Monday, May 10, 1999
Voinovich becomes a voice in Capitol
BY PAUL BARTON
Enquirer Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — It's not everybody who can get choked up over a bill dealing with education regulations, but Sen. George Voinovich may be the exception.
Mr. Voinovich, R-Ohio, says there were tears in his eyes when President Clinton last month signed a bill known as “Ed-Flex” into law. It's designed to give states greater flexibility in how they spend federal education money.
The former Ohio governor had been pushing the idea since 1991 and was elated to see it pass during his first four months in the Senate. Acknowledging his longtime support for the legislation, the White House invited him to the bill-signing ceremony in the Rose Garden.
That Mr. Voinovich could get worked up over a bill called “Ed-Flex,” says much about what motivates him as a senator.
He may live in Washington, but on many issues his heart is still in Colum bus, where state officials often see the federal government as more hindrance than help.
Mr. Voinovich says he is determined to be an advocate for state and local governments in Congress and remains passionate about the same policy ideas he lobbied for when he was chairman of the National Governors' Association in 1997-98.
“I am continuing to do the same (work) I did before, except now in the Senate,” he said.
“It's a crusade I have been on since 1981 for federalism — to move power back to state and local officials. They can do it better and cheaper,” he said.
Mr. Voinovich spent eight years as governor and 10 years as mayor of Cleveland.
His current issues include:
• Keeping the federal government's hands off of money won from the tobacco industry by state attorneys general.
• Streamlining transportation regulations, so that highways can be built faster.
• Holding a critical spotlight to new, tougher clean-air regulations that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to enforce soon.
Mr. Voinovich continues to work on other issues that carry over from his term as NGA chairman.
With film director Rob Reiner, he stresses the importance of development in the first three years in shaping a person's life.
Mr. Voinovich is developing child-related proposals that he will unveil in the Senate.
State and local lobbying groups in Washington already sense that they have a significant new friend on Capitol Hill.
“We're pleased he is in the United States Senate,” said Katie Cullen, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “We feel he will be very supportive of our issues in the next couple of years.”
But Mr. Voinovich has not limited himself to state and local issues.
He has been an ardent opponent of the Yugoslavian war — calling it a “major foreign policy blunder” — and has called for a halt to the bombing. This week, Mr. Voinovich, the only member of the Senate of Serbian descent, will be making a trip to the Balkans to see conditions firsthand.
And when he gave his first extended speech on the Senate floor on March 8, Mr. Voinovich devoted it to how the current budget process uses the Social Security trust fund to hide deficit spending elsewhere.
All the talk about the government's running a surplus for the first time in 30 years isn't true, he said.
“What the president does is take the off-budget Social Security trust funds and continue to use them to mask the deficit while saying he's saving Social Security. It's a shameless fraud!” he said.
Instead of having a surplus, he said, the government continues to run a deficit of as much as $16 billion a year. The former governor said he is determined that people learn the truth of what's going on.
“One of my goals is to educate people that there is no surplus,” he said last week.
He may be having an effect.
“Last year, they kept talking about the surplus, and now they are talking about the Social Security surplus,” he said.
Also bolstering his early credentials as a budget hawk was his vote in February against a military pay raise bill. Mr. Voinovich was one of only three Republicans to vote against the bill. They protested that it violated recently established budget caps.
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