Midnight approached, with most of the town long tucked in, when the raspy New York voice sounded sharply across the vast congressional hearing room.
“We ain’t gettin’ a haircut,” Rep. Charles Rangel proclaimed theatrically with mock sincerity. “No, we’re getting a reduction in the rate of growth of our hair!”
Even exhausted Republicans chuckled. With aplomb, a Democratic nemesis from New York derided a debatable premise of the new majority’s messianic attack on federal spending, namely that the GOP isn’t really cutting, it’s merely slicing the growth in federal spending.
A marathon debate in the House Ways and Means Committee over the GOP’s dramatic proposal to change Medicare provided not just a window on the new Republican order. It also spotlighted a new, frustrating role for Rangel, a dynamo in the land of the bland.
A political king of Harlem, America’s most famous and culturally significant black neighborhood, he’s a big-city liberal seeing much of what he believes in going down the tubes. But the dean of the New York congressional delegation may prove that it can be a higher calling to lose with grace than to win without it.
“The Republicans’ whole idea is to prove that whether you’re poor or an infant or aged or sick, you’re not entitled” to federal help, Rangel told me after the committee’s passage of a plan to cut Medicare (or Medicare growth) by $270 billion.
More Top Picks Silent Migraine Symptoms Migraine Without Headache
“And so they have traditionally tried to break the entitlements but have never been able to do so. But driven by (a call for) $245 billion in tax cuts, plus balancing the budget, and catching America off guard, (Speaker Newt) Gingrich is successful where no other Republican since the time of Franklin Roosevelt has been successful.
“We have set in this country an example of what industrialized countries should do for the aged, the sick, the disabled. Now, the Republicans say: `Go to the states for help. And if they don’t provide it, go to some charitable organization or Boys Town or something.’ The way it was before Roosevelt.”
Rangel, 65, is a Korean War veteran who was a federal prosecutor and served in the state Assembly. In 1970 he defeated Harlem’s legendary congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and came to Washington. In 1994 he defeated Powell’s son.
He’s been a positive force in New York. In Washington he’s been a vigorous proponent of federal aid and some racial preferences, and adamant in attacking the illegal drug trade.
He’s backed tax breaks for U.S. businesses in Puerto Rico (nearly half his district is Hispanic) and pushed successfully for designation of Harlem (and part of the South Bronx) as a federal enterprise zone, allowing tax breaks to encourage job creation. But Republican Gov. George Pataki pointedly named a Rangel adversary to oversee the zone.
He’s the second-most-senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. When Illinois’ Dan Rostenkowski was chairman, he was a Rosty loyalist. He didn’t shy from the Chicagoan when Rosty’s legal troubles began to mount, unlike many fair-weather colleagues.
Except for a recent, brief hallway shouting match with Rep. Jim Nussle (R-Iowa), a Gingrich acolyte who exudes smugness, Rangel is generally diplomatic and devoid of the self-righteous, aggressive earnestness and gushy piety that mark some liberals in the House and Senate.
He is taken aback by the lack of public outrage over the change playing out now. Nearly every day, so many head-turning changes are being made, it’s hard to keep track. In one 24-hour period last week, a GOP-run panel approved a total rewrite of the Endangered Species Act, another voted to dramatically limit the number of refugees who can enter the country, and a third moved to ditch federal quality and staffing standards for nursing homes.
“It’s sad to see that with all the struggles to get those programs, so much can be taken away in the middle of the night without any outrage,” he said.
In a comparison fraught with the danger of moral disproportion, he equates the tactics of the GOP with Hitler.
“When Hitler really wanted to take over the world, he started with the Jewish community. And as long as people thought `just’ the Jewish community was affected, and not them, they were indifferent, even supportive.
“So when Gingrich goes after the out-of-wedlock child, the aliens, the illegals, the fraud and abuse, attacks the poor just for being poor, and goes after school-nutrition programs or Aid to Families With Dependent Children, everybody thinks, `Well, he’s not talking about me.’
“Then (Gingrich) starts talking about Medicare and Medicaid, and he sees the gains the Republicans have made and not even having Clinton outraged.”
His party’s leader is not alone, Rangel said. A Catholic, he not only criticizes his church, and Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, but religious leaders nationwide for not rising to protect the least protected.
Pope John Paul II “comes to town and tells people that in addition to freedom, there should be economic independence,” Rangel said. And, yet, precious few speak up for the poor. For example, he’s chagrined (and rightly so) with GOP dismantling of the earned income tax credit, long a bipartisan-backed way to make it easier for those on welfare get jobs.
Rangel’s passion on Medicare is manifested by a facet that he spearheaded: coverage for those with end-stage renal disease, regardless of age. “We are the only industrialized society that does that,” he said about a provision that will remain.
He also may be “the best champion of big-city hospitals, understanding how things work in the street and what would happen to the Bellevues and Cook Counties (hospitals) with this proposal,” said Rep. James McDermott (D-Wash.), a Chicago native and pediatric psychiatrist who trained at Cook County Hospital.
McDermott suggested to me several months ago that Democrats, hard upon their 1994 election bashing, were confronting the classic stages of grief as laid out by a British psychoanalyst: denial, apathy, anger and adjustment.
The Medicare vote, McDermott said, “is like another death, another loss. But it’s tougher than losing the election or this committee. This is a program. You have to go back to the district and tell people you are losing something and couldn’t do a thing to stop it.”
Rangel cited black leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Adam Clayton Powell as having had to climb “a slippery slope” to fashion the existing levels of government services. We should be proud as Americans, he said, that we didn’t abandon the poor and disabled.
But he knows the nation has changed. An hour before the committee passed its Medicare plan, he told the panel that Republicans are trying to exploit a populace “frustrated with 30 years of Democratic rule” in the Congress.
“Forty years,” a Republican interjected.
“Ah,” said Rangel with weary self-deprecation, “how soon we forget.”
Cokie watch
More Top Picks Best 33 Inch Refrigerators
It was disclosed here that David Gergen, Revolving Door Man, who has worked in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations, is cashing in after returning to journalism from his Clinton stint. He’s reclaimed jobs as editor-columnist at U.S. News & World Report and pundit on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”
A few weeks ago, he and MacNeil/Lehrer comrade Mark Shields split $20,000 to gab to the Independent Insurance Agents of America.
Last week, Gergen worked the annual American Bankers Association convention in San Francisco alone and picked up $20,000 for a 2 1/2-hour appearance, including moderating a panel on improving the industry’s image.
The comptroller of the currency and the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation appeared too. But federal ethics rules barred them from taking a penny.