Fox News Channel Interview - Transcript

Interview

Fox News Channel Interview - Transcript

FOX NEWS CHANNEL INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR JOHN CORNYN (R-TX)
SUBJECT: ECONOMIC STIMULUS PACKAGE INTERVIEWER: JON SCOTT

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MR. SCOTT: Let's talk about the other side and talk about it with the other side now. Our next guest is a senator who says that with a deficit at more than a trillion dollars, this is not the time to, quote, "throw another trillion dollars up in the air and hope for the best." We're talking about Texas Senator John Cornyn, a Republican and a member of the Senate Finance Committee.

It would seem, Senator Cornyn, is that as if you might have a lot of common ground there with Senator Conrad?

SEN. CORNYN: Well, I think I do agree with much of what Senator Conrad said, first of all, we know that housing was what got us into this mess initially and this bill does nothing to help people with foreclosures or worrying about whether they can sustain themselves beyond a resetting of their adjustable rate mortgage, and so I think we need to fix housing first.

And secondly, I do think that rather than having the government just shower the country with money and pick winners and losers through direct government spending, we need a real tax relief that for small businesses that are the primary job creators in this country to put people back to work. And third, I think we have to be very careful that we don't spend money that we don't have for things that won't work when it comes to getting our economy back on track.

So as the bill exists now, I can't support it and I'm pleased to hear that people like Senator Conrad whose opinions I respect are looking at this very seriously, hopefully, we can come up with something that will work and that we'll not run up trillion dollar deficits on top of the $1.2 trillion deficit we have right now.

MR. SCOTT: Yeah. The Wall Street Journal took a look at that bill that came out of the House and pronounced it a grab bag of every Democratic program that has been pushed for over the last 40 years, things like the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and that sort of thing.

SEN. CORNYN: Well, that's right, Jon, I mean, I give a lot of credit to President Obama for making some very magnanimous gestures for bipartisan cooperation and dealing with this economic challenge we have, but I tell you, I don't think the leadership over here in the Congress, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid have gotten the memo. Virtually every single suggestion that our side of the aisle has made to improve this package, to make it something we could support, and more importantly, something that would actually work have been rejected strictly along party lines.

So I hope Speaker Pelosi and Leader Harry Reid will listen to the president's request that we work on this together to come up with something that will work and won't waste money.

MR. SCOTT: We were just talking with Senator Conrad. He'd like to see this money invested in programs that are going to be spent quickly. We had an earlier report from our William La Jeunesse in California who says that Governor Schwarzenegger would like to ram through a program to build some highways, but there is the prospect of that being held up by environmental concerns. It seems like everywhere you turn, there are logjams when you try to spend big amounts of federal money.

SEN. CORNYN: Well, I don't know if any of us can really truly conceive of what a trillion dollars is, I mean, I can't think of a really good analogy, but maybe it's like putting ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound sack. I'm not sure we can spend that much money without wasting a lot of it that quickly, and that's the premise upon which this stimulus package is built. Primarily, the federal government just spending our way out of the recession and I just think that we have no confidence, I have no confidence that will actually work and I hate to see all that money wasted in the meantime and the deficit, which essentially will be kicked down to our children and grandchildren just to go up to stratospheric heights.

MR. SCOTT: Texas Senator John Cornyn, a Republican. Thank you for being with us.

SEN. CORNYN: Thanks, Jon.

END.

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