[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 36 (Tuesday, March 28, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E434-E435]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        HONORING THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF REP. SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, March 28, 2006

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the contributions of 
my friend and colleague, Congressman Sherwood (Sherry) Boehlert. After 
24 years in Congress, Congressman Boehlert who has served this House 
with dignity and a great deal of integrity has decided that ``it's 
time.''
  First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, 
Congressman Boehlert represents the 24th District of New York, and he 
does so with steadfast leadership, commitment, and simply put, a love 
for the job.
  As he rose in seniority and became chairman of the House Science 
Committee in 2001, Boehlert worked to further economic development for 
his district and the State of New York, as well as to push for an 
environmental agenda that would benefit not only his constituents, but 
the nation as a whole.
  While we are losing one of the most dynamic and passionate Members of 
this great body, the good people of central New York, are losing a man 
who fought and worked tirelessly on their behalf. From his efforts to 
secure money for transportation projects to supporting the agenda of 
the National Science Foundation, Sherry Boehlert was going to do what 
it took and what was best for those who elected him into office.
  It has been a privilege to serve with my friend in the House and to 
work side by side with him on matters concerning the New York State 
Congressional Delegation.
  Mr. Speaker, I submit to the Congressional Record, an article by E.J. 
Dionne, Jr. which speaks to the retirement of our much-respected and 
admired Member, Sherry Boehlert.

               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 21, 2006]

                       The GOP's Shrinking Middle

                         (By E. J. Dionne Jr.)

       Members of Congress retire all the time, but some 
     retirements are leading indicators of the direction of our 
     politics. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert's announcement last week to 
     call it quits matters, and in a depressing way.
       The affable 69-year-old New York Republican is one of the 
     last of a breed: a liberal Republican, though he calls 
     himself a ``moderate'' and has the record to prove it. 
     Boehlert's departure does not leave the House bereft of 
     liberal Republicans--Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa is more liberal 
     than Boehlert. But Leach, alas, is an outlier. The spotted 
     owl is in good shape compared with liberal Republicans.

[[Page E435]]

       Boehlert chose to retire in the year when National Journal, 
     the political world's answer to Sports Illustrated, featured 
     him as the ultimate ``Down the Middle'' guy. In its Feb. 25 
     issue, the magazine published its annual ratings, which 
     showed that Boehlert's votes were more liberal than those of 
     52.2 percent of House members and more conservative than 47.8 
     percent. Boehlert's district includes the Baseball Hall of 
     Fame in Cooperstown, and it's hard to move the ball more to 
     the middle of the plate than he does.
       It's been downhill for his brand of Republicanism from the 
     moment he set foot in Washington as a congressional staffer 
     in 1964. That's the year Barry Goldwater won the Republican 
     presidential nomination and the great flight of the 
     Republican liberals began.
       After Goldwater's landslide defeat, two Republican 
     progressives who later became conservatives, George Gilder 
     and Bruce Chapman, wrote a brilliant book called ``The Party 
     That Lost Its Head,'' detailing how and why the party's 
     liberal wing responded so anemically to the conservative 
     challenge. But it was too late. The party of Abraham Lincoln 
     and Theodore Roosevelt was destined to become an annex of the 
     conservative movement.
       Boehlert has always been unabashed in embracing his liberal 
     roots. Over breakfast on a sunny summer morning in 
     Cooperstown five years ago, Boehlert embraced two of the most 
     progressive politicians of his lifetime. ``People say to me: 
     `Why are you the kind of Republican you are?' Because in my 
     formative political years, when I was coming up in New York, 
     my governor was Nelson A. Rockefeller and my senator was 
     Jacob K. Javits.''
       Why does the decline and fall of liberal Republicanism 
     matter? After all, rationalizing the political system into a 
     more conservative GOP and a more-or-less liberal Democratic 
     Party makes the alternatives clearer to voters, who are 
     offered, in Goldwater's famous phrase, ``a choice, not an 
     echo.''
       But it turns out that a Republican Party dominated by 
     conservatives is no more coherent than the party that left 
     room for progressives. The huge budget deficit is 
     conservatism's Waterloo, testimony to its political failure. 
     The conservatives love to cut taxes but can't square their 
     lust for tax reduction with plausible spending cuts. Oh, yes, 
     a group of House conservatives has a paper plan involving 
     deep program cuts, but other conservatives know that these 
     cuts will not pass, and shouldn't.
       Paradoxically, because the liberal Republicans didn't 
     pretend to hate government, they were better at fiscal 
     responsibility. They were willing to match their desired 
     spending levels with the taxes to pay for them. It didn't 
     make for exciting, to-the-barricades politics. It merely 
     produced good government.
       Boehlert, being an optimist by nature, was always ready to 
     declare that the ``moderates' moment'' had finally arrived. 
     Last November, after I had written a column taking some 
     moderate Republicans to task for backing the outrageous 
     budget bill that passed under the cover of darkness at 1:30 
     a.m., there was Boehlert on the phone insisting that he and 
     fellow moderate Mike Castle (R-Del.) had wrung some important 
     concessions out of the House leadership. Maybe so, I replied, 
     but I had a higher opinion of moderate Republicans and 
     expected more of them than that lousy budget bill.
       The problem may be that Boehlert and Castle did get as much 
     as they could, given the numerical weakness of their variety 
     of Republicanism, but that's not good enough. I suspect 
     Boehlert knows this. Absent a robust progressive wing, 
     congressional Republicans will continue to produce fiscally 
     incoherent government. Democrats now have the task of 
     representing their own brand of politics, and that of 
     progressive Republicans, too.
       I'll miss Boehlert and his optimistic moderation. Our 
     politics worked better when a sufficiently large band of 
     Republican moderates and liberals could take the edge off 
     polarization and orient government toward problem-solving. 
     But the liberal Republicans are gone. We have to deal with 
     the GOP we have, not the GOP we wish still existed.

                          ____________________