MSNBC "Interview With Senator Charles Grassley" - Transcript

Interview

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MS. O'DONNELL: And the president will address 535 members of Congress tonight, 219 of them are Republicans. Of those, only three voted for the stimulus package.

Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee who voted against the stimulus and who will be key in any new health care legislation.

Senator, good to see you. Thank you so much for joining us.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Oh, I'm glad to be with you. Thank you very much.

MS. O'DONNELL: What would you like to hear from the president tonight?

SEN. GRASSLEY: I would like to hear him talk about long-term entitlement reform and I would like to have emphasis upon bipartisanship and I would like to have him instruct his party on the Hill not to stonewall as they did when we started talking about entitlement reform in 2005 when President Bush campaigned on Social Security reform and started in 2005 down that road until we were stonewalled.

It's going to take bipartisan cooperation and bipartisan cooperation isn't like Speaker Pelosi says, we won the election, we write the bills. Senator Baucus and I have been involved on the Finance Committee in bipartisanship for eight years. You started out at the foundation by sitting across the table from each other and building a bill and building it up and then having it be a Republican- Democrat bipartisan proposal from the start, not from the finish.

MS. O'DONNELL: Well, Senator, I want to get more specific on the health care legislation because the president is holding a health care summit next week, but I first want to ask you about what you just hit on, bipartisanship, because if anything is going to get done like the president is going to try and outline tonight, it will depend on exactly that bipartisanship, and yet we have new polls out today, several new polls that suggest the American people think that President Obama is trying and that it's the Republicans who aren't offering back. According to two polls, three-quarters believe Obama has been trying to work with Republicans, while just three in ten Americans think the GOP is doing the same thing.

Is it the Republicans who are the problem?

SEN. GRASSLEY: President Obama is trying to engage Republicans. Just before you interviewed me, I overheard what President Obama said about Republicans not being constructionist, offering alternatives and Democrats working with them and he said that before the stimulus package. Three weeks ago last night, he said Republicans have good ideas and it should be bipartisan, but on the Hill, his leadership is not responding to his entreaties for them to be bipartisan because we offered amendments and those amendments were not old time stuff, they were ideas that hadn't been presented before and they were rejected by the majority.

So the president needs to get his people on the Hill listening to him and doing what he says.

MS. O'DONNELL: Senator, let's talk about what's next, the president holding a health care summit. He has said -- this White House has indicated they're going to put off talking about entitlement spending, Social Security and Medicaid for some time because they want to do health care first and provide health insurance to the more than 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance. He calls it the single-most pressing long-term financial challenge we are facing.

Are you going to join with the Democrats and with the president and help get this done?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Since November 13th, Senator Kennedy, Senator Enzi for the Health Committee, Senator Baucus and me for the Finance Committee, have been meeting on a regular basis to do just that. At this point, its been very bipartisan and I think you get back to what I previously said. If the majority party on the Hill listens to our president, their leader of their party, then I think we'll have bipartisanship, yes. And I think the president is very right in saying we need to tackle health care reform before entitlement reform because you understand that health care reform is 100 percent of the package and Medicare and Medicaid is about 40 percent of that total 100 percent and if we can do something on health care reform of the 100 percent, it's going to make the job easier to get the entitlement of Medicare under control.

MS. O'DONNELL: Finally, Senator, I just have to ask you about because, of course, one of the huge concerns is about these reports about partially nationalizing the banks. You wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Geithner yesterday expressing your concern about the government buying upwards of 40 percent of Citibank. You call it de facto nationalization.

Why should we all be concerned?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, you should be concerned because whether or not you -- there at the grassroots where you are or are the people that are listening to you at the grassroots, whether you think people that work for the federal government are smart enough to run the banks of America. I'm a farmer. I would not want bureaucrats in Washington running John Deere, and if they did, I wouldn't buy a John Deere tractor.

MS. O'DONNELL: All right. Senator Chuck Grassley, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Senator, good to see you. Thank you for joining us.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Thank you. I'm glad to be there.

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