PENNSYLVANIA CATHOLIC CONFERENCE
2006 General Election
Candidate Interviews
Rick Santorum (R)
What qualities do you think the Commonwealth needs in its US senator?
I would say first, because Pennsylvania is such a diverse state and has so many different challenges in front of it, Pennsylvania needs a senator that works very, very hard to understand the state. That means they are out and about and they are staying in touch with people and their concerns. The problems in center city Philadelphia are different than in Sullivan County; the economic problems in Indiana County are very different than what is happening in the Lehigh Valley, for example. Because of the unique concerns that we have across the state I am committed to getting to every county, every year, which I have done for twelve years.
Part of this effort is having really good communications with the people in your state. Pennsylvania is a big state, with almost thirteen million people. It is also a very diverse state. Being a leader who takes the concerns of the people in a community and try to have those concerns reflected in what we do in Washington, DC is important. From the standpoint of what you do for the pedestrian, I try to solve people’s problems and make sure the federal government interacts with our local governments and our communities in a way that is beneficial to them.
I also believe that being a leader is fighting for the issues and causes that we struggle with as a nation. I think I have done that in both cases. I work very, very hard to make sure that Pennsylvania’s concerns are addressed in Washington, and at the same time have taken leadership on a lot of very important issues. In fact I am recognized by my colleagues as such and have been elected to leadership in the Senate.
I think on both accounts I have filled the bill as to what I believe Pennsylvania is looking for in a Senator. Someone who stays in touch, represents those local and community issues that are important and takes leadership on the big issues that confront us all as Americans.
How would you characterize your political philosophy as it relates to the role of religion in public life?
This is probably a question I get more than any other elected official in Washington ever since The New York Times Magazine published a story, where I was on the cover of the magazine with my hands folded like I was in prayer. The headline was a “Senator From a Place Called Faith,” taking off on the Bill Clinton line that he used in his campaign, which was “A Man from a Place Called Hope.” The inside title of the article was “The Believer.” The entire story asked the question of how your faith intersects with what you do in public life. I don’t think the New York Times meant it as a complimentary article, because I think maybe to their readers this was very threatening. However, I thought the article was relatively fair.
I guess the answer to the question is that, obviously, I believe there is a very significant role that faith plays in public life. I don’t believe that you check your faith at the door when you walk in the office, check your faith at the door when you walk in your house, or check your faith at the door when you coach little league. Faith is either a part of who you are, or it isn’t. And if faith isn’t a part of your life, that’s your choice. For those who don’t have faith a part of their life, then it doesn’t form their world view, moral imagination, or how they interact with other people. Faith doesn’t have that kind of formative effect on them, like it has had on me, and like it has had on most Americans to some degree or other. When a politician, or anyone for that matter, says that faith doesn’t affect their job, I think that raises serious questions. The serious question is what does? If your faith is not forming your moral code or moral view, or your sense of right and wrong, what does form your sense of right and wrong? What do you draw upon to make decisions as to what is just and right and true?
I can’t think of more than a handful of issues that we deal with, where there aren’t moral components to it. To suggest that religion doesn’t play a role in your life I think leads to some serious questions as to what does.
When I make a decision I bring in all of the things that have helped form my world view – my life experiences, what I have seen, what I have done, what I have learned, and my religious training and my faith certainly plays a role in that. In particular, on issues where there are great moral questions, it is a very significant role. When it comes to issues such as stem cell research there is no question that my faith has an important role.
There is faith and reason. The Church uses both, and so do I. I think if you saw what I said on the floor of the Senate recently, you would see no allusion to faith, no allusion to Catholic teaching. What you would see is a world view expressed in a very logical and reasonable way that is informed by my faith and by the teachings of my faith. But is not a blind faith. It is a rational and reasonable approach that should have a broad appeal to a secular audience.
To me, this is one of the most important questions that we deal with in public life, and I think it is one of the most important questions the Church has to deal with in public life. I am very proud of the fact that I have the opportunity to talk about this issue as much as I do.
Which statement most closely reflects your opinion and why?
* Government officials should maintain a strict separation between personal religious beliefs and public leadership.
OR
* Government officials should seek to integrate their faith life with their public life.
This whole concept of the idea of separation is really new, and I talk about this issue quite a bit when I see student groups, where we’ll often discuss moral and ethical issues. When this issue comes up, I will always ask this question: “which phrase is in the Constitution ‘separation of church and state’ or ‘free exercise of religion’?” You would be shocked that the majority almost always says separation of church and state is in the Constitution and that free exercise of religion isn’t.
You have a society that has drilled into young people that your faith is separate; it’s a private matter and that you cannot bring faith into the public square. Some say you can’t bring faith anywhere other than in the church, maybe into your home, but don’t be pushing it on our kids. It’s privatization of faith. It’s really an attempt to try to marginalize faith, and to try to set your lives in American society just as we have seen that happen very successfully in Western Europe, to the detriment of Western Europe, to the death of western Europe.
This is something that I feel very strongly about as a public official who has a unique role to play in the public discourse.
Would you support legislation that would protect religious institutions and individuals from being required to provide, pay for or refer for products or services contrary to their conscience and moral teachings?
Absolutely. I have sponsored and worked on amendments that provide conscience clause exemptions for health care institutions, social service institutions that have religious objections to state and federal requirements and hopefully local requirements. The government can be a pretty tough, blunt instrument to faith, with a huge hammer called money. Tax exemptions are just like money, which I why I support giving tax breaks for non-profits. It’s this power of the purse over the non-profit and faith based community that is trying to leverage them to accept a world view that is contrary to theirs.
You can go back to the Constitution, look at the Bill of Rights and look at the first freedom. The first freedom is the freedom of religion. It’s first for a reason. Freedom of conscience is the most important. You have to believe what you want to believe. The rest, in my opinion, are just ways in which that first freedom is exercised, whether it’s through assembly, or speech or freedom of the press. This is an area where I have spent a great deal of time, both in the non-profit area and in the workplace. I introduced the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, and I have a monthly meeting of groups from all over that represent religions of all stripes. They come from all over the world to talk about religious freedom issues.
This is an area in which I have provided a lot of leadership, and will continue because I think it’s what distinguishes us from the rest of the west at this point. It’s why we are the strong country we continue to be in so many ways. It’s because of our viable faith. It’s the fact that we still look at America as an opportunity to pursue the ultimate goals in life, not just the temporal ones. It’s as free of fascism as we find anywhere in the world, and I think that’s one of the reasons that people are attracted to this country. There is a lot more to America than just a good economy.
Please comment on the following issues or initiatives:
* Expanding protection and support for unborn children and their mothers in Pennsylvania.
As you know I have introduced the program, I think that was passed by Governor Casey, to help women and children. I am a very strong supporter of that program, because I believe you can’t be pro-life and not be there during the time of the pregnancy and after the pregnancy. The question is; what’s the best way for the government to do that? I think clearly the government has some role to play with respect to basic services, but I would argue the best way for government to be helpful is through supporting non-profit organizations that are out there doing it on a grassroots level. Everything from the CARE Act, to increased charitable giving, to faith based initiatives I have put forward, to other types of programs that provide help for everything from a “mom’s house” type of operations to crisis pregnancy centers, is making a difference. I have been out there pushing very hard for these programs, and I will continue to do so.
* Amending the Pennsylvania or US Constitution to define marriage as the union between one man and one woman and prevent civil unions or other functionally equivalent legal relationships.
I am one of the sponsors of the Marriage Amendment and feel very strongly that we need to set a uniform national standard, rather than having a mish mash of state laws on the issue of marriage that will have to be resolved eventually and result in marriage being lost. Losing marriage has real world consequences for the future for society.
Children are better off in families that have stable relationships, and marriage is the ultimate glue that holds the family together. We have a horrible problem with generational poverty and generational out-of-wedlock births. If you look at the family structures in those communities which have habitually broken families you’ll find that in every social indicator, from education, to crime, to drug use, to domestic violence, to out of wedlock births themselves, children do worse and do not lead lives that I think most of us Americans would like to lead. This is a foundational issue, and I do support a constitutional amendment for traditional marriage, and I am not a supporter of civil unions.
Civil unions are marriage, but with a different name. There is a reason we have marriage as a society, not why we have religious marriage. Religious marriage came before government marriage. The reason government has adopted marriage and put it into law is because of the societal benefits, particularly societal benefits for children. Every generation of Americans and every government in the history of man has recognized that marriage of one man and one woman benefits society. It provides the best place for children, the future of society, to be raised. And so that is why marriage is in the law books.
There is an argument that if you let other people marry then somehow you are going to have more marriages and more stable families. But just the opposite occurs. Marriage becomes insignificant, because if anybody can get married then it has no meaning.
What we have seen in countries that changed the definition of marriage is that marriage rates go down. These people, who are clamoring for the right to be married, actually don’t get married.
One of the sad things that we do when we talk about a lot of these cultural issues is we get bogged down with the consequences of the slippery slope. In the case of marriage today you don’t have to even look for the slippery slope, we are already at the bottom. My opponent is on the other side of this issue.
* What is your position on the death penalty?
I have supported the death penalty in limited circumstances. It’s an issue that I have struggled with my entire career. I haven’t been out there calling for increasing the number of crimes that are subject to a death penalty.
I have been an advocate for mandatory DNA testing, because we have found that through DNA testing, mistakes have been made. Not many, but one is too many.
I think the death penalty is still important for society on a couple of levels. Number one, there are individuals that are a continuing threat to society. Even in the penal system we have, which is relatively safe, there are people that are so inherently dangerous that removing them from society is a good thing. There is also the sense of society and just punishment. Societies collectively and individually want to see justice done. I think there are certain crimes, and they would have to be extreme crimes, that society rightly demands a most severe form of justice. And then it actually is beneficial to society as a result.
I believe it should be used in very limited circumstances. I think it was in the 1980s and early 1990s where we sort of went wild on the death penalty. After the death penalty statutes in the Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to come back, I think we probably went further than we needed.
I think people have the right to make sure that all the legal issues are exhausted, and in the end I think the death penalty should be used under limited circumstance.
And finally, many ask whether the death penalty is a deterrent. I don’t know. There are studies out there that show many different statistics, but the death penalty for terrorists probably is not a deterrent. However, I think it probably is for some criminals. So I think that it has some inherent deterrent authority to stop certain people from doing heinous crimes because of it. That has a beneficial effect for society.
* Expanding the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) by allocating more money for tax credits to businesses donating to approved scholarship.
I have introduced a bill that takes the Pennsylvania law and turns it into a federal law. We have been working on that and I believe very strongly in religious based education. I am the product of Catholic school, and I think children need to be educated on arithmetic, reading and writing but also character formation and their faith.
I remember going to a Jewish boy’s school and we were talking about the importance and vitality of getting public assistance for their religious schools. The leaders of the school made the statement that if the government doesn’t help fund and keep their schools alive to educate their children, they will be slaughtered as a people. Because then their children will have to go to public schools where they will be swallowed up and pulled away from the values that make them, in their minds, separate. You can argue whether that separate is good or bad.
This struck me. I thought about it as a Catholic. When I think about Catholic education, I see it in the same way. What a Catholic education was intended to do from the beginning was to make sure that we were separate. We set up our school systems to make sure that we would not be undermined as a faith. We were discriminated against. There is a pretty strong history of that.
I think it is vitally important that we have Catholic education. I do believe that the Church’s obligation is not just to educate kids, but principally, in my opinion, to form Catholics for the future. These Catholic schools must preserve our Catholic identity. If you look at all of the influence that children get in our society today, the internet, television, all the multimedia, if we don’t have Catholic education there to form our children in the faith they will be lost.
* Expanding or changing programs to grant greater access to health care for low income citizens such as children’s health insurance, Medicaid and Medicare.
I have introduced a bill for eight years now that would do exactly what your question suggests. The president adopted it in part when he ran for election in 2004, but so far we have not gotten it passed. That is a provision of tax credits for the uninsured.
I believe we have a provision in the tax code that allows employers that provide health care to deduct health care as a cost of doing business from their taxes. When you get your health care provided to you, you don’t have to pay taxes on the benefit. So you get a tax free benefit.
The federal government in underwriting your benefit vis-à-vis someone who doesn’t have employer provided health care. Those who purchase their own health coverage should receive a tax benefit for that cost.
You have this situation where we have a tax policy set up that provides huge economic benefits to employers and employees who have employer provided insurance, and no economic benefit to people who don’t have employer provided insurance. You would think it would be just the other way around that you would help those who don’t have insurance as opposed to providing tax benefit for those who do.
So I introduced a bill in reference to health care which provides a $3,000.00 tax credit, a dollar for dollar, refundable credit. That means if you don’t pay income taxes you get a check from the federal government to help you pay for your insurance. I think that will go a long way in helping a lot of people get basic health care coverage.
In addition I am sponsoring a bill, which the president proposed last year, which ties this tax credit to health savings accounts. I have been an advocate of health savings accounts since I was a freshman Member of the Congress back in 1991, and have been sort of a champion of those over the years and eventually have gotten them passed in the Medicare Modernization Act.
One of the reasons I was an advocate of that was because I think it is important to change the way we consume health care. Patients have disinterested involvement as a third party in the payment of healthcare. I would like to see a system where the patient is on the front line, actually paying for some of their services, negotiating prices, and making decisions as to what they want to consume.
Health Savings Accounts, I think, are a step in the right direction. What we have also found with Health Savings Accounts is that over a third of the people who signed up for them in the last two years were previously uninsured. So it has actually been a way to reduce the number of uninsured. And if you provide tax incentives on top of what we have in place now, I think a lot more people would sign up for these programs because they provide very low cost, catastrophic insurance and a way for you to pay for your ordinary, and necessary medical expenses with tax free dollars. I think that is a very nice combination for a lot of people who currently do not have health insurance.
There are two major reasons we are seeing an increase in the number of uninsured. A quarter of the uninsured in this country are illegal immigrants. We have seen an explosion of illegal immigrants and they don’t have insurance. They are counted in the uninsured because they show up at hospitals. If we dealt with the illegal immigrant problem we would have a huge reduction just by dealing with them.
Second is cost. The cost issue is driven a lot by our liability system. We are going to have to get into liability reform. We must look at states that have implemented the kind of reforms that I have worked on in Congress, which puts caps on non-economic damages of pain and suffering. If we can keep costs down, health care becomes more affordable and insurance becomes more affordable.
* How would you address the concerns that are being raised right now by illegal immigration?
I have taken a common sense approach to address the issue of illegal immigration. We have an enormous number of people crossing our border illegally, which is a national security issue as well as a concern for the health of our Commonwealth. Immigration officials are telling us that the last two to three years have seen record numbers of people crossing the border. And when this bill came through the Senate, we saw an additional spike of people coming across or trying to cross the border. Estimates suggest that over a million people successfully evade border agents and get across; and we catch about a million, too. It is a long border, and that is an enormous number of people.
Pennsylvania is a very traditional state. People believe it is wrong to break the law or do something that is illegal then be rewarded with benefits as a result. It is just something that strikes people as unfair. I think in Pennsylvania, to a large degree, fairness still matters.
The other day in Greensburg I met a woman who came from Venezuela. She has spent seven years trying to get her son into the country and she is just irate at the situation. It’s not fair. She is playing by the rules, and yet we reward those who are breaking the rules. I think government shouldn’t be out there undermining our own sense of what is right and wrong. That is one of the reasons I feel as strong as I do about it. We have to solve this problem, and that means we have to increase our security at the borders, and I recently introduced the Border Security First Act to address this important issue.
The second thing we need to do is to provide employers with the tools, better tools, to be able to identify who are the legitimate workers.
The third thing we need to do is establish a temporary worker program. I know we need more employees in this country for a variety of different tasks, that either there aren’t Americans to do the work or Americans don’t want to do those jobs. I am willing to set up a temporary worker program, where people can come into this country for two, three years, whatever it is, work and then return home. If they want to come back for another tour then they can come back. That makes sense to me.
I have never spoken out against the level of illegal immigration that we have. There is a question about the mix of people that we are bringing in and whether there is a sufficient enough diversity both in terms of ethnic diversity as well as diversity of skill. We tend to bring in less skilled people than we have in the past and secondly we tend to be bringing in more people of more recent immigrants because the priority is family members of immigrants so they jump to the top of the list. This means if you have several people here who are recent immigrants, they tend to skew the numbers because even more of their relatives are coming in, as opposed to a broader diversity.
If we did those three things, the problem of the people here in this country who are here illegally I think would by and large go away. If you want to drive to Mexico, you just drive right in. They don’t even stop you at the border. Illegal immigrants could return to Mexico pretty easily, get processed as a temporary worker if they want to come here to work. That would provide a sufficient number of people to come here and work. I think that 10, or 11, or 8 million people who want to work here, if they really want to work here they can just go back to Mexico, or their country of origin, and then come back as a temporary worker. I think we would see a dramatic decline in the number of illegal Immigrants, and I think we would not have to go through the painful process of amnesty, which I oppose. My opponent, however, has spoken out in favor of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.
We know you have a time schedule to keep. Is there anything you would like to say, anything you would like to share about yourself with the Catholic public in general?
I am Catholic, and a daily communicant. I have six kids. I am married to a good Catholic girl. Karen comes from a great family and is one of twelve kids. We have six children ages 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15. We home school our children, which I suspect most people don’t do, and we do it because one of the things that we feel pretty strongly about is using a Catholic curriculum.
Another issue that has arisen in the U.S. Senate that would be of interest to the Catholic Church is the work I did to confirm two highly qualified judicial nominees. We face the problem of judicial activism. Confirmation of nominees in the Senate should be about selecting the most qualified candidates, and seeking nominees who will exert judicial temperament, and I believe we did just that with the confirmation of Judges Roberts and Alito.
Additionally, as you know, I have been a leader – sometimes the only leader – in the Senate on protecting the unborn and sanctity of life. I strongly oppose federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, legislation which encourages euthanasia, and human cloning.
I gave a speech at the National Press Club where I talked about facing the enemy, and defining the enemy for what it is. In essence, what we have to recognize is that the folks who are fighting us believe that they are fighting a holy war. I feel very uncomfortable with that and I understand that and I don’t want to think about it as a religious war, because in America we are all about religious tolerance. And so the idea that there would be a religious war is unimaginable. We don’t want to be a part of anything like that.
The problem is we have no choice. They are attacking us, and they will continue to attack us until we respond. And I think it is important that we understand this is not a war on terror. We are not fighting the IRA. We are not fighting Shining Path. We are not fighting a whole host of terrorist organizations. We are fighting Islamic fascists, radical Islam. And we have to understand what they are all about, what their objectives are, why they want to kill us, and the fact that they are not going to go away because we just say we quit.
One of the things that we have not done, in my opinion, is to lay out to the American public exactly who this enemy is, what they are all about, and what their objectives are. People have to understand that this is not something that just popped out of the blue on September 11th. The most recent surge of radical Islam started in the early 1980s and has grown in the Islamic world. It is now increasingly a dominant force as you have seen in Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran obviously is a central piece of this mosaic.
These folks are gaining influence in a world where a billion people that share that faith. Now obviously, the vast majority of those people don’t share this radicalism, in fact a very small percentage shares this view of Islam; but they are increasingly influential within the Islamic world. I would make the argument that they want to destroy us. These people see death as a desired objective as opposed to a tragic consequence. These people want to die, these people are willing to strap bombs around themselves and they see it as a glorious end. And so these are very dangerous people.
We should understand they see this as a long struggle and that we fail to see it this way. If we do not understand our enemy, and just as bad if we do not respect them, and their ability to harm us we are doomed to fail. No matter how strong a power we are we are doomed to fail.
So I think I have had a blessing in having this race be the biggest race in the country. The blessing is that occasionally you have the opportunity to stand up and speak, and people because you are in this position, people will listen. So I try to take advantage of that and I will try to do so throughout the course of this campaign. Because I think this is the greatest threat that faces our nation, maybe the greatest threat that has faced our nation in a long, long, time, in part because we don’t recognize the threat. I think if we really recognize the threat I feel very confident we will be successful so long as we don’t politicize this issue any longer.
(c) 2006