CNN "State of the Union with Candy Crowley" - Transcript

Interview

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CROWLEY: Senator Alexander, let me ask you if you buy into Senator Warner's premise, which is that tea party folks are basically at fault, I think I'm -- that's not a direct quote, but that the tea party-backed folks in the House are the ones behind this stalemate that is now threatening yet another government shutdown. Do you agree with that?

SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER (R), TENNESSEE: No, I don't. You know, I'll give the Senate Democratic leader most of the credit. He manufactured a crisis all week about disaster when there's no crisis.

Everybody knows we're going to pay for every single penny of disaster aid that the president declares and that FEMA certifies. And the House sent over a bill that does that and the Senate should have approved it.

What it did was take $1.5 billion of unobligated funds and say, we're going to -- instead of adding to the debt we're going to not add to the debt when we do this.

Now what we should have been doing this past week is all we could do to create an environment so the work that Senator Warner, Senator Chambliss, and others have done to reduce the debt by $4 trillion succeeds. That would have been a good use of the week instead of this chest-pounding and game-playing that has been going on.

CROWLEY: Well, we kind of are where we are. And Monday, as far as we understand it, there will be a key test vote in the Senate which is not -- the Senate version at this point being, we will accept the spending levels in the House bill for Federal Emergency Management Agency and other things, but we will not do the offsets or the pay- for-it parts of the House bill.

It looks like that's not going to happen. It looks like that cloture vote, as we call it, it is a test vote, will fail. What then, Senator Alexander?

ALEXANDER: Well, that's up to Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and others. But let's be clear about this. We spent all week talking about this with Senator Reid saying we had to have $7 billion, when that hadn't -- when nobody certified that much damage.

Then on Friday the Republicans said, OK, let's vote today. Let's not wait over the week, so he puts it off until Monday. I don't like this business of sitting around blaming each other over such small potatoes.

What we really ought to be doing is spending time to see if we can get $4 trillion in debt reduction. Senator Warner, Chambliss, and others have rounded up 37 senators, equally divided by party, who agree we should do that.

We'd like our super committee to succeed. If we could do that we could begin to get the economy in better shape and gain some confidence in the country. CROWLEY: Senator Warner, back to the sort of the larger question, rather than the inner workings of this bill, and that is Secretary Geithner actually put it this week, he talked about how our global trading partners think that the U.S. political system looks manifestly broken.

Is there something that you could -- I mean, and you hear this, I mean Senator Alexander saying this is -- we're talking about the wrong thing, this was a manufactured political debate, regardless of whether you agree with him -- you think it was a manufactured political debate, too, although you blame different people.

So why can't we -- why should we look at this and go, you know what, this should be the year the anti-incumbent -- just vote for any name you don't know.

WARNER: Well, I think -- I agree with Senator Alexander that we need to get back to the single biggest thing we can do to actually restore some confidence both internationally and domestically and that is put in place a long-term $4 trillion debt reduction plan. I think that would give confidence back to consumers to start spending, businesses who are -- actually large businesses who are sitting on a couple trillion dollars of cash on their balance sheets. I think that would be very, very positive.

And Senator Alexander's been very supportive of this effort. We've got an equal number of Democrats, Republicans trying to do this.

But I would say I mean, one point about who to blame or not to blame on this current hopefully non-shutdown is that there is a group -- I do believe it is mostly centered in the House in terms of some of these Tea Party Republicans -- who say on every issue we're going to make this a make-or-break. We saw it on the FAA when they shut down the Federal Aviation Administration. We're seeing it now on this debate about FEMA.

We should be able to have a legitimate debate about emergency aid. Why link that into a government shutdown or not? And so my hope is that cooler heads will prevail on this short-term so-called continuing resolution budget extension.

But I -and I do agree with Senator Alexander, we've got to get back to the bigger issue which is how do we send confidence back to the American public and to the markets. The only way we're going to get that done is if we actually, Democrats and Republicans, start being Americans before they put on their partisan hats.

CROWLEY: It is sort of what we've been talking about for a long time now. It never quite seems to happen.

Let me move you to the so-called super committee which is looking to find -- has to find $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in savings that everyone can agree on by the end of the year. This seems to me to be a very tall order. And it also seems to me that we are seeing more and more stories now about how this is not going to happen. Can you all afford to not come up with some agreement? Because then, as you know, supposedly automatically budgets will be cut... WARNER: Here's the circumstance. Every economist that I've heard of has said that if we don't get $4 trillion in debt reduction over the next ten years, then we're not going to put our economy and get ourselves the debt-to-GDP ratio on a sustainable path. The challenge the super committee's got is we've cut about $1 trillion. Even if they do $1.5 trillion more, that's really not going to be enough.

So we've got to go ahead and say to them, go ahead and take on tax reform and generate some additional revenues, take on entitlement reform and make sure programs like Medicare and Social Security are going to be there for the next 75 years.

And what our group is trying to say, Democrats and Republicans alike, business leaders, if you will do that we got your back. If you will go big, we will stand there and be supportive, because this is a once in a long time opportunity, because whatever they come up with will get a straight up or down vote. That doesn't often happen. And we can actually then cut out the rhetoric and see where you stand on this issue.

CROWLEY: Senator Alexander, I'm going to give you the last word on this. I know that you hope that the super committee can go big or can at least go to what it's supposed to be doing. But I want you to tell me what you honestly think will be the work product of the super committee.

ALEXANDER: Well, I'm not sure exact -- I'm not sure the details, but I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic. The budget agreement that we agreed on in August is better than people think. It took 40% of the budget, the discretionary put, everything from national defense to national parks, and it's got it going up over the next ten years at about the rate of inflation, 55 percent that's mandatory spending is going up at three times the rate of inflation.

I hope that the super committee works on that part of the budget. And I'm willing to define success in terms of what happens not just in the next ten years, but the ten years and the ten years after that. Because as Mark said, we're looking at 75 years of solvency for Medicare, Social Security and these other programs. And if they make real progress in that area I think that would be success as well.

CROWLEY: Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, Mark Warner, senator from Virginia, thank you both so much.

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