McCAIN: I would never, and have never in all the years I’ve been there, imposed a litmus test on any nominee to the Court. That’s not appropriate to do.
Q: But you don’t want Roe v. Wade to be overturned?
McCAIN: I thought it was a bad decision. I think that decision should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist. And I believe strongly that we should have nominees to the Supreme Court based on their qualifications rather than any litmus test. They should be judged on their qualifications. I will find the best people in America who have a history of strict adherence to the Constitution. And not legislating from the bench.
Q: Even if it was someone who had a history of being for abortion rights?
McCAIN: I would consider anyone on their qualifications. Someone who has supported Roe v. Wade, that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.
OBAMA: If it sounds incredible that I would vote to withhold lifesaving treatment from an infant, that’s because it’s not true. There was a bill that said you have to provide lifesaving treatment. The fact is that there was already a law on the books in Illinois that required providing lifesaving treatment, which is why not only myself but pro-choice Republicans and Democrats voted against it. With respect to partial-birth abortion, I am completely supportive of a ban on late-term abortions, as long as there’s an exception for the mother’s health and life, and this bill did not contain that exception
McCAIN: Americans are hurting right now, and they’re angry. They’re hurting, and they’re angry. They’re innocent victims of greed and excess on Wall Street and as well as Washington, D.C. And they’re angry, and they have every reason to be angry. But we also have to have a short-term fix, in my view, and long- term fixes [as you outlined about my plan].
OBAMA: The fundamentals of the economy were weak even before this latest crisis. Sen. McCain and I agree that we’ve got to help homeowners. I disagree with Sen. McCain in how to do it, because the way Sen. McCain has designed his plan, it could be a giveaway to banks if we’re buying full price for mortgages that now are worth a lot less.
Now, we have allocated $750 billion. Let’s take $300 billion of that and go in and buy those home loan mortgages and negotiate with those people in their homes, 11 million homes or more, so that they can afford to pay the mortgage, stay in their home.
Now, I know the criticism: what about the citizen that paid their mortgage payments? It doesn’t help that person if their next door neighbor’s house is abandoned. And so we’ve got to reverse this. We ought to put the homeowners first. And I am disappointed that Secretary Paulson and others have not made that their first priority.
The Facts: On his Web site, McCain calls it “an American Homeownership Resurgence Plan.” Under his plan, the government would buy up some troubled mortgages at their full value--meaning the lenders would not take a loss. The government would then renegotiate those mortgages, so that eligible homeowners would be paying rates based on their homes’ current, reduced value. The McCain campaign says the plan would cost about $300 billion: “Funds provided by Congress in the recent financial market stabilization bill can be used for this purpose.”
The Verdict: True. The McCain campaign acknowledges the plan would shift the burden to taxpayers.
McCAIN: Obviously, that law waved the statute of limitations, which you could have gone back 20 or 30 years. It was a trial lawyer’s dream.
The Facts:The legislation McCain was referring to was the Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2007. Ledbetter alleged that she had suffered years of unequal pay. Ledbetter’s case was throw out by the Supreme Court on the grounds that she should have filed suit within 180 days of the first unfair paycheck. The Lilly Ledbetter Act would allow people to sue up to 180 days after the last instance of pay discrimination--not the first, as curren law requires.
The Verdict:False. The legislation does not waive the statute of limitations on discrimination suits, as McCain says, but changes the interpretation of when the limitation begins in cases of continuing violations.
OBAMA: What I’ve said is I want to provide a tax cut for 95% of working Americans. If you make less than a quarter million dollars a year, then you will not see your income tax go up, your capital gains tax go up, your payroll tax. Not one dime. In fact, independent studies have looked at our respective plans and have concluded that I provide three times the amount of tax relief to middle-class families than Sen. McCain does.
So choice and competition amongst schools is one of the key elements that’s already been proven in places in like New Orleans and New York City and other places, where we have charter schools, where we take good teachers and we reward them and promote them. And we find bad teachers another line of work.
We have to be able to give parents the same choice, frankly, that Sen. Obama and Mrs. Obama had and Cindy and I had to send our kids & their kids to the school of their choice.
Charter schools aren’t the only answer, but they’re providing competition. They are providing the kind of competitions that have upgraded both types of schools.
McCAIN: I’m sure you’re aware, Sen. Obama, of the program in the Washington, D.C., school system where vouchers are provided and there’s a certain number, I think it’s a thousand and some and some 9,000 parents asked to be eligible for that. Because they wanted to have the same choice that you and I and Cindy and your wife have had. And that is because they wanted to choose the school that they thought was best for their children. And we all know the state of the Washington, D.C., school system. That was vouchers, Sen. Obama. And I’m frankly surprised you didn’t pay more attention to that example.
OBAMA: The D.C. school system is in terrible shape, and it has been for a very long time.
OBAMA: I support clean coal technology. Doesn’t make me popular with environmentalists. So I’ve got a history of reaching across the aisle.
McCAIN: He voted for the energy bill that was full of goodies for the oil companies that I opposed. So the fact is, let’s look at our records
McCAIN: We can eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and Venezuelan oil. Canadian oil is fine. We can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by building 45 new nuclear power plants. With wind, tide, solar, natural gas, with development of flex fuel, hybrid, clean coal technology, we can, within seven, eight, ten years, eliminate our dependence on the places in the world that harm our national security.
OBAMA: In ten years, we can reduce our dependence so that we no longer have to import oil from the Middle East or Venezuela. Number one, we need to expand domestic production and that means telling the oil companies the 68 million acres that they currently have leased that they’re not drilling, use them or lose them.
OBAMA: For far too long, certainly during the course of the Bush administration with the support of Sen. McCain, the attitude has been that any trade agreement is a good trade agreement. And NAFTA did not have enforceable labor agreements and environmental agreements.
McCAIN: I am a free trader. Let me give you another example of a free trade agreement that Sen. Obama opposes. Right now, goods and products that we send to Colombia, which is our largest agricultural importer of our products, because of previous agreements, their goods and products come into our country for free. So Sen. Obama opposes the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. The same country that’s helping us try to stop the flow of drugs into our country that’s killing young Americans. Free trade with Colombia is something that’s a no-brainer. But maybe you ought to travel down there and visit them and maybe you could understand it a lot better.
McCAIN: I would have an across-the-board spending freeze. I know how to save billions of dollars in defense spending. One would be the marketing assistance program. Another one would be subsidies for ethanol. I would fight for a line-item veto, and I would certainly veto every earmark pork-barrel bill.
OBAMA: Every dollar I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut hat it matches. To give an example, we spend $15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies. It doesn’t help seniors get better. It’s a giveaway. I want to go through the federal budget line by line, programs that don’t work, we cut. Programs we need, we should make them work better. Once we get through this economic crisis, we’re going to have to embrace a culture of responsibility, all of us, corporations, the federal government, and individuals who may be living beyond their means
McCAIN: It really is the escalating costs of health care that’s inflicting such pain on working families and people across this country. And I am convinced we need to do a lot of things. We need to put health care records online. The V.A. does that. That will reduce costs. We need to have more community health centers. We need to have walk-in clinics.
OBAMA: Here’s your fine--zero.
McCAIN: Zero?
OBAMA: Zero, because as I said in our last debate and I’ll repeat, I exempt small businesses from the requirement for large businesses that can afford to provide health care to their employees, but are not doing it.
OBAMA: If you’ve got insurance through your employer, you can keep your insurance. We estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year. If you don’t have health insurance, then we’re going to provide you the option of buying into the same kind of federal pool that both Sen. McCain and I enjoy as federal employees. We’re going to make sure insurance companies can’t discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions. We’ll negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available prices. We are going to invest in information technology to eliminate bureaucracy and make the system more efficient.
McCAIN: Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I’m going to give a new direction to this economy in this country.
OBAMA: Let me tell you who I associate with. On economic policy, I associate with Warren Buffett and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. If I’m interested in figuring out my foreign policy, I associate myself with my running mate, Joe Biden or wit Dick Lugar, the Republican ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or General Jim Jones, the former supreme allied commander of NATO. Those are the people, Democrats and Republicans, who have shaped my ideas and who will be surrounding me in the White House. And the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Sen. McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me.
McCAIN: Sarah Palin took on a governor who was a member of her own party when she ran for governor. When she was the head of their energy and natural resources board, she saw corruption, she resigned. She’s given money back to the taxpayers. She’s cut the size of government. She negotiated with the oil companies and faced them down.
OBAMA: Joe Biden is one of the finest public servants that has served in this country. It’s not just that he has some of the best foreign policy credentials of anybody. It’s also that he has never forgotten where he came from, fighting on behalf of working families, remembering what it’s like to see his father lose his job and go through a downward spiral economically.
McCAIN: I think that Joe Biden is qualified in many respects. But I do point out that he’s been wrong on many foreign policy and national security issues, which is supposed to be his strength.
He voted against the first Gulf War. He voted against it and, obviously, we had to take Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait or it would’ve threatened the Middle Eastern world supply.
In Iraq, he had this cockamamie idea about dividing Iraq into three countries. We’re seeing Iraq united as Iraqis, tough, hard, but we’re seeing them. We’re now about to have an agreement for status of forces in Iraq coming up.
There are several issues in which, frankly, Joe Biden and I open and honestly disagreed on national security policy, and he’s been wrong on a number of the major ones.
The Facts:Sen. Biden co-authored an opinion piece in The New York Times on May 1, 2006, that proposed a five-point plan “decentralizing” Iraq, greatly beset at the time by civil warfare between Shiites and Sunni Arabs.
The column likened Iraq’s sectarian woes to those in Bosnia [in which the] Dayton Accords kept Bosnia intact by “dividing it into ethnic federations, even allowing Muslims, Croats & Serbs to retain separate armies.“ The result was that Bosnians ”have lived a decade in relative peace.“ The proposal, which became known as the Biden-Gelb plan, generated attention in Washington & Baghdad, and the US Senate voted for a Biden amendment expressing support for a US-backed political settlement that would include a federal system.
The Verdict: False. Biden proposed decentralizing Iraq’s government, but not breaking up the country.
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The above quotations are from 2008 third presidential debate, John McCain vs. Barack Obama, at Hofstra University in New York.
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