Harkin’s HELP Committee Shows Off the Lost Art of Legislating (with Lamar's help!)

rollcall.com ^ | 7/15/14 | Niels Lesniewsli and Humberto Sanchez

[cotton1706]

Ask Sen. Tom Harkin about his committee’s work this Congress and he’s ready to rattle off a key statistic.

“Fourteen bills. More than any other committee in the Congress. Fourteen bills signed into law.”

The retiring five-term senator might seem at first blush an unlikely candidate to break through in the most dysfunctional Congress ever. Harkin is an unabashed Midwestern liberal. But he’s also proved adept at reaching across the aisle on issues that don’t always make the front pages — such as the Workforce Investment Act reauthorization — a major overhaul heading to the president’s desk.

To hear Harkin tell it, much of the opportunity for success comes from having an old-school legislator as a partner.

“First of all, I have a good ranking member in Lamar Alexander. While we disagree on things, we’re able to work together and find common ground and get it done,” the Iowa Democrat said. Alexander, who became the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this Congress, learned the ropes under a fellow Tennessean, the late Majority Leader Howard Baker.

“That’s just it. We just work. It takes work. It takes time,” Harkin said last week, as leaders in both parties hailed the WIA.

It also takes discipline.

Harkin rejected the idea of adding an unemployment extension he and other Democrats supported to the re-authorization. “We worked five years on it and it’s a good bill and we are not going to let it get screwed up by anything,” Harkin said when the bill headed to the floor.

Alexander said the HELP committee has a history of focusing on areas where common ground between the parties can be achieved, including under the leadership of the previous chairman, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

[cotton1706]

“First of all, I have a good ranking member in Lamar Alexander. While we disagree on things, we’re able to work together and find common ground and get it done,”

If republicans take the senate, with Lamar as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, do you honestly think we'll repeal Obamacare, eliminate the Department of Education or at least get rid of Common Core, reform Social Security and rein in the labor unions??

[Gaffer]

You mean the same Tom Harkin that claimed he was a fighter pilot combat veteran in Viet Nam? That Harkin? That Harkin who it turns out just flew REMF cargo planes? That Tom Harkin?

[Nervous Tick]

>> “Fourteen bills. More than any other committee in the Congress. Fourteen bills signed into law.”

Fourteen new laws for a government that has already over-extended its size and reach?

That’s something to be ASHAMED of, not PROUD of, Harkin.

Get back to me when you rat bastards have REPEALED fourteen EXISTING laws. Until then, FOAD.