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 | PBS DEBATE NIGHT: |
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In this portion of the debate the Congressional leaders discuss which party is best suited to run the government.
A RealAudio version of this Newsmaker interview is available.
Topics addressed on PBS Debate Night:
- Should the Republicans should maintain control of Congress?
- Which party would handle the economy better?
- Would Democrats or Republicans improve America's quality of life?
- Would a Republican or a Democratic majority in Congress ensure America's place in the world?
- Which party would run the government better?
- What is the connection between a vote for the President and a vote for a member of Congress?
Browse the Online NewsHour's Congressional coverage.
JIM LEHRER: All right. Now we’re going to go to our fourth and last topic tonight, and it is governing, running the government. Again, the question comes in the form of a resolution. Be it resolved that the Democratic Party can best manage the work of Congress.
REP. GEPHARDT: Well, I think there are three things that we need to do to improve our Congress and our country. The first is campaign finance reform. In my view, the most important thing for the operation of our democracy in the future is to get meaningful campaign finance reform. We disagreed, I think, on the key element in it. We believe that you’ve got to limit the amount that can be raised and spent in congressional campaigns. I think some Republicans believe that we need more money in campaigns. I’ve heard people quoted to that effect. I believe we’ve got to find an agreement on what we’re trying to do, what the goal is, and then we’ve got to go about getting it done. Secondly, we should never ever shut the government down, as was done last year for three weeks. I know that there was a desire to put pressure on the
President to get him to sign the budget Republicans had, but it was wrong. It was irresponsible. Taxpayers paid money for those services, and they shouldn’t have been denied. For our part, we will never ever shut the government down. Third, we’ve got to make government work for working families. And that brings me back to Families First. We’ve got to listen to what people are saying to us. They’ve got practical, everyday problems. We’ve got to have practical, modest, realistic solutions to those problems. I think Families First is that.
JIM LEHRER: Republican rebuttal.
REP. GINGRICH: Well, I’m not so sure it’s a rebuttal. Let me say first of all, we were delighted when President Clinton went to Chicago and cited 14 specific accomplishments of this Congress--increased funding, for example, for breast cancer, the Violence Against Women Act being funded, which we did, the welfare reform bill, the illegal immigration reforms--14 times President Clinton said this was a pretty good Congress. He only cited the previous Democratic Congress five times in his acceptance speech at the Democrat convention. Second, we passed a law for the first time putting
the Congress entirely under the same laws as everybody else. If OSHA visits you, it visits the Congress. If you have wage and hour laws, the Congress has wage and hour. It was very important for us to put the Congress under the same laws. And it’s beginning to change things as members of Congress encounter what small businesses across America have encountered in red tape. Third, we just frankly use common sense and save money. I carry an ice bucket around this fall as a campaign prop. When we were elected, we discovered that there were 14 full-time people delivering ice every day--two buckets in the morning, two buckets in the afternoon--82 years after the invention of the refrigerator.
JIM LEHRER: To whom were they delivering ice?
REP. GINGRICH: They were delivering it to every office in the Capitol.
JIM LEHRER: All right.
REP. GINGRICH: Automatically. You arrived at your office--
SEN. LOTT: That was on the House side. It’s not in the Senate.
REP. GINGRICH: And what we found was that, that literally people were putting the ice buckets next to their refrigerator. Now--
SEN. LOTT: How much money did you save by--
REP. GINGRICH: We saved--
SEN. LOTT: --eliminating that?
REP. GINGRICH: We saved $500,000 a year. We did--we saved $200 million a year by doing those kind of common sense, practical things to the U.S. Congress.
JIM LEHRER: The dialogue, Democrats.
SEN. DASCHLE: Well, you know, I think I know where you put all that ice--in some room some place where you put also the campaign finance reform bill. It’s been iced for another--another Congress. But you talk about saving and that common sense, Newt. Let me ask you this. I, I recall, as I guess we all do, that Oval Office series of
negotiations where at one point you indicated to the President you felt that while he had the veto, you had the ability to shut the government down. That cost $1.4 billion. That was--we were shut down for 27 days. That little money you saved with saving the ice was all lost in 27 days of shutting the government down. I hope we could all agree--and I guess this is my question--will you agree with us that in the 105th Congress, regardless of the circumstances, you’ll never shut the government down again?
REP. GINGRICH: Well, listen, just two quick things.
SEN. LOTT: Go ahead.
REP. GINGRICH: But since this is directly tied to me, uh, first of all, we were all sort of surprised to learn from Dick Morris’s comments that he’d planned for five months, as he said it--
SEN. DASCHLE: Did he call you about that, Trent?
REP. GINGRICH: --the President--
SEN. LOTT: Yeah. He told me he’d planned it for months. (laughter among group)
REP. GINGRICH: --the President’s former adviser, as you know. Secondly, I think we did learn a lot out of that. And I think it’s a tribute, the bipartisan way we’ve passed things recently, that we have learned a lot. But I also think it’s important to recognize that the American people do want a balanced budget, they do want government coming under control. And frankly, we were gratified when the President said this January that the era of big government is over. We’re just trying to help shrink it some, and I think that’s part of what we’re all about.
SEN. LOTT: Well, as a matter of fact, I might say that if the Senate does its job tomorrow, we’ll complete the work the House completed last night. Then there won’t be any threats of any kind of shutdown. But just remember, when the President vetoed that bill and shut it down, what was it he was vetoing? He was vetoing the first balanced budget in 26 years. He was vetoing tax relief for the American people. He was vetoing legitimate entitlement reform, so just remember, the President vetoed those--and it included a lot of other things--including eliminating the marriage penalty for young couples when they get married. But I tell you what. The proof is in the pudding, Jim, because we have produced--we started off with these common sense reforms, we made
them apply to ourselves. We cut the numbers of subcommittees and committees. We cut spending on Congress, itself, we made the laws apply to ourselves, as Newt mentioned. We stopped unfunded federal mandates where the federal government was telling people, oh, you’ve got to do this, do that, but by the way, how you pay for it is your problem. And one other thing, when you talk about governance, we also are going to pass tomorrow night after a lot of effort on our part and illegal immigration bill. You can’t have governance if you can’t control your borders. In America, we have a tremendous problem with illegal immigrants. And they’re coming in and they’re getting into our, our welfare systems and our food stamp systems, and they’re staying there forever. If we’re going to have genuine governance, we’d better learn how to control our own borders. And we’re going to pass a bill under our leadership that will get that job done.
REP. GEPHARDT: Well, I don’t think Democrats take a back seat to anybody on getting the budget into balance. The budget we passed cut spending more than you cut it in the last two years. We also got the budget down from over $300 billion, where it was when President Clinton came in, to now about $100 billion. And we both have plans--they’re different for getting it the rest of the way--to balance the budget. I’m glad to hear that we’re not going to see another government shutdown. Tom Delay was quoted in the paper today as saying if Bob Dole gets elected and the Republicans retain their majority, there will be a second revolution. I don’t think we need a second revolution. I think that scares people, and I don’t think we need to do that. But I want to come back to campaign finance reform. Do you both believe that we can figure out a way to put all of our beliefs aside and figure out how we can finally reach an agreement that we can both live with to limit the amount of money that is raised and spent in campaigns? We have got to do this for our democracy.
SEN. LOTT: Go ahead.
REP. GINGRICH: Well, let me say first of all, I was very disappointed after the President and I shook hands in New Hampshire that despite three or four efforts to get a commission off the ground, we couldn’t for I think reasons that go back to partisanship. But let’s take two examples. The unions have announced a $35 million effort to buy control of the U.S. House outside of what you’d call campaign reform. And that’s coerced money. Republican union members, independent union members, union members who are for Ross Perot, they all are compelled to give them money. So we
have $750,000 being spent by unions against Steve Chabot in Cincinnati. We will have had $2 million spent by the unions against J.D. Hayworth in Phoenix. I’m faced with a millionaire running against me who has said already he’ll spend $3 million out of his own pocket. Now, I don’t think the Supreme Court will let us stop him because of the right of free speech under Buckley--under the decision. But tell us, how can you have the unions as a group coercing money, spending $35 million in targeting individual members with $2 million, and then talk about campaign reform only here at the congressional campaign level? I mean, I frankly think if the Democrats were sincere about campaign reform, part of it will be to say to the unions, don’t take money from Republicans who are union members, don’t take money from independents who are union members, and don’t go out and spend $2 million in one city trying to beat poor J.D. Hayworth, who’s just out--
SEN. LOTT: Not even report.
REP. GEPHARDT: It’s against the law to coerce money and take money from people that they don’t want to give voluntarily. And why shouldn’t--
REP. GINGRICH: But they do it.
REP. GEPHARDT: Why shouldn’t--but why shouldn’t union members have the right to express themselves in campaigns?
SEN. LOTT: Why shouldn’t--
SEN. DASCHLE: Let me ask--
SEN. LOTT: --they have to report it as a campaign--
SEN. DASCHLE: Let me ask you this.
SEN. LOTT: --contribution is what you really--
REP. GINGRICH: Let me just make a point for one second, Dick. This money is dues money that is coerced. This is not voluntary contributions. These are dues that are being coerced.
REP. GEPHARDT: That’s not true.
REP. GINGRICH: Dick, how can you say that?
SEN. DASCHLE: I want to ask you this. Could I--in the short time that we have available--
REP. GINGRICH: I’m astonished.
SEN. DASCHLE: --let me just--speaking of special interests, I’ve never been able--I’ve never had an explanation to this. How was it that you created this project relief organization, uh, this effort about a year ago where 200 of the biggest polluters were actually invited into a committee room to figure out ways of which we could dirty the air and dirty the water and find ways of which to eviscerate the rules and regulations--
SEN. LOTT: People planned to dirty the air--
SEN. DASCHLE: Absolutely.
SEN. LOTT: --dirty the water? Come on, Tom.
SEN. DASCHLE: --to create--
SEN. LOTT: They breath the air--
SEN. DASCHLE: --to create loopholes.
SEN. LOTT: --and drink the water too.
SEN. DASCHLE: To change the regulatory environment to allow us to--
SEN. LOTT: We passed the Safe Drinking Water Act.
SEN. DASCHLE: --to find news ways to, to create remarkable loopholes in the law to give polluters more ability to dirty the air and dirty the water. That happened under Project Relief. It was well reported. How did that happen, and would you prevent that from happening again in the 105th Congress?
REP. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, the way you described it, I think I can tell you unequivocally I do not know of any meeting we ever had planning to dirty the water.
SEN. DASCHLE: You didn’t do that under Project Relief?
REP. GINGRICH: But, but by the way, what we did try to do is we did try to pass the, the superfund legislation to clean up toxic waste dumps. We try to bring in scientific experts to get the toxic waste dumps out of the way and to not spend the money on trial lawyers and on bureaucrats--
SEN. DASCHLE: But you’re avoiding the question.
REP. GINGRICH: --but to spend it on engineers.
SEN. DASCHLE: Did you not have a Project Relief--
REP. GINGRICH: We never had--
SEN. DASCHLE: --which the largest polluters were called--
REP. GINGRICH: --to the best of my knowledge--
SEN. DASCHLE: --into a committee room to write the law itself?
REP. GINGRICH: To the best of my knowledge, we have never, ever had a meeting the
JIM LEHRER: We’ve got a time problem here. The Democrats--
REP. GEPHARDT: Let me just ask one short question.
JIM LEHRER: Sure.
REP. GEPHARDT: If we could get campaign reform by getting the amendment to the Constitution, could we work on amending the Constitution to say that we’re going to be able to regulate what can be done in campaigns?
REP. GINGRICH: If we conclude it doesn’t threaten the freedom of the American people.
SEN. LOTT: Two other--
REP. GEPHARDT: Absolutely.
SEN. LOTT: If I could get a point in here, Jim.
REP. GEPHARDT: I don’t think it does. I think it helps the American people.
JIM LEHRER: We’ve got--
SEN. LOTT: I want to point out that this Congress once again produced. We passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in a bipartisan way. You all, I presume, both voted for it. I know Tom did. We passed pesticide reform. We passed the Freedom to Farm Act, which is probably the most sweeping conservation and environmental law passed in years. Again, we did it. We didn’t talk about it.
SEN. DASCHLE: But let me say that what you wanted to do was to absolutely emasculate the rules and regulations that protect the environment, Trent, you and the Republicans. And, you know, that’s your position, and I respect it.
SEN. LOTT: We want to reduce regulations in Washington.
SEN. DASCHLE: The fact is--
SEN. LOTT: You got that right.
SEN. DASCHLE: Well, yeah, you want to give the polluters every chance they can--
SEN. DASCHLE: --to pollute the air, to pollute the water.
SEN. LOTT: I don’t want to do that.
SEN. DASCHLE: Well, I’m afraid that’s what was going to be the result. And we know that that was it, and fortunately, we stopped you from doing it.
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