Face the Nation transcripts September 22, 2013: Kissinger, Manchin, Coburn
(CBS News) Below is a transcript of "Face the Nation" on September 22, 2013, hosted by CBS News' Bob Schieffer. Guests include: Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Plus, a panel of experts looks at the week's news.
SCHIEFFER: And good morning again. There is breaking news this morning in Nairobi, Kenya, as more troops have been brought in as a hostage standoff continues with an Islamic militant group in an upscale shopping mall. At last count, 59 have been killed; 175 have been wounded. Four of the wounded are Americans. These images were taken by New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks. We will continue to monitor this situation and bring you more news on it as it happens. In Washington, the attention is back where it has been before in recent years, another congressional shutdown of the government. Three key players in the debate with us. We begin with West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. And let me just start right here, Senator Manchin. The House passed this budget that funds the government for the rest of the year but only if funds for Obamacare are cut off. Is there any way, shape or form, any way that that would possibly pass the Senate?
MANCHIN: No. And next of all, it should be an unacceptable option. There is no way we should be talking about shutting the government down. But I will say, on the other hand, Bob, raising the debt doesn't fix the debt. We're talking about our financial future. We're talking about getting our financial house in order. We need real adults at the table working that out. You know, every six months or so this seems to come before us, and it end up being a political football.
SCHIEFFER: But why do you think -- why do you think this has happened? The president said "They're just messing with me." That was his direct quote. Why do you think they've done this?
MANCHIN: I've been here for three years and nothing has really changed. No one's really been serious about fixing it. And the blame can be on everybody, Democrats and Republicans. We had the Bowles- Simpson template out there. It's the only bipartisan, had a large buy- in. It's continued to gain momentum throughout the country. It's a tough one, but it needs -- you know, it needs to be done. You need to take that, whether it be spending and revenue and reforms, that are reasonable, and sit down and work this out. But when you start putting these nuances or wedges in, such as the affordable health care act, or Obamacare, you know what? I didn't come here to vote no on everything. I could -- this could be the happy retirement home if you vote no all the time. Let's fix it. Let's repair it. And since I have been here, not one of my colleagues have come up and said, "Joe, here's a better way to do it. Here's how we can fix this part. Let's repeal this, and we'll fix this part of it." Nobody has done that. They've just said, "OK, vote up or down." Well, let's fix things.
SCHIEFFER: What would you think would be a way to, kind of, get this started again?
MANCHIN: On what, the...
SCHIEFFER: Anything.
MANCHIN: Oh. Well, first... I understand your frustration. The bottom line is, you've got to sit down and say, "What's our goal?" Our goal is, first of all, if your finances are not in order, whether it's privately in your own home or your business or whatever, you can't do anything. We've found ourselves in a situation now, we need to rebuild America. We're spending money around the world we can't afford. You know, the wars have cost us $1.6 trillion. We need to come back. We almost started another one. I'm glad we averted that, and hopefully that's going in the right direction. But the bottom line is what's the most important thing? You pick out your priorities based -- you know, based on your values, your children having a start in life, having an opportunity, educating a work force, making sure you take care of those who sacrificed and give them back and make sure you're strong enough to defend this country and help people who need help around the world.
SCHIEFFER: Do you think people really understand what it would mean to shut down the government, and even if we don't shut down the government, to continue with the sequestration in place, where you're going to have to drastically cut back our national security apparatus, that in addition to putting these vital social programs at risk or ending them?
MANCHIN: Bob, I do think they know -- there's people who were here when it happened before, the last time it happened, and they know how devastating that was. Politically, it was devastating also, and I don't think they're going to go down that road again. But we really should get people together. The leadership should come together and start giving options that are viable options. You know, from the budget standpoint, they say the Republicans are saying that we don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem. Democrats are saying we don't have a spending problem; we have a revenue. They're both right and wrong. But we need a tax system that people believe in. And if it spends off more cash, can't we agree on how it should be spent? If 70 cents of every new dollar went to debt reduction until we got our financial house in order; the next 30 cents goes to infrastructure, it's not Democrat or Republican. That's American.
SCHIEFFER: You know, Senator, after the Newtown massacre, you worked very hard to get a rewrite and tighten up the background checks on people before they bought weapons. You lost -- it came to a vote and you lost by six votes. Now we've had this awful thing at the Washington Navy Yard. Do you have any idea -- do you plan to bring that back or is there going to be any movement to try to tighten up these background checks?
MANCHIN: Bob, first of all, my prayers and thoughts go out to these families. It's just horrific. These crimes and these mass crimes like this, it's just horrific what it does to our society, but think what it does to those families. So all of our hearts and prayers and thoughts go out to them. Next of all, this is not background -- I mean, this is not gun control, what myself and Pat Toomey put forward. Strictly, it's a common sense what we call "gun sense" background check. We want to know, through a commercial transaction, are -- do you have a criminal record? Have you been adjudicated from serious mental illness? Or are you a terrorist? We should know those things.
SCHIEFFER: Well, are you going to try to put some new emphasis on that?
MANCHIN: Not unless there's a movement. You know, I'm not going to go out there and just beat the drum for the sake of beating the drum. There has to be people willing to move off the position they've taken. They've got to come to that conclusion themselves. I'm still talking to everybody and I welcome everyone's input, if they think that we can make some adjustments that make them comfortable. But this is something that, really, law-abiding gun owners understand, Bob. In West Virginia, 75 percent of West Virginians agree that background checks are common sense.
SCHIEFFER: Well, I wish you the best of luck with that. Thank you so much for being with us.
MANCHIN: Thanks for having me, Bob. I appreciate it.
SCHIEFFER: OK. We turn now to Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn. He's in Muskogee this morning.
And, Senator, before we get to this whole business about the threat to shut down the government, you are the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Do you have any information for us on this awful thing that's unfolded this morning in Nairobi?
COBURN: Well, I don't have any specifics, Bob, beyond what's in the press, other than this is another indication that soft targets is where Al Qaida is going, and they're not on the decline; they're on the rise, as you can see from Nairobi.
SCHIEFFER: Senator, what is your message to House Republicans this morning who passed this budget that we can't continue government operations and funding the rest of the government unless we defund Obamacare?
COBURN: Well, I think it's a great attempt to raise the issue of some of the weaknesses and the problems with Obamacare, but it's not -- it's not a tactic that we can actually carry out and be successful, and I am sure that the Senate is going to move that bill forward. You know, the ironic thing, Bob, is that the answer now in the Senate, by those who proposed this strategy, is to filibuster the very bill they said they wanted. And that's what's wrong with the tactic. We don't have the ability, both according to CRS, nor politically do we have the ability to put a total stop and defund Obamacare. It would be nice if we did. I'd be in the fight. So I think they're going to get a chance again this next week to vote again and send us something different than that, because Harry Reid and the votes are in the Senate that this is going to be changed and sent back to the House.
SCHIEFFER: So there is no way -- what you are saying this morning, there is no way that this could possibly pass in the Senate. And so why did they do this, do you think?
COBURN: Well, there was a tremendous demand among special interests to try to prevent this bill from totally being implemented because of the dangers to our country, the ultimate costs. I agree with them that, if we could do this, we should do it, but we can't. And the political reality -- you know, tactics and strategies ought to be based on what the real world is, and we do not have the political power to do this. And so we're not -- we are not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one House of Congress, tell the president that we're not going to fund any portion of this, because we can't do that.
SCHIEFFER: What -- what do you think the fallout from this is going to be? Some people are going so far as saying that Republicans might lose control of the House next time, the reaction might be so severe, because there is no question, I think this time around, don't you agree that it will be Republicans who will take the blame if by some chance the House -- the government was shut down? I, like you, do not believe that will happen, but I don't see any good coming out of this for Republicans.
COBURN: Well, I think the exercise is fine. I don't think we will shut down the government. I think right now, with our economy where it is, the lack of confidence in our country, we actually have a crisis of confidence in our country right now, both in Congress and with the president. We have got trillions of dollars sitting on the sideline that aren't being invested. We are not going to shut the government down. What we -- it takes away from the real focus. The real focus is the $250 billion to $300 billion Senate that's totally wasted every year by Congress in the federal government, and what we ought to be is about that. And, you know, we have changed 14 times, we have made changes to ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, and we need to make more. I would love to stop it and send it in a direction where we still have the safety net and really have competitive pricing for health care and transparency but we are not going to get a chance to do that. So the real issue is to not talk about something that Republicans can win on, which is, for the first time since the end of the Korean War we will have actually decreased discretionary spending in this country two years in a row, which is a real achievement, and we haven't even touched the surface of the waste and fraud that is out there.
SCHIEFFER: There was a very serious incident as you well know at the Washington Navy yard last week, Senator. What are we going to do about that? I mean, you know, I know there's a big argument over gun control and all of that, but it seems to me the argument should be about how do we keep weapons out of the hands of deranged people? And I don't see us making any progress on that.
COBURN: I agree, Bob. You know, that was my greatest disappointment over the gun debate. We had a great -- some great amendments. There are things we can do. The first thing is when people are having auditory hallucinations and they are telling that to people in the V.A., and they are not doing something to actually interchange with that, it sounds to me like the history that a complete mental status as a physician, a complete mental status exam should have been carried out. We would have seen some of these problems. You know, we have to make it where the health care professionals in this country, when they see somebody that is having symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia, that they can act on that by notifying the do not sell list so that people can't buy a gun. He bought a gun in spite of the fact that, at several interchanges, people were aware of his psychosis. The other question is, is how did he walk into the Navy yard with a shotgun?
SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, Senator, that is a question that nobody right now has been able to answer. Thank you so much.
COBURN: You bet. Thank you, Bob.
SCHIEFFER: And we are here now with Arizona Congressman Matt Salmon, one of the House Republicans who voted in favor of eliminating funding for the president's health care program as a condition for keeping the government running. Well, Congressman, we just had a conservative Democrat and a Republican in the Senate both say there is no way, no how, that this is going to get done in the Senate and, you know, other people all week have been comparing this to a kamikaze attack, a suicide mission. Why did you do it?
SALMON: Well, Bob, let me throw out a couple of other examples. Three weeks ago I think everybody in this country thought it was a fait accompli we were going to bomb Syria, but the voice of the American people was heard and we didn't bomb Syria. In fact, the president is over negotiating now with Vladimir Putin to ensure that we take care of that issue --
SCHIEFFER: If I may say so, Congressman, Putin can't help us on this one.
SALMON: Well, I find it ironic that the president would negotiate with Vladimir Putin, but he won't negotiate with the Republicans in the House of Representatives, I think the American people might find that a tad ironic, too. Also I will point out that back in I believe 1996, '97, we sent welfare reform to President Clinton; he vetoed it. Nobody believed that welfare reform could ever take place. The third time that we sent it to him, not only did he sign it but he also took credit for it. I think the voice of the American people is loudly being heard and they are saying that ObamaCare isn't going to work. They are afraid of it. They were promised they would be able to keep their health care. They are finding that is not true. They were promised that their insurance rates would go down; many of them are seeing them go up. In fact, most are seeing them go up. And I heard loudly and clear in the August recess that we want ObamaCare down.
SCHIEFFER: But I guess, Congressman, the point that we just heard being made -- and it has been made all week by a list of people as long as my arm --
SALMON: Right.
SCHIEFFER: -- a lot of Republicans, business leaders is, fight a fight that where you have some chance of winning. You are just wasting everybody's time by going through one of these exercises again to shut down the government. And I don't -- and I have seen no poll that thinks it is a good idea to shut down the government.
SCHIEFFER: We don't want to shut down the government. I want to make it clear, we want to shut down ObamaCare. The American people have made their voices clear; most of the polls that I have seen over the last few weeks have said, clearly, there is a majority of Americans that don't want ObamaCare. The president has postponed 41 out of 82 of the provisions of ObamaCare; he has given exemptions to big business, he has given exemptions to Congress. Why doesn't he give the same kind of exemptions to the hardworking American people?
(CROSSTALK)
SCHIEFFER: You know what's going to happen. I mean, you can write the script now, they are going to strip out this thing to not fund ObamaCare out of this bill in the Senate; they are going to wait till the very last minute. They're going to send it back over to the House and then you are going to have to vote on whether we just shut down the government.
SALMON: Well, I would hope that Senator Reid would take the voice of the American people seriously, that they would seriously try to -- if they can't come up with the total defunding of ObamaCare, then come up with another proposal, but have a straight-up vote on the floor. That is all we are asking. This is what the American people, (inaudible), they have made their voice loud and clear, and we are simply trying to enact the will of the people.
SCHIEFFER: But this is not the land of wishful thinking. This is the land of what is real and what is going to happen. And even if you pass this, the president would veto it and there are certainly not 67 votes in the Senate to override his veto. It is law.
SALMON: Well, I would hope that the president would value keeping the government open over preserving a law that most Americans are against.
SCHIEFFER: Let me also ask you about this shooting that we had. We had Gabby Giffords shot, again, a deranged person with a gun. I don't see much happening on that front. Do you thing the Congress -- do you feel any responsibility to do anything about that?
SALMON: I think that ultimately, as Senator Coburn just said, there are mechanisms to ensure that people who have serious mental illnesses don't get guns. There are tons of laws on the books that address this fact as well. I think we have a crisis in America when it comes to dealing with serious mental illness, and we should focus on that.
SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, Congressman, thank you so much.
SALMON: Thank you.
SCHIEFFER: Appreciate you coming by. SALMON: Thank you very much.
SCHIEFFER: Back in a minute with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: With the Russians and the United States now working together on getting rid of Syria's chemical weapons and with Iran's new leader headed to the U.N. with peace feelers, I thought it was time to check in with Henry Kissinger. And as he has often done during 60 years on the world stage, the former secretary of state had some valuable insights. I found him less than enamored with the process that got the United States and Russia to the same place on Syria's weapons, but now that we are there, he is optimistic the plan might actually work.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HENRY KISSINGER, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: There could be quite a good outcome, because if we get the chemical weapons, if this then becomes a basis for a transition in Syria that leads to relative peace. Then at the end of the day, however tortuously we arrived at this conclusion, it will have served the interests of the world.
SCHIEFFER (voice-over): Will Syria really go along with this?
KISSINGER: Based on no inside knowledge, my guess would be that they will comply with 90 percent of what they are supposed to do. And that they may hold back a little, but the risk of holding anything back is very great.
SCHIEFFER: Can we trust the Russians here?
KISSINGER: You can trust the Russians to pursue their own interests.
SCHIEFFER: And Kissinger believes Putin has decided getting these weapons out of Syria is in Russia's interests. As for the visit of Iran's President Rouhani to the UN next week, Kissinger is not sure the time is right for a meeting between the president and the Iranian leader just yet. But he believes the Iranians should be taken seriously and welcomes a strong diplomatic effort by the United States.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SCHIEFFER: On part two of our broadcast this morning, we will have a lot more of the Kissinger interview on that and other topics, plus why he believes Russian President Putin decided it was time to work with the United States on the Syrian problem. I will be back in a moment with some personal thoughts. Stay with us.
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SCHIEFFER: I can't remember how many times over the past year that I have said I have never seen anything like this, but as I watch congress turn away from so many things it should be doing and revert to yet another rerun of let's shut down the government, I find myself saying it again -- I have never seen anything like this. There is a reason that last week seemed to make no sense. It made no sense. The Wall Street Journal told House Republican firebrands not to do it, Republican strategist Karl Rove told them not to do it, the business community said don't, Senate Republicans said don't, but they did. My question, if they shut down the government, will congress shut down too? Will it furlough itself and stop its own paychecks? They don't like Obamacare. We get that. I have a lot of problems myself with the process of how it became law, but it is the law and Republicans don't have the votes to kill it. So wouldn't it be wiser to fight that fight when you have a chance to win? There are just too many other vital issues to deal with. The country is going broke, not only by those social programs but our national defense must be drastically scaled back unless something is done soon. In the Kabuki theater that is Washington, the firebrands have made their point, again. But time's awasting, it is time now for all sides to get to work. Back in a minute.
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SCHIEFFER: Welcome back to Face the Nation. In the long history of America, few men have had the influence of Henry Kissinger. For at least 60 years, powerful people have asked what does Henry think? And he has never been shy about telling them.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr. Henry Kissinger...
SCHIEFFER: He first appeared on this broadcast on November 10, 1957. He was a Harvard professor and he had just written a book called "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy."
KISSINGER: The point is that the Soviet Union possesses a growing nuclear stockpile and that the choice between whether a war is going to be conventional or nuclear is no longer up to us.
SCHIEFFER: Kissinger would go on to be Richard Nixon's national security adviser. He received the Nobel Prize for getting peace talks started on Vietnam, was point man for the opening to China, and guided the effort to forge new arms agreements with the Soviet Union. The media loved him. He became secretary of state and as Watergate exploded, kept American foreign policy together at a time when America had never been more vulnerable. As an elder statesman, he is still working to eliminate nuclear weapons and his advice is still eagerly sought by world leaders. When we sat down, what I wanted to know was why all of sudden did Russian President Putin want to work with the United States on Syria?
KISSINGER: I would think his biggest security problem is radical Islam. And he does not want the United States to look totally irrelevant in the Middle East, because otherwise he would be stuck with having to deal with radical Islam. So there is part of this competition that is partly inherent in the Russian-American relationship. There is also a necessity for the selfish interests of both sides for cooperation, and especially if one looks at the long-term situation of Russia, its long frontiers and covering a large land mass. In that sense, one can trust him. But not in the sense that he has suddenly been converted to our point of view.
SCHIEFFER: Where do you see this going?
KISSINGER: Well, I have been in the minority that have believed that focusing Syria policy on the removal of Assad was not the best way to go. It did not seem to me to be a fight between Assad and the people, it was a fight between the Alawite Shia group and the Sunni group. And therefore the removal of one man would not solve the problem, but the coexistence of these two groups is an element of peace and therefore, paradoxically, a total victory for one side would lead to the high probability of a massacre. I think we now have a possibility that we can talk about the element of peace and that Russia and we, together with other interested countries, can distill out of this chemical removal -- removal of chemical weapons, some sort of peace process.
SCHIEFFER: The visit of Iran's new leader to the U.N. this week, and his recent declaration that Iran will never build a nuclear weapon, has prompted some to say the president should push for a face- to-face meeting.
Kissinger says, not just yet.
KISSINGER: Iran has been building with great energy a nuclear program, and I would be more at ease if the meeting of the president occurred at the end of some diplomatic achievement, but I can see the temptations.
SCHIEFFER: With so many common interests, Kissinger believes the United States and Iran can resolve their differences, but if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, the Middle East would be vastly different.
KISSINGER: The security element for countries in the region would be -- would be totally changed. It is not just for Israel, which would be, of course, directly under the gun, but countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, would have enormous temptations, to which they would succumb, to get some kind of nuclear capability. So if we want to stop a nuclear arms race and if one really wants to have a more tranquil region, then Iran should not have nuclear weapons.
SCHIEFFER: Kissinger says government gridlock and things like the stop and start decision-making process on Syria caused the world to look on America with some uncertainty. Still, he is optimistic about America's place in the world.
KISSINGER: We are on the way to solving the energy problem -- not just solving it, but becoming a major factor in the energy situation of the world. Other countries like China and even Russia have enormous challenges that they set themselves of concentrating on domestic affairs. So if we can get our economy going in which, again, the energy situation helps, which in turn will help to return some manufacturing to the United States, if we are a chess player and then you have two hands here, the rest of the world or the United States, you would play the American hand. But it requires that we have an understandable direction and with some unity.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SCHIEFFER: Henry Kissinger. Here to talk about what he had to say this morning and more on all of what we have discussed on the broadcast this morning, our panel. And we want to start by congratulating Nancy Gibbs, who was named managing editor of TIME magazine last week. She has been here on FACE THE NATION many times. Her colleague, Bobby Ghosh, the TIME international editor. We also have chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times David Sanger with us this morning. And own political director John Dickerson. Bobby and David, let me start with you, because I know both of you have been getting ready for this U.N. session to get started, the Iranians coming here and so forth. First, David, Kissinger seemed -- I was a little bit surprised that he is fairly optimistic about this Syrian deal that he thinks it might work.
DAVID SANGER, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: He does, and, you know, just in the past 24 hours, Bob, the Syrians have turned in the first piece of homework they were given, which was an accounting of their chemical weapons stockpiles. We haven't seen it publicly yet but from what we have heard about it, it sounds like it is at least credible. Now the hardest question then is what do they do for the next step, when they've got to let the inspectors in, show them where it all is, and then get very much on this very rapid effort to disarm them. I don't know anybody who believes that Syria can get disarmed over the next year, which is what the agreement calls for. But as long as they are in the process, I think it is probably very difficult for them to launch a chemical attack on anybody. And so in that case it may have a good deal of deterrence under way.
SCHIEFFER: And, Bobby, let me ask you about what Dr. Kissinger said on the Iranians. He says maybe not right now on a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. What are your Syrian -- I mean, your Iranian sources telling you? Do they want a meeting right now? Where are they on all of this? Are they serious with these feelers they are putting out, do you think?
BOBBY GHOSH, INTERNATIONAL EDITOR, TIME: Well, it's something like a handshake, and they would like more, but they also -- David and I, we have been seeing more of the Iranians in the last few days than we have had in the last five years. And there is clearly a big push to take advantage of this moment, to present Rouhani as the kinder, gentler face of Iran. And the change in tone is very important .. And it is not to be taken lightly. That having been said, I think Kissinger is right that there -- it has to be more than language. They have to show some more good faith before they can get a meeting. I think there has been a change in tone from the administration as well, a little more subtle, perhaps, so the total exchanges are where I think they ought to be. But now something concrete needs to be brought to the table. The Iranians have to show that they are serious. They have offered to help out with Syria, but I think we are -- we probably don't need them for that at the moment. The central issue is their nuclear program. What can they do to reassure us, their neighborhood, and the rest of the world?
SCHIEFFER: Well, David, what do you think has caused this change?
SANGER: Well, the main thing that has caused it, Bob, is that -- this is one of those rare moments where international sanctions have worked. The Iranians have seen their oil export revenue drop by more than half, their currency has crashed. They can't get their ships around to a lot of places in the world. And they are suffering. And that has made a difference. Now, the big question, as Bobby suggests, is do we see a concrete change? When President Rouhani was last dealing with the West, he was a nuclear negotiator. And Iran had somewhere between 100 and 200 centrifuges running. These are the machines that spin uranium. They now have 18,000. They are not all producing. And the big question is, can the United States get off of its formal position that not one centrifuge spins and allow something of a capability? And can the Iranians agree to dismantle some of what they built so the U.S. can go forward knowing that if Iran ever did run for a bomb it would have a year or two's notice? If you can get to that kind of thing, and we are hearing things like that from both sides, then maybe you could see what the out lines of a deal would look like.
SCHIEFFER: Rouhani says he -- that Iran does not want and is not pursuing a nuclear weapon. Does anybody take that at face value?
SANGER: They may not want an actual weapon, they may want the capability, this threshold capability to be able to build one in a short period time. We don't know what President Obama's position is on that. He's only said he would stop them from getting a weapon. We know what the Israeli position is, which is being a few weeks or a few months from a weapon is as good as having one. And I think that is where the president is going to have a hard time keeping his alliance together, which is stopping the Iranians from not only having a weapon, but having a short-term capability to build one.
SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, Nancy now that we have let Bobby and David untangle or try to help us understand this, Iran's nuclear capabilities, I want you and John to untangle what is going on on Capitol Hill right now.
GIBBS: Well, it's almost -- it's the same thing, watch what they do, not what they say. We've seen from Speaker Boehner that he can't control what his caucus is doing, and in a way the president can't either. This was s really the week where the Senate collapsed, the president wasn't able to get his choice for Fed chairman through, Speaker Boehner can't control the suicide wing of his caucus. So if you are taking bets about whether the government is going to shut down, I don't think you would lose money, the White House itself says they think 50-50.
SCHIEFFER: Really? Do you think so, John?
DICKERSON: I think that it looks bad now. And, you know, John Boehner joked the president was willing to deal with Vladimir Putin and not willing to deal with the House Republicans. Vladimir Putin has more control than John Boehner does. And that is part of the problem here. I think that in the end, though, John Boehner doesn't want to shut down. And the question now, the thing to watch, the real moment will come, the House conservatives have gained control of the process so far. It goes to the Senate. The Senate will cut down this measure for continuing funding the government. Then it comes back into John Boehner's lap. Then that is the crucial question. Does John Boehner suddenly get the support of his conservatives again, or does he then have to go to Democrats and say I will need your help to pass this funding measure that will continue funding of the government. The reason John Boehner doesn't want to -- need Democrats is not just that it will anger his conservatives, he doesn't want to give away that leverage. One vote you get from a Democrat that means that Democrat can then say OK, well I want this, that and the other thing in this funding measure. So that is right on John Boehner's head. And the choice for him will be shut down the government or get something that can pass out of the House of Representatives.
SCHIEFFER: And my guess is that in the end, Nancy, that is what will happen. I cannot believe that we would actually shut down the government.
GIBBS: But then we just hit the next role with the debt ceiling vote and there the stakes are even higher.
SCHIEFFER: And -- which leads me to the next point, we have wasted another, what, two or three weeks here. I mean and that seems to be what happens here in Washington. I mean, all of these things are happening, but congress seems somehow divorced from reality. And in the end, nothing happens on Capitol Hill.
DICKERSON: Well, it is on that point, Bob, that what we saw here in the split in the Republican Party is a little bit different than what we have seen before. The debate in the Republican Party has been between the establishment and those who represent the grass roots. What you saw this week was, really, members of the grass roots, Republican grass roots, Republican Senators who were brought into office by, like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, he is a Tea Party guy, ran against Obamacare. He was saying this plan from House conservatives was crazy. Why? Because it -- because first of all it will never get passed in Senate, this tying defunding Obamacare with the funding of the federal government. But Senator Johnson and other Republicans were saying this muddles the argument. Obamacare was already unpopular. Now you're kind of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory. The president was in trouble. Now we are giving him a chance to paint us as kind of totally over the edge. Their argument is if there of if there is just a funding debate, the Republicans are on much better grounds. And that's the debate they want to have. But they've got to get this mix of Obamacare out of the way so they can go back to saying let's just cut government spending. That's where they feel like they have the strongest argument.
SCHIEFFER: All right. We're going to take a little break here and come back and talk about this more in a minute.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) SCHIEFFER: Amongst other things this week, big story coming up in New York magazine tomorrow about Hillary Clinton. And basically Nancy what the story says is she says she's not running, but you know what, she is running.
GIBBS: She has been saying that all along and everyone else has been saying, yes, sure all along so in that sense nothing has changed. But it was interesting hearing her talk about how much she is enjoying being a private citizen. And then you look at her schedule and who she is talking to and the pace she is keeping up and it doesn't seem very private and it certainly seems like it is...
SCHIEFFER: You know what I found interesting in the piece, it was also almost like they are throwing Bill Clinton under the bus on this, that this will be Hillary's campaign and Bill will not play a major role.
DICKERSON: Well, remember what major role he played in President Obama's campaign at the convention. You know he will play a major role in this campaign. I thought another thing that was interesting in that piece was Hillary Clinton said running for president now, it's -- we get a president and then suddenly everyone is looking over their shoulder at the next president and that is something that she suffers from, because it is three years before the contest, but people are already looking to her. She has to deal with this question constantly. And there is a period where people might just get sick, we get kind of sick of people in front of us all the time and even if she tried tries to sequester herself, we're still having -- everybody is still having the conversation. That is a political issue, because people will maybe get a little fatigued. But it's also a governing issue, people now when they hear President Obama speak they think we have heard a lot of him, imagine what it would be like for her to run and then have to govern, having been in front of people for years and years as a candidate and so much so for her she has the two balances with this exposure she is getting, whether she wants it or not.
SCHIEFFER: I think that is a very good point to make. David, what is congress going to be able to get to this year we know we are going to go through this year? We know we're going to go through this Kabuki theater on shutting down the government. There are some pretty serious things out there that need to be dealt with.
SANGER: You know, you said before that they wasted three weeks in this. You know, you could argue that we have now gone through basically the past three years without addressing many of the issues you were discussing in the first half of the show.
SCHIEFFER: The Defense Department right now is operating under the sequester rules. A few months ago we were sitting around this table and couldn't imagine sequester going on for a few months, now the assumption inside the Pentagon is that the sequester will continue fully into next year. Now, is that the end of the world? No, but what it means is, that you are not debating how you would try to orient the Defense budget toward the threats of the future, whether you want to put more into drones or cyber or whatever and less into big, old Cold War weapon systems or what the size of the force should be. Instead you are doing these across-the-board cuts which everybody agrees, Republicans and Democrats and certainly those in the Pentagon, is probably the stupidest way to go about cutting a budget rather than setting priorities.
SCHIEFFER: Yeah, but it is almost saying the executive branch and the congressional branch have lost control of setting priorities for this country. How does the rest of the world think of us on this on this, Bobby? Dr. Kissinger said in that interview with uncertainty, and that was certainly an understatement.
GHOSH: There is a sense that important, profound events are taking place in the realm of foreign policy and the American voice is not heard or when it is heard, we are not exactly sure what America is saying because one day the president says something and the next day his secretary of state says something slightly different. And for next week congress says something just completely out of left field. There are important things apart from domestic issues that are affected by this. As we discussed at the start of this panel, Syria, Iran, these questions will keep coming back And the president and the United States will keep coming, over the next few months, will keep coming to very important forks in the road and if he is distracted, if congress is not paying attention, I feel that we are going to see more of this -- less of the world will feel that America has lost its place as the leader of nations.
GIBBS: You know, especially as we get to the debt ceiling fight, remember what happened last time in the summer of 2011 when we were there, Standard & Poor's downgraded us, consumer confidence collapsed. Economists said it prolonged the recession, just the possibility of a default. If we come up to another of these, you know, midnight-hour votes on the debt ceiling, the global repercussions of that at a time like this, I think, are very, very serious.
SCHIEFFER: And, you know, I think the point you make is such a good one, because we spend so much time, and I'm as guilty of it as others, trying to assess does this hurt the Republicans or does this hurt the Democrats? And sometimes we forget to factor in does this hurt the country? What kind of a shape does this leave the country in? And I think that's where we ought to focus more.
DICKERSON: Well, that's why you had the Chamber of Commerce talk about business and jobs, saying to Congress, don't go through another one of these nightmares of either whether it's on funding the government or on the debt ceiling. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, said the same thing, don't do this again. Because what's not getting taken care of are all the issues we talked about. Immigration is another big one that's not getting taken care of. But what's also not getting taken care of is the economy. Not only are bills not being addressed but this puts a huge iron, you know, weight on top of the economy as Washington fishtails all over the place. And that hurts economic growth.
SCHIEFFER: Do you think this could really hurt Republicans politically? Because my sense is they don't feel they're vulnerable. They feel that this will not hurt them.
DICKERSON: It hurts them only in this way, if it's a protracted and long issue and problem. If this is shut down for a couple of days, it might not. But what these conservatives are doing is filling out the caricature Barack Obama has been painting for the last two years, when he said, "I can't negotiate with them because they're controlled by this conservative wing." That's what you're hearing some Republican senators say out loud.
SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, we'll be right back.
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SCHIEFFER: We want to remind you to tune into "CBS This Morning" tomorrow and every day this week, for this matter, especially Tuesday. Former President Bill Clinton will join Norah and Charlie to talk about everything from the Clinton Global Initiative to whether or not Hillary Clinton is going to run for president.
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SCHIEFFER: Well, that is it for us today, but before we go, we want to pay tribute to the 12 victims of last week's mass shooting at the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard.