Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Here’s a question they could use on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” See how you do with it. The question is: What are the chances that a congressional incumbent, who has been in office for more than two terms, will be reelected if he runs again for office? A) Not a chance, B) Fifty-fifty, C) Between 80 and 90 percent, or D) Between 99 and 100 percent. If you have to use a lifeline, you haven’t been paying attention to the last four hundred installments of “Common Sense.”

The answer is D, between 99 and 100 percent. Sure, once in a while an incumbent Senator might get knocked out of office. But it’s rare indeed for a member of the House to lose in his district. And it is especially rare after the incumbent has survived his freshman and sophomore terms in office. The advantages of incumbency are just too great. Some of us have argued that because of Congressman Gary Condit’s tap dancing with the police during the Chandra Levy missing-person investigation, the congressman should resign. So far, he shows no signs of doing that. If he does run again, he might or might not win. But the whole sordid mess reminds us once again that it really does take a big scandal to rattle the cage of congressional incumbency. Unless a representative retires, dies, gets squeezed out of power by redistricting, or lies to police about a missing person who might be dead, he has a permanent lock on power. If what we want is a healthy and competitive democracy, that’s not a situation we should accept.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

One of my favorite political leaders, former Kansas Governor Joan Finney, passed away recently. She was the first woman to be governor of Kansas. Though she had quite of a career in politics 16 years as Kansas state treasurer, 4 years as governor, Governor Finney believed in the people and always seemed much more comfortable among regular folks than among the state’s political elite.

In 1990, she surprised the entire political establishment by knocking off the incumbent governor in the Democratic primary. Then she bested the Republican in a strong Republican state. When asked why most of the state’s politicians and media didn’t see her upset victory coming, Finney said with her usual candor, “Legislators talk to each other and forget the people. The press, they talk to legislators.”

Joan Finney had a unique commitment to citizen-led government. She was a tireless champion of the initiative rights of citizens: the ability of voters to bypass their servants in the legislature and enact laws or constitutional amendments directly. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to convince enough legislators to go along with her and actually establish that right in Kansas. Joan, a co-chair of the U.S. Term Limits Council, was one of the first political leaders to embrace term limits.

I was lucky to know Joan Finney personally. She was down-to-earth, genuine, not just another plastic politician. She had strong beliefs and she fought for those beliefs. She was a woman of her word and someone who trusted and respected the people. Thanks, Joan. We’ll miss you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It’s called “pork”: The spending of our tax dollars for the special benefit of those folks well connected to our congressmen. And who is better connected to our congressmen than the congressmen themselves? In the end, the pork is really for their benefit, to help them get reelected by buying off powerful lobbies and taking credit for spending other people’s money. That’s why porkbarrel spending is so tough to stop. And sadly, the Bush Administration has already given up the fight.

Sure, when he announced his budget in April, the President vowed to cut pork in half as part of a “new way of doing business.” But Budget Director Mitch Daniels points out that even under Republican control of Congress, porkbarrel spending has “gotten out of hand.” Congressional requests for special earmarks to spend money on their pet home-district projects have more than tripled under a GOP-run House. Mitchell admits that recent efforts to curb such pork have met with little success. The biggest problem is his own party’s leadership in the Congress.

House Appropriation Committee director James Dyer, smugly says he’ll make a deal with the administration, namely, “if they do not direct money to politically popular programs then I will not direct money to politically popular programs.” A deal that stops politicians from using the U.S. Treasury as their reelection slush fund! Dyer knows none of the career politicians want that deal. And now Daniels says that while it may not be good government, pork is, in his words, “an acceptable cost of doing business.” Dear tax-paying listener: Is it acceptable to you?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Las Vegas is a mecca for gamblers. But these days, you’re a gambler in that town just for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Worried about Columbine-type shootings, many officials have lost all sense of proportion when it comes to matters of security. An example is the boy that reporter Joe Schoenmann identifies only as “Joseph K.”

Joseph had told a girl, who had left him on hold for 15 minutes, that it’s “people like you who get on the Columbine lists.” For that single impatient remark made during a conversation on the phone while at home, Joseph was summoned to the principal’s office the next day, handcuffed, and arrested. Then he had to cool his heels in jail for ten days while his family wondered what was happening. Then he was expelled from school. Now, if some incidental remark seems disturbing, that might be worth looking into in order to find out whether there’s cause for alarm. But that’s not what happened here. Nobody sat down with this eighth-grader to ask, what did you mean by such-and-such? Nobody took his typical behavior into account. Instead they just came down on him like a ton of bricks. The Nevada legislature deserves a lot of the blame here.

According to the police, Joseph was defined as a “habitual disciplinary problem” because two years ago, the legislature officially defined that term to include anyone who makes even a single apparent threat. So even a kid like Joseph K., who makes good grades and has not been in trouble before, can be condemned as a habitual problem child. That’s a lousy gamble.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The career politicians are gnashing their teeth in Nashville. Why? Because they were unable to impose on Tennessee what one-term governor Lowell Weicker was able to foist on Connecticut: a state income tax.

There has been plenty of mumbling in the state legislature over the last few years about imposing this new tax. And plenty of protesting by Tennesseans who think they’re taxed more than enough already, thank you. Most of the protests have been peaceful. More recently, though, taxpayers were banging on the doors of the capitol and buttonholing legislators in the hallways. Crazy, huh? Mere citizens demanding to talk to legislators? That does sound pretty dangerous. Who do they think they are . . . lobbyists?

But you can sort of forgive the impetuosity. After all, Tennessee is a state, just like Connecticut, that does not have any statewide initiative and referendum process. So, it would have been impossible for voters to overturn a bad piece of legislation at the ballot box once their so-called representatives had passed it. State Senator David Fowler was working to place a referendum on the income tax on the ballot, but who knows whether he would have succeeded. Yet, he seems to think his gesture in this direction should have been enough to send people home. “People outside are protesting, not even knowing we were trying to find a way to give them a vote,” he told the press.

But Fowler is either terribly nave or more than a tad disingenuous. Would the senator have gone even this far in recognizing the rights of the voters without all their public protests over the last three years? I don’t think so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Sick of hearing about Congressman Gary Condit? Just remember it can always get worse. Today’s subject is one we’d rather not talk about sexual abuse of children.

Two Maryland politicians have become embroiled in scandals involving sexual abuse. Part of the scandal is how others too often turn a blind eye. Alfred Muller had been mayor of Friendship Heights for 26 years until he was accused of molesting a 14-year-old boy in the restroom of the National Cathedral. First, seeking another term, he denied the charge. But then he plead guilty and stepped down. After babbling on about taking “full responsibility,” Muller was sentenced. How long will he serve for his crime? No jail time, just three years probation. Judge Shellie Bowers believes Muller paid for the crime with his public fall from grace, explaining, “As for the punishment aspect, I think there’s the humiliation, the disgrace, all of that.”

Or take the case of State Delegate Joan Cadden and her husband, who was convicted of the sexual abuse of his niece abuse his wife knew about but didn’t report to authorities. Seems the whole family, even the abused girl’s parents, put Delegate Cadden’s political career as first priority. State GOP Chairman Michael Steele says, “When you hear family members say they were trying to protect the delegate’s political career, that they turned a blind eye to the abuse because of political considerations, it gives you pause.” Yes, a great deal of pause . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

You may have heard that pensions for congressmen and most other federal employees are way out of whack. If you haven’t, listen to Hastings Keith.

Former Congressman Hastings Keith of Massachusetts is lobbying Congress to stop doling out far too generous cost-of-living increases, known as COLAs to retirees like himself. Keith says, “COLAs are supposed to keep up with the cost of living, not the cost of living it up.” He should know. Not only because he’s on the receiving end himself. Mr. Keith also chairs the National Committee on Public Employee Pensions. Keith says that after 14 years in Congress, his pension paid him $1,560 in the very first month after his 1972 election defeat. And now? Now he rakes in $7,172 a month almost a thousand more than he should after adjusting for inflation.

But the COLAs are also calculated too generously on his Social Security and on his widower benefits on his wife’s pension from the federal government. Only the COLA on his military pension falls short of inflation. In all, Keith pulls in more than $134,000 a year in retirement benefits. What did he have to do to get such a lucrative pay-out from taxpayers? He estimates he contributed less than $34,000 toward all these benefits, much of that in Social Security taxes. So, each year, Mr. Keith receives four times as much as he paid in over his entire lifetime. And he’s not alone. This is an outrageous rip-off of taxpayers, to the tune of billions of dollars. And everybody knows it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

There they go again those manipulative career politicians! Economic commentator Bruce Bartlett says that a particularly underhanded budget strategy is now underway in the Congress a ploy that was all the rage during the Reagan years when the Demo half of the Demopublican Party dominated the Hill.

During the Reagan years, the career politicians used to stall and stall before sending their bloated appropriations bills to the President for his signature. Often, they’d wait until the very last minute of the very last day of the fiscal year before calling the U-Haul truck to lug the legislation over to the Oval Office. What that meant was that if the President at that late hour chose to veto the appropriations for being too lard-laden, the government would have to shut down, and the chief executive would have to take the political heat for it.

Of course, after the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, when the Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress, the Republicans proved to be just as fond of bloated spending as their careerist colleagues across the aisle. Now Senate Democrats are using their newly acquired majority status to drag their legislative feet just like they did in the old days. Bartlett predicts that, once again, the congressmen will call U-Haul at the very last minute to lug the spending specs over to the White House. And without a line-item veto, George Bush will have a tough decision to make: sign off on all the pork or shut down the government. Oh, those manipulative career politicians. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This is Common Sense . I’m Paul Jacob.

Smile, you’re on candid camera! If you live in Tampa, Florida, anyway.

The Tampa City Council approved legislation to install cameras in a popular night-life district of the city. The technology was tested at the Super Bowl. The cameras digitize your face and transmit the image to a computer which matches your face with those of wanted criminals. It’s a cheap and easy electronic way of dragging everybody before a police lineup whether they like it or not. Tampa citizens are up in arms. And now the politicians who authorized the cameras are saying, “Huh? We had no idea this was going on. Outrageous.” Tampa is the place where career politicians just don’t quit.

Twice last year they tried to undo term limits. First they put a repeal measure on the ballot, which voters squashed. Then they mumbled something about calling a special election to try again. It was Council Member Gwen Miller who said enough is enough. Now some councilpersons are saying that the authorization for the peeping-Tom Tampa snapshot-taking was buried so deep in other legislation that they just missed it. Okay, I guess that’s possible. Our congressmen don’t bother to read all the legislation they vote for either. Meanwhile, the Tampa councilman who wrote the bill, Robert Buckhorn, says he didn’t call any hearing about the cameras beforehand because no new money had to be appropriated for them. Apparently, it didn’t occur to the buck-passing Mr. Buckhorn that treating innocent people like criminal suspects might raise a hackle or two. Or maybe it did occur to him.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The story about the missing woman, Chandra Levy, and Congressman Gary Condit, is all the media rage. Some folks are comparing the wall-to-wall coverage, the denials and the infidelity to the Clinton scandals.

Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott called on Congressman Condit to resign, saying, “Infidelity is always unacceptable, but particularly when you have an elected official involved in a position of trust with a young girl, an intern.” Congressman Christopher Shays of New Jersey countered, “If infidelity is the test . . . a number of members of Congress should resign.” Marital infidelity, like any other act of breaking of one’s word, ought not be dismissed by a smug ‘everybody’s doing it’ rationale. Yet, someone else’s marriage and private life is their business, not mine. Once again, most of official Washington misses the point.

This young woman may be dead. Time is critical in such a missing person investigation. Condit admits to having an affair with Levy. But it took him 10 weeks before he told the police the whole story. It’s too bad if the truth was uncomfortable, but a woman’s life may have depended on his prompt cooperation with police. And that’s why Condit should resign. For years now, we’ve been treated to a steady diet of politicians doing what’s best for their political careers, instead of serving the people. Our civil standards have fallen to pathetic levels. We now debate whether someone’s character really even matters. Well, this is a life-or-death case to show that, yes, character matters. Condit should step down. We can do better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.