Obama Against Rushing Bills Through Without Reading Them

An old interview with then, just elected Senator Barack Obama, has been released on YouTube by Naked Emperor News that shows Obama was against rushing bills through when the President was a Bush. The interview is from November 22, 2004, and was with Randi Rhodes of Air America. Here some transcripts from the interview;

BARACK OBAMA: …When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what’s in them and nobody has read them.

RANDI RHODES: 14 pounds it was!

BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. And it gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate then these kinds of things happen. And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean you remember that there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.

The YouTube clip then segues to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd explaining Rahm Emanuel’s rationale for ramming bills through congress. Todd says,

And a few things that I feel like that I’ve picked up from these guys. Number one is that they are very aware. Rahm Emanuel is Chief of staff…had experience in the Clinton White House. And he is trying to learn every lesson from those days of Clinton and apply it to Obama. So number one is, don’t deal with just one big issue. One of the reasons why, for instance, they thought health care went down is you had one issue sitting out there when Hillary Clinton introduced it. We all focused on it in the media. And the opposition got to organize and stop it. And you can kill anything in this town if you set an idea out here long enough and give the opposition time to organize and stop something. And I don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on. You can kill anything in Washington doing that. And I think they’re attacking it this way: saying we’re going to push 3 or 4 different things. Because they believe the opposition won’t have time to unite and kill all of it.