“Champion of the Poor” Surrendering His Gavel, For Now
By Randy Trick
WASHINGTON, Nov. 25, 2002–For the second time since Edward Kennedy entered the Senate in 1963, he has seen his chairmanship of the labor committee slip from his hands.
Kennedy’s work with the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee– which has the appropriate acronym HELP–has become as much a part of the senator’s identity as his Massachusetts accent, his family name and the pain of seeing all his brothers die violently.
His work on the committee, which has gone by different names but has always focused on the issues of the working class, is a reflection of his identity as the indisputable champion of the poor, his staffers say. And while they may be glum about seeing their party lose control of the upper chamber yet again, the seventh-term senator has been through this before.
Kennedy, the alpha-male of the Senate Democrats, adapts.
He will see his colleague to the north, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, take the committee reins, just as he saw Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah take them from Democratic Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey in 1981, and Sen. Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas take them from Kennedy himself in 1995. When not commanding the agenda of public welfare, gavel in hand, Kennedy takes to the Senate floor, lambasting the gridlock keeping his public health or economic bills from seeing the light of day. It’s another strategy Kennedy uses with ease.
“He’s had great success both ways,” said Michael Myers, staff director of Kennedy’s HELP Committee.
Kennedy has given no hint that as the ranking minority member he will reduce the workload for his committee aides, Myers said. Instead, he’ll change his tactics and become the panel’s minority voice; he will “keep showing up and blasting away,” said his press secretary, Jim Manley, who focuses on committee issues.
“He fights. He’s always been a fighter. There’s not another gear there,” said Myers, gesturing as if trying to put an invisible five-speed into sixth. “He can’t get more aggressive.”
Each time the chairmanship of the committee has been transferred to a Republican, Kennedy has gotten it back, and his aides say it’s only a matter of time before the senator is at the helm of the ship again.
In the meantime, Kennedy will continue high-profile fights for two issues, universal health care and lower prescription drug costs.
41 million and counting
Kennedy’s unfinished symphony during his 30 years in the Senate has been his fight for universal health care.
He wrote the opening movement in 1970. Having been in the Senate for under a decade, Kennedy proposed that the United States join other industrialized nations and extend universal health care coverage to its citizens.
The second movement came in 1993, when he teamed with then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was pushing her husband’s universal health care proposal.
“Kennedy waged a big battle within Congress to make sure the bill ended up in his committee,” Myers said.
Clinton’s proposal did go to Kennedy, and he arranged exhaustive hearings on the issue. However, Clinton’s plan died on the Senate floor when Republican stall tactics forced the Democratic leaders to abandon it.
Kennedy, however, refused to raise the white flag and delivered a passionate speech from the floor.
“I will never give up the fight for health reform until senior citizens no longer have to worry about how to pay for long-term care,” he said on Sept. 26, 1994. “I will never give up the fight until the working men and women of this country know that years of effort and hard-won savings cannot be wiped out by a sudden illness. The drive for comprehensive health reform will begin again next year. We are closer than ever to our goal, and I am confident that we will prevail.”
“Everybody felt disappointed, but he felt maybe with this opportunity he got something done,” Myers remembered.
Since that debate ended in 1994, Kennedy pared his goal and has since completed three smaller pieces of his universal health care opus. In 1996 he teamed with his Republican counterpart, Kassebaum, on a law that allows workers to retain their health care insurance as they change jobs.
In 1997 he joined with Hatch to push through Congress the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides medical insurance to low-income children. During the 106th Congress he successfully sponsored legislation to make it harder for managed care companies to decline patients’ claims, teaming with Vermont’s James Jeffords, now an independent but the Republican chairman of the HELP Committee before Kennedy resumed control in 2001.
He tries to see what is doable and focuses on that, Myers said.
Kennedy sees universal health care as doable again, not because it is popular now, but because the problem with rising health care costs is pressing, and presses the working class more and more each year.
In a speech Nov. 21 at the Harvard School of Public Health, Kennedy unveiled his composition’s most recent movement: his plan to put universal health care back into the fray come January.
“In the past year, the number of uninsured grew by two million, the largest increase in a decade,” Kennedy said. “Forty-one million Americans now have no health insurance at all. Over the course of a year, 30 million more will lack coverage for an extended period.”
“Quality, affordable health insurance for every American is a matter of simple justice,” he added.
“The time is long overdue for America to join the rest of the industrial world in recognizing this fundamental right.”
But Republicans controlling the Senate, and those preparing to mount a major campaign to unseat Kennedy in 2006 should he run for re-election, hear something out of tune in Kennedy’s speeches.
“When voters are educated about what [Kennedy’s proposal] means, a national HMO, voters are not really too excited,” said Jonathan Fletcher, executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party. “The government’s underwriting the cost of health care for all citizens will become such a drain on the Treasury that it will come to rationing health care.”
People with expensive shoes
The HELP Committee’s hearing room, with a rich wood décor and seating for fewer than 100, was packed on July 11. Kennedy’s committee members were voting to open the door for generic drugs to enter the market by making it tougher for pharmaceutical companies to renew patents on prescription drugs by altering the color of the pills or instituting some other small change.
Although the vote was, as Kennedy is fond of saying, “in the light of day,” behind the scenes, pharmaceutical lobbyists had waged a blitzkrieg against the bill. But, Myers boasts, when it came time to vote, five Republicans crossed the party line to side with all the committee’s Democrats, making the final vote 16-5 and sending the generic drug legislation to the Senate floor.
Face-offs with special interest lobbyists have been standard operating procedure in Kennedy’s public health agenda.
“Part of what he always says [about special interests] is to bring sunshine to this, bring public attention and make the vote in the light of day,” Myers said.
“That room was jammed with people in expensive shoes,” Manley said of the lobbyists watching the vote in mid-July.
Still, despite the lobbyists’ attempt to torpedo the bill, all but five of the committee members saw the importance of the legislation, Myers said.
“They were all saying there is no way Kennedy could get the bill out of committee, but when it came time to vote, five Republicans joined with the Democrats,” Myers said. “Health care affects everybody.”
Kennedy learned how much people care about drug prices years before many of his colleagues, and he fed the first flickers of the flame that has since exploded into a major campaign issue, Myers said.
“He always starts with Massachusetts and find that the challenges he sees there he’s also seeing across the nation,” Myers said. In the mid-1990s “seniors were telling Kennedy they cannot handle the drug prices. … He saw all that in Massachusetts and came back to Congress and said this is what he’s seeing and started talking about it. In two years others were seeing it and they were all talking about it.”
The House killed the generic drug bill this year by never acting on it, but Kennedy and his aides still feel victorious because the Senate approved it.
“He has a special passion for those in poverty and for working families,” Myers said.
However, stiff words from his state’s opposition party allude to Kennedy’s proposals as passé, and as throwbacks to the New Deal.
Most lawmakers are “using public policy to better people, rather than throw money at the problem,” said Fletcher. “With [most] Democrats that strategy has gone the way of the dodo bird.”
Published in The Lawrence Eagle Tribune, in Massachusetts.
