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September 27, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - September 27

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JERRY NADLER (D), NEW YORK: This bill makes the president a dictator. For when someone can order people jailed forever without being subject to any judicial review, that is dictatorial power. The president wants to live in a law-free zone.

REP. JIM SAXTON (R), NEW JERSEY: We have produced an extraordinarily fair criminal process here to adjudicate the fate of these terrorists. Those who would find the court procedures in this bill wanting will never be satisfied until we're reading Miranda Rights on the battlefield.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: But more than 150 Democrats found the rights, according to the terrorist suspects and enemy combatants, wanting and voted against the bill in the House of Representatives today. It did pass.

Some thoughts on all this now from Jeff Birnbaum, columnist of the "Washington Post"; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of "Roll Call"; and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. FOX NEWS contributors all.

Well, gentlemen, it was widely said when the president asked for this authority that it was good for Democrats that Republicans, some Republicans, John McCain and others were bucking it in part in the House because of the treatment methods that were going to be or not be allowed, but that when the Republicans got out of the way, the bill would sail through. Well, it got through the House today but it didn't exactly sail.

Jeff, what's going on here?

JEFF BIRNBAUM, "WASHINGTON POST": Well, the Democrats decided to make a stand against various portions of this bill, especially the portions that deal with how much appeal the detainees have. I don't quite understand why they're doing it, I have to say. It seems like a political mistake. The speaker of the House, for example, accused the Democrats of voting more rights for terrorists. John Boehner the No. 2 Republican.

HUME: Is that a fair statement?

BIRNBAUM: I think wanting to vote more rights for terrorists, I think, without question. And I think we'll probably see that phrase or something very much like it in a lot of Republican ads against incumbent Democrats, especially the 160 who voted against this package.

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": The speaker accused the Democrats of wanting to coddle terrorists. I suspect that that's going to be, you know, used during the campaign. It was widely believed that what the president had done by depositing the people in the secret prisons in Guantanamo and calling for Congress to get this legislation over with by the time of the election was a trap for the Democrats. And.

HUME: You mean if they resisted it?

KONDRACKE: If they resisted it it'd be used against them. And the way I understood it, one, they were going to use McCain and Graham's objections on the detainee questioning issue as their -- as their cover, but once the cover was removed, they did what the Republicans were hoping they would do and they walked into this trap.

So, you know, now, the one argument that they had that makes any sense to me or any -- has any sway with me is the danger that if the U.S. Supreme Court ever get appeals from the D.C. Court of Appeals, if somebody appeals to the Supreme Court, which is not supposed to hear the case, but if it does and the Supreme Court strikes this down that somebody like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would go free on the grounds that he has been denied constitutional rights, I don't know how -- it's impossible for me to tell how likely that is.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I think the likelihood is zero. I can't imagine Supreme Court springing Khalid sheikh Mohammed and what would be essentially a technicality.

HUME: There were two arguments, it seems to me, Charles. One was that some of these detainees, battlefield combatants -- enemy combatants will be held indefinitely. That was a complaint; you heard that reflected from Congressman Nadler's comments. The other argument was that all these prisoners would be without the traditional habeas corpus protections that had been the part of, you know, Western jurors prudence for as long as anybody could remember and they were going to be stripped of that. What about the merits of those arguments?

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, they don't get the habeas corpus that an American citizen who is caught breaking into a bank would get. What they do have, however, is a mechanism for challenging their detention which is more than the hundreds of thousands of German POW's had in America in the second World War, who were held here in America. What they can do is appeal to a military court tribunal, special one, and if they lose on that they do have a single place in the court system, the circuit court...

HUME: The civilian court system?

KRAUTHAMMER: Yes. Federal court, the highest court below the Supreme Court, a single one which will review the detention. The reason that was instituted, I think it was Senator Graham who insisted on this, is that in response to a previous Supreme Court ruling the Guantanamo prisoners had gone shopping for district courts all over America looking for a lenient one who would give them standing and drag out a process for every detainee. So, it's now been streamlined. One appeal to a military commission, one review at the D.C. circuit and that is more than POW's have had in the past. And more than any of them, obviously, would grant us if any detention situation.

HUME: What is the public likely to make of these objections by Democrats? What I mean, Republicans are hoping they think it's good for them. Is it?

KONDRACKE: Look, these are terrorists. And these people -- these are the worst terrorists in the world, they're the ones who perpetrated 9/11. I cannot believe that granting them constitutional rights is going to be popular. That the Democrats -- I think this is going to work against the Democrats.

BIRNBAUM: There's no question. If you look at the polls, the Democrats have been on the short side when it comes to the war on terrorism. I think this debate, this complaint that the Democratic leaders are making will put them even on the shorter side. That they will not have very much standing to say that they -- that they are strong when it comes to the war on terror and will validate President Bush's advantage on that side.

HUME: When we come back with our panel, the U.S. economy is perking right along heading into the fall elections. That topic, the market and the rest of it next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROB PORTMAN, WH BUDGET DIRECTOR: What we have found is over the last few years despite the growing cost of the global war on terror, across the board with intelligence, military, and so on, that we have actually been able to see a growing economy, thanks to pro-growth tax policy among other things and that has resulted in our deficit not going up, but going down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, whether it's because his pro-growth tax policies or what it's because of certainly the economy has contained to perk along in spite of 9/11 and in spite of Hurricane Katrina and in spite of anything else. And the Dow Jones Industrial average, which is the proxy for the stock market in most people's eyes, came today ever closer to all-time record. It's about 40 or so points off of that, right now, and might make it tomorrow. Who knows? The other broader market averages, it should be noted, the NASDAQ and S&P 500 are not near their all-time records. And it'll be many years before the NASDAQ ever gets close to it, but nevertheless the economy seems to be doing well as the Autumn campaign is in full swing. Back with our panel.

Jeff, what are the ingredients here, I mean, obviously gas prices are down, as well. What about all of this? How big a deal is this politically?

BIRNBAUM: Well, I think it's a very big deal. I think there was a sizeable group of swing voter looking to the midterm election here, who were worried about a squeeze below that good news at the top level you tacked about, a squeeze between expensing and rising expenses and rising debts, especially mortgage sorts of debts. This was a group of anxious people, economically speaking.

But with the decline of gasoline prices over the last month or so, they're now below where they are a year ago. And with the rising stock market and even there was good news today, by the way, new home sales in August were actually up after three-month decline. People were very worried about the housing market. I think that that anxious group of voters that the Democrats thought would come into their side are -- the Democrats are worried that they may slip away and they may go to the Republican side, in part, because all of the economic indicators are moving in their direction.

KONDRACKE: According to their council of economic advisors, (INAUDIBLE) productivity gains that have been experienced since this recovery began are beginning to end up in wages in real -- real wage increases on the part of the average worker, which it had not been the case in the past. And there was something like a seven percent increase over -- in the last, I believe the last month, over the year before in wages, so that people are beginning to get more money in their pockets which they hadn't been before. That combined -- if anybody knows about that, and I would think that ordinary people would experience it, that, plus the fact that gasoline prices are going down would give people a bit of a lift. And it does show in a bit of an increase in the consumer confidence index.

KRAUTHAMMER: Well we all know what happened, the vice president, Cheney, picked up the phone and he called his buddies in the oil industry and he ordered a drop in gas prices in time for the midterm elections.

Look, we always attribute good news on the economy to presidents and it's way out of his control. Yes, tax cuts helped in getting us through the 9/11 emergency, but what we've had is a 25-year expansion with very shallow recessions and two things account for that. A, we've learned to manage the money supply, the Federal Reserve has acted incidentally and quashed inflation, and secondly productivity increased with the information revolution and that makes everybody wealthier and the economy stable and more prosperous.

BIRNBAUM: I think the economy doing -- rather the stock market doing well is also an important political indicator because voters tend to be owners of stock, either themselves or otherwise.

HUME: Yeah, we got a larger shareholder class in America than we used to.

BIRNBAUM: Much larger, and with the fed stopping interest rate increases, the stock market's likely to reach new heights.

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