is the area where scoop jackson was always a leader. he really lived up to the van denburg quote of politics ends

at the water's edge, and he was very much, you know, a leader and a thought-provoker coming to thought policy. that is an area i changed. i came from the house, and a whip, and a protectionist basically and reflekting any upbringing and the son of a blue-collar ship worker, and then when i got to the house i had to learn about foreign trade policies, and then i worked about every free trade agreement while i was in the senate. i never voted for a foreign appropriations bill in the senate except for one. so you do. you are supposed to learn. i still considered myself, very solid conservative, but in my

last year in the senate, the rippon society gave me a teddy roosevelt award, ands he is goi but i am going to give it to the grandson instead. and i got it because i was a moderate. i thought, well, i don't know when that happened to me, bu it is, then i accept the moniker with pride. i'm still conservative and a pragmatist and populist, but i'm an optimist, but i believe that you can get things done in america, and you can get things done in the senate, and if you have to moderate the position some. i mean, tom and i used to do that. there were times when we were actually saying to each other in effect, look we got the votes, and we are going to whip you, but is there something to do to

modulate this to easier go down with you and your team or me and my time and we did it for each other. one time john mccain was blocking a bill that involved tom in south dakota. and i had to track him down and i finally got him in phoenix airport and i said, john, this is tom daschle's bill. this is really important to tom, and you can't do that to the democratic leader, and he said, okay. we got it done. tom was my friend from then on. [ laughter ] >>@hat is where it all started. >> we have a question right here at that microphone if you could identify yourself. >> alex fultonith the "hill" newspaper. i wanted to get your thoughts on president obrecent recess appointments of richard cordray and the others in the midst the pro forma sessions, and they

are said to be sham sessions, t were those appointments justified under the constitution and the senate rules as you see them? >> well, you will find a difference here. >> you will find a difference, but i believe that the president was entirely justified. for two reasons. one, because as trent said earlier, we are make it harder and harder and harder for nominees to go through this incredibly laborious and incredibly long time process and there is no end. it gets worse by the year. so to me alone that is the factor of where do you draw the line. secondly, constitutionally, as i understand it, there is no clear direction as to the session. these are bogus sessions, we know it. it doesiilate to a certain extent past precedent, but that

is not the first time that precedent has been altered in the course of doing the right thing. ultimately, i think that we have to as trent said earlier address the whole nominating process, but short of that, because you had two institutions that literally could not function without these nominees, and this is not just the nomination, but this had to do with whether these agencies could even function, and i think that in the name of creating an opportunity for the agencies to do what they were by law required to do, he had no choice. >> i guess that the courts will decide. i think that it was wrong and he should have done it and maybe there is a chance that the courts will rule that way. i am trying to remember who perfected this technique of having these pro forma sessions, and i don't think i did that, but i think that harry really turned it into a fine art to keep bush from doing that. we used to have the struggles when clinton was president. dave hoppe was my chief of

staff, and now he is the chief of staff for jon kyl, anb when we would have the sessions, quite often hundreds of nominees and work through the list and go through and say to clinton's people, and congratulations people or erskine bowles or whoever it was, and look, you can do these 100 or so, but these six, we have a problem. and this one in particular if you do it, the roof is going i blow off. and for the most part, we gc the ones needed done that way and one time he did that with the one we said don't do that and he did it, and all hell broke loose and it causes bad feelings, but i do, you know, there is a reason for that. i do think that advice and consent, and that would be interesting to how senator byrd would react, but a the senate does have a role. if the senate is abusing the rule, then calmer heads should

sit down to say, how can we improve this process, but the main thing i would say about is get away from the constitution and the people and the personalities involved and it does really exacerbate the process. and we do need a hearing on how to exacerbate the process. >> and we are at the end of our rule time here, and we could talk a lot more, but i would like to thank senators lott and daschle for their time here. [ applause ]

ederal lier this month the budget proposal to congress. over the past several weeks members of his administration have come to capitol hill to discuss their agencies' requests. tuesday we will have live coverage on c-span3 of two of the hearings0:00 eastern the house energy subcommittee will hear the testimony from the epa administrator lisa jackson. under the president's plan the epa budget would decrease by 1.2%, a total of $ 8.3 billion. later in the afternoon we will hear from secretary ostate

hillary clinton before the senate foreign relations committee. the president is requesting $51.6 billion, a 1.6% increase over 2012. you can watch live coverage of both of the hearings tuesday on c-span 3. political parody a nonpartisan group dedicated to doubling the number of women in congress held their campaign luncheon in washington. according to the organization, women comprise 17% of congress and 51% of the population, and participants included the ambassador to austria, suwanee hunt. >> thank you everyone for coming today for this round-table discussion sponsored by pl

political can parody. my name is kerry healy and i'm the political chairmanan and founder and the original inspiration for this project. we are here to announce and kickoff in some ways a historic effort to double the number of women in congress and in governor's offices across the country by the year 2022. all of the folks you see here today and many of them are involved in this effort, and suwanee will explain how, but this is a ground-breaking approach, because for the first time we are bringing together women from the full range of the political can spectrum to work on one common issue, and that's electing more women to the top offices across the nation. so, we are nonpartisan, and we do not endorse any woman or candidate, but we work to make sure that all women have the

best possible opportunity to serve in these high positions. and now i would like to introduce our chairman, ambassador suwanee hunt who will talk more about the structure of political can parody, but also then why it is important to elect women, why women. ambassador hunt? >> well, yes, kerry, and i particularly want to thank you for coming out of the campaign trail. kerry and i are working for opposing candidates which probably, probably gives you a sense of this whole endeavor, right, kerry? >> yes, we are modeling cooperation across the aisles, yes, that is right. >> and we have worked on opposite sides before when you were running for governor and i held two fundraisers for your opponent. so, here we are nonetheless. the idea as kerry said is to double the number of women in the congress, and to, so to do that what we have realized is

that the democratic efforts have not made it and the republican efforts have not made it and the right, left wing people in the middle, and still -- we are stagnant here, and we have to figure out a new breakthrough, and our foundation which is called the hunt alternatives fund put together this initiative and tailor woylor wo so it is a small private foundation that we have, and well not too small, because we are putting $750,000 a year into this for ten years, and what we are doing is figuring out how is it that women will make the decision to run, because we knee women win at about the same proportion that they run. so, we are doing the research behind it. you know, we are funding the research, and that will help us to figure out the strategies,

and then we have a whole idea of wider weaving and get the word out. it is not just national strategies, but state strategies that people at the municipal level who are also wanting to increase the number of women and some of them are doing it for the democrats and some for the republicans and that is cool. some are just saying, any kind of woman, and we want to get them in, and we are focusing on the u.s. congress and the governorships as kerri said even though other people working with us are saying, no, let's work on the pipeline and getting younger women at the university level to run, but we know what that goal is ultimately. actually the ultimate goal is the white house, i would say. but, we're doing this bit. so, when we found out that someone like gloria totten from the progressive majority or terri o'neal from the national organization of women were interested, too, and we have a whole wide group of other women

leaders who are interested, who have fabulous bios, we said, well, let's put together this grass roots group as an advisory group, and we called them the leadership team. now, this is not a coalition of their organizations, but these are individuals, but wow! look at their bios, and you will see the wide expanse of organizations that they lead. thank you all so many of you for being here this morning, also. so this leads us to the question of why on earth would we do this? why would we go to all of this trouble? it is frankly, because we care. we care about the world. yes. we care about our country. that's why we are doing it. it is a grand experiment that we have undertaken. we have a lot of research around the world that says that if you increase the number of women in parliaments, you actually end

with less funding for health and education and children and families and guess what? you will also end up with more funding on i'm talking about the international parliamentary union and their research. now, the united states of america, you know, our great country, where are we in terms of this whole issue of representation of women in the legislature? whh started working on that issue we years ago when i was individually working on it. and now we are 88th in the world, and that is because we are stagnant and other countries keep increasing. like we are behind ethiopia, folks. behind afghanistan. we are behind nepal, and we are behind most of africa.

in the u.s. congress? well, new gallup poll, and there are a couple of polls out recently, and one says that the approval of congress is 11%, and one is 13% so it is within the margin of error and that is terrible. it is terrible in terms of what it does to the citizens, in terms of their desire to be part of the group or to support and to go to the polls and be excited about, you know, what they can do with our government. so we have to change that. how do you change that? well, one of the things that we know is that women tend to -- and i have never talked about one woman or one man, but as a group, women tend to be more collaborate. that's whether it is inds of settings, and true in politics, because thigh teey tend to works

lines more easily and it is very important however that we have enough critical mass to let that happen. because otherwise, it is extremely hard to vote apart from the party, but if you have a bloc of 30%, 35% or 40%, that is is when you will see the women really taking off in terms of their collaboration. what do they vote for? well, how do they get the information about what they are going to vote for? women as a group have a different style of raising, of gathering information. they tend to do it from the grass roots. they have the ears open. they tend to be running not because of a desire to be a senator, but rather because they have a concern about an issue. i'm talk about interviews. you know, widely held with

women. and if they can find somebody else across the aisle who cares about that issue, they will co-sponsor bills. women sponsor more bills than men and they cosponsor more bills, so what do the bills say? well, obviously, they are talking about issues that women have a lot of experience with, like families, kids, but, but new research, republican women vote more for environmental concerns than the republican men. and democratic women are stronger on environmental concerns than democratic men. like who knew? so there's all kinds of reasons for this collaboration. and they bring the very different perspective, and it is just good. and by the way, that we ha a ht women, and by the way, i'm not the chairman, but the chair. >> i'm a