Common Cents (Timothy Penny and Major Garrett)
Barnes, Fred
to promote their agenda. Pauken decided to try to counter Hayden's campaign by producing a documentary film that "traced the activities of the New Left from the anti-Vietnam era to its current...
...And so on...
...Older members tied to special interests...
...Note that two of these conditions would occur far more frequently with term limits: more newcomers, more departees...
...That said, there certainly must be some vets who are fabricating ills in order to collect disability...
...is necessary, if only to direct the downsizing that voters have called for...
...It's the classic example of not seeing forest for the trees...
...It's a clubby, protective, and static environment...
...Instead of being representatives of the people in Washington, they become emissaries of Washington to the people...
...Goligowski's letter shows that one need not have pored over all the studies and testimony relating to Gulf War Syndrome to understand, nor have written a 5,000-word article to convey, that there is something terribly wrong with the Gulf War Syndrome picture...
...Both friends and critics of the Republican Congress should learn them...
...CI around votes that defy the entrenched interests...
...As I made clear, symptoms of stress-related illness can be very real...
...Done...
...When members stay on the same committee for years, their world-view tends to shrink," he notes correctly...
...His view of government is far closer to Newt Gingrich's than to Richard Gephardt's...
...In Jimmy Carter's administration, ACTION had been run by the former anti-war activist Sam Brown, which gave Pauken plenty to reform...
...Entitled Whatever Works, the documentary showed that, in the hands of the left, issues such as Vietnam and nuclear power are merely "political weapons to be used to gain political power...
...I'm not sure if term limits would be good public policy," he writes...
...And the only solution is mandatory term limits...
...He's a real deficit hawk, not a rhetorical hawk like Leon Panetta...
...Pauken's filmmakers scoured the film archives for graphic evidence of their point and they found a zinger: the then-unknown but now-notorious clip of Jane Fonda sitting in the cockpit of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes...
...Some programs may well be better off run by sensible conservatives in Washington, rather than leftist activists in the states...
...Most lawmakers find it easier to vote courageously when one of three conditions is at play," Penny insists...
...Yes, Penny explicitly backs term limits for committee chairmen and urges voters to side with any candidate "willing to impose his or her own term limit...
...Penny-Kasich lost 219-213...
...The first one, don't vote for lawyers...
...The problem with lawyers is that law school trains people to be legalistic, prosecutorial, and argumentative," he says...
...It wasn't just Democrats either...
...and eliminate funding of leftist political organizations...
...During Penny's tenure, only Ron Dellums, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, named freshmen to conference committees...
...Newer, younger members...
...To my dismay, I discovered the definition of a Democrat had changed in the 1980s," Penny writes...
...All it takes for this to happen is time, which is also what it takes for a member to get a committee chairman-ship and become transformed into an entrenched power...
...It is disturbing that a medical doctor such as John Boyles would confuse stress-related illness with a "figment of one's imagination...
...Number two is to "reduce the number of congressional committees and the number of staff employees in Congress...
...If one works, keep using it so long as it helps to advance the political objectives of the moment...
...1 n 1981, when Pauken joined the Reagan administration as the director of ACTION, his assignment was to reduce ACTION's budget and to begin drying up the federal funding that had flowed to activists promoting a left-wing agenda under the guise of volunteer programs...
...True, he makes a strong case for this limited reform...
...And still other programs shouldn't be funded at all...
...Pauken relates the simple yet rarely followed game plan: develop a sound strategy, hire people who are both competent and committed to the agenda, keep a close watch on the bureaucrats and the media, and work like hell...
...Nirvana...
...The old-timers prefer "the comfortable and the familiar...
...it's all about winning the argument, not revealing the truth...
...While the anti-nuclear movement prevented the development of that industry, Hayden and Fonda failed in their effort to build a broad-based political movement...
...If he weren't, he'd be a Republican...
...Penny cites the case of Sanford Bishop, Jr., a black Democrat from Georgia who changed his mind and voted in 1994 for the ban on nineteen semiautomatic weapons...
...In extreme cases, stress can have The effect of a severe allergic reaction and be life-threatening...
...Number three is to abolish baseline budgeting...
...We know of one fine young man who went to a VA hospital two years ago with a rash to demand payment for having Gulf War Syndrome...
...Besides reforms, he offers tips for voters...
...His top recommendation is to "place Congress under all health, safety, labor, and discrimination laws that govern the private sector...
...This memoir is filled with such lessons...
...They become wedded to the status quo on the committee and hostile to new approaches...
...Simultaneously, we developed an alternative social policy to the Great Society approach of helping the poor which accomplished more with less money...
...Pauken's first instinct was to decentralize decision-making and allow local agencies to determine which organizations would get ACTION's grant money...
...Anyway, the phenomenon of senior members protecting their turf, their programs, and their spending evaporates with term limits...
...Pauken decided to try to counter Hayden's campaign by producing a documentary film that "traced the activities of the New Left from the anti-Vietnam era to its current involvement in nuclear energy...
...W hat's striking as well is that many of the congressional reforms recommended by Penny—he began writing the book during his final year in the House, 1994—have already been carried out by Gingrich and company...
...Done...
...The answer is, he's a political eccentric...
...Penny dissented...
...A little bit of common sense and an open mind go a long way...
...So why does Penny shy away from the obvious, term limits...
...They "compile a mountain of facts to defend their preexisting political beliefs...
...Some of the new incentives are bad (like the desire to line up a job with a special interest) but most are good (like the need to serve the public they'll soon be joining...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 13) Michael Fumento replies: Mr...
...But he soon realized that some centralization M uch as George Will did in his 1992 book Restoration, Tim Penny has written a persuasive screed in support of term limits...
...More important, while Penny is willing to raise taxes to shrink the deficit—he backed George Bush's catastrophic budget deal of 1990—he's faCOMMON CENTS: A RETIRING SIX-TERM CONGRESSMAN REVEALS HOW CONGRESS REALLY WORKS—AND WHAT WE MUST DO TO FIX IT Timothy Penny and Major Garrett Little, Brown / 262 pages / $21.95 reviewed by FRED BARNES 72 The American Spectator August 1995 natical about cutting spending and eliminating federal programs...
...Penny doesn't make the leap from problem to solution, but if anyone should, it's he...
...Andrews must be correct with regards to some persons...
...The longer a member of Congress stays, the more he grows tight with lobby after lobby...
...That's why I believe that many of these vets truly are sick, despite the overwhelming evidence that in all but a tiny number of cases, it isn't from any exposure in the Gulf...
...Democrats, Penny's partisan colleagues, refused to adopt any of these reforms...
...Pauken unveiled his film in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in conjunction with Hayden's kickoff of a national tour of his own, and followed Hayden around the country...
...In the Congress I joined in 1982 we had to be willing to increase spending to impress the Democratic leaders who had built their careers around maintaining and expanding federal programs that the country could no longer afford...
...Penny is one of that dying political breed, a moderate-to-conservative (and pro-life) Democrat...
...Everything in Common Cents, every argument, every anecdote, every statistic, says they would be...
...Bishop found it possible to chart a new direction because he wasn't wedded to the gun lobby," Penny says...
...They're chosen because "they can trust one another to carry out the old policies with the same old compromises," Penny says...
...I don't blame his co-author, Major Garrett of the Washington Times, a premier Capitol Hill reporter...
...Their incentives change when they know they'll be quitting Congress...
...Fonda dropped out of the tour, and the nuclear campaign never became the basis for any broader politics...
...T here's a culture of spending in Washington, Penny argues, and "seniority plays a big part" in it...
...All thirteen senior Republicans on the Appropriations Committee voted against us," he writes...
...Well, if that's true for Bishop, it's also true in the case of every special interest in Washington, from the peanut lobby to AARP...
...They're the folks who get on the conference committees that resolve the differences between Senate and House bills...
...As I say, Penny, 43, is an eccentric, but a lovable one...
...Others might be better handled by the states and other authorities...
...This is wacky...
...And guess who opposed the cuts...
...Unfortunately, on this as with so many other hot-button issues, they seem forever in short supply...
...Only Penny, who imposed a 12-year limit on himself by leaving the House of Representatives in 1994, doesn't realize it...
...Done...
...Some of the problems he faced are relevant to Republican reformers today...
...Think for a moment about a Congress with term limits and no lawyers...
...It's the place where innovations approved by the House or the Senate often die...
...But this complaint applies to members of Congress more broadly: they gradually imbibe the Beltway culture and become Washingtonized...
...Yet all of them had voted against Clinton's budget, claiming it taxed too much and cut too little...
...And guess who were most often his allies in fighting to curb spending...
...They elected Republicans to the House for decades before Penny, and they elected one, Gil Gutknecht, to succeed him...
...His constituents in Minnesota—Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, is in the district—thought of him as the equivalent of a Republican...
...Penny admits as much in his recounting of the battle over Penny-Kasich, the bill to pare $90 billion from the federal budget in 1993...
...His name was Timothy McVeigh...
...It wasn't enough any longer to support basic civil rights, labor rights, equal rights, and education rights—positions that gave Democrats much of the moral (if not political) high ground in the 1960s...
...They are new to Congress and less frightened by the entrenched interests, they have decided to leave and are no longer beholden to the entrenched interests, or they have built a political career Fred Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard, which begins publication in September...
...If that isn't enough, Penny has still another argument against senior members of Congress...
...They lose sight of the big picture...
...Yet his remedy is merely to have term limits on committee chairmen...
...But constitutionally mandated limits on Senate and House terms...
...It is telling that of the six congressmen most influential in terrifying the vets, five of them opposed the Gulf War even though a large majority of congressmen voted in favor of it...
...There are many motivations behind the Gulf War Syndrome myth, and certainly Mr...
...He took his licks from the media, stayed his course, and won: Within a four-year period at ACTION, our Reagan team managed to cut the staff from more than a thousand to five hundred, reduce the budget by 25 percent...
...Their votes, Penny adds, "would have made the difference...
...According to DoD, leishmaniasis has been isolated as a cause of The American Spectator August 1995 73...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
