MSNBC "Interview With Senator Charles Grassley" - Transcript

Interview

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MS. O'DONNELL: President Obama says he will be reviewing names to fill the impending Supreme Court vacancy this weekend. So does that mean an announcement could happen before Memorial Day?

Well, let's get right to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee.

Senator, I know that your staff has been in touch with the White House. When do you think we're going to get a name from the president? He says he's going to be working on it this weekend.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Rather than speculate when we're going to get a name, I think it's very important that the Senate get this done before August the 5th and August the 5th is when we take a month for spring break, because that person should be chosen so that they've got plenty of time to be ready for court when it opens up the first week of October. Because you see the Supreme Court takes off July, August and September.

MS. O'DONNELL: So you think it is important for the president, if not before Memorial Day, to have it that week between Memorial Day and June 5th, when he heads out to go to Egypt?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, yes, the president needs to do that and then, don't forget, we on the Judiciary Committee need several weeks to go over the record of this person and then there's probably going to be a good week of hearings on a Supreme Court nominee.

So I'm shooting to have a vote on the Senate floor before August the 5th, if you understand because then they'll be ready for the first term of the Court on the first Monday of October.

MS. O'DONNELL: Oh, that's interesting. So in other words, we're going to -- if he announces then, we're going to have these high profile hearings all through the month of July so that you can vote in August --

SEN. GRASSLEY: Yeah.

MS. O'DONNELL: Before the summer, which is a pretty accelerated schedule. Let me ask you about the tone of those hearings. What's been the discussion to make sure that, as you know, there are interest groups on both sides of this that may weigh in and turn this whole thing into a huge circus?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, you know, its been that way since the controversial hearings during the 1980s over Judge Bork and that kind of set a very bad pattern, both for Republican appointees, as well as Democrat appointees since then. It's not the most ideal situation, but you know, the Senate is an institution based on precedent, so once something gets started, its apt to continue.

So, you know, it's a far cry when somebody in the 1960s was nominated one hour and within three hours, he was through the United States Senate. Now, maybe that's too quick, but we need to make sure that this person is thoroughly vetted, both from the standpoint of their knowledge of the law, their judicial temperament, meaning that they're going to leave their own personal feelings out of it and that they're going to be in every way unbiased, in other words, looking at the law, what does the law say, the interpretation of the law, the relationships and the facts to that law and be very impartial just like the lady of justice that's over the Supreme Court entrance that's blindfolded, holding the scales of justice.

MS. O'DONNELL: Let me turn the topic now to a big controversy that's brewing up there on Capitol Hill about the very issue of torture or these harsh interrogation or enhanced interrogation techniques that were used.

I don't know if you had the opportunity to see Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She had a press conference earlier today, of course, because questions have been raised about how much she knew and when about when waterboarding was being used. She essentially said today that the Bush administration and the CIA misled her, I mean, she was asked if the CIA lied to her and she said, yes, misleading the Congress of the United States, I am, essentially, whether the CIA lied to her.

In the briefings that you've been in, would you agree with that that the CIA has misled you, has lied to you?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, you understand most of the briefings I've had since I'm not on the Intelligence Committee and those briefings are entirely different for that select group of Senators than those of us generally that have CIA briefings. It would be a much higher level of security and I've never been involved in that high level security, so I can't comment on that, but I can say that, you know, since this issue is brought up, there's got to be a record that's going to answer all these questions.

MS. O'DONNELL: Well, let me just ask you just sort of generally speaking as someone who has been here in Washington for awhile as a Senator, that what happens is that the Speaker of the House is essentially accusing the CIA of lying.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, then it seems to me that we have to have confidence in our agencies and we should get to the bottom of it because we can't have the public being cynical about our intelligence community because our whole national defense is based upon the intelligence gathering. We've got to have credibility there and we ought to be able to show this and if an agency is lying, you know, in our democracy, you can't have that.

MS. O'DONNELL: Let me ask you about former Vice President Dick Cheney, of course, he's a member of your party, the Republican Party. He's been out there defending some of the techniques that were used, in fact, he's tried to push the CIA to release more documents that, in his words say, show that these techniques worked to prevent terrorist attacks. We've just learned that the CIA has turned down Cheney on that request.

Do you think that the former vice president should continue to speak out? Or would you like to see him go away as former President Bill Clinton said?

SEN. GRASSLEY: No. I believe that the vice president should be speaking on anything he wants to speak out, and there's plenty of precedent for that and all you've got to do is look at what Vice President Gore has been doing over the last nine years, speaking out on anything he wants to, being critical of everything. You know, when you're vice president, you don't become a second-class citizen; you've got just as much right as Senator Grassley or Joe Blow or Mary Smith, grassroots Iowa has a right to speak up and we've got to respect that right, in fact, in a democracy like ours, we ought to encourage as much comment and opinion as we can. The more we get from people that are in the know, the better off we're going to be.

MS. O'DONNELL: I know, but I just mean for the politics of your party, the Republican Party, which is somewhat in disarray, I think you would agree right now, you're having some trouble with national leadership, that the face of the Republican Party on the national level is the former vice president whose approval rating is 13 percent.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Listen, whatever his approval rating is, his speaking out is not a problem for the Republican Party. The problem we have is that we've lost the respect of our own Republican Party members because during the years of 2005 through '06, we were fiscally irresponsible and we actually lost them in 2006, not in the 2008 election and still haven't gotten them back and we're going to have to show that we stand by our principles of fiscal conservatism if we're going to get back to that point and Vice President Cheney isn't making that worse or better by speaking out.

MS. O'DONNELL: And on that matter of fiscal discipline, I know that Republicans have said that this effort to reform health care is essentially going to cost $1 trillion over ten years. I still can't find anybody who'll explain to me how this reform is going to be paid for. I keep hearing now and the latest thing I've heard about is, not only a tax on health care benefits, but now there's going to be a tax on sugary soda?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, that suggestion was out there, but it didn't come from anybody very responsible within the Congress. It comes from an outside group and let me tell you this, that if this is going to cost $1.2 trillion, it's not going to fly. It's going to cost some more money as you cover 47 million people that haven't been insured and that's got to be one of our goals, but there's also going to be reforms brought to health care that's going to save money. But you're going to have to have some upfront money, but it's counterintuitive for Chuck Grassley or anybody else to say, you know, we're spending 16 percent of our Gross National Product on health care, more than any other country and it isn't efficient and we aren't getting our quality that we ought to have. It's counterintuitive then to say you've got to spend more.

So I've accepted a rule that if we spend more, there's got to be a five year payback.

MS. O'DONNELL: All right. Senator Chuck Grassley, a senior member of the Finance Committee, of course, and also on Judiciary.

Thanks. We tackled a lot of issues today. I appreciate it, Senator.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Thank you.

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