earthquake had to be changed, had to be removed. so this is the bridge that's going replace the bridge that has been there since the '30s. the bridge is being built by u.s. contractors and by u.s. employees. the steel, however, is from china and when the bid was put for consideration, there was no stipulation that it had to be u.s. only steel. so that's why as a cost to the taxpayers, it was cheaper to buy steel from china than to buy it from the united states. >> next call for jackie spear comes from herrmanntown, minnesota, bob, you're on the washington journal, bob. >> good morning. thanks for taking my call. >> good morning, bob. >> i think that the people that are receiving any help from the

government as far as being under water on their home owns deserve it because the banks got a bail out, aig got bailed out and aig literally fleeced the money they were supposed to be holding in reserve to insure the loans with and they used more of the money that we gave them to pay their check executives with, and my other comment is the keystone pipeline is going to a place in texas where it's going to be exported. i'm all for the keystone pipeline as long as we are able to use it here in the u.s. >> it's important to note that there are two issues that need

to be resolved before i think the pipeline is constructed. one is the leaks. there were more spills in the first couple of months of the existing pipeline than were expected to be over the lifetime of the pipeline. so we have got to deal with the impact of oil spills in that pipeline. you are right, the oil that will be piped to then be shipped will not be in the u.s. market, it's more than likely going to go to china, it's not oil that can easily be used for our energy needs here in the united states. in terms of your question about aig, it survived to the extent it did because of our bailout because it was an insurance company and regulated by state insurance commissioners and had to have reserves.

it was when we created -- which allowed banks to become insurance companies and insurance companies to become banks, they became less responsible of having the reserves than they did typically in the insurance industry. >> there's been some political talk roorntly that the democrats are feeling pretty confident that they can possibly retake the house. >> i wouldn't say we're feeling pretty confident, i think we're feeling much more confident than we were a few weeks ago. lots of things have to fall our way our message is resonating with people in the culture wars. they want a job, they want to remain the roofs over their heads. the majority in the house under speaker boehner hasn't delivered

on creating new jobs and fixing the housing crisis. >> something that you nay not know about representative jackie spear, she began her political career as a congressional aid, what is your back story very know. >> in 1978, i was legal council to congressman ryan who went to guyana trying to free people who were being held there against their will. i was on that trip there with him. congressman ryan was shot 45 times, i was shot five times and left for dead there on that airstrip and it wasn't my time. so i came home and committed to never take another day for granted and commit my life to public service. >> capital of -- laura on our

republican line. >> i am a conservative woman and i'm just kind of upset with you saying that all women or ins insinuating that all women are upset at the stance on cont contracepti contraception, first of all, this president went to the national prayer break fast and quoted from the bible saying what jesus would do on tax policies. well, there are bip kl principles that many of us think are very important, these culture issues are rooted in that and the one that i wanted to specifically say is corinthians 6:9 and that was about sexual immorality.

this girl in george wants to engage in the sin of fornication and she wants us to subsidize it. >> my question is it takes two, does that mean that the man who engages in sex with her is committing a sin. all of this is leveled on women because we have the -- there is nothing in the bible that says that contraceptive pills should not be made available to women. of course the bible was written centuries og. i'm a roman catholic and i am a practicing proman catholic. when i was a kid growing up, it was a mortal sin to eat meat on friday. and then after we changed popes, you didn't have to abstain on fridays and it wasn't a synonym. i'm worried, why do we allow

this kind of pontiffical action to not have any kind of flexibility. because it was a mortal sin when i was a kid and it's not a sin today. >> here's a story from "the huffington post." from the headline if you could just briefly tell us this story as well. >> it was a debate we were having on the floor about whether or not we should continue to provide funding to planned parenthood who provides services for, you know, breast canner, breast screenings, contraceptive pills and 3% of their business is for abortion services, none of the federal money was going for that purpose. and one of my colleagues started talking about second trimester abortions and was reading from a

book and describing a leg being sawed off. i just was stunned by it. i had a second trimester my carriage which resulted in abortion because that's what happens when you miscarry, you have an abortion, you have either a d and c or a d and e, in my case it was a dilation and evacuation. i was upset because it was not the experience that i had. i was a painful experience for me. i lost a baby, and for him to conduct himself in the way that he did and to carry on on a procedure that he knew nothing about had not endured, really sent me through the roof and i spoke out about it. >> next call for jackie spear comes from huntington beach, california. >> specifically, since i am in california, and i'm in southern california, i can keep the

housing crisis is not going to be fixed until the banks take a hair cut on what is owed. i mean i'm talking about what people that are in strategic foreclosures giving up a house because you're $200,000 under water and i know they have good credit, et cetera, et cetera. and this doesn't make any sense to keep going. and going back to the early people going, the banks got bailed out. they made a commitment to do the right thing, i happen to at this time be in the mortgage business so i happened to know that i was totally caught off guard by the piracy that occurred in the big banks.

and i include fannie and freddie in is that. >> we have about 15 million homes in the country that are probably under water. we have 5 million dollar in some form of foreclosure and another 2 million to 3 million that are just being held back. so we still have an inventory of homes in this country that are going to need to be repurchaseded. and we're not going to have the economy return until we have stabilized the housing market and we have new starts in terms of construction of homes. i do think that this concept of principal reduction which is what i think you're suggesting is one that, well, on the one hand it has merit, what people really need is relief in their monthly mortgage payments and eth that's why i think we need to take a lid off the restrictions

that we have all of those loans should be eligible for interest reductions, and that could mean upwards of $500, $600, $700 a month, to homeowners which will mean more money they'll have in their pockets as a result. >> i want to celebrate the representative for her clear understanding of the complexities of every argument that she's covering this morning. if she's representative of what's going on in the house, we're in great shachlt on the subtleties of the law on contraceptive. but this has got around complicated because it is impossible for catholic services to function without support from the federal government, which

clearly is going to allow the federal government to make some determination as to how that money's being used. thank you very much. >> i'm not quite sure that that was the question. but i would say that the catholic church, any religious organization has the right to protect itself values and not have to do things that offend those values. when an organization becomes more specular in nature, when they're engaged in more secular activity, then they have to be responsible and comply with the laws that everyone else complies with. and that's why i think, as the church expands and provides services outside of its nexxus, where it becomes a provides services to the community at large, it needs to comply with the laws that every other hospital in the community come plies with. >> jackie spear is our guest,

bergen county, new jersey, colleen, a republican is our caller. go ahead, colleen. >> good morning, cspan. jackie i'm not sure you agree with the quote that's going on, war women. do you agree with that? >> i don't like to use the word war. it's rife with all kinds of, i think, difficult elements. there's not a war on women in my view. there is a culture war going on, i think that womenize at they se pawns in a political game that might be being played. and i think women should speak up for themselves but i'm not one that ascribes myself to the term war on women. >> traverse city, michigan,

mary, who's a democrat. i'm sorry, not yet, mary, steve a democrat in. i'm really -- i remember seeing the show on jones town, knowing that that was you laying on the ground there is just amazing to me. my question is that the subject that you have nearly 100 federal judges that are being filibustered in the senate and let's say president obama were to get re-elected, how do you plan on moving your agenda forward considering the problems that you've had in the last four years. >> i think that the american people should spend a strong message to members of congress. put your weapons away, come together and find ways to work together. i think we have got to move off of this polarization on both

sides and find ways to work together. that's what the person people want to see. we're not going to get 100% of everything we want. we may not get 75%. but there's got to be a way that we can both come together and resolve some of these thorny issues that we're dealing with in this country without the kind of acrimony that's been present in the last four years. >> we have a long -- mandatory responsibility to carry auto insurance. so this individual mandate, or health insurance, i think will have -- will be held constitutional.

that's certainly something that we will see in the next few months, there's so much in the affordable care act. whether it's the protection you're going to have against being forecloseded from having health insurance if you have a preexisting condition, which will go into effect in 2014 and already in effect for children. nose are hugely important. >> are you satisfied with the approach that the u.s. is taking with iran at this point? >> i think the approach is very -- we're not imposing

sanations on their national b k bank. i think we should go as far as we can in terms of sanctions to see if in fact they will work. if that doesn't work, you know, then the next step of course is making sure that iran does not get the nuclear power. >> your chairman of the armed services, buck mckeon was on our news program last week and one of the things he said was that the armed services committee was a bipartisan committee and that we work together would you agree with that statement? >> i have only been on the committee for three weeks so it's hard for me to make that assessment. i think that the committee has a history of working together. i want to make sure that we work together on military sexual trauma as well. >> traverse city, michigan, mary, democrat, thanks for holding, mary, you're on with jackie spear. >> no problem, i'm a patient person. i just want to say first i am

incredibly impressed because most of what we see on botching in the house and the senate. i had no idea that we had people like you in there and if we had, we would have more done, that's obvious. in michigan, we knew about things being bad long before the country did and we have tried to buy michigan, we have tried to buy america, usa and when you were talking about buying the steel from china, any time there's a bid that's going to be from some other country that doesn't have the same restrictions we have. >> get back to the oakland bay

bridge, if purchasing the steel from china puts america is it sue and to mary? i would agree with you. i am one of nose that believe wes have to bring manufacturing back to this country, we have got to create incentives for all of these companies that have outsourced their jobs. particularly apple. so bring those jobs back to the united states and i want to say to mary, i'm a upper. >> a yupper is that an upper peninsula person? >> yes. >> only about 5% of the

companies have over a trillion dollars overseas that they would like to repatriate and my message to those but i wajtd to repatriate the money so there's some benefit to america and i think that means if you bring the money back, a percentage of the money has to be used specifically for bringing the manufacturing back for creating new jobs. >> from the washington time this is morning, ceos urge legislators not to put off tough issues until election, the business round table challenged washington to take action on immigration, tax reform and the government's fiscal woes. and the economic competitors are not waiting until after the november elections before making meaningful policy changes and we shouldn't either.

>> well it sounds like a ceo would make a statement like that. when you are in a command and control environment, when it's top down, it's easy to say that. you've got a president running for re-election, it probably makes good sense that you want a straight answer it's probably not going to happen. >> we have done virtually nothing in the first three months of this congressional year. i'm actually quite embarrassed by what we haven't accomplished. we're going to get a bill through the congress. i'm hoping that we're going to do some solid work on the

budget. but i'm not certain that both those things are going to happen. >> segue, new jersey. >> i'm a disabled veteran, 100%. i have been shot and i feel your pain. i have a plate in my head and i had to be checked out by the nsa to get through boot camp in paris island. i'm a russian immigrant, i came here in 1952 at 3 years old. my questions are this. steel from china, what kind of quality is it, they were poisoned before. were you ever in the military, natural gas is clean and plentiful. i have a hot -- yes, we all sin. >> all right, we got steel, military service, natural gas uses, syria and sin. >> okay, back to that steel issue, that was a decision made

by a republican administration and i really had no say in th that -- use of natural gas energy policy. >> natural gas is what's really going to save us and i think that we have got to be much more bullish in how we move forward.

you can just go to these switching stations. we have got to get less dependent on foreign oil and we have got to do it in a bold way. they're going to be creating that network in denmark n australia and in israel, and in a bay area facility as well. >> charlotte, north carolina, democrat, good morning. >> yes, good morning. >> i would like to address -- she said absolutely nothing about sex, her argument was --

she lost some of her reproductive organs. >> what do you think about the fact that we're having a natural debate about those issues, does that strike you as the right thing? >> i think that it's really, really crazy. i think that people come up with anything really to attack this president or anybody on the left. it ain't right, sometimes, but just ridiculous things like contraception, but it's a health issue for me. i wish people would just learn more about it and then not thinking it's just abortion or it's about sex. >> all right, marcus, let's leave it there. >> jackie spear, any comments?

>> marcus, i would say you're absolutely right. ms. luke was referring to one of her classmates who has ovarian cancer and contraceptive pills are used to assist with precancer conditions for ovarian company sir. it's also used to endometriosis, it's also used for acne. it has many purposes besides preventing the embryo from being created by being a contraceptive for purposes of preventing pregnancy. >> good morning, i just have two comments, one on the contra step

i ive -- contra accept tiff. for instance there's a famous case, the beasleys, their son had cancer, and in their religion they didn't believe in medicine, they believe solely on prayer, so when you any about the there's so many different religions here in america, you could frame the argument much better so its just not focused on catholics. i think it's in imperative that the government argues that everybody's already engaged in economic activity because everyone's born or dies in a hospital and they utilize the medical services, everyone gets sick. so i'm hoping that the government wins in this argument.

>> this tweet from tony, can you explain why the amish organizations are exempt from even having to supply insurance but catholics must provide health care. >> i'm not familiar with the amish experience there. there was a case there about a jehova witness setting where they were not going to make blood transfusions available, in that case, the court held that blood transfusions had to be made available. there's a separation of church and state, you have religious freedoms, but, again, as you move into a more secular setting, no matter what your religious believes are or your religious organization is. you're going to be subject to the more secular laws are going to have to be complied with. >> matthew, on the independent

line. go ahead, matthew. matthew? >> yes, thank you. i would love to state and echo the same sentiments that the callers have to you representative spear that you seem very well reasoned and i agree with most all of your statements. also i would like to agree with all but one point. on the argument about the health care mandate saying that car insurance is a mandate, that's correct, but i'm sure you know that the state versus federal government has very different restrictions. the federal government has enumerated authority and the states have virtually unlimited authority. so i want your current view on that, or where you feel that the federal government drives it's ability to regulate the health ca