FOX News "Fox News Sunday" - Transcript

Interview

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REP. FRED UPTON, R-MICH.: Happy New Year.

REP. DARRELL ISSA, R-CALIF.: Happy New Year to you.

WALLACE: Let's start with the big picture. The two of you wrote an article together in the Washington Times in November under the headline "Reclaiming the Right to Oversight," in which you said this, "The new majority in Congress certainly has its work cut out to undo the big government havoc that was wrought during the Democratic one- party reign over the past two years.

Congressman Upton, let me start with you. Given the fact that Republicans still don't have control of the Senate, still don't have control of the White House, how much can you and the House do to undo and block the Obama agenda?

UPTON: Well, we can actually do a lot. I was glad to see the president talk yesterday in his radio address about jobs and the economy, reducing the size of government and reducing the deficit.

We're going to try to help them do that job. We are going to have a very aggressive oversight subcommittee in my committee, and I know that Darrell is going to do the same with his full committee.

We are going to be working together. We are going to be looking to identify programs that don't work, programs that ought to be cut, working with our leadership, Boehner and Cantor, to bring up spending reductions virtually every week, as we've done without success this last year to really get the job done.

WALLACE: Congressman Issa, White House officials have already said they're going to hire more lawyers to deal with all the oversight investigations, particularly coming from your committee. Are they going to need them?

ISSA: They're going to need more accountants. The fact is that in the 1980s, Congress did about 1,600 days of oversight. That's a lot more than my committee alone could ever do.

Last year, we did less than 400, far less. And that's with you being able to call an oversight, whether it is or it isn't. Looking for the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, Office of Management and Budget, the president's Office of Management and Budget views $125 billion of misspending by Medicare, and yet year after year it doesn't change.

That's 10 percent of the deficit that would go away if we simply stop paying to people who don't exist their claims. There is so much opportunity, but it's more of an accounting function than legal function. It's more about the inspector generals than it is about lawyers in the White House.

And the sooner the administration figures out that the enemy is the bureaucracy and the wasteful spending, not the other party, the better off we'll be.

WALLACE: All right, Congressman Upton, I want to ask you about two big issues that your committee is going to be looking at, Energy and Commerce. First, health care reform. For all the talk about repeal, as long as Barack Obama is president, can you really block the law? Can you really stop what is going to happen between now and 2012? Or are you basically going to be holding hearings to point out problems?

UPTON: Chris, watch what happens. As part of our pledge, we said that we would bring up a vote to repeal health care early. That will happen before the president's State of the Union address.

We have 242 Republicans. There will be a significant number of Democrats, I think, that will join us. You will remember when that vote passed in the House last March, it only passed by seven votes.

WALLACE: But you're not going to repeal it? The vote in the House -- it's not going to happen in the Senate.

UPTON: Just wait. If you switched four votes from last March, that bill would have gone down. So we'll take the Democrats that voted no. We'll take other Democrats who probably agree with Speaker Pelosi's statement.

Remember when she said we want to pass this thing because then we'll learn what's in it? Well, now the American public does know what is in it. Unpopularity numbers are as high as 60 percent across the country. I don't think we're going to be that far off from having the votes to actually override a veto.

Remember President Clinton? It took him three times before he signed welfare reform. If we pass this bill with a sizable vote, and I think that we will, it will put enormous pressure on the Senate to do perhaps the same thing. But then, after that, we're going to go after this bill piece by piece.

We'll look at the 1099 issue, Dave Camp's committee, Ways and Means, to look at the $600 1099 that has to be processed for every business-to-business transaction. We'll look at the individual mandate requirement. We will look at all of those as individual pieces.

We're going to take up early I think the Stupak language, no funds shall be spent on abortion, as a separate bill early on. And we will look at these individual pieces to see if we can't have the thing crumble.

WALLACE: I want to ask you about another big issue your committee is going to take up, and that's the EPA, which starting today is imposing new regulations on some industrial facilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

In the Wall Street Journal this week, you co-wrote an article in which you said this -- "This move represents an unconstitutional power grab." This is the EPA regulation. "This move represents an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs unless Congress steps in."

Specifically, what are you going to do about EPA regulation of greenhouse gases?

UPTON: We are not going to let this administration regulate what they've been unable to legislate, and that's -- came up, if you remember, through the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House and never got through the Senate.

The Clean Air Act, which was passed in the '90s, does require that the administration in any regulation has to look at the impact on jobs and the economy. We knew that through cap-and-trade, we would see at least in the Midwest energy prices increase by as much as about 20 percent almost overnight.

WALLACE: So you are saying you can stop the EPA regulation?

UPTON: A couple things that we can do. We're going to have early, early hearings on this. We're going to see exactly what their analysis is on its impact on jobs. There's also something called the Congressional Review Act, that within 60 days of rules being published, Congress can take this up and with an up-or-down vote, it is filibuster-proof in the Senate. It's been used before.

WALLACE: But it can be vetoed by the president.

UPTON: It can be vetoed by the president, but already we've seen a number of powerful Democrats indicate that they have real, real qualms about what the EPA is intending to do.

WALLACE: I want to follow up quickly on this with you and then I want to bring in Congressman Issa, on this question of EPA regulation. In the article that you co-wrote with the head of Americans for Prosperity, which is a group that is financed in part by oil companies, you say this -- "This presumes that carbon is a problem in need of regulation. We are not convinced."

But we checked, Congressman, on your congressional web site, and you say on the web site, "I strongly believe that everything must be on the table as we seek to reduce carbon emissions. Climate change is a serious problem that necessitates serious solutions."

So question, is carbon a problem or isn't it? And if it is, if you're going to kill the EPA regulation, what is your solution?

UPTON: We want to do this in a reasonable way. Before the end of the next decade, our country is going to need 30 to 40 more percent more electricity that we use today. So we need an all-of-the-above strategy. We need clean coal. We need natural gas. We need nuclear -- something that has not happened. We need a whole host of things.

WALLACE: Do we need to regulate carbon?

UPTON: I don't think that we have to regulate carbon to the degree we have a carbon tax or you have a cap-and-trade system. And the House spoke pretty loudly -- you know, you take that same cap-and- trade bill that passed the House last year. Today it would lose by 50 votes and it could never come up in the Senate. This is not -- this regulation process is not the way to proceed.

WALLACE: Congressman Issa, you have been very patient. I'll bring you in. You're chairman -- going to be chairman in a couple of days.

ISSA: I can be being patient for those two days.

WALLACE: Right, of the House Government Oversight Committee and you've already decided what are going to be your first hearings. I want to ask about one of them, regulatory impediments to job creation.

Given the fact that the White House has made it clear that it's going to do much more this year to govern through legislation and not through regulation, with the House now in Republican hands, does that mean you're going to be in a constant battle with the White House?

ISSA: I think we're going to be in a constant battle over jobs and the economy. My father-in-law was an Air Force pilot, and he used to say when there was a problem that stopped him from doing something, oh, another rock in my knapsack.

But as a pilot, he understood every bit of weight you put on is a fuel you don't have. It's a distance you don't go. You wouldn't want to be bomber pilot over the English Channel and find out you have too many rocks and not enough fuel. We have about $1.7 trillion worth of regulatory costs already in the government. If the president wants to throw another $300 or $400 billion, what he's doing is taking it right out of businesses, right out of employment, right out of competitiveness. We need to make sure we compete.

People always talk about China. We need to compete against Brazil and against Europe.

ISSA: Those countries are doing regulatory reform that is reducing the amount of rocks in the knapsack. We need to do the same thing.

WALLACE: But -- but other than holding hearings, what are you going to be able to do?

ISSA: Well, my committee is the committee primarily of efficiency and regulatory -- some oversight. Fred's and some of the other committees specifically get into the laws.

Yes, mostly what we're going to do is shed light on it. But, at the same time, as you shed light, you build the American people's demand that we realize that the president took two years to say I found out nothing was shovel-ready. Well, you know why nothing's shovel-ready? Because the bureaucracy slows down those road programs, those other things that the president said were so important.

We need to make it to where when we do a WPA-type project, a project about road building or buildings, with government expense, that they can actually happen in six months or a year, not 10.

WALLACE: Over the last two years, you have repeatedly criticized the Justice Department over not investigating the community group ACORN, for scaling back a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, and for failure to go after WikiLeaks.

Question -- what do you think of Attorney General Holder?

ISSA: Well, I think he's guilty of all of those things. He isn't doing enough. Certainly, he -- he didn't do anything about ACORN, and we're going to continue to make sure that we don't have that kind of waste in government.

He didn't do anything effectively about the New Black Panthers. Chairman Lamar Smith, as a civil rights issue, will take that on.

WALLACE: Head of the Judiciary Committee?

ISSA: The Judiciary Committee.

And when it comes to WikiLeaks, at the end of the last Congress we couldn't get a whistleblower bill passed because ultimately the next whistleblower bill has to deal with WikiLeaks and the loss of these classified documents in a mature, bipartisan way. And we're going to do that right off the bat because the kind of transparency we need is not to have somebody outing what is said by diplomats in private.

And we need to change that, and that's going to be a big part of our committee's oversight, is to get that right so the diplomats can do their job with confidence and people can talk to our government with confidence.

WALLACE: When you say that Attorney General Holder is guilty of all of those failures, should he step down?

ISSA: Well, I think he needs to realize that, for example, WikiLeaks, if the president says I can't deal with this guy as a terrorist, then he has to be able to deal with him as a criminal, otherwise the world is laughing at -- at this paper tiger we've become.

So he's hurting this administration. If you're hurting the administration, either stop hurting the administration, or leave.

WALLACE: We've got a couple of minutes left, and I want to ask you both the same question. The Tea Partiers -- and we're going to talk to two of them in a moment who were elected -- are not very happy with -- and I'm going to talk to both of you as members of the Republican establishment.

They say you made too many deals collectively in the lame duck session, you added a trillion dollars of debt, you voted new money, billions of dollars for the first responders, you reinstated the estate tax, there are no Tea Partiers in the House Republican leadership.

The question -- I'll ask you first, and then -- and then you -- did you get the message or did you fail to get the message the voters sent in November?

UPTON: I think the big message was we need to cut spending, and you're going to see that happen. A year from now --

WALLACE: Added $1 trillion to the debt.

UPTON: No one wanted increased taxes and that would have been the alternative had it not happened.

But we are going to be -- we are going to be cutting the size of government, we are going to be cutting the deficit and we're going to do it on the spending side, not by raising taxes. And a year from now I think you'll see that -- that the evidence of -- of what we do in the House, for sure.

WALLACE: Congressman Issa?

ISSA: Well, as somebody who a state -- will pay the estate tax, trust me, I think it's inherently immoral and wrong, and I -- and I share that with the Tea Partiers that taxing the dead just because the --

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WALLACE: But you guys reinstated it.

ISSA: There's no question that the five and 35 -- the $5 million deduction and the 35 percent is nowhere close to what it should be. It will kill small businesses.

You know, Warren Buffett always talks about how he can afford. He's a public company. Small private businesses are killed by the death tax everyday because they can't afford to finance that amount of money.

WALLACE: Real quickly, do you think the Tea Party is going to be good for the GOP in -- in the House?

ISSA: I think fiscal conservative -- all the fiscal conservatives coming in at one time and coming into a group like ourselves who really want that aid and help, giving us a majority of the majority that cares about reducing waste and reducing spending, it's great.

WALLACE: Congressman Issa, Congressman Upton, we want to thank you both so much for coming in on this holiday weekend. And we're going to be following all the action in the House this year.

UPTON: We look forward to it.

WALLACE: You guys will be busy.

ISSA: Thank you.

WALLACE: Up next, how -- will -- how will the Tea Party candidates govern as new members of Congress? We'll talk with two of them when we come right back.

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