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BACK ON YOUR SLED, SENATOR TED
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I don't want to be a square and say I watch Congress, but I do surf
Congress, which means I sometimes watch it when something nasty's going on. If the
boys and girls are fighting it makes a good show. If they're not, it's like
watching paint dry.
Surprisingly, very few people stand out. By now I've seen practically all
there are, but only one so far has been a star. This is Bill Thomas of
California, the Republican chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He is the best
speaker in the House or Senate, but he's more entertaining holding a
committee hearing than giving a speech. He uses a kind of insinuating drawl to
suggest that his opponents on the committee are out to lunch when they attempt to
contest his rulings or challenge his control of hearings. He makes it plain
that he looks on them a set of pinheads and enjoys ruling them out of order
or non-responsive or over their time limit or whatever else he needs to do to
keep them in their places. It's very entertaining, especially if you are a
Republican.
After that it's all a blank, as I've said. All the same there are people
you must pay attention to even if they haven't got Thomas's talent. They have
power and they can get things done so they can't be overlooked. One of them
is Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, former chairman of the
Appropriations Committee, now chairman of the Commerce Committee, who controls the
flow of money to the pet projects of the other ninety-nine Senators. This
gives him beaucoup power, which he doesn't hesitate to use. Lately he blew a
gasket on the Senate floor and threatened to resign, after thirty-seven years,
if Congress revoked funds for two bridges he had included in a highway
appropriations bill. The Senator at fault had been elected on an anti-waste
platform and he thought the bridges, known as the "bridges to nowhere" because one
of them was meant to serve an island with a population of fifty people, were
a pretty flagrant example of government waste.
Stevens disagreed and made it plain if he didn't get the bridges restored
that he would be blocking funds for expenditures in the offending Senator's
state, Oklahoma.
The result was not a cave-in exactly, because the bridges were cancelled.
The funds, however, were not. They were left in the bill, to be used for other
purposes in Alaska. Not only that, but the other purposes could turn out to
be the bridges themselves. The Senate works in this way, it seems.
I don't like it. I thought Stevens should have been put in his place. Where
does a senator from a pipsqueak state with a population of 600,000 get off
threatening one from a state with six times that many? Oh, that's just the way
the Senate works, huh? Yes, it's in the Constitution, you see. Each state
regardless of size gets two Senators, making the big equal with the small
until the end of time. Even if, as required, you got three-quarters of the
states to pass a Constitutional amendment to change this, it wouldn't be any good,
because this is one thing in the Constitution that can't be amended. Equal
representation in the Senate is locked in and can't be unlocked with
dynamite. Stevens is pretty much of a midget (but a tough one; he flew combat in
WWII) and he's from the fifth emptiest state, but standing on the Constitution he
's ten feet tall. Schwarzenegger could put him in his pocket and California
could take in all his constituents without feeling it, but so what?
I don't really object to this, which is to say I don't go about screaming "
What a sell! I've been robbed!" and the like, even though I know Stevens'
bridge money came out of New York's pocket. I learned about the Constitution
when I was young, and heard how the small states got themselves equal
representation with the big ones as the price of signing on to it. A deal was made
218 years ago and we've got to stick to it. Fair enough.
All the same it's not possible that the high contracting parties fully
realized what they were signing on to. In the first place they didn't foresee
today's kind of government
growing out of the modest little setup they had, where the whole operation
could be run out of a couple of buildings in the Washington mud flats, where
there was no FBI or CIA or HUD or FCC or EPA or NLRB, and most of all, no
IRS. Where there was an Attorney General but no Department of Justice, a
Secretary of War but no Pentagon, and thirteen States but no...more. They didn't
contemplate a future where there would be all those things and a lot more,
along with fifty states to keep them occupied. And when they created equal
representation they didn't contemplate a Senate where the eight least populous
states with five million people would have as much representation as the eight
most populous with 139 million. This is 28 times the population of the
smallest.
Not everybody is unhappy with this. The Gang of Eight obviously isn't. How
could they be when all their bills are paid by the their big brothers? It's
certain that any federal money they receive is far in excess of any they pay
in. What's the use of having sixteen Senators on the job in Congress if they
can't do this much for you?
Other people who aren't unhappy are the vast majority of the big-state
citizens who aren't aware of this situation and never bother their heads about
it. This number is shrinking however, because people are waking up, to the
bullfrog voice of Stevens and others.
One other class of people that is not discontented is the Republicans. In
the eight small states they only have six Senators out of the possible
sixteen, but they're safe seats, and some of the others look attainable if enough
effort is put in. The eight big states have seven Republican Senators, which
isn't bad, but it's a major job getting them in and then keeping them
straight under the radical pressure that's always bearing down on them from the
big-city pressure groups.
I think the Republicans ought to bite the bullet and tackle this situation
while they still can. The bigger the State, the more Democratic it tends to
be. In time their people are going to realize that the Ted Stevenses don't
have to be tolerated completely no matter what the Constitution says. If the
Okies tackled Ted over his threats to short-change them, he would retreat at
full speed, rather than fight a losing battle in the media. He could be
reminded that a chairman of a committee can be removed by a party caucus, no matter
if he has seniority going back to the days of Dan McGrew. There could even
be warnings given of the possibility of a new Constitutional Convention. It'
ll have to come some day. The populous states of the Union are eventually
going to revolt against the idea of the tail wagging the dog. The Constitution
has no provision for another Convention? Get the Iraqis. They're making a
constitution right now. They can help.
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