thornberry responding to questions about the cut in the nuclear weapons program. and of course, when members of the president's cabinet and administration testify, all issues are fair game, and that is one of the exchanges earlier today. you are listening to "washington today" heard coast to coast on xm channel 119 and streamed on the web at c-span radio.org. >> and other news today on wall street, the dow fell 97 and the nasdaq down 17, and the s&p is down 7. robert zelic has inforred the board that he is going to be resigning from the world bank. the board will begin a new process to find a new leader and a process more open in the past

under an informal agreement based on the bank's founded 186 years ago in the u.s. it is to boost growth and overcome poverty. the fed is open to the idea of a third round of bond purchases to boost a still modest recovery, but the members remain divided over when or whether to take that step. the minutes of the fed's meeting from late january show that some fed officials thought that such bond purchases should begin soon, because the unemployment rate is high and inflation low, and others said that the step should only be take even if the economy is weak eped further or the fed's target rate of 2% is reached. the u.s. senate has confirmed the first cuban-born judge to the 2nd court of appeals in atlanta. the judge can confirmed today by a 95 -- 94-5 vote after several

days of procedural delays. sep or the rand paul, the republican of kentucky held up the confirmation, because he wanted to vote on a unrelated bill to deal with financial aid to egypt, and he has not been granted the vote. and the pugh research study shows that interracial narnmarrs have climbed to 18.4% as a new pool of asian americans expands the pool of americans. african-americans are more likely to marry whites than before. 8.5% of all u.s. marriages are interracial which is up from 3.2% in 1980. back in a minute with more of "washington today." get notified about what is on the c-span networks with the c-span alert into the inbox directly.

you can get updates on floor hearings, and policies, and plus the capitol spotlight news story of the day and trivia and also alerts from book tv and history tv weekend programming and sign up for all of the c-span alerts at cspan.org. and welcome back to washington. you will see a photograph of the president after a tour of a plant in milwaukee. and the state has ten electoral votes, and key state, but the president traveling there to talk about the jobs and the economy, and the factory is a facility with 100 jobs that returned from china back to the usa with the president standing in front of a stack of metal crates that had made in the usa stickers around, and the white house using this as a background to tout job growth and especially jobs overseas now

returning to the united states. >> we have to seize the moment of opportunity, and we can't let it slip away. we have an opportunity to create new american jobs manufacturing and put that back where it needs to be. one place to start is with the tax code. i talked about this a little bit at the state of the union. right now the companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. >> [ audience boos ] >> and they are taking deductions for moving jobs and companies out of the united states, and yet companies who choose to stay here are hit with the highest tax rates in the world. it does not make sense. everybody knows it does not make sense, and politicians of both f parties have been wanting to change it for years. my message to congress is don't wait. get it done. let's get it done.

[ applause ] as congress thinks about tax reform principles, there's some basic things they that can do. first, if you a business that wants to outsource jobs, you have that right. but you should not get a tax deduction to do it, but that should be money used for companies like master lock to move the companies back home, and give them the tax break. [ applause ] second of all, no american company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. so we have said from now on every multinational company has to pay a basic minimal tax and every penny going towards lowering taxes for companies who choose to stay here and choose to hire here in the united states. give them a big hand.

third -- third, if you are an american manufacturer, you should get a higher tax credit, and if you are a new service, you should get a double credit for making products here in america. and if you want the relocate into a community like this one hard hit when factories left house, you should get help financing new plants and equipment and training new workers. it is time to stop rewarding companies who shortchange us. and this congress should send me the tax reforms right now. i will sign them right away. right now.

[ audience yelling "right now" ] >> the president at the master lock plant in milwaukee and the first stop in a series of visits to take the president out west for politics and public policy. joining us live on the phone from the political news room is carey round, and thank you for being with us. >> thank you, steve. >> first, let's talk about the trip to wisconsin and it is an important battleground state in the 2012 election and the president using this as one of the issues that he brought up in the state of the union address and part of the themes that we can't wait in bringing jobbing bas to the united states. >> well, the situation is that the obama plan has a plan to get out to 280 electoral votes, and

wisconsin is always in those game plan, so they are planning on wisconsin to be a stalwart state for them. he won it easily in '08, but since then, there has been a republican governor and become more of a republican state in terms of the elected officials, and he has work to do and concerns him in the economy, and the message he brought back there today is wone he has been hit hard, and it is one of the messages that he feels contrasts well with romney, and or just the eventual plan of romney to have the rebirth of manufacturing in the country, but it is a sort of comfortable conversation for him given what he did with the auto industry in michigan and the white house is feeling confident about this message. >> where does the president head from here, and it is three days of campaign-style events as he talks about the state of the i

union address. >> well, it is a heavily dom it naedb -- how do i say, the heavily campaigned trips. he has eight fundraisers and he has been to los angeles now, and he will have already had two fundraisers there. he heads out tomorrow morning to corona delmar which is another area around los angeles to give remarks. he is kwing to san francisco, and then he heads to seattle where he is going to be doing an official event, but also raising money there as well. this is i would say since the first of the year or even for the several months before that. >> and that is co-hosted, and we are told by the white house that he will gain $8 million for the

re-election effort. hollywood mogul says there are a lot of issues including the legislation over anti-piracy legislation, and some of the relationships with celebrities maybe coming back to the forefront. >> well, this is before he heads to san francisco where there is a plan to strengthen the issues around hold, and that folks are interested in sort of interested in the stories that are going to be written and continue to be written about the support of hollywood. at the end of the day, he lines up more closely with many of the big moguls, you know, in terms of politics. than what we will see from romney or santorum at this point. so i still expect there to be

stories and showing some cracks in the support, but, you know, i think that we will get a better sense of it, but he is a -- while trying to maintain as much as he can. >> all right. the response of politics indicates that the president has been given more to the campaign than any other estate, and the top two donor groups are real estate and the silicon valley. i want to show you a snapshot of where the president stands in his own re-election effort. he has the highest approval rating that is the highest since may of 2010. >> yeah, this is a good poll for him. not only are the approval ratings above the 50% rating and

people are saying they believe that the economic output is improving and those who think it is worse. that is an important indicator, because his re-election in large part rests on how people view the economy and whether it is getting better, and so he is benefiting from that, and that's something that the white house is thrilled with. of course, with e h we have seee in march of last year, and upturn of the economy, and discussions of when did he declare that the economy was on the way, and then of course, things went terribly wrong for him in washington, so everyone thinks it is tenuous, and fees s good about it, and polls like that boost their spirits. >> carey brown joining us from the political newsroom, and thank you for join uing us on c-span and c-span radio. >> thank you, steve. let's turn our attention to a couple of bills making it

through the house and the senate of the department of energy and transportation specifically. house republicans deciding to split what was the $260 billion transportation bill into three separate parts, and house republicans did so according to the "hill" newspaper after it was clear that the vote was not there after the provisions were packaged together. last night over some democratic objections, the house committee ruled that the rule that governs the debate on all three bills which possibly began earlier today on that rule tries to clarify some of of the bills, and also sent members of congress back and forth on not only the issue, but also the rule that was put forth, so to give you a sense of how this is unfolding here as we listen to jim mcgovern from massachusetts. >> and speaker boehner said it would not pass the straight face test, but i will tell you that i'm having trouble having a

straight face right now, when i look at the slap dash bills before us, and the awful, and con troe luvoluted process that here. madam speaker, this process is an absolute travesty. the republican leadership took a 1,000-page bill and the most partisan transportation bill in congressional history, and made it worse. they took a bill that was written in secret and jammed through the transportation committee and inserted unrelated and controversial provisions like keystone and anwar and offshore drilling and cuts in federal pension, and even worse, they changed the rules in the middle of the game, because yesterday morning after everyone had submitted the amendments to the original single bill, speaker boehner decided to split it in three separate measures, and he said it was the name of transparency. transparency! give me a break. it was more like the valentine's

day's massacre of transparency. you know a bill is bad when the competitive enterprise institute, and taxpayers for common sense and the natural resources and the defense council are all opposed to how it is structured. talk about strange bedbedfellow. and former transportation secretary ray lahood called hr-7 the most transparent transportation bill i have ever seen, and i further quote him, he said, it is the worst transportation bill i have ever seen during 35 years of public service. it came out of the transportation committee and so in and of itself defeating them doesn't make a bill bipartisan.

-- asked and not only worked in good faith on this bill, thaw i have -- but they have put their d differences aside. -- and the 1998 reauthorization bill, and yet it is suffering a bad faith in the years of -- >> and the announcement of the house voting on a collective

piece of legislation, and divided into three separate parts, and the sus pex of the rules a and here is the representative from utah. >> i enjoyed watching "money ball ball" and reading the book as well. they talked about field of averages and in the book, billy bean says that the talentf of avoiding failure is not a great trait, and in fact, the easiest way for someone to avoid a mistake is to be too slow to get to the ball. with all due respect this administration and my friends from the other side are too slow to get to the ball. they are in the background or the basis of the argument to get this particular rule for this particular bill is that they wish to find transportation programs the old fashioned way which means that we spend money that we don't have. what we trying to do with this particular bill is to go outside of the box and find a way to

actually pay for infrastructure improvement, a way to pay for our transportation needs and to do it with energy development. like we all fear the escalating prices at the pump, and we all have a problem paying for heating oil, and economic development, and business development demands a cheap source of energy if it is going to happen, and we need to find a way to fund the infrastructure needs, a nd we are wrapping the all together by paying for it with economic energy development, and who can be opposed to that? even the president of the united states in one of the arguments for having a payroll tax increase says that the reason we need to do it is because we are paying too much money at the pump for gasoline, with which is justifiable in his case. when president obama came into office, the average cost of gasoline was $1.79. and today, average cost of a gallon of gasoline and not inflated dollars, but same price is $3.23, and that is 83%

increase in the cost of the pump since president obama has been in office. we asked in the rules committee the other day, if we went back to the old fashioned way of paying for the transportation and just paid for it out of gas taxes how much would we have to raise to fund this program and the guesstimate at that time was around 20 cents per gallon. 20 cents a gallon. and even if you had a small car, that is still two to three bucks a time every time you want to fill up. at that rate, no ebb in the car can afford a big gulp, but basically on the republican side, we are trying tole allow people to drive with good drinks on good roads. our friends on the other side apparently want us to walk or if we have good roads, you have the pay for the significantly more for it. that simply is wrong. we have problems with the heating oil in this country, and the other side's approach to it is to freeze in the dark. there is a better way of doing it and this bill, and these

bills try to accomplish commen rob bishop, a republican from utah. and again, his bill separated into three different parts. according to roll pal, the energy and the pay for bills both expected to pass easily. roll call saying neither include any significantly new language and house republicans have already passed much of the language in separate legislation, however, the big issue, the transportation bill, where difficulty comes together. one house republican saying the measure was pitting republican factions against one another. the aide who was not identified is quoted as saying, this thing is a mess. let me share with you what roll call says, it appears speaker john boehner may have overestimated his conference's willingness to support one of his legislative packages in finding himself forced to scrap plans for a grand transportation and energy bill. this legislation which now will be broken into three smaller parts we talked about just a moment ago, done so in hopes of

salvaging at least the energy portion of the bill and getting a lot of contention and debate on capitol hill, even from conservative republicans. meanwhile, senator harry reid critical of the process on the other side of the chamber. he spoke to reporters earlier, he spoke on the senate floor earlier in the day about the house approach to this legislation. >> the house of representatives, led by the republican caucus which is overwhelmingly tea party, they decided they were going to do some legislation. now, that is a dandy. their legislation is so bad that the congressional budget office sunday it would bankrupt the trust fund. huh. we're trying to replenish the trust fund. they're bankrupting the trust fund. but as i hear on the news this morning, the republican caucus over in the house is fractured. and now they can't figure out what to do with that bill.

they're thinking maybe break it into three different pieces. even with the power of the tea party it is so obnoxious and so out of control, that piece of legislation, that they're not going to appear to allow a vote to take place on that, the bill itself, because it's so bad. >> senator harry reid on the action in the house of representatives, the decision by house republicans to split up the transportation and energy bills as the senate also taking up action on this legislation. well, transportation, one of the issues that came up on the senate floor and in a senate hearing with jeff sessions, a republican from alabama, as he questioned ray lahood, transportation secretary, former member of congress from illinois, as he testified before the senate budget committee on the issue of high-speed rail. its purposes, its goals, and the cost of high-speed rail. >> so i know it sounds good to have a nationwide high-speed rail project. but at this point in history, we don't have the money, and we

don't have the possibility of anything close to paying for that plan. and i just would say to you that i think that's the reality you'll face in congress. but we do understand that there are traffic jams in cities. some cities could use mass transit. some cities could use improvements to their interstates. most of them could use high-speed interstate improvements throughout. i'll give you a chance to respond to that. thank you for your commitment to the program. we should have a person in this office that's committed to transportation. but i got to tell you, and when you're talking about these kind of increases and these kind of programs, when we're running the largest deficits in history, you've got to understand congress is not going to be able to agree to everything. >> well, having served in

congress for 14 years, i know that. i'm proud of the -- during the 14 years, five of those years, we had balanced budgets. thanks to the work of senator conrad and others. and we still had priorities. you have priorities. one of the priorities is pay down the debt. that's what we did during that five-year period. but we still had priorities. one of our transportation priorities is implementing passenger rail. when florida turned back $2.3 billion, we had $10 billion worth of requests. some of that came from republican governors. one in michigan that we just came almost $1 billion to so he could fix up the tracks from detroit to chicago so people can get the little higher speeds. we've invested in the northeast corridor. which a lot of people in this town use, from washington to new york. to get to higher speeds. to fix up the catenar ymt.

we're going to continue to make these investments because this is what america wants. they want the next generation of transportation. >> what was your -- to fix up -- you said to fix up the? >> detroit to chicago. >> no, in the northeast corridor? >> we've given -- we've invested about $1 billion. just recently. >> and what will that do? >> it will get new catenary, buy new cars, get the tracks in a position where they can go higher speeds. >> catenary? >> that's the electrification. >> i see. fixing up tracks, identifying systems that are cost-effective, i say do that and report to us and we'll see if it can be justified. but what you're talking about is major rail systems, new ones across florida or some of they'll other areas, governors are running the cost totals, the

costs are coming in much higher than projected. the ridership and the income is below what's projected. and it would be a massive, colossal error to try to build nationwide system right now when it cannot possibly be justified, in my view. >> mr. chairman, can i just say one thing? america has always been about vision. particularly when it comes to transportation. now, i'm glad that when president eisenhower signed the interstate bill, there were a few visionaries here in congress and in subsequent administrations, because what they did, they built large chunks of concrete that didn't really connect for a while. but there was a vision. to connect america. 50 years later, we have a state-of-the-art interstate system. because of visionaries like eisenhower and like members of congress. that's the kind of vision that

president obama, some governors, some people in america, have for getting to the next generation of transportation. for connecting our kids and grandkids. so they can get out of cars. so they can get out of congestion. so they can ride in a comfortable train that goes a decent speed. if we don't have that vision, we are going to really short-circuit our ability to get what other generations did for us. >> you got a vision, it's just not connected sufficiently to reality, in my opinion. thank you, mr. chairman. >> the comments of transportation secretary ray lahood as he testified before the senate budget committee, taking questions from senator jeff sessions on an ongoing debate here in washington and around the country, high-speed rail. we've seen it in great britain, elsewhere in europe, japan. the question is, will we have it here in the united states? by the way, there is an association focused on high-speed rail if you're interested. the web web side is ushsr.com.

this is "washington today" on c-span radio. on march 20th the u.s. supreme court hears the oral argument in miller v. alabama. a case about whether a life sentence without parole for someone convicted of murder when he was 14 violates the constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. you'll hear a case cited in miller v. alabama saturday on c-span radio's historic supreme court oral argument from 2005. donald roper, superintendent of the patosie correctional superintendent, versus christopher simmons. >> legislatures can evaluate the series of studies and then kick what is essentially an arbitrary age. there is no study in anything mr. simmons cites that justifies that particular date, 18. they talk about adolescence, young adolescence, old adolescence, adolescence continuing until the mid-20s. nothing justifies the age of 18. that makes it the kind of fact that a legislature ought to be

evaluating, not a court. >> everyone agrees that there is some age below which juveniles can't be subject to the death penalty. the question here is where are society's evolving standards of decency now drawing that line? 15 years ago this court found unsufficient evidence to justify a bright line at 18. but since stanford a consensus has evolved and new scientific evidence has emerged and these developments changed the constitution aal calculus for mh the same reasons the court found compelling. >> saturday at 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span raid. >> around the country, we're on xm satellite radio channel 119. and everywhere streamed at c-span span radio.org. "washington today" continues. although the strategy is framed as making the