Casey embraces his ‘independent streak’

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The following are excerpts of reporter Charles Hurt’s recent interview with Senate candidate Bob Casey Jr., Pennsylvania Democrat and state treasurer:

Question: How would you have voted on the Senate immigration bill, which critics say would grant amnesty to some 10 million illegal aliens?

Answer: Even though that bill had a number of problems with it, if the choice was either voting for that or doing nothing, then I would have supported the bill.

[Sen. Rick Santorum] started his media campaign on that issue, which I thought was kind of bizarre that an incumbent with 12 years and is in leadership would have his first ad about an issue about which I think he has got a bad record. He has voted against border security, I think, seven times. He voted the wrong way in terms of holding employers accountable several times.

Q: The recent Senate bill to bolster state laws that require minors to notify their parents before getting an abortion was opposed by most Democrats. How would you have voted on that bill?

A: I would have voted for it.

Q: As a pro-life Democrat, how comfortable will you be joining a caucus that is almost entirely pro-choice? Will you stand up to leadership on those issues?

A: On the issue of abortion, my position has been different than the national party for a long time. Even though there is significant and intense disagreement on both sides of that issue, there actually is something everyone agrees on: reduce the number of abortions.

People expect you in that body, especially from a state like Pennsylvania, which is large and diverse, to have an independent streak. It’s very important for this state to have that. When people review my record and the way I’ve approached issues, I’ve been independent on a lot of things.

People in the Senate leadership understand that in order to be successful, you have to have a big tent. You have to reach out to people that are of differing opinions because that’s how you get a majority. I want our party in 2008 to be able to count to 51. That’s how you win.

I spent months making this decision [to run for Senate], and the party leadership at every turn was in no way pressuring me saying, “We disagree with you on abortion.”

Q: Who do you support in the Connecticut Senate race between Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent, and Democratic nominee Ned Lamont?

A: I’ve always supported Democratic nominees. I think it’s important to endorse, support Democratic nominees.

Q: How would you have voted on the recent Senate bill that would have eliminated the estate tax and raised the minimum wage?

A: When you look at the question of the estate tax, I think it’s actually pretty simple. In my judgment, it’s a question of fiscal responsibility. We can’t afford the estate-tax cuts that the Republicans have been pushing. If that’s what they’re going to merge into a minimum-wage bill, I just don’t think that’s the right policy for the country.

Q: You have said you would roll back President Bush’s tax cuts for the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans. Would you have opposed the entire tax cut package — that included a wide array of popular tax cuts — in order to block that top 1 percent?

A: It’s difficult for me to enumerate every one. There are several tax cuts that have broad support and are important to build a strong economy — certainly the child tax credit, the efforts to remove the marriage penalty, research and development tax cuts. Tax cuts that are focused on helping middle-income families, helping small business make a lot of sense. But I think the top 1 percent tax cut — it’s wrong just to think about it as something that is unfair or just a question of what the rich get. It’s fiscally irresponsible, especially at a time of war, a time of deficit, a time of real failure by this White House to do anything real about health care. If you’re going to give a tax cut to the top 1 percent, at least in this country at this time in this economy, by definition, you have just told the American people that we’re not going to make lowering the cost of health care a priority and we’re not going to lower the deficit.

Q: So, you would have voted for or against the Bush tax cut packages?

A: I would support a whole menu of tax cuts like the ones I described. Without enumerating every one, there are a lot of them that make a good deal of sense. But the top 1 percent — it’s showing us now that it didn’t work and we can’t afford them.

Q: So, while you support tax cuts in general, you would have voted against the Bush tax cut package as presented to Congress?

A: I would not have supported the top 1 percent.

Q: But they weren’t separated out.

A: Well, I wasn’t in the Senate.

Q: To fix the pending collapse of Social Security, would you cut benefits or raise taxes?

A: I would do what they did in the 1980s: sit down and have a bipartisan agreement where both sides sit down and work it out. And that could mean a lot of things. You can’t even begin to describe what would happen until these guys in Washington have some kind of real commitment to bipartisanship. That’s missing.

Q: Okay, so what are some of your ideas that you would throw out there for fixing the pending crisis?

A: Well, I think you’ve got to think about it in terms of being fair, in terms of being fiscally responsible. But I’m not going to try to predict what a bipartisan agreement would result in. I think you’ve got to do everything possible to make it sound and to make it secure for future generations. And at the same time, you’ve got to tackle Medicare as well, and we know that over 75 years, Medicare is a much bigger problem, by four times maybe.

Q: So, you don’t have any specific ideas for what you would propose in terms of saving Social Security?

A: You could do a lot of things with some of the revenue you have coming from the repeal of the tax cuts.

I would consider first of all sitting down and working in a bipartisan way. I don’t know what that would be until they do that.

Q: You are the treasurer of one of the biggest states in the country. You don’t have a single idea to throw out there?

A: No. Look, in the 1980s, there was a real commitment to do something about it. They sat down and worked it out. There are things they’ll have to do. It may result in someone paying more. It may result in changes to benefits. The first thing you’ve got to do is make the initial commitment to a bipartisan effort to do that.

Q: You say you want an open, bipartisan debate on this, but haven’t you and other Democrats demagogued the issue by attacking Mr. Bush’s proposal for creating private Social Security accounts to prevent the federal government from raiding people’s retirement funds?

A: Well, if I thought it was a proposal that was worthy of debate — I thought it was a scheme. There’s an agenda in their party, which is to undo a lot of what the New Deal did. Their idea is that the market should be controlling a lot more of what government is doing now.

Q: To get control of the ballooning deficit, would you cut spending or raise taxes?

A: Part of the answer is [rolling back the tax cuts for] the top 1 percent. That’s part of the revenue that you should dedicate to deficit reduction and health care reform. That’s part of it.

Also, just the general commitment you have to make to fiscal responsibility, which means you look at every budget with that in mind. I don’t think these guys are doing that. I’ve had to do that in state government. I have to run an agency. I think those that have to balance a budget have to do that all the time.

Corporate welfare — one of the things I proposed early in the campaign was to have a corporate welfare commission, which would have a lot of the same independence and insulation from politics that the [Base Realignment and Closure] Commission has, where they’re appointed for long terms and they look at the budget every year and they identify major expenditures or potential expenditures that are wasteful on both sides. That could affect Democratic programs and Republicans’ favored programs as well.

One estimate was that you could save $250 billion over 10 years. If that number is accurate, that’s $25 billion a year. I think that’s part of what you have to do. I think there is some waste, fraud and abuse that I could find because I’ve been doing that for a decade now. In every agency, in every program, in every department of government, there’s some kind of waste, there’s some kind of abuse, some kind of fraud.

Gosh, even if it’s a small number, you should always try to identify that. Part of this is a conditioning process that government agencies and public officials have to go through. That’s a big part of the problem.

[Republicans] went in front of the American people last December, and they claimed to have cut $39.5 billion. They cut Medicare, Medicaid and student assistance of higher education. That took a $12 billion cut. They called that $39.5 billion deficit reduction and, a couple of weeks later, gave away more in tax cuts. There’s no commitment at all to any kind of real fiscal responsibility. But it’s not going to be one budget. It’s going to take a couple of years.

Q: Do you believe global warming is caused by human behavior?

A: I do. And I believe that unless the country takes a strong stand on emissions, we’re not going to get to the reduction of emissions that we have to.

Q: Then, why do you object to the high price of gasoline?

A: Well, I object because I think our government should be doing everything possible to provide some relief. Now they would say that they can’t do that, it’s market forces. We’re supposed to have a great relationship — at least this White House claims to — with the Saudis. We should use that to lower the prices. I supported the proposals from [Sen. Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota] that once the price of oil goes above a certain threshold — the overage or the excess profit above that — at least half of that gets rebated to taxpayers.

That’s short term. Long term, it’s a real commitment to reducing our dependence and a real commitment on renewables and alternatives, but also a commitment to reducing emissions.

We had a debate a couple of weeks ago in early June, Senator Santorum and I. It was just on the environment. It was only about 30 or 35 minutes long. He talked about reducing emissions and he talked about how — and this is a Bush policy — you could reduce them by 75 percent, and he threw out some numbers about what it would cost. I knew what he was talking about and I turned to him and I said, “Senator, that’s going to take awhile.” He meant 20 years.

What I’m talking about and what a lot of serious people are talking about is getting serious. We’re not just talking about, “Please, will you reduce the emissions?” It has got to be mandatory or it’s not going to work.

I realize some people think increasing the price of gas exponentially will lead all of us to be more conscious.

Q: Why? Isn’t that a pretty good incentive?

A: I am not in favor of increasing gas taxes that high.

Q: Are you in favor of increasing them by smaller margins?

A: They’re too high right now. They’re at an all-time high. They’re over three bucks. The price at the pump is over three bucks.

You increase the gas tax, and you have places like Union and Snyder County in the middle of Pennsylvania hit pretty hard. These people here have to drive a lot farther to the grocery store.

Q: But if the threat of global warming is as serious and urgent as people say and driving cars contributes to it, isn’t the government obligated to slap a huge tax on gasoline in order to drastically reduce emissions?

A: In academic circles, these kinds of proposals are bandied about. The problem is, people in these houses here are going to feel the impact of that in their budgets and their lives in the short run. I don’t know whether that would work eventually or whether that would be a great policy over time, but you’re hurting a lot of people that are having trouble making ends meet on other things because of the cost of health care and everything else.

I’d like to listen to people who think that theory would work. But I’ll tell you, in the short run — meaning a longtime short run, months if not years — middle-income people that are struggling and paying through the nose and didn’t get a lot of tax relief, didn’t get their pay raised are going to be paying through the nose for a theoretical way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Q: If you believe global warming is a serious issue, it’s going to hurt one way or the other.

A: I would agree with that.

Q: So what you’re saying is that you don’t want to be the guy who makes the tough decision to hurt people?

A: The premise of the question is that’s the only way to do it, and therefore, I’m the bad guy for not supporting it.

Look, it is going to be difficult for people. It is going to be difficult for all of us. That’s why you need leadership. You need to remain committed. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but no one’s convinced me that’s the way you get there. You have to try to arrive at a policy that doesn’t disproportionately impact middle-income Americans in the short term. That is a traumatic shock to an already injured patient.

It’s going to require difficult decisions by a lot of people. It’s going to require people leading by example. It may require some incentives and carrots and sticks. But it’s going to be difficult. I just don’t believe that’s the only way to do it.

Q: In the past year, the Senate has approved two of Mr. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. How would you have voted on those nominations?

A: I would have supported both.

Q: How would you have voted on the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq?

A: If we knew then what we knew now, I don’t think there would have been a resolution.

Q: At the time, would you have voted for the resolution?

A: I’m like a lot of Americans. I wanted to believe my president when he told us that here was weapons of mass destruction, when he told us this was about American interests, this was about fighting the war on terror.

I’ve never supported a timeline, never supported some of the proposals some Democrats have. At the same time, if it’s a choice between timelines on the one hand or carte blanche by Bush on the other, which is carte blanche, trust me, this will go into the next administration. I think what has been missing from day one is just basic accountability. We weren’t getting senators asking tough questions, and that’s part of the reason a lot of the mistakes were made.

Q: Who’s to blame in the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel?

A: I think it’s pretty clear. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that came across an international boundary line. Two Israelis were kidnapped. And these guys have sent now more than a thousand rockets into Israel.

I think Israel has every right to defend itself and do what it takes to beat back that kind of aggression. I also hope, like a lot of Americans, that it will be resolved peacefully.