CNBC The News with Brian Williams - Transcript
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SHOW: THE NEWS WITH BRIAN WILLIAMS (19:00)
HEADLINE: THE NEWS WITH BRIAN WILLIAMS for September 9, 2003, CNBC
GUESTS: Charles Grassley, Gail Sheehy, Phil Bronstein
BYLINE: Brian Williams, Jim Miklaszewski, Norah O'Donnell, Martin Fletcher, Robert Hager, George Lewis, Carl Quintanilla, David Faber
WILLIAMS: Iowa Republicans Senator chuck Grassley is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a huge job, also a member of the Budget Committee. Senator Grassley has been kind enough to join us from Capitol Hill tonight.
And senator, is the debate right? Should the argument be over the size of this amount, $87 billion, overor over stopping the meter, and getting out of there?
SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY (R-IA), CHAIR, FINANCE COMMITTEE: Once you go to war, you only go to war to win. And once you win the war, obviously you're going to want to preserve the peace. And it worked in Germany, it worked in Japan, and there's democracy there, and that's our goal here.
And also to protect the rest of the world from the threats of terrorism that can emanate from Iraq.
WILLIAMS: Senator, if I remember correctly, one of the few things you enjoyed about the Clinton years as a fiscal hawk was bringing that deficit down. It's going back up like a rocket, and what do we do about that?
GRASSLEY: Well, obviously, one of the things we have to do is divert money from domestic expenditure, where we have been increasing expenditures 9 percent each of the last three years, and that's not sustainable to a deficit reduction and to the war in Iraq and homeland security.
And also, remember in the process that the federal government is the only level of government that can take care of our national security. With education, a lot of other things, you know, federal, state, and local works together to accomplish those. But only the federal government on defense.
WILLIAMS: Senator, since your fellow Republicans have been fairly candid on this topic, allow me to ask you this. Do you think the American people view this war in Iraq as an elective, something the president chose to fight and pay for, or as a direct and necessary outgrowth of 9/11?
GRASSLEY: I can only speak for my town meetings in Iowa that I have had this year. And the most recent ones were 12, the last week of August. And I never heard a single Iowan say that this was an elective thing on the part of the president, that they saw it as part of the war on terror, and they saw the same threat that we have seen since September 11.
WILLIAMS: What do we do with so many domestic challenges? For one, fixing the power grid that plunged 50 million Americans into the dark, that would cost about three-quarters of the initial cost of this war? How do you now prioritize, given the huge cost of this?
GRASSLEY: Well, first of all, when it comes to something like the electric grid, and that's a legitimate point to bring up, considering the blackout, but remember, that's been private sector funding. We have not put much, if any, federal dollars into that throughout the history of electricity in the United States.
So we would still see that as a private sector deal. But we need to deal with those sort of incentives for investment in the energy act that's coming up, and we will do that.
When it comes to other federal programs, you have to remember that the national security interests of the United States, and also those economic interests that come from the Middle East, because we're so dependent upon oil from there, have to be foremost on the federal government's mind, as opposed to other issues, because no other level of government's going to defend America. They don't have the constitutional responsibility to do it, state or local governments.
WILLIAMS: Senator Charles Grassley tonight, you're nice to join us. Good to have you on the broadcast. Thank you very much.
GRASSLEY: Thank you.