FOX News "FOX News Sunday" - Transcript

Interview

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WALLACE: The Obama administration must now deal with two key Republican congressmen. Paul Ryan is set to take over the House Budget Committee, handling spending and entitlements, and he joins us from his home state of Wisconsin.

And Congressman Darrell Issa is expected to head the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which means he'll be issuing subpoenas to administration officials.

Congressmen, welcome back to "Fox News Sunday."

REP. DARRELL ISSA, R-CALIF.: Well, thanks for having me back and thanks for...

REP. PAUL RYAN, R-WIS.: Thanks for having us.

ISSA: ... covering election night in a fair and balanced way.

WALLACE: Well, always.

Let's start, gentlemen, with a brief overview.

And, Congressman Issa, I'll start with you. What do you see as your role on the Oversight Committee dealing with the Obama administration?

ISSA: The most important thing my committee can do is seek the truth. You know, we're the investigation committee. We're the accountability committee. But Paul can't be effective if the underlying facts and assumptions are not mutually agreed.

And it's one of the problems we had during the previous two years -- was that we couldn't agree on what the facts were, therefore the conclusions that were different -- each side blamed the other. That's got to end.

WALLACE: Okay. I'm going to get into some specifics with you in a minute. Let's turn to Congressman Ryan.

What are your plans for the Budget Committee dealing with the Obama agenda?

RYAN: Take the budget in a different direction than it's been going. This is an electoral repudiation. Bring fiscal accountability. Spending cuts. Spending reforms. Get the budget on the right glide path and prevent a huge tax increase from happening in the future so we can get job creation.

That's basically what I'm going to be doing, is get this budget going in the right direction. It's been going in the wrong direction for quite some time.

WALLACE: All right. Let's get into -- as I said I was going to with Eric Cantor, let's get into some specifics, because as I discussed with him, the pledge that Republicans have made is to cut the non-defense discretionary spending by $100 billion in the first year.

Let's put up at least what Democrats say that would mean. They say it would mean major cuts in Head Start and Pell grants for college students, a $6 billion cut in the National Institutes of Health, and the FBI will have to cut 2,700 agents.

Congressman Ryan, do you think the American people really want that?

RYAN: This is the Washington Monument strategy, which is put out the most glaring kinds of cuts and show that this is going to be how devastating it is.

This category of spending -- the base spending went up 24 percent in the last two years. When we add stimulus, it went up 84 percent. We have had spending on a gusher. And if borrowing and spending and taxing and spending actually created jobs and produced prosperity, we wouldn't have all this joblessness. We wouldn't have this lame economy we have right now.

So I think these spending cuts are actually quite modest considering the pickle we are in. And so what you'll have is we are going to try and get spending turned in the different direction, cut spending, get it controlled.

And you're going to have these kinds of tactics being played, which will show you that they're really not serious about getting our spending under control. And instead, they're going to put the spending line on a glide path that's unsustainable in order to have big tax increases.

We are at a fork in the road.

WALLACE: Well, all right. but give me -- Congressman Ryan, we'll get to that in a second. Give me -- you're going to -- you're the head of the Budget Committee and you know this budget backwards and forwards. Give me a couple of specific examples of big-ticket items that you can cut to try to get closer to that $100 billion without gutting programs that people want.

RYAN: Chris, when you add stimulus -- the Environmental Protection Agency got a 124 percent increase in its budget in this last session of Congress. There have been so many massive spending increases, 24 percent in the base budget, 84 percent when you add stimulus.

We need to take all these spending increases back so that we can get this deficit in the right direction and take the pressure off tax increases.

WALLACE: All right. Why -- I'm going to get back to Darrell Issa in a minute, but I want to ask you two more questions, if I can, about the budget.

While House Republicans -- and you are talking about cutting $100 billion. This week the Federal Reserve announced that it's going to create another $600 billion and pump that into the banking system. What's that going to do to the economy?

RYAN: It's a big mistake, in my opinion. Look, we have Congress doing tax and spend, borrow and spend. Now we have the Federal Reserve doing print and spend. If this quantitative easing, which is basically monetizing your debt -- I think the upsides are very low.

We already have very loose monetary policy, very, very low interest rates. This is going to give us an inflation problem in the future. It's going to give us an interest rate problem in the future. It is destabilizing investment horizons.

The Federal Reserve should be focused on sound and honest money, not on trying to micromanage the economy in a comedy (ph) that's really bad fiscal policy.

What the Fed is basically doing is they're trying to bail out the fact that our fiscal policy is so bad. The Fed should focus on keeping our money sound and honest, not on doing this, which I think is going to give us a big inflation problem down the road.

WALLACE: All right. One last area. Given the fact that for all the talk about repealing health care reform, you're not going to be able to do it as long as Barack Obama is in the White House, Republicans are talking a lot about defunding health care reform.

But the biggest federal subsidies don't kick in until 2014. And I read a report this week that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says that even if her budget is cut, she's still going to have enough money to continue implementing health care reform.

So the question is, how much can you really do to defund health care reform, especially over the next two years?

RYAN: Well, three things. Number one, we can do a lot of oversight, through Budget, Ways and Means, Commerce, and Darrell's committee as well, and bring -- shed light to all the problems they're going to be bringing in with this.

Second thing is we can defund specific actual roll-outs of this law, but then again, the president has to sign those bills, so that is a challenge.

Third thing is these attorneys generals and their court challenge. That is also an avenue we're going to pursue. Bad things happen between now and 2013 -- Medicare cuts that put Medicare providers out of business, that dump people off of Medicare Advantage, premium increases, and people losing their employer-sponsored health insurance. All these things happen before the subsidies kick in in 2014.

But to answer your original question, I think you're right. You can't fully repeal and replace this law until you have a new president and a better Senate. And that's probably in 2013, but that's before the law fully kicks in in 2014.

In the meantime, we really -- this bill is such a fiscal and economic train wreck for our country and for the health care system itself. We're going to do everything we can to try and repeal and replace this thing. And ultimately, I think 2013 is when it will be done the right way.

WALLACE: OK.

Congressman Issa, as Congressman Ryan mentioned, there's been a lot of talk about congressional oversight of health care reform. How much can you slow down the actual plan through committee hearings?

ISSA: Well, first of all -- and I want to answer that, but first of all, it's arrogance by a cabinet officer to say they have enough money to do something. They don't have any money after this continued resolution runs out. Congress gives that money, and Congress can start giving money in the proper way -- specific authorization and appropriation for specific projects.

So you know, can we hold hearings on, for example, the bending up of the health care curve? You know, even AARP is finding out they have a double-digit increase in the cost of their health care for their employees. What a surprise. That's one of the things we can do.

The other thing we can do -- and you asked Paul, and I think you asked Eric, something about how do we cut the $100 billion. We keep talking about earmarks. Congressional earmarks has become a buzz word.

Administration earmarks -- they call them competitive grants. That's where we give a slush fund, just like the stimulus, to the president. And then they come up with who they like and where they like them and they issue the money.

Congress has to start saying no. You figure out who wins the competitive grant. You come back to us and say, "I'd like to award this amount of money for this," instead of a budget that has blank checks. If you do that, there will be less money awarded, and it will be awarded for more meritorious projects.

WALLACE: OK. Over the last two years you talked a number of times about how you would like to investigate certain things but as the ranking minority member you couldn't.

Now you're going to be the chairman. Now you're going to wield the gavel. So let's, in sort of a lightning round, go through a series of issues and you tell me whether you're going to pursue them as chairman of the Oversight Committee.

ISSA: Fair enough.

WALLACE: Will you investigate the Justice Department's handling of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case?

ISSA: I believe that will be handled by Judiciary and Lamar Smith. Certainly, I will help get the facts for them, but it really is a judiciary function and he's going to lead that, I believe.

WALLACE: Is that something that you think should be investigated?

ISSA: I think it should be investigated. All voter intimidation, all distortion of democracy, is a first priority in a democracy. That's why Acorn continues to be one of those where -- they're gone, but we have to make sure that the voter registration process is sound everywhere in the country by whoever is participating in doing it.

WALLACE: Will you investigate the White House effort to get Joe Sestak out of the Democratic Senate primary in Pennsylvania?

ISSA: Chris, I'm going to do what President Eisenhower suggested. I'm going to take a complicated problem and expand it in order to solve it. People in the Bush administration, W. Bush, said they did the same thing. That means that we have a endemic problem, an epidemic, if you will, of administrations thinking it's OK to save their party money by clearing a primary with a government job.

I think we have to bring that to an end, and I'm going to look for ways to expose it and then bring it to an end for this president and every president to come afterwards.

WALLACE: What's the first thing -- what's the big investigation you're looking to hold?

ISSA: Well, I'm going to go after a lot of things, and I'm going to do a lot of investigating. But I think finishing off the Angelo Mozilo, friends of Angelo program, where...

WALLACE: This was Countrywide.

ISSA: Countrywide -- where it created the financial meltdown, in no small part, because Freddie and Fannie took huge amounts of bad loans and are continuing to have losses.

I think we have to bring that to a successful conclusion and make sure it doesn't happen again, because again, that probably (ph) distorted the process of law-making and regulation-making with money that shouldn't have been -- discounts, if you will, that shouldn't have gone not just to politicians but to all kinds of bureaucrats that made bad decisions.

WALLACE: How do you reconcile -- because some of these things are -- you're going to be putting White House officials on the hot seat and making them take the oath, and tell the truth and nothing but the truth, how do you reconcile that with what you said -- and I've put it up on the screen here -- in "USA Today" last month? "Oversight is not and should not be used as a political weapon against the occupant of the Oval Office."

ISSA: And that's very true. If you can go down-ticket to the bureaucrat and take care of the problem, you shouldn't bring in the politician or the political appointee. And I think that's going to be a change. We're going to look for the person most knowledgeable of a problem and have them before our committee.

And in many cases we're going to do it outside the public glare, through depositions, with Republicans and Democrats both sitting there, because I think we need to do investigations in a less partisan way.

WALLACE: OK.

Congressman Ryan, we've got a couple of minutes left. I want to ask you about another one of the hats you wear. You're a member of the President's Deficit Commission, which has a December 1st deadline -- seemed a long time in the -- in the future, but now it's really coming up -- for issuing some recommendations to Congress.

First of all, do you believe that you will be able to get the supermajority of 14 of the 18 members to propose anything? And what are the chances that there will be some kind of grand bargain when it comes to entitlements?

RYAN: I don't think you'll see a grand bargain when it comes to entitlements, because I don't think there's a majority to redo this health care law on the commission.

When it comes to entitlements, the big problem, about 85 percent of it, is health care. So my hope is that we can make a dent on spending going forward, on some spending reforms and discretionary caps, maybe, and some other categories.

We haven't met for a while. We meet next Tuesday. And then we start deliberating henceforth after that. So it's unclear where we're going to go. But I don't think you're going to see some big grand bargain.

My personal hope is a big dent on spending in some categories where we can get some common ground on. And we'll find out. Look, Erskine Bowles is a very talented Democrat who's really good at bringing people together.

But we're not interested in growing government and raising taxes. We're interested in getting spending going down. We don't want the revenue line to go up to meet the spending line. We want it to go the other way. And hopefully we can make a dent in that process.

WALLACE: And let me ask you, in less than 30 seconds, Bowles has talked about deficit reduction -- two-thirds spending cuts, one-third revenue increases. Could you accept that formula?

RYAN: I'll give you a shorter answer. We do not have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. Let's focus on the problem.

WALLACE: Congressman Ryan, Congressman Issa, we want to thank you both so much for coming in and talking with us. And, gentleman, we'll be following both of you on Capitol Hill.

ISSA: Great.

WALLACE: Up next, we bring in our Sunday regulars. We'll get their take on what President Obama will do after the Democratic shellacking, and we'll discuss Nancy Pelosi's surprising decision to run for House minority leader.

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