by Al Franken
Maybe I wasn’t allowed to be funny anymore. But I could still let my id out once in a while by eviscerating some right-wing jerk.
“It’s not enough for you to kill these guys,” Mandy Grunwald observed after one such evisceration. “You have to set them on fire.”
Would you like another example? I bet you would. And I would love to relive it.
As I mentioned in the powwow chapter, I made it onto the Indian Affairs Committee in the face of some stiff competition from no one. One day, we were considering an amendment to the Indian Health Care Improvement Act that would allow dental therapists to provide oral health care to American Indian and Alaska Native children in woefully underserved Indian country.
Children in Indian country have twice the rate of tooth decay as the general population. Sixty-eight percent have untreated cavities. One in three report missing school because of dental problems.
More than fifty developed countries outside the United States have a licensed trade called “dental therapist”—midlevel oral health providers, whose scope of practice is somewhere between a dental hygienist and a dentist. Guess who doesn’t like that idea? Dentists.
In 2006, the American Dental Association opposed (unsuccessfully) an experimental program that paid for Alaska Natives to train as dental therapists in New Zealand and then return home to provide oral health care to isolated Alaskan villages—many of which are accessible only by air, and which would receive dental care just once a year, when a dentist would fly in and stay for all of a week.
The Alaska experiment had been successful. Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski (a Republican), who had cosponsored a new Indian dental therapist amendment with me, invited one of the dental therapists from Alaska to testify about the difference it made for kids to have an adult from their own village reminding them to brush every day and take care of their cavities. And a pediatric dentist from Minneapolis testified that peer-reviewed studies showed that dental therapists “improve access, reduce costs, [and] provide excellent quality of care.”
But the American Dental Association didn’t want the competition from dental therapists, and so they opposed our amendment. They sent their president, Dr. Ronald Tankersley, to testify against it. The night before the hearing, there I was with my binder, reading his testimony, getting that old familiar feeling as my lie-dar began to tingle.
“This year alone,” he was planning to say the next day, “there will be seventy additional dentists providing care in tribal areas. With one more year of similar recruiting success, the shortage of dentists in IHS (Indian Health Services) could actually be eliminated.”
That couldn’t be right, I thought. I called my staffer on Indian Affairs and asked for some real data. How many dentists are there in Indian country? What’s the shortfall? What’s the attrition rate?
He called back a few minutes later. Here was my end of that conversation: “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh, man—this is going to be fun!”
The next day, after Dr. Tankersley read his testimony, I asked him, “Shouldn’t everyone have access to dental care?”
“We believe they should,” he answered.
I repeated back to him what he had just said about the seventy new recruits this year, and about how if there was similar success the next year, the dentist shortage could actually be eliminated.
Was that his testimony?
“Yes.”
“Do you know how many dentists there are in the IHS?”
“No, I don’t.”
“There are six hundred dentists in the IHS. Do you know how much the shortfall is?”
“Yes. The shortfall at this point is about another seventy dentists.”
“No, it is not.” The shortfall, I told him, was about 25 percent—or around 150 dentists. And did he happen to know the rate of attrition?
“I don’t know the statistics,” he said, blanching a bit. “But the turnover rate is high.”
“So when you said that ‘with one more year of similar recruiting success, the shortage of dentists in the IHS could be eliminated,’ why did you use the word ‘could’?”
“Because there is no way we know that it will be eliminated.”
“Why did you even bother to say it? Because the turnover rate is about 30 percent.”
I did the math for him. The current shortfall was 150 dentists. Turnover would add another 180. That made a shortfall of 330. Seventy new recruits would still leave Indian country about 260 dentists short.
I asked him again if he agreed that everyone should have dental care.
“We do.”
“It doesn’t seem to me,” I said, “that your testimony is convincing at all. And what I want to do is make sure that kids in Indian country don’t have rotting teeth. That is my responsibility.”
Of course, I have failed in that responsibility. Yes, our amendment passed, which means that dental therapists can serve in Indian country—but only in the two states where dental therapists are licensed to practice at all: Alaska and Minnesota.*
American Indians receive less than half per capita what we spend on health care for the average American. And that’s a disgrace, one that even the most satisfying takedown can’t eliminate. But at least that day I got my Indian name from a Minnesota Ojibwe friend of mine: Yells at Dentist.
It’s one thing to take on a professional association president who didn’t prepare and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s way more fun to take on a right-wing ideologue from a conservative think tank.
In 2011, Tom Harkin, chairman of the HELP Committee, called a hearing to talk about how we can build and strengthen the middle class.
There is a classic philosophical divide between the two parties on how the economy works, and on the government’s role in creating jobs. The night before the hearing, I read the testimony of Kenneth Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Designated Conservative on the panel. Green’s written testimony ended with the sentence, “In conclusion, the idea that the government can create jobs in the economy is a myth.”
Mm-hmm.
The next day, I began my questioning by noting a few government projects that had created millions of jobs.
Had Mr. Green heard of the Erie Canal? It opened European markets to midwestern agricultural goods and timber and made New York the Empire State.
The hearing itself, I noted, was being carried on C-SPAN, the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network. Was Mr. Green aware that the Defense Department had sent up the very first satellites?
The hearing was also being streamed on the Internet. Did Mr. Green know that the Internet had been created by the government?
How about rural electrification? The interstate highway system? Don’t a lot of companies rely on the interstate highway system to ship their goods? And what about Mr. Green himself? His bio said that he had received his graduate degree from UCLA—a public university. Did any of his professors believe that they had jobs? Did any of them teach him anything?
“It would be absurd,” Green finally conceded, “to say the government can’t create jobs.”
I got in one last swing. “When we receive testimony here in the United States Senate,” I pointed out, “we really like the testimony to say what it means and mean what it says.”
These hearings quickly emerged as one of my favorite parts of the job. The only problem was that there was a fine line between showing up a jerk and being one myself—between letting my id out and letting it run amok.
And every so often, I’d go overboard.
In 2011, we had a hearing in the HELP Committee to talk about chronic disease prevention, and one of the witnesses was a guy named Tevi Troy from the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank in Washington, who was there to complain about the Affordable Care Act.
At one point, he was arguing that the ACA would force employers to drop health insurance for their workers because it would be cheaper to just pay the penalty than to pay for coverage. So I asked him about
Massachusetts, where the reverse had happened under Romneycare—the percentage of companies insuring their workers had actually gone up, the only state in the country where that had happened.
He cited a statistic from “a study in the Wall Street Journal that showed that AT&T, for example, spends about $2.2 billion annually on covering its workers”—whereas it would have cost only $600 million to drop the coverage and pay the penalty instead.
Of course, AT&T hadn’t dropped coverage, because offering health insurance makes you a more attractive place to work and also keeps your workforce healthier and more productive, which was why more companies had chosen to offer insurance in Massachusetts, not less, which was the entire point.
There might have been an interesting argument to be had there, but I got a little sidetracked by the words “Wall Street Journal.” You see, the Journal has a serious and trusted newsroom, but its editorial division pumps out a steady stream of absurd piddlepaddle,USS and right-wing hacks love to borrow credibility from the news department to support the nonsense on the op-ed page. So anytime I hear someone cite it, I get a little suspicious.
“Did the Wall Street Journal,” I asked the witness, “have a study? Or an editorial?”
“It was a statistic cited in the Wall Street Journal,” he answered, a little nervously.
Oh, man.
“Cited where in the Wall Street Journal?”
“It was, um, on the editorial page,” he stammered.
I had him. “On the editorial page.”
“It was an op-ed.”
“Okay,” I said. “It was an op-ed. In the Wall Street Journal.”
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, or, if I’m being honest, smirked.
“The statistic remains accurate,” he offered lamely.
“You know,” I sneered, “it’s funny. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page sometimes—I don’t know if you know this—uses statistics in misleading ways.” There was laughter in the room as the witness squirmed, but my health care staffer, Hannah Katch, quickly pushed a note in front of me: “You’re being an asshole.”
She was right. Not only was I focusing on the wrong thing (the editorial credibility of the Wall Street Journal), but I was badgering this poor guy.
Immediately after the hearing, I thanked Hannah. Then I went straight to our office and called an all-staff meeting. Everyone piled into the conference room wondering what this could be about.
“Hannah just handed me a note while I was questioning a witness,” I said. I read the note aloud. “Hannah did me an enormous favor. I don’t want anyone in this office ever to be afraid to call me an asshole.”
Blank stares, a few nods.
“Okay. Meeting over.”
Chapter 31
I Screw Up
As minority leader, Mitch McConnell constantly used—and, I’d say, abused—the rights of the minority in the Senate to slow things down. Things like nominations to the federal bench. Or important diplomatic posts like ambassadors to Turkey (while jihadists were using it as a base to invade Syria) or Sierra Leone (during the time it was gripped by the Ebola outbreak) or South Korea (which is located just south of North Korea). Or key national security positions like under secretary for personnel and readiness at the Department of Defense, under secretary for nuclear security at the Department of Energy, and, oh yeah, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, it’s one thing to stand up and filibuster something or someone you oppose. This was something else. On hundreds of occasions, the minority would use a parliamentary procedure called “forcing a cloture vote” simply to waste everyone’s time. They did it more than ever before in history; in fact, four out of every ten cloture votes in the history of the United States Senate up to 2014 came in the eight years that Mitch McConnell served as minority leader.
If you don’t know what a cloture vote is, here’s the deal. If the minority won’t consent to proceed to a vote, the majority has to file a cloture motion to end debate. Passing a cloture motion requires sixty votes. So when you hear people talk about a “filibuster,” more often than not it isn’t Ted Cruz or Rand Paul talking for sixteen hours. It isn’t an exhausted Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith, his voice rasping from speaking through the night, collapsing as the gallery gasps. It’s just the minority leader refusing to allow a bill or nomination to move forward. He doesn’t have to say anything except “I object” when the majority leader asks unanimous consent to go to a vote.
The filibuster can be (and is) used to kill proposals that don’t have strong bipartisan support. Mitch McConnell’s innovation was in using it constantly to slow down things that did have bipartisan support, just to make sure as little as possible happened that Obama could get credit for.
You see, once a cloture motion is filed, it can’t be voted on at all until an intervening Senate day passes.
So if you file a cloture motion on a Monday, you can’t vote on it until Wednesday. And even then, you’re still voting on the cloture motion, not on the actual thing you wanted to vote on. If you get those sixty votes and the cloture motion passes, the Senate then has to wait for another thirty hours of “debate” to elapse before we can go ahead and vote on the dangUSS bill or nomination. I put “debate” in quotes there because, again, it’s not like we spend thirty hours actually debating the topic. It’s just a way of saying we have to kill a bunch more time.
And in fact, in most of the situations there wasn’t actually anything to debate. McConnell would force cloture votes on ridiculously noncontroversial stuff.
So it was not uncommon for us to file a cloture motion on a Monday for a vote on, say, a noncontroversial district court nominee, only to have the nominee confirmed with an overwhelming majority (in one case by a 98–0 vote) late on Thursday evening. That’s right—Republicans would routinely filibuster things that they’d then turn around and vote for.
This wasn’t just a thumb in the eye of that poor nominee who had to wait forever to become a judge or a postal regulatory commissioner or a member of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. It was a deliberate strategy to prevent the Senate from moving to important issues we really needed to address. (For a more in-depth discussion of how the filibuster is used to eat up time, check out my forthcoming seventh-grade civics textbook, How a Bill Doesn’t Become Law.)
What made it worse was that McConnell had made his intentions clear by actually saying, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Not making sure that kids get a great education, not creating millions of good jobs, not even getting our deficit under control. No, his first priority was about Republicans winning the next presidential election. I wasn’t shocked that he thought that. I just was appalled that he actually said it.
Mitch was really good at antagonizing the Democratic majority, which I think he’d take as a compliment. And perhaps that helps explain my first really big mistake in the Senate, which came during the debate on Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I was presiding over the Senate, which means I had to listen to speech after speech from conservative Republicans explaining why Kagan, who had been a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall and White House counsel in two administrations and dean of Harvard Law School and solicitor general under President Obama, was the least-qualified Supreme Court nominee in our nation’s history.
As the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell gave the final speech against Kagan. It was awful. And at one point during his awful, awful speech, Mitch said:
No one has any doubt that Ms. Kagan is bright and personable and easy to get along with. But the Supreme Court is not a social club. If getting along in polite society were enough reason to put someone on the Supreme Court, then we wouldn’t need a confirmation process at all.
And, I am truly embarrassed to report, listening to Mitch’s awful speech, I rolled my eyes.
Now, rolling my eyes at this patronizing sexist dreck about t
his extremely brilliant legal scholar that made her sound like a promising debutante might have been a very reasonable reaction for the ordinary observer. Certainly for the ordinary Democratic observer. But I was not the ordinary observer. In fact, at that moment, I had the distinct privilege of presiding over the United States Senate.
It is the duty of the presiding senator to listen to each and every colleague with respect, or, short of that, work on thank-you notes or read press clippings. Rolling my eyes at McConnell was a huge breach of Senate protocol, which I compounded by shaking my head once or twice and, worse, smirking at stuff I found particularly objectionable. In my defense, I was tired.*
Fortunately, C-SPAN always stays on the speaker during Senate sessions, so there is no visual record of what was a very serious transgression. But as soon as Mitch had finished his speech, he marched up to the podium and let me know he was furious, as he had every right to be.
“This isn’t Saturday Night Live, Al!” he said, loud enough for the press to hear.† Mitch is very smart, and for his purposes that was exactly the right thing to say—after all, the political press had been itching to write something about Senator Yuk-Yuk causing trouble by reverting to his old ways. I came back lamely with something about how offensive I had found his speech, which didn’t impress Mitch at all. He informed me that if I ever did anything like that again, he’d call me out on it right there on the Senate floor.
The Senate then moved to a vote on the Kagan nomination, and as I presided over the process, it quickly began to register that I’d really screwed up. I got to declare that Elena Kagan had been confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, which should have been a pretty fun moment, but my heart wasn’t in it, and as soon as I finished my duties, I left the chamber and went directly to the minority leader’s office. Mitch wasn’t there, but I told his aide that I had come to apologize. And then I walked back to my office, feeling terrible.
