On Wednesday, July 30, HUMAN EVENTS Assistant Editor David Freddoso interviewed Rep. Pat Toomey (R.-Pa.). Toomey, a conservative three-term congressman, is giving up his House seat to challenge liberal Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-Pa.) for his Senate seat in the primary election next spring.
HUMAN EVENTS: You proposed an amendment to offset the $900 million in added spending in the recent emergency supplemental bill. The amendment failed, 111-300. It just seems like no matter what, spending is never going to be under control. Republicans used to have big plans for abolishing agencies, cutting spending, and now that the party controls the government they can’t control spending. What’s the problem? Is it the appropriations process?
TOOMEY: Well, it’s a combination of things. Maybe more than anything else it’s the psychology in Washington. I think there’s a mentality that says, ‘Don’t just stand there, spend something.’ And that’s just the mode that we’re in. Everything grows every year. You’ve seen we can’t offset an extra billion dollars worth of spending, which was only necessary because there was a conscious attempt to thwart the budget in the first place. We were talking about cutting 29 cents out of every $100 being spent, and we were giving 14 months-a year and 2 months to get that done. If you can’t pass that, it’s a real sorry commentary on the fact that most Members of Congress are not interested at all in limiting spending.
Is the power in the appropriations process too tightly concentrated in the chairmen of the Appropriations subcommittees, the so-called cardinals? A few weeks ago, when you proposed an amendment [to strip federal funding from] pornography studies [see rollcall, July 28 issue, and story, July 21 issue], all these conservatives voting against it when it could have passed easily. One of them is on the [Appropriations] committee and voted with the chairman of that committee. Is this a corrupt process?
TOOMEY: No, corrupt is not the right word. There’s just a culture of spending there, and of course appropriators are extremely protective of their prerogative and their power to make those decisions about what kind of spending occurs and under what circumstances and how much. So they tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to want to oppose any amendment that makes a change in that. I think that’s unfortunate. I don’t see why it hurts their power or their prerogative to have an offset when we have an additional billion dollars in spending, when we’re already running a $450 billion deficit. They didn’t offer any reasonable arguments as to why we shouldn’t do it except the ludicrous one of saying, Well somehow these agencies couldn’t ever operate if we asked them to actually trim 29 cents out of $100. It’s kind of ridiculous to think that these agencies couldn’t operate with 99.71% of their budget.
But of course every year spending has to increase in every agency. That’s become a rule of thumb, almost.
TOOMEY: It is. It’s standard operating procedure in Washington, and it’s warped. It’s absolutely warped. I mean, we fund programs that can no longer be justified-maybe they had a legitimate purpose years ago but they certainly don’t anymore-and you’re absolutely right. The starting point is some level higher than last year’s funding for almost everything. And it’s just ridiculous that we can’t go out and do a freeze or do some modest cuts. I proposed an alternative budget earlier in the year, and my budget actually had some modest reductions in non-defense discretionary spending. And I held the rate of growth on mandatory spending to a lower rate of growth. And what you discover is with these modest belt-tightening measures in non-defense, non-homeland security areas-and not Social Security and not Medicare for that matter-it’s not hard to get back into a balanced situation relatively quickly. My budget would have had us back in balance within four years. But there’s unfortunately just not the will to control spending in Congress.
Have conservatives done enough to frame the argument of limited government in more than just the economic sense? As Sen. Jeff Sessions [R.-Ala.] said to me, it is morally wrong to take people’s money and throw it away on this kind of ridiculous stuff. In fact, it seems like you’re the Grinch for wanting to be wise with other people’s money, and that’s perhaps just part of the spending culture you’ve been talking about.
TOOMEY: I think it is. And obviously the people who are the real Grinches are the people who are taking the money from the hard-working Americans who earned it in the first place, and then spending it for some politically motivated purpose. We should be waking up every day saying, Where can we cut spending some more? It’s both a moral and an economic issue: We don’t have the moral authority to be taking money from people needlessly and spending it on things that can’t be justified. But also there’s an economic price to be paid. Everybody who advocates a spending program in Washington loves to always say, look at the economic growth it’s going to generate because of the activity that comes from that-which is a ludicrous argument because the money doesn’t materialize out of thin air. It comes from someone, and it means that every dollar that’s being spent on a government program is not being spent or saved or invested by the people who earned it on things that are important to them. It invariably leads to greater economic output when the market is deciding how to allocate capital than the economic output you get when government allocates capital.
Boosting GDP with government spending is kind of like jumping for joy at getting your tax return back-your own money.
TOOMEY: Yeah, in a way, sure. To look at the growth that comes from government spending, without looking at the fact that there would have been more if that money had been spent in the private sector, is ridiculous. The total burden-the measure of the economic burden that the government places on our society-is not only measured by our level of taxes. Really it’s best measured by the level of government spending, because that’s the measure of the misallocation of our capital.
The House passed the Medicare prescription drug bill, which represents a lot of government spending. Rather than create a big new entitlement, isn’t there a free-market solution to the problem of extremely high drug costs? Why did you support the entitlement?
TOOMEY: Well, I am not fond of even the House-passed bill. The Senate passed a horrendous bill. Frankly, I voted for it for three reasons: One, it’s the first chance we’ve had since Medicare was created to make profound, fundamental reforms in the program. The House-passed bill sets up a mechanism by which Medicare has to compete with private sector plans by 2010. That is very much the direction we need to move in, and I have never seen a vehicle that had a credible shot at achieving that until this bill. So that’s point No. 1. I think we badly need to reform Medicare, change the model completely, move away from this government command-and-control bureaucracy that runs half of health care in America, and move toward a market-based model, where you provide some financial help to people who need it to obtain a private health insurance package. That’s the direction we need to be headed in. This bill takes a modest step in that direction, but the first step I’ve ever seen. No. 2, I obtained from the Speaker a letter promising that he would work in conference to try to put a cost-containment mechanism in place. And that could take any number of forms, but what I envision is that every year you check and see how much is actually being spent and you compare that to what was projected for that year. If it’s going to exceed projection, then you re-jigger the formulas, so that you keep the cost under control. And the third thing, very frankly, is I had very good reason to believe that if we had not passed that bill, we would have had a discharge petition. We would have had on the House floor a much worse bill-spent more money, had no reforms, and it would have been able to pass.
You don’t think [the leadership] would have come back the next day with a new one?
TOOMEY: If we had actually killed our bill, no, I don’t think so. I advocated that we kill the rule, and I voted against the rule, because I wanted to offer amendments that try to improve that bill. I wanted to put a cost-containment mechanism right into the bill. I wanted to have it means-tested-I don’t think we need to have a plan that pays for Ross Perot’s prescription drugs. Frankly, a huge percentage of American seniors already have prescription drug benefits. In fact, it’s crazy to create a whole new entitlement for everybody.
If it doesn’t have the cost containment mechanism, will you vote against the [House-Senate] conference report on the entitlement?
TOOMEY: In all likelihood.
Didn’t Sen. Rick Santorum [R.-Pa.] make an argument that a lot of people in Pennsylvania would end up losing their current coverage in deference to the federal program?
TOOMEY: I do think that there’s a real danger that millions of seniors would get dropped from more generous corporate plans because a rational corporate manager is going to say, Why should we be picking up the stamp when Uncle Sam’s willing to do it? So, believe me, I have a lot of reservations about this bill, and frankly, I think it’ll be better for us if we can’t reach a conclusion, a compromise in conference on the kind of bills we have here right now. I’d be more happy, frankly, if we would go back to the drawing board and draw a much more scaled-down, modest version of this bill which provides some kind of basic coverage for very low-income seniors and catastrophic coverage for middle income seniors, and that’s it. You means-test it, you limit it, it should be a fraction of this cost, it should not be a universal entitlement.
On the topic of drug re-importation, which you support: [Many conservatives have] wanted to abolish the FDA. I find the whole thing a little unusual that so many conservatives are now saying-
TOOMEY: Are arguing about safety?
Right, ‘These pills would be unsafe???’
TOOMEY: Frankly I think the safety argument just has no credibility whatsoever. The argument that we would be somehow importing price controls is a more legitimate argument, but one that is not valid. . . . My [two reasons] for supporting re-importation: One is, I’m a free trader. I don’t believe I have the right to tell Americans from whom they can purchase or to whom they can sell products and services. I think it’s a fundamental question of personal and economic liberty, that you be able to trade freely with people anywhere in the world, but the only exceptions are national security in my mind. So that’s number one, but number two: I see this as a mechanism to help to destroy the price controls in other countries. I have no hostility to pharmaceutical companies. I want them to make a lot of money because when they’re making a lot of money it means they have products that consumers value. I think that the status quo is just unacceptable, whereby Americans are subsidizing the rest of the industrialized and wealthy world’s consumption of prescription drugs.
Let’s talk about your Republican primary campaign against Sen. Arlen Specter. Recently, Sen. Specter has supported in the Judiciary Committee the appellate court nomination of William Pryor, although he’s said that he will reserve his decision on whether to vote for him on the Senate floor. Whereas he previously supported school choice in D.C., he has now voted against it. I get the real impression of someone who holds his finger up in the wind a lot. How do you plan to-
TOOMEY: Well, there are many cases where Sen. Specter likes to be on both sides of an issue so that he can go to both groups and say, See I was with you. On partial birth abortion-he’ll vote for the amendment to make the bill meaningless, and then he’ll vote for final passage at the same time, so that he can go to liberals and say, See I voted to gut it so that it’s not a worrisome thing, and then he’ll go to conservatives and say, See I voted for it on final passage. I think we’re seeing the same thing with some of these judicial nominees. He’s expressing this great reservation and hemming and hawing about whether or not to support a perfectly qualified nominee of the President. He votes for them in committee, and then suggests that he’s going to reserve his judgment on the Senate floor. This is all an effort to have it both ways, so that he can go to both groups and say either I was with you or I tried to be with you.
This method has worked for him for almost 24 years.
TOOMEY: Well, at times by very narrow margins. Look at 1992, when there was a credible Democrat running against him [Lynn Yeakel]-not the strongest Democrat in the world, mind you-but a reasonably credible and reasonably well-funded opponent. Sen. Specter was held to less than 50% of the vote. And he has never had a credible primary opponent before. I have already raised more than three times the sum total of all of his previous primary opponents combined, and I have a political base that is vastly larger than any of his primary opponents. I will have the resources to inform Republican voters about just how terribly liberal his voting record has been. And if they discover that, they are reminded of why they don’t want to see him return for another term.
Are you going to be hammering things like campaign finance reform? Perhaps it’s not an issue with as much appeal, but there’s that and maybe more than ten other issues where he’s actually changed from one side to the other.
TOOMEY: Well, he’s done both. He has reversed himself completely and flip-flopped and been on both sides of many issues. But I think the more important issue is that at the end of the day he generally comes down on the left. He’s a traditional liberal; he’s left-of-center on economic, business, legal, judicial, social, cultural issues, and that’s what I think matters to Republican primary voters, the fact that more times than not he’ll vote to raise taxes and he’ll fight against cutting taxes. More often than not he will fight to expand spending in every direction he can. On legal issues he will consistently vote against tort reform, including medical malpractice reform. He was the only Republican senator to support subjecting U.S. soldiers to an international criminal court. On questions on the sanctity of human life, he’ll try to find a vote to throw to the pro-life movement on partial-birth abortion, but the fact is he has voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion in the past, he votes for amendments that gut the ban on partial-birth abortion. He votes to have taxpayer funding of the distribution of abortion pills to school children without their parents’ consent. He joins Ted Kennedy to introduce legislation to allow human cloning. He’s a big supporter of affirmative action and hate crimes and all the other liberal agenda items. So I think the main mission of the campaign is to make it clear that he is in fact an established liberal. And that’s what this primary should be about: Do we want an established career politician who has a very long and very liberal record, or do we want a conservative in this seat?
When you kicked off your campaign, you mentioned to me that you were looking to reach a certain threshold in fundraising. Do you feel you’re they’re yet?
TOOMEY: Oh no, no. I’m not there yet. But we’ve also got 9 or 10 months left before the campaign is over. We are exactly where we need to be at this point in time, and we are right on track. We had, as of June 30, $1.5 million in the bank.
And you’ve already done some airtime?
TOOMEY: We have done some airtime. And fundraising is continuing to go very well.
On the Democratic side, Rep. Joe Hoeffel [Pa.] has jumped into the Senate race. He’s got what’s become a pretty safe [House] seat. Do you think he’s betting on you winning the primary?
TOOMEY: I think he believes that I have a very good chance of winning. He recognizes that. And I think he also recognizes that Sen. Specter is always vulnerable to a strong Democrat. And the reason is, Sen. Specter has such a liberal record that many conservative Republicans will just never vote for him. In a general election they’ll just skip over his race. [Specter] therefore depends on a huge crossover of Democrats, and that crossover is very difficult to sustain if there’s a strong Democrat on the ballot.
Especially if like Specter he’s also from Philadelphia.
TOOMEY: Right. So I think Joe Hoeffel is simply observing the inherent vulnerability that Sen. Specter has to any strong Democratic challenger.
