White House Driveway Stakeout With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Following A Meeting Of Congressional Leaders With
Statement
White House Driveway Stakeout With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Following A Meeting Of Congressional Leaders With The President And Vice President
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SPEAKER PELOSI: Thank you very much, Mr. Leader. A pleasant breakfast it was, indeed, in many respects. It was a new experience for the president, in another, because as we come down toward the end of this session and need to negotiate the appropriations bills, the president is dealing with a Democratic majority, and that's, again, a new experience for him.
So I think we -- I think we had a nice exchange of understanding as to how we would -- how we hope to proceed. Leader Reid extended the hand of cooperation and friendship to the president to work together in a way as to negotiate the very small difference between Democrats and Republicans on these appropriations bills, less than 1 percent; in fact, .7 percent difference of a $2 trillion budget. But that difference is about border security, the education of our children and the health care and benefits for our veterans. That's largely where the difference is. So we hope that, again, we can resolve those differences and understand that there's a new majority in town.
In terms of FISA, as many of you know, I'm the longest-serving person on the Intelligence Committee, and as a member and ex-officio, and so I've followed this issue closely for a long time. And it's a classic example of where checks and balances, where our Constitution and our oath of office to uphold, support and defend that Constitution comes into play. It's about a branch of government having a check from another branch of government, in this case a judge having a warrant over the power of the president to collect information.
We want any president -- our president, President Bush, and any president and our policymakers to have the best possible intelligence. The threats to our country are real and must be dealt with. The FISA law accommodates that. And to the extent that more flexibility is needed, as Director McConnell has indicated, we are prepared to make those accommodations under the law. And so we hope to do that this week. We're working with the administration. We hope that we can do that without too much conflict between now and the end of the week.
Q Madame Speaker, did you and the leader commit to enact FISA before you go on recess?
SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, what we committed to is to work closely with the administration to come to agreement on the FISA law. I have said that in the House we will pass FISA legislation this week.
SEN. REID: And you noticed I was very cautious; in the Senate I don't promise any legislation, because the rules are so different. But we would like to do that, we hope we can do that, and I'll try to do that. There's no guarantees.
Q Senator, what did you tell the president exactly about negotiating out the differences on appropriations bills?
SEN. REID: Well, it's exactly as the speaker said. We have a very small difference. We have, I mean, really a small difference. And the question is whether we want to have a political issue or solve a problem.
The problem we have in this country is we see the American people looking at us -- why can't you get along? And we're saying to the president, and we've said it on a number of occasions, let's get along. The difference is so small. Why are we doing all these veto threats?
Work with us on individual bills, an example being, why threaten to veto all these appropriation bills, Foreign Operations for example? We're $700 million less than what the president wants. There are ways we can work this out.
In addition to that, we've had, since he gave us his number, a number of things that have come up -- border security. We've had also come up the Shalala-Dole report, which is going to cost about a billion dollars. There has to be room in this someplace to do this. We want to work together with the president. We want our fiscal house to be in order, and the way that that can be done is working together.
Q And he agreed to that?
SPEAKER PELOSI: He agreed that we had a conversation about it this morning.
Let me just add this one thing because in the House, we've passed nearly all of our appropriations bills. We intend to complete two, the Agriculture appropriations and the Department of Defense appropriations bill, this week before we leave. In all these bills, we have had strong bipartisan support.
So it -- the difference that the president is talking about is not necessarily a difference of priorities in the Congress. It's a difference between the president and the Congress. And we're saying, work with the Congress, which is passing these bills with bipartisan support, in some cases, overwhelming bipartisan support, so that we can resolve that 0.7 percent difference, which makes a difference in the lives of the American people, the education of our children, the health care benefits for our veterans and the security of our border.
Q Did you get any genuine sense that there's room for compromise here, that the president might go off his top number and that Democrats might change? Or are we going to have to go through the veto process?
SPEAKER PELOSI: I believe that the president was very firm in where he was on the subject. But I'm not one to take no for an answer in terms of the priorities that we just discussed. So I think that when the president sees the manifestation of what his cuts might be or a change of priorities, at the end of the day, we may -- if we honor the president's number, we may not be able to accommodate his priorities. And then he may have a different thought about it. But this is all about negotiation. And again we intend to continue to pass this legislation, doing our own negotiations in the Congress, with bipartisan support.
Q Did the veto threats come up?
Q Did you all discuss the president's many veto threats?
SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, it was a point of reference. It was a point of reference.
Q What about raising the debt limit, Madame Speaker? Did that come up?
SPEAKER PELOSI: We didn't talk about that this morning. We talked --
Q (Off mike) -- leadership going to do about it?
SEN. REID: Well -- I'm sorry.
SPEAKER PELOSI: What -- do you want to deal with that?
SEN. REID: We have to pay our bills. This debt we didn't run up, it was done by this administration, which has had the longest stream of red ink in the history of the country.
So the -- it's my understanding the debt limit will be exceeded sometime in October. We understand this obligation that this government has to pay its bills, and we'll take up responsibly that at the right time.
SPEAKER PELOSI: And let me say, as that is happening, Democrats are committed to pay-as-you-go, no new deficit spending. And we are committed to that, to the point that was one of the first rules we -- rules of the House that we passed as a rule of the House. We're now preparing to move forward to make that a statute, so that it becomes the law of the land. We cannot heap mountains onto future generations.
And just to remind, coming out of the Clinton administration, we were on a trajectory of $5.6 trillion in surplus. Within a couple of years in the Bush administration, that was reversed -- a swing of about $10 trillion -- that we are now going into deficit of several trillion dollars. The last four Clinton budgets were in surplus, under the pay-as-you-go, no deficit spending formula.
So it is our goal to again reduce the national debt, eliminate the deficits and eliminate the need for us to have to increase debt ceilings in the future.
Q What about the nomination of Jim Nussle as OMB director? Where does that --
SEN. REID: Had to bring it up, didn't you? (Laughter.)
SPEAKER PELOSI: (Chuckles.) That's a Senate matter. I'll defer --
SEN. REID: It appears that will be reported out of the Lieberman committee tomorrow. Conrad will do it at some later time, at least take it up.
We were very clear with the president: there's no guarantee he will get confirmed.
Q But will -- is Conrad going to take it up before you leave from --
SEN. REID: I doubt it.
Q You doubt it.
SEN. REID: I doubt it.
Q Is discussion of his confirmation at all tied to the spending discussions --
SEN. REID: It was part of the -- no, it wasn't --
Q Is there any kind of bargaining that could go on with that?
SEN. REID: No. Yeah -- no, I don't think so. I think this is something we're going to have to work out internally. We talked about it a little bit. To say the least, the president is very sincere about thinking Nussle will do a good job, and we hope that's the case. But that is not done yet.
Q What are the concerns about him?
SEN. REID: What are the senators' concerns?
Q Yeah.
SEN. REID: Well, he's been very partisan in most everything he's done, including -- beginning with the sack over the head. You know, it's a little trouble that we have --
STAFF: Thank you. They've got to go.
SPEAKER PELOSI: Thank you.
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