captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- >> i do not think the president is focused on trying to find a solution. >> this week on "inside washington," how not to get along in government without even trying. >> they refuse to compromise even an inch. >> also, does the 1965 voting rights act perpetuate racial entitlement? >> we should not have to read-

fight this battle every five years. >> i am proud to announce that the united states of america will be providing an additional $60 million immediately in assistance. >> it is it too little, too late? and for the first time in centuries, the pope walked off the job. >> we are going to be living through an incredible historic moment. >> it seems we have stood and talked like this before. some things that have happened for the first time seem to be happening again. lyrics to an old rodgers and hart song. i would sing it for you, but there are children in the room. the love song they are singing this week is a dirge. >> instead of cutting of

government spending we do not need, what the sequestered does is use a meat cleaver approach. >> saying the sky is falling in an effort to scare the american people into doing what he once, which is to raise taxes. >> days of doom impending, from the latin mass for the dead. we will be talking about the pope in a minute. actually, this is a big game of chicken. this cover looks like the poster for a grade b horror film. how horrible will it be? >> it already is. when i woke up on friday morning, there were frogs falling from the sky and a swarm of locusts coming from the west. the pestilence lay heavy on the land. we have sequestered against the

government, and the wrath is great. >> which side has taken a bigger hit? >> the republicans have taken a big hit. allen ginsberg in maine said it is like watching a bad marriage come to an end, the recriminations, the blame, the bickering back and forth. even though the democrats are better off politically than the republicans, the process, politics and the public sector take an enormous hit. >> if it is the end of the marriage, at least you can divorce and go your separate ways. these people are stuck with each other. it is like being in a car with a drunk driver. you want to grab the keys. that is what i would like to do, but i cannot. nobody elected me to anything. the republicans just say no. president obama does not really

have a plan. it is really kind of awful to watch and we will pay the price. >> beyond sequester, we have something else going on, and we saw it last year in the election. we really have two different views of which way the country should go, and that is what is holding us up. the election decided which way the country wants to go and president obama has a sense of where he wants to take it, but we have republicans resisting. we are going to have another fight later this year over the debt limit. it is not just a question of the debt and deficit. it is the direction of the country and policy. no tax increases, nothing, off the table, we are stuck.

experts when the republicans start to feel this? -- >> when does the public starts to feel this? we have heard that april 1st is when we see the real political fallout. >> between now and 1995 is that than it was immediate when they close down the government. this is gradual. the first thing is the grants that do not go out, the contracts. it will be awhile, whether it is a food inspector, and meat inspection, a safety of the airports from a transportation security, i think it will be awhile before people really feel it. >> we are talking about this like it is an act of god.

it is an act of man, and it is very simply solve. this is two since on the dollar. the government now, for every dollar it spends, barrault's $0.35. this is -- borrows $0.35. the solution is for congress to give the president, the administration, the authority to move money between accounts, two since on the dollar. it is not armageddon. some republicans will not. the overwhelming majority of republicans are prepared to say to the president, $0.02 on the dollar, you decide how to do it rationally. >> this would be the congress that bolted for home on

thursday, after what? a three or four day work week. >> after rejecting a bill that would have dealt with it. >> unfortunately, a majority vote does not count any more in the senate. there is the solution right there. >> republicans, in truth, are not agreed on charles's approach. if they were and could come up with a bill in which the president did have discretion, it would be a very unusual allocation of executive power, but he probably should take it if that were the case. >> he said he would refuse. he said he would issue a veto. >> i do not know what is actually in the bill, whether it actually gives him enough discretion. he probably should take it. >> it is not enough to demand whether the president should cut something. it is a question of a balanced approach. you have to do something on the

revenue side. he is absolutely right to resist any effort to make this a cuts only action. if he does that, he is giving away the store. >> thank goodness we are free of the bickering and squabbling here. i just want to point out that the republican party is at its lowest point in history, according to a pupil. that will be small comfort to the -- according to a poll. that will be small comfort to the democrats, who have a 15% drop in approval ratings. it is not a great tribute to the party. >> what i want to know is, what happens to the children? >> you're so right. in the divorce. we are the children. we are the village that will experience the chaos of that

divorce. >> the voting rights act is racial entitlement. >> i bought my 92-year-old dad out here and my daughter, to show that she should have the right to vote when she turns 91 prepared -- 91. >> justice scalia raised some hackles by suggesting that a renewal of the voting rights act might lead to racial entitlement. >> he did not just say it once. he said it twice, maybe three times. and because this bill passed 98- 0 in the senate with only 32 votes against it in the house, you could not take the law seriously. nobody had any interest in voting against it. it was politically incorrect to

vote against it was the implication, and therefore the court should not defer to it as it might normally defer to the law. >> what has changed since 2006 with this lot? >> the covered states need to be covered. because of voting rights violations. the congress amassed evidence of this, and that is why they extended section 5. >> special the county attorney, but jealous -- the shelby county , said we butch ellis have made tremendous strides. >> shelby county is the last place you want to make this case because the evidence of verifies

keeping that county covered. chief justice roberts thinks things have changed. things have not changed that much. go back to the last convention. the evidence of attempted voter suppression is pervasive in this country. even more states probably should be covered than are already covered. >> that is sort of the point of shelby county. it says, you have not re- evaluated if it is already covered. we have not looked at this in any new way to see if there are any new problems. >> the other argument is by any standard if you look at where we

were in 1964-1965 and look at where we were in the last elections, even though there were some problems, we have travelled a long, long way. >> there is a fact of the lowest ratio of black-white turnout in the country is massachusetts and the highest is mississippi. it tells you that there, using the template of the '60s is the wrong template, and either you reevaluate which county should have special attention, or you get rid of it entirely and say that if there is a problem in any county the justice

department will be after you. >> i miss something in this debate. i remember republicans pledging to nominate people to the court who did not make law, who showed respect and deference to the legislative process. the legislative process was done in 2006. the republicans control the house. the republicans controlled the white house. there were at that 0.15000 pages of testimony. there were 90 -- at that point 15,000 pages of testimony. there were 90 witnesses. , w, in the middle of the lawn the supreme court's leading intellect, antonin scalia, has decided to be a judicial activist. of what take note justice scalia said the three times, referring to racial

entitlement as the voting rights act, the voting rights act of racial entitlement. it was just offensive. >> i do not know where to start. we're not talking about reimposing poll taxes, preventing people from going to the balls. -- going to the polls. there is a constitutional question as to whether the federal government has a right to discriminate among states. this is a constitutional principle of equal treatment of , and if you determine as a supreme court justice that it is unconstitutional, you law isned upothe

unconstitutional, and you do not look of the political parties. >> this week, the administration said that a congressional ban on same-sex marriage of violence -- violates the constitutional protection of equal rights. plant eastwood is on the same page as a obama. -- clint eastwood is on the same page as obama. >> public opinion on gay marriage has changed faster than anybody anticipated, including same-sex couples. it is astonishing to even the people who initially sponsored this referendum. with the obama administration has done here is very carefully woven a position that says, you do not have to look at the whole

country. just look at california and other states like it. they give all the same rights to same-sex couples except marriage. in other words, what they argue is, that is a stamp of inferiority. can wait on the other states. that is a way of saying you do not have to wave a red flag at mississippi and alabama and wyoming right now. wait. do this now and let the world catch up to you, and then we can move on. that is essentially what that brief is saying. >> but it is precisely because there is this rapid change, unprecedented, that i think the best course is to learn the lesson of the abortion decision. let the social changes happen. they are so rapid, the changes

in public opinion. ruth bader ginsburg said before she got on the court that the court decision on roe v wade prevented social opinion from reaching this place on its own. let it happen organically and we will not have demonstrations in half a century as we do in the abortion case. >> charles is so right. you do not want to short circuit things. as we did on the voting rights act. i respect the point he's making. let me add this. as a constitutional expert, clint eastwood was elected mayor of carmel, california.

and wyoming was the first state to ratify women's suffrage, so let's hear it for wyoming. >> contrary to what everybody is saying, there are equal rights. your withholding those rights if you refuse to allow same-sex couples to marry. i would like to see it established by the supreme court across the country. i think it is a principal just like brown versus board of education. it is unconstitutional to discriminate against same-sex couples. >> that is the hard thing. at this point, states have not articulated our region and -- a reason to deny marriage to same-

sex couples. they use the reason that marriages to procreate, but not everybody who mary's procreates. >> we will continue to provide assistance to the syrian people and we will continue to increase our assistance in an effort to bring about a post-assad syria. >> jay carney of the white house. john kerry, our new secretary of state, announced this week that the obama administration will provide an additional $60 million to the rebels. a conservative columnist wrote that the situation demanded baldness -- boldness and that

the obama administration may well have allowed the middle east to blow apart. do you agree with that? >> not all. in syria, you have a serious question of what replaces assad? you have anti-assad actors who are just as bad as some of the others we have seen pop up in other countries, like libya. i think this probably is the right approach. i am not even sure this is going to affect the outcome, because ultimately, the group that prevails probably will not be the group' that will establish authority in syria. i think we will see militants takeover. they will take over as they have done in egypt. we have to be very, very careful this. desperat

>> non-legal aid. >> non-legal aid in the middle of a raging civil war. it is prophetic. the issue here is not a saud. the issue -- this is pathetic. the issue here is not bashar al- assad. the issue is who will take over? there are people who are non- jihad this who would live in peace. who would be the best inheritor of syria? the money will go into the hands of the hottest like the ones in libya who killed our folks -- than -- jihadists like the

ones in libya who killed our folks. >> the reason to give anyone arms would to be sure that once the dust settled we had a responsible group on the ground. the problem is there is no control over that. so we did not do anything. i am glad all the monday morning quarterbacks are so sure what we should do. i am not sure it is controllable or up to us in any way shape or form. >> i think the point has been reached where something had to be done. this is a humanitarian disaster. one of the five syrians right now, in a nation of 22 million people when this thing began, now a million have already left, and 82 million, fled the country. -- maybe 2 million, fled the country. they have no power, no heat, no telephone. after that 70,000 dead. that would be the equivalent in

this country of 980,000 people being killed. the irony, of course, in history's ironies, is that this was not an islamic hotbed. it is a sectarian country. i am not rationalizing its other problems, but the possibility of a.g. hottest state israel and demands some action -- a jihadist state is real and demands some action. >> cardinal of new york, first among equals when it comes to american cardinals, is in rome for the conclave that will elect a successor to pope benedict xv, who resigned from the papacy.

this is something that does not happen every day. >> six centuries. i think it is probably a pretty good bet that pope benedict will be remembered most for the fact that he did resign. we will let history call it what it is, but he said the job was too much for him. >> the church has been getting some pretty bad press lately. certainly the vatican has. is the coverage unfair? >> the coverage is certainly not balanced. the child pandarus and abuse scandal is one that cries to heaven -- pederast into abuse scandal is one that prize to heaven for vengeance. -- cries to heaven for vengeance. but with the church does to feed the poor and provide comfort to the lonely, to visit the sick, to fulfill christ's mission and

message coming gets short shrift and very little coverage. >> this is "inside washington," somethinget back to about politics and power. how would you like to be the new pope with the old pope just a building away and people in power saying, pope benedict does not like what this new pope is doing? i think that is why popes usually don't retire. >> there is a question of moral authority and have they lost that moral authority? the child abuse area is only one area where there is a question. the church and theological leaders have to be concerned about the moral authority.

across the board. >> look, for the last 50 years i have in hearing how the church is in crisis. i think the remarkable story about the church is that it is a strong, a venerable institution. i think the pope choosing to retire before death will be a great villain. >> we will see. and we will see you next week. >> for a t