A: The very next sentence was that I am consumed with the notion of what’s going to happen to my kids, my grandkids & my country, and that that’s why I was running for president. We had a long discussion from which they cherry-picked, of course, to try to make a little interesting story out of it. I’ve never been personally consumed. It’s not a part of my identity--politics isn’t, and never will be. I’ve said that I don’t like every aspect of the way that people have to campaign nowadays in terms of process taking precedence over substance. But I’m in the middle of a 50-town tour in Iowa, working day and night. I think that speaks for itself.
A: Yes.
Q: Do you believe that abortion is the taking of life?
A: Yes.
A: What the situation is now is as follows. Because of Roe vs. Wade, all states are restricted from passing rules that they otherwise would maybe like to pass with regard to this area. If you abolish Roe vs. Wade, you’re going to allow every state to pass reasonable rules that they might see fit to pass. There hasn’t been a serious effort to put forth a constitutional amendment because people knew that it wouldn’t pass. What I’ve been talking about is directing our energy toward something that was halfway practical, something that might could get done. So now where we have no states with the option of doing anything about it, then we would have however many states wanted to. You could move from zero yard line, to the 60- or 70-yard line instead of standing pat, which is where we will remain if we don’t abolish Roe vs. Wade.
A: Exactly.
Q: That is the essence of the pro-choice argument, not individual choice, but pro-choice for states.
A: No, not really. How many pro-choice people say that they want to see the abolition of Roe vs. Wade? I don’t know any. What I’m talking about is abolishing Roe vs. Wade [and allowing the abortion decision at the state level].
Q: So even if you disagree with them, states could have abortion on demand.
A: No, not abortion on demand. They could restrict. They would have the ability to restrict abortion more than they do now.
Q: But pre-Roe vs. Wade, some states had abortion on demand.
A: Well, they would not have anything under that situation that they don’t have now. I mean, the gain would be on the pro-life side. I mean, they have Roe vs. Wade and all of the progeny from that already.
A: I think Rudy was kind of squealing before he got stuck there. Somebody asked me a question about gun control, and I said Rudy was mayor of New York and apparently felt like gun control was a great idea back then. He says it was because he was representing NYC. But I don’t think New York City has necessarily the same values as the rest of America. And that’s in reaction to that. My experience has had to do with matters on the national level. I was on the Intelligence Committee. I chaired a committee dealing with nuclear proliferation. I was Republican floor leader for the homeland security bill. I could go on and on and on. I’ve dealt with those issues for almost a decade both in and out of government. And of course, Rudy has not, you know, five minutes of experience with regard to things of those nature.
A: First, I’ll say I hope your estimates are better than the professionals who estimated that we would get so much less in capital gains revenue if we lowered the capital gains rate. They were totally wrong about that. They were wrong as to the amount of tax revenue we would lose under the 2001 tax rate cuts also. They always overestimate the losses to the government.
Q: So give us three specific things you would cut.
A: Well, let me give you one big one, that’s worth about $4.7 trillion--my Social Security plan. I have put out a Social Security plan that basically faces up to the fact that Social Security is going bankrupt and we’re going to have to do something about it [by allowing 2% of your payroll into a private personal account].
In the long run, the government would come out ahead. A person would have a nest egg at the end of his retirement time.
And if you do that in conjunction with indexing the initial Social Security benefit to inflation instead of wages, at the end of the day you’re going to save Social Security. You’re going to put it on a sustainable basis. And it will save the government $4.7 trillion at the end of the day. So eventually you do have to address the spending side, but the spending is going to have to be addressed on the basis of our entitlement difficulties.
A: Yep. It’s maintaining the tax cuts that we had in 2001 & 2003. It’s eliminating the death penalty. It’s reducing the corporate tax rate. We have the second-highest corporate tax rate among our competing partners. It’s hurting us competitively. We’re probably losing revenue from it. We have several other provisions in it, but another major one is an adoption, basically, of the approach that the House Republican study group has that would give taxpayers an option of continuing to file the way they do now or filing under a flatter plan where you only have two rates, but no exemptions past the personal exemption and no deductions. So give that a try. And it would be a major move toward tax reform, which I think is greatly needed.
A: Eventually.
Q: Because there’s no indexing, there’s concern that middle class families who weren’t supposed to fall under the AMT are now being hit, but you’re going to repeal it for rich people as well. Why repeal it for everyone?
A: Well, it was a tax that never was supposed to be imposed on anybody except about 155 taxpayers, and now we’re seeing about 23 million taxpayers. At the current rate, the AMT will be collecting more tax revenue than the regular tax system. So what we’re saying is that let’s index it from year to year until we get a handle on spending, and then we’ll eliminate it. [Otherwise] taxes are going to be high without anybody having to do anything-- the automatic AMT increase would include millions of people who were not originally intended to be covered, income tax rates going up substantially for just about everybody in America. And that’s bad for the economy.
A: Pro-life.
Q: Do you want to overturn Roe v. Wade?
A: I think Roe v. Wade was bad law and bad medical science. And the way to address that is through good judges. I don’t think the court ought to wake up one day and make new social policy for the country. It’s contrary to what it’s been the past 200 years. We have a process in this country to do that. Judges shouldn’t be doing that. That’s what happened in that case. I think it was wrong.
A: I think that we ought to be a tolerant nation. I think we ought to be tolerant people. But we shouldn’t set up special Q: Let’s do a lightning round to see where you stand. Gay rights.
A: I think that we ought to be a tolerant nation. I think we ought to be tolerant people. But we shouldn’t set up special categories for anybody. And I’m for the rights of everybody, including gays, but not any special rights.
A: Yes. You know, marriage is between a man and a woman, and I don’t believe judges ought to come along and change that.
Q: What about civil unions?
A: I think that that ought to be left up to the states. I personally do not think that that is a good idea, but I believe in many of these cases where there’s real dispute in the country, these things are not going to be ever resolved. People are going to have different ideas. That’s why we have states. We ought to give great leeway to states and not have the federal government and not have the Supreme Court of the United States making social policy that’s contrary to the traditions of this country and changing that overnight. And that’s what’s happened in a lot of these areas.
A: I came from the outside to Congress. And it always seemed strange to me. We’ve got a situation where people could give politicians huge sums of money, which is the soft money situation at that time, and then come before those same politicians and ask them to pass legislation for them. I mean, you get thrown in jail for stuff like that in the real world. And so I always thought that there was some reasonable limitation that ought to be put on that, and you know, looking back on history, Barry Goldwater in his heyday felt the same thing. So that’s not a non-conservative position, although I agree that a lot of people have interpreted it that way.
A: That’s right.
Q: And you helped raise millions of dollars for his extraordinary legal expenses. Would Pres. Thompson pardon Libby now or would you wait until all of his legal appeals are exhausted?
A: I’d do it now. This is a trial that never would have been brought in any other part of the world. This is a miscarriage of justice. One man is bearing the brunt of a political maelstrom here that produced something that never should have come about. This Justice Dept. knew in the very beginning that the thing that was creating the controversy, who leaked Valerie Plame’s name, did not constitute a violation of the law. Mr. Armitage leaked the name. It wasn’t Scooter Libby. They spent the next year drilling in a dry well and finally got some inconsistencies or some failure to remember out of Libby and made a prosecution out of it. It’s not fair. I would do anything that I could to alleviate that.
A: Well, I’m against gun control generally. You know, you check my record. You’ll find I’m pretty consistent on that issue.
Q: So you’d be perfectly happy to have people have handguns in their homes?
A: Yes. Absolutely. The court basically said the Constitution means what it says, and I agree with that.
A: No, no.
Q: You said last year about illegals, “You’re going to have to, in some way, work out a deal where they can have some aspirations of citizenship but not make it so easy that it’s unfair to the people waiting in line and abiding by the law.” And you said, “Look, it’s just not realistic that we’re going to round up 12 million people and ship them all out of the country.”
A: Well, that’s true, as a general statement. We woke up one day after years of neglect and apparently discovered that we have somewhere between 12 million and 20 million illegal aliens in this country. So it became an impossible situation to deal with. I mean, there’s really no good solution. So what do you do? You have to start over. Well, I’m concerned about the next 12 million or 20 million. So that’s why enforcement, and enforcement at the border, has to be primary.
A: I would do essentially what the president’s doing. I know it’s not popular right now, but I think we have to look down the road and consider the consequences of where we are. We’re the leader of the free world whether we like it or not. People are looking to us to test our resolve and see what we’re willing to do in resolving the situation that we have there. People think that if we hadn’t gone down there, things would have been lovely. If Saddam Hussein was still around today with his sons looking at Iran developing a nuclear capability, he undoubtedly would have reconstituted his nuclear capability. Things would be worse than what they are today. We’ve got to rectify the mistakes that we’ve made. We went in there too light, wrong rules of engagement, wrong strategy, placed too much emphasis on just holding things in place while we built up the Iraqi army, took longer than we figured.
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The above quotations are from Chris Wallace presidential candidate interview series, "Choosing the President", on Fox News Sunday, throughout 2007.
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