In a rousing critique of deficit hawk and Social Security "reform" crusader Pete Peterson's Financial Fiscal Times hatchet job story on the AARP, CJR provides a key history lesson about Alan Simpson.
Here’s where the missing history and context come in, and why they should be useful for journalists who will cover this story for the rest of the year. In the mid-1990s, Simpson, as chair of the Senate Finance Committee’s subcommittee on Social Security and family policy, picked up the attacks made on the organization by conservative think tanks worried that AARP could block their efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security....
Simpson, who disagreed with the AARP’s positions on Medicare and Social Security, believed the group was obstructing budget cuts that Republicans needed to make in order to offset a planned round tax cuts. Simpson held hearings on the AARP’s finances. "I’m a chairman. I can have hearings," he boasted to reporters in the Capitol corridor, dancing a little jig and pumping his arms in the air. A few days before he announced the hearings, Simpson said "People ought to know where their money comes from and what it’s used for." As I reported at the time, Simpson never produced a smoking gun, but he created plenty of smoke, focusing on irrelevancies like the size of AARP’s new building and its executives’ salaries.
But the AARP recognized what the hearings were really about. At a meeting with AARP’s board and staff, Simpson told them "I want you to know that the intensity of my investigation will be directly related to the intensity of your fight on Medicare." In an interview then, AARP’s chief lobbyist John Rother told me: "Many people on the right wing realized that AARP was the force to contend with. They realized they wouldn’t get anywhere unless they dealt with us as an institution." [emphasis mine]
That sounds like extortion. Because the AARP was lobbying on behalf of their members, and effectively, Simpson threatened to ratchet up his investigations if they continued to fight for their members. Nice. And now, once again, Simpson has the ability to try to crush his old nemesis and the "greedy geezers" and "lesser people" they represent and he so greatly disdains.
You have to wonder, what was Obama thinking in naming this guy to the commission. He should never have been selected to participate on the commission and certainly not been named a co-chair, however much the President wanted to reach out to Republicans. Simpson's agenda seems to be almost wholly motivated by an irrational antipathy to the AARP. Not only should journalists covering this story keep that in mind when they write about it, but policy-makers--members of Congress and the President--need to remember it when the recommendations of the commission are made.
The best thing about Alan Simpson continuing on the catfood commission is that his seat there just keeps on discrediting its work.