Townhall.com:
A Rising Conservative Star
Mar 23, 2006
by Tim Chapman
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/TimChapman/2006/03/23/190904.html
 
Last week, Senator Arlen Specter declared the death of a conservative Republican Party. After the Senate approved an amendment he offered to bust the budget by $7 billion for more domestic spending, Specter rejoiced. The Pennsylvania Republican bragged to reporters, “The Republican Party is now principally moderate, if not liberal!”
 
Specter’s comments may be truer than many Republicans would like to admit. But conservatives in the Senate have not disappeared. There are some left, like the junior Senator from Nevada, John Ensign.
 
Ensign has always been a conservative. Elected to the House of Representatives as part of the fabled and historic class of 1994, he went on to serve on the House Ways and Means Committee where he embraced the principled conservatism that swept Republicans into power that year. He ran against Senator Harry Reid in 1998 and lost by only 400 hundred votes – with voting irregularities noted across the state.
 
When he ran for Senate again in 2000 he was elected by running on a limited government conservative platform. That platform is one that he has remained true to throughout his entire first term in the Senate by casting vote after vote in favor of limited government.
 
Over the course of the last five years, Ensign has cast tough votes against the bloated farm bill, the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, and against the free-speech squelching McCain-Feingold campaign legislation.
 
Now, as he faces his re-election race this November against former President Jimmy Carter’s well-funded son, Jack, Ensign is doing something that many of his colleagues standing for re-election are not: he is embracing his deeply held beliefs in limited government.
 
Indeed, of late Ensign’s embrace of these principles has been inspiring. He is not only talking the talk, he is walking the walk.
 
On the issue of limited government, specifically how much tax dollars the federal government spends, Ensign has been a conservative champion unafraid to stand up for his beliefs even in the face of strong opposition from his own leadership.
 
In February, the Senate was considering legislation on asbestos reform. The legislation had the laudable intention of fixing a system that benefited trial lawyers over victims but it sought to achieve that by creating a federal trust fund to compensate victims. The trust fund had serious flaws which would have likely resulted in its default, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for a $500 billion bill.
 
The Senate leadership was heavily invested in this bill and lobbied all their members hard to ensure its passage. But Ensign recognized the faults within the bill and understood that it broke the Senate-passed budget. Much to the Senate leadership’s chagrin, Ensign took the Senate floor to raise a budget point of order – a parliamentary procedure designed to uphold the budget – against the bill. Ensign explained that he recognized the problem that needed to be addressed but “with that looming problem of the baby boomers coming up, the last thing we can afford to do is to enact a bill that potentially could have a major impact–literally, maybe with a number in the hundreds of billions of dollars–that could have a drain on our government.”
 
Ensign prevailed in his parliamentary maneuver and as a result helped defeat a bill that had the potential to cost taxpayers billions.
 
Less than a month later, the Senate was again busy working to spend more unbudgeted money.
 
Northeast Senators led by Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME) had proposed an amendment to spend an additional $1 billion in funding for the Low Income Heating and Assistance Program (LIHEAP). The proposal by Collins and Snowe was a budgetary gimmick that would take funds from Fiscal Year 2007 and shift them forward a year to 2006. It was offered with the intention of coming back around in 2007 and asking for the same funds again, thereby doubling their original request.
 
Recognizing the gimmick, Ensign joined fellow fiscal conservative Tom Coburn (R-OK) in working to defeat the politically popular election year ploy. The duo narrowly failed in their attempt to hold the line on the budget, but Ensign succeeded in exposing the frivolous spending requests.
 
On the floor of the Senate Ensign took aim at the amendment’s sponsors and pointed out that this was not time for political gimmicks that would spend more taxpayer dollars. “There are those of us who believe that deficits are real,” said Ensign. “They are absolutely real…But when it comes right down to whether you are willing to make tough choices instead of just increasing the spending and passing that debt on to the next generation, they aren’t willing to offer other spending cuts so that we are not increasing the deficit… It is time to start being fiscally responsible around here instead of just passing this debt on to the next generation.”
 
Finally, just last week, Ensign cast two principled spending related votes that flew directly in the face of his party leadership’s wishes. The Senate Budget Act – the one that Arlen Specter all but relegated as useless thanks to his big spending antics – barely passed the Senate by a 51-49 margin. But Ensign was the only Republican to oppose the bill because the amendments offered by fellow Republicans and adopted by the Senate pushed the bill up to $10 billion over the spending limit set by Congress. Ensign’s vote against the budget came hours after he had cast another big vote bucking party leadership – this one to raise the federal debt limit.
 
After his votes Ensign released a statement explaining his rationale, “Too many members of Congress are too involved in grabbing what they can for their states or districts without enough emphasis on overall fiscal restraint for the sake of the nation as a whole,” Ensign said.  “We need to usher in a new era of fiscal sanity. I am not willing to subject my children and grandchildren to the level of debt that Congress has created.”
 
Ensign’s leadership on issues of fiscal restraint comes at a time when the Senate is lacking in that department. Certainly, he has strong allies who lead on various issues. The six other members of the Senate Fiscal Watch team, a group which Ensign was instrumental in starting, are each stars in their own right. But Ensign appears to be growing into a familiar role in the Senate that has been absent since 2004.
 
In recent years, the role of fiscal watch dog – the senator who would come down to the Senate floor and fight increased spending no matter how complicated the issue was and no matter how politically unpopular it was – was played principally by two actors. First, Texas Senator Phil Gramm filled the role ably until he retired in 2002, then Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles (full disclosure: Nickles is my former boss) took up the torch and carried it until he retired in 2004. Now, many wonder if it is John Ensign who will fill that void in the Senate.
 
He has the conservative credentials to assume the mantle. And his heroic actions of late only buttress his claim.
 
Tim Chapman is the National Political Writer and Senior Congressional Liaison for Townhall.com.
 
He also hosts Townhall’s Capitol Report.
 
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