WESTERN SKIES - August 25, 2005

*** JOEL HEFLEY INTERVIEW ***

ERIC WHITNEY: Congressman Joel Hefley has represented Colorado's Fifth Congressional District for almost twenty years. During that time, he generally hasn't attracted a lot of headlines. But in 2004, Hefley presided over the House ethics committee when it issued two written admonishments of Majority Leader Tom DeLay. In January, Hefley was removed as the committee's chair, which suddenly thrust him into the limelight as DeLay's ethics problems gained more attention.

Hefley remains the third most senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and he chairs the subcommittee on military readiness. Local media started speculating this spring that Hefley would retire after his current term, a rumor which the congressman denies. Hefley is in Colorado Springs during Congress's August recess, and sat down with Western Skies' Stephen Raher to discuss ethics, the military, and the federal budget.

STEPHEN RAHER: Earlier this year there was this flurry of rumors that you were going to retire. And then those subsided and now, lately, I've been hearing two different tacks. I've heard some people say you'll definitely be running again and some people say that you typically make up your mind at the end of the year. Are either of those correct?

REP. JOEL HEFLEY: Traditionally I make up my mind at Thanksgiving, Christmas time period of the year before an election. And the reason I wait to do that is I don't want to be campaigning all the time. In this business, a lot of folks are just campaigning all the time. I want to spend most of my time doing the job, and campaign when you have to. Probably between Thanksgiving and Christmas or the first of the year, I will definitely decide. And I think people need to make the assumption that I'm running until they hear from my lips that I'm not running.

RAHER: At the beginning of the year it was kind of interesting for all of us here to see you in the national news over what was happening with the ethics committee. I have a few questions about that. My first one is are you satisfied with the media coverage of both what you did on ethics committee and then your leaving the committee. Do you think people got it right?

HEFLEY: They mostly got it right, I guess would say. The one thing that was distorted a little bit was that I really had my nose out of joint because I got kicked off the committee. Well the reality is, I am delighted to be off the committee. I was on it for eight years, it's one of the hardest jobs you can do in Congress. I chaired the committee for four or five years and it's something that's very important to do in Congress. And it's one of those things if you get asked to do it, it's kind of like jury duty, you feel you kind of have to do it. But you do it for the institution. There's no personal gain in it for yourself.

I thought the media covered it pretty well, really. I was glad to go off. I was very upset at the way the Republican Party handled it. They kicked off two members of the committee (we have five Republicans and five Democrats), they kicked off two other Republican members that were very good members, hadn't been there as long as I did, should have stayed. They fired two staff members on the first day the new chairman took over, who were not political staff they were professional staff, lawyers. They weren't my staff, they were lawyers that worked for the committee and that was wrong and they shouldn't have done that and it made the Republican Party look very, very bad. It looked like there was a cover-up of Tom DeLay. And the people they appointed to the committee made it look like there was a cover-up. Whether there was or not, I don't know. But I was very disappointed the way the Republican Party handled it. I wasn't so disappointed the way the media handled it, I think they did a pretty good job.

RAHER: Do you think the committee has gotten back on track?

HEFLEY: Well I think they're moving now. They've got to put staff in place. And another thing that was handled poorly was that the new chairman tried to put in his Chief of Staff as the Chief of Staff of the ethics committee. Well, that's a partisan person and the ethics committee has to be completely non-partisan. That's why it's the only committee in Congress that has five Democrats, five Republicans. So they're going to have to get staff in place. They have a number of investigations on the table that they need to do and they don't have the staff to do it right now. But I do think they're off now, starting on the road to getting the committee back as a functioning committee.

RAHER: While you were on the committee and while you were the chair a lot of people from all over the country were coming out to compliment you as being very principled and non-partisan on that committee, even though no one was doubting your credentials as a conservative. Do you think for individual members of the House it's becoming harder to play that role?

HEFLEY: Oh yes. I mean, that's one of the most partisan places you can imagine, there in Congress. It's very difficult. And on the committee you have some of the most liberal members of the U.S. Congress on that committee, and you have some of the most conservative. And yet, we were able to instill in them their role in the committee, and that was that they had to be non-partisan when they came in here. So, the Democrats could not, in good conscience, defend a Democrat that had done something wrong. Nor should the Republicans, and I think we proved that with the Tom DeLay thing, defend a Republican if we thought he had done something wrong. You have to do it for the institution. And we were in the position, it hadn't always been that way on the ethics committee, but we were operating in a completely non-partisan, unbiased, evenhanded kind of way. And that's the way it has to work if it's to have any credibility at all.

RAHER: Right now as we speak, the BRAC commission is voting on base closures. The proposal that was sent to them by the Pentagon would actually bring more personnel to Colorado Springs. Were you surprised by that?

HEFLEY: No, I wasn't surprised. We worked very hard to see that that would be the result. But I sweated it out. I thought we were in good shape. Ten years ago, when they did the BRAC, Fort Carson was on the bubble and we were afraid we might lose them. And the community banded together, and we worked real hard in Congress and so forth, and we avoided it. But we did see some of the deficits that Fort Carson had that could come back to haunt them. And I've spent ten years trying to plug those holes. And we pretty well did that.

RAHER: A lot of people I know were excited when the Republicans got the Whitehouse and the Congress because they thought it would be a new era of fiscal restraint. But obviously the war and the recession made it a bigger challenge to balance the budget. How do you think the party has done with fiscal issues?

HEFLEY: Well you know, when we first took over in 1995-one of the reasons I went to Congress was to try to balance the budget-and when we took over in 1995 we began to move on that front. And I was thrilled at that moment. And we were actually beginning, over several years there, to begin to pay down the deficit. But then we got hit by, you've said it: the recession and the war at the same time. And that did make it very difficult and so we got out of balance again. But, that was used as an excuse for increased federal spending.

I offer an amendment on almost every appropriations bill to cut that bill by one percent. I do it symbolically, to say "We need to be moving towards a balanced budget." And those amendments never pass. If we can't save a penny on the dollar, then we're never going to get to a balanced budget. I'm very, very disappointed by that. And the answer to your question: no, the Republicans have not done as good a job as I would wish we would, even under the circumstances that we have, which is the recession which we're coming out of strongly now, and the war.

RAHER: There's this political debate going on right now about the war in Iraq and whether we should have gone in, and now that we're in, what we should do. And, politics aside, what are some of the mechanics of the war that you think will be top priorities for the Armed Services Committee to deal with when you get back.

HEFLEY: There's several things. To train the Iraqi security forces so they can do their own security. And that is happening, we now have more trained police and Iraqi military than we have our forces in there. To get the new constitution done. To get the new elections done. And to get them functioning as a democratic society. And we're making progress on all those fronts, but it's hard progress. Because you have some people over there that simply do not want democracy to work in that part of the world. And if it works with Iraq, then what about Syria and what about Egypt and some of those other countries?

RAHER: And then, we just skipped over the politics, but coming back, there were clearly multiple rationales for the military action. And at least with the weapons of mass destruction, some of them turned out not to be correct. So, knowing what we know now, do you still support going in to Iraq?

HEFLEY: Well, he had weapons of mass destruction. We know that, there's no question about that. He used them. He used them against his own people, the Kurds. He used them against Iran in his war with Iran. So we know he had weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons. We know because we have defectors who've come out, who worked on his atomic program. He was trying to develop atomic weapons as well. I've been told, by Iraqis who seem to know what they're talking about, that had we gone in six months earlier we would have found all kinds of weapons of mass destruction. But because we waited six months, he was able to disperse them. Some went to Syria, some went other places, some were probably destroyed. But we know he had them. So people who say "Bush lied to us about that," they're just blowing smoke, because he based it on the best evidence he had.

But I think the other thing is, you had a dictator there who was paying suicide bombers' families twenty-five thousand dollars a pop for their kids or whoever to go blow up something. Here was a guy that hated the United States, that tried to assassinate President Bush the first. Who was a definite enemy of ours, and was fomenting unrest and terrorism in that part of the world. We have found now the connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam. So I think it's a good thing we went in. I think the world is safer because we went in. But war is never a pleasant thing, and I wish we hadn't had to go in, and I'll be very pleased when we pull out.

RAHER: Thank you very much.

HEFLEY: Thank you.

WHITNEY: Republican Joel Hefley is the ten term incumbent representative of Colorado's Fifth Congressional District. It's made up of El Paso, Teller, Fremont, Park, Chaffee, and Lake Counties.