Benevolence amid an orgy
Consider this: The bailout for thousands of millionaires on Wall Street took a couple of weeks to get through Congress; the bailout for millions of Americans who are mentally ill took 12 years.
The halls of Congress last week resembled one of those old supermarket contests. The contestant would be given a minute to fill a shopping cart, and naturally most went right to the meat counter. That's what happened Friday, except most of our elected representatives couldn't find their way past the pork section.
After being treated to a week of the-sky-is-falling hysterics by all those big stockholders on the financial cable shows - no conflict there! - the passage of the $700 billion bailout came down not to what would best serve the American people but what would best serve the pet projects of politicians.
No doubt the bailout beneficiaries - including those who produce wooden arrows and rum - are sleeping better. But there was one thing tacked on the bailout package that was not about someone's bottom line. There was, amid all this cynical politicking, an example of politics working for the better of people because of better people.
Tacked onto the bailout was legislation requiring insurance firms to treat those who suffer from mental illness no differently from those with physical ailments. If the bailout of financial institutions was an example of special interests trumping politics, then the passage of the mental health parity act is a case of politics trumping special interests.
Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico, has eight kids, and one of them, Clare, was diagnosed with schizophrenia more than 20 years ago. Suddenly, Domenici and his wife, Nancy, were talking not to the Georgetown set but to parents just like them. What they found appalled them. Families with mentally ill kids were being financially ruined because insurance companies wouldn't pay. The Domenicis had money, but even they were hit hard.
Domenici looked at the Constitution and figured if it's wrong to discriminate against people because of their skin color or where they pray it had to be wrong to discriminate against them because of their brain chemistry. Paul Wellstone, the liberal senator from Minnesota, couldn't have been more politically different from Domenici. But the pair teamed up on a mental health parity bill in 1996, and while it got through the Senate, it died in the House because congressmen who took contributions from insurance companies were able to kill it.
In 2002, they reintroduced the bill and President Bush endorsed it. But later that year, Wellstone was killed in a plane crash. Domenici asked Ted Kennedy to become the bill's cosponsor. Kennedy had long been a champion of the mentally ill, and his son Patrick, a Rhode Island Democrat, had become, with Representative Jim Ramstad, a Minnesota Republican, a leading House proponent of parity. After Patrick Kennedy had his much publicized bizarre drive around the Capitol and disclosed he was bipolar, Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic, stood by him.
You might see a pattern here. These politicians are ideological opposites. But they do not subscribe to the partisan-at-all-cost politics polarizing the country.
There is a poignant coda to all this. Last year, Pete Domenici was diagnosed with a progressive form of brain disease. He is retiring from the Senate. Ted Kennedy found out four months ago he has brain cancer. So while Congress feasted on pork, two men whose brains are failing them proved they are the wisest and most compassionate among us.
On Friday afternoon, after Bush signed parity into law, Ted Kennedy picked up the phone at the family compound in Hyannis Port and called his old friend Pete Domenici in Washington. They didn't talk a long time, because they didn't have to. But Ted Kennedy told Pete Domenici that for all their years in the Senate together, they probably had never done anything more important.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com 