By Christopher Dunagan- Kitsap Sun
- Posted November 6, 2010 at 6:06 p.m.
But the Belfair Democrat has played the minority role before — such as before the Democrats gained a House majority in 2006. He hopes his influence won’t dry up completely.
The Republican takeover of the House next year will force Dicks to give up his chairmanship of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. It will also prevent him from vying for chairmanship of the powerful Appropriations Committee, a post he was in line for following the retirement of Wisconsin Rep. David Obey.
“Chuck Knox (former Seahawks coach) said it pretty well,” Dicks noted as he prepared to board a plane back to the nation’s capitol. “You have to play the hand you are dealt.”
When Dicks was the ranking minority member of the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee before 2006, he raised concerns about the condition of national parks across the United States. The Republican chairman and other committee members agreed to boost the budget for the National Park Service. That started a trend, and Dicks pushed for increasing the budget even more when he became chairman of the committee.
Fortunately, Dicks said, bipartisanship has been the name of the game on the Defense and Interior appropriations subcommittees since he came into Congress in 1976.
“When you’re the chairman, you make the ultimate decisions,” Dicks said. “When you’re the ranking member, you try to convince the chairman to go along with your perspective.”
In many cases, committee chairmen are trying to reach a consensus among all committee members, he said. The notion of trading votes is less common than many people think.
“Sometimes a chairman will want you to go along with something,” he said, “but it’s mostly a matter of persuasion. I have always felt that if you treat people nicely when you are in power, they will remember that when they are in power.”
Dicks said he can’t predict how the Republican takeover of the House will change the atmosphere this time around.
“We’re just going to have to wait until they submit their budget,” he said, “and the president will have a budget. I hope we can pass our bills. I hope we can find the appropriate balance. But it is going to be messy.”
Dicks said he was “disheartened” that so many people failed to recognize how many jobs were created by the federal stimulus package and how that program kept the economy from sinking.
“The message on the Republican side was very effective,” Dicks said, “but it is ridiculous to stay the stimulus didn’t work. Now the other side is going to have to say what they are going to do to create jobs.”
The nation’s roads, bridges and tunnels are falling apart, Dicks said, and Congress can help local communities rebuild them. Sewer systems are in poor shape in many places, and improvements would be a good investment — for Puget Sound and other places in the country.
The Puget Sound Partnership has identified 614 projects in the Puget Sound region funded by $460 million in stimulus dollars. Those projects have created more than 15,000 jobs while helping address the problems of Puget Sound, Dicks said.
But House Republicans are likely to promote a very different approach to stimulating the economy.
John Boehner, R-Ohio, the next speaker of the House, has said his goal is to reduce federal spending and encourage job creation by bringing more certainty to the business community.
U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, next in line to become chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, is calling for budget reductions.
“We all ought to be concerned about the debt we are incurring that we are putting on our children,” he said in a hearing last summer. “We can point fingers at Republicans, at Democrats, it doesn’t matter, but everyone needs to be concerned about the debt we are piling on our children’s future, on our grandchildren’s future, and on our great-grandchildren’s future.”
Dicks said he will work with Republicans, but he has yet to see a clear strategy to aid the economy.
“All they can talk about is tax cuts. Well, we have done tax cuts, so there’s a big question mark out there,” he said, explaining that a third of the stimulus funds were used to reduce taxes on middle-income people.
Dicks remains proud of the ecosystem-restoration projects he helped bring to Washington state, including removal of the Elwha dams, restoration of the Nisqually and Skokomish estuaries, and setting Puget Sound on par with Chesapeake Bay in terms of federal spending. He also secured funding to deal with the low-oxygen problems of Hood Canal.
With respect to military spending, Dicks was a key player in the construction of the submarine base at Bangor, conversion of Trident submarines and sustaining workloads at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
This year, both Democrats and Republicans worked together to cut $7 billion from the Department of Defense budget. That resulted largely from a collaboration between Dicks and U.S. Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., a 30-year member of the House who will slide into the chairmanship of Defense Appropriations next year.
“It’s going to be more difficult, because they (Republicans) want to make major cuts in discretionary spending,” Dicks said, referring to programs approved for each budget. “Those are the programs that create a lot of jobs.”
Asked if the shift in power makes him think about retirement, Dicks said everyone who gets older must think of such things.
“We’ll have to see how things go,” said Dicks, whose 70th birthday is next month. “If and when I make a decision, it will be in a timely way so that everyone who wants to run can run. That may be out in the future or whenever. When a person makes up their mind (to retire), they usually give at least a year’s notice.”
Dicks said he’s ready to face the “important work” of the coming congressional session.
“You work as hard as you can,” said Dicks. “Democrats are still in control of the White House and the Senate, so I have some people I can talk to.”
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