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Common Cents: A Retiring Six-Term Congressman Reveals How Congress Really Works-And What We Must Do to Fix It

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Timothy Penny was a six-term Democratic Congressman from Minnesota. As previous reviews indicated, what set him apart from fellow Democrats was a visceral revulsion to profligate deficit spending by Congress. I became aware of Penny while conducting research for a book that includes a historical review of U.S. federal government science agencies (Manheim, Springer (2009). The curious title of Penny's book derives from an extraordinary but now little remembered Congressional drama.

In 1993 Penny and John Kasich, Republican Congressman from Illinois submitted an amendment entitled "The Common Cents Deficit Reduction Act of 1993" to the the House "Government Reform and Savings Act of 1993".The Penny-Kasich amendment encompassed an array of budget cuts and federal agency reorganizations estimated to save $90 billion. "A new consolidated Cabinet-level Department of Science, Space, Energy, and Technology was to replace by tranfer or dissolution functions of the Department of Energy, NASA, NSF, parts of a dismantled Dept. of Commerce (including NOAA and NIST). All bureaus of the Department of Interior except the Bureau of Reclamation would be wiped out." The proposed amendment was estimated to result in reduction of 252,000 full-time equivalent federal positions.

This bill, that would have created cataclysmic change in federal science agencies, came within six votes of passage in the House. To be sure, The Penny-Kasich bill wouldn't probably been vetoed by President Clinton even if it passed the Senate. But it carried a powerful message of Congressional dissatisfaction with the status quo. Two years later backwash from this bill hit my agency, the U.S. Geological Survey. A new Director announced a massive RIF. USGS, which, decades earlier, had been assessed as the most effective scientific organization - public or private - in U.S. history, has still not recovered from the direct and indirect results of this event.

In his 1996 book Penny sketches out a series of cultures, none attractive, that permeate the U.S. Congress: fear, hypocrisy, spending, power, isolation from voters, etc. Names are named. Penny is nothing if not candid. The Publisher's Review calls Penny's book unbalanced. In a narrow sense this is certainly true, in that he offers no redeeming virtues, successes, etc. But in hindsight Penny's negative perceptions of Congress have been borne out in books like Mann and Ornstein's "Broken Branch", and the Gallup Poll of July 2010. Gallup found Congress's rating with the public dead last among 16 institutions and at the lowest level recorded since Gallup began the polls. Penny may be aroused and angry, but he is not a crank.

Where I think Penny is unconvincing is in prescriptions for improvement, which neither gained traction with the Democratic Party leadership, nor showed awareness of lawmaking systems that do exercise the kind of controls he sought over spending. These are found in parliamentary systems of leading European nations like Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Scandinavian nations, and Germany.

There are thousands of muckraking or partisan books that serve up dirt about politicians or organizations.Though I try as a policy researcher to maintain contact with all sides of political developments, I find that most authors of polemics so mix facts with assumptions, exaggeration or distortion that sorting out the valid information is not worth the trouble. In my judgment Penny's book rises above this level. His facts and realities are solid enough so that his book remains a useful source of realistic information on Congress.

Timothy Penny's book is now more than 10 years old but remains pertinent in today's political world.

Penny was a 12 year liberal democrat and gave up trying to reform congress and returned to private life and when you read this book you'll understand why he left Washington DC.

This book should be required reading before anyone enters a voting booth!

We hear a lot about 'earmarks' in today's news and this is what Penny wrote about 10 years ago and how politicians use the power of the federal dollar to create their own private fifedoms.

This isn't a democrat vs republican book - it damns them all!

"Common Cents" was written by Timothy Penny, a former Representative(D), from Minnesota.

Penny would probably style himself as a "progressive"-in favor of more of the current style of government, but cleaner, and without a big load of debt for the next generation.

Right away there's a contradiction. We can't have more of the same style of government without a major cataclysm down the road. Do the words "Ponzi Scheme" mean anything to you?

1 can see why Penny quit after 12 years. His dream of freeing future generations from our debt ($245 billion interest in 1995, almost equal to defense spending) was farther from realization than when he started.

Penny's solution demands the traditional Democrat fix of higher taxes. I say that even if you could make it work that way without a revolution, the result would be what people like Orwell, Huxley, and Ayn Rand have written about.

These days everyone instinctively knows that Congress sucks. Penny offers some in-depth illustrations: flawed budgeting, the helium reserve, the anthracite coal subsidy, the Lawrence Welk Museum, the imperial trappings of officeholders, the Super Collider, Space Station Freedom, and the billion dollar B2 bomber, and the committee system-too many committees, too much power given to committees, and rules that make chairmen too powerful.

Here's my personal favorite: enacting feel-good laws that have no positive impact, giving the appearance of making responsible decisions while in fact preserving the status quo.

I'm not convinced that Penny's "new rules, reforms, and bipartisan cooperation" are the answer. We'll have to move beyond that to the point where we quit looking to the government for solutions to everything.

I don't know what the heck a copy of the Declaration and Constitution were doing in this book. Penney writes,
"When you read these powerful words, you will sense some of the inspiration that motivated our Founding Fathers..." Feel their pain, maybe.

Too bad he didn't write, "When you read these powerful words, you will recoil in horror at how far we have strayed toward extinguishing the basic rights that our Founding Fathers delivered to us as the law of the land."