps are republicans talking about? good question. i hear it a bit. the reason speaker painter and i and others constantly talk about repealing the entire lot speaker gainer and i constantly talk about repealing the entire law is is difficult to enact anything that would improve the system while you still have that law on the books. very confusing. when we were having the debate before this was put through on christmas eve, republicans offered a number of proposals to address many of the issues that this affordable care act was supposed to address. we wanted to look at things that would address the pre-existing conditions and build high risk pools. we had legislation to do that. we think it is important when you are trying to lower cost to address the drivers. like defensive medicine. lawsuits. we had a proposal to get medical liability reform, which was going to save the government over $50 billion. we still think that is a very important thing. we might see some of these ideas you might raise them guest: yes. but, we want to be very careful not to do what speaker policy and the democrats did in janitor legislation. speaker pelosi did in jamming legislation. we think a replacement bill is the wrong thing. do not rush anything. we want everybody to read the doggone thing. in fact i find interesting is we have been cracking the number of pages of regulation and we are over 12,000 pages of regulations. they re not writing them. it is no wonder that when you talk to businesses, which i do a lot, men and women whether they are large companies or small businesses, they are flummoxed. they do not know what to do. they do not know what will happen to them. they re trying to figure of with their cost will be. they re considering dropping. they simply do not know. it is very important when the supreme court acts that we take action to clear the whole thing off the books so we don t have all the uncertainty. there are a lot of ideas that he to be brought forward, but it is impractical to bring them when you have what is potentially remnants of this law. we have 8 minutes left. great. health care has been a big issue. education finally came up a few weeks ago. romney unveiled his education plan. he wants to use federal title i at any school. you think the federal government decides the d.c. voucher program should play a smaller role when it comes to school choice. we do not have the specifics of romney s plan. the discussions we need to have i am planning to ta to his team next week. my schedule is working to talk with him. we in the committee in the conference, we like to see work choices. more options. more parental involvement. we want to expand charter schools. we have the bipartisan support for that. we think it is important that you reduce the federal mandates on schools. i think his ideas about more options, more choices, will be matched with us. the specifics of how he does that and which ones you use, he will have to work all that out. i would argue and have argued that we have a situation now where we have this administration spending money on things they like and neglecting some fundamental responsibilities like special education. this was one of my first discussion with secretary duncan. it has come up every year since then. i think we can work with governor romney, president romney, on making sure we are setting the right priorities. romney s also said he wants to combine the department of education with another agency. can you get behind that? [laughter] well, many people have said, ever since jimmy carter, that there was not justification for the whole department. we have taken the view that we need to look at what it is that the department is doing. we need to diminish, in my view, some of the mandates of the department. we need to look to see what needs to be done, what is a legitimate federal role. then we need to see how that leads to changing that role. it used to be part of health education and welfare. perhaps remodeling it that way. as you know, there are issues we have to work through before you could do that. for example, the department of education is one of the largest lenders since they have taken over the student loan business. over $100 billion per year. you have to work for how you will do that. that is the approach we have taken. we would be happy to talk to governor romney about how he sees that. with the immigration issue, you mentioned republicans in the house and senate are waiting for romney to take the lead on the position. we have seen headlines in the paper. when it comes to education, should these talks have started earlier? is it too late to be talking with his team about getting things rolling? has he been listening enough to you? you may recall that earlier, there was a somewhat heated competition to see to the republican nominee was going to be. no, i do not think so. it is not practical to have those conversations with 12 or 9 or however many candidates you have to start with. now, he is the nominee. it is important to start to have those discussions. we want to be able to work in conjunction with him to get things done. ideas.e our own ou that does not mean we will adopt his ideas but we will work with him. if he is elected, and republicans keep control of the house and maybe the senate, what would it be like next january before your committee for your committee? well, some of the frustrations we have felt under the current balance with president obama in the white senatorsenate to rea is we see theiedeid need for regulation. we would like to have the effect there. we would like to get some legislation passed like the workforce investment approved an act. improvement act. it i would hope we would be able to move some of that legislation. we have been able to move legislation in the house, sometimes strongly bipartisan legislation. and not be able to get any action in the senate rul. it is majority leader mcconnell, we expect to move those things. i expect we could do a fair amount of its as bipartisan legislation. time for one or two or questions. one of the challenges you will have before there is a new or a second obama term is what will happen with sequestration, cuts to every program including education character education be protected under any deal including education. should education be protected under any deal? sequestration is disastrous. across the board cuts with some formula divisions, the offense takes a horrific cut. i think we need to set priorities. house passed legislation to avert some of those cuts in sequestration. i understand as we are recording this that the senate has taken some action, calling on the administration to come back with some impacts with what the sequestration will beat. the administration, even though it is the law, has been unwilling to say how they would implement this law. we need to get that information. i think it is incumbent upon us to set priorities. our first priority is to do something to get this economy going. we have been in the situation of unemployment over 8% for 40 months. we have this very weak recovery. you get this bad economic news that comes out. we just had very low job creation in this last month. and so, our priority needs to be to take action to see this economy grow and that means that you have to get the private sector engaged and get them to create jobs. that affects all of these things. money for the occasion. money for defense. money for education. money for defense. it is very frustrating that we can get things passed in the house and we are having difficulty getting them to take it up in the senate, as we have found since they have been three years without passing the budget. it is hard to set these priorities like education or defense when you don t even have that basic tool. final moments. [laughter] any other oversight plans? you mentioned race to the top. yeah. in the elementary and secondary education act, we have changed the approach to teachers and our rid of the qualified a teacher business that came with no child left behind. we are asking states to take a different approach. we will continue to have oversight hearings and continue to ask for information. we have challenges in higher education where we are fighting over side. the committee has oversight responsibilities over the department of labor. i am acronyming. we are doing lots of oversight in those areas, as well. there is a lot to be done. representative john kline, thank you for being our guest on newsmakers. staying with us to reflect are our reporters. have we heard before that the chairman is planning to meet with governor romney s team to start hammering out plans? no. i wonder if they will invite me. [laughter] why would that be interesting to sit in on? governor romney kind of put forth its framework that relies on school choice. we really want to see more details are flushed out on that. i want to see how well that jives with the german s own bill he talks about for renewing no trial but the that chairman s own bill he talks about for renewing the child left behind. i want to know where the details are. how could that be significant? will you be watching? the question you are asking is if governor romney was elected, how well will he get along? what we he do with a republican house? i got a sense from chairman kline that he has thought about it and he is hopeful they lot of current problems that a lot of current problems would go away. the significance to me is that kline is frustrated.or john and flummoxed with the status quo, it is as thought he looks beyond the election. student loans. he talked about it. did you hear anything new? no. no new arguments or deals. we were hoping to break the story about the big deal on student loans. that did not happen in this interview. we heard the chairman s frustration. are you getting a sense he will try to get something to go through? our