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April 10, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - April 10

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm here 11 years. I have never seen another white person house cleaning. And the Americans, they are on welfare. We are willing to work, we don't want welfare. We just want work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: One of many, tens of thousands of protesters who turned out in cities across the country today to object to a House-passed immigration reform bill and to encourage the Senate to pass something much milder.

Analytical observations on the issue now from Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent of the "Washington Examiner," Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio and the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, FOX News contributors all.

Well it was a very big set of demonstrations, started yesterday. I guess there was a big one in Dallas and there were demonstrations here in New York and Phoenix, a number of other places, big one in Atlanta. The one in Phoenix was absolutely huge.

What about the likely political effect of these protests, Bill? The last time, you remember there were a lot of Mexican flags. They didn't have a lot of Mexican flags today. Today, the flags -- if there were any, were virtually all American.

What about the political effect of this? Does this inflame the opponents of immigration reform or does it soften up the senators who backed away from it last week?

BILL SAMMON, WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Yes. It does both. It gets -- it gets -- it makes it more likely that the Senate will be pressured into revisiting this issue and trying to salvage the bill that they had that fell apart last week. But it also angers those hard-core conservative Republicans who oppose a guest worker program and will make them dig in in support of the House version, which doesn't include the guest worker program.

It only includes measures to enforce the border security. And it's an interesting political sort of game here, because for every conservative Republican who gets ticked off by all of this, Bush supporting a guest worker program and may be tempted to not vote in November, you may get an Hispanic who would be more willing to consider voting for a Republican.

Of course, Hispanics are the burgeoning voter group in America. So, you know, what Bush may lose in terms of his base, he may pick up in terms of Hispanic voters.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: I think in the long run, the politics of this are where Bush is. In other words, it's for comprehensive reform, some kind of earned legalization. The demonstrations you saw today represent this big new growing block, voting block. There are signs, "We Vote, We Work."

HUME: They are among the illegals, they really can't vote.

LIASSON: They can't, but there weren't only illegals out there. There were the sons and daughters of illegals who are now legal. And family members and people who maybe once were, but aren't now. I think that's the future.

In the short term, I think the politics are quite complicated and there still is some value, including for those 36 Democrats don't forget who voted for the Sensenbrenner bill, the House bill, the tougher enforcement only bill to have -- to be tough on enforcement.

I think if the Senate comes back, passes the compromise, the Hagel- Martinez compromise, then goes to conference with the House, I think the trick is going to be -- and Charles is always talking about this -- a mechanism where you somehow certify or guarantee that the border is closed first before you do the other part.

HUME: Those are the practical realities of the legislation, which are many and problematic, but let's talk a little bit further here about the politics of this. If the Senate, Charles, is to pass a bill, it appears that it would be the Democrats who pulled the plug on it last week who would have to change their course. How likely?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, I think the Democrats will be pressured by the Hispanic constituency, and this is -- these demonstrations are the coming out party of Hispanics as a political force.

United in a way, because remember in the last election, it was split almost half-and-half, Democrat and Republican. This is a way of asserting that they are going to stand on a single issue and judge people on a single issue.

I think that will sway a lot of Democrats into recalculating the politics of this. I think the reason the Senate Democrats killed the bill is because they would rather have the only legislation existing be the House bill which came out of the House and which declared all illegals felons.

That's what brought millions into the street. That's what has created this Hispanic constituency as a political force. But they may recalculate and think that if they don't help to pass a bill to placate that constituency, they will either be penalized or not gain.

So I suspect Democrats will work on the amendment issue, on these technical issues and try to get a bill out when they return.

SAMMON: Well the Republicans are also trying to figure out a way so that they get credit for this. If there are some Hispanic votes to be gained here, they want to get credit for it.

Bush was out on this issue before anybody, Bush was out on this issue the day before he came into office and suddenly everybody else was on it now.

Today you saw the White House explicitly again blaming Harry Reid for killing this thing. It's key to blame the Democrats. The Democrats are blaming the Republicans for killing this bill, and whoever wins that will win a lot of the political gain.

LIASSON: But they're just arguing right now about who is blocking the Senate bill. In the end, the fault line is going to be, who is for earned legalization and who isn't? And right now, the Democrats are pretty much united. They are all on one side, earned legalization.

HUME: But they killed the bill that would have provided it.

LIASSON: Well, no, they didn't -- what they did is it ends up looking like that, but I think we have a couple of plays to go here. Right now, the Democrats didn't say, "We don't want this bill because it has earned legalization." They were saying, "We wanted to protect the bill against all these amendments that will weaken it."

SAMMON: But because of what Charles said, because they were worried that they wouldn't get credit and they wanted to have that mean old House bill to drape around Republicans necks in the November elections.

LIASSON: As Charles said, I don't think that's a sustainable position for them.

KRAUTHAMMER: Of the two events, the Senate nonaction is less important than the House action. The House action is what produced these huge demonstrations. And they started two weeks ago, long before the Senate had gone inactive.

That's what's driving this issue. And if nothing else happens, what will be remembered is not that the president wanted a program of legalization, it's that the House had as it is being portrayed, a punitive bill that declared immigrants being felons.

HUME: It is probably, everyone will note after all, that Republicans at least supposedly control both the House and the Senate, not to mention the White House.

KRAUTHAMMER: And it will be hung on their necks.

HUME: When we come back with our panel, President Bush says he is focused on diplomacy, not plans for an attack to keep nuclear weapons out of Iran. We'll talk about that when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: I know, I know we're here in Washington, prevention means force. It doesn't mean force, necessarily. In this case, it means diplomacy. And by the way, I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. That was just wild speculation, by the way. What you're reading is wild speculation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And the articles in the newspapers that the president was talking about were triggered, it seems, by an article in the New Yorker magazine by the irrepressible and excitable Seymour Hersh that said there were actually people in the Pentagon that were prepared to resign because the president is bound and determined to keep a possible nuclear attack on Iran in his kit of options for dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, and moreover that we already have ground personnel ordered -- military personnel ordered into Iran to possibly scope out targets for some kind of military attack there. The administration obviously very eager today to tamp down that notion.

But what about this? Does this account make sense? Does the media reaction to it make sense? Is the president to be believed? What?

SAMMON: Well, first of all, I think it would be wrong if the administration wasn't making contingency plans in case something went wrong with Iran to do something militarily. I think they would be remiss if they didn't have plans on the books for any number of potential enemies. North Korea, I think there is a contingency plan for how we might move militarily against North Korea.

Now, we probably have done a bit more aggressive planning since Iran has been problematic lately, but the excitable Seymour Hersh obviously took it too far and talked about we're ready to nuke them. The bottom line is this. All of this talk where Bush is distancing himself but not ruling out the military option, is actually very helpful for our diplomatic effort to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions because now Iran is like wait a minute, we're not sure what to believe, but now they are talking about the military attacks.

Of course, Bush is denying it, but can we believe Bush? So I think this talk is very useful for the administration even though the administration is trying to distance themselves and tamp it down.

HUME: Helping the administration, do you think what Mr. Hersh had in mind?

LIASSON: I don't know what he had in mind, but some are reporting this weekend it was just part of an effort, the psychological warfare and effort to put some muscle behind it. That's what Iran called it, warfare.

But look, I think that - I believe that the plans are probably pretty aggressive and detailed. I believe probably there is no final decision made that this is actually going to happen. But at some point in the next year, Iran is going to be just about to cross that line that everybody fears to do -- to take the technological step that means they can make nuclear weapons, and at that point, the president is going to have to make some pretty serious decisions because so far diplomacy hasn't worked.

KRAUTHAMMER: Whenever you hear these reports of secret plans, troops inserted clandestinely, you enter a world of shadows, where if you're on the outside as we are, you don't know what is disinformation, what is intimidation or psychological warfare.

It reminds me, the best take on this I ever heard on this was Secretary of State George Schultz. A quarter of a century ago there was a report that the CIA had been involved in some shadowy bombing in Lebanon, and the CIA denied it. Schultz was asked for his comment. He said, when the CIA denies something, it's denied. And the Pentagon has denied that it has any of these imminent plans.

The fact is that of course we have contingencies for invading everybody. I'm sure we have contingencies to invade Canada if they get annoying enough, and occasionally they do. Of course Iran, being the biggest threat in the world with a crazy leadership, is going to be first on our list and our plans are going to be detailed. But the Hersh article implies it's imminent.

The only person who knows about that is the president because he is the one who decides what is imminent or not and he hasn't told anyone, I'm sure, not even his closest advisers. I'm not even sure he knows at what point he would pull the trigger. So it is, in fact, wild speculation. And everything that is in there that is true is stuff we already know. Of course we have contingencies and we ought to have contingencies.

LIASSON: What's true isn't new and what's new might not be true.

SAMMON: What's much more likely if it comes to a military strike would be Israel doing a military strike because we're already laying the foundation to give them some cover with President Bush saying hey, Israel has a right to defend itself, this guy wants to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. So I think that would be a more likely scenario down the road.

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