Washington needs more people like Senator Warren Rudman (+video)
Sen. Rudman, who passed away last week, was perhaps best known for his legislation on deficit reduction. But he also fought tirelessly for campaign finance reform and citizen-funded elections. And he was willing to work across the aisle and stand up to his own Republican party to do it.
Cape Town, South Africa
Republicans weighing the direction their party should take after the election would do well to consider the example of one of their own: the late great Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, who passed away last week. I was privileged to work with him during the final, lesser-known chapter of his distinguished public service career, and to observe a different kind of statesmanship from what we're accustomed to seeing on Capitol Hill.
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Writing in this publication Rudman called himself an “old-fashioned sentimentalist” because he believes that the US Senate could still be a place where “sober-minded men and women with a hankering for public service came together to listen to different points of view and forge common solutions to the nation's tough problems.”
He saw a Congress “stuck in the mud of strident partisanship, excessive ideology, never-ending campaigns,” and he was deeply concerned that the “bridge-builders” in Washington had all but left the scene.
But Senator Warren Rudman did more than just bemoan the Washington state of affairs. He worked hard to set things right while serving on Capitol Hill, and continued his efforts long after he had returned to private life. While he is rightly remembered for his legislative accomplishments as senator, especially on deficit reduction, there is a little-known aspect of his post-Senate career that bears special note.
Taking a page from the maverick Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, Rudman devoted a portion of his final years to challenging the Washington power establishment – and especially his own party – to pass campaign finance reform. Writing in The Washington Post in 2010, he cited decades of Republican leadership on reform, beginning with Roosevelt's own claim in 1904 that “contributions by corporations…for any political purpose should be forbidden by law,” and called on his fellow Republicans to “return to our roots [and] enact the only real and lasting solution I know: citizen-funded elections.”
He was not afraid to chide his party for the appearance, and sometimes the fact, of siding with moneyed interests – a position he claimed the Supreme Court had already taken in Citizens United – instead of with the American people. Indeed, the former New Hampshire Attorney General challenged the very notion of corporate-funded political speech that Republicans had largely accepted: “Supreme Court opinion notwithstanding, corporations are not defined as people under the Constitution, and free speech can hardly be called free when only the rich are heard.”
To put his ideas in practice, he campaigned for Sen. John McCain for president in 2000 and 2008 (and other reform-minded Republicans along the way) and co-chaired the bipartisan group for which I worked, Americans for Campaign Reform, since 2005. That he was invited to join the organization by John Rauh, its Democratic founder whom he had helped defeat for Senate in 1992, did not detract a whit from his resolve.
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