Social Studies - A Stubborn Senator Who Matters

by Jonathan Rauch

Sat. Nov. 17, 2007


In real life, which is not quite as cruel as the Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown finally got to kick the ball. He sent it soaring between the goalposts. He won the game.

Of course, real life is still pretty cruel. That big win did not clinch the series. The ball rolled back down the field. Most players lost interest. Still, no one should forget the sometimes lonely guy who wouldn't give up.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., recently announced his retirement. First elected in 1972 after heading Albuquerque's city government and then losing a 1970 bid for governor, he will leave, when his term expires in just over a year, as the longest-serving senator in his state's history.

Outside New Mexico and the Capitol's corridors, few Americans know his name. Soon he will be one of thousands of legislators who have passed through Washington and into history's dusty pages. But he will get an honorable footnote, at the very least, and it will say, "He kicked the ball."

"He's an institutionalist," says former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who has known Domenici since the early 1970s and who now heads the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are fewer and fewer of them, who take seriously the role of the Congress under the Constitution. When you lose one of those people, there's quite an empty space left."

An empty space, a hole: Ask around about Domenici's departure, and you hear many variants of that metaphor. "He is willing to and was successful at making bipartisan deals to get legislation passed," says former Sen. Bennett Johnston, D-La., who is now chairman of Johnston and Associates, a lobbying and consulting firm. "There's a reduced number in both parties with those skills. He will leave a big hole."

New Mexicans love him for bringing home federal dollars, particularly for the Sandia and Los Alamos national labs, whose patron saint he has been. Late in his career, Domenici turned his hand to energy policy, becoming chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 2003 and playing a leading role in shaping the 2005 energy bill. He also stumbled, committing what appears to have been a serious lapse in judgment by placing a phone call that seemed to pressure a federal prosecutor. (Being scrutinized in the U.S. attorney scandal, Domenici has told the Associated Press, was the worst "hell" of his career.)

"But I think in the end," says Leon Panetta, a former House Budget Committee chairman who went on to be President Clinton's budget director and chief of staff, "his greatest legacy is going to be in regards to his budget work." For more than 20 years, starting in 1981, Domenici was either chairman of the Budget Committee or its ranking Republican member -- surely two of the most thankless jobs in Washington. Domenici's career, far more than that of any other public figure, has been entwined with deficits.

I first encountered him in 1984, when I was a young reporter covering the budget for this magazine. Domenici, I soon discovered, differed from most politicians. Backslapping bonhomie and smooth-talking charm seemed foreign to him. He was all business, his demeanor unsmiling, reserved, often cantankerous. Like Charlie Brown, he seemed to carry the world's weight on his shoulders.

To his core, Domenici believed in fiscal discipline. He never accepted the headier formulations of supply-side doctrine that spiked the Republican Party's punch bowl. Gung-ho tax cutters, who regarded budget balance and spending cuts as "root-canal economics," were annoyed. His longtime senior aide (and current Chief of Staff) Steve Bell remembers being present in the early 1980s when a prominent House Republican, one of the young Turks of the Reagan revolution, told Domenici, "You know what your problem is? You're terminally responsible."

Among today's Republicans, being fiscally responsible means cutting taxes and denouncing earmarks (congressionally mandated spending on legislators' pet causes). Bell once overheard a conversation in which Domenici rebuked a colleague for posturing on earmarks and styling himself a fiscal conservative. "You're not, really," Bell recalls Domenici saying, "because if you were, you wouldn't worry about a million here and a million there. You'd be worried about Social Security and the big entitlements." To Domenici's way of thinking, million-dollar earmarks can grease the passage of multibillion-dollar entitlement reductions.

And, yes, he was willing to support tax increases, provided he got something in exchange. "He was always for discipline," Panetta said. "I never found him unwilling to deal with both spending cuts and tax increases." This was not because he liked taxes. It was because, former math teacher that he was, he could add. He knew that long-term solvency was a pipe dream if taxes and entitlements were off the table.

In the early 1980s, Domenici championed legislation moderating President Reagan's 1981 tax cuts, crossed the aisle to vote for a Democratic budget resolution containing new revenues, and pleaded with the Reagan White House not to rule out future tax increases in the 1984 campaign (Reagan declared tax increases a "last resort"). Then, in 1985, he put everything on the line for entitlement reform.

Conventional wisdom held that Reagan's attempt to cut Social Security benefits in 1981 had cost the Republicans dearly in the 1982 elections. Nonetheless, after Reagan's landslide win in 1984, Domenici and then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., saw 1985 as a fleeting chance to break the Social Security taboo and establish control over entitlements, then -- as now -- the engine of federal insolvency.

Dole and Domenici spent painful weeks bringing Reagan and the Senate's Republicans together in support of a deficit-cutting plan that included Social Security cuts. Democrats and House Republicans wanted nothing to do with it. Still, in a cliff-hanging 50-49 party-line vote, with one Republican senator roused from his hospital bed and Vice President George H.W. Bush breaking the tie, Dole and Domenici prevailed -- only to be double-crossed by Reagan. Lucy -- sorry, Reagan -- cut a deal with Democrats abandoning the Social Security cuts, claiming, in true Lucy fashion, to have supported them only "reluctantly."

Domenici had taken a flying kick and landed flat on his back. He and Dole had hoped that taking on Social Security would set a precedent, and that is just what happened -- except the precedent was the opposite of what they intended, putting Social Security effectively off limits (with only minor exceptions) ever since.

Still, that year Domenici showed a kind of political bravery whose like is scarcely imaginable today. And he kept working on the deficit, as did two responsible presidents, the elder Bush and Bill Clinton, both of whom undertook major deficit reductions at high political cost. In 1997, Domenici got his entitlement cut, when Clinton and congressional Republicans negotiated a budget deal that included significant Medicare reductions, along with minor tax increases. And the Budget Committee chairman watched as the federal budget swung, astonishingly, into surplus.

"We made it to the top of the mountain in 1997 with Clinton," says Bill Hoagland, a Budget Committee staff director under Domenici (now with Cigna in Washington). "We got to our goal of a balanced budget. That I consider to be the pinnacle of his career."

Of course, the budget swung back into deficit in this decade. Domenici felt "terrible" about that, Bell says. Tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts became the Republican rallying cry. "I do think he started to get a little bit more isolated," says Hoagland. "He looked around and didn't see as many of his old buddies.

It wasn't the old Senate where he could work across the aisle." Domenici was a loyalist but not a partisan, and a conservative but not an ideologue, in a political environment that was becoming more partisan and ideological by the day. "He saw the writing on the wall as Congress became increasingly partisan," Panetta says, "and as Republicans and Democrats became increasingly locked in trench warfare."

Still, people who know him say Domenici would have run again if not for his health. He faces a progressive brain disease called frontotemporal lobar degeneration, an adversary that may require all his stubbornness.

Along with Dole, Hamilton, former Republican Sen. Howard Baker, and others, Domenici was a member of a political generation that could be infuriatingly partisan but also knew how not to be. He leaves behind a Congress in which, as Johnston says, "the Domenicis are fewer in number and more needed than ever." Relentlessly persistent in the pursuit of a principled moderation, Domenici is a man who believes in balance, and whose own career has been a model of it.

 

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