THE POWERHOUSE ROUNDTABLE ON
“THIS WEEK WITH GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS”
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2012
This transcript portion has been provided by ABC News "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"
On today’s Powerhouse Roundtable on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” political odd couple James Carville and Mary Matalin, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and ABC’s George Will and Matthew Dowd discussed the latest on the Supreme Court and gay marriage.
Sandy
Cannold is the executive producer. The program airs Sundays on the ABC
Television Network (check local listings). Visit the “This Week” website
to read more about the show at: www.abcnews.go.com/thisweek
Transcript:
STEPHANOPOULOS:
We got to take a break. Lots more roundtable ahead. We're going to
get their take on the Supreme Court and gay marriage. Plus, why did a
Tea Party star quit the Senate? What does it mean for the GOP? And
Hillary's next move. The world is her oyster now, but what does she
want?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON:
I'm, frankly, looking forward to returning to living a life that
enjoys a lot of simple pleasures and gives me time for family and
friends.
RYAN:
Marco is joining an elite group of past recipients for this award.
Two of us so far. I'll see you at the reunion dinner, table for two.
You know any good diners in New Hampshire or Iowa?
RUBIO:
Paul, thank you for your invitation for lunch in Iowa and New
Hampshire. But I will not stand by and watch the people of South
Carolina ignored.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS:
The joking and the jockeying have already begun for 2016. We're going
to get to that in a little bit with our roundtable. Let me reintroduce
everyone, George Will, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Matthew
Dowd, James Carville, and Mary Matalin.
I
do want to get to that, George. But, first, some big news out of the
Supreme Court on Friday. They took up two big gay marriage cases, one
on the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal benefits to couples
that are legally married in various states, but perhaps more
interestingly, they took up the Proposition 8 case, which banned gay
marriage in California, which at least leaves open the possibility that
they get to the underlying question, whether gay marriage is a
guaranteed right under the Constitution.
WILL:
As part of equal protection. Peter Finley Dunne, great American
humorist, created a man named Mr. Dooley, who famously said the Supreme
Court follows the election returns. This decision by the Supreme Court
came 31 days after an Election Day in which three states for the first
time endorsed same-sex marriage at the ballot box -- never happened
before -- Maine, Maryland, and the state of Washington.
Now,
the question is, how will that influence the court? It could make them
say it's not necessary for us to go here. They don't want to do what
they did with abortion. The country was having a constructive
accommodation on abortion, liberalizing abortion laws. The court yanked
the subject out of democratic discourse and embittered the argument.
They may say we don't want to do that, we can just let the democracy
take care of this.
On
the other hand, they could say it's now safe to look at this because
there is something like an emerging consensus. Quite literally, the
opposition to gay marriage is dying. It's old people.
STEPHANOPOULOS:
That is true. At the same time, James Carville, right now at least --
and this might argue for the split-the-difference position that George
talked about -- 41 states still outlaw gay marriage.
CARVILLE:
Yeah. And I think George's right. It depends on whether they're
going to go, you know, to allow this to happen. But, I mean, his larger
point is absolutely correct. The election just matters in profound
ways that we can't believe.
Look
in Salt Lake City, the 12 Apostles. The Mormon Church after the
election says, well, maybe we're going to change our position on
homosexuality is a choice, you're not born that way. I mean, the
effects of an election reverberate all the way through society. And
this is just one of these that did. I cannot believe that they took
this up. The fact that they took it up just tells me instinctively that
they're going to uphold some...
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS:
And, really, not just -- not just the election. We see it -- the
trend has been pretty clear here over the last dozen years. I want to
show this Pew poll, it shows right now, back in 2001, 57 percent of the
country opposed gay marriage, only 35 percent were for. This year, it's
crossed, the lines have crossed, 48 percent approaching, you know,
going above 50 percent, 48 percent now support gay marriage in the
country.
MATALIN:
Right, well, because Americans have common sense. There are important
constitutional, biological, theological, ontological questions relative
to homosexual marriage, but people who live in the real world say the
greatest threat to civil order is heterosexuals who don't get married
and are making babies. That's an epidemic in crisis proportions. That
is irrefutably more problematic for our culture than homosexuals getting
married.
So
I find this an important dancing on the head of a pin argument, but in
real life, looking down 30 years from now, real people understand the
consequences of so many babies being born out of wedlock, to the economy
and to the morality...
(CROSSTALK)
KRUGMAN:
By the way, that chart -- I don't know why they highlighted 2001,
because it was actually a wider gap in 2004. And gay marriage was a
losing thing for Democrats in 2004, and it's now a winning thing.
That's amazing. Eight years, this country has changed dramatically.
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you think it's gone beyond neutral. You think it's winning?
KRUGMAN:
I think -- yeah, I think it's actually -- it's actually a positive,
because this is a significant bloc of voters that will make a decision
based on which party they see as being favorable to equal rights here.
DOWD:
To me, this -- the consensus has already emerged on this issue. It's
just a question of who's going to -- is the Supreme Court going to catch
up and follow that wind of the pack...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Or get ahead of it.
DOWD:
... or get ahead of it or put a block in the path of it. I mean, if
you take a look at this, there is still a division in this country over
this issue, but there is no division in this country among people under
35 or 30 years old on this issue. There is no division.
Now,
I have a perfect example. My son went in the Army. They asked him --
10 years before, they'd ask everybody to raise that hands, 300 guys
raise their hand, who's for gay -- who's for gays in the military?
Eighty percent of the troops said we're opposed to gays in the
military. When he got in, five or six years later, 80 percent said they
were for gays in the military. It had changed that much and that
quick.
To
me, we still -- you still have to know there's a huge group of folks in
this country that believe this issue is not ready to be settled
nationally, and they're over 35, they go to church regularly, they still
view marriage as traditional and all that, but in the end, this issue,
five years from now is even going to be more settled, 10 years from now
is going to be more settled.
STEPHANOPOULOS:
And interestingly, George Will, that is still the president's
position. Even when he came out in support of gay marriage, he didn't
come out for a complete federal solution. He was saying -- and he
didn't say that it was a right guaranteed by the Constitution. He said
let the states continue to decide this.
WILL:
Well, marriage law is traditionally the prerogative of the states, but
let's put a human face on this. One of the two cases concerns a New
York woman who married in Canada her female partner. They lived
together 44 years. The partner dies. As because the partner wasn't a
man, the woman is hit with a $363,000 tax bill from the federal
government. There are a thousand or more federal laws or programs that
are at stake here. And the more the welfare state envelops us in
regulations and benefits, the more the equal protection argument weighs
in, and maybe decisively.
STEPHANOPOULOS:
It's hard to see how the Supreme Court is going to allow the Defense
of Marriage Act to continue to deny those benefits.
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