MSNBC "Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Joining us now: Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York. He is the Senate"s third-ranking Democrat. He sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which is holding the hearing with the five oil company executives tomorrow.

Senator Schumer, thanks very much for being on the show tonight.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: Glad to be here, Rachel.

MADDOW: The ConocoPhillips CEO says said it would be un-American to stop paying subsidies to his oil company and other big oil companies. What is your feeling about that assertion?

SCHUMER: Well, I think he"s on the different planet than almost every other American except oil company executives. To say it is un-American--

I"ll tell you what"s un-American. What"s un-American is to take these tax breaks at a time when ConocoPhillips and other oil companies are making record profits, at a time when oil was over $4 a gallon at the pump and over $100 a barrel, when they argued that they need these subsides when the price of oil was $17 and they need to encourage exploration.

At $100 a barrel, they don"t need any financial nudge from the federal government to explore. They"re making so much money they"re exploring, exploring, exploring.

MADDOW: In the short run, it seems to me like it makes sense politically to tie oil companies getting subsidies to how high gas prices are right now. But it seems like the more substantive question, maybe the longer term question that this gets at, is whether or not corporate taxes and corporate subsidies get counted as one of the things that we spend on as a country.

Are you opening that part of the conversation as D.C. fights about the deficit?

SCHUMER: Exactly.

MADDOW: You are.

SCHUMER: In the bill that Senator Menendez is putting forward that the Senate will vote on next week, we put all of the money two deficit reduction. Now, some have said we should put the money into encouraging green energy. And we"re going to try to do that later on this year.

But this is an issue of the deficit. Speaker Boehner says, mister--the congressman from Wisconsin says that we have to decimate Medicare, end Medicare as we know it to balance the budget. And yet, at the same time, they"re not touching the oil company subsidies. So, we want to see if our Republican colleagues are actually going to say that keeping the subsidies to the oil companies when they"re making record profits and need no encouragement to explore for oil is more important than say helping students go to college and not cutting Pell grants, doing cancer research and not cutting NIH research.

And one bit of good news actually happened tonight, Rachel. John McCain showed his old independent self when he said to a number of reporters, when asked, that he was seriously considering voting for our bill.

MADDOW: Do you think that you have a chance of passing this? Is Senator McCain"s statement a sign of more Republican support to come?

SCHUMER: Well, actually, when you look at it, other Republicans in the past have supported ending these subsidies. Senator Thune did at one point. Speaker Boehner said that the big oil company shouldn"t get subsidies. We"ve had even some of the many other Republicans say the same thing.

So, we"re hopeful this bill can pass. But I will tell you this--how are we every going to come to some kind of budget agreement if the Republicans in the House continue to block even this little cut, because what you say is right--you can balance the budget in one baby cutting programs and some of those programs need to be trimmed down, but some of them are extremely important to average middle class families. Or you can balance the budget by eliminating all these kinds of wasteful, what the economists would call, tax expenditures, like this oil and gas, one, and there are many others.

We also believe that millionaires shouldn"t get the kind of tax break that George Bush gave them. And that is something we should do sooner than cutting Pell grants or cancer research which is Republicans in the House seem to want to do.

MADDOW: On that issue of the Bush tax cuts, Ezra Klein at "The Washington Post" today had some useful math talking about how if Senator Boehner wants to demand $2 trillion in cuts, which he demanded earlier this week at a speech in New York, in exchange for not holding the debt ceiling hostage, Ezra argued that if those $2 trillion of cuts were just granted to Speaker Boehner, whatever he wants them to be, the deficit would still not go down--the deficit would continue to grow because the Republicans want to hold on to the Bush tax cuts and indeed extend tax cuts for the wealthy and corporation beyond everything that we"ve ever seen before.

SCHUMER: Yes.

MADDOW: How soon are we going to have the debate about the Bush tax cuts and the rest of the Republican tax cut proposals?

SCHUMER: Well, this is--the oil subsidies are opening, but we"re going to go on to these other issues that you have mentioned. And the bottom line is very, very simple. If you want to get the deficit in order, you can do it in only one of two ways. There aren"t enough cuts as you said and as Ezra Klein said today on the domestic discretionary programs to do it.

You have to do one of two things. You have to decimate Medicare, which the House Republican budget did, or you have to eliminate these tax cuts for the very wealthy--whether they be wealthy individuals or wealthy corporations like the great American company Conoco. And those are the only two choices.

And 80 percent of all Americans would favor the choice we make, which is to eliminate the tax cuts to the wealthy, not decimate Medicare. And Republicans, when they go home to their districts are learning just this. And that"s why they"re having some trouble.

MADDOW: Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, sir, thank you very much for your time tonight. I really appreciate it.

SCHUMER: Nice to talk to you, Rachel.

MADDOW: Thank you. We"ll be right back.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source