WASHINGTON — Among the 14 women senators, relatively little national attention had focused until last week on Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lambert Lincoln. She is not a former first lady or Cabinet member, she chairs no committee, nor is she the daughter of a political dynasty, nor a client of Karl Rove.
The senators who have those distinctions — Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Dole, Susan Collins, Mary Landrieu, Lisa Murkowski and Kay Bailey Hutchison — drew more publicity. Still in her first term, Lincoln is also outranked by all but a couple of her female colleagues.
Nonetheless, hers has been an interesting and unusual career. A former congressional staffer, now 42, she won the first of two House terms in 1992 by defeating her onetime Capitol Hill boss. But in 1996, learning that she was pregnant with twins, she retired from politics. The retirement was brief. In 1998, when Sen. Dale Bumpers stepped down, Lincoln defeated serious rivals to win the seat.
From the beginning of her service on the powerful Finance Committee, Lincoln has been a watchdog for families with children. When President Bush offered his first big tax-cut bill in 2001, she and fellow committee member Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine, formed the core of a bipartisan bloc whose members insisted that the $600 per child tax credit he proposed be made refundable to those whose paid little or no income tax — in effect, converting it into a cash payment.
This year, Bush proposed increasing that tax credit to a maximum of $1,000 (with a phase-out that eliminated the benefit for upper-income families). But his plan to accelerate the tax break would have left the maximum benefit at $600 for families with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625. Those workers have an estimated 11.9 million children.
The House passed the bill essentially as Bush wished, but in the closely divided Senate Finance Committee, Lincoln and Snowe once again applied their leverage and managed to get the credit made refundable up to $1,000. The full Senate approved.
That set the stage for a final House-Senate conference. These conference committees have changed from the not-so-distant days when senior members of both parties from both chambers, and their staffs, would actually sit and negotiate their differences. Nowadays, the real decision-making is done by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate and the Republican committee chairmen, along with the White House.
The tax conference was operating under heavy pressure. The president demanded that the final bill be passed before the Memorial Day recess. The Senate had set a $350 billion limit on its cost. Powerful interests were pushing to protect various big-buck benefits — a $20 billion bailout for the states, a much larger reduction in dividend and capital gains taxes. No one in the closed-door meetings was committed to protecting the $3.5 billion item that would have helped those 11.9 million youngsters.
The first time that Lincoln and Snowe knew that their fight had been lost was when staff members found a footnote in the conference committee report saying that the refundability provision had been dropped. It was almost another week before the first press reports of the action surfaced. By then, Bush had signed the bill into law.
Lincoln was furious. "Almost 60 percent of the families in my state make under $26,000," she told me. People say these families don’t pay income tax. But they pay a lot of other taxes — Social Security, sales tax, excise taxes. And those taxes just keep going up. And they buy the same things for their kids — soap powder, blue jeans — as I buy for the twins. And pay the same prices."
So she mobilized. With Snowe again her partner, she quickly rounded up more than half the Senate as co-sponsors of a bill to restore the full $1,000 refundability, paying the $3.5 billion cost by closing several Enron-style corporate loopholes.
But the Senate Republican leadership blocked an immediate vote on the bipartisan fix while it searched for an alternative — yet another, grandiose tax cut going far beyond the 11.9 million youngsters — that might appeal to House Republicans whose majority leader, Rep. Tom DeLay, had made clear his distaste for what Lincoln and Snowe were trying to do.
After three days of increasingly bad publicity, the GOP leadership caved, cutting its alternative from $100 billion to $10 billion and finding offsetting revenue-raisers to make it budget-neutral, while giving Lincoln and Snowe what they demanded.
In a rare victory for children and common sense, a bipartisan agreement was reached late Thursday to do what was right. Maybe the women should speak up more often.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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