What It Takes To Be A Senator…And How NH’s Pair Matches Up
WASHINGTON – While many people may think a senator’s main duty is to propose bills and pass laws, New Hampshire’s Republican Sens. Bob Smith and Judd Gregg say it’s not that simple.
With about a decade each in the Senate under their belts, Smith and Gregg say representing the Granite State is more complicated than drafting and pushing through legislation. There’s also the studying, the personal connections, and the constituents.
This is what New Hampshire’s Senators say is most telling about the daily grind of their jobs. This is what they say makes them active representatives, not just their bill record.
Smith took his seat in 1990 after serving six years as a member of the House, and has used his almost 12 years in the Senate to file 337 bills. Gregg was elected in 1992 after serving as New Hampshire’s governor for four years and a House member for six, and has filed 193 bills in nearly 10 years. That’s a yearly average, before this year, of 30.6 bills for Smith and 21.4 for Gregg.
Not every piece of legislation reached the president’s desk for his signature, many died in committee. Not every bill was a full bill; many were amendments offered to other bills. And the Democratic majority in Congress from 1991 to 1993 and the Democratic president in office from 1993 to 2001 factor into the Senators’ record. A bill is not always well-received, passed or signed into law by the opposing party.
In his 11 years in the Senate, Smith filed 28 joint, Senate or concurrent resolutions, 80 bills and 229 amendments to bills. Gregg filed nine resolutions, 73 bills and 111 amendments. With two more years of Senate service than his colleague, Smith filed only 7 more complete bills than Gregg.
Interestingly, Gregg filed more full bills than Smith did in 1993-99, but Smith caught up and moved ahead in this Congress and the last.
Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said a senator’s bill record alone does not make him active or inactive in his job performance.
“No, it’s one indicator among many,” Mann said. “It doesn’t tell you anything about effectiveness. You’d have to look deeper.”
Mann said Smith and Gregg have “very different legislative styles,” and though Smith has filed seven more bills than Gregg, “the question is, what happened to those bills?”
“Was it for show or for law?” he said. “Some members work largely through their committee, others work hard on amendments or on the floor, some members introduce bills for local consumption. You just have to get underneath it.”
Smith said seeing his Everglades Restoration Bill signed by President Clinton last year was “important” because “the Everglades were really drying up, they were about lost, and had we not passed this legislation, they would have been lost.”
“I think the Everglades [bill] was huge because that had lollygagged around here in the Congress for years,” Smith said. “It was locked up in bitter debate over how much water should we use for a natural system, how much water should we use for commercial use.”
Smith introduced the bill on June 27, 2000, and the Senate approved it on September 25, 85-1. After a Senate-House conference, the bill cleared Congress on November 3, and was signed into law by Clinton on December 11.
Kathy Copeland, senior policy advisor of the south Florida division of water management, said that the state is grateful to Smith for his work, and pleased with what it will bring to the Everglades. Smith “was instrumental in making sure it was a very open process,” she said. “There was a lot of very intensely-debated negotiation on all sides. He and his staff spent hours and hours making sure” everyone involved in the process was heard.
Smith said the bill “took a lot of effort, took a lot of my time over the last year and it wasn’t a New Hampshire project.”
“Some people would say ‘what’s he working on the Everglades for?’ Because the Everglades are a national treasure, for the same reason I’d want the senator from Florida to help me with the White Mountains if something happened up there and we needed help. That’s what the Senate’s about. If they need help, then we want to be helping each other. It’s all America.”
Smith said sponsoring bills is not the focal point of the job, or the most telling.
“I would not want to be judged on the number of bills I passed,” Smith said. “I think there’s much more that I would want to be graded by and I think bills would be a small part of it – maybe 10 percent of it. I think there are literally thousands of other things you do in the course of 11 years of constituent service.”
Smith said in “the last six years I’ve been more effective at passing legislation than in the first six, but I don’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary on that.”
“I think the grades go up as you’ve been here,” Smith said. “When you’re a freshman senator you don’t have a lot of seniority, it’s more difficult. This last term, I think we’ve done extremely well. Some of these bills have my name on them, some don’t, the bottom line is you’re the prime mover. You make it happen.”
Smith said the longer a Senator is around, the more he knows his colleagues, which makes it easier and “to govern a lot more effectively.”
“I think the experience of seniority in the Senate is crucial to passing good legislation,” he added. “It’s very helpful because you know your way around, you know other people, you develop personal relationships with people, whether they be Democrats or Republicans. That’s where it helps.”
Smith said a lot of his other senatorial business is more important to him than his bill record. He said he wants to be judged “as the complete Bob Smith. If I could be remembered as one who did always what he thought was right for his country or his state and didn’t compromise his principles, that’s the way I’d want to be judged.”
For Judd Gregg, reforming the social security system is a major goal.
“We’re still struggling with social security reform and that’s a very important issue because if we don’t get social security straightened out soon we’re going to run out of time because the baby boom generation is going to retire,” said Gregg.
Gregg said he believes “that we have to change the system to give people the opportunity to create wealth so everybody in America has an actual asset, which is actually theirs and is part of their retirement package.”
Evelyn Morton, senior legislative representative with the American Association of Retired People [AARP], said Gregg “has some clear ideas of the direction he would like to move social security reform in,” she said.
Gregg said this struggle for reform has been “basically a question of education and getting past what is an issue that has been used aggressively for partisan gain, especially by the Democratic leaders.”
“Social security is a sacred trust and people are reticent to address the issue because it has very significant political implications, but if we don’t address it, then when the baby boom generation starts to retire in 2008, we’ll end up passing on to our children a huge financial obligation to support the retired Americans,” he said.
In addition to this work, Gregg said that each year for the past five years, he has “authored the Commerce-State-Justice Appropriations bill, which is a very significant piece of legislation because we have begun in that bill initiatives like the fight against terrorism.”
President Bush signed the 2001 appropriation in late November. The bill designates $21.5 billion for such departments and programs like the FBI, and anti-terrorism and violence against women initiatives.
Outside of the legislative aspect of his office, Gregg said he likes serving New Hampshire in more ways than just on paper.
“I enjoy the job and I appreciate the fact that the people of New Hampshire give me their confidence in sending me here, and I try to bring what I call ‘New Hampshire values’ to Washington,” Gregg said.
Gregg said he is proud of his efforts to meet the needs of children as well as the conservation work he has done in upstate New Hampshire and with the Great Bay.
He said he doesn’t “think passing laws is all that essential to good governance.”
“The senatorial job is a balance between two major areas,” Gregg continued. “One is taking care of people’s problems in New Hampshire, making sure that if you have a problem getting the government to be responsive to you, you’ve got an advocate. That’s my job. The other part is trying to make our government run well and efficiently, getting the most for the tax dollars that are sent down here.”
