The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

When the history of the first decade of this century is written, a long chapter will be devoted to real and lasting restrictions of civil liberties justified by vague and ephemeral threats. Even though Randy Kuhl's decision to lock the doors of his local service offices won't make any history books, it still fits the same, depressing, three-step pattern of liberties restricted "for our own good":

1. Exaggerate: The real threat to Randy Kuhl's office is the embarrassment and inconvenience of having a set of anti-war protesters take over for a day. Since that threat doesn't justify a lockdown, his spokesman had to invent a new one: "future, more radical protesters". But even she admits that those threats aren't real: "I believe we have received some threats, but I'm not positive about the nature of them."
2. Over-React: Common sense indicates that the real threat, non-radical protesters, could be dealt with in ways that fall short of locking office doors from here on out. How about locking them on days when protests are happening? How about working with police to ensure a more aggressive response? Instead we're left with constituents having to make appointments just to speak with members of Kuhl's staff.
3. Publicize: As soon as the decision was made to lock doors, Kuhl's spokesman was all over the press talking about it. If it were smart to publicize every change in security, then we'd see headlines like "Local Bank Begins Use of Dye Pack Decoys". Since we don't, I have to assume that the real reason that Kuhl's change in security made the paper wasn't because it's smart, but instead because it fit his political agenda of appearing as a helpless victim of crazy radicals.

We began this month with a few harmless hippies spending a day in a couple of Randy Kuhl's offices. We end it with his offices on perpetual lockdown, justified by vague, unspecified threats of future radicalism. This is a classic case of "look what you made me do", and it would be comical if it weren't so common.

Both candidates in the 29th are trying to make pork a major issue in the 2008 race. Most of Randy Kuhl's press releases tout the arrival of federal money in the district. Eric Massa has made Kuhl's habit of voting against bills that contain his earmarks a frequent topic of his press conferences and press releases. Though the term "pork" gets thrown around frequently, there's not a lot of discussion of the nitty-gritty details of federal money entering the district. Today, in the first of a multi-part series on pork, I'll examine the difference between a grant and an earmark.

Let's say you're on a town board somewhere in the 29th district. Assume that your water system is broken, or perhaps you have an intersection that needs widening. Your town doesn't have the money, so you need to look somewhere else for funding: the federal government.

There are many ways to get federal funding for an ad hoc local project. To make things simple, I'm going to look at two that occupy most of Randy Kuhl's press releases: earmarks and grants. Let's start with grants.

Federal grants are blocks of money appropriated by Congress and administered by an agency in the executive branch. For example, if your problem is an intersection, the grant might be administered by the Department of Transportation. When Congress wrote the law appropriating the money for the grant, they also put a set of requirements down for distributing the grant money. Perhaps the grant is for rural areas, or maybe it is for poor areas, or for "critical infrastructure". Whatever the requirements, the federal agency administering the grant uses the legislative guidance from Congress to create a set of requirements for receiving the grant. Your intersection must meet those requirements.

To show that you meet the requirements, you need to write a grant application. Because requirements are complicated, "grant-writing" is an art form unto itself, and consultants are often used to wordsmith grants. Once the grant application is written, it is reviewed by a career civil servant (a.k.a., a "bureaucrat"). If the grant meets all the requirements, and there's enough money to go around, your project gets funded.

That's obviously a long, drawn-out process. The alternative is an earmark, which is a targeted appropriation for your intersection. To get an earmark, you need to convince another set of folks: your Congressman and/or Senators. You call their staff, convince the staff that what you want is important to a vital constituency, and then, if you're lucky, your Congressman will insert your funding request into a bill as an earmark. Once the earmark is placed and the bill is signed into law by the President, you get your money.

This is probably a simpler process, but it has its downside, too. If you live in a part of the district full of members of the other party, your Congressman might not think that your earmark is as important as some others in the "right place". Maybe your Congressman has spent his earmarks on other priorities. Or perhaps you have a feud with him about something else. Since earmarks are person-to-person politics, your ability to get an earmark relies on your political skills.

So which is better? It obviously depends on where you're sitting. Beneficiaries of the status quo, like Randy Kuhl, think earmarks are great. In a recent article in the Corning Leader, Eric Massa's criticism of pork-barrel funding in the 29th brought this retort from Randy Kuhl's spokesman, Bob Van Wicklin:

Randy knows the district better than the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. [...] The 29th Congressional District isn’t the highest priority on their list, but it is the highest priority on Randy’s list.

Van Wicklin's argument is one commonly heard in the earmark discussion. If you're concerned with issues like corruption and fairness, you might point out that civil servants implementing federal regulations are less likely to be swayed by political considerations. Bureaucrats might not know the district, but they might know better than to fund a "bridge to nowhere", and they certainly wouldn't fund it unless there's a government grant program for bridges to empty islands.

My take on the grants vs. earmarks controversy is that New Yorkers should support neither mode of federal funding. In the next post in this series, I'll explain why.

Congressional Quarterly reports that House Minority Leader John Boehner's leadership PAC has begun to make maximum contributions to Republicans who are in danger of losing their seats. In contrast, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's PAC is making contributions to Democratic challengers. Randy Kuhl recently received the $10,000 maximum from Boehner's PAC.

Exile at Rochesterturning notes that these defensive buys put the lie to the notion that low Congressional approval ratings might lead to a Republican resurgence. I agree. Those interested in the source of the low approval ratings might want to read what Glenn Greenwald has to say about them -- the bottom line is that low approval is being driven by Democrats' discontent with the Democratic Congress.

As fundraising shifts into high gear, it will be interesting to see if another factor is at play: "live by the corporate PAC, die by the corporate PAC". Randy Kuhl received big donations from corporate-financed PACs that want to pass legislation agreeable to the corporations who pay their bills. A Member of Congress who is part of the minority party, and on the edge of losing his seat, isn't an automatic investment for those PACs. It will be interesting to see whether Kuhl can attract funds from them again, or if he'll have a shortfall that can't be shored up by a few donations from House leaders.<?p>

The State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) saga keeps getting more complex, with the llatest news that the White House wants to keep states like New York from raising the eligibility ceiling for the program. Though the White House thinks that S-CHIP is a problem because it may replace private insurance for some, that's not Randy Kuhl's position.

The last post on the (S-CHIP) dealt with Randy Kuhl's charge that it will cut Medicare benefits. Kuhl also says that the bill will "increase taxes on private health insurance policies, and make it easier for illegal aliens to get government-funded healthcare." Like the Medicare charge, there's a grain of truth in that spin, but it's fundamentally wrong.

The tax increase that Kuhl crticizes amounts to roughly $1/year for each insured person. That dollar will be used to fund research into the effectiveness of drugs, devices and treatments. Even the private insurers agree that the research is a good idea - they just argue about how to fund it.

The concern over illegals getting Medicaid is a result of S-CHIP's repeal of the requirement for documented proof of citizenship for all Medicaid recipients. Again, there's more here than meets the eye.

Before the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005, states weren't required to collect documented proof of citizenship for Medicaid recipients. In the run-up to the DRA, the Health and Human Services Inspector General recommended [pdf] some common-sense methods for states to better document the immigration status of Medicaid recipients. In the DRA, Congress went far beyond those recommendations. It mandated the use of hard-to-get documents, and made that requirement an up-front one.

The result was a mess. A report study in one state (Virginia) [pdf] showed that the requirement mainly caused more cost in the program and delays in getting health care. Most important: emergency room visits, the most expensive way to provide care, went up after the DRA requirements were enacted. Administration costs for Medicaid also went up, because applicants needed help getting documents like certified copies of birth certificates, which cost $25-50.

In the DRA, Congress didn't do its homework before writing legislation. New York is the only state in the nation that's had a long-term policy of verifying citizenship status for Medicaid recipients. The Kaiser Family Foundation has issued a report [pdf] showing how New York is able to do a decent job of verifying citizenship while still getting people enrolled. To pick one glaring example, New York automatically enrolls newborns without further checks, since a baby born on US soil is a US citizen.

The DRA requirements are a classic example of "sounds good" legislation that doesn't work. If the S-CHIP repeal of those requirements is signed into law, Congress needs to go back to the drawing board to find a practical, workable solution to the issue of illegals getting Medicare.

Of course, this lengthy explanation is a lot harder to understand than the one-liners in Kuhl's press release. Kuhl is facing the accusation that he doesn't want to insure children. His spin -- he's protecting seniors, keeping taxes on insurance down, and keeping illegal immigrants from getting benefits -- sounds good, but doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

Over at Rochesterturning, poster Exile asks whether the recent McClatchy investigation into the politicization of the grant-making process has any relevance to the 29th. The McClatchy reporters showed that grant announcements from agencies, and public appearances with cabinet secretaries, were correlated with "GOP Interests". The report concentrates on the Commerce and Treasury departments.

Under the Hatch Act, agencies aren't allowed to provide grants in order to help candidates. But meeting with Members of Congress, and attending political briefings, are allowed. It's going to be hard to prove causation, but there's definitely some correlation between grant announcements and GOP political needs in the 29th. Exile points to this Kuhl press release, where a $2.6 Energy Department grant was announced two weeks before the election, accompanied by fulsome praise of Kuhl from the Energy Secretary. Earlier in 2006, Kuhl also received great credit from the Commerce Secretary for an Infotonics grant.

Since these grants were vetted by career civil servants who are protected by whistleblower legislation, I doubt that any of them were purely politically motivated. But there is persuasive evidence that the current White House went far beyond previous administrations in raising political awareness of cabinet agencies, and Randy Kuhl sure got a lot of attaboys from cabinet secretaries in 2006.

Update: Today's Washington Post has a front-page story on the same topic.

Randy Kuhl's press release on HR 3162, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), is headlined "Kuhl Votes Against Measure That Cuts Senior's Medicare Benefits". Since this bill is likely to become a campaign issue, it's worth seeing why that headline is a little right and a lot wrong.

S-CHIP reauthorization increases the number of children covered by the bill, so costs will rise. One way the bill pays for itself is cuts to the Medicare Advantage program, which is a subsidy paid to HMOs and other insurance programs.

Medicare Advantage began as a program to allow private insurance programs and HMOs to provide coverage to Medicare patients. When those programs were first allowed to be part of Medicare, they received 5% less than fee-for-service providers, since they were supposed to be more efficient. After 25 years of lobbying, the "more efficient" private sector providers are paid 12% more than regular providers, which amounts to an additional $1,000 per Medicare recipient.

The extra money paid to Medicare Advantage HMOs leads to three things: additional benefits for seniors in Medicare Advantage, higher profits for HMOs, and increased fraud:

Senate investigators released to Congress interviews and documents that indicate sales agents in at least 39 states have used unethical or illegal practices. Such practices have included the enrollment of dead or mentally incompetent Medicare beneficiaries, the impersonation of Medicare representatives and the use of personal information stolen from federal records...

Even if Medicare Advantage led to no fraud and no extra profits for HMOs, the fact remains that it unfairly rewards about 20% of Medicare recipients. Cutting the Medicare Advantage subsidy to fund S-CHIP makes good fiscal sense and it is fundamentally fair.

So, Randy Kuhl's press release is technically right about Medicare. A small minority of seniors will lose benefits because of this bill. S-CHIP also means one less gravy train for HMOs, and one less source of Medicare fraud.

Kuhl's press release makes two other claims, about higher taxes and immigration. I'll deal with them in a later posting.

I've been hard on the protesters lately, so I want to be sure that I acknowledge that the latest protest by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq was about as well-run as any protest I've seen in the last year.

AAEI's protest was more of a press conference, but it managed to avoid a number of the pitfalls of the last event in Bath. First, the organizers emphasized that all the participants were from the 29th district. Second, their press conference/protest occurred after AAEI tried to get a meeting with Kuhl through proper channels. It was only after Kuhl wrote back to AAEI saying that he was unable to meet with them that they decided to hold the press conference.

The effectiveness of the latest protest was also clear from the weakness of the response from Kuhl's office. The best Kuhl's spokesman could manage was that the protesters should call the office for a meeting -- in other words, they should do what they've already done.

The inability of Kuhl's spokesperson to respond with anything but a non sequitur shows that AAEI gave Kuhl's office no room to quibble. This protest gave AAEI a media window that was almost entirely sympathetic, and they did so without anyone getting arrested. AAEI showed that you don't have to re-live the 1960's to get your point across.

Randy Kuhl has an op-ed in today's Democrat and Chronicle that defends his vote against H R 3159. That bill required mandatory rest periods between troop deployment. Kuhl's op-ed is worth close study because it perpetuates the kind of thinking that has us mired in Iraq.

Kuhl's first reason for his vote is:

This legislation would allow Congress to undercut our troop strength and commanders' decision-making capacity. I did not vote for this bill because Congress should not micromanage our troops on the ground. This is a job for our commanders.

This is a dodge. It has always been Congress' job to fund the army, not the executive, and not commanders on the ground. As part of its funding responsibility, Congress determines the size of the armed forces and has full oversight over their recruiting and retention activities. That's a legitimate role, not micromanagement. It's time for Congress to get back to that role instead of abrogating it to the executive branch.

Kuhl's second paragraph makes two interesting claims:

• Specifically, this bill would hinder our military by reducing the number of troops in Iraq, thus putting troops on the ground in harm's way.

  The under-resourcing of Iraq has been happening since the beginning. We've had far too few troops to accomplish the mission of occupying and pacifying the country. Why has Kuhl been silent about that all these years? Why only now does he begin worrying about the size of our Iraq force?

• It also would extend the period of time troops can remain on the ground in Iraq, which may further strain and diminish their morale.

  This bill only mandates the length of rest periods between deployments. If the armed forces are working sensibly, deployments would shorten, not lengthen, because the armed forces would want to be able to rotate troops back in theater pretty quickly.

Though the piece is short, it manages to impugn the patriotism of the Democrats twice. Democrats are "not concerned about the needs of our military forces." And they are willing to "put party politics ahead of our soldier's safety." Ever since 9/11, anyone who has questioned the conduct of the war has been met with these types of attacks. They're over-the-top and wrong. There isn't a single Member of Congress who isn't deeply concerned with the needs of the military forces or soldiers' safety. This kind of rhetoric is poisonous to the real debate that needs to happen, and happen quickly.

The consensus of military observers is our current deployment schedule is wearing out the armed forces. We need to come up with an alternative to ensure the security of our country. Limiting deployments is a blunt instrument, but if it's not the way to save our armed forces, opponents need to come up with another strategy. Calling names isn't going to increase recruitment and retention, and it isn't going to save the Army and Marines.

If you're not sick of reading about last week's protests and the "packing" comment, I have three observations to make. They're behind the jump to spare those who can't stand to hear another word.

1. Fights about dumb remarks occupy far too much bandwidth in today's political media.

   Randy Kuhl's "packing" remark barely rose to Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe: "when a politician tells the truth -- or, more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head." Kuhl's remark was more of a dumb, offhand comment, one which might have gone unnoticed in a friendly gathering, but not when he was on the record.

   The ensuing controversy was essentially political theater, which is often a contest over who's more offended. Kuhl was offended that the D&C would print his comment "out of context". His opponent was offended by the "gansta rap" term.

   The real reason that so much time is spent on dumb comments like these isn't hurt feelings. Reporters and partisans have decided that a few dumb comments, or perhaps a dumb stunt, is enough to end the career of a politician. Recent examples include Howard Dean, and perhaps, Mitt Romney. But that's a presidential race, not a race for Congress where most of Kuhl's constituents have known him for 20 years. Residents of the 29th have already formed a more durable impression of Kuhl, one that can probably withstand a few dumb remarks.

   So follows my second observation:

2. Portraying Randy Kuhl as a bad, bad man won't lead to his defeat.

   Every time Kuhl says something dumb, which isn't that often, a legion of partisans resurrect every bad fact we know about Kuhl, and draw outrageous conclusions about him as a person. These conclusions fly in the face of the facts: Kuhl may be a flawed person (as are we all), but he's not crazy, and he's a hard worker.

   Kuhl is active in his district, has an almost-perfect attendance record, and has a long history in the Southern Tier. If he's going to be beaten, it won't be because of his personal history, which everyone has processed, nor will it be from a couple of dumb comments. Kuhl's going to have to be beaten on lack of responsiveness on substantial issues.

   If you want to see what a lazy, crazy Member of Congress looks like, take a look at Barbara Cubin. Babs likes to make racist remarks, threatened to slap her wheelchair-bound opponent after a debate, and missed more votes this session than a Congresswoman who died in April. Cubin is the kind of disaster that Democrats wish for. Kuhl isn't, and viewing him as such is a dangerous miscalculation.

   Since Kuhl will be beat on issues and responsiveness, let's move on to the most important point:

3. The whole "security" controversy is the transparent attempt to change the subject from our security to Kuhl's.

   Kuhl's "packing" comment garnered all the attention, but even if he hadn't said it, he still would be guilty of dragging a security red herring into the discussion about opposition to the war.

   Kuhl portrayed the protesters as outsiders with "rap sheets". I've been in contact with one of the protesters. Here's his "rap sheet":

   1) violation trespassing - for locking myself in my church's bell tower with another guy and ringing the bell in mourning for the dead, when the war first began.
   
   2) Rounded up by the capital police in DC last September, along with various priests, pastors, nuns, monks, and people of faith, as we made our way to the Senate office building. I paid fifty bucks and was released without being charged with a crime.
   
   3) This latest one is being called criminal trespassing.

   These are not life-endangering offenses. There may be some threat to Kuhl's office, but it doesn't come from a bunch of pacifists who live in the district or around nearby Cayuga Lake.

   The reason Kuhl tried to change the subject to his security is because he's arguably made the rest of us less secure. Right before coming home last week, Kuhl was on the wrong side of another symbolic though damaging vote on HR 3159. That bill mandates reasonable deployment periods for soldiers and reservists. Kuhl's colleague Jim Walsh (NY-25), who's also facing a tough election, voted for the bill, because he knows political dynamite when he sees it.

   This bill is about the true security issue facing our country. The Iraq war is wearing out our ground forces, and inflicting long-term damage on our military. Recruiting is way down, even after standards have been lowered. If we are really facing a "long war", we might well lack the military capacity to fight it.

   The protest arrests gave Kuhl a convenient excuse to change the subject, but at some point he'll have to address the damage done by the war, and that's a daunting issue for a man whose party is supposed to be best at keeping us safe.

The Democrat and Chronicle's new editorial blames the whole "packing" controversy on blogs taking comments out of context. Their new line is that the context of the comment was new security measures at the Capitol, not protests.

My message to the D&C: what you wrote couldn't have been clearer. Here is the whole paragraph, which had the heading "Protesters":

Kuhl said that he wasn't at his offices when the protesters in Bath and Fairport were there. When I asked him if he had ever protested, he said "Yes, when I walked off the floor in Congress recently." I asked if that means he thinks the protesters have a right to do so and he again said "yes, just not over the line." He said that the types of protests have caused him to rethink security at his offices and that means securing doors. He said they are "more protective now" and that he "thought about packing."

The context of protests was provided by the D&C, not the "blogosphere". According to the D&C, we were supposed to "check the facts with the editors and reporters at the meeting. Or with Kuhl himself." That line is a laughable desertion of basic journalism by the supposed paper of record for Monroe County. If you want to be considered a "professional journalist", you need to report what's said in an interview correctly. There are no "facts" to be checked other than those generated by the D&C itself.

Speaking of facts, here are a few: the "packing" remark was reported on the D&C's blog at 1:12 PM on Tuesday by an editorial board member. It was followed by two posts by D&C reporters, including the editorial page editor. If the remark was out of context, it could have been corrected by them then. Wednesday morning's editorial said the following (emphasis mine):

Kuhl said, not in jest, that he has thought of arming himself, given the perception — not accurate, he said — that he is an inflexible supporter of President Bush's approach to the Iraq war.

This watered-down paragraph is less clear about the context of Kuhl's remark, but it leaves the impression that the reason Kuhl wants to pack has to do with opposition to the war, not heightened Capitol security.

It was not until Wednesday afternoon, at 1:45 to be precise, that Tom Tobin decided that Kuhl's remark was "a casual reply". His colleague, James Lawrence, wrote this at 2:38 p.m.:

But I believe Kuhl wanted to make the point that he was concerned about personal safety and that of staff at his district offices in the aftermath of demonstrations there by anti-war activists.

Today's editorial called it "friendly banter" and re-cast the context of the remark as Capitol security. Who knows what the D&C's next version of the story will be, but I'll bet we haven't heard the last from them on this topic. It appears that they'll say anything after feeling a little heat from readers and Rep. Kuhl.

The proper way to address a mistake, if that's what the D&C believes they made, is to publish a correction. The unprofessional and cowardly way to deal with a mistake is to blame it on others. Today, the D&C took the latter route.