When Tom Harkin became chairman of the powerful Senate Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in 2009, he declared
that he would “carry on the legacy of Sen. Ted Kennedy,” who
managed to wheel and deal his liberal politics into federal
legislation during his two-decade sway over the committee as
chairman and ranking minority member. But these days, the Iowa
Democrat and former presidential aspirant can’t carry his own
torch, much less that of his more-successful predecessor.
Harkin’s obsessive joint effort with the Obama
administration to crack down on for-profit colleges, the
fastest-growing and most-innovative sector of the nation’s higher
education system, has descended into a quagmire. Even as Harkin
launched into his latest jeremiad against for-profits on the Senate
floor last Thursday, he and his staff found themselves under the
microscope after an e-mail obtained by the
Daily Caller asserted that they placed pressure on the
Government Accountability Office — the nonpartisan agency charged
with objectively investigating government spending — to churn out
an error-filled report released last August that purportedly showed
that 15 for-profit colleges “made deceptive or otherwise
questionable statements” and engaged in “fraudulent practices” such
as falsifying data on student loan applications. The GAO sheepishly
(and quietly) revised the report three months later after the
errors were revealed. (Mark Hyman
detailed the problems with the report earlier last
January.)
His push for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act,
whose infamous “card check” provision banning secret votes on
forming and disbanding unions is championed by labor activists
within Democratic Party ranks, has fallen by the wayside amid
fierce opposition from Republicans and centrist Democrats. The
DREAM Act, another bill championed by Harkin that would allow
undocumented immigrant children (most of whom were brought over by
their parents) to stay in America for six more years while
completing college (and obtain student aid in the process), is
stuck in legislative limbo thanks to the much-wider debate over
immigration reform. While Harkin plans to bring the legislation up
for committee hearings this year, the chances of it being passed
are slim to none.
Harkin can’t even get any traction on the one piece of
legislation that should be easy for him to gain Senate and House
passage: The reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, the
centerpiece of federal education policy — and the nation’s school
reform effort — that is the hallmark and best part of Ted
Kennedy’s otherwise overly-liberal political career (and that of
his more-conservative counterparts at the time of its passage,
now-Speaker John Boehner and then-President George W. Bush). While
Harkin has promised to have a new version of the bill ready for
Senate consideration by next month, he has made little headway
toward that goal. And given the divide between centrist and liberal
Democrat reformers and the teachers unions who have long opposed
the law’s prescription of standardized tests and holding schools
accountable for improving student performance, it may never
happen.
It isn’t as if Harkin hasn’t been successful in getting
any legislation passed during his four-decade political career.
After all, he introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act, whose
rules requiring wheelchair-accessible entrances have been the
scourge of every conservative, landlord and architect. But its
passage in 1990 had less to do with Harkin than with Kennedy, who
could count on full Democrat control of Congress and the help of
longtime friend, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch.
For most of his career, Harkin has been better-known for
his faux populism, grandstanding for left-leaning causes, and
ensuring that agri-giants such as DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred division
continues to collect generous subsidies, than for any substantial
legislation. The son of a coal miner who spent five years ferrying
damaged aircraft as a naval pilot before joining the staff of
longtime Iowa congressman Neil Smith in 1969, Harkin first gained
fame in 1970 when photos he took of the notorious Con Son Island
prison in helped swing public opinion against the Vietnam War.
After knocking off Roger Jepson to win his current Senate seat,
Harkin has spent the next three decades attempting an unsuccessful
run for the Democratic presidential nomination, voting to censure
George W. Bush over the Iraq invasion, hustling for ethanol
subsidies, and championing efforts to bring back the Fairness
Doctrine (to better shut down those pesky conservatives and
libertarians he with whom he constantly spars).
Harkin also became one of the first congressional
politicians to get called on the carpet for exaggerating his
military service record. After the late David Broder recounted
Harkin’s declaration that he flew reconnaissance missions during
the Vietnam War in his 1981 book, Changing of the Guard,
Harkin was confronted by Sen. Barry Goldwater and the Wall
Street Journal. Harkin later admitted that he never saw
combat. The revelations would dog his first senatorial campaign and
contributed to the failure of his presidential run.
Although Harkin helped carve up federal higher education
spending and criticized for-profits as a member of the Senate
Appropriations Committee, he never showed much interest in
education. He also had a powerful spot chairing the Senate’s
agriculture committee that has pleased his fellow Iowans. So Harkin
wasn’t exactly expected to take over the Senate’s education and
labor panel in 2009 after Kennedy died from his long battle with
brain cancer. But another famed Senate dealmaker expected to take
over the spot, Christopher Dodd, stepped aside (and ended his
re-election campaign) after fallout from the financial industry
bailout (and the passage of Dodd-Frank). Harkin took the spot and
got to work.
Failure for Harkin came early — and often. His push to
ensure the public option in the Affordable Care Act couldn’t
overcome centrist Democrat opposition. The Employee Free Choice
Act, one of the last bills co-sponsored by Kennedy, didn’t even see
the light of day; neither he nor Reid could muster enough votes to
overcome Republican threats of a filibuster. So Harkin moved on to
an issue of greater personal interest: Cracking down on for-profit
colleges, the former backwaters of higher education that now
educate 12 percent of the nation’s undergrads. As the Obama
administration moved to restrict the sector’s federal student
aid-driven revenue growth by enacting the Gainful Employment rule,
Harkin sought to further embarrass the sector with a series of
hearings on the low quality of for-profit courses and the fact that
for-profit students account for 44 percent of all student loan
defaults.
But in the process, Harkin and Obama ran afoul of
activists within their Democrat base — including members of the
Congressional Black Caucus, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the National
Urban League — which have long supported the sector. Revelations
that FrontPoint Partners money manager Steve Eisman (who was
shorting the stocks of for-profit college and had testified before
Harkin in August) met with U.S. Department of Education officials
three months before the agency released the new rule, along with
news about the errors in the GAO report, also proved embarrassing.
These problems, along with Republican control of the House, all but
ensure that Harkin’s push for further crackdowns will fail. (The
author will profile the politics driving the crackdown on
for-profits next month in Organization Trends, a monthly
newsletter published by the Capital Research
Center).
Meanwhile Harkin has given little attention to the
protracted debate over reauthorizing No Child, the one legislation
that, in theory, could be passed with bipartisan support. President
Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan — who
want to put their stamp on federal education policy and advance
their own reforms — are particularly interested in getting a new
version of the law passed this year. But as with so much Harkin has
touched, the effort has turned to mud. At least it’s largely not
his fault. Democrats are divided as efforts by the NEA, the AFT,
and other defenders of traditional public education want to weaken
the law’s accountability provisions, which have helped expose the
abysmal quality of America’s woeful traditional public schools (and
have helped lead to the array of
reforms and overhaul efforts Obama,
big-city mayors, and governors such as Indiana’s Mitch Daniels and
Wisconsin’s
Scott Walker have put into place over the past two years).
Obama and Duncan are willing to go along with some of this. But
the centrist and liberal Democrat reformers who, along with
conservative counterparts, are in control of federal education
policy oppose any retrenchment.
Harkin should be able to count on his Republican
counterpart in the House, John
Kline, who shares common cause with the NEA and AFT on gutting
No Child, to get things moving. No dice. Kline himself faces
problems from freshmen Republicans on the education committee more
concerned with ending ObamaCare than with education policy, and
battles with Republican
governors who have successfully leveraged No Child to enact
their own school choice and reform efforts. Kline also has an
obstacle in the form of House Speaker Boehner, who worked with
Kennedy to craft No Child when he was Education committee chairman;
movement conservatives interested in keeping Democrats from scoring
a legislative victory, fiscal conservatives who just want to cut
education spending, and conservative backers of No Child such as
former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Sandy
Kress (who masterminded the law) also stand in the way.
By the time the next Congress is seated, Harkin will have
little to add to his well-crafted biography. That may not be good
for Harkin or for the left-leaners who want him to be the next
Teddy Kennedy. But it will be for taxpayers and
children.
