June 26: a day in the life of Congress:
Amidei, Nancy
NANCY AMIDEI O NCE UPON A TIME, tile founders of this country said: "In order to form a more perfect union.., we do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." They...
...And he is not troubled that the many citizens earning $10,000 will be taxed to provide the roughly $19,000 in new tax benefits for each of the relatively few with incomes over $200,000...
...If poor pregnant women cannot afford to eat or see a doctor, and so have retarded, immature, or physically handicapped babies, too bad...
...a defense establishment with what amounts to a blank check...
...All that would change are the purposes to which tax revenues are to be put...
...They voted to repeal legislation for the prevention of child abuse and the care of runaway youth...
...It is time to end the courtship -for quite serious reasons...
...Early in this century we created a public health service to check the spread of communicable diseases, and later we acknowledged a national interest in producing enough medical professionals, scientists, and mathematicians...
...And, when no one was looking, l.hey leveled the National Science Foundation and wiped out the research budgets of three other federal agencies...
...fewer services for retarded, disabled, and troubled citizens...
...On Friday, June 26, a majority of the elected representatives of people in all the states said that they share that vision of society, of national governance...
...Throughout our history we have dealt nationally with questions too important to leave to the individual states...
...minimum social security benefits taken away from those who depend on them...
...At least two of the 31 July 1981" 429...
...thousands of small businesses forced to close...
...millions of poor Americans with less than $1.30 a day for food...
...On the following Tuesday one Republican member angrily told his staff that he only learned through the papers and the angry calls coming into his office from constituents the consequences of what he had done, because David Stockman had lied...
...a housing crisis that will now get worse...
...And the Congress elected to oversee their use has said it will no longer be accountable or responsible for how those federal tax dollars are being spent...
...In these and many other areas a national consensus had developed over the years that the protections involved should not vary from state to state...
...cians like Reagan have become shrewd enough to appropriate neoconservative anti-liberal jeremiads for their own ends...
...Stockman speaks with great feeling about the person Commonweal: 428 earning $20,000 who is taxed to provide food stamps for the worker earnihg $7,000...
...Despite his Inaugural comments, the president does intend to employ the power to tax for social purposes...
...On Friday, June 26, 217 members of Congress voted for all that has already been mentioned and more, to make budget reductions beyond what was required by the budget resolution adopted earlier this year...
...Budget reductions of that magnitude cannot come indefinitely out of Medicaid, food stamps, and CETA jobs...
...They voted to repeal omnibus social services legislation ("Title XX"), and to withhold medical care till the last trimester from poor women who are pregnant for the first time...
...a national tragedy of incalculable proportions...
...Of course, it is argued that those in need will be better off under the new discipline -- o~ce the powers of free enterprise are released from the burden of government social spending...
...After all, it is no.great secret that the New Right intends to destroy Senator Daniel Moyniban's political career with the same verve it successfully displayed against more traditional liberals...
...They voted for provisions that had been rejected by the authorizing Committees of the House (bypassing the process established to consider legislation), provisions known only to David Stockman, who is elected by no one...
...They acknowledged the need for a federal entity, a national form of governance...
...But roughly $260 billion of existing "tax expenditures" (that is, tax breaks) are also made possible by levies on everybody's income...
...They would I NANCY AMIDEI, formerly deputy assistant secretary of the U.S...
...The differences between the two "conservatisms" should be profound...
...If some states deny equal education opportunities to children because of their race or social class, and they in turn cannot become employable productive adults, too bad...
...But does anyone believe that the vote on June 26 really represented such a pragmatic calculation, and that the Representatives will swiftly reverse thelnselves if it turns out that the needy are not the eventual beneficiaries...
...Unlike the days of the Johnson presidency when he masterfuilyy used the process itself to win the passage of legislation, on June 26 these Representatives permitted the president and his OMB Director to supplant the legitimate process...
...The third year alone of the individual tax cut will cost the governmerit about $100 billion...
...disabled and elderly people forced into costly institutions or left without help...
...John Breaux of Louisiana, for example, can expect support for higher subsidies to sugar cane growers that Reagan officials had earlier described as dangerously inflationary and unjustified for a generally affluent industry...
...They voted for a "document" that was really a collection of over five hundred mostly unnumbered pages and handwritten notes, full of pen and pencil deletions that abolished entire 9 programs and gav e duplicate authority for others, much of it with far-reaching implications that could not be discussed or debated because the content was unknown...
...Department of Health, Education and Welfare, is the director of Food Research Action Center in Washington, D.C...
...31 July 1981:427 search and demonstration efforts--including some involving nuclear fission...
...Protection of our food supply, the medicines we buy, our lands and natural resources, the air we breathe, and the safety of the water we drink was deemed too important to leave to chance and local finances...
...The president and his appointees have laid out a challenge that would deny two centuries, and especially the last fifty years, of American history...
...workers paying twice as much or more for transportation to their jobs...
...After all, in politics as in romance, one who pursues the uncatchable -- and wastes his resources in doing so -is both foolish and irrelevant...
...Over the years we have held that protection of basic religious and other individual liberties were matters of national concern...
...more fear and anxiety in poor neighborhoods...
...In short, we have agreed with this nation's founders that creating the individual states and conferring certain responsibilities on them did not absolve the federal government of responsibility for all those matters which go beyond state borders...
...millions more workers forced out of low-paying jobs...
...The Republican-dominated Senate adopted much the same legislation earlier...
...less protection for our air, water, and food supplies (more "Love Canals...
...Thus, the adage that elected officials often repudiate many of their followers (and break their hearts) once in office is seemingly again demonstrated...
...The president argues that the twenty-eight percent of the voters who elected him and his congressional supporters gave him a mandate to change the nature of our society and government...
...And we recognized a national interest in the education and support of the young, as well as a responsibility to those who can no longer work because of old age or disability...
...Ronald Reagan, thirty-seventh president of the United States, does not agree...
...a lower quality of life for us all...
...and (d) a reaffirmation of the alleged moral and social traditions of an older America without violation of legal and constitutional norms and precedents and, indeed, by moral suasion rather than law...
...They voted to take Social Security student benefits away...
...Such neoconservatives as Moynihan and Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Midge Decter, Seymour Martin Lipset, and even their right-wing flanker Irving Kristol, have three fundamental political interests: (a) strong support of Israel...
...they will come directly out of every working family in America and the quality of all our lives...
...national and state parks across the country likely to close...
...But for now, at least, the deed is done...
...But even the catalogue of horrors already described is not complete...
...have us believe that we are no longer citizens of a national government with mutual responsibilities and a stake in securing the basic human needs of citizens wherever they may live...
...And June 26 was only the first step...
...military spending three times the level at the height of the Vietnam war...
...That, apparently, is the new role of government: using the power to tax to ensure the very wealthy more $2,000 dresses and chauffeured limousines...
...They voted to gut the program that aids schools with large populations of poor and minority children, and to end the special targeting that has assured some level of housing, sewage, water, and social services in rural areas...
...No, the vote was a judgment in principle -- about what "fate" has in store for millions of Americans...
...Indeed, it is probably true that neoconservatives such as Moynihan infuriate the New Right even more than do traditional liberals, although politiIi Jill !i Ill ~ I! ! 1 ~. ISIDORE SILVER teaches constitutional taw and history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City...
...Over time there is to be a sweeping withdrawal of federal involvement from matters of broad societal concern...
...a nonaccountable, irresponsible Congress and federal government...
...For the Congress, June 26 was a busy day...
...If expensive medical care or care for physically handicapped individuals is beyond the private resources of individual families, too bad...
...nearly one million long-term unemployed workers with no place to turn...
...And they voted for it without even having seen a copy of the legislation...
...That 217 members of the House of Representatives would abdicate their responsibilities to their constituents and cause this to occur is extraordinary...
...Even their elected representatives did not know, because they set aside their own rules, their own procedures, to vote for legislation they had not seen, for changes that had not been debated or discussed...
...One hundred and twenty years ago, slavery was such a question, and we fought a civil war to, resolve the issue, nationally...
...While other Americans were at their jobs or caring for their children, 217 elected representatives were changing their lives in ways even they did not understand...
...Over the centuries mutual dependence among all citizens and between state and federal governments has provided strength in time of crisis, a basis for shared action in tiptoes of peace...
...tax giveaways to busine-s will cost the country half a trillion dollars over the next ten years...
...Next year David Stockman will be taking $40 billion more in spending cuts beyond the ones just detailed...
...no more special legislation for abused, abandoned, troubled, and poor children...
...ISIDORE SILVER A FTER ONE BOOK and several articles demanding a new hard-headed "realism" in American foreign policy, Norman Podhoretz has suddenly discovered that Ronald Reagan's version of that desirable, though undefinable, trait is "appeasement," at least when applied to the proposed sale of AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia...
...In fact, most voters still do not understand how radically the president means to change their lives...
...To them the federal government is a curious new creature: a mix of moralist, militarist, and protector of individual and corporate wealth...
...If million go hungry, we will not let that bother us...
...c) economic revival of the declining Northeast by reallocation of both public and private funding (most neoconse/ vatives work and live in the Northeast and would not want to move to the Sunbelt...
...That is what every Republican but two, and twenty-seven elected Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for...
...They voted to forbid any "remedial action activitiesU for a broad range of energy reS OME MEMBERS were candid about what they got in return...
...the loss of more than half a million publicly-supported jobs...
...Under Medicare there will be new limits on home health visits, on dental coverage, on physical and occupational therapy, and on the care of those in the final stages of kidney disease...
...They voted to turn a host of activities with federal standards and accountability into "block grants" that give money to the states with virtually no strings attached...
...In effect the president asked for and was given by Congress: more pain and human suffering...
...Yet only a few days earlier he was willing to cast his vote in ignoranee...
...No matter, apparently, that they now know with terrible certainty some of what their votes will mean: --more babies born with epilepsy and handicapping conditions...
...higher state and local taxes (or fewer police, fire, and sanitation services...
...As the youthful, well-paid David Stockman so generously put it, they'll have manage on less...
...Why neoconservatives should believe --- in the face of the evidence -- that they can make common cause with the Reaganites continues to mystify me...
...b) deep antipathy toward Communism ~/nd the Soviet Union...
...Thus, the n.eoconservative-conservative romance is distinctly one-sided and unrequited, and has been since the neoconservative decision in 1972 to embrace Richard Nixon's dubious candidacy...
...Asked if this meant his vote could be bought, Breaux said "no," but it could be "rented...
...on June 26 that consensus was set aside...
...If the private sector is incapable of producing housing that people can afford, and so they "squat" in abandoned buildings or crowd together in unhealthy conditions, too bad...
...Federally collected taxes will be used for a dramatically increased military budget--the merits of which have yet to be discussed--but no longer to guarantee the broad national purposes for which taxes have traditionally been collected...
...They only know what the president has told them, and the scanty details carded in the local paper or the evening news...
Vol. 108 • July 1981 • No. 14
