Bass Wants to Get In, Get Out

“I’m passionate about doing whatever I can over a relatively short period of time to change America, and then I want to go back to what I was doing before,” said Bass, a six-term former Republican congressman who has worked in the alternative energy industry since losing a 2006 re-election bid.

Bass told Monitor editors last week he spends his time thinking about his work as an adviser to Laidlaw Berlin BioPower, the company building a wood-burning plant in Berlin, and Berwind Private Equity, an investment company in Harvard, Mass. But he said the ever-growing national debt compelled him to attempt a return to public life. He said the government must reduce its borrowing for the United States to endure.

“If it doesn’t happen, agree with me or not, we won’t be here in 10 years,” Bass said. “We will either be living in a world of economic misery because of inflation or taxes will be on the order of 10 percent or 12 percent higher than they are today. Or we will have successfully brought this growth of government under control.”

Spending can only be slowed if the government makes changes in entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as discretionary spending, Bass said. He would like to see commissions of lawmakers and policy experts propose reforms to Social Security and Medicare for an up-or-down vote in Congress. Specifically, Bass would propose reforming the appeals process for Social Security disability insurance so administrative judges use the same criteria as caseworkers.

If Republicans take the House, Bass said their leadership should instruct the appropriations committee to devise a plan to return spending to the levels of January 2009. He said he could not identify the necessary cuts, but would follow the judgment of the committee.

“If they do that, and there are tough cuts associated with that, I will support that,” he said.

Bass said all spending should be considered for cuts to reduce the deficit. He said he would not support increasing taxes. He also repeated his support for establishing a committee dedicated to reducing federal spending. The committee would be able to make real cuts in spending because it would be allowed to bring reductions directly to the legislative floor, without the approval of other committees whose members wished to protect particular industries, he said.

Bass said he hasn’t read all of the “Pledge to America” that the Republican Party unveiled last month. He said he doesn’t agree with everything in the pledge, but he said he finds it difficult to disagree, either, because “every piece of it is subject to interpretation.”

But he said he does disagree with his party on its entire social agenda, as well as areas of environmental policy. Bass supports abortion rights and opposes amending the U.S. Constitution to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. He opposes drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and he said he believes Congress must address global climate change, though he dismissed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill as “a really sad story.”

Bass said he would vote to repeal the federal health care law. He opposes public exchanges, where consumers will be able to buy insurance, the requirement that all people have health insurance, and taxes on Medicare and private plans.

“Instead of being health care reform, it would end up sort of being expansion of the existing system,” Bass said. “Now you have to buy a health insurance policy as a right of being alive and a citizen of America.”

Instead, the government should encourage more competition in health care, he said. He said the government could prevent people from losing health insurance after hitting a company’s lifetime cap by implementing a national catastrophic health care policy. The government also should increase funding for community health care centers, and consumers should be allowed to purchase insurance from other states, he said.

Bass supports extending the full set of tax cuts signed into law by President George W. Bush, and he accused Democrats of rejecting House Republican Leader John Boehner’s statement last month that he would support extending tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000, even without an extension for high earners.

“They seemed to think that turning the tax relief bill into a political, class warfare, election-year issue is to their liking, and they had no interest in negotiating,” Bass said. “You only hold out the olive branch so far before you get shot.”

In Afghanistan, Bass said the United States needs to abandon its current mission and focus on developing intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks.

“I would have voted for the surge, because I don’t think we have much choice,” Bass said. “But I believe we cannot possibly expect to build a representative democracy in this country.”

Bass said he is proud of the federal money he brought home to New Hampshire through earmarks, but he would support a moratorium on the earmark process as “a symbol of our intent to get a handle on spending.”

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