No 1 Chellenges to Pr. Obama
Call for Peace
In the Name of Allah,
the Most Gracious, and the Most Merciful
US Politics
Critical Analysis
By Media
Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and Chris Mathew
Source
Video Clip
www.msnbc.com
An accounting of the president’s promises
Jan. 29: President Barack Obama addresses perceived contradictions described by Congressman Jason Chaffetz. Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews join Keith Olbermann for analysis.
Challenges to President Obama
Keith Olbermann:Now former Democrat turned to question the President Obama, boy! This is good one. Mr Jason Chaffetz of Utah currently claims to the title fiscal conservative. He challenged the President on the subject of earmarks. Perhaps because Mr Chaffetz did not ask any earmarks in the 2010 budget. He also questioned the role of lobbyist in the Obama administration but right out of the (inaudible) asserting Republicans were not to blame for the healthcare quad mire. Mr Chaffetz challenged candidate Obama campaign proposal to put the healthcaredebate itself on C Span in (inaudible) six minutes.
Question Congressman Jason Chaffetz, Utah
President is Listening
I’m one of 22 House freshmen. We didn’t create this mess, but we are here to help clean it up. You talked a lot about this deficit of trust. There are some things that have happened that I would appreciate your perspective on, because I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists. Democrats have the House and Senate and the presidency. And when you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-SPAN, you didn’t. And I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed.
You said you weren’t going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did. I applauded you when you said it — and disappointed when you didn’t.
You said you’d go line by line through the health care debate — or through the health care bill. And there were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said, “We would like to take you up on the offer; we’d like to come.” We never heard a letter, we never got a call. We were never involved in any of those discussions.
And when you said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks — in fact, you didn’t want to have any earmarks in any of your bills — I jumped up out of my seat and applauded you. But it didn’t happen.
More importantly, I want to talk about moving forward, but if we could address –
President Interrupted
THE PRESIDENT: Well, how about — That was a long list, so — (laughter) — let me respond.
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: — I would certainly appreciate it.
President Answers Question
Look, the truth of the matter is that if you look at the health care process — just over the course of the year — overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings in which you guys were participating. I mean, how many committees were there that helped to shape this bill? Countless hearings took place.
Now, I kicked it off, by the way, with a meeting with many of you, including your key leadership. What is true, there’s no doubt about it, is that once it got through the committee process and there were now a series of meetings taking place all over the Capitol trying to figure out how to get the thing together — that was a messy process. And I take responsibility for not having structured it in a way where it was all taking place in one place that could be filmed. How to do that logistically would not have been as easy as it sounds, because you’re shuttling back and forth between the House, the Senate, different offices, et cetera, different legislators. But I think it’s a legitimate criticism. So on that one, I take responsibility.
With respect to earmarks, we didn’t have earmarks in the Recovery Act. We didn’t get a lot of credit for it, but there were no earmarks in that. I was confronted at the beginning of my term with an omnibus package that did have a lot of earmarks from Republicans and Democrats, and a lot of people in this chamber. And the question was whether I was going to have a big budget fight, at a time when I was still trying to figure out whether or not the financial system was melting down and we had to make a whole bunch of emergency decisions about the economy. So what I said was let’s keep them to a minimum, but I couldn’t excise them all.
Now, the challenge I guess I would have for you as a freshman, is what are you doing inside your caucus to make sure that I’m not the only guy who is responsible for this stuff, so that we’re working together, because this is going to be a process?
When we talk about earmarks, I think all of us are willing to acknowledge that some of them are perfectly defensible, good projects; it’s just they haven’t gone through the regular appropriations process in the full light of day. So one place to start is to make sure that they are at least transparent, that everybody knows what’s there before we move forward.
In terms of lobbyists, I can stand here unequivocally and say that there has not been an administration who was tougher on making sure that lobbyists weren’t participating in the administration than any administration that’s come before us.
Now, what we did was, if there were lobbyists who were on boards and commissions that were carryovers and their term hadn’t been completed, we didn’t kick them off. We simply said that moving forward any time a new slot opens, they’re being replaced.
So we’ve actually been very consistent in making sure that we are eliminating the impact of lobbyists, day in, day out, on how this administration operates. There have been a handful of waivers where somebody is highly skilled — for example, a doctor who ran Tobacco-Free Kids technically is a registered lobbyist; on the other end, has more experience than anybody in figuring out how kids don’t get hooked on cigarettes.
So there have been a couple of instances like that, but generally we’ve been very consistent on that front.
Keith: One gets the feeling that if you asked him to the President could recite phone extensions of everyone in the Whitehouse.
Mr President! No doubt this gives you and your team ammunition to win back the support of Democrat, Republican and Tea Party supporters.
May Allah be with you.
Wa’Assalam
[May Allah Bless you]
PS:
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