Government Executive - Authors - John Aloysius Farrell

Analysis: Rudman's passing reminds senators of what they can be

John Aloysius Farrell — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:14:09 -0500

In choosing this moment to depart this vale of tears, Warren Rudman performed one final service to the Republic he loved and served ably in the U.S. Senate. At a moment when the capital seems mired in avarice, self-indulgence, and partisan rancor, his death reminds us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Rudman served in an era when independence, intelligence, and integrity were the qualities of a great senator, and he had more than his share of these attributes. Words that are shunned today—bipartisan, intellectual, reasonable, cooperative—were guiding standards in the 12 years he was a senator, from 1980 until 1992, toward the end of the Senate’s grand modern era.

For 50 years after World War II, the Senate was a hall of titans. From the postwar assemblies that starred Robert Taft, Richard Russell, Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and William Fulbright, to the renowned company with whom Rudman served— Barry Goldwater, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Howard Baker, Robert Dole, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Alan Simpson, Gary Hart, John Stennis, Russell Long, Sam Nunn—the chamber was rich with spirit, autonomy, legislative skill, and intellectual brilliance.

Yes, there were rogues and scolds and drunks. But it was a time when the national interest was identified; science, economics, and arithmetic were respected; Republicans sat down to negotiate with Democrats; argument raged, and compromise ensued. There were bitter partisan battles over military spending, Supreme Court nominations and other weighty issues, but no one dreamed of destroying the country in order to save it. The Senate had a big, rowdy bloc of centrists who would not recognize, and would no doubt deplore, the political polarization that stifles initiative today.

Amid such high-class company, Rudman held his own. He was a feisty, sometimes abrasive guy. As Adam Clymer notes in Rudman’s obituary in The New York Times, the senator was a decorated “Korean War veteran and former amateur boxer [who] prided himself on his blunt-speaking adherence to centrist principles and his belief in bipartisan compromise as the underpinning of good government.”

Rudman was of a breed that’s rare in Washington today: the New England Republicans, as tight on fiscal discipline as they were generous in recognizing individual liberties.

His landmark legislative achievements were two deficit-reduction laws, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act in 1985 and the Gramm-Rudman Act in 1987. These bipartisan measures sought to curb the Reagan era’s blooming federal deficits with an automatic sequestration scheme, much like the one set to kick in starting Jan. 1. Though lawmakers found ways to evade it then, Rudman’s mechanism forced them to recognize and address the tide of red ink. After leaving the Senate, he helped found the Concord Coalition, which has continued the fight against debt.

But if Rudman was a hero with fiscal conservatives, he clashed with his party’s growing, Southern-based right wing, which viewed social issues through the prism of religion. One of his most lasting contributions to secular freedom and civil liberties—and what he considered his greatest accomplishment as a senator—was the role he played as champion of the nomination of a fellow New Hampshire resident, David Souter, to the Supreme Court in 1990. To the great dismay of the religious Right, Souter joined the Court’s liberal wing, and his votes helped preserve abortion rights.

Rudman alienated some fellow Republicans in 1987, when he was vice chairman of the Senate delegation to the joint committee that investigated the Iran-Contra affair, in which White House aides were discovered selling arms to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan anticommunist Contra forces, in defiance of Congress. In a celebrated moment on national television, Rudman lectured Lt. Col. Oliver North, who orchestrated the arms trade, on the Constitution and the rule of law.

Rudman left the Senate after two terms, in part because of frustration with the growing partisan enmity and polarization in the chamber. His last major contribution to his country, he would ruefully remember, was ignored: In 2001, just a few months before the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, he served as cochairman of a federal commission that warned of the danger of terrorist attacks.

Times change. With every election comes hope. Perhaps the Senate will end its entropy. Perhaps it will rediscover grandness.

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Study forecasts more polarization in new Congress

John Aloysius Farrell, National Journal — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 08:45:55 -0500

The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed decades of voting records and concluded that the incoming House will have the lowest number of competitive seats in more than 40 years.

In the 1970s, there were 152 competitive seats, the center found, but that number has slipped to 101.

At the same time, the number of “misaligned” seats -- House districts that voted for one party in a presidential election but were represented by a member of the rival party in Congress -- will likely “dwindle to nearly zero” on Tuesday, the report predicted.

As recently as 1992, 96 House members represented districts that supported presidential candidates from the opposing party. After Tuesday’s balloting, that figure could be as low as two or three.

“The drop in competitive and misaligned seats is likely to produce fewer congressional moderates – from either party,” the report concluded. “Redistricting in the lead-up to the 2012 elections is likely to further the polarization that Americans have seen in Congress.”

Such polarization could make it even more difficult for the newly elected president to reach bipartisan agreements with congressional leaders on a host of thorny issues, said former GOP Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia.

“Redistricting does make for polarization,” said Davis. In districts dominated by one party “most members now worry about their primaries, … [and] primary voters do not reward compromise.”

It may take an economic “tremor” before the two parties reach agreement on taxes, government spending, and health care, said Davis, who now heads the government-affairs department for Deloitte & Touche.

The connection between redistricting and polarization is a matter of considerable debate among political scientists--if for no other reason than that the Senate, whose members are elected on a statewide basis, is also polarized.

But the center’s report confirmed other studies -- including National Journal’s annual vote ratings -- that have chronicled the withering away of the ideological center in both chambers of Congress. Redistricting, the center concluded, does “exacerbate the situation.”
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Analysis: The legend of Simpson-Bowles

Nancy Cook and John Aloysius Farrell, National Journal — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 11:42:02 -0400

Coming this holiday season! From the people who brought you the most acclaimed, misconstrued, pain-laden tax and budget plan of all time!

Simpson-Bowles: The Sequel.

A crowd of ex-politicians and business executives, led by former Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles have been working behind closed doors on Simpson-Bowles 2.0.

If all goes well, this updated deficit-reduction plan, with fresh new segments on health care policy and taxes, will be unveiled after the election, when Congress confronts the fiscal cliff and must decide the fate of trillions of dollars in expiring tax provisions and spending cuts.

Amidst the expected chaos, the relaunch of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform proposal, as it is properly known, could become the de facto template.

“Simpson-Bowles is a brand that’s very well accepted by most Americans,” says Gregg, the former chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “It’s a vehicle that has great credibility, because it’s the only vehicle that is bipartisan and substantial on fiscal reform. It’s a hugely significant starting point.”

To build support for the plan, Gregg and Bowles have met with a bipartisan group of roughly 40 senators who are wrestling with the end-of-the-year tax and spending questions. The group has hosted discussions and dinners with think-tank scholars from the Concord Coalition and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as with roughly 100 executives from Fortune 500 companies.

Momentum may be building. Hardly a day goes by in Congress or on the hustings without some lawmaker extolling Simpson-Bowles as the kind of potent fiscal medicine Americans must swallow if the country is to fix its debt and deficit problems, reform government and revive the economy. It’s becoming all things to all women and men.

When President Obama and Mitt Romney want to demonstrate they are bonafide fiscal tigers, they cite Simpson-Bowles. When the tax- and budget-panel chairmen and their corresponding ranking members assure their constituencies that there is light in the gloom, they point to Simpson-Bowles. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants praise its fiscal formulas. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his captains hail its call for discipline. Speaker John Boehner calls it “the menu” that guided him during budget negotiations with the White House.

“The Bowles-Simpson group is the best example of what can be accomplished,” says Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. It can serve as “a consensus bipartisan template.”

It offers “a conscientious way to address the debt and deficit,” says Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.

Simpson-Bowles helped foster and fuel the ongoing push for tax reform. The commission was for changing Medicare before changing Medicare was cool. There is a growing feeling on Capitol Hill, says Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, that something like the Simpson-Bowles “framework” will ultimately be passed by Congress and feted at a signing ceremony on a sunny South Lawn.

Something like. There’s the rub. Click here to read the rest of this National Journal article.

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Justice Scalia: Guns may be regulated

John Aloysius Farrell, National Journal — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:54:11 -0400

Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the Supreme Court's most vocal and conservative justices, said on Sunday that the Second Amendment leaves room for U.S. legislatures to regulate guns, including menacing hand-held weapons.

"It will have to be decided in future cases," Scalia said on Fox News Sunday. But there were legal precedents from the days of the Founding Fathers that banned frightening weapons which a constitutional originalist like himself must recognize. There were also "locational limitations" on where weapons could be carried, the justice noted.

When asked if that kind of precedent would apply to assault weapons, or 100-round ammunition magazines like those used in the recent Colorado movie theater massacre, Scalia declined to speculate. "We'll see," he said. '"It will have to be decided."

As an originalist scholar, Scalia looks to the text of the Constitution—which confirms the right to bear arms—but also the context of 18^th-century history. “They had some limitations on the nature of arms that could be borne," he told host Chris Wallace.

In a wide-ranging interview, Scalia also stuck by his criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority opinion in the ruling that upheld the Affordable Care Act this summer. "You don't interpret a penalty to be a pig. It can't be a pig," said Scalia, of the court's decision to call the penalty for not obtaining health insurance a tax. "There is no way to regard this penalty as a tax."

Scalia, a septuagenarian, said he had given no thought to retiring. "My wife doesn't want me hanging around the house," he joked. But he did say he would try to time his retirement from the court so that a justice of similar conservative sentiments would take his place, presumably as the appointee of a Republican president. "Of course I would not like to be replaced by somebody who sets out immediately to undo" what he has spent decades trying to achieve, the justice said.

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Ron Paul: No federal financial aid for tornado victims

John Aloysius Farrell, National Journal — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:00:00 -0500

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, stood by his libertarian beliefs on Sunday, saying that victims of the violent storms and tornadoes that have battered a band of states in the South and Midwest in recent days should not be given emergency financial aid from the federal government.

"There is no such thing as federal money," Paul said, on CNN’s State of the Union. "Federal money is just what they steal from the states and steal from you and me."

"The people who live in tornado alley, just as I live in hurricane alley, they should have insurance," Paul said.

Paul said there was a role for the National Guard to restore order and provide care and shelter in major emergencies, but that the Federal Emergency Management Agency led to nothing but "frustration and anger."

"To say that any accident that happens in the country, send in FEMA, send in the money, the government has all this money—it is totally out of control and it's not efficient," Paul said.

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Our polarized Congress: Divided we stand

John Aloysius Farrell, National Journal — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:25:20 -0500

The House and the Senate are in a state of near-paralysis over the country’s finances. Even conservatives—who generally embrace Thoreau’s maxim that the government that governs best governs least—show signs of fear and alarm about the government’s inability to get things done.

The United States has an aging population that is depending on underfunded federal health and pension programs during a time of sluggish economic growth, unrelenting international challenges, soaring debt, and pertinacious division.

“If we keep kicking the can down the road, and ducking … and pushing responsibility off to the next Congress, then we’ll have a European-type situation on our hands: We’ll have a debt crisis,” warns Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican from Wisconsin who chairs the House Budget Committee. And that procrastination will mean “bitter austerity … sudden, disruptive cuts … slow economic growth … [and huge] tax increases.”

The 2011 National Journal voting ratings offer little cause for optimism. Polarization remains endemic. Lawmakers march in lockstep with their party. Heretics are purged.

For the second year in a row but only the third time in the 30 years that National Journal has published these ratings, no Senate Democrat compiled a voting record to the right of any Senate Republican, and no Republican came down on the left of any Senate Democrat. (The first time this happened was 1999.)

Not Ben Nelson, the Democrat from oh-so-Republican Nebraska. Not Scott Brown, the Republican from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. Not the soon-departing Joe Lieberman, the independent Democrat from Connecticut, nor the newly arrived Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia. Not Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, the moderate Republican Ladies of Maine.

Ideological mavericks are an extinct breed. The otherwise iconoclastic Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had the most conservative voting record in the Senate (Democrats Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York were tied for the most liberal), and the old fighter jock himself, John McCain of Arizona, voted more to the right than two-thirds of his GOP colleagues.

The 435 members of the House are as polarized as their Senate colleagues. Only six Republicans—Chris Smith of New Jersey, Tim Johnson of Illinois, Justin Amash of Michigan, Ron Paul of Texas, Steven LaTourette of Ohio, and Walter Jones of North Carolina—compiled a slightly more “liberal” voting record than the most conservative Democrat, Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma.

And Ron Paul makes the list only because his libertarianism takes him so far right that on some issues he runs off the screen, Pac-Man like, and pops up on the other side.

Believe it or not, it wasn’t always so. In 1982, when National Journal published its first set of voting ratings, 58 senators—a majority of the 100-member chamber—compiled records that fell between the most conservative Democrat (Edward Zorinsky of Nebraska) and the most liberal Republican (Lowell Weicker of Connecticut). Now it’s zero, zip, nada.

The House in 1982 was chock-full of “Boll Weevils” (conservative Democrats) and “Gypsy Moths” (liberal Republicans). That year’s National Journal ratings found 344 House members whose voting records fell between the most liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrat. Today, the number is 16, up slightly from the seven in that category in 2010 but virtually the same as the 15 “betweeners” in both 2008 and 2009. As recently as 2006, when moderate Republican Jim Leach represented a House district in Iowa, the number was 42. The NJ ratings reflect an ideological sorting of Americans into communities that suit their political tastes: the average scores of members of Congress closely tracked how their districts voted in the 2008 presidential election.

Continued polarization could lead to awful consequences. “The country is in dire straits, and … we are tied down like Gulliver by the Lilliputians .… We can’t do squat,” said Keith Poole, an expert on political polarization from the University of Georgia. “The tea party whack jobs are right: We’re bankrupt.… But we’re just drifting, drifting toward the falls.”

Read the full story at NationalJournal.com

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