Party Lines: GOP's Senior Class

W A S H I N G T O N, June 30, 2000 -- Less than a month ago, House Republicans showed little interest in passing a prescription drug benefit. Then party pollsters warned them that failure to act could help Democrats retake the House in this fall’s elections.

“Upset seniors don’t believe politicians, (especially Republicans),” read a memo circulated to the House GOP on June 8. “Understand how important and concerning this issue is to them … It is more important to communicate that you have a plan than it is to communicate what is in the plan.”

This week, Republicans heeded that advice, passing by just three votes a plan that asks insurance companies to offer benefits while providing government subsidies as a backup.

Theirs is far less expansive than President Clinton’s plan, which guarantees a benefit under Medicare. But Clinton threatens to veto the GOP version, saying it “provides more political coverage for Republicans who voted for it than insurance coverage for the seniors who need to buy medicine.”

Message Received

Both sides are jockeying intensely for the coveted senior vote, an electoral block that strategists have said is up for grabs this year. Seniors cast 25 percent of the votes in the 1998 midterm elections that brought Republicans within just six seats of losing their majority in the House. Eager to avoid another humiliation at the ballots, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., this week acknowledged the electoral significance of the drug issue.

“Some analysts out there are saying that this is the big political vote of the year, and they may be right,” Hastert said.

The debate was bitter, with Democrats accusing Republicans of deceiving seniors with a plan that even insurance companies won’t accept.

“Insurance companies aren’t money printers,” said Rep. John Tanner, a conservative Tennessee Democrat who has voted with Republicans in the past. “We had a private system before Medicare. The reason we have Medicare is that the insurance companies couldn’t insure all the seniors who are getting sick.”

In addition to blasting their bill, Democrats criticized Republicans for shutting them out of the process. When GOP leaders refused to allow Democrats a vote their plan, they walked off the House floor to a rainy press conference outside where they stood under umbrellas emblazoned with the word “SHAME.”

“They were dumbfounded,” said Rep. Chris John, D-La., of the GOP reaction to the alternative plan. “They’re afraid of it.”

Campaign Fodder

Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, warned that the GOP’s tactics would hand his party the senior vote.

“They are going to remember this vote in the November election, when they vote to return a Democratic majority to the House of Representatives. Because this Republican plan is nothing more than empty promises,” said Kennedy. “And what do American’s seniors get when they get empty promises? They get empty pill jars.”

But satisfied they had gained the upper hand on the prescription drug issue, Republicans urged Democrats to put partisanship aside.

“There is one issue that should transcend politics, and this is it,” Hastert said in his speech on the floor. “We should vote for this out of the concern for our constituents who need our help in dealing with the high cost of prescription drugs.”

But even as Hastert spoke, Republicans were stepping up their outraged rhetoric in press releases ready for distribution immediately following the vote. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, compiled a list of vulnerable Democrats with the number of seniors residing in each of their districts. Their statement called it a “district-by-district campaign to let the media and voters know which Party is for progress and cheaper prescription drugs, and which party is for partisanship and gridlock.”

Despite the urgency that propelled the drug issue through the House, momentum has failed to reach the other side of the Capitol. Prospects for passage in the Senate remain murky. While a handful of Republican senators up for re-election this fall are in competitive races where the issue may resonate, leaders there have yet to make plans for a version of the bill that could pass in the roughly 23 remaining legislative days this year.

“There are a lot of ideas in the Senate, a lot of flowers blooming, but no consensus,” said Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.

But with or without the Senate, GOP lawmakers in the House may have neutralized the issue with the mere act of passing a bill, even one with little hope of becoming law.

“In ’94 we should have passed health care,” said Rep. Bob Matsui, D-Calif., referring to the last time Democrats held the majority in the House. “Instead we bickered and bickered and bickered and then we looked incompetent. But if they get a bill, that helps them a lot.”