Exit Interviews

Do term limits matter? Just ask Congress’ quitters.

Katherine Mangu-Ward & Michael W. Lynch from the October 2000 issue

(Page 7 of 9)

Salmon: The degree of partisanship amazes me. There’s not really an ounce worth of difference between what they propose and what we propose, or what we end up voting for. We act like we are doing this big, mean, ugly fight. We try to draw these distinctive lines, but the lines are really blurred. Ninety-five percent of it is theater. When you look in the eyes of the appropriators, I don’t see a lot of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. When it comes to pork barrel spending, I don’t see a big difference here on Capitol Hill.

Reason: What have been your major accomplishments?

Salmon: Not going insane. (Laughs.) That’s one major accomplishment.

Reason: How would you know if you had gone nuts?

Salmon: I don’t know. Do you think I’m insane? I think my major accomplishment hasn’t been so much what I’ve been able to accomplish as what I’ve been able to stop. Recalcitrants like me dug in their feet on some of the budget measures and I think we made a difference. I consider one of my best accomplishments sending Newt Gingrich packing. It was me who stood up after the last election and said, "I have seven votes with me." I went on Larry King Live and several other shows and two days later he resigned. After I announced that I had seven votes he started calling around to different people trying to shore up the support, have them come around and drop a ton of ugly on me.

Reason: Why did Gingrich need to go?

Salmon: He had become so gun-shy of taking on the president in any kind of a fight that he’d been neutered–Newt had been neutered. When the government shut down, the biggest mistake we ever made was to open it again. My constituents were thrilled to death to have the government shut down.

Reason: Why do so many of your colleagues want to stay in Congress?

Salmon: There are several reasons. You are kind of a mini-celebrity. You go back to your district, and people wave at you, they know who you are, and they treat you like you are something special. You come back here and it’s like la-la land. You really are controlling billions upon billions of dollars. You get to go on national TV. People treat you way smarter than you are. They treat you like you are a rock star or something.

Reason: You’re a budget hawk, but you like the space station and B-2 bombers. In fact, you want to fund the bombers at a higher level than even the Pentagon does. And you want to publicly fund a space station.

Salmon: The Pentagon has compromised itself time and time again with this administration. When I saw the strategy that they came up with for Kosovo, it became pretty clear to me that they are no longer independent thinkers. The Stealth Bomber technology is one that, if we get into a major conflict, we are going to be thankful that we’ve got.

The second issue is the space station. My belief is that without a space station, NASA really doesn’t have a clear mission. I believe that space exploration is beneficial not only in the advances that it has helped us with on the environmental issues, but also the ancillary benefits, the biomedical advances that we have made, the technical advances.

I also support government spending on research and development. I believe very strongly that government has a major role to play both in biomedical and in technological things if we are going to maintain our edge as the world’s superpower.

Reason: Do we really need the government involved in this?

Salmon: The private sector’s idea is to compete with each other to make the better widget. But if we are talking about breaking new technologies, I just don’t see it happening in the private sector. If we cut the taxes way back and provided major tax incentives for them to be in research and development, that is another route we can go. Absent that, you got to have government.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.14.10 @ 10:02PM|#

ndghs