GRASSLEY: The Justice Department has come under a lot of heat lately because of their decision to hold civilian trials for five Al Qaida terrorists. These are the terrorists that plotted and planned the 9/11 attacks.
This has been largely unpopular and a highly questionable decision.
In November, I asked the attorney general about the lawyers working on policy related to Guantanamo detainees at the Justice Department. It's important for the American people to know who's advising the attorney general and the president on these decisions, particularly in light of the attorney general's recent comments that civilian trials for the 9/11...
(CROSSTALK)
(UNKNOWN): Hey, Chance, is that you?
QUESTION: No, it's Jim Boyd.
(UNKNOWN): OK, Jim.
GRASSLEY: Particularly in light of the attorney general's recent comments that civilian trials for the 9/11 conspirators are still on the table.
The country has the right to know what the predilections of people in the Justice Department are towards terrorism, especially -- since Jim's on there I'm going to change to the hand-held phone so he can get (inaudible).
The response from the department -- and I did get a response Friday and the department failed to answer any simple -- what, are we not on there?
Can you guys hear me?
STAFF: Yes, we can hear you.
QUESTION: We can hear you.
GRASSLEY: They can hear me.
I got a response from the department creates a lot of suspicion about conflict of interest, and the department's refusal to be forthright is very much out of character of an administration that promised transparency.
Of course now, not only has the administration decided to bring these terrorists to U.S. soil, but the president also requested a total of more than $500 million in new spending sprinkled through his budget to transfer, prosecute and house 9/11 conspirators.
The president's budget includes $73 million for the Department of Justice to prosecute the terrorists in civilian courts, $237 million to purchase, renovate and staff the Thomson Correction Center, $200 million for state and local security costs associated with criminal trials, and $22 million in the budget for the federal judiciary for court security and public defenders for the terrorists.
In other words, not only will the 9/11 terrorists get constitutional rights, taxpayers' money is going to be spent defending them in U.S. courts with federal public defenders.
It seems to me that, given the current fiscal constraints facing the federal government, with more than $500 million that this adds up to could be saved by holding the trials by military commission at the existing facilities at Guantanamo that were put there specifically, designed to handle these sorts of cases.
Questions?
QUESTION: Hi, Senator, I'm just wondering about a report that the Hill came out with yesterday, saying that the House has passed 290 bills and that the Senate has yet to take any action upon.
Is this, kind of, just par for the course?
I've heard a lot of criticism, kind of, lodged at the Senate lately, that they're -- they're not giving too much as -- or as much as the House. What's your take on that issue?
GRASSLEY: Well, you want to remember that -- that that's the situation, the way it is a lot. Because you've got to remember, there's 435 members in the House of Representatives and there's only 100 senators. And, obviously, with 435 members compared to 100, you're going to have a lot of bills passed that may not get through the Senate because there's different interests. And senators may not -- 100 senators may not share the same interests of 435 House members.
Implicit in your statement would be a supposition that we ought to pass, you know, just because the House passed it. And then, also, you didn't give us any statistics of the numbers of bills that passed the Senate that have not passed the House. Maybe, proportionately, it would be about the same amount. I don't have those figures, and you may not have them, either, but you ought to look at those figures to see whether Senate bills have gotten through the House yet.
But, also, your question brings up a very basic, fundamental difference between the House of
Representatives and the Senate, intended by the Constitution writers.
You know, the Senate has the reputation of being the most deliberative body in the entire world. Well, it was meant to be a deliberative body. It was meant to -- well, I guess George Washington explained it best to Thomas Jefferson, so I'll explain it the same way he did.
He had a cup of hot coffee, and he says, "This coffee represents what the House of Representatives does."
And then, as he was explaining this to Jefferson, he poured the hot coffee out into a saucer. He says, "The saucer is the Senate. We pour the coffee in the saucer to cool. The purpose of the Senate is to be a deliberative body and not -- not pass stuff without thorough deliberation." And so that's the way it was set up in 1787.
Another way to put it would be the way Kirk Porter, who was head of the political science department when I was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa -- and I didn't get my Ph.D., so I don't have all the expertise that, maybe, a Ph.D.er would have. But Kirk Porter lectured in class that the purpose of the checks and balances of our government was to -- I think he put it something like this. He used the word "trenchant majority," "to prevent the will of a trenchant majority from being done, just what it was that day."
In other words, he's saying that the House of Representatives might represent a more up-to-date or casual point of view for that day, but it might not be good for the country. And the Senate was meant to slow down that process and determine was what the House of Representatives do best for the country.
So that's, you know, that's not my answer. That's the answer from George Washington and Kirk Porter (ph).
QUESTION: Thanks.
STAFF: Tom Beaumont?
QUESTION: Senator, what do you plan to say or contribute tomorrow during the White House summit on health care?
GRASSLEY: Well, I can tell you the areas that I'm going to cover. And I'm going to cover the area of -- of deficit reduction and I'm going to -- the other one is what we call discrimination based upon preexisting conditions.
QUESTION: Do -- do you have a speaking part, for lack of a better term?
GRASSLEY: No. I think it's going to be pretty free-wheeling.
QUESTION: And then a follow up on the jobs bill from a couple of weeks ago. Is Senator Reid's action on that, the bill that you and Senator Baucus came up with, what you think is a sign of things to come this year and beyond?
GRASSLEY: Well, I'm totally surprised at what Reid did. And I hope it isn't evidence of things to come because if he fills the tree on every bill as he did on this bill, then the Senate minority will not have any voice in legislation, contrary to just what I answered for the previous questioner, about the role of the Senate versus the role of the House.
And I think it just compromises democracy. Democracy isn't working when a majority leader decides behind closed doors what's going to be in the package and doesn't allow any amendments, as we just saw. And it would just completely neuter the purpose of the Senate, which is for the previous caller, or previous questioner, I can say additionally, it was meant to see where minority views are protected, and they're protected through extended debate, and not to move quickly, and to give consideration.
Unlike the House of Representatives where a minority party never gets an opportunity to do anything except offer a substitute, and then you don't get a vote up or down on the substitute. You only get a vote up or down of whether or not it ought to go back to committee and report out such a bill.
So -- let me go on, Tom, because I feel a little frustrated about this process, because you see for two or three weeks, Baucus was working closely with Reid. I was working closely with McConnell. We didn't -- our intention was never to put out a mark, a Grassley-Baucus mark, take it or leave it. As my press release last week or two weeks ago said, we were putting it out under our policy of transparency to give Republicans and Democrats an opportunity to look at it and get reaction before we finally put it down.
But I think I had talked to enough Republicans, and I think Baucus felt, working with Reid, close enough that we had a package that would get overwhelming amount of votes. And that was the whole purpose. We didn't want to spend days and weeks in debate on it. We wanted something that would -- would get through quickly, and well thought-out, and for the most part, the reestablishing of existing policy.
So up until two weeks ago yesterday -- and remember, that was the snow week, so we were in session on Tuesday, we weren't in session on Wednesday, so there wasn't much head-to-head talk between senators after Tuesday, but I left Tuesday night with an understanding that we're going to be working on the Baucus-Grassley bill.
And then Thursday he pops up with this partisan approach, and I don't have any explanation except just one or two Democrats implying to me that he was getting pressure from the left wing of the party, that he was decreasing for a year, which is policy that's been in place for 20 years, just reestablishing that policy, and wasn't doing enough on unemployment and everything else that was in the bill.
Well, other things in the bill went for a year, but some of them, you know, just went for a few months. But that was for the specific purpose of keeping the cost of the bill down.
So I'm -- I guess the bottom line is I'm frustrated. But I can tell you this, getting back to your
original question -- What do you think it means for the future, what Reid did? -- it's going to make me more cautious agreeing to a bipartisan bill in the -- in the Senate Finance Committee.
QUESTION: Thank you.
GRASSLEY: You bet.
STAFF: Jim Boyd?
Mike Glover?
Joe Morton (ph)?
QUESTION: Yes. Senator, sorry if this got asked before, I got on the call a little bit late, I think, but are you planning on attending the summit tomorrow...
GRASSLEY: Oh, yes.
QUESTION: ... and what do you expect to come out of that?
GRASSLEY: Yes, and I just answered for Tom Beaumont that my area -- if I'm going to pick up on kind of a very casual -- what I consider to be a potentially very casual environment and more of a discussion group, I'm going to concentrate on preexisting conditions and deficit reduction.
And by the way, these four, that's two of four things that we're going to be discussing. What we're going to be discussing was the format was set by the president.
And we're going to be -- it's my understanding that, let's see, it probably be 32 people of Congress and the president going to be sitting around some sort of U-shaped table just discussing these things without a lot of parliamentary rules interfering with discussion. It would be the environment that I would expect.
QUESTION: How do you rate the chances that this actually produces some sort of bipartisan cooperation on...
GRASSLEY: Well, I can tell you what our approach is. Our approach is that 70 percent of the people in this country thought we ought to start over.
So starting over. What do what Republicans stand for. And what's wrong with what Reid put on the table, which is basically what passed the Senate with a few additions. A few subtractions, but I think it's fair to say it's almost the same as what went through the Senate, which obviously is partisan.
And it seems to me that to some extent the president limits the opportunity for bipartisanship when he says: Well, this is what I'm for, is there anything we can add for the Republicans?
That isn't how we're going to approach it. We're going to approach it the same way you ought to approach any bipartisan talks, like Baucus and I did, with a blank sheet of paper.
STAFF: Tim Rohwer?
QUESTION: Yes, Senator. The other day I know you spoke on the floor of the Senate, seemed rather frustrated on this -- the tax extenders...
GRASSLEY: Yes.
QUESTION: ... for the third stimulus bill. How does that look?
I mean, is that (inaudible).
GRASSLEY: Well, first of all, for the review of everybody else listening, and you may have heard me say this, I was frustrated -- and this gets back a little to the question Tom Beaumont asked me when I -- when I said that I'm frustrated with what happened, and that I'm not -- I'm going to be a little more cautious the way Reid treated Baucus as well as me, by going political, that it's going to make me cautious.
So what I was reacting to is what he said about why they went partisan, that this bill was filled with a bunch of GOP corporate tax -- I forget the word he used -- some sort of corporate tax advantage, you know. In other words, just GOP big tax.
Well, then I went on to quote how this tax policy's been on the books for years, and in a few cases, for decades. And it's passed by consensus or almost unanimously many times, and that this characterization of these tax policies being something to benefit GOP and -- and presumably GOP economic interests, is wildly inaccurate and intellectually dishonest because we're in the situation where Democrats have supported all these policies, and we were only extending them for one year.
And in other words, he was saying that the teachers -- he was saying that the teachers who get a deduction of the state -- I mean from their federal income tax for supplies they buy for the classrooms -- that they're GOP -- well, I mean, they aren't corporate interests is what they were saying.
And there's another one on the deduction of qualified tuition -- college deduction on qualified tuition for -- that would be tuition for middle class families, you know. And we also had property tax deduction for taxpayers who don't itemize as another one. Those are just average middle-class American citizens, and to label them as corporate fat cats is just intellectually dishonest.
And then there's 29,000 people that are laid off because the bio-industry tax credit didn't go. And those people are for the most part blue collared working people. Well, what about them? They aren't GOP corporate fat cats. And then so I cited so many times that Democrats voted for all these policies, and that's -- that's some of the frustration I expressed.
QUESTION: How do you see the, you know, President Bush's, you know, the tax is supposed to end this year. Do you see that continuing?
GRASSLEY: Well, I sure hope it continues and I hope it continues with the president's blessing because I told the president back the first or second week of December when several of us were down to the White House and invited down to talk about jobs. And I said, "Before you were sworn in as president, you said even though you ran on a platform of increasing taxes, particularly on wealthy people, that you were going to delay that because there's a recession." Well, the recession isn't any better right this minute in December or even now near March.
And he ought to say the same thing.
Because I -- you know, as I walked around the home and garden show two weeks ago in Des Moines -- and I did that on two different days -- and then as I walked around the home improvement show in Waterloo the same weekend to talk to vendors and things like that, I very definitely got the opinion that this potential big tax increase, the potential of cap-and-trade, the potential of cost of business of health care reform, the uncertainty that's out there is going to keep people from hiring.
Because I was asking about the jobs bill, you know. What about the -- you know, if you have a holiday for a payroll tax if you hire somebody?
They said, you know, that might work, but it's -- it's not the big thing that's out there. It's the
uncertainty of all these other things, that we ain't going to hire until we know that -- what the future is.
And it's this uncertainty that's keeping the economy from turning around, getting over the recession.
OK, thank you all very much.
END