Note: Gerson represents the conservative voice, Shields is the liberal voice
Excerpts from transcript
MICHAEL GERSON, Washington Post columnist: Well, I think it would be fascinating, if it weren't so frightening.
We have a situation where about 10 percent of the Republican Caucus in the House wanted to humiliate their own speaker in order to get a vote on a balanced budget amendment that is symbolic and completely irrelevant to the process. I think that's a sign of weakness on the Republican part.
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JIM LEHRER (Editor, Newshour): Explain -- pick up on what you said earlier. Just explain it one more time, while this whole constitutional amendment thing is symbolic and it will have no effect at all on anything we're talking about now, that they're talking about.
MICHAEL GERSON: No, I completely agree with that.
You're instructing the Senate. The House is instructing the Senate to have a two-thirds vote in order to get a future increase in the debt deal for a constitutional amendment. I don't think you can instruct the Senate to do a two-thirds vote on the sun rising in the east effectively. They're not going to accept that under any circumstance. And so it was entirely symbolic.
JIM LEHRER: And that, even if they did get that vote, it then has to go to the -- there's a long process to amend the Constitution of the United States.
REMINDER: Constitutional Amendments require ratification by 3/4 of the States (Article V)
MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: It's illusionary. It's -- they're kidding themselves.
But it's a fig leaf that -- to bring on conservatives who are against the original plan, to give them sort of a rationale that they could go back to their people and say, we got this balanced budget.
Jim, it doesn't even say -- it doesn't say what the balanced budget amendment is. It says a joint resolution called a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It doesn't say what it is, whether it requires a two-thirds vote, as one of the proposed ones did. To raise any taxes at all, a two-thirds vote would be required.
So it's ludicrous, if it weren't so reckless. We're trifling right now with the well-being of the United States economy, which is in tough shape, and with the good faith and credit of this country, which has never been tampered with in 222 years.
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MICHAEL GERSON: Yes, Congress would have to vote against it.
So I think that the elements of a deal are here. You know, the problem from my perspective is, this is the easy stuff, because it doesn't deal with taxes, because it doesn't deal with entitlements. The question is -- it doesn't even solve the deficit problem. But it's been such a problem just to get the easy stuff.
The question is that the rating agencies, the credit rating agencies and others have, can they do the harder stuff right down the road? That, I think, is the real difficulty.
MARK SHIELDS: One of the things that hasn't been addressed, Jim, is -- and Republicans stand guilty of this, quite frankly -- this is the first time anybody has ever done this with the -- raising the debt ceiling.
JIM LEHRER: Use it to do...
MARK SHIELDS: Use it as a non-negotiable terrorist demand. And if anybody...
JIM LEHRER: Non-negotiable terrorist demand?
MARK SHIELDS: That's essentially -- that's essentially what was done in the House of Representatives.
If you put a penny...
JIM LEHRER: Paul Krugman in The New York Times this morning called it extortion.
MARK SHIELDS: Well, if you put a penny of revenue, a penny of revenue, if you even suggest that a registered nurse in an emergency room and a New York firefighter shouldn't pay taxes twice the rate of a hedge fund manager, we leave. We're not going to be a party to that. That's -- that's basically where they were.
But more important than that, to use this vehicle, to think this is only a one-time precedent and that next time that there's a Democratic Congress and a Republican president that this isn't going to be used again vengefully, I mean, you talk about the poisoning of the Washington well, this does it in spades.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree; the well is poisoned beyond...
MICHAEL GERSON: I think it helps poison the well.
Reference made in video: "The stranglehold on domestic policy" by Michael Gerson, Washington Post 7/28/2011
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