Meet The Press Transcript (3-15-09)

On the program the Republican Congressman, Eric Kantor, demonstrates hypocrisy on the budget and the deficits:

REP. CANTOR: David, David, the Republicans will have a plan. We had a stimulus plan. You know, part of the problem with being in the minority is, David, that sometimes your colleagues in the press don't want to cover the ideas that the minority has. We had a plan on the stimulus. It was, it was tailored to small business tax relief. It was focused on what a stimulus plan should be, which is the preservation, protection and creation of jobs. And what we see in this president's budget is, is a lack of that kind of focus. I mean, what we're talking about with him is, is trying to address the energy situation, the health care situation. And you heard Dr. Romer here just today say if we can look long term, these short-term problems will just fix themselves. Well, that's not true. When you sit here and advocate long term, an energy tax and a tax that some have some have said will amount to about $3,000 per household of four, that means everybody that pays an electric bill will have an additional tax, everybody that pays a gas bill will have a tax, everybody that buys anything manufactured in this country will essentially have an $800 per man, woman and child tax. How is that something that will help create jobs in this economy? Again, they're trying to do entirely too much and not focus on the job at hand, which is to get these credit markets working again and have small business create jobs again.

MR. GREGORY: There's a concern about spending in this budget that you and other Republicans have talked about. And yet this was John McCain, the--obviously the standard-bearer of the party, the presidential candidate in 2008. Back in 2007, this is what he said about the Republicans.

(Videotape, May 15, 2007)

SEN. McCAIN: We didn't lose the 2006 election because of the war in Iraq. We lost it because we in Republican Party came to Washington to change government and government changed us. We let spending go out of control. We spent money like a drunken sailor.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: Where was all the concern about fiscal conservatism and reining in spending from you and your Republican colleagues during the Bush years?

REP. CANTOR: Well, well, listen, David, if you're asking could we have done better, absolutely. If you're asking us did we blow it in terms of restoring fiscal sanity into this system, absolutely. But that doesn't give now the Democrats in power in this town to go in and repeat the mistakes that perhaps we may have committed in the past. You know, you look at this budget, how can it be that they claim that they're balancing the budget when they are doubling the debt, when they are increasing the deficit to record levels of a trillion, seven hundred billion dollars this year? How is it that, that that is a fiscally sane plan? We've got to remember...

MR. GREGORY: Did you oppose President Bush's budgets that increased the deficit or the debt?

REP. CANTOR: Well, David, we were in a time where I think the priority then was to make sure that we could deliver the money for our troops. And I joined along with Democrats on, on the other side of the aisle as well as my colleagues on mine to say the most important thing we needed to do at the time was to support the efforts of our military to insure our national security.

MR. GREGORY: So it was OK to, to support deficit spending at wartime, but it's not OK now during an economic crisis, when Warren Buffett calls that the equivalent of Pearl Harbor?

REP. CANTOR: Listen, I, I, I--there is no question that priority one has to be to restore the confidence in this economy, and, and we must do that which we have to do. But when you're talking about the type of budget--and look, look, over the last 50 days we have passed the stimulus bill, we have passed the omnibus spending bill. And it is striking to see the lack of change in that bill, the type of waste and pork barrel spending, the earmarks that exist in that bill. You've got that train from Disneyland to Las Vegas, you have, you know, you have other things like the, the money that goes to remove pig, pig odor.

MR. GREGORY: All right.

REP. CANTOR: I mean, come on.

MR. GREGORY: How many earmarks have you supported...

REP. CANTOR: Well...

MR. GREGORY: ...in the time in Congress?

REP. CANTOR: Well, I mean, I...

MR. GREGORY: Because Democrats provide data saying that you voted for more than 46,000 earmarks. Is that wrong?

REP. CANTOR: Well, in terms of the votes and the budgets in the past, clearly. But I for one, along with our leader, John Boehner, have said we ought to all embrace a moratorium on earmarks so we can get the process working again.

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

REP. CANTOR: And we're looking to President Obama. You know, he did promise, he said he'd come to Washington to get rid of the pork barrel spending. We saw him sign the omnibus spending bill without doing anything of the sort. And what I would say to him is we will work hard to sustain his veto if he will, you know, keep--deliver on his promise that he made. We'll work to help sustain his veto on these pork barrel spending bills. And frankly, if he wants to look at some of the things that he's already signed into law, we'll work as well with him to try and rescind some of those expenditures.

MR. GREGORY: But, but isn't the problem in the, in the public's mind, Republicans are calling for things now that they didn't actually do during the Bush years? And you look at some of the polling, here's our recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: Which party would do a better job of getting the U.S. out of a recession? It's the Democrats that have, by a 48 to 20 percent margin, the advantage in terms of people's confidence. What do you do to change that as the minority party?

REP. CANTOR: Well, I mean, listen, as the minority party, I think part of our job is to be the honest opposition. And we also, I think, are charged with the task of bringing President Obama back to the center. That's what bipartisanship is about and, frankly, that's what the solutions are going to be about going forward. And what we see is very troubling given the last 50 days and the direction of the ideology of this administration and, frankly, of Speaker Pelosi and others in Congress. We've seen the failure of that ideology in the '70s in Great Britain, in the '80s in France. We, we understand in this country, I believe, that we're about free markets, we're about individual freedoms, and that is what our goal is. And when you apply that to the budget that we're going to be discussing over the next couple weeks, we've got a job to do. I mean, because I don't think that the American people are going to embrace this budget. I think you've seen the news reports that the administration now is on an all-out campaign to beef up the support for their budget. If it was a sane budget, I don't think you'd have to have some kind of multitiered campaign plan to get people behind it. It'd sell itself.

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