Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Novak, Hunt & Shields

Interview With Richard Armey

Aired March 23, 2002 - 17:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ROBERT NOVAK, CO-HOST: I'm Robert Novak. Mark Shields and I will question the Republican majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.

MARK SHIELDS, CO-HOST: He is Congressman Dick Armey of Texas.

Robert Novak is in Syracuse, New York, and Congressman Armey joins us from Altoona, Pennsylvania.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHIELDS (voice-over): The House voted 221 to 209, along party lines, to pass a Republican-drafted budget for the next fiscal year, and then adjourned for a 10-day Easter recess.

Before the budget passed, Democrats accused the Republican majority of jeopardizing Social Security.

REP. EVA CLAYTON (D), NORTH CAROLINA: This issue is about senior citizens who are fearful that they would not get their Social Security in the future. This issue is indeed putting those senior citizens at risk.

REP. TOM DELAY (R-TX), MAJORITY WHIP: It's amazing to me that the other side is arguing stop the raid on Social Security. Now, when they were in the majority for 40 years, they took the surpluses of Social Security and spent it on big government programs. We're the ones that stopped the raid on Social Security and paid down over $450 billion on the debt on our children.

SHIELDS: The Democratically-controlled Senate Budget Committee was working on a very different kind of budget as partisan division in Congress continued.

Dick Armey surprised the political world in December by announcing he would not seek a 10th term in Congress.

An economics professor at the University of North Texas, without political experience, he was the narrow upset winner for Congress in 1984. When Republicans took control of the House after the 1994 elections, Congressman Armey was elected majority leader.

(END VIDEOTAPE) SHIELDS: Congressman Dick Armey, no one has been a sterner critic of Social Security as it exists, or stronger advocate of change, partial privatization. And yet the leader of your party, politically in the House, the campaign chairman, Tom Davis of Virginia, says: "Not on your life are we going to listen to Dick Armey and debate this issue before the election of 2002. We're staying away from it."

Is Tom Davis wrong, politically?

REP. RICHARD ARMEY (R), TEXAS: Well, I think he's wrong realistically. The Democrats have only Social Security and the politics of fear that they associate with it to campaign on this year. We will debate Social Security. And it's time that we Republicans call the Democrats for what they are, which is shameless demagogues on this subject and get busy with the process of fixing Social Security before it is too late.

SHIELDS: Why then, Congressman Armey, are you the only person in the leadership of your part with the courage to address this issue while the rest, including the White House, cringe from discussing and having a full debate whether it involves the transition costs of a trillion dollars, as projected, or even potential cuts in benefits?

ARMEY: Well, I think it's a question of recognizing the mood of the American people. The American people are thoroughly disgusted with the way Democrats have handled Social Security over all of these years. They are completely aware of the need to do something about this, and they are impatient with those among us who aren't dedicated to getting this problem fixed.

I think the White House recognizes that, but quite frankly, I think you have to understand, the Democrats have ruthlessly and effectively used Social Security on the campaign trail for a long time. It's going to take a lot of courage to get past these sort of mean-spirited campaigns that they've put together on this subject.

SHIELDS: Bob Novak?

NOVAK: Mr. Majority Leader, in the same debate on Wednesday that the Democrats attacked Republicans on Social Security, they also attacked you for returning to deficit spending because of the tax cut.

Isn't it a fact, sir, that even Republicans in the House, particularly conservative Republicans, are uncomfortable with the -- that this budget does call for a budget deficit?

ARMEY: Well, you know, the fact is we're in a war, we're in a time of national emergency. We're just coming out of an economic downturn. The fact is I believe we will end the fiscal year with out a budget deficit. The economic growth will be better more earlier because of what we've done in tax reduction.

And I don't think the conservatives are all that upset about where we are. And they are very optimistic about where we will go. And we look especially responsible when you see the kind of budget the Democrats are creating in the Senate, that would, one, be larger deficits and, two, spend even more of Social Security revenues.

NOVAK: On the question of recovery of the economy, Congressman Armey, the president has signed a stimulus package, which is much more modest than was proposed by the House Republicans and, indeed, passed on several occasions by the House.

Do you believe that if you had your original stimulus package, with larger tax cuts, that the economy would be in better shape than it is today? And are you worried that the stimulus has been inadequate and you have a danger of an inadequate recovery?

ARMEY: Well, yes. In fact, I raised that worry some time ago when we got into this recession. What we did, and managed finally to get through the Senate, was good for the economy, especially the high- tech sector with the 30 percent expensing. This is a big deal and will make a difference in the performance of the economy.

ARMEY: We could have done more. We should have done more. But Tom Daschle was dedicated to the proposition that he should never do more than the least he should. And we just simply couldn't get more past the Senate.

SHIELDS: Congressman Dick Armey, the war in Afghanistan, you had been a strong supporter of George W. Bush as commander in chief, and you've actually cautioned your colleagues about being second-guessers. Yet, we're talking about now overthrowing Saddam Hussein, invading Iraq.

Shouldn't we have a full, free public debate, especially in the halls of Congress, on this important move?

ARMEY: Well, first of all, I think we're going to have to deal with Saddam sooner or later. We've all known that. And when we do deal with him, I think we need to strike quickly, use the element of surprise if we have it available to us, and be decisive in the results. If you have a big public debate, it's very hard to imagine that you will preserve the element of surprise, which can be very important in this.

And quite frankly, we in the House and we in the Senate committed ourselves to following the lead of our commander in chief on this. I don't think it's appropriate for us now to start second-guessing the commander in chief in a manner that this crucial to our nation's security and, indeed, to the safety of the world.

SHIELDS: Now, let me understand this, you're advocating then that the Congress continue to advocate its constitutional responsibility to declare war?

ARMEY: No, not at all. I think the Congress of the United States has appropriate committees that are, more or less, responsibly staffed, where we can take in and digest the security information that the White House is more than willing to share with us and have been.

But Congress must handle this information in a responsible fashion. We cannot have leaks that put our men and women in physical danger because somebody in Congress is careless with very important information.

So I think you need to use the need-to-know basis. There are a lot of members of Congress that are asking for information that is beyond what they need to know, and we can't rely on them to be careful with how they handle that information.

NOVAK: Mr. Majority Leader, a very prominent, conservative Republican, Congressman Ernest Istook of Oklahoma, has joined Democrats in demanding that Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge testify in open session before Congress.

Does that not reflect a widespread opinion in the Republican caucus that Governor Ridge should testify?

ARMEY: No, I don't think so. I think most of us on our side of the aisle understand exactly what the Democrats want to do with Tom Ridge. They don't know how to attack President Bush. They're going to try to turn whatever President Bush is accomplishing in defense and homeland security into a domestic policy failure.

We do not believe -- I do not believe that the Democrats would give Tom Ridge a fair, decent, honest and objective hearing. This is a political gambit, on their part, and Ernest ought not to ally himself with them.

These folks cannot be trusted on this subject. They are not going to handle it responsibly. And the administration is, in fact, acting in the nation's interest to say, look, we don't make public dog-and-pony shows for political purposes out of homeland security.

NOVAK: OK. We're going to have to take a break.

And when we come back, we'll talk to the majority leader of the House of Representatives about border security, steel imports, and where George W. Bush is going ideologically.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHIELDS: Congressman Dick Armey, the majority leader of the House, President George W. Bush has advocated limited amnesty for undocumented aliens who have been in this country, working and living here.

Isn't this now the time that we have to concede that our borders are not secure and that they are really porous at a time of national concern?

ARMEY: Well, we do concede that, and that is why President Bush is saying we need to make border security a number-one priority. We can't afford to continue to have one senator, Senator Byrd, stop us from securing our borders.

But by the same token, people who do comply with our law and are here legally and are trying to maintain their legal-resident status and are failed by a dysfunctional that can't get its work done, should not be separated from their families and punished for the failure of an agency of this government to its job decently.

So George Bush, I think, has divided these two issues properly, has made the proper commitment to border security and has made the heartfelt commitment to treating people that are guests in this nation and are here legally with some sort of decency and respect. And I'm proud of him on both counts.

SHIELDS: On another matter, the issue of partial-birth abortion. During the Clinton years, the Congress regularly passed with Democratic votes, as well, a ban on the procedure known as partial- birth abortion. Yet, here we had Republican administration, a second year, Republican control of the House. Bill Clinton vetoed that legislation, as you know and, yet, it has yet to come up.

Why has the Republican Congress and the Republican president failed to address this urgent issue?

ARMEY: Well, we had a recent Supreme Court decision -- I think it was on an Oregon case -- that was a misguided decision, in my opinion, that has legally complicated the issue. We've had the people that are working on this, the lawyers that attended this kind of legal speak, working on the language. And we do intend to bring it up.

It is so inhumane. It is such an awful procedure. I mean, this nation cannot tolerate this kind of gruesome procedure continuing, and it will be brought up. And I am so proud that we've got a president that will sign this and say this kind of inhumanity is not acceptable in the United States.

NOVAK: Well, you're not in the Congress this year?

ARMEY: In this Congress probably this summer, I would hope by July. It's been very difficult to deal with the language of the Supreme Court decision.

NOVAK: Mr. Majority Leader, the president's decision to impose a 30 percent tariff on steel imports has been universally criticized by conservatives, even by people inside his own administration.

Why do you think the president abandoned his promises of free trade to impose that tariff?

ARMEY: Well, that was a difficult one for me to understand, and nobody in the -- you might guess, nobody in the White House really confided with me on this, in terms of what the president's thinking was. Obviously, for a person with my background and training, this was a surprise and something of a disappointment.

But President Bush is trying to manage a regional balance and he's had a great sensitivity to the hardships of the Rust Belt. And I just have a sense that maybe he said, look, this isn't necessarily what George W. Bush would do in a perfect world, but those folks in the Rust Belt are really having a difficult time and they need something that will encourage them.

I don't think, in the long run, it will be helpful, even to people from Pennsylvania and Ohio. But I do think there was an effort of this president to try to help out a distressed part of the country.

NOVAK: But, Congressman Armey, you take the steel import imposition, the abandonment of school choice, the lack of any action on the partial-birth abortion, the president's alliance with Teddy Kennedy on the school bill, and the revival of President Clinton's AmeriCorps. Is this president, this Republican president, drifting to the left?

ARMEY: No, I think if you take a look at it, he is reforming AmeriCorps. Thank the Lord for that. That needs to be done. It was such an obnoxious notion the way it was. And I'm proud of him for what he's trying to do in that regard.

He has worked very hard on education. And, quite frankly, what he found was we didn't have the votes for school choice, as we should have had. And I've been disappointed in that for a lot of years, even before he got here.

So he's very strong with us on understanding what we accomplished on welfare reform and anxious to get on and renew that.

So for the most part, we just find this president to be such a solid guy, so reliable and so consistently who he -- being today who he was, who he said he was during the campaign, that we have very little room for disappointment in this president.

SHIELDS: Mr. Armey, you're talking about a potential war and the United States being deployed in 60 different countries. And yet, we have a military force 2 million fewer than we had at the time of Vietnam. And we're really running into a terrible crunch: one-third drop off in the highest intelligence scores among the recruits; 380 felons recruited by the Army last year; failure to meet the quotas, every branch except the United States Marine Corps.

SHIELDS: Isn't it time we have to revisit this question of an all-volunteer service and whether, in fact, we need a draft?

ARMEY: Well, I think what we need to do first is to get the pay raises up and make the living conditions better for our men and women of the service; make serving for the nation more attractive than it has been in recent years. And also, let the folks who go in the service understand, we will provision them properly to conduct the business that they've signed up to do.

We have done a great deal to rehabilitate the circumstances of our armed services on all of these fronts. We have more work to do.

But my own view is we can bring an all-volunteer service up to the kind of standard we need much more easily and with a good deal less tension in the country than if we tried to institute a draft. I don't see that a draft is necessary.

NOVAK: We only have about 30 seconds before we take another break, Mr. Leader. When you became majority leader after the 1994 election, high on the Republican agenda was tax reform, and you were a leading advocate of the flat tax. Nothing has been done. Is that a huge disappoint, and will anything ever be done on general tax reform?

ARMEY: I think we will get there. The president -- this president is committed to tax reform. We have not had presidential leadership on this subject before.

The time must come, though, when this goes forward. We have a lot of people in the Congress, in the House, in the Senate that are committed to this. I think it will go forward.

There has been one point of confusion that we have to clear up. We still have a great many people, misguided people in this country that have bought into what I consider the most multifaceted pipe dream in American today, a national sales taxes. We have got to get that card off the table. It won't work out for people; it's never worked out for anybody else. And it's just simply confusing the issue.

NOVAK: We have to take another break, and when we come back, we'll have the "Big Question" for Dick Armey of Texas.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

NOVAK: "The Big Question" for Dick Armey:

Mr. Majority Leader, through the whole administration of Ronald Reagan, through the Bush administration, through the eight years of Republican control of the House of Representatives, government has continued to grow beyond the rate of inflation.

Is this something that everybody in America is just going to have to accept, that government will always get bigger and never smaller?

ARMEY: I think we have to stay diligent in working on this. There is a natural tendency for government to grow, and we never pare off the dead limbs of the tree. We never remove things that are of no value to the American people, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which is -- if it every had a reason for being, we've moved so far beyond that it's ridiculous .

So someday, sooner or later, we're going to have to get to the point where we can pare, to pare off the dead limbs and return to a rate of growth in the less necessary programs, establishing a clearer set of priorities.

We have made big changes in that direction since the Republican majority of '95. We have not gotten to all the places, all of the distance we need to get on that, but we are certainly doing a better job than was done before '95.

SHIELDS: Mr. Armey, under President Bill Clinton, the country enjoyed the lowest unemployment, lowest inflation, biggest growth in the stock market value in our history. It's the lowest unemployment in 30 years. And yet, in 1993 when President Clinton offered his economic plan, you said, "This is a recipe for disaster, a defeat for the American people and for our economy."

Do you have any second thoughts? Do you want to revisit that right now?

ARMEY: No, I did -- I underestimated the strength of the Reagan revolution and how strong Reagan economics was driving his economic growth. It even got beyond the folly of the Clinton presidency. Bless our hearts in America, we did such a great job.

And the other thing that didn't materialize in the Clinton years that I feared at the time I made that statement is he didn't go with the great big AFL-CIO labor agenda that would have killed jobs at the time.

So I give him credit. He only made half the mistake that I thought he would make, and the economy was strong enough to overcome the mistakes he did make.

SHIELDS: Dick Armey, the majority leader of the House, thank you very much for being with us.

Robert Novak and I will be back with a comment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHIELDS: Bob, Dick Armey is very lonesome among Republicans. He wants a full debate on privatizing Social Security, but Republican congressmen led by Tom Davis of Virginia, the campaign chief, say, "Not on your life. We're not going anywhere near that third rail during the campaign of 2002."

NOVAK: Mark, Mr. Armey did not hide his unhappiness with the president's steel import tariff imposition, but he didn't let me lead him into a general criticism of the president's ideology for drifting to the left that I hear from a lot of conservatives. Dick Armey is a good party man.

SHIELDS: Well, Dick Armey is also a conservative constitutionalist, Bob, that's why it surprised me that he really said no, no, no to any public or congressional debate on the very important issue of invading Iraq for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and declaring war.

NOVAK: Well, I, for one, will miss Dick Armey as a free-market reformer. And I was glad to hear he hasn't given up on tax reform; he says we still need it. But he did rule out of the national sales tax, which is a variety of tax reforms that I think is gaining a lot of support.

I'm Robert Novak.

SHIELDS: I'm Mark Shields.

Coming up at 7 p.m. Eastern on "CAPITAL GANG," unrest in the Middle East, reaction to campaign finance reform passing the Senate, and the budget battle over Social Security in the House. Our guest is Congressman Robert Matsui of California. And an Oscar preview with our "Newsmaker of the Week," "TIME" magazine film critic Richard Schickel.

Thanks for joining us.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com