gavel and a new presidency has begun. president obama returned today with a 50% approval rating. that could rise farther if republicans try to repeal health care, if they spend the next year complaining instead of governing. republicans mission, that s our top story. plus, president obama s considering names bill daley as his new chief of staff. is this the guy the person is president needs right now? and here s evidence the republican rs in bed with big business. their top investigator is asking corporations around trade associations themselves, what regulations they d like him to target. didn t know it worked that way. the top ceos get to decide how they get regulated. they call the shots. also, the showdown over the dead zone. tea partiers are fiercely opposed to raising the debt limit even if that means raising the limit. that s for our strategists tonight. it s very worrisome what happens if the federal government doesn t pay itself bills. remember greece, ireland? and w
no surprise there. on business tax cuts it calls for giving small businesses a deduction equal to 20% of their business income. it calls for a new cap on government spending. for the repeal of the health care bill. repeal. and fully funding, i don t know where this came from, missile defense. full funding of missile defense. that s an odd one. you re not laughing, steve. you re not todd. here s what i think is being hidden under the table. during his campaign, changing the 14th amendment to guarantee citizenship in this country. let s talk about someone making the proposal, it s not on the paper here. people come here to have babies. they come here to drop a child. it s called drop and leave. republicans are talking about actions that would shut down government if they take control of congress. let s listen again. stage one. of the end of obamaism will be a new republican congress in january that simply refuses to fund any of the radical efforts.
reasonable and rational that we would prepare for something like that. but there s no question that missile defense is not going to be at the core of what republican candidates are talking about. steve, you take over. they re talking about missile defense of the whole continental of the united states. they call it homeland. i call it civil defense. they re talking about the whole country, they re going to have missile defense for. the cost of that, i would imagine is unimaginable. and there s the question. is that something to spend money on because somewhere down the line, someone s going to get an icbm, the kind of missile that iraq had, that got us here now, that they had a deliverable weapon that could reach here. you have a party on the one hand that wants fiscal. it was ronald reagan who first proposed this in 1984 and 1985 and it was something that we didn t need then. it s something that frankly we don t need now and it s something that we certainly can t afford right now.
we get it. we get it. and this is why when we outlined in here, our pledge to america, i can tell you, we are very serious about implementing our pledge. i love it they take off the suits when they get serious. welcome back to hardball. that was house republican leader john boehner introducing the republicans pledge to america and here s what congressman james clyburn of south carolina had to say about it. after reading it over last night, it occurred to me that if this is implemented, what we re going to see is the infliction of a plague on america. wow, what effect will this new pledge have on the midterms? who gets an edge. joining me now is democratic strategist steve mcmahan and todd harris. here are some of the points in the pledge on paper. on tax cuts. it calls for making bush tax cuts permanent.
may want to ascribe things that other people have said to what our party s going to run on, but that doesn t make it so. so now you ve got the argument, steve, which is supervision will be at hand. all the crazy stuff we ve heard for months now isn t going to happen. because according to todd what s your argument? going to keep all of these people in the playpen. no trouble from them. what s argument the democrats are going to be? it s funny because the democrats have been saying for a while the choice in this election is a choice for the future and the past. i think what the republicans have done now is they ve actually proven that case. they objected to it before, saying no, no, no, we re not going back to that. but now they are proving. they want to cut tax for rich, build the dang fence, build the antiballistic missile system. why that is needed is anyone s guess. and the tea party candidates are even more insidious and extreme. many of them want to do things like get rid of