NBC-TV
05-14-06
Meet The Press
Transcript for May 14
MR. RUSSERT: Let me share with our viewers something from the Philadelphia
Inquirer from Newt Gingrich. “A dozen years after he engineered his party’s
takeover of Congress, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned that his
fellow Republicans could be swept out of power this year. ‘They are seen by the
country as being in charge of the government that can’t function. ... We could
lose control this fall.’ He said there had been a series of blunders under
Republican rule, from failure in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to
mismanagement of the war in Iraq. He said the immigration bill passed by the
House was unrealistic and too harsh toward undocumented immigrants. He
called congressional efforts to regulate lobbying ‘much too weak,’ and said the
government had squandered billions of dollars in Iraq.” That is very condemning
of your party.
MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think, I think we have to confront the fact that on a
variety of fronts we’re not getting the performance we want. I don’t think—look,
the people who are in charge have an obligation to deliver. The United States is
a very tough-minded country, and we actually want the people we put in charge
to get the job done. When you, when you’re told this morning by the person
who—from 2003 to 2005 was the head of the border for the United States
government, that the border is essentially an invitation to illegal entry, you know
something has to change. When you learn that maybe as much as 16 of the $18
billion dollars that we sent to Baghdad for economic purposes wasn’t spent
effectively, you know something has to change. When you look at Katrina and
you realize that we, we—the United States government paid $1.75 to a general
contractor who paid 75 cents to a contractor who paid 35 cents to a
subcontractor who paid 10 cents to put the blue tarp on that was the temporary
roofing, you know something has to change.
My argument with my own party is simple: I want a Republican majority, I want a
Republican presidency. I think that means we have to recognize when things
aren’t working and we have to fix them and not wait for the American people to
get so upset that they decide to replace us. So I’m advocating in behalf of
retaining our majority, that we have to be more aggressive about spending, we
have to be more aggressive about energy. And, you know, I, I wish the president
would call a renewable fuel summit at Iowa State and, and, and have all the
major players, and propose in the next 30 days a very substantial renewable
fuels bill that could significantly reduce our, our reliance on Saudi Arabia and our
reliance on Venezuela.
But I think the country wants us to lead. The country would love for Republicans
to be solid on this, the country does not want to go back to a left-wing Democratic
majority, that they do want the Republicans to recognize things need to change.
MR. RUSSERT: They don’t want more of the same.
MR. GINGRICH: Right. They don’t want more of the—they’d rather have a
conservative change than a liberal change, but they’re not going to tolerate being
told it’s OK for the border to be uncontrolled, it’s OK for 11 million people to be
here illegally, it’s OK to have a Senate bill which sets up a very strange threelayer tier of how long you’ve been breaking the law, for example, on immigration.
MR. RUSSERT: But let’s, let’s accept that everyone wants to toughen the border,
the president talking about moving National Guard in there, both parties seem
convinced to do that. What do you do, specifically, with the 11 million
undocumented workers in the country? Do you send them back?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, look, first of all, I’m going to disappoint you for a halfsecond, because you can’t answer these questions in six-second sound bites.
These are, these are hard things, all right? The United States, because the
government failed to enforce the law and because many businesses broke the
law knowingly and many businesses broke the law unknowingly because the
documentation is so bad, the United States has now created a mess for itself
over a 20-year period. I voted in 1986 for the bill which in fact amnestied three—
almost three million people. It said we’re going to set up a temporary worker
program, it said we’re going to control the border, and it said we’re going to
enforce the law on, on employers. None of that happened. So now you are where
we are today.
What the American people want’s very straightforward, and the numbers on this
overwhelming, and I just wish that the, the Republican leadership would side with
the American people. One, control the border; two, enforce the law on illegal
employers. I mean, 84 percent of the country says the problem isn’t somebody
who comes here from Guatemala or Mexico City because they want a job and to
work hard, the problem is the guy—the American who’s breaking the law. Three,
we assert that the the path to citizenship has to involve learning English and
giving up the right to vote in any other country. Four, create a worker visa
program that has a background check, that has a biometric card, probably a
retinal scan so it’s really accurate and very, very hard to counterfeit, and have
that card, by the way, run by AMEX or—American Express or Visa or
MasterCard, because you know the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t
have any possibility of running that program.