photo by pepper watkins

Here is the transcript of my exchange with Nancy Pelosi this morning. She responds to claims made in Newsweek article sourced to an anonymous "senior Obama official," indicating that she had fast tracked the stimulus bill over the objections of the White House:

JANE HAMSHER: There was an article in Newsweek yesterday that indicated you had fast tracked the stimulus bill over the objections of the White House — is that true, and also how would you respond to anonymous "senior Obama officials" who say that dealing with Democrats is tougher than dealing with Republicans?

NANCY PELOSI: For some reason, it serves somebody’s purpose to put this kind of thing out there. Let me get this straight. You’re the President of the United States, you have a recovery package that you want done by the President’s break, we get that done and we fast tracked it over the President’s objections? It couldn’t be further from the truth.

But you will see a series of articles now that serves somebody’s purpose — whether they’re saying that I keep a list of members — couldn’t be farther from the truth. My commitment is to all of my members, and every day is a new day for me. They voted wrong one day, I need ‘em for another vote the next day. So I don’t have any "list," A.

B, another one said I said I said to the White House, "you can’t talk to the members unless you talk to me first." I don’t have that kind of time. Nor do I have the interest. What I said to the White House is, talk to the members: Talk to the chairmen, talk to the different caucuses, they have a lot of ideas that you all should be communicating with them on. But again, it serves somebody’s purpose to put out that we have this division with the White House. We absolutely do not.

And in terms of — to tell you the truth, I could’ve fast tracked this much faster. We did it one week and one day. We didn’t start on inauguration day — we had the this, we had the hearings. This is a false claim on the part of the Republicans — we had the hearings. The Republicans said they want — what is that thing called, the operating loss carryback — they wanted that in in the bill, and they wanted hearings, they wanted markups for the bill. So we gave them the operating loss carryback, and hearings. We had hearings, but we also had hearings on the amendments, markups on the amendments — we had 26, 27 hours of markups on the amendments.

And then they went to the floor, they had their amendments, we won some, they won some. The Senate actually took out one of the Republican amendments that won, which was the whistleblower one. So we gave them the regular order in order to go forward. We were not going to go backward and adopt their economic failed policies, and that’s what they’re upset about. Operating loss carryback is no longer in the bill, we didn’t get one Republican vote. That was their priority, that’s what they wanted, it may have some merit, maybe we’ll see it another day. It’s in there for smaller businesses, but not across the board. But that’s no longer in the bill, because the Senate wanted the Alternative Minimum Tax, and that prevailed.

So we are an independent branch of government. We have our own process as to how we bring legislation to the floor. We work closely with the Obama administration to move their priorities forward, not without Congress working its will with on certain aspects of the bill, and as you saw in the reconciliation with the Senate, they prevailed on some points, we prevailed on others. But I don’t think the President wanted to — he wanted his bill passed, and we got it passed.

The audio from the event can be found here. Our exchange happened very near the end.