Gregg and Kennedy: The Not-So-Odd Couple
WASHINGTON, April 25–After a decade of sparring in the Senate, Sens. Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) – who some may think have little in common other than their states’ shared border – have found some new common ground. The lawmakers with contrasting ideologies and styles have agreed in the current session of Congress on everything from anti-terrorism protection to agricultural subsidies, collective bargaining, environmental conservation, and – most notably – education reform. And another political odd couple, President George Bush and Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT), may have helped bring them closer together.
Since the 107th Congress started in January, 2000, the Granite State’s Gregg, a fiscal and social conservative who supports cutting taxes and expanding gun owners’ rights, has strayed at times to vote the same as Kennedy on initiatives such as a failed amendment to help firemen unionize. And the quintessentially liberal Kennedy, famous for his support of the poor and disadvantaged and increases in funding for programs like Medicare, has shifted to the right to reach compromises – as he did when he worked with Gregg and Bush to reauthorize the massive education bill that was signed into law in January.
This education compromise started when Bush, four days into his term, summoned Gregg and Kennedy to the White House to talk about reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the law that comprises the major part of the federal government’s commitment to K-12 education. Joining them were the heads of the House health committee – Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and George Miller (D-CA). The law that was enacted in 1965 had not been renewed as it was supposed to be in 1999, because of partisan squabbles, and Bush made reaching a compromise a priority.
So the president called the four partisan education leaders together for coffee and asked them to help him reauthorize the bill before the end of the year.
Gregg and Kennedy did not have a good track record: they had spent most of their time serving on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee disagreeing, according to observers. Jeffords was the chair of the committee, Kennedy was the ranking minority member and Gregg was the ranking majority member.
“They sat on both sides of Sen. Jeffords in hearings,” recalled committee spokesman Jim Manley. “And Senator Jeffords, who is hard of hearing, got caught in the middle of some epic battles.”
In a typical squabble in 1995, for example, Gregg and Kennedy traded jabs over a successful Republican committee effort to repeal a Depression-era law that protected workers wages on federal construction jobs. Gregg, calling the law “a holdover from a time that is past,” said their debate was “about whether we believe or not that the market system works.” Kennedy retorted by calling opposition to the law “an uglier face of class warfare, waged by Republicans to keep blue collar workers down, to keep them out of the middle class.”
There were a few instances when they managed to work together such as in 1989, when Gregg was governor and worked with Kennedy to call on the Bush administration to investigate the rising cost of home heating oil.
But most of the time they were each other’s nemesis. Kennedy once tried to sneak special health care coverage for fisherman into an obscure section of the federal budget; his plan failed because Gregg found the initiative, labeled as a neighborhood health item, and killed it.
Their styles differ greatly as well. Gregg is taciturn, Kennedy more outgoing and at times a bit bombastic.
“Senator Gregg has a sarcastic, biting kind of analysis of things while Kennedy kind of sits there and gets a head of steam going,” said Joel Parker, a lobbyist at the National Education Association who covers the Senate health committee.
“They didn’t know each other very well,” said Manley. “They were from different parties and very different philosophical backgrounds and very different political backgrounds.”
Gregg, 55, was elected to his second six-year term in the Senate in 1998 after serving two terms as governor and four terms as a U.S. Representative for the second congressional district; Kennedy, 70, has served in the Senate since 1962, when he was 30. Gregg stays out of major ideological battles, preferring, he said, to take “complex issues and breaking them apart to get a result;” Kennedy, Manley acknowledges, loves the game of legislating.
Case in point: During the State of the Union address in January, Bush thanked Gregg for his help on the education bill. But when television cameras turned to the audience to show the New Hampshire senator, they scanned the crowd in vain before turning back to the president and then on to Kennedy. Sources said Gregg was not in Washington the night of the speech.
“That’s demonstrative of the senator’s style,” said Mark Wrighton, a political science professor from the University of New Hampshire. “He isn’t the kind of person to seek out credit.”
That presidential praise, though, came after a year of impasse and compromise. After meeting at the White House in January, 2001, Gregg and Kennedy spent the early part of the year writing the Senate version of the education bill before bringing it to the floor of the Senate.
Then their burgeoning working relationship was tested. The House passed its version of the education bill on May 23, 2001. On May 24, Sen. Jeffords left the GOP, shifting control of the Senate and anointing Kennedy the head of the health committee and Gregg the ranking minority member. Jeffords, the buffer between the two, was gone. Now they had to not only help the Senate pass its education legislation (which it did on June 29) and then help consolidate over 3,000 differences between the Senate and House bill – they also had to rule one of the most high-profile committees together.
Manley said he and other staffers on the Hill expected a “shootout at the OK Corral” between Kennedy and Gregg when they assumed their new roles. But they surprised everyone by getting along.
“They actually developed an excellent working relationship,” he said.
Gregg went from being the ranking majority member to the ranking minority member – a role that requires more leadership and compromising with the chair.
“When Jeffords, who is very low key and very soft spoken, was still on the Republican side and chairman, he would agree more with Democrats than Republicans,” said Manley. “So at times Gregg [when he was ranking majority member] tried to act as the conservative champion.”
But as the ranking minority member he had to be more tempered, said Gordon Humphrey, a former senator for New Hampshire from 1979 to 1990. “The chair has to rely pretty heavily on the ranking minority member,” said Humphrey. He added that Kennedy, a “much stronger ideologue,” very much relies on Gregg to garner Republican votes.
“I am the theoretical leader of the Republicans and I know I need to participate with the majority,” Gregg said. “In this system, the committee can’t function as a committee unless the chairman and the ranking member work in a professional way.”
Gregg also works across the aisle in committee with Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC), the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary, on which Gregg is the ranking minority member.
“You develop a style,” Gregg said. “At the end of the day, you need to be able to produce something.” And Gregg does this even with someone like Kennedy who, Gregg said, “plays for keeps” and “has the votes and will beat me on [many] issues.”
Observers say Gregg’s close relationship to Bush – so close that he helped Bush practice for his presidential debates against Al Gore – has elevated his status.
“A part of the job of top Republican is to support the president, be the voice of the president,” said Humphrey.
Gregg did advance Bush’s education priorities over the summer while meeting with the education leaders – Kennedy, Boehner and Miller, dubbed the Big Four. They convened in regular secret sessions in Kennedy’s hideaway in the third floor of the Capitol two to three times a week, even meeting through the August recess.
Then, on the morning of the September 11 attacks, Gregg and Kennedy were on the third floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, where both of their offices are, with First Lady Laura Bush and Splash, Kennedy’s Portuguese Water dog. Mrs. Bush had planned on speaking about early childhood education at a 10:00 health committee hearing down the hall from Gregg and Kennedy’s offices.
After hearing that the second World Trade Center tower was hit, Gregg said, he called Kennedy. “I went to Ted’s office and Laura was already there. The three of us sat in his office for a while watching what was happening.” They moved to Gregg’s office, where the watched the second tower collapse.
“All I could think to myself was, the only other thing like this was when John F. Kennedy was shot,” Gregg said. “And here I was sitting with JFK’s brother.”
On September 12 the Big Four issued a statement pledging to move ahead on the education bill, and they did. They worked for more than 100 hours on the legislation that was signed – after a year of compromises – into law right after the New Year.
Gregg admitted work amongst the Big Four was slow at times.
And though he said Splash added some levity to the meetings in Kennedy’s hideaway, Gregg said negotiations over issues such as public school choice and civil rights language were often like “running into a brick wall.”
“There were some points that I didn’t think we’d reach agreement,” Gregg said. “We spent six weeks on supplemental services. We weren’t moving on until we got that worked out, and I was adamant about what had to be included in this bill.”
But they pulled it off.
“Senator Kennedy and I have clear philosophical disagreements, they are deep and significant,” said Gregg. “But we use the rules to pursue our positions in the most aggressive ways we can.”
Thomas Rath, a Concord attorney and veteran Republican activist, said that despite their differences Gregg and Kennedy “have mastery to get results in a Congress that can get grid locked.”
This skill, history shows, has helped them work on other issues aside from education.
Gregg voted on April 12 for the amendment to the Labor-HHS appropriations bill to help firemen unionize – legislation Kennedy supported. Though the proposal to ease restrictions on collective bargaining by emergency workers did not garner the votes it needed, Gregg supported the Democratic measure. He said he did so because “New Hampshire firefighters came to me and made a good argument.”
On November 15, 2001 Gregg joined with Kennedy and Sen. William Frist (R-TN) in introducing legislation they drafted for a bioterrorism protection plan. The successful proposal, which passed the Senate on December 20, calls for stepping up inspections of imported food, giving states money to improve public health systems, and encouraging pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs that treat illnesses such as botulism.
More examples abound.
In February they cosponsored a bill to designate some Massachusetts and New Hampshire communities as a national heritage area. Kennedy supported an amendment to the farm bill Gregg introduced last December to phase out the federal sugar program. In August 2001 they supported confirming John L. Henshaw as assistant secretary of labor directing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“Neither one of them is one-dimensional,” said Rath.
Of course, differences remain.
And school vouchers, something Gregg has advocated for since the Clinton administration, may be the most polarizing difference, predicted lobbyist Parker.
Last June, when Gregg proposed a creating a pilot program to test the effectiveness of vouchers, Kennedy said, “above all, there is no evidence that students using vouchers for private schools do better in school.” The proposal lost, 58 to 41.
When Gregg and Kennedy disagreed in July on holding hearings for nominate Gerald Reynolds to oversee the federal office that enforces Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in school sports, Gregg accused Kennedy of being partisan in his opposition to Reynolds. Reynolds was appointed by Bush in mid-April, 2002.
“I think we now know where each other stands and where we can get on those issues,” said Gregg.
And committee spokesman Manly predicted that Gregg and Kennedy will never agree on issues such as vouchers, cloning, and pension reform.
“They’ll work together when they can and oppose each other when they have to,” Manley said.
Gregg said he sees no epic issues arising, “unless they try to nationalize health care again,” he said
More evidence of the Gregg-Kennedy alliance will emerge in the coming weeks, when the two announce new early education legislation.
Gregg may continue to become more visible, according to UNH’s Wrighton, thanks to his role as the president’s spokesperson on the committee and his legacy as the crafter of the education bill. “These things have helped him to become a player on issues,” he said, “and it’s always good for any state when its senator gets the opportunity to become a player.”
Asked if he likes being considered a player, Gregg grinned and said, “Everyone likes to be acknowledged.”
Published in The Union Leader, in Manchester, New Hampshire
