MSNBC "Hardball" - Transcript

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: And now the man of the hour, the new Democratic leader on Capitol Hill, Steny Hoyer. Let‘s play HARDBALL.

Well, I am here with the winner today, a big win today. What was that vote one-something to eighty...

REP. STENY HOYER (D-MD), INCOMING MAJORITY LEADER: 146-89.

MATTHEWS: 146-89, and you knew all those people who voted for you?

HOYER: I hope.

MATTHEWS: Do you know all the ones that voted against you.

HOYER: We‘re finding out. Actually, no, Chris, we‘re moving on.

We‘re moving on.

MATTHEWS: Is this really a secret ballot? I‘m asking. Oh, yes, everybody is moving on when they win. When they lose they keep grudges. You have in your mind those who are loyal to you and have stuck with you.

HOYER: Big number.

MATTHEWS: And you know the ones that didn‘t?

HOYER: Actually, there weren‘t very many, as you can tell.

MATTHEWS: No, I think Murtha had his numbers off. There‘s no doubt about it.

HOYER: There weren‘t very many of them.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about your leadership and what your goals are. I‘m sure when you go to bed tonight, you put your head on the pillow, you‘re going to be thinking about the huge opportunity you have to lead, basically, the congressional opposition in this era. What are you going to try to get done?

HOYER: Well, I—you know, we pretty much set forth what we want to get done. We think there was a mandate for change, a mandate for a new direction, and that was our mantra, new direction.

Clearly, we set forth six things that we want to do in the short term:

9/11 Commission, minimum wage, college costs, start dealing with energy independence, do something on the prescription drugs, make negotiation possible, bring prices down, and then we‘re going to start dealing with Social Security and make sure it‘s there for people.

Obviously, the first things we‘re going to do, Chris, is we want to return honesty and hopefully civility to the House of Representatives. We think there has been very a confrontational, negative, non-inclusive Congress. We think that needs to be changed.

MATTHEWS: Are you going be kinder and more civil to the Republicans than they were to you?

HOYER: I hope so.

MATTHEWS: Is that your intention?

HOYER: It is my intention and it‘s Nancy Pelosi‘s intention, our speaker. And I think together we can accomplish that. I don‘t know who is going be elected to the leadership tomorrow in the Republican Party, but I can tell you that John Boehner and I and Roy Blunt and I, in my position as whip—minority whip—have had good relationships. We, obviously, have disagreed, but we‘ve had an ability to talk to one another.

MATTHEWS: I have heard that just a few years ago that when Newt Gingrich was speaker, he and Dick Gephardt, you friend and former colleague, never had one meeting in a room alone in a whole year. They were never—it was surrounding by a big bunch of people to sort of insulate them from each other.

HOYER: Chris, I think that‘s the case. As you know, Dick is a very close friend of mine and I was in the leadership with Dick Gephardt when, in 1994, we lost the House and Gingrich took over.

The story that I hear in talking to Dick was that he called the then-Speaker Gingrich early in the year and never got his phone call returned, and so he didn‘t call again and they had very, very few discussions. And the reason for that is Gingrich‘s premise was that cooperation was not helpful for his political strategy. He was a political strategist, and he didn‘t think that worked for him.

MATTHEWS: Let‘s talk a little HARDBALL here. The previous government of this place that you guys have overthrown in this election had a rule that they do no majority action without the majority of the leading party, for example, when it comes to Iraq and trying to carve some sort of negotiation with this administration of joint policy. Will you honor that deal that you will only make a deal with this administration if a majority of Democrats go along with it?

HOYER: Well, I think the probability is that will be the case. What we will not do is we will not prevent action that a significant majority of the House approves of. Hastert—Speaker Hastert, who I also got along with well, and get along with well.

But the hardball that they played, if you will, was that if the overwhelming majority of the party—if they, in effect, could not pass it themselves, they really were not interested in making accommodations to Democrats to make a less divisive piece of legislation.

MATTHEWS: I see.

HOYER: And one of the reasons for that was Tom DeLay wanted to have the hardest alternative to deal with the Senate. He did not trust the Republicans in the Senate, much less the Democrats.

MATTHEWS: So he wanted to drive a harder bargain.

HOYER: Yes.

MATTHEWS: But let me ask you this, to get back to the point. If the president comes up here and his idea of bipartisanship is to cherry-pick a minority of your party and try to bring them in—the Lieberman types, real conservatives—and bring them in on a deal, would you let that happen? Would you fight that?

HOYER: I don‘t think that will be our objective and we do not want to see that happen. Nancy and I, as you know, had lunch with the president last week. He was very gracious, very congratulatory of Nancy, very cognizant of the historic nature.

MATTHEWS: Did he seem to prefer you to her?

HOYER: No, no, no.

MATTHEWS: He didn‘t try to say you‘re a moderate Democrat, I can work with you and Nancy might be cut out of this thing?

HOYER: Divide and conquer you mean?

MATTHEWS: Yes.

HOYER: No, he did not do that.

MATTHEWS: He didn‘t try to do that?

HOYER: No, and that is not going happen. It‘s not going to happen because Nancy and I, while we may have differences, know that we need to work together and want to work together for the success of our party. And we know that Iraq is a critical issue not just for the Democratic Party, but for the American public. Now, that was one of the big reasons for this win, and they want to see a change of policy in Iraq.

Now, the—obviously, Baker-Hamilton‘s coming down the road. We‘ll see what that says. Perhaps that will be—perhaps—a basis on which we can move towards some sort of consensus.

MATTHEWS: You think it‘s OK for your party having won a majority to wait for a Republican-dominated commission to give you leadership?

HOYER: No, no, no. I don‘t think that we‘re going to wait give them

give us leadership. What we‘re going to wait is for them to give the president of the United States a reason for changing his stay the course policy.

MATTHEWS: Can you reveal to us—or is it off the record—your conversations with Nancy after you won? Did she say good work or did she say I‘ll give you a year to prove yourself?

HOYER: No, she said we‘re going work together.

MATTHEWS: All right.

HOYER: That‘s what she said. We have not had a long discussion yet, but I just saw her at her reception and we said the same thing and we embraced. You know, again, we have known each other 40 years. We had this temporary disagreement, obviously, but we will get over that quickly. Why? Because we‘re going to move fast, and when you‘re moving fast, you are thinking about going forward, not what happened yesterday.

MATTHEWS: What is your sense of how important your record is here in the next year to how—whether the Democrats get the White House back?

HOYER: I think it‘s...

MATTHEWS: Do you see yourself as laying down a Democratic record that the country gets confidence in, and therefore is more likely to pick a Democrats president next time?

HOYER: I think the country expects us to do a job, and I think if the country sees us doing a job, Chris, and working in a bipartisan way to accomplish that job, they‘re going to be very pleased, and yes, I think it will help our presidential candidate.

MATTHEWS: OK, let‘s go to the ticklish things. You‘ve got the subpoena power now. You haven‘t had it since ‘94. If you look at history, the subpoena power was in the hands of the Republicans in ‘47-‘49. They used it. They caught one real communist, Alger Hiss. The rest of the time they just messed around.

The Watergate Congress was able to go after Nixon. The Republicans went after President Clinton with the impeach. Do you see any aggressive role there for the subpoena power with regard to, say, energy policy, with regard to how we got into Iraq? How aggressive will you party be in using that subpoena power?

HOYER: John Dingell and Henry Waxman are pretty energetic...

MATTHEWS: They‘re strong guys.

HOYER: ... pretty focused, and very smart. And they are experienced people that know how to investigate and get to the bottom of issues. We are going do that. We think that is the responsibility of the Congress. Checks and balances, we think, have eroded very substantially over the last six years. And the American public expects there to be somebody watching the store. That is our role and we are going do it.

We are not going do it in a got you way. We‘re going to do it in a way that looks at real problems, as you‘ve pointed out, so that we don‘t do them again, make the same mistakes twice.

MATTHEWS: Do you think you were told in the truth in the run-up to war in Iraq?

HOYER: I don‘t know the answer to that question, but it‘s...

MATTHEWS: Is it worth finding out?

HOYER: It is worth finding out, so if it was the intelligence community that misinformed the president, we need to know that. If it was, in fact, the president utilizing the information given to him by the intelligence community in a wrong way, we need to know that as well. The American people need to know that. So, yes, I think it‘s an important question for us to pursue.

MATTHEWS: Do you have any sense that the vice president may not be serving the full term?

HOYER: No.

MATTHEWS: I‘m just wondering that, because the president of the Untied States, when he said I wasn‘t going to get rid of Rumsfeld, said I‘m not going to get rid of Cheney. And then he got rid of Rumsfeld. I wonder if this is how he lays out his agenda, by saying who he‘s not going to dump.

HOYER: Well, I don‘t know about that, Chris.

MATTHEWS: It is odd, isn‘t it?

HOYER: There‘s somewhat of a Constitutional difference, you know? He can rid of Rumsfeld. Getting rid of Cheney may be more difficult under the Constitution.

MATTHEWS: How do you think your working relationship will be with the president?

HOYER: We‘ll see. The president indicated, as I say, when we were down there, he wanted to work together on those things that he thought we could. We specifically discussed immigration. I think he thinks he is going have an easier time dealing with the Democratic House, by far, than he had dealing with the Republican House.

MATTHEWS: Yes, but if you pass him one of these weak-willed immigration bills like Simpson-Mazzoli where all it does is give away independents—or what do you call them—citizenship cards, and does nothing about enforcement, what good is that?

HOYER: We are not going pass that kind of bill.

MATTHEWS: Because you‘ve talked to Simpson about it. He knows it was a joke.

HOYER: Yes, we‘re not going to pass that kind of bill.

MATTHEWS: OK, good. Let me ask you...

HOYER: Let me say, I think there is general agreement that the borders have to be secure. We cannot afford to simply have...

MATTHEWS: How about sanctions against employers who hire people cheap and illegally?

HOYER: I think we need that. I think we need that.

MATTHEWS: OK, let me ask you about the president.

HOYER: But we also need guest worker, and we also need to do something with the 11 or 12 million people who are here.

MATTHEWS: I agree. That‘s true, and everybody agrees. Let me ask you about the president, because you‘re in that room and you have that amazing ability. The morning after a congressional election when your party has taken back at least the House and it looks like you‘ve got a 50-50 shot at the Senate at that point—the Virginia thing wasn‘t decided—you are sitting in the Oval Office with the president of the United States, and he is looking at you as the winners and he‘s the loser.

HOYER: Right.

HOYER: He said, You thumped us badly. He said, You really gave us a.

MATTHEWS: Did he treat you with respect?

HOYER: Yes.

MATTHEWS: He didn‘t treat you like the little kids coming in the room, with the little kids table next to the Thanksgiving table, like you guys are over at the card table and we are at the big table.

HOYER: I never got that feeling that he treated us exactly that way, but, clearly there was a difference. Clearly, this time he understand that it was not simply being polite, it was a necessity because we now have the ability to pass or defeat legislation, which we did not have then.

MATTHEWS: Does he get it in his gut and in his brain that you guys are, like it or not, his partners in government now? Or does he still think you have to meet his standards, like, I‘m still holding onto my principles and I‘m sure you will—in other words, I‘m not cutting any deals that violate anything I believe in. In other words, can you push this guy into something he doesn‘t want to do?

HOYER: In the past.

MATTHEWS: This president—I should say it with respect—can you make him do something he doesn‘t want to?

HOYER: -- he was dealing with a powerful lieutenant governor—he was dealing with a powerful lieutenant governor in Texas, obviously, that made common cause with him. I think it‘s yet to be tested. He‘s certainly expressed a desire to do just that. Whether he does it remains to be seen. This president has demonstrated he is pretty willful, he‘s pretty sure of himself and he‘s not likely to compromise. But we‘ll see.

MATTHEWS: Is he over his head? Is he in over his head? Does he have the ability to deal with the complexity of the situation we face in the world today, where you have the old Baathist people, you have the Shia, you got the Sunni, you‘ve got the jihadists, the relationship among Syria and Iran and Iraq, and the Jordanians and the Israelis. Has he got the mind power to put that together so we‘re better off in two or three years than we are now?

HOYER: I think the answer to that is—I think he.

MATTHEWS: We are getting worse off, obviously.

HOYER: He is not sure that he has that kind of brain power around him, and I think that is why he is now reaching out to people with more experience who historically, during the course of his administration, he felt were too moderate, on the one hand, and on the other hand, people not as decisive as he wanted. Now he is thinking to himself, I need somebody else.

MATTHEWS: Okay, let‘s move ahead here. If Gates doesn‘t pass muster because he gets caught in the loop on Iran-Contra or something, would you go along with Duncan Hunter as a fallback for him? Would you support him for Defense chief?

HOYER: I am not going anticipate that appointment.

MATTHEWS: I think it is going be a tough round of hearings on Gates up here. Your party‘s out for blood, and your not going let Gates skip in there, just because you‘re faced with Rumsfeld when you‘ve got another choice you can go with.

HOYER: That is the Senate decision, but I think clearly Gates is going to get careful consideration, sure, and properly so.

MATTHEWS: Are you going be a great leader for many years to come?

HOYER: I am certainly not going say on your program I am going to be a great leader for many years to come!

MATTHEWS: I hope you are.

HOYER: I‘m going to try to be the best leader I can be.

MATTHEWS: I think you‘re great to come on here the night you won. You‘re the hottest hand in town. You are going to get a lot of friendship tonight. And beware of new friends.

HOYER: Thank you, Chris. You are an old friend, and I need to beware of you.

MATTHEWS: Exactly. We had Jack Murtha last night, we have you, and if anybody ever beats you, we‘ll have them on.

HOYER: All right.

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