A Partisan Clash at the Bipartisan Commission

The scene: Room 5110 of the Dirksen Senate Office building. The occasion: the first public meeting of the bipartisan National Commission on Social Security Reform to take place since the President and Senate Budget Committee called for $40 billion in cuts in the system over the next three years. The result: a partisan shouting match, with cameras clicking, that symbolized the tensions evoked by this sensitive issue.

Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, who is running for a second term this fall, announced that he was tired of hearing that his party was "trying to balance the budget on the backs of Social Security recipients." He proposed separating the program from the overall budget, as one way to avoid "a lot of political posturing." Heinz's proposal drew support from other commissioners, but then the fun began.

Florida Democrat Claude Pepper, 81, who heads the House Select Committee on Aging, wondered if television cameras would be required to leave the meeting after ten minutes. "Absolutely not," said Economist Alan Greenspan, the commission's chairman. The TV crews could stay as long as they liked. Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was incensed about the entire proceedings. Heinz's proposal was fine for the future, he said, but "we are facing a crisis of the present." Since the Senate Budget Committee "ordered this commission to cut $40 billion," Moynihan complained, "we've been told in advance what we must report." Chimed in Pepper: "People must be in a grave quandary" with talk of $40 billion in cutbacks coming on top of presidential assurances that benefits will be protected. "What are people to believe?" he drawled. "This commission has been compromised." Moynihan was just getting wound up. The Reagan Administration, he fumed, has "terrorized older people into thinking that they won't get their Social Security."

That statement triggered the fury of Colorado's Republican Senator William Armstrong. "I'm dismayed by the conversation that has taken place here," he said. "My colleague from New York on the Senate floor has demagogued this issue from front to back and top to bottom and he is trying to do the same here," he said. "You've tried to emotionalize what should not be an emotional issue. We have done everything to avoid making this a partisan issue," Armstrong declared, just before charging that the proposal for the $40 billion cutback originated with the Democrats.

Pepper demanded that Chairman Greenspan rebuke Armstrong: "If one member can make an assault on another, we become a brawling group." Greenspan mildly reiterated his hope that "we can keep the rhetoric down to an absolute minimum." Wisecracked Republican Senator Robert Dole of Kansas: "We carry on like this all the time on the floor of the House and the Senate."

So went the turbulent first hour of the session, which was only the third meeting of the commission since Reagan proposed its formation last September. The 15 members of the commission--five named by the President and five each by the leadership of the Senate and House--include Robert Ball, former head of the Social Security Administration, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and Robert Beck, chairman of the Prudential Insurance Co.

The commission's ostensible goal is to recommend changes in the Social Security system, but it is not due to report any findings until the end of the year, well after the congressional elections. There is little hope that the commission will reach any kind of consensus, since it has been hampered by the grandstanding of members who are up for reelection, by the intransigence of "gray power" activists like Pepper, who see no real need for reform, and by an untaxing schedule: just one meeting a month. At the commission's first session last February, Chairman Greenspan jocularly suggested that its members might wind up by issuing 15 minority reports. His prediction may yet prove to be true.

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