July 29, 2005

Announcer: From our nation's capital, this is WASHINGTON WEEK. Substituting for Gwen Ifill, here is moderator John Harwood.

JOHN HARWOOD, guest moderator: Politics and policy on stem cell research; energy and trade with Central America. The debate over stem cell research takes a major turn when Senate leader Bill Frist breaks with the president.

Senator BILL FRIST (Republican, Tennessee): Embryonic stem cell research must be supported. It's time for a modified policy, the right policy for this moment in time.

HARWOOD: Could his declaration set the stage for President Bush's first veto?

On Capitol Hill a late rush of victories for the president's economic agenda.

Representative BILL THOMAS (Republican, California): It's a pleasure to stand up after several frustrating years and Congresses to be here supporting an energy bill.

Representative ED MARKEY (Democrat, Massachusetts): The Republicans are tipping the United States consumer and taxpayer upside down and shaking money out of their pockets.

HARWOOD: The Republican Congress hopes for a jump-start of momentum, while Democrats seek a comeback formula for 2006 and beyond.

And will the president's party be able to count on this man, the White House strategist caught up in the CIA leak investigation? Are we closer to knowing whether a crime was committed and, if so, by whom?

Meanwhile, the charm offensive continues for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts while new documents sharpen the picture of his political and legal views. Will they affect his prospects for Senate confirmation?

Covering these stories this week: Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post; Karen Tumulty of Time magazine; Anne Kornblut of The New York Times and Pete Williams of NBC News.

Announcer: Here again, John Harwood of The Wall Street Journal.

HARWOOD: Good evening.

Analysis: Senator Bill Frist changes his stance on stem cell research

JOHN HARWOOD, guest moderator: All year there's been one story line about Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee: that he's carrying water for Christian conservatives in the White House, in part, to further his own presidential ambition. But today there's a new story. The majority leader charted an independent, centrist course on embryonic stem cell research.

Senator BILL FRIST (Republican, Tennessee, Majority Leader): I'm a physician. My profession is healing. I've devoted my life to attending to the needs of the sick and suffering and promoting health and well-being. That's me. I believe the president's policy should be modified. We should expand federal funding and the accompanying NIH oversight and current guidelines governing stem cell research carefully and thoughtfully, staying within ethical bounds.

HARWOOD: His speech was a boost for legislation to change the president's policy, but it also matters for Republican politics.

Representative TOM DELAY (Republican, Texas, Majority Leader): I think a candidate that believes in the destruction of life in order to--and making a choice between one life over another and creating commodities out of embryos would have a very hard time appealing to the vast majority of the Republicans in this party.

HARWOOD: Now, Ceci, that's a warning any Republican candidate has to take seriously. So what exactly did Bill Frist do and why did he do it?

Ms. CECI CONNOLLY (The Washington Post): Well, John, what Senator Frist did today was he came out and said that he no longer felt that the president's restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research were sufficient. Keep in mind, the president four years ago brought out a policy saying he would allow some federal money to be spent on a small number of these cell colonies that had already existed. They initially said it was going to be 78 or so lines. In reality today it's only about 22.

Interestingly, up until last month Senator Frist was saying the president's policy is just fine. We don't need to revise it. Today he came out and said, `No, I think we ought to lift those restrictions,' and in fact, said that he would be willing to vote for a bill that passed the House in May that would lift those restrictions and essentially permit research on up to 400,000 frozen embryos that are now in fertility clinics, assuming that there is proper consent by the donors, it's done voluntarily and other ethical constraints on that.

So it was a major announcement, in part because he is the Senate majority leader and they've been having trouble getting this issue onto the Senate floor. But it's also significant because he is a physician. And much of his speech today spoke from his experience as a transplant surgeon. We probably forget today, but if you go back to the beginning years of transplantation, it was quite controversial to take an organ out of a person who was still barely alive on life support and put it into another person. And so he's drawn a lot of parallels between that experience early in his career and this debate.

HARWOOD: Now that bill in the House that he referred to passed, but it didn't have enough votes to override a veto. Is it possible that what Frist did today can change the dynamic of the whole debate so that this could become law in this Congress?

Ms. CONNOLLY: You know, that's a great question, John. I think that certainly Senator Frist's announcement is going to help them pick up some votes in the Senate. There were some fence-sitters and there were already indications today that some of them--the word that Senator Hatch used was that Senator Frist will give them `political cover.'

In the House it's a little bit trickier because they need about 50 votes to override a presidential veto. That's a lot of votes to pick up mainly from the Republican side. But they're certainly talking that way right now...

HARWOOD: So this is more...

Ms. CONNOLLY: ...and it's just to be seen.

HARWOOD: ...significant for the long term, perhaps, than for action in this Congress?

Ms. CONNOLLY: I think that--yes, absolutely. But when you have people like Nancy Reagan, who is making telephone calls to lawmakers this week and during the House vote, that starts to say something.

Mr. PETE WILLIAMS (NBC News): Can you explain something about his reasoning? He said today, if I understand this right, that he still believes a stem cell is a human life.

Ms. CONNOLLY: An embryo.

Mr. WILLIAMS: An embryo, rather. So how does he get from there to this position?

Ms. CONNOLLY: Well, the exact phrasing that he uses--and he constantly refers to himself as pro-life, anti-abortion--he uses the phrase that an embryo is a nascent life, deserving of value and protection and respect and dignity. But, again, going back to that transplant experience of his, he emphasizes that most of these embryos at fertility clinics would otherwise be discarded. They would be medical waste. And so if you were simply taking spares that would otherwise be thrown in the trash, you ought to use them in an effort to develop other treatments and cures.

Ms. KAREN TUMULTY (Time Magazine): Ceci, Senator Frist has already announced that after this next election he'll be leaving the Senate. Everyone anticipates that that will be followed up by a run for the White House. Does this move help him or hurt him in his ambitions, if he has them, to become president?

Ms. CONNOLLY: Well, probably a little bit of both. One of the things that was so striking in this story as it unfolded was how fast and how vehemently conservative activists, particularly religious conservatives, came out and condemned Senator Frist. The Weekly Standard has a new editorial that describes the incoherence of Frist's position as being staggering. He was referred to as a flip-flopper, a traitor. The group the Christian Defense Coalition said they won't support him in the primaries. So today the conventional wisdom is this could be problematic in those Republican primaries. On the other hand, keep in mind, polling on this issue has consistently been support for embryonic stem cell research up around 70 percent or 75 percent.

HARWOOD: Well, which means it's not one of those issues in politics today that cuts--polarizes the country along partisan lines. It's much bigger than that.

Ms. CONNOLLY: No, it really doesn't and that's what's so striking when you have people like Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter, who have been the most vocal, ardent supporters of this research. But as we all know sitting around this table, in places like Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries you can have a very narrowly defined base constituency that comes out to vote.

HARWOOD: Thanks, Ceci.

Analysis: Republicans move legislation in Congress as Democrats deal with controversy among themselves

JOHN HARWOOD, guest moderator: Now Republicans may have been bickering over stem cell research at the end of the week; the Democrats were struggling all week long. Their allies in organized labor showcased bitter divisions at the AFL-CIO convention. The party's biggest star, Hillary Clinton, warned that infighting was helping President Bush achieve his goals. The Democratic left responded by criticizing her, and all factions watched the Republican Congress win on trade, energy and highway bills.

Now, Karen, what does this say about President Bush's influence in the second term and the Democrats' ability to slow him down?

Ms. KAREN TUMULTY (Time Magazine): Well, this whole week brings to mind the phrase `winning ugly.' And as anybody who's ever been around Washington right before a recess knows, that these bills--if a lot gets done we often don't want to, sort of, see how it gets done. But the fact is that until Bill Frist put this pothole in President Bush's way with stem cell research, he was having a pretty good week in Congress. He had gotten through the CAFTA trade bill, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, by two votes, real squeaker, and that vote was held open for an hour at midnight. He got this energy bill that he had been fighting for since almost the first day of his presidency. There was a six-year highway bill passed that's going to allow Republican congressmen to say that they actually accomplished something for their districts--a lot of people, however, said at great cost to the federal deficit.

So how significant? I think that what you see happening here is that the Republicans are seeing both the president's approval ratings and Congress' own going down very quickly, and that there is a calculation here that the only cure for this is to actually get some things done. So you saw in all of this legislation maybe it wasn't exactly what the president had wanted in the beginning, but everybody had decided that getting something done was better than not having anything to do.

HARWOOD: Speaking of `winning ugly,' we've learned--I want to talk about the trade bill, CAFTA, Central American Free Trade Agreement. We've learned a lot of the gory details over the last 24 hours of exactly how they got the votes to pass it. Why did President Bush want that deal, which isn't all that large, so badly?

Ms. TUMULTY: Well, you're right. It isn--in the grand scheme of trade agreements this was a relatively minor one. But it had taken on--because of his difficulties of getting this thing passed--it had taken on enormous significance politically and symbolically. And if President Bush had been the first president in modern times to fail to get a trade bill through a Congress that is controlled by his own party, I think you would have had to stamp `lame duck' across his forehead.

Ms. ANNE KORNBLUT (The New York Times): How do you see these bills, the CAFTA bill or energy, affecting actual voters? Will it do anything to change their lives whether it's, you know, gas prices or air conditioning prices at this point?

Ms. TUMULTY: You're right. The energy bill is a big question. Right now one of the voters' biggest concerns are gasoline prices, and this energy bill really will not address them in the short term. It's got a lot of tax breaks for industry, which plays to the Republican base. It's got some incentives for the development fuels, windmills and tax incentives for hybrid cars, but it really doesn't do much to even either increase production or lower demand.

Mr. PETE WILLIAMS (NBC News): How could it in the short term?

Ms. TUMULTY: Well, what the Republicans wanted was drilling--well, what the president wanted and what the House Republicans wanted was more drilling in Alaska. A lot of environmentalists, Democrats were arguing for higher fuel efficiency standards out of Detroit. In the very short term, there was probably not a lot they could have done to affect gasoline prices, but these sort of midterm measures might have.

HARWOOD: Now do we think that drilling is still going to happen? You know, they passed it in budget legislation in the Senate. They left it out of this bill, but is that still on track?

Ms. TUMULTY: And that is what, you know, they're promising in the Senate, is that there are other opportunities to come back at this and they're opportunities that won't be as vulnerable to procedural attacks, to filibuster, that sort of thing.

Ms. CECI CONNOLLY (The Washington Post): Karen, I have to ask about the other party this week. There seemed to be liberals in a bit of a tizzy about what Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had to say at the Democratic Leadership Council. Is that a problem for Senator Clinton?

Ms. TUMULTY: You know, I think that right now she does not mind at all being attacked by the left because, let's face it, she was again being attacked for making the absolutely outrageous comment at the Democratic Leadership Council meeting that perhaps the Democrats should unify and call a cease-fire between their various factions. And she was attacked by some from her liberal base, but these are the voters who I think she thinks are going to be with her no matter what.

HARWOOD: Well, you also have the AFL-CIO basically breaking apart with the largest individual union opting out, saying that basically John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO president, wasn't effective enough. They need to organize workers better. How's that going to affect Democratic campaigns?

Ms. TUMULTY: Right, and the largest union was followed by two others as well. Labor is important to the Democrats because it provides a lot of money and it provides the foot soldiers in the ground war in these elections. I think that this is going to be a real problem for the Democrats because they've got to find somewhere else to get those resources or, better yet, come up with a message that brings voters to the polls.

HARWOOD: Well, one other thing you had in terms of division was on this trade vote; 15 Democrats voted with the president on this vote and they were bitterly attacked by people on the left saying they shouldn't get a red cent of progressive money anymore. That can't help Democrats get back majority status.

Ms. TUMULTY: That's right. They're already calling them the CAFTA 15, and their--and the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, was raising the possibility that some of these people might see their committee assignments threatened because of this.

HARWOOD: Thanks, Karen.

Analysis: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears end of his investigation but outcome still a mystery

JOHN HARWOOD, guest moderator: The spotlight on Congress was good news for Karl Rove, who's been spending more time than he'd like in the headlines about the CIA leak case. Lately attention is centered on his involvement and that of vice presidential aide Scooter Libby in discussions with journalists about CIA operative Valerie Plame. But this week we learned from Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus that he'd discussed Ms. Plame with another administration source still unidentified. The White House isn't talking while special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald investigates, and so far the only person in jail is New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to identify her sources.

Now, Anne, does it look like Fitzgerald is getting to the bottom of what happened and when is he going to tell us?

Ms. ANNE KORNBLUT (The New York Times): Well, according to all of his public statements or what we can glean from them, because there aren't that many--they happen almost entirely in court--and other sources who are involved in this case, he is getting near the end of his investigation and it's been going on since, you know, 2003. And what we don't know is what he's going to tell us. That is the great mystery in this case. If I knew that, I could make quite a bit of news. What's expected is that sometime by October, which is when the grand jury that he's convened is set to expire, he'll either have them issue an indictment--there will perhaps be multiple indictments--or not. There could be just a report.

A lot of speculation has focused on the indictments and whether he would be--feel some political pressure to issue them because this case has been so high profile. There's a reporter in jail, as you said, from The New York Times. It's brought in the president. He's interviewed the president and the vice president. Karl Rove's name is in it. So if all that political pressure were perhaps to come crashing down on him, he might feel the need to issue indictments, but that's pure speculation at this point. We don't know is the answer.

HARWOOD: What do you think happens in the near-term while we wait for that Fitzgerald report? You know, Republicans have been saying Karl Rove and Scooter Libby didn't do anything wrong and this is a passing thunderstorm in the summer. Congress is now going out of town. There's going a news vacuum in Washington. Where do you think the story is headed?

Ms. KORNBLUT: Well, that certainly is what Republicans would say. At this point though--I mean, for the last week and a half, I mean, I think the Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court and some of the things that Karen was just talking about--CAFTA, the energy bill--that certainly changed the subject for a great deal of the press. But, you know, August is a very long month. The president is going to spend a lot of it down in Crawford talking about Social Security. And I think because there are so many mysteries remaining in this case I don't see it going away anytime soon.

Ms. CECI CONNOLLY (The Washington Post): You know, Anne, I enjoyed your story--I don't know how enjoyable it was for you to be camped out on the lawn of former presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, who we haven't heard from in a little while--but can you bring us up to date on whether or not he is kind of getting pulled into this investigation? Might he be in any kind of trouble here?

Ms. KORNBLUT: Well, it's almost impossible to say with any of these people--I mean, the witnesses who come out and tell us what they've been asked only really have a snapshot. The prosecutor has been very careful not to tell the full narrative to anyone, as far as we can tell, but the grand jurors sitting there. So you could probably, based on each person's encounters in there, make a case against almost anyone that would be completely unreliable.

As far as what we know about Ari, he, you know, was obviously one of the first people that would have come to mind. It was his job to speak to reporters. So when you're talking about who someone had leaked it to, you know, he's been interviewed by the grand jury. At this point though...

HARWOOD: There was a phone log showing that Bob Novak, the columnist, had made a call to Ari Fleischer.

Ms. KORNBLUT: That's correct, but we were able to learn that he testified--Ari testified that he did not return that phone call. So at this point, one of the big mysteries in this case is who was Bob Novak's original source? We now know that Karl Rove was the confirming source. Then I think we know at least Ari wasn't that, but we don't know. We really don't know what Fitzgerald is after here. So it's almost impossible to say if he's in trouble or not.

Mr. PETE WILLIAMS (NBC News): But the prospect that Ari Fleischer didn't return a phone call does seem--has the ring of truth to it, I suppose.

You said something that I'm wondering about. He is a special prosecutor. He has broken a great deal of china in going through his investigation so far. And you said if he decides not to bring an indictment he might issue a report. Is that a for sure? Isn't it possible that he just...

Ms. KORNBLUT: Absolutely.

Mr. WILLIAMS: ...goes back to Chicago and says nothing?

Ms. KORNBLUT: He could just go away at the end of all this. He has a full-time day job to do. I think as--perhaps it's just wishful thinking on the part of a lot of reporters and other curious political types in this town that everyone wants to know and including people that I talked to inside the White House. They want to know what he finds. He's got--as far as we can tell, he's been able to weave a pretty incredible narrative about what happened.

Mr. WILLIAMS: But it's not like the independent counsel who is...

Ms. KORNBLUT: Where he's required--no.

Mr. WILLIAMS: ....required to. He could--there's no requirements.

Ms. KORNBLUT: None whatsoever.

HARWOOD: How could you possibly have a reporter in jail, no charge on the underlying case, no perjury case and justify what you've been doing for the last couple of years?

Ms. KORNBLUT: Well, it isn't that--well, from everything we know about him, he doesn't seem to have a thin skin when it comes to that. His job is to investigate and, you know, not necessarily indict the ham sandwich. But...

HARWOOD: Be a lot of heat to take.

Ms. KORNBLUT: ...in so many of these cases it is the additional charges, not the underlying charges, that get brought.

Ms. KAREN TUMULTY (Time Magazine): One thing we know he's been interested in is a memorandum that was produced by the State Department trying to explain the whole chain of events that led to this. What's the significance of that? Do we know anything more than we did about what's in that memo?

Ms. KORNBLUT: We know a little bit more about the memo itself. We know that it does make clear that Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson's wife, for the people inside the story know it well, except it doesn't refer to her as Valerie Plame, which is the name that Bob Novak used in the column. So on the one hand, it does seem to track some of what Novak wrote in his column that stirred this whole case up in the first place. On the other hand, it refers to her by a completely different name. So it sheds a little bit of light, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the final answer.

HARWOOD: Thanks, Anne.

Analysis: Congress continues its investigation into Judge John Roberts' record ahead of the confirmation hearings set for early September

JOHN HARWOOD, guest moderator: For the president's Supreme Court nominee, the last 10 days have gone more smoothly than almost anyone had predicted. But there was a different tone this week as the early applause for John Roberts died down. Newly released documents from his service in the Reagan administration showed a young lawyer brimming with conservative enthusiasm. That reassured the right, but troubled liberal Democrats, who raised questions about his commitment to civil rights and demanded more documents from the first Bush administration.

Now, Pete, are the president's lawyers going to hold firm on that document demand and could that stop this nomination?

Mr. PETE WILLIAMS (NBC News): Yes, as far as I know they're going to hold firm on it. They say it's attorney-client privilege. In the odd way that this works, this stuff when he was in the White House counsel's office isn't covered. But when he was further down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Justice Department they say it is covered.

Some of the liberal groups are already rehearsing the word `stonewall' to see how that plays. They have a little more enthusiasm for argument...

HARWOOD: That word's got a track record.

Mr. WILLIAMS: They have a little more enthusiasm for that than I think some of the Democrats do. You know, there don't seem to be any showstoppers in these documents. You have to look at--here's some--this was all written 24 years--when he was 24 years old just out of Harvard and Harvard Law, two years of clerking for a federal judge, full of all the hubris that that would give you when you had that position in life. So how much of it is that? How much of it is he echoing the views of the--saluting the flag to the Reagan administration and how much has he changed his mind since all these years? You can't tell. But even so, they certainly add to some of what's known about Judge Roberts. It takes us a little further away from the idea that he's just sort of a careful, quiet, self-effacing legal craftsman. And you do get an impression here that he was not perhaps a doctrinaire conservative, but someone who civil rights groups say was very driven to push the attorney general, his boss at the time--he was special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration and that's the documents that we get--to push him toward having a very narrow view on civil rights.

On affirmative action, for example, he held the view that it wasn't always effective, that if a program was forced to treat men and women equally then the tight budgets might force them to just cancel altogether. He says, at one point, that the reason a police program to bring in minority applicants didn't work is that affirmative action forces you to get unqualified applicants. But some of the other views that he expresses were in line with where the Supreme Court was at the time. On Title IX, a ban on sex discrimination in education, he said you should only look at the money that the individual program gets, not the whole university. And the Supreme Court ultimately would eventually hold that view; Congress would then change it. In counseling against broad coverage for the Voting Rights Act on how you tell whether there's discrimination or not, he supported the Supreme Court's very narrow view of what test you apply, which Congress later would vote to change. But--and he also suggester perhaps limiting the number of appeals that convicted murderers could take and Congress would ultimately end up doing that. So he's not an outlier. He's not way out on the edge.

And there's also some--we get some impression in some of these documents that he did change his mind. When he was at the Justice Department he wrote several memos saying that Congress could constitutionally prohibit the lower federal courts and even the Supreme Court from even hearing cases on the hot button issues of the day: busing and school prayer and abortion. He said, yeah, Congress could do that. But then later when he got to the White House he said, `You know, I still think that's constitutional, but I think it's bad public policy.'

HARWOOD: So Democrats say they want to know more from these documents, from his work in the solicitor general's office in the first Bush administration.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Right.

HARWOOD: And document requests helped them hold up the nomination of John Bolton to be UN ambassador, although it looks tonight as if the administration is going to make a recess appointment...

Mr. WILLIAMS: Right.

HARWOOD: ...and put him in New York anyway. Does it feel more, in this case, in the Roberts case, that the Democrats are going through the motions with that request and they don't really expect to find anything that dramatic in the new documents?

Mr. WILLIAMS: No, I think that they feel that--they really are emboldened by the first little glimpse that we get in these documents that John Roberts got excited about these issues and did feel very strongly about judicial restraint. They want to know what his internal counsel was when he was in--the solicitor general's office is the office that argues cases before the Supreme Court--and they--there were some pretty exciting cases then on school prayer, on limiting abortion--access to abortion, school desegregation, and they really want to try to get their hands on it. And they say, by the way, that in the past the White Houses have dribbled out some of these documents in past confirmation proceedings.

Ms. CECI CONNOLLY (The Washington Post): Pete, as I recall, correct me if I'm wrong, that there were three senators who had opposed Roberts when he was nominated to the appeals court. Obviously, much can happen between now and the vote, sometime between October--by October 3rd, but what do you figure his prospects are today? How many no votes?

Mr. WILLIAMS: I couldn't count the votes for you, but I don't know of anybody right now who thinks if the vote was held today that he couldn't get confirmed. And, by the way, they set dead--they set the time for this. They now say that the confirmation hearings will start on September 6th, right after Labor Day; hope to have the committee vote by the 15th.

HARWOOD: Well, that'll have to wrap it up for tonight.

JOHN HARWOOD, guest moderator: Congress may be taking some time off, but we'll be back around the table again next week on WASHINGTON WEEK. Good night.