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David: Congressman Richard Neal from Massachusetts is joining us. Our actual congressional district,
where our studio is, is within your jurisdiction, so it's great to finally have you in our studio.
Richard Neal: Great to be with you, David.
David: I want to start by talking and get your sense of the Republican social agenda
that we've been covering extensively since January, and it's included everything from,
quoting John Boehner, "the high priority of redefining ***", defunding Planned Parenthood,
changing "*** victim" to "accuser", making health care more difficult to acquire for
women. I've characterized it as an attack on women. I'm curious to get your sense...
you can comment on that, but also I would love to hear what do you think is at the root
of some of these proposals?
Neal: Well, I think the considerations have been pretty noteworthy, for the lack of long
thought, and I think that you could characterize the votes that we have on the House floor,
that took place, incidentally, in a series of two-minute procedures, that a lot of forethought
didn't go into them. There is no indication, for example, with Planned Parenthood, that
there's this great appetite across America for defunding Planned Parenthood. At the same
time, you can see that they've taken a series of social positions that are meant to placate
the base of the Republican Party.
I mean, I think one of the things that's been missed in this debate over the role that the
Tea Party has played is that fundamentally, most Tea Party members are Republicans to
begin with. And I think the notion that it's been simply an uprising that has occurred
because people have put down the plow and left the farm to migrate to the city to reverse
a policy is not supported by fact. Many of the individuals that are involved have been
Republicans to begin with, and I think that necessarily, Boehner took the position that
he wanted to placate or appease the base of the Republican Party. I think that, in general
terms, that this will not play well with mainstream America.
David: Behind the scenes, when you hear in the halls of Congress that John Boehner is
calling the redefinition of *** a high priority, I mean, do people candidly go up to him and
say what are you doing here? Or how does that... I'm curious how it works behind the scenes.
Neal: There are two well-structured elements in American politics, the left and the Democratic
Party, and the right and the Republican Party. The difficulty is, as you can note by Barack
Obama's current positions, that everything that President Obama says is meant to be reasonable
so that it might appeal to suburban independents, because they tend to be the deciding factor.
I mean, there comes a point in the election season where you've received every Democratic
vote that you're going to receive or you've received every Republican vote that you're
going to receive, and then the rush is on to use the correct terminology for the purpose
of securing independent voters, who overwhelmingly now tend to reside in suburbia.
And I think that in the case of Boehner, I've known John for a long time, bump into him
virtually every morning and chat with him amiably, I think he would've been an individual
who you might've described 10 or 12 or 14 years ago as a country-club Republican. They
were kind of interested in a stable financial situation with a decent return for individual
investors. They tended, in those days, as you would note, not to get wound up on the
social issues. If anything, they wanted to keep the social issues to the side.
But the nexus that began in the probably mid-80s during the Reagan Revolution between urban
Catholics and Republican conservatives literally changed the whole debate, and the result is
that a Republican leader now I think feels as though they have to offer some sort of
consolation to the base of the Republican Party.
David: It's interesting you phrase it that way, because what we've been talking about
here is do I really feel like the Republicans who support what I would call bizarre or extreme
proposals on the social side, do they personally feel strongly about them or do they feel that,
for whatever reason, whether it's because of who's giving them money during their campaign
or special interest groups that have supported them, that they, in other words, have to give
the back end of the quid pro quo? I mean, does this really come back to the money?
Neal: I think most of them want a marker. And let's be frank, I think that in many Southern
states, there has to be an acknowledgment of the role that the religious conservative
plays in a Republican primary.
David: Can a candidate, a mainstream candidate for major office, win saying I am an atheist?
Neal: Certainly not, in my judgment, coupled with the fact that it's prohibitive in the
Republican primary, that's for sure.
David: Before we get to more generally to money and politics, the budget is something
that we've been digging into both specifically and kind of from a bigger context, and one
of the biggest misinformation streams that I've observed has been the use of the word
"cuts" in many cases where what we're seeing is the increase that was expected is not going
to be as big. It seems to me to be disingenuous. What do you think?
Neal: But it is disingenuous, but I think there's a framework that should be acknowledged
as well. The people that set the fire are now the ones calling the fire department.
David: But that's silly. Yeah.
Neal: But let's contrast January 19th of 2001 with January 20th of 2009. And the contrast
couldn't be any more clear. When Bill Clinton leaves the White House, we've had three successive
balanced budgets, Alan Greenspan warns that the debt is being paid down too quickly.
David: This issue of calling a cut something that...
Neal: That's the point, but the point is if you can get away with saying the tax cuts
pay for themselves, as was popular theology...
David: Yeah.
Neal: During the Reagan years, and Bush II, because Bush I really didn't buy that, he
referred to it as "voodoo economics", and that's exactly what we're now currently discussing,
except that the cuts that have been proposed in the series that we had a couple of weeks
ago, they'd been so draconian in nature as to literally put longstanding institutions
out of business. They propose an end to corporate broadcasting-- public broadcasting...
David: They haven't...
Neal: Planned Parenthood, an end to Teach for America, AmeriCorps.
David: This brings up the other issue, which is there's so much discussion of those specific
cuts that you mentioned, but there is really no valid discourse in the media about the
fact that the military-industrial complex spending, the defense spending that is just
a part of... it's part of the... you start there, there's no real discussion about...
Neal: There is some.
David: Do we need 50 army bases in Germany? Maybe not zero, but maybe 40 would keep us
safe, you know?
Neal: Yeah. You're onto the right point, largely because of the following: the money for Iraq
was borrowed, and it was borrowed to masquerade the size of the requests that were being made
because they knew that the pushback that would come from the administration, hence *** Cheney's
position, $60 billion for Iraq, in and out in six months.
David: And greeted as liberators.
Neal: Greeted as liberators. Oil reserves will pay for America's entry into the war.
I mean, so much of that information was not only ill-considered, but I think meant to
distract people from the real issues that were involved.
David: Both... I mean, even, I'm surprised to say it, at one point, Donald Rumsfeld proposed
to both Democrats and Republicans you know, here's places overseas where we can scale
down, and both parties on the whole said we don't want to do it. So sometimes I'm hearing
from my progressive friends well, Democrats want to shrink defense and Republicans want
big defense, but there have been opportunities where both parties have said we're not going
to do that right now. Why? Do you... would you support drawing down overall?
David: You would?
Neal: Yes, I would. And I think that there has been no better bargain in international
politics than the decision of the United States after World War II to commit ourselves to
the defense of Western Europe. Western European nations have spent about 1% of their GDP on
national defense. We've hovered close to 6% or 7%, so...
David: And the public broadcasting funding we're talking about, these are drops in the
bucket compared to what could be had...
Neal: Oh, miniscule amounts of money.
David: And I don't think that's being really discussed.
Neal: It's not being discussed.
David: Money in politics. We were talking about net neutrality, something which, as
a small independent production, really could affect us in very specific ways depending
on which way it goes. Started researching, and Fred Upton from Michigan, who headed up
the committee that wanted to say, wanted to explore, do we really need to impose these
restrictions on companies like Comcast or not? Who funds Fred Upton? Comcast and Verizon
and AT&T, and even a lobbyist group, the NCTA, which, as if the Comcasts weren't strong enough
on their own, they have their own lobby called the NCTA.
And I'm thinking to myself he has been bought. This is a pre-- we know what the result will
be of that hearing, and effectively enough, he said you know, I actually don't know we
really need to be watching these companies like Comcast so much. Do you find something
wrong with that system, where those companies are giving him money and then he is holding
a hearing about what should or should not they be able to do?
Neal: Well, you know, I'd probably refrain from questioning the motives, but I will say
this: it's an example of what happens, based upon your opening question during this get-together.
Fred Upton was a fairly moderate member of Congress until he decided that he wanted to
be the Chairman.
David: I hear what you're saying. Let me go about it a different way, and not to pick
on you, but because you're here, and we could do this with whoever we were interviewing.
Aflac...
Neal: Not going to have a better opportunity.
David: Aflac has donated to you, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Merck, Northwestern Mutual, MassMutual.
From a complete layman's, I find someone on the street and I say if I were to tell you
that Congressman Richard Neal votes on issues related to health care and here's 60,000 or
so donations that he received from those who have a very specific interest in how those
votes go, is there not the appearance of a problem there?
Neal: Well, I mean, there's a question of appearance, but I would also balance that
very carefully by saying Liberty Mutual's a big employer in the state of Massachusetts,
and in fact, they're in the inner city of Springfield, where they keep a steady presence.
MassMutual on State Street has 4800 employees, and I believe another 4000 employees just
across the state border in Enfield. I think the life insurance industry's a very good
industry. I think that they sell very important products. And incidentally, MassMutual's not
involved in health care insurance.
David: I feel like we're a little bit going around the issue, and we can forget about
the specifics of these donations, but do you believe that the system...
Neal: No, no, it's not... I think it's important to talk about this...
David: The system we have in place...
Neal: I think it's important to talk about the role that money plays.
David: In other words, the other day I was interviewing an individual who runs some so-called
"pregnancy centers" in New York. He got very angry when I mentioned that they're actually
unlicensed, and he hung up on me, but in that discussion, he asked was I taking money from
Planned Parenthood. I'm not, we barely get any money from anybody, but if I had been,
that would be a case where how am I going to conduct a fair hearing of both sides if
one side has given you money? That's the...
Neal: My impression based upon the industries that you've outlined is that it's money that
follows votes, not necessarily that votes follow money. And I think that there needs
to be a legitimate discussion in America about more of the role of secret money in campaigns
as opposed to the system that we have that nobody's crazy about. But the Supreme Court,
in Buckley v. Valeo, they've held the position that money constitutes expression. And as
long as that opinion holds, one would be very foolish to disarm...
David: One dollar, one vote.
Neal: Well, it would be very foolish to disarm going into any election season. And let's
be frank, I mean, who has changed this system? And not to understate the role that George
W. Bush played or that Barack Obama played. I mean, they're the ones that decided that
they could do better outside the norm of public financing than they could do inside of the
norm.
David: No question about it...
Neal: So there has to be some expression of the acknowledgment of the pivotal position
that that Supreme Court decision played.
David: Certainly there is, but would it not be better, I mean, would you support a Dennis
Kucinich-type campaign finance reform?
Neal: Probably not.
David: What would you... what do you find about it that would not work for you?
Neal: Well, I mean, I think that the hybrid that has been offered is a year-after-year
decline. I mean, there's no evidence that the American people are checking off greater
amounts of money on their tax forms. If anything, it's been going south steadily.
And I think President Obama's decision two years ago, actually, three years ago, which,
as you know, he fretted about it for a long period of time before announcing what we all
knew was about to become reality, look, whether we like it or not, Barack Obama is the president
today in some measure because of his extraordinary ability to have raised north of $750 million.
So in that since, when you consider that overwhelmingly his donations came from small contributors,
I think it worked. But not to dismiss the fact, either, as you know, in that campaign,
there were some big contributors.
David: Absolutely, yeah. And you know, I'm obviously not hiding my feelings, which is
I think that the system is both completely open to corruption and filled with it.
Neal: Sure. It's certainly subject to the need for some changes, that's for sure.
David: Before we wrap up, Libya, what should the U.S. involvement be, what should happen
in that region? It's such... my sense going in was some of the protesters believed it
would go like Egypt, and it did not. Every government will react differently, and that's
where we are now. What's your sense?
Neal: I think we need to nurture the dissidents, those that are challenging Gaddafi, and at
the same time, that any action that's taken needs to be done with the sanction of the
United Nations or European Union. I think the idea that we would go it alone again in
a Muslim nation does not make sense, and I think that we need to be very mindful and
careful of that, that quickly, trying to topple a military dictator, in this case, you run
the risk, if you're not careful, of making him a martyr again in the Arab world.
David: And isn't U.S. involvement in great part going to be dictated by how profitable
might it be to go in there, the way we've seen happen with conflict after conflict?
Neal: Well, I'm not so-- this uprising in Libya was one that we didn't see coming, and
I'm not sure that that was the intent as we began, but now there's a very precarious balance
that we have. We want to certainly give all the support that we can to the forces on the
ground that want to bring an end to his leadership, but be mindful of something, we don't know
what the next act is. And recall, the most vivid example of what I've just stated is
Iran after the fall of the Shah.
David: Absolutely, absolutely. Congressman Richard Neal, great to see you. Thanks for
coming in.
Neal: Good to be with you, David.
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