The seniors’ club

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Jul 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

America’s longest-serving Republican senator has been indicted

Illustration by KALTHOMAS JEFFERSON once asked George Washington why he had agreed to a two-house Congress. Washington, noting that Jefferson had poured his tea into his saucer in order to cool it, said that he had answered his own question. “We pour House legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.” But the father of the nation never imagined that the inhabitants of his cooling chamber might try to pocket the silverware and run off with the teapot.

On July 29th Ted Stevens, the senior senator for Alaska and the longest-serving Republican in the upper house, was indicted on seven counts by the Justice Department. The department accuses Mr Stevens of falsely reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars of services he received from an oil company that had helped to renovate his home. He denies all the charges.

The “services” seem paltry given the billions of dollars at stake in oil deals. His house is hardly a mansion: one newspaper talks of “peeling paint and an overgrown backyard”. Mr Stevens’s loot included some furniture and a stove. The interesting thing about the Stevens case is not what it tells us about suspected corruption but about everyday political life in Mr Stevens’s intersecting worlds, Alaska, the Senate and the Republican Party.

Mr Stevens has used his decades in the Senate—he first arrived there in 1968—to pour billions of dollars into his home state: so much money that Alaskans refer to him as “Uncle Ted”, talk of “Stevens money” and joke about changing the name of the currency to “the Ted”. The state is littered with tributes to his powers, such as the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. There is even a federal penitentiary named after him.

Alaska likes to think of itself as the “last frontier”—a place where rugged entrepreneurs carve a living out of an unforgiving landscape. But in fact it is a quasi-welfare state. Alaska has been number one in per capita federal spending for more than 16 years, with $13,800 being spent on each Alaskan in 2006. Much of the state’s economy—particularly oil and fishing—is based on making money out of government-controlled land and sea. Each of its 680,000 inhabitants gets an annual payout from the state’s oil fund of $1,654.

Mr Stevens puts up a vigorous defence of his activities. Alaska is a unique state with unique needs, he argues: a geographically isolated and sparsely populated giant of a place that was only admitted to the Union in 1959, it needs government money in order to pump-prime the private economy. But Mr Stevens’s model of development had created an inbred class of politicians and businessmen who spend their lives doing favours for each other.

Mr Stevens was first appointed to his Senate seat by the then-governor, Walter Hickel. The junior senator, Lisa Murkowski, was appointed by her father, Frank Murkowski, when he left the Senate to become governor. (She has since been re-elected.) These hereditary politicians—and dozens of smaller players in the state capital, Juneau—are all hand in glove with the state’s big industries, particularly oil. Some local politicians have even taken to wearing baseball caps embroidered with the letters CBC—for “Corrupt Bastards Club”. The scandal that is consuming Mr Stevens is also consuming lots of local politicians, including his son.

The Stevens affair poses some awkward questions about the Senate. Its seniority system gives extraordinary power to people who can get in early—perhaps because they have a family name like Kennedy or a powerful patron—and then stay around for as long as possible. This gives a disproportionate amount of power to people from small states with non-competitive political systems (Mr Stevens was chairman of the Senate’s most powerful arm, the cash-dispensing Appropriations Committee, for seven years.) It also encourages states to keep voting for incumbents and incumbents to hang on until they drop. The current Senate contains 26 people who are 70 or over.

It also poses yet more problems for the Republican Party in an election year. Mr Stevens’s indictment gives the Democrats a chance to resurrect the corruption charges they used so effectively in 2006. It also gives them a chance to raise the question of hypocrisy. The Republicans have always claimed to be the party of limited government and fiscal restraint. But when it comes to their own constituents they are all for handing out free money.

Baked Alaskan
Is Mr Stevens’s disgrace proof that people have had enough of all this? There are some encouraging signs. Alaskans once named Mr Stevens “Alaskan of the century”. Now they seem ashamed of what he stands for. Even before this week, he was stuck in a close re-election race against his Democratic rival, Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, and also facing a primary challenge from a disgruntled Republican. Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, has made her name campaigning against the state’s corruption and nepotism.

Mr Stevens has also become a national symbol of out-of-control spending. His voluble support for a $400m “bridge to nowhere”—in fact, to a sparsely populated island where his friends owned land—helped to create a huge backlash against “earmarks”, particularly among fiscal conservatives. Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, tried to divert the largesse from Alaska to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. John McCain is a long-standing campaigner against pork-barrel spending.

Mr Stevens managed to roll over the objections to his bridge in the Senate. “I will put the Senate on notice—and I don’t kid people—if the Senate decides to discriminate against our state, to take money from our state, I’ll resign from this body. This is not the Senate I came to.” It would be nice to think that Mr Stevens is right for once about his last point. But the Senate is pretty hard to shame. Mr Stevens’s successor as chairman of the Appropriations Committee is Robert Byrd, a 90-year-old Democrat from the pork-gobbling state of West Virginia.