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April 27, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - April 27

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BILL FRIST, (R) TN: A plan that could give taxpayer $100 gas tax holiday rebate check to help ease the pain that they are feeling at that pump.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER, (R) NY: The $100 rebate no one is against that but what's going to happen five months from now and 10 months from now and 15 months from now as the price stays high because they haven't touched big oil.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Well, what about this Mort? Is it true that money is against the $100 rebate?

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": I'm against $100 rebate largely for the reasons that .

HUME: I'm sorry I forget to introduce you. You are Mort Kondracke.

KONDRACKE: I am, yes.

HUME: And you're Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio and that's Charles Krauthammer, the syndicated columnist.

KONDRACKE: The good news in this whole debate, if there's any little piece of good news is that no one has called for price controls, you know, setting the -- the government setting the price of gasoline at a certain level. That is gone. We don't do that anymore. But they have got all kinds of other ideas. And the first idea is to point your finger at the opposition and in the case of the Democrats blame big oil and George Bush the oilman and Dick Cheney the oilman and in the case of the republicans blame the Democrats for blocking drilling in ANWR which is a legitimate case but, you know,.

HUME: Well, what about the $100 gas tax holiday rebate check?

KONDRACKE: You're going to have to keep doing it - are you going to keep buying off -- If the price goes up to $4 are you going to up the rebate to $200? It just never ends. It's just buying off. There are decent ideas, I think. One of them is to eliminate the tax subsidies that are given to oil companies. They don't need them. Another one may be to check out to see whether there has been any gouging or price fixing, you know.

HUME: How many times has that been done before?

KONDRACKE: Never.

MARA LIASSON, NPR: No, it's been investigated in 30 investigations.

KONDRACKE: It's never been found but check it out just to see.

LIASSON: This is like a ritual gas prices go up in election year, everybody has to rush to pretend like they are doing something. Although I have to say the coverage has been extraordinary. If anybody would take the time after -- while they are waiting in line at the pump or whatever to read this, every single article says this isn't going to have anything to do with the price at the pump in the short-term. This is not -- has no effect at the price. This is all just symbolic and kind of political posturing and it still goes on.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: This is utterly shameless predictable and cyclical. Ten years ago Saturday, 29th of April, 1996, President Clinton ordered the Justice and Energy Departments to investigate price fixing on gasoline because it hit the astronomical $1.27.

HUME: This was President Carter .

KRAUTHAMMER: 1996, 10 years ago.

HUME: Oh, Clinton.

KRAUTHAMMER: And at the time I hit a column guessing that perhaps it was not the gouging, it was an increased demand and decreased supply. And that the reports, which were launched, the reports would ultimately show that and, of course, a few months later that's exactly what they showed. The fact that the president ordered a similar inquiry this time around is shameless. He knows the answer. It's increased demand, China and India and, of course, our increase in the use of less efficient cars, and a decrease of supply.

HUME: The supply actually is up it's just not a concomitant increase.

KRAUTHAMMER: It's not keeping up with the increase in demand. What you have also is we have lost 1/20th of our capacity, refining capacity as a result of Katrina and what you get is spot shortages increases which everybody understands and, yet, everybody is pretending it's otherwise and it's the fault of large companies. You have no control over the world price of crude.

HUME: But they are all profiting or at least some of them at least are profiting enormously from this. Should that be reigned in, Mort?

KONDRACKE: No, I don't think so. How are you going to get oil companies to invest in expanded refining capacity if you charge windfall profit tax on this. They have every incentive now to expand refining capacity. They have the money to do it and the president was -- tried to jawbone them into doing it if that needs to be done.

HUME: Of course, environmentalists have blocked a lot of refinery construction.

KONDRACKE: Exactly. If this weren't an election year you could perhaps get another agreement like you did last year on a comprehensive energy policy that would increase supply and reduce demand.

HUME: Over time?

KONDRACKE: Over time. Yeah. But this is an election year so everybody has got to blame everybody else in the first instance.

KRAUTHAMMER: You don't get it in non-election years. You tried that last year.

KONDRACKE: We did get it last year.

KRAUTHAMMER: But you got a ridiculous bill, a lot of whose provisions are causing the shortages. For instance adding the ethanol requirements is causing shortages, increases in prices because we have a lack of ethanol supply. So, it made things worse. Election year or non-election year nobody wants to do the real stuff that you have to do. Nobody will touch the real things. Drilling in the Arctic and raising the gas price. Gas tax.

LIASSON: And also raising CAFE standards and trying to look for alternative sources. I don't think we'll ever see this but I would like to see Democrats and Republicans feel the same since of urgency and panic even thinking about the long-term problem.

HUME: When we come back, Senator Specter threatens to withhold money, well sort of threatens. We will explain that -- if he doesn't get the answers he wants on wiretapping program involving al Qaeda suspects speaking into or out of the United States. Stay tuned for that. It's coming next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SPECTER: On this date in the record I'm not prepared to call for the withholding of funds. But I think that it is important to elevate the public consciousness as to what is going on here because the four hearings which we have held and the way the matter is drifting, in my view, is insufficient.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And what is the right honorable gentleman talking about? He is talking about the National Security Agency's interception of telephone calls into and out of the United States that the NSA believes are coming from al Qaeda or related terrorists and what does he want to do? He says is he not ready to vote for it yet, that is, a measure to cut off funding for that program but he says he will shortly introduce such an idea. Now, that may seem odd but Senator Specter has unusual ideas. What about this? And what does it say about Senator Specter, what does it say about the Republicans and Democrats on this issue and where all this stands?

LIASSON: Well, first of all, it's a threat. It's the only threat that Congress can use in this case, the power of the purse. And I think Senator Specter in terms of the Democrats and Republicans Senator Specter represents a group of members of both parties that feel this is an institutional issue. He said today that the presidency is walking all over Congress at the moment and if we are going to maintain our institutional prerogative this is the only way we can fight back.

He even said that the power to do this warrantless wiretapping may very well be within the president's Article II powers, as the president claims but he said we are trying to find out a way to find out, to have somebody determine this.

HUME: He is actually saying that he doesn't know what is that's actually being done because it's so secret and is he not on the Intelligence Committee so he can't find out.

LIASSON: But he wants the FISA court which overseas requests for warrants in these kind of wiretaps to take a look at this and decide whether it's constitutional.

KRAUTHAMMER: But I can't imagine a president giving up his powers in response to a ruling from this little secret court. Perhaps if it was a ruling from the Supreme Court and unanimous it might.

Look, what's interesting here is how this issue evolved. It started out as a Democratic/Republican issue with Democrats attacking the president initially for spying on Americans, et cetera. Then after Americans understood what was happening and the polls came out and showed overwhelming support for listening on al Qaeda if they call the United States, everybody backed off and now as you said it's purely an institutional issue. Specter is speaking on behalf of Congress which feels that the president has taken over territory that at least is unclaimed.

And he particularly, I think, is piqued because he is head of Judiciary and yet he was not among the eight members of Congress who were initially told. So he wants to defend his prerogatives as the chairman and he is acting on behalf of Congress. Ultimately he is using the threat, which I don't think anybody will actually execute of withholding the money, because it would kill a program that Americans support.

But is he using it as a way to try to get, I think, a negotiation started with the White House to some kind of compromise in which at least the executive acknowledges some say on behalf of Congress but I will bet the administration will not concede an inch of constitutional territory on this at all.

HUME: Mort, you are a guy likes compromises. Should the administration compromise on this one?

KONDRACKE: I think actually Senator DeWine has the beginnings or the right idea.

HUME: He's a Republican from Ohio.

KONDRAKCE: From Ohio. To authorize the program in general terms without spelling out what it is and then expand the oversight of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the congressional intelligence committees over how it's managed. I think terms that DeWine wants to impose are much too restrictive. I mean, it's 45 days. You've got to reauthorize it. You've got to approve every single tap. That's ridiculous.

But they ought to be able to oversee in general what the program is and certain people ought to know about it. I mean, one of the items in what Specter wants to do is to get an advisory opinion from the FISA court. Now, courts don't give advisory opinions. He says it's not an advisory opinion but that's what it is. You can't go to a court and ask. I mean, it's a violation of separation of powers for a court to say is this program constitutional or not? Just tell us off the record, you know. Or off without a case. They don't do that. So I don't think -- I don't think this can fly.

LIASSON: The other idea that some Democrats have is to figure out a way to get it into the regular court system, the Supreme Court, which is to figure out a way to give somebody standing. Right now you have no way of knowing if you have been surveilled because it's a secret program so you can't challenge it. And, you know, that's another idea. But this is hard for Congress to get its hands around. They have also asked the attorney general over and over again if there are other programs just like this but that involve Americans, not just somebody who is overseas, and he hasn't told them which suggests there might be.

HUME: So, what to do?

LIASSON: Well, Specter is trying one path.

HUME: One other thing that happened today out the Senate committee Senator Collins of Maine with Senator Lieberman as the leading Democrat there came a proposal to abolish FEMA in favor of a new agency all new still within Homeland Security called the National Preparedness and Response Authority because it was argued FEMA is such a broken, dysfunctional demoralized agency that it cannot be repaired and, well we have got to leave them in place for hurricane season but we have got to get -- is this a serious new proposal or is this simply something else?

KRAUTHAMMER: It's a proposal designed to look radical and impressive. It's ridiculous. Why start over? We have had success with FEMA in the past in a lot of hurricanes in Florida. We had a disaster with Katrina. You don't start all over.

What we had was starting over 9/11 and including it in Homeland Security and moving the boxes around and it made things worse. I think, you know, physicians do no harm. I think we ought to go slow here and be respectful of how much damage Congress causes over and over again by mandating starting over on these programs.

LIASSON: We learned with the Department of Homeland Security it takes a very, very long time to get a knew bureaucracy up and running and functioning properly.

KONDRACKE: I think you want to fix FEMA and the one decent idea involved in this is that during a crisis, a declared crisis the FEMA director would have a direct pipeline to the president.

HUME: Right. Can any federal disaster relief agency called the preparedness and response authority or whatever you call it ever be really effective in America under our system if state and local doesn't do a good job.

KONDRACKE: There was a proposal by one of the House committees to .

HUME: To nationalize the whole thing?

KONDRACKE: Well, to have -- I forget what it's called -- the Insurrection Act. To amend the Insurrection Act so you could .

HUME: Federalize everything?

KONDRACKE: Not federalize everything but more easily federalize it.

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