Amid congressional rancor, New York lawmakers may stake middle ground

WASHINGTON — The news releases tell the story: Rep. William L. Owens, D-Plattsburgh, is on a “spending and borrowing spree” and likes high taxes. His congressional neighbor on the other side of Lewis County, Rep. Richard L. Hanna, R-Barneveld, wants to end Medicare and Social Security.

But in the parlance of human relations, those accusations may say more about who’s making them — the fundraising arms of House Democrats and Republicans — than about the lawmakers themselves.

The truth is that Mr. Hanna and Mr. Owens have similar world views and talk regularly about the matters on which they agree. And they could play a role in making Congress more professional and productive — if their parties don’t succeed in ending one or both men’s congressional careers next year.

Indeed, the sharp partisanship and nastiness that led to the debacle over raising the debt ceiling, and ultimately cost the United States its sterling credit rating with Standard & Poor’s, is starting to wear on some members of Congress, although some are not willing to talk about it in public. The question is whether they can stake a middle ground — the traditional position for upstate New York members of Congress — without alienating the party organizations they will need to raise campaign money and the political base that can help deliver voters.

For Democrats, relative newcomers such as Mr. Owens become easy targets because their party’s more liberal leadership sets an agenda based on defending social programs and allowing higher taxes. For Republicans, the right wing and tea party enthusiasts threaten to make the GOP look uncompromising and mean-spirited.

In fact, Mr. Owens and Mr. Hanna — despite what their party’s news releases say — do not fit snugly into those categories, although each has his contradictions. The same is true of other lawmakers, including Rep. Christopher Gibson, R-Kinderhook, a tea party-endorsed Republican who likes public radio, refuses to rule out tax increases in the future and votes against his party’s leadership on almost three out of 10 votes.

Mr. Owens has ideas for job creation, such as promoting “green” energy and expanding high-speed Internet in the north country. He does support a tax increase, but only on households making more than $500,000 a year, which includes very few people in his district. Mr. Hanna has endorsed big changes to Medicare, including some that would make it more costly for beneficiaries, but he has no problem fundamentally with the program and has said he thinks the GOP proposal moves toward controlling costs and preserving the program for the long run.

“I think that there’s tremendous weariness, but people don’t know what to do now,” Mr. Owens said in a telephone interview. Most of the collaboration now is on local projects, such as federal support for improvements at hospitals in the Adirondacks that he and Mr. Gibson both support, he said. But big-picture issues still defy bipartisanship, he said.

“Where conversations break down is when you approach the macro,” Mr. Owens said. “People walk away from the conversation and you get talking points.”

If lawmakers, in the midst of a summer recess, hear enough constituents demanding that Congress fix the problem, that might make ending the stalemate better than a big turnover in the next election, Mr. Owens said. “I think another wave election will just set off another countercyclical attack,” he said.

Although partisanship has been a fixture in American politics since the nation’s founding, the situation in Washington these days is different from even a decade ago. The Democrats had liberal leaders and the Republicans had conservatives then, but politicians in the center had the ability to broker compromises, helped by old-fashioned American horse-trading. Thus lawmakers such as former Rep. John M. McHugh, R-Pierrepont Manor, could thrive in Republican circles while defending workers’ rights to organize and protecting home heating aid and other social programs that few House Republicans advocate now.

“There’s a whole lot missing on the Hill today. I think the whole thing is toxic,” said former Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert, R-New Hartford, who retired from Congress in 2006. He represented the area that Mr. Hanna now does and built a career on environmentalism and working with members of both parties to find common ground. He said he always figured voters picked him because they thought he was marginally better than his opponents and could find common ground, but he doubts he could survive in today’s charged atmosphere.

The past few elections have swept away many moderates. In 2006, Democrats gained a majority in part by beating moderate Republicans. Some of those moderates who weren’t beaten retired ahead of the 2008 election. Then, in 2010, conservative Republicans swept out many of those centrist Democrats, thanks in part to tea party activists whose agenda doesn’t include much room for compromise.

The House has about half as many “true moderates” as 20 years ago, said David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, which analyzes House races. The number of swing districts has shrunk by half as well, he said, with Mr. Owens’s 23rd Congressional District considered one after years of Republican domination.

Part of the reason for fewer swing districts is that voters have sorted themselves into political camps, Mr. Wasserman said. But redistricting is in play, too, as the parties draw lines to favor their political bases, he said.

Former Rep. Michael A. Arcuri, D-Utica, who lost his seat to Mr. Hanna last year, blames redistricting for some of Congress’s dysfunction. If districts were not drawn so politically, he said, their populations would be more ideologically even and lawmakers would be forced to listen to a wider cross section of people.

Although Mr. Arcuri lost his bid for re-election to Mr. Hanna, he does not blame the makeup of his district.

“Mine was pretty evenly laid out,” Mr. Arcuri said. “I still as a Democrat had to listen to the Republicans.”

New York’s lines will be redrawn for next year’s election, with the state losing two seats, but Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s call for an independent process hasn’t advanced.

Mr. Arcuri also blames Washington’s nastiness on extremists from both ends of the political spectrum and on the “extreme media,” which, he said, “creates a big divide” in the political discourse.

Mr. Arcuri and Mr. Owens also suggested that many lawmakers aim solely to prevail, rather than to seek good policy that benefits the most people. After Barack Obama became president, Mr. Arcuri said, “the Republicans refused to do anything. They didn’t want us to have any success.”

Republicans such as Mr. Hanna are counting on the moderate Tuesday Group, a gaggle of 49 Republican lawmakers who have a policy lunch every week, to assert itself more in the months ahead as Congress looks for agreements on cuts to entitlement programs and defense and explores whether more revenue needs to be raised. Republicans remain unified against tax increases, but bipartisan panels have agreed that a mix of ambitious cuts and more revenue is the way out of the debt crisis, in the long run.

“We’ve seen the Tuesday Group carve a niche as the adults in the room,” Mr. Wasserman said. That was especially true, he said, in the debt debate, where the group’s members helped push a deal to raise the debt limit and give in to some Democratic demands — a step conservatives had sworn not to take.

And the Tuesday Group is putting money behind its effort. It recently created a political action committee that contributes to moderate Republicans, including $2,000 each this cycle to Mr. Hanna, Mr. Gibson and Rep. Tom Reed, R-Corning. It has given $86,000 to House GOP candidates this cycle, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.

On the other hand, Mr. Hanna, Mr. Gibson and Mr. Reed also belong to the conservative Republican Study Committee, which aims not just to cut, but to eliminate such programs as weatherization assistance for low-income homeowners. The group, opposed to raising the debt ceiling, caused a stir by working within the party to oppose a measure floated by House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, undermining the leader to the extent that some members have threatened to quit the RSC.

“Hearing a wide range of opinions equips me to be the best representative I can be for upstate New York,” Mr. Hanna said in a statement. “I also am friends with many Democrats and work with them on any number of issues. I try to take the best ideas — wherever they come from — and move forward.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gibson, Stephanie Valle, said he belongs to both groups because the meetings provide substantive information and opportunities to partner with other members.

Mr. Boehlert, who was a leader in the Tuesday Group, blames extremists on both ends of the political spectrum for refusing to meet the other party near the middle. But far-right Republicans outnumber far-left Democrats and are a bigger part of the problem right now, in his view.

“I think it’s going to catch up with them eventually,” Mr. Boehlert said. “Quite frankly, I’d show the door to a number of the freshman class.”