Barbara Lee — Rep. Barbara Lee Joins All In With Chris Hayes to Discuss the Bush Legacy

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Speaker 1: Truth spoken by former President Bill Clinton today at the unveiling of the new George W. Bush Library. Let's bring in Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Democrat from California. Also joining me from Dallas, former special

Speaker 2 (lower-pitched voice): assistant to President George W. Bush, Dylan Glenn. And here with me at the table, Joy Reid, MSNBC contributing and managing editor of TheRio.com

Speaker 3 (higher-pitched voice): Congresswoman Lee, I want to begin with you for two reasons. One, Talk about these difficult decisions. You made

Speaker 4: this remarkably difficult decision to vote against the authorization for the use of military force within just a few weeks after 9-11. You were the only member of Congress in both houses to do so. And so I wonder what your reaction was

to

Speaker 2 (lower-pitched voice): watching the celebration of the Bush presidency today at the library and all this talk about difficult decisions

Chris

Speaker 5: first of all, that resolution that came to Congress was three days after

Speaker 6: the horrific events of 9/11. It was on 9/14, which just tells you how much time the president and Congress had to really make some hard decisions about a response to these very terrible events. It was a blank check. It was a resolution that was written in a way that gave any president, President Bush, now President Obama, the authority to go to war forever. And of course I could not vote for that

That gave

Speaker 6: the Constitution our constitutional responsibility over to the president and so while it may have been a hard political decision it was clearly the right decision based on our Constitution also based on what I worried about and that was going to war for a time that we don't know how long we were going to war for you know and we're still in this state of perpetual war

Speaker 4: Having lived through the Bush years and having

Speaker 1: had to vote on things that were being fought out in the legislative branch during that time, are you disposed to look on the bright side today and look for the silver lining and say, you know, he was good on this, he was good on, I don't know, funding for AIDS in Africa or something like that

Speaker 8: Well, let me tell you that the facts speak for themselves. First of all, we went to

Speaker 6: war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq, just look at that. The facts were misleading. They were manufactured and they were wrong. And we took our country into war. We lost over 4,400 brave young men and women. You're talking about $800 billion could be a trillion dollars. And look at what's happened to our country and our economy. Now, I have to say I worked with President Bush on the global HIV/AIDS initiative and i'm hoping that in his library he has those documents because i have to tell you it was the congressional black caucus that met with president bush and we laid out what we

Speaker 9: thought would be a magnificent robust response to save millions of lives and i'm very proud of the fact and please with president was that he really move forward work with us and find the first global aids but really the second global aids bill into law and so there were many things

I

Speaker 9: think that hopefully are in the library that showed the relationship between the Congressional Black Caucus and our global HIV AIDS response

Speaker 10: Dylan, can I ask you, conservatives I think have had a really interesting relationship to the Bush legacy. Obviously, during

Speaker 1: his presidency, he was remarkably popular with conservatives. He became to be less so in the second term. He has been essentially written out of history in a weird way. He hasn't appeared at the last two conventions. His name is never uttered

Speaker 11: And now it seems like this is a kind of moment of re-embrace for conservatives at George W. bush is that how you kind of understand

the

Speaker 12: trajectory well first chris let me say i wish you could be down here in dallas it's been a great day here with all the five living presidents and of course here to honor first of the bush's family and it's been a wonderful homecoming for all of us who have the privilege of serving with him but to your question i guess i'd

say You

Speaker 13: know, this president has been a person that sort of has shunned politics since he's left office. He's not a political leader today. He's a public servant, which is something I think he and his family, and that's been a tradition that he's lived his life about. And I think what you're going to see coming out of this library and over the course of the next

Speaker 12: Hopefully many years you're going to see a president leads by example working on those issues that the library stands for education, freedom around the globe. Right, but he's the last two term, he's the

Speaker 10: last Republican president. He had a huge legacy and how conservatives view themselves in relationship to him seems to have a really big effect on what conservatives are going to do

Speaker 1: And it seems like there was a period where conservatives really wanted to reject him and now it seems like they're embracing him

Well

Speaker 13: listen, I think you can err on both sides. I'm not sure they ever rejected it. I'm not sure that they're embracing him that much today versus how they've always handled the president. This is a guy that ran on his first campaign on being a compassionate conservative. He governed center right. I think he's been respected from the conservatives, and I hope to. to think across the american planet we for governing that way but i don't think there's a rift with conservatives before and i certainly don't think this that's being healed now i think this day and and looking forward is is going to be about stepping back and letting the stories take a look at the record and having american citizens draw their own conclusions that sort of this day-to-day pettiness of politics i think he's going to try to stay out

of joy

Speaker 14: Well, I mean, I think that the problem with that analysis is that the major movements within Republicanism in the last few years have seemed to be a negative reaction to Bush. You had that sort of Tea Party movement that was about bailouts. Well, who instituted those bailouts? TARP, etc., the first bailout of the auto industry. Well, that would be George W. Bush. And the revulsion that was attached to that got placed on Barack Obama, but it was Bush. policies. And then the other big movement that you're seeing within the Republican Party, the libertarian sort of wing of the party that is more isolationist, that is more skeptical of foreign wars. Well, that would seem to be a direct repudiation of the kind of neoconservative policies that Bush didn't run on in 2000, but that he fully embraced, I think pushed by Dick Cheney, pushed by the neocons in the Pentagon. So I think that George W. Bush got taken off the trajectory of being the kind of Republican he was before he was president. He got pulled into this neoconservative wing of the party that even made

him

Speaker 14: a disappointment to the third part of the party, which is evangelicals, to whom he seemed to promise a lot. He never delivered on a federal ban on abortion, things like that. So Bush was a disappointment to so much of the party that he was pushed away. But the one way that he was embraced, the idea that the media and that the

Speaker 15: culture disrespected Bush is a lot of the reason

Speaker 16: that the right to spy Obama. Conservatives on Twitter, and I understand if I were conservative and I watched my opening, I would not like it either. I understand that

Speaker 10: That's fine. I mean, but people, like, what's What's interesting is that

there is a

Speaker 10: degree to which he has been distanced from the conservative movement. But if you attack George W. Bush, conservatives get incredibly upset. And Congresswoman, I want to ask you a substantive question. And then Dylan, I want to ask you about this legacy question. But Congresswoman, one of the things President Obama said today I thought was very interesting was he gave props to George W. Bush for trying to get comprehensive immigration reform

Speaker 3 (higher-pitched voice): done. And one of the things I thought that was interesting and clever about that is that it pointed out the fact that, as Joy was just saying, in some ways, the Republican Party has moved to the right after George W. Bush, right? I mean, in certain ways, the House Republican Caucus, your colleagues, is the most conservative part of any major party

Speaker 10: we've seen in a very long time, and that's more conservative than George W. Bush. Is that how you understand the trajectory since

him

Speaker 9: Yes, indeed. There is no way that I can say that I have ever seen a more

Speaker 6: conservative Congress. I've been here now 15 years, and I am telling you, when we have an economy now with double-digit unemployment, for example, the African-American community and Latino community, not to be able to even bring up a jobs bill. a bill to create jobs, to reduce unemployment, we can't even get this Congress to talk about and move forward to create jobs. I don't believe a more moderate Congress, a more moderate Democratic caucus, would be obstructionists as these Tea Party members are. I mean, this is really very serious, Chris, I am telling you, this is, they're dug in. I think they came here to dismantle government

Speaker 11: Dylan, can I... I'm sorry Congressman, I just wanted to get Dylan in here

Speaker 10: because he's sitting there and I want to give him a chance to respond to this, because you just said, you know, people are going to figure this out, history

is

Speaker 3 (higher-pitched voice): going to be left of this. My question is to you, as someone who worked in the administration, is he a great president? Are you proud of what he did? Do you stand by the legacy

I'm

Speaker 12: very proud of how he's governed. I'm very proud of what he tried to do. You know, this is the president that tried to reform Social

Speaker 13: Security. Tough decisions. Certainly we're not going to relitigate the wars. People will make their own decisions about that. But he improved education in this country. We lowered tax rates for we created a lower tax rate for the lowest income people in America. We reduced taxes for Billions of Americans and we got the economy moving. Certainly the economy hit speed bumps, but listen, this is an imperfect science in governing this great nation, which is what makes us great. And I think President Bush will be

Speaker 17: remembered as someone who was not afraid to put his principles first and to stand behind those principles. Dill

Speaker 18: and Glenn, thank you so much for that defense. That is the defense that I've heard. Congressman, I was sorry to cut you off. I did want to give Dill another chance, but

Speaker 19: I want to talk to you again