Excuse me, whose rec room? Yes, yours. Grandma’s going to take possession of it, sooner or later, and maybe your second bathroom, too, unless the nurse wants to set up her bulky equipment in there. See, one of the things you missed somewhere during the time-line evidence or DNA redirect was that the current plan is to cut $182 billion out of Medicaid over seven years. Not Medicare, Medicaid, which is different, even though lots of really smart people don’t know exactly how. Leslie Abramson and Jack Ford and all the rest haven’t filled hours of TV time explaining this big hit on the poor and the way millions of middle-class, even rich, elderly spend down all of their assets until they’re poor enough to be eligible for nursing-home care paid for by Medicaid. And the talking heads haven’t told you how this is going to change, making it much more likely grandma will have to move in. It’s a complicated plot, but you’d better start following it.
Of course, this is just one of many twisted but truly major problems headed our way. Everyone laughed when Sam Nunn rescheduled his press conference announcing his retirement from the Senate, which had been slated for the same hour as the Simpson verdict. But isn’t it about time to plug in to the unfolding Washington drama, where the battle between the “prosecution” (energized Republicans trying to put away the welfare state) and the “defense” (demoralized Senate Democrats, slowing down the process) is for stakes higher than one celebrity murder trial?
Nunn, the eighth Democratic senator to announce he won’t seek re-election in 1996, represents an older, more gentlemanly tradition of forging bipartisan compromise. Like other departing Democrats, he is critical of the new Senate sniping. Paul Simon, also leaving, says he has seen more party-line votes in Senate committees this year than in the previous 10. Last week the Senate Finance Committee marked up a major tax bill (giving a $500 tax cut) without any real Democratic participation, even by conservative Democrats. When the Democrats controlled the Senate, the reverse–no GOP help–would have been unthinkable.
If the Nunns and Bradleys are on the way out, what type is on the way in? Try Rick Santorum, a freshman conservative Republican from Pennsylvania who beat Harris Wofford last year. After he successfully floor-managed the landmark welfare bill that passed the Senate last month, Sen. Alan Simpson dubbed him “rookie of the year.” Santorum, who served two terms in the House, is 37 years old, bright, relentlessly ideological, uninterested in admission to the club. “The Senate is now where the House was in ‘90,” he says. “There were a few of us who were rabble-rousers and troublemakers. As we get more conservatives, you’ll see a shift here, too.” Earlier this year, Democrats were offended by Santorum’s Barry Scheek-style manners (he repeatedly referred to the president as “Bill” on the floor) and some Republicans were, too (he tried to bounce Sen. Mark Hatfield as Appropriations chairman when Hatfield voted against the balanced-budget amendment).
But in trying to dynamite the status quo, Santorum can be refreshing. He can list all of the senators on the Agriculture Committee, including fellow Republicans, and which crop subsidy each one protects. This logrolling – which gives billions to rich peopLe who don’t even live on farms–is the perfect symbol of how we ended up with such a huge deficit. Even as he fails, Santorum is absolutely right to try to end the game. Nunn-style caution (Don’t alienate colleagues by attacking their projects because then they won’t vote with you on other bills) is part of what brought us to this sorry pass.
But Santorum’s distrust of government lacks nuance. When the conversation turns to shredding the safety net in favor of completely untested free-market charity–a trendy conservative idea–he’s all for it. And when it turns to national service–small but symbolic–any sense of compromise completely eludes him. Long before Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps, Sam Nunn, while hardly an avatar of big government, was nonetheless a big believer in nonbureaucratic national service. Santorum practically spits up his Senate bean soup on the subject. AmeriCorps isn’t perfect, but Santorum’s not interested in fixing it; he seems to loathe the whole idea of public service–which is strange, considering his occupation.
What makes these divisions over the proper role of government so compelling is that the jury is still out. As Santorum spoke, Wofford, his old adversary, was at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, being sworn in by Clinton as the new chief of AmeriCorps. While the Republicans have defunded the program as a way of jabbing the president, Wofford left the White House feeling peppy. He thinks enough moderate Republicans in the Senate will eventually switch over to save AmeriCorps even without the help of a veto. In that sense, Sam Nunn’s bipartisan legacy lives, though this time the swing voters are moderate Republicans like Bill Frist, John Chafee or Jim Jeffords instead of conservative Democrats. Learn their names and faces. They have more to do with your life than some stranger wearing Bruno Magli shoes.
