From 'McBunnell' to Northup, Kentucky's delegation stands way to the right

By David Hawpe

 It wasn't always like this. I remember traveling around what was then the 5th
 congressional district with U.S. Rep. Tim Lee Carter, a Tompkinsville doc
 who represented Kentucky in Washington for 16 years. We shook hands and
 slapped backs from Fountain Run to Kingdom Come.

 He was a Republican and, in many ways, a progressive one. Far from
 bad-mouthing government, he wanted to use it to help the people of his
 chronically depressed region.

 Today, he wouldn't fit in. The National Journal says that, based on analysis
 of 73 carefully chosen votes, Kentucky had the eighth most conservative House delegation in
 Washington last year. It ranked just above those from such bastions of political enlightenment as
 Alabama and Oklahoma.

 The Senate? Well, if you're a hard-line conservative, nobody does it better for you than McBunnell
 (we might as well refer to Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning jointly, since their ideological
 score is exactly the same).

 Kentucky's two senators are in a group of 13 who have the most conservative voting records in the
 U. S. Senate. The rest of the list includes just one each from Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama,
 Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Indiana (Dick Lugar).

 In the old days, Kentucky sent moderate Republicans to the Capitol, such as Carter and former Sens.
 John Sherman Cooper, Thruston Morton and Marlow Cook.

 Once there, Carter pushed hard for federal spending on vocational schools, water projects, hospitals,
 libraries, airports, roads and recreational programs.

 And, unlike today's bunch, he loved to point out that he always supported the taxes to pay for them.
 He was fully behind President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, which are wholeheartedly
 denounced today by the Republican hardliners who control the House of Representatives. (Except
 Medicare. They claim to like Medicare.)

 Carter was an early proponent of national health insurance for catastrophic illness, an idea which,
 even today, is heresy among militant free-market Republicans. And as for wedge issues, he once
 attacked a Louie Nunn election campaign for its "racism, religious bigotry and mud-slinging."

 His successor is Hal Rogers, who has the voice of a moderate but the voting record of a latter day
 Boll Weevil (the Republican version). They say he talks like Jesse Jackson but votes like Jesse
 Helms.

 Of course, the chief architect of hard-right hegemony in Kentucky's congressional politics is
 McConnell, who, ironically, likes to feature himself as the inheritor of the state's noblest Republican
 tradition — the much-honored career of his early benefactor, John Sherman Cooper.

 Yes, John Sherman Cooper, the liberal Republican who was an early and strong supporter of civil
 rights laws and federal aid to education. About whom Sen. Edward Kennedy said, at the time of his
 passing, "I inherited many things from my brother (John F. Kennedy), but his friendship with John
 Sherman Cooper was one that I prized most."

 According to the National Journal analysis, Rogers is not the most conservative member of
 Kentucky's House delegation. This year the honor goes to Rep. Anne Northup of Louisville.

 But he is the most influential, and here's the irony: Rogers, the most powerful member of one of the
 most conservative state aggregations in the House, once called moderate-to-liberal Cooper "the
 model politician after whom all of us would pattern our own efforts."

 Just as Rogers replaced the moderate-to-liberal Tim Lee Carter, Northup replaced
 moderate-to-liberal Democrat Ron Mazzoli. Both act as if they regard former Kentucky Rep. Gene
 Snyder as their beau ideal, not Cooper.

 The money-grubbing Snyder used to be an aberration, but now he's the model. The agenda is simple:
 Cut taxes for the rich, shift as much of the burden as possible to the middle class, bring home as much
 pork-barrel money as possible, and let the deficit be damned.

 If you agree, then Mitch McConnell is your man. He's by far the most consequential Kentuckian in
 Washington, with the possible exception of Bush-buddy Will Farish, who actually is in London as
 ambassador to Great Britain.

 Gone are the days when Kentucky sent real middle-of-the-roaders like Cooper, Carter, Morton and
 Cook to Capitol Hill, not to mention long-lasting liberal and moderate Democrats like Carl Perkins
 and Bill Natcher. More's the pity. And it need not be that way, despite McConnell's insistence on it.

 Kentucky voters are not afraid of ambitious, affirmative government, or of financing it, if the need is
 made clear. One proof is that the Kentucky Education Reform Act and higher education reform were
 passed and then embraced, despite the determined opposition of McConnell's Republican retainers in
 Frankfort.

 This very week, despite the regressive image that still attaches to Kentucky's local school officials,
 160 of 172 superintendents are opposing the conservative assault against the Commonwealth
 Accountability Testing System (CATS). "This may be the most impressive evidence yet of just how
 far Kentucky public education has progressed," said Marion County Superintendent Roger Marcum.

 Kentucky's congressional delegation should have room for politicians who believe in government, not
 just in setting up tables for the moneychangers in the temple of democracy. But apparently not while
 McConnell owns it.

 David Hawpe's columns appear on Sundays and Wednesdays in The Forum. You can read them
 on line at www.courier-journal.com.
 

                                       Copyright 2004 The Courier-Journal.