Word: gramm
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Since November, Gramm has positioned himself at the head of the socalled "revolution" that gave Republicans control of Congress. Republican legislators have turned that election into a mandate for a remarkable assault on big government, seeking to roll back everything from welfare to federal health and safety regulations and to balance the budget through various constitutional contortions. Through it all, Republicans have claimed to hear, like divine inspiration, the clear voice of the American people, instructing them to dismantle the bloated apparatus of the federal government piece by piece...
...Gramm is neither Speaker of the House nor majority leader of the Senate. His place in the revolution's vanguard was secured by virtue of his role as the True Believer, a title he alone can claim among his presidential rivals. He would have voters see him as the staunch ideologue whose time has finally come, an uncompromising conservative even in the darkest days of Democratic hegemony. In announcing his candidacy, Gramm played up his co-authorship of the ill-fated Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction plan, as well as his unbending resistance to the Clinton health-care plan. In these...
What does Gramm's America look like? To put it another way, who are Phil Gramm's Americans? Gramm's rhetoric, and his legislative record, make it clear that answering this question is no simple matter. In the wake of the November elections, President Clinton declared that the voters had sent a message: they want a smaller government, one that "is not a burden to them, but that empowers them." In reply, Gramm remarked, "Government doesn't empower you. Freedom empowers you!" But Gramm's statement contains a central irony: freedom only empowers those who are personally, economically and socially...
...Senate intern this summer, I saw Gramm's principles in action on an issue that put his high-minded rhetoric of freedom in its proper context. As the Senate debated the appropriations bill for the Department of Justice, one of the funding items was the Legal Services Corporation, an agency that provides legal assistance to the poor. Gramm offered a "very, very simple" amendment that would bar any Legal Services money from funding any lawsuit "that would have the effect of nullifying any provision of Federal or State law which seeks to reform welfare...
...Gramm is a great partisan of "welfare reform," which in his view consists of asking those who are "riding in the wagon of welfare" to "get out...and help the rest of us pull." The senator was up in arms about a New Jersey case in which several organizations, using Legal Services funds, had sued the state on behalf of welfare recipients, charging that New Jersey's attempts at "welfare reform" were arbitrary, discriminatory and punitive. Among other provisions, the New Jersey law would deny an increase in welfare payments for any child conceived while the mother was on welfare...