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C-SPAN’s Newsmakers

STEVE SCULLY, HOST, NEWSMAKERS: Joining us on Newsmakers on this Sunday, Congressman Allen Boyd, Democrat of Florida and the Co-Chair of the Blue Dog Coalition. And joining us for the questioning is Gail Russell Chaddock, who is with The Christian Science Monitor, Congressional Correspondent – thanks for being with us – and Rick Cowan, who is the Congressional Correspondent for Reuters.

Congressman, let me begin the questioning with the compromise reached this past week, supporters say it was a compromise. But your colleague in the Senate, Democrat Feingold, said it was capitulation. What is it?

ALLEN BOYD, CONGRESSMAN (D-FL) AND CO-CHAIR OF BLUE DOG COALITION: Well, I think it’s a perfect example of a way a legislative body in America should work. We have – the two issues here are one is the protection of our individual freedoms, privacy rights, those kinds of things versus how do we protect ourselves from the people outside who would do us harm?

That problem became an exacerbated one after September 11. And this country began to wrangle with how we deal with protection of privacy rights versus security for our nation. And this is the culmination of several months, even years, of negotiation between the White House, the civil liberties groups, the House, the Senate, Republicans, Democrats, all coming together saying this is the best compromise for America.

So I’m very, very pleased with what has happened in the passage of the bill this past week.

SCULLY: But how do you guarantee those civil rights?

BOYD: Well, I think they’re, again, guaranteed in our Constitution. And what we’ve tried to do here is to make sure that you have the proper executive reviews and judicial reviews of any procedures that would be put in place for surveillance. And those civil rights are guaranteed, I believe, by the Constitution. And this will not abridge that.

SCULLY: Rick Cowan.

RICHARD COWAN, CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT, REUTERS: Congressman, on the same day that the FISA deal was announced, the House of Representatives passed a huge war spending bill. It also had new money for veterans and unemployment insurance.

You have been very outspoken about not adding to the federal debt. Yet you voted for this bill. People yesterday – on Thursday on Capitol Hill were saying, “This is legislation that will add about a quarter of a trillion dollars to the debt.”

How do you square those two things, voting – supporting the bill but racking up so much more debt?

BOYD: Well, I think first of all, Rick, it’s important to understand that bill passed the House of Representatives 416 to 12 – 416 to 12. The bill – the substantive legislation in the bill contained several items which we, as a nation, needed to do. One was provided the funding for the war fighters that we have overseas, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have a very controversial war and a great debate going on at war – about that war here in America now. But many of us divide the policy debate from doing the things that – given the resources to the folks in the field who are carrying out that policy that their government puts – charges them with. So that – the war funding was something that we needed to do.

The other part of the bill, the GI Webb bill obviously is an update to a 60-year-old GI education benefits bill, something that most of Congress decided that we really needed to do, update a 60-year-old program. Unemployment insurance benefits were in that. We have the highest unemployment rate since the ‘90s now, 5.5 percent. We are on the verge of going into a recession. The economists tell us that unemployment insurance extensions of those benefits are the best way to stimulate the economy.

There were some other issues in that bill, all of those which the government needs to do. My problem with the legislation is that we, as a nation, the richest nation on the face of the earth, have said, “We’re not going to pay for this. We’re going to go borrow the money and send the bill to our children and grandchildren.”

I think that’s morally wrong. I think it’s a mistake. We’ve staked out our – that position on the rule and on the initial stages of the bill. We passed the bill out of the House of Representatives that paid for the new mandatory spending program, the GI Webb bill, as you know. The Senate rejected that.

The Senate really doesn’t understand yet about the PAYGO concept. They don’t have really many members in the Senate that understand that when you have a government program, somebody’s got to pay for that. And now the White House certainly doesn’t because the White House has increased spending at record levels in the eight years that they’ve been in office.

So we have to continue to carry this fight, the Blue Dogs do, have to continue to carry this fight about fiscal responsibility. We staked out our ground on the rule. As you know, we lost that fight. And we will continue to carry that fight as we go to the next level.

COWAN: This has been maybe a recurring theme where you have some impact in the House, it gets over in the Senate, you fail, it comes back. In that next step, is there anything that Speaker Pelosi could be doing to hold the line harder and to try to establish your position in the bill that gets to the White House?

BOYD: Well, I guess there is. But Speaker Pelosi has to weigh all sides of that issue, and that is do you – are you willing to cut the war funding for the folks who are wearing the uniform overseas to make that point? And that’s the dilemma that Speaker Pelosi was in.

I’ll tell you what we really have to do. We have to – when we get a new president, a new person in the White House, we’re going to be in his office. And we’re already talking to the candidates about these issues, these fiscal issues of fiscal responsibility.

We’ll have an election also that senators – we’ll have new senators. And hopefully we’ll have a different mindset in the Senate as it relates to fiscal responsibility. We’re going to – the Blue Dogs are going to keep pressing this issue. We think we make incremental steps here. You don’t fix this all at once, especially in this political environment for this White House and this Senate.

So we have made tremendous steps in the last year and a half under Speaker Pelosi’s leadership.

The Republicans, when they were in the majority in the House and Senate let the old PAYGO rules and the old tools that were in place to give us fiscal responsibility, they let them all expire in 2001, 2002. Speaker Pelosi reinstated the PAYGO rule in a House rule. We couldn’t get it passed in the law because you can’t get it through the Senate and you can’t get the President to sign it. But we did put a House rule in place called PAYGO which provides us a tool to act a little more fiscally responsible.

SCULLY: Gail, before we turn it to you, one quick follow-up. Who in the Senate doesn’t understand the PAYGO rule, specifically, which members?

BOYD: Well, I mean, you’ve seen many of those – let me give you an example. We sent the GI Webb bill over to the Senate totally paid for. They sent it over here. It was unpaid for. So 60 – this GI Webb bill is a $62 billion mandatory entitlement new spending – new program created by an emergency supplemental bill.

They sent it over to us unpaid for. The Blue Dogs said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” And Speaker Pelosi worked with us. We found the pay for (ph), sent it back paid for, the same legislation they sent over to us. They stripped the pay for (ph) off, and I think that vote was 75 to 16 or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, about three-fourths of them.

So, I mean, I don’t know how much time you’ve got, Steve, but the list is pretty long. So, you know, this is just a mindset about the – people out in the country that are struggling with paying their bills at home, they understand that the revenues have to equal the expenditures. People who run businesses understand that if you don’t pay your bills, you go bankrupt and you’re out of business.

The federal government somehow know that we have a different mindset up here. And we have to change that because we’re doing pretty severe damage, long-term damage to our economic model if we don’t.

High deficit spending, probably the economists will tell you probably the major reason for the value dollar. Oil, as you know, is priced – world oil market, world oil prices, priced in dollars. So we’re paying almost two times what the Europeans are paying for a barrel of oil.

So it’s a very serious problem.

GAIL RUSSELL CHADDOCK, CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Why is it so hard to stand up to the Senate? For example, why not the Senate sends back a bill? Some of us who were standing outside the House floor when the Senate passed that bill, you came up and you said to anyone who would listen, “If a CEO of a company did this, he’d be fired immediately.”

So why not send it back again and again and again to make it right?

BOYD: Well, that’s a decision, Gail, that Speaker Pelosi has to make, obviously, one that I’ve had many discussions with her about. And I respect her leadership and what she’s done here. She believes in fiscal responsibility. She believes in the pay/go (ph) principle. And I think that she believes that after the election that we’re going to have a different set of, sort of, dynamics here, different set of people to work with and that we’ll continue to carry this fight.

But I certainly understand her point.

CHADDOCK: So you have gone against Speaker on a number of points where the Blue Dogs will send a letter, what was it, on the FISA bill. Twenty-five of you signed a letter saying there must be some sort of liability exemption for telecom companies?

BOYD: Right.

CHADDOCK: That was running against the trend in your own party. Why did you do that?

BOYD: Well, we think the – solving the issue of privacy rights versus protection of our people – what happened on September 11, all of the people who attacked us on September 11 had originally come to this country legally. Now, they weren’t necessarily here legally the day that – of the attack. But they had originally gotten into this country legally.

They used the protections that we have in place, constitutional protections for our own freedoms and rights to privacy. They used them against us. So we had to figure out how to balance those rights. And the telecom companies were told by the justice department, the attorney general, and the president, that what they were doing in terms of handing over all those telephone records were legal. It was legal to do that.

And so, you know, this is – this – I was here, as you were, on that day, September 11. The environment was very much different. And I can imagine being in those meetings where the president of the United States and his attorney general comes in and says – and he says, “I need your telephone records. It is legal.” Here’s the attorney general who gives an opinion.

What we did in this FISA bill, though, is ask the court – or by law require the court to review those documents and look and see who – if there were some constitutional violations and if there were then they’ll be dealt with properly.

COWAN: Congressman, a couple of times you’ve referred to the November elections and looking forward to a change. Given that both Barack Obama and John McCain have laid out proposals that spend a lot of money, either by cutting taxes or new programs, healthcare or whatever, isn’t it the chance that life could actually get worse for Blue Dogs next year, that it’ll be even tougher to hold the line on deficit spending, much less balance the budget.

BOYD: I think there’s always that chance, Rick. But we have to – we have to be diligent and we have to keep our shoulder to the wheel, so to speak, about these issues. We are having our own party’s nominee, Barack Obama – we’re having those discussions with him. He has – he has a provision on his Web site which adheres – in his platform – adheres to fiscal responsibility and the pay/go rule.

We’re going to have some discussions with him as we move into the fall about this issue and how we may help him develop his policy on that issue.

But you’re right, it could be – until the markets, until the economy is totally wrecked by irresponsible governmental action, nobody up here in Washington will react. And, you know, we – sometimes we only react when we have a crisis and some of us want to say, “Let’s not get to the crisis point,” because when you destroy that economic model or damage it, it takes a long time to fix it.

CHADDOCK: Have you endorsed Senator Obama? Do you intend to?

BOYD: I’ve not. And I really, Gail, just told my people that my job is not to elect a president. It’s to try to represent the interest of my people back home.

I’ll be looking for two things as the campaign moves into the fall. I think the White House, the president, will set the tone of how we operate here in Washington.

But policy wise, two very important things that he does. One is manage our part of economic model, the government’s model. We’ve got a wonderful model here in this country, the best in the world. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best in the world. That’s pointed out by the fact that – reflected by the fact that we’ve got the strongest, most successful economy in the world.

We’ve not done a very good job of managing that model in the last eight years. We’ve ratcheted up spending at a governmental level as the same time produced revenues. And we had to go into the capital markets to borrow that difference.

So that’s number one. The position of the candidates on managing the economy and acting fiscally responsible and moving us back toward a balanced budget is number one.

Number two would be the management of the foreign policy. It is my – it is my feeling that from a foreign policy perspective, we’ve got this about as botched up as you can get it the last six or eight years. And we’ve – we need a new direction, a new policy. I’m hoping that one of the candidates – and it appears to me that Barack Obama is sort of out front on that – about how we change the direction of this country, the policy of the country as it relates to how we deal with other countries.

COWAN: Having had the last, say, year to listen to both candidates as they talk about the economy and as they talk about national security, does one or the other indicate to you a better ability to achieve the goals that you think are needed to be achieved?

BOYD: As I said earlier, I see on the Web site of Senator Obama talk about fiscal responsibility and PAYGO and moving back to a balanced budget. We haven’t seen that on Senator McCain’s. I hope that he will come around to do that. It’s the fiscally responsible thing to do.

On the other point is that any policy that looks like it’s close to what President Bush has had from a foreign policy perspective, I’m not interested. And I think we need a new change.

We are – we are sending over – about $3 billion a week it’s costing us to do the Iraq-Afghanistan piece. And in Iraq, I’m telling you, we are – we’re doing two things. We’re policing the streets of Baghdad, and we’re refereeing a civil war.

That’s not a proper role for our U.S. military. That’s a role for the Iraqi security folks. We’ve trained their people. We’ve got 350, 400,000 Iraqis that American tax dollars have trained to protect their own homeland. Why can’t we turn that over to them? We should insist that the Iraqi government and President Maliki stand up a command and control system that allows them to protect their own country and get that monkey off our back.

SCULLY: Congressman, let me follow up on two very specific questions. Can Senator Obama win in your district? Yes or no.

BOYD: I would say if you looked at history of the last few presidential elections, Steve, it would be very difficult for him to win. But that’s why we have elections. You know, it’s – we’ve got to – we’ve got to vet the candidates. They – the campaign is all about them – the electorate, the people out in the country understanding who they are, what they’ve done with their life and their vision for how we lead this country forward.

So Senator Obama has a very tough order in the district – some districts like the one I represent.

SCULLY: Is there a chance that you would support Senator McCain?

BOYD: Well, I don’t think – from what I see right now, from a policy perspective, I’d say no.

CHADDOCK: Would you expect to campaign with Senator Obama in your district?

BOYD: I’ve already said that I would. I’m looking forward to speaking with Senator Obama about some of these policy issues and then what I may do to help him down the road.

CHADDOCK: Can you imagine an election that turns out with a democrat in the White House and stronger democratic majorities in the House and Senate? The Blue Dogs, when they were founded, the great name, Blue Dog, you might explain to our viewers what that comes from. But do you expect that it is possible that after an election with a stronger democratic majority that it’ll be tougher for Blue Dogs?

BOYD: It could be, Gail. And, you know, the tone of how Washington works is set by the person who sits in the White House. Really it is. And I would hope that whoever is in the White House that the tone is different than it has been in the last eight years. I know one thing, whoever’s there, I will be there with many of my Blue Dog colleagues shortly – if he’ll invite me to his office – to talk to him about the things that we feel strongly about.

So it could be tougher but, you know, we’ll just have to wait and see. You just never know how somebody’s going to govern until you – until they get there. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought that it would have been like this for the last eight years, but it has.

CHADDOCK: Could I just ask before we leave this, how many times did you ever meet with President Bush like that?

BOYD: In his office?

CHADDOCK: Yes.

BOYD: Probably three or four.

CHADDOCK: Over what issues?

BOYD: Three or four. You know, usually just courtesy visits to listen to what he wanted to do. And we talked to him about foreign policy. And we talked to him a lot about this fiscal – the debt and fiscal responsibility and how we balance revenues and expenditures. And we really never got anywhere, though.

COWAN: When you talk about the problem of debt and fiscal responsibility, is there a way to explain in lay terms what it means to have $9 trillion of debt sloshing around and what that means to, say, a family with a couple of young kids? Does it mean that when those kids grow up, will it be tougher to find a job, buy a house? Does it really mean anything?

BOYD: Well, it does. It does. A $9 trillion debt, I mean, if you divide that by 300 million people I think comes to about $34,000. It’s a pretty high number that we start in debt. And it’s – obviously it doesn’t all have to be paid back at once.

But remember, you have to service that debt. That is – that’s – we all it debt tax. And whatever the interest costs are, you have to – you have to service those bonds that you purchase. A lot of those bonds are held by countries like China and Japan and Mexico, and some of those folks are not necessarily our closest friends. I wouldn’t want to be – at home be in debt to somebody that didn’t like me and wanted to do harm to me because they have leverage over you that – as a result of that loan.

So we just don’t think it’s a good idea to lever ourselves at that level. You have to – you have to pay that interest. And that interest now is about a billion dollars a day in the neighborhood of $300 billion to $400 billion, depends upon where the interest rates go.

You know as you continue to deficit spend, the pressure comes on the capital markets to get that borrowed money out of the market. Those interest rates go up. And as those interest rates go up, our interest bill goes up.

So look for what that does to the future. It means that you’ve got less money, tax – you’ve got to take that tax money from the folks to pay that interest and you have less money to have a good, great military, to provide healthcare and education and things that many of us as democrats aren’t interested in.

So I’ll tell you another thing that happens and – down the long run is your baby boomers retire and the Medicare and Social Security bills become due – come due for those baby boomers, the tax rates are going to increase significantly for the young people who are coming into the workplace the next 15 or 20 years.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see tax rates close to what we had back during World War II and during the ‘50s eventually for our children and grandchildren because of their irresponsible policies of this – of this administration. And I think that’s where most of the fault lies.

COWAN: Do you have in mind any names for either treasury secretary or budget director as a person who could both put the country back on a path of surplus as well as keep taxes low?

BOYD: Well, there are a lot of good names out there. And I know that there are a lot of folks that Senator Obama is talking to. And the only one I would throw out is we’ve got a great Blue Dog that’s been very – is a bright guy that understands these issues, Jim Cooper. So that’s one name that I would throw out.

But I’m sure…

COWAN: For treasury secretary or budget director or either?

BOYD: …I think he’d make a great budget director. But, you know, that’s the decision that Senator Obama has to make. And I’m sure he’s got good people helping him make that decision. If he asks me, I’ll tell him.

CHADDOCK: And we – a few weeks ago the Congress was talking a lot about housing and the foreclosure crisis, which is – seems to have vanished off the radar screen. At the time, the Blue Dogs were very concerned about anything that would allow a federal judge to write down the principle of a mortgage.

Why did you take a stand on that? And do you feel that there’s anything more that needs to be done at this point on the foreclosure crisis?

BOYD: There’s always a tendency by our government, representative government, to want to help people who are hurting. But you have to careful about injecting yourself into the, sort of the market system in the way the supply and demand system works.

And I’ll tell you, we had a run up from, say, 1998 to 2005 in real estate prices that just were – I’d never seen anything like it in the course of my lifetime. Housing prices, real estate prices, doubling in two or three years, you know, it was just – it was a crazy market. And many of us knew that it was risky in a lot of ways and it would burst sooner or later.

You have to let those things sort themselves. You have to let that market sort itself out. And it will. And if we do the things that we’re supposed to do as a government, security, transportation, education, environmental protection, those – and there are others, too, other issues – but if we – those issues that the government ought to be doing are limited. If we will do them, do them well, and be willing to pay for them, that economic model works great. And the private sector will figure the rest out.

But when we start dabbling in, you know, the contracts between a buyer and a seller and bankruptcy and all that, it gets to be a mess pretty quickly. It’s the wrong thing to do.

CHADDOCK: So going to the gas prices, do you think the same thing is going on in that market, that it’s supply and demand? Or are, for example, speculators in part to blame for the spike we’ve seen in gas prices?

BOYD: It’s supply and demand. And there is some psychology and speculation in that kind of – that kind of thing that goes on. But that goes on in all of your commodity markets with oil.

I remind folks that less than 10 years ago, in the late ‘90s, oil was less than $10 a barrel. And, you know, nobody wanted government to do anything. Keep your hands off, you know?

Many of our domestic wells will be enclosed because oil prices were too low to keep them open. India and China are the two largest countries in the world, what, probably have 35 – over a third of the world’s population now have great emerging economies. They both have gross domestic product growth of – economic growth of over eight percent for the last several years.

And they are – their per capita use of oil is so much smaller. It’s miniscule compared to ours. And so now suddenly they have these growing economies that are coming in to the market and they want to buy oil, too. And so you have a world – you have a great demand on the world’s supply.

Our job as a government is to do this, is to incentivize the private markets to develop alternative sources. Four dollar and a half gasoline, $135 barrel of oil, will bring us alternative sources for energy. We know it can happen. We already know what those things are. I mean, it was just a matter of developing them.

Our job is to take our tax code, incentivize those industries to speed up the development of those alternative sources and make it happen. We can’t drill our way out of this problem.

SCULLY: Congressman Allen Boyd, democrat from Florida. Thank you for joining us on Newsmakers.

BOYD: Thank you, Steve. Gail and Rick, delighted to – I’m delighted to be with you.

SCULLY: Gail Russell Chaddock of The Christian Science Monitor and Rick Cowan of Reuters. Rick, what did you learn?

COWAN: It was interesting. A couple of weeks ago I did a brief interview with Congressman Boyd in a hallway in the Capitol and I asked him about Barack Obama and whether he would endorse him and how he felt about him. And at the time he was very noncommittal.

Today he really seemed to move toward Obama. Maybe his mind was already made up but he was giving Hillary Clinton some space. But he had some very positive comments about Obama even though he comes from a moderate to conservative district and did not have very much good to say about McCain.

SCULLY: If you were to write a headline from today’s discussion, what would it be?

CHADDOCK: Nancy Pelosi has her work cut out for her in the next Congress. You know, it’s interesting no matter who you talk to – which caucus on the democratic side, progressive caucus, new democrats – everyone thinks that the gains that they are expecting in November and the White House are going to lead to an easier time for them.

And it’s, I think, very likely not to be that case. It’s going to be very difficult to say to a, a Lynn Woolsey on the progressive side who says, at last, a stronger majority, time to get more spending to the people who need it the most, time to instantly get out of the war.

And someone like Congressman Boyd who thinks, you know, national security counts first, you know, we have to see how this pans out. And fiscal responsibility is what has to come out of the new Congress. I think it’s going to be very difficult to square that circle.

SCULLY: And on the FISA issue, the two C words. One person’s compromise was another’s capitulation.

CHADDOCK: That’s it.

COWAN: Mr. Boyd clearly he very early on wanted the Senate bill. He was backing the Senate bill in the immunity for the telecom companies. And it seems as if he’s fairly pleased that the bill that has passed the house has pretty much gone in his direction.

SCULLY: Last Friday, The Washington Post indicated that this is probably one of the last legislative victories for President Bush. Is it? Was it?

CHADDOCK: Oh, I think so. You don’t sense a lot of compromised deal making. I think people are already into the November elections. And even giving this much of a victory was a stretch for some.

But I think there’s some very interesting things that are still coming up that will give us a hint about what’s coming in the new Congress. For example, next week two important hearings on whether or not speculation is a part of the big spike in oil and gas prices, and what, if anything, needs to be done about it.

Now, he came squarely on the side that supply and demand will solve this problem. But many of his colleagues absolutely believe that’s not the case and we need a much stronger government role in curving speculation.

SCULLY: And finally, one political question is we asked him about his district. And as he was leaving, he also indicated that Florida is going to be tough political terrain for Barack Obama. What did you take away from that?

COWAN: The congressman made it very clear it’s going to be very tough. And he seemed skeptical that Obama could win the state of Florida. The Obama campaign is doing the calculations to see if they can do without states like Florida. And republicans are jumping on them saying that it’s ridiculous that you can’t, that at some point he has to win big states like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan.

And Congressman Boyd made it very clear that he has a tough time ahead of him.

SCULLY: Last word from you.

CHADDOCK: He also said – I thought this was very interesting – that he had grown up on a plantation that his father had owned, that his great grandfather had owned slaves and that the whole racial element to an Obama candidacy is changing. He sees much more openness in younger generations to a broader look at race than in his own.

SCULLY: Gail Chaddock of The Christian Science Monitor, Rick Cowan of Reuters, thank you both for being with us on Newsmakers.

CHADDOCK: Thank you.

COWAN: Thank you.

END