[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Page 16328]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      REMEMBERING WARREN B. RUDMAN

  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I want to join my colleagues in extending 
condolences to the family of Senator Warren Rudman, and add my voice to 
those saluting a distinguished, effective and principled member of this 
body.
  It has been hard in the last few months, for those of us who knew and 
served with him, not to think of Warren Rudman. More than 2 decades 
ago, our circumstances were strikingly similar to the situation in 
which we find ourselves today. Rising Federal budget deficits were the 
cause of alarm. Almost everyone agreed that we needed to bring them 
down. The difficulty was how. Meeting the widely differing priorities 
among members of Congress--and the American people we represented--
seemed impossible.
  Senator Rudman, along with Senator Ernest Hollings and Senator Phil 
Gramm, crafted a solution. It is fair to say no one liked it very much. 
None of us here at the time, including me, voted for it with great 
enthusiasm. That was its genius. By establishing a mechanism for 
automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that would take place in the 
absence of a more tailored program of deficit reduction, they sought to 
force all of us to make the difficult choices required to reduce the 
deficit.
  The arrangement Senators Rudman, Gramm and Hollings concocted was 
disagreeable to everybody, and so we looked for ways to avoid it. I 
voted for the 1985 agreement in part because I believed it would help 
force elected officials to get serious about the fact that revenue was 
an important part of the deficit-reduction formula. It was true then, 
it was true now, and Warren Rudman helped clarify that important fact. 
We borrowed from Warren Rudman's playbook with the sequestration 
provisions which are now the subject of so much debate and concern 
here. I dislike the blind, Draconian cuts of sequestration today as 
much as I disliked them in the 1980s. Now, as then, I am hopeful that 
members of good will can reach across the aisle to reach compromise 
solutions--solutions that we may dislike in part, in order to avoid 
even worse outcomes. If we do so, it will be because of the Sword of 
Damocles called sequestration that hangs over our heads. I know that is 
what Senator Rudman would hope for, and be working hard for, if he were 
still serving here.
  We should reflect on Senator Rudman's career today for another 
reason. When he decided not to stand for re-election in 1992, he did 
so, in the words of the New York Times, because ``the Federal 
Government was not functioning and that it was impossible to get 
anything done in a Senate rife with posturing and partisanship.''
  Maybe the lesson is that the present always looks more partisan and 
polarized than the past. I hope all of us can reflect on Senator 
Rudman's efforts to achieve practical solutions to difficult problems, 
his willingness to compromise, and his integrity, and keep those 
qualities in mind as we struggle with the many and complex problems we 
face today.
  Barbara and I were terribly saddened to learn of Warren Rudman's 
passing. Our thoughts are with his family and the many close friends 
who mourn him.

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