Election 2008 Democrats | Republicans | General Election: Heads-to-Heads | Latest Polls

---

August 06, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - Aug 6

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP RAHM EMANUEL, (D) ILLINOIS: We've got our work done. We got a minimum wage to his desk, we got a 9/11 Commission's recommendations to his desk. We got a comprehensive lobbying reform to his desk. All for signature.

REP ADAM PUTNAM, (R) FLORIDA: Our nation was founded on freedom and security, and we've seen an erosion of both of those values for the last seven months, whether it's the explosion in tax increases on every bill that is moving, whether it is on the loss of security on our border that would entitle illegal aliens to receive benefits, and a whole host of other issues that are certainly not in the favor of the American people

On top of that, we've seen unprecedented institutional abuses this week.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER: Well, there you have two very different perceptions of the 110th Congress, what has been done so far before they left for summer vacation. So let us see what our panelists think about the 110th Congress so far.

Some analytical observations from Bill Sammon, Senior White House Correspondent of the Washington Examiner, Mort Kondracke, Executive Editor of Roll Call, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, FOX News contributors all.

Mort, let's do the laundry list first.

MORT KONDRACKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ROLL CALL: OK. I would say that the Congress gets an "F" for style, and maybe a "C-minus" for substance.

The "F" for style is that they are always fighting. They are always yelling and screaming, and it came to a crescendo as they were leaving town with the House completely out of order. And when they are not doing that, they are beating up on Alberto Gonzalez, or they are beating up on the president. They are constantly fighting, and it looks terrible.

On substance, as Rahm Emanuel said, they got a Lobbying Reform Bill, they got a Minimum Wage Bill, both houses have passed various versions of the Children's Health Bill. They are making slow, unsteady progress on energy reform.

They passed, and very few people have pointed this out, although Major Garrett did, a major $43 billion over three year Competitiveness Initiative, doubling the research budgets of the National Science Foundation of the Energy Department, lots of stuff for training science and math teacher, and stuff like that.

That's a real achievement that they ought to be proud of. but it's too bipartisan, I think, for them.

BAIER: So what came out of there? Does that trump the accusations by the Republicans and the White House that they are spending all this time on investigations and not getting anything done?

BILL SAMMON, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, WASHINGTON EXAMINER: They are getting some things done. But another way to look at this substantively is that they promised to end war in Iraq, and they failed to do that. In fact, Bush escalated the war in Iraq during this Congress's tenure, and the Congress passed funding for the war in Iraq without conditions

So I'm not sure how that is going to play to the liberal base of the Democrats when they go back from recess.

BAIER: The other thing they did was pass a modernization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But it has, Charles, a six month sunset on it, something that the White House really didn't want to see.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: That means it will become an issue early next year, and the Republicans will win again. That is a slam dunk issue for the president. It means if a bad guy in Pakistan is speaking to a bad guy in London, and if the speech or the email happens to go through a router in the U.S., or computer in the U.S., under the old law you'd have to get a warrant, which is absurd.

It was never intended--that kind of thing didn't exist in 1978 when the original law was passed. And it has been fixed, and it will be fixed again.

But on the stuff that the Democrats have been trumpeting, energy and ethics--on the ethics law, if you look at the substance, the main issue is not whether a lobbyist can purchase lunch for a congressman--it's a little harder to do, it's not going to have any effect--the question was on earmarks, which is real corruption, a drain on the budget--nothing of substance happened on earmarks.

And on energy, that is one of the worst bills in the history of this republic. It has got taxes which actually decrease production instead of consumption and regulations, and of course an obsession with ethanol. It's a model of compression, one built with so many bad ideas.

BAIER: So, Mort, we're heading into this appropriations battle as these bills come forward, and it looks like a veto threat for almost all of them.

KONDRACKE: They are not even going to get Appropriations Bills, not a single Appropriations Bill for the fiscal year that starts on October 1 has been passed by both houses. They've all been passed by the House, not a single one by the Senate. And they are going to have to bundle them all together in an omnibus funding bill which the president is going to veto.

I think that he's going to veto it largely for political reasons. The amount of money, the excess funding, as Charles pointed out one day, is piddling by comparison to the size of the federal budget.

I mean, this is all about him trying to re-establish his role as a fiscal conservative at the expense of education programs, and some pork. There's no question that there's pork in a lot of these bills, but the idea that he has suddenly discovered that there's excess spending by the federal government after years, when he let it pass through, when a Republican Congress did it, is ridiculous.

BAIER: So, Bill, crystal ball, and quickly. Do we come to the end of this fiscal year and not have the funding, as we have seen this standoff before?

SAMMON: We could see a government shutdown like we had when Newt Gingrich did it, I forget what year that was. But that got blamed on the Congress. So if that template holds true, the betting is that Bush would come out looking better than the Congress if there was a government shutdown.

So it also would rally the conservative base. So it's a tough one to call.

KONDRACKE: And no call.

KRAUTHAMMER: No shut down.

BAIER: We will leave it there.

Next up with our panel--so the Afghanistan President say Taliban fighters are a defeated force. Are they really? And what about the hunt for bin-Laden? Stick around, we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I'm confident that with actionable intelligence we will be able to bring top Al Qaeda to justice.

We're in constant communications with the Pakistan government. And it's in their interest that foreign fighters be brought to justice. After all, these are the same ones who are plotting to kill President Musharraf, we share a concern. And I am confident with real, actionable intelligence we will get the job done.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER: That was President Bush today at Camp David answering a question whether he would send U.S. troops into Pakistan to go after al- Qaeda leaders. This, of course, comes after last weeks speech by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, in which he said, if we have actionable intelligence about high value terrorists targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.

We are back with our panel. Bill, how is this playing? And how does the sound bite from the president play versus what Barack Obama's said last week?

SAMMON: I think that the president putting some distance between himself and Barack Obama, saying we will go after terrorists in Pakistan, but we will work with Musharraf to do that.

Barack Obama was suggesting that unilaterally the U.S. would somehow go in there and attack terrorists in Pakistan, which is not a great idea consider that that Pakistan is our ally, and that could destabilize the country and result in the ouster of Musharraf, which would make things worse.

So Bush was very gingerly putting some distance between himself and Obama, because the Pakistani government and our State Department were not pleased with Obama's comments. There were anti-American protests in Islamabad, there was a burning of the American flag, and so I think there was a little bit of repairing and smoothing the ruffled feathers by Bush here.

BAIER: But he didn't stop short of saying that he wouldn't send U.S. troops in.

KONDRACKE: The problem is we don't have actionable intelligence. We don't know where Usama bin-Laden is. We think he's in Waziristan. It's a very difficult terrain there, and the natives are not friendly. And they haven't been friendly to the Pakistani army, which is why they were pulled out of there.

I'm sure Musharraf doesn't know exactly where bin-Laden is, and he can't control the territory.

So that is the problem. We haven't been able to get him. And what you saw today in that press conference--he was with Hamid Karzai--is Karzai is all of a sudden declaring the Taliban is defeated. It's demoralized. It's cowardly, and all that.

Now, only a day ago Karzai was saying that his security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. And the two things are connected, Afghanistan and Pakistan, by the enmity that there has been between the Pakistani government of Musharraf and the Afghan government of Karzai. They have not been cooperating.

They are supposed to meet on August 9, and, maybe, now that Musharraf is back in the hunt for Usama bin-Laden, maybe that they will get together and do something positive instead of fighting all the type.

BAIER: And, Charles, we see all of the recent increase in attacks in Afghanistan, and yet you have President Karzai saying today that the Taliban is a defeated force. Where is the truth in that?

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, it's half way between statement A and statement B, and that is the Taliban are not going to retake Afghanistan. That day is over. But they are a serious nuisance in the south.

The rest of Afghanistan is relatively stable and peaceful. In the Pashtun areas, which have never accepted national government, the Taliban have activity, but they are not in control, and they are not in the major cities.

It is a chronic issue. Rory Stuart, who is a British diplomat who served in Iraq, and actually walked across Afghanistan, he wrote a book about it, is in Kabul, and he has written about this, and said, essentially, the Pashtun issue is going to be a simmering one. But it is not a threat to the central government.

What we have in Afghanistan is a situation in which never has a central government in Kabul controlled all of the country, under the British or Soviets, or even under the kings. What we have to do is contain the problem, and it's being contained.

We had a shift of control from America to NATO forces two years ago. That's when you had a resurgence of Taliban activity. But the Anglo Saxons in NATO, the British and Canadians and Americans, have done well in holding them back, and we're going to have a chronic issue.

SAMMON: And you can even step back to the even bigger picture and think that less than six years ago the Taliban controlled that place. We liberated it. I went there 19 months ago and watched Karzai swear in the first democratically elected Parliament in 5,000 years.

So, in a big picture, they have actually come quite a way.

BAIER: We will leave it there. That is it for the panel, but stay tuned.

About Us | Contact | Advertise | Privacy Policy         © RealClearPolitics 2006