Part Three: DeMint on Obamacare and the election

Q: It’s a larger list

DeMint: We’ve laid it out, it’s a train wreck.

Q: A train wreck. It is. So the unhappy question is, if Obama is president what will be your game plan?

DeMint: Well it does get tiring to just get up everyday and stick your fingers in the dike and just try and minimize the damage. That’s what I feel like I am doing most days now. Just trying to stop bad things from happening. If he is president again than the opportunity to do good things is almost off the table. It will again just be an issue of how can we hold our own, how can we minimize the damage. I think I president that has done what he has done in his first term, unleashed and flexible in his second term is a frightening thing. And if we don’t have the Senate, we’re going to lose every battle, it is just a matter of to what degree we lose it.

That’s why the Senate to me is so important. If Barack Obama is still president, the only thing between him and outright socialism is gonna be the Senate. So what we’ll see is a lot of the campaign will be directed on those things that are going to happen in the lame duck session. Obama will say, “they are going to raise taxes on the poor,” all this stuff and “cut benefits for seniors” all that stuff will come out and we’ll be saying, “If you want your taxes to go up just reelect Obama. If you want your gases prices to keep going up just reelect Obama.”

Q: If things do work out well on the Senate side, and you take the Senate in November, are you at all worried that current leadership could cut a deal with Obama on taxes before the reinforcements arrive in January?

DeMint: It really just depends on the magnitude of the election and if there is some type of clear mandate where we see going down the stretch the energy that we saw last time. I think will see it, it’s just going to be different. Our fundraising is 300% higher than it was. FreedomWorks, HeritageAction, they’ll all tell ya the same thing. The people who had signs at rallies last time are now organized into so many existing groups as well as formalized some Tea Party groups. So I think the energy will be out there. It may not be as visible, as far as rallies, but if we are elected with a clear mandate to balance the budget and elect some of those conservatives and get the majority in the Senate, I think our leadership will have to look at things differently and not concede on these points, particularly in a lame duck.

So I am hoping that we wait until we get the majority before we do things. Unless Democrats are willing to work with us. We need to do tax reform, we don’t need to just extend what we’ve got. What we’ve got is a mess.

Q: Last night Senator Rubio endorsed Mitt Romney on Hannity. You’ve said Romney is a true conservative. Endorse?

DeMint: Well I’ve said I don’t question his conservative credentials. And I am not going to endorse. I just want to stop the beating. If the candidates were selling a vision of America its fine to keep it going, but now its deteriorated into name calling and we need to get onto focussing on Obama. But I think Romney is um instinctively not necessarily a political conservative, he is instinctively a problem solver. And I think we’ve seen some pretty good conservatives like Reagan take that same journey, where they were not necessarily conservative but the more they spoke about it, wrote about it, the more solid they got.

And when you have a conversation with Romney like I did last week, you realize that the last four years have been very clarifying. And his well developed second language now is conservative thought and limited government. And a pragmatic conservatism in the sense that he understands the problem with the debt and the potential problem with our monetary system. And I think he’s got a good grasp on the problem. So from a pragmatic standpoint he knows that we have to eliminate some agencies and make some pretty serious changes.

So just talking to him reinforced that this is a man who understands the problem, and I don’t question his character. He has demonstrated leadership and success in all areas of his life.

And all the other candidates I like. Rick’s been a friend of mine. He was an ally on Social Security reform on personal accounts. And I’ve told all the candidates that while Ron Paul is not going to be our president, there is a lot of common ground with constitutional limited government, individual liberty, with conservative and libertarians. We need to bring those together under the Republican umbrella. Ron Paul makes a lot of sense on some aspects of our monetary system that we need to listen to ‘cause I frankly think that that is a danger that may even be greater than our debt.

Q: Did anything that you might have heard during the last three days in the Supreme Court Obamacare deliberations jump out at you?

DeMint: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve had more hope for our country in a long time because I feel like what they are deliberating is whether or not we are going to have a constitutional government. Because if you can justify this mandate on a national scale, I don’t see anything that the Congress could not legitimize. And if they actually do overturn and throw out Obamacare, I think what is going to happen is, it is almost like a jolt to us in the Congress that there is a limit to what we can do.

Frankly it’s disturbing that we never mention the Constitution or enumerated powers on anything that comes up. And you’ve got Congressmen who think we need to get involved on whether we need to have a bowl system or playoff system in college. We need a jolt. There really is nothing that is off limits. If you look at the bills that are introduced, it’s like, we see a problem, let’s get a solution. That’s what we’re here for, to do good things.

So I think if the Court actually throws this out then it may give us a fresh start in a way and it would be particularly good for a new president who can begin to talk about constitutional limited government, and the appropriate role of government. And if you put that in the context of unsustainable debt there is some legitimacy to begin to devolve things to the states as I think was intended in the first place.

Justices as you know sometimes play devil’s advocate with themselves and it does not necessarily mean that that is their position, but some of the things Kennedy said, it would be hard to imagine him coming back and voting to keep Obamacare. I hope thats right. I hope we’re reading it right. I hope we don’t have other defectors that we don’t suspect. But this is a pretty big case.

Q: Did constitutional government come up when you were talking to Romney?

DeMint: Yeah. Now the constitutional limited government  is almost being forced on us. Because we know if all we do is go across and give everything a hair cut, cut education a little, cut health care a little, cut transportation a little bit, then we hurt everything. But if we let some of those things go, the states would actually have more money, with less of a federal burden, they would have more money to spend on health care if we block grant Medicaid at a lower level. More money on education if they get less from the federal government but more freedom to do it they way they want. You could look at a lot of things where we could actually improve public services while diminishing the federal role and saving money overtime. But if we hold onto it with all the rules and bureaucracy and the cost of administering the federal programs, we actually do more harm. There is not going to be more money for these programs over time.

There is a good fit and hopefully it will work together the need to move things out of Washington with the realization that this was supposed to be a limited government in the first place and then hopefully that will help us focus on the things we are supposed to do like defend the nation. And that is pretty consistent with the philosophies of most of the candidates that are running for president.

Q: Senator last night I threw open to Twitter, speaking of the health care law, I threw open to Twitter, “Hey we are going to be interviewing Jim DeMint, ‘What should we ask him?’” and one of the questions that came up was on health care. Why in the last two or three years have Republicans not unified around one alternative to replace it?

DeMint: Well because we don’t believe in one alternative to replace it. I mean we know there are things that we need to do to facilitate the ultimate goal which is for individuals to own their own policies, policies that they can keep from job to job and until the end of retirement. And some of the things we’ve talked about are part of a package of things that facilitates that happening.

Like individual deductibility of health insurance. It makes no sense that The Examiner gets to deduct it if they buy it, but if you buy it you can’t. Allowing associations to come together, small businesses to come together and buy insurance. There is no reason you can’t do that. And while we don’t want to step on the state’s right to regulate certain things, if there has ever been a case for some interstate commerce, it is to allow individuals to buy insurance anywhere in the country. When you allow state by state quasi monopolies, most states have one or two companies that dominate, the prices are jacked up much higher than they need to be. We can facilitate high risk pools at the state level for people with pre-existing conditions so people can get coverage without saying you have to cover everything and people can buy insurance after they get sick, which is what happens under the system they are talking about now.

There is kind of a package of things, but we have to agree on a goal that we want is for people to have their own health insurance. Instead of a mandate that forces that there are things we can do, under the umbrella of personal responsibility. If you show up in the emergency room and you can’t pay for it, and you have assets, you have a car, I think that once people learn, which I used to believe, I was always afraid to go a week without health insurance. You know I had my own small business and I thought, “If something happens to me this week and I don’t have health insurance, I lose everything I’ve worked for.” But that is not necessarily the case right now.

So there are things we can do that encourage people to be responsible and the thing that will do it more than anything else, and maybe this is getting into the weeds, is that if you could buy a plan that you could keep, like whole life insurance, that accumulates equity, if you don’t use it, that becomes an asset, bigger and bigger over time, then there is a reason to buy it when you are young and healthy.

I bought a whole life insurance policy when I was younger and it was expensive then but it looks real sweet now because the rates are locked in. And I think you’d see different kinds of products. But what you got now is no incentive for people to buy insurance, at least not to buy a policy that they can keep, and there really is no incentive for employers to do something this permanent because they know that employee may move on. So if we change that paradigm, I think you’ll see people investing in health insurance just as they do with other investments. That could be the best asset you have.

And what Paul Ryan is talking about with premium support, that fits into this because you arrive at retirement with a private plan, then instead of taking some government insurance plan, you get some equivalent value to continue paying for your own plan.

So there are good solutions to that. We don’t have to have a national health care system to make it work. In fact, no one could honestly believe that if they look at our track record that we could manage a national health plan.

I mean Cash for Clunkers went bankrupt in two weeks and that was just a used car program. Health care is much more complicated than that. So we are never going to have a perfect system, but it is an industry I worked in a lot before I came up here and I got some pretty strong ideas about how it could work.

Q: Senator if I could jump back to the presidential race, you sound more resigned to Romney at the top of the ticket. I wonder if having him at the top of the ticket might be an impediment to your chief goal which is to get a conservative senate.

First, its not resigned, I’m going to feel good if its Romney or Santorum or whatever, I think you’re going to see that Obama in the White House is a great unifying factor, I think you could pull somebody off the street and nominate him and you’re going to see some excitement. But I think that all of these candidates have made their case, become better candidates, its been a long grueling process, they survived it. So I’m going to be excited whoever it is, so my responses last week were not necessarily trying to target one candidate, because I’ve said I could be excited about all of them.

But I’m not exited about having a good president, frankly you could put Ronald Reagan in the White House right now, and if Harry Reid is majority leader, its just a waste of a good president.  That’s why its so important to me to tell everyone, “Hey folks, the president is important but really its the Senate stupid, (laughing) It’s the Senate, the Senate has been the black hole of good ideas ever since I came to Congress, even when we had the majority. It was just the club that took on the bacon. We’re close to changing that and if we get a few more solid conservatives if we have the majority, then the next president might actually get some good legislation.

Q: Senator you mentioned that the Tea Party would look a little different this year than 2010. What are some of the signs that are different?

Well first the press has pretty much taken “Tea Party” as a derogatory term, because every time I show up somewhere, its a Tea Party meeting even if it has nothing to do with the Tea Party. I’m a Tea Party senator when in fact I’ve been the same for 12-13 years and so, they use that because they try and marginalize these folks and so I think that a lot of them are operating under another name, like Freedomworks or Club for Growth or whatever, so I think that you’ll see them more organized as far as getting out the vote, that’s what when I travel around and I’m speaking with them that that’s what they appear to be doing and talking about, organizing, getting lists, trying to direct the Republican party instead of vice versa,  they’re not interested in joining the Republican party, they’re trying to change it and that’s really helpful in some ways and I think that you’ve seen some of the people that sign up to run in the Republican primaries, its not just the tea party and  the establishment sometimes we have two or three tea party. So its made it a little more complicated, some of these primaries are not as clear as they were last time, so I don’t think you’re going to see as many Republicans run who are any tea party.

No one is going to run, you don’t see anybody coming up here looking for the endorsement from the Senate Republican committee because they want to run in that genre, not necessarily under the Tea Party umbrella, but some of them do. So I think its there, its more organized, its more of a get out the vote effort, you know some of it is organized under social issues, under some right to life groups and things like that. Other things are libertarian bent but I think we’ve got a good mix within the Republican Party thats why whoever our nominee is has got to recognize that Ron Paul had some ideas, Santorum, Gingrich, that are attracting people and we need to we’re not alienating any of them as we go into the general election.