True Compass (54 page)

Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, and I was the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee, of which Jim Jeffords of Vermont was the chairman. I was pleased that the president was interested in education reform and assumed that time would tell just how serious he was.

But in the meantime, I felt it imperative to keep the lines of communication with the White House open. One reason was the opportunity to keep the federal government involved in education. Abolishing the Department of Education had been a popular cause among some Republicans, who preferred to see school policy reside entirely within the individual states. But some states are wealthier than others, and some are more under the sway of extra-educational forces that can affect the quality of learning. But I believed that federal resources could be effectively used as a helping hand in areas where there is an obvious need: as a partner, not a competitor, in improving education.

The other reason is that we were elected to do something. And, politics aside, if we had a shot at education reform, especially with a Republican president and a Republican Senate and Republican House, well, I was going to try to seize it. Several months of negotiation, frustration, and compromise led at last to the passage of No Child Left Behind late in 2001. Flawed but necessary, No Child was itself a child of bipartisanship.

My faith in No Child Left Behind was bolstered by the evaluation of Bush's blueprint by my counterpart in the House, George Miller of California. Miller was the new ranking Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee. He was a powerhouse on many progressive issues, education foremost among them. He'd been impressed with Bush's grasp of educational matters. Miller and I would work closely together in crafting the "No Child" concept into legislation, along with two Republicans, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Congressman John Boehner of Ohio.

No Child Left Behind was to be the title for Bush's proposed $46.7 billion reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a leading feature of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty back in 1965. It had been set to expire in 1970, but had been reauthorized by Congress approximately every five years since. Partisan fighting in Congress had stunted the Education Act's effectiveness for many years, with Republicans demanding more emphasis on block grants and voucher programs, and Democrats pushing for reduced class size and teacher training. Its scheduled reauthorization in 1999-2000 was in fact lost in the ideological sparring of the presidential campaign.

The annual expenditure for Bush's plan was budgeted at $17.4 billion. Its tools of reform were to be standards and accountability, with a high emphasis on testing and with the federal government taking the dominant role in measuring the results. I had spent a good deal of time familiarizing myself with testing measures, and I found this approach full of promise. Accordingly, I expressed great public enthusiasm at the outset. I complimented Bush's personality and his intelligence. I emphasized to the press the areas in which Republicans and Democrats generally agreed on No Child. And I downplayed such thorny issues as the vouchers question.

By early April, things were looking rather good; enough compromise had been achieved that Senate debate on the bill could move forward. The Democrats agreed to use federal funds for private tutoring of students at failing schools and Republicans let go of the push for vouchers, at least for the time being. Our side even consented to a trial block-grant program involving seven states. To the consternation of some of my Senate colleagues, I announced "substantial progress" to the press and praised President Bush for keeping education reform as his top priority.

Full Senate debate on No Child began in May and continued for a rigorous and exhausting six weeks. Bipartisanship ruled the day in the early going; my Democratic colleagues and I were pleased to see several important agreements and concessions from the administration's side: targeting resources to children in the neediest schools, increased support for teachers, and stronger parent involvement in schools. These and other progressive measures were authorized in the bill that finally emerged. That was the good news.

But, as with all bills of this nature, we would still need the necessary appropriation of funds from the Congress. The president never fought for the funds he promised. When the Republican-controlled Congress announced its budget resolution in early May, appropriations for No Child Left Behind fell far short of what we needed. I was angry, and said so, yet my thoughts were focused not on accepting defeat but on finding ways to keep success within reach. I announced my hope of opening up funding by attacking the huge tax cuts then being debated in Congress, and by getting more money into the Labor, Health, and Human Services appropriations bill that was also headed for a vote.

My party had been adapting itself to survival without institutional power since the 2000 elections, but on May 24 an act of unusual political courage abruptly ended that situation. The Republican Jim Jeffords of Vermont announced that he was ending his affiliation with his party. The precipitating event was the president's and the Republican Party's lack of commitment to special education funding in the budget. Jeffords would become an independent, but would caucus from now on with the Democrats. Jeffords's decision had several immediate effects. It gave Democrats a de facto fifty-one-seat majority. It turned over committee chairmanships to Democrats, unseated Trent Lott as majority leader in favor of Tom Daschle, and on June 6 restored me to chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

On June 14, the Senate passed the bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with ninety-one senators voting in favor. I was enormously heartened; I had done everything in my power to keep people from both parties together on this. I understood the apprehension of some on my side. "What is absolutely essential," I pointedly told the press, "is having the kind of funding levels to make sure children who need extra help get it." For now, what mattered to me was that education reform was still alive. The bill now would head for a conference committee that would try to bring it and the House's bill into alignment. Improving its weaker elements and fighting for funding, I believed, could be tackled once it became law.

Bush called for Congress to send him a bill to sign before recessing in early August. Easier said than done. George Miller and I, leading the Democrats, worked hard to find common ground with the Republicans John Boehner and Judd Gregg, but we stalled on several issues. July and August passed without an agreement.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I sat in my Senate office with Senator Gregg, awaiting the arrival of Laura Bush, whom we were to escort across the hall to her testimony before our committee on the subject of early education. I had brought a painting of mine to give her as a memento. The First Lady's husband was at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, reading to a class of young pupils as part of his tour to publicize his administration's commitment to education reform. I was waiting for Mrs. Bush when someone from my office came to tell me that Vicki had just called: an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. At this point, reports were that it was likely a small plane that veered off course, but Vicki raised the specter of terrorism.

I found the news bizarre, grotesque. Judd Gregg felt the same way. A few minutes later Vicki called again.

Aware now that something cataclysmic and deliberate had happened to the nation, we saw Mrs. Bush perhaps seventy-five yards down the corridor, walking toward me in front of her Secret Service detail. The rest of that day is part of the nation's history. Mrs. Bush, Judd Gregg, and I announced that we would postpone our hearing, but that we would not be defeated by terrorism. Senator Gregg and I then spent the next couple of hours on Capitol Hill with Mrs. Bush. We kept the television set off and simply talked for a while. I will always remember her composure and elegance, qualities that she drew upon in the hours that followed to help comfort a nation in shock.

A sense of patriotism and shared responsibility took hold in all of us. Getting the education bill enacted into law had become both an affirmation of America's values and a demonstration to all countries that this Congress would not allow terrorism to cripple its ability to continue the nation's essential work.

Huge differences remained, however, and as talks progressed through the fall, they centered more and more on the cost of the reforms. Those crafting the appropriations bill for 2002 had floated a figure of $4 billion in discretionary spending increases for education. That was far too little to do what needed to be done. I called for twice that amount. And House conservatives revealed their own preferred level of expenditure increases: none whatsoever.

Exhaustive negotiations regarding testing requirements and funding provisions (and many other issues) continued for almost two months among designated members in the House and Senate. Finally, on December 12, 2001, we agreed on the specifics of the legislation. It was the only bipartisan measure of any scope passed in that year. The following January, President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law.

In several important ways, the Democrats had scored a major victory. Our negotiations had produced an appropriations agreement of $22.6 billion for education in fiscal 2002, a gigantic increase over Bush's original goal of just a $685 million increase over the previous year's $17.4 billion. And we had retained many of the policy principles that we'd considered essential from the start.

My remarks as the bill became law were conciliatory. "This is the president's signature issue," I said. "He can claim a big victory. But so can we, as well as the children." I genuinely believed this. No Child, as I saw it then, was the most significant advance in public education of the past quarter century.

In other important ways, however, our victory rested on shaky ground. Though the $22.6 billion represented a 20 percent increase over the previous education budget, Miller and I believed that it was still not enough to fulfill the standards that the act itself required.

That worry became sadly moot a few weeks later, when President Bush sent his new budget to Congress. It included none of the new money he had promised us. He blamed the costs of the military strike in Afghanistan, seeking the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks, for the need to trim back.

No Child has struggled on through the ensuing years, effective in some ways, but never the transformative tool that it could have been: "underfunded, mismanaged, and poorly implemented," as I put it, "a spectacular broken promise of the Republican administration and Congress." I added that America's children deserved better.

All of America's people deserved better than the misuse of U.S. power in Iraq. As did the Iraqi people. The war's effects are still fresh as I write these words, and so I will attempt no detailed retelling of them here. Looking over my personal journals and the many speeches and briefing memos in my files, I am struck once again at how clear the march to disaster seemed to me at the time, and how brazenly the administration's justifications departed from reality.

That march began in the glow of Americans' support for President Bush immediately following the September 11 attacks by Al Qaeda, and for his sending troops to Afghanistan to hunt down the terrorists responsible. The president and his men lost no time exploiting that trust and goodwill. In what I have called an "extraordinary policy coup" led by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the administration succeeded in changing the subject to Iraq.

I had met Vice President Cheney years before, when he was a congressman, through our mutual friend Alan Simpson, who like Cheney was from Wyoming. Cheney seemed agreeable to me at first, affable and smart, even though we had different political views. His votes were ultraconservative. Maybe we just didn't notice how extreme he was because his positions didn't carry the day. But when he became vice president, he had the power, but he lacked the good judgment to see beyond those extreme views.

I withheld my final judgment on the prudence of the Iraq war until I went back to the Senate in September 2002. There are no more important votes that a senator makes than on issues of war and peace, and I wanted to understand the issue fully before reaching a final decision. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, I listened carefully to the testimony of the witnesses.

I was struck by the consistent drumbeat of opposition to the rush to war by respected military leaders--General John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe; marine general Joseph Hoar, former commander in chief of Central Command. I will never forget what General Hoar in particular said in response to my question about urban warfare. He said that Baghdad would look like the last fifteen minutes of the Spielberg movie
Saving Private Ryan
.

My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a "just" war, and these principles were my guiding arguments:

• A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question;
  
• It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people;
  
• It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, selfinterested motives;
  
• It must be a last resort;
  
• It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and
  
• It must have a reasonable chance of success.
  

There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur
after
midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.