WASHINGTON — Women have reached unparalleled numbers and levels of power in the U.S. Senate this year, exemplified by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a low-key former educator who is the first woman to take over the helm of the Senate Budget Committee.
In her first three months in that job, Murray led the effort to pass the first Senate budget in nearly four years, uniting Democrats behind a fiscal road map that serves as the party’s agenda for the fiscal wars. Those battles will resume this year when Washington will again battle over spending cuts, federal funding levels and raising the nation’s borrowing limit.
She did it without appearing on any Sunday news programs, underscoring Murray’s willingness to defer the media spotlight to colleagues such as Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who have appeared a dozen times each on Sunday shows this year.
“My job is two things: to help drive a national policy that sets the agenda for the kind of country that I think is important for people and to try and help them understand how it impacts their lives,” Murray told USA TODAY.
Former Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Murray’s predecessor, took a data-driven approach to the federal budget with a more genteel tone toward Republicans, but Murray has proved more eager to engage in the political arena.
As a two-time former chairwoman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign operation, she most recently served in 2012 where she led the party to a two-seat gain for a 55-seat majority and a freshman class that includes four new female Democratic senators. Overall, the Senate includes a historic 20 women, including eight committee chairwomen.
Her distaste for the Tea Party ethos and the anti-tax advocacy of conservatives such as Grover Norquist is frequently invoked when Murray assesses why Washington has repeatedly failed to find fiscal compromise.
She blames both for the failure of the 2011 “super committee,” which she co-chaired. The group was unable to meet its mandate of cutting a deal for $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.
“One man’s name entered the negotiations on the very first day we had a discussion and that man’s name stayed until the very end, and that was Grover Norquist, and I had literally Republicans come and say to me, ‘I want to do this, I can’t, Grover Norquist controls the Republican Party,'” Murray said.
Norquist shrugs at the criticism. “She’s all politics,” he said, predicting that Murray will fail at advancing her budget objectives in the upcoming legislative fights.
Norquist says the Republican Party is committed to keeping spending at the levels imposed this year by across-the-board cuts called “sequestration.”
“There’s nothing you can do to make Republicans replace some of those savings with a tax increase that the president wants,” Norquist said. “And you can’t threaten them by saying the blame will be placed on you because (President Obama) has done that a bunch of times, and it didn’t work.”
Murray’s Senate-passed budget doesn’t have the force of law — and partisan divisions mean there is little chance of negotiating a compromise with the House-passed GOP’s budget — but it gave Democrats a counterpunch after years of bruising GOP attacks for Democrats’ budget failures.
“It’s given all of us the ability to go home and say, ‘This is what we believe in as Democrats,'” Murray said. House Republicans have passed a budget every year since their 2010 takeover of the U.S. House.
Murray’s budget put all but four Senate Democrats on record in support of eliminating the sequester with a mix of spending cuts and nearly $1 trillion in new tax revenue while investing $100 billion in spending for new roads and bridges, among other projects.
Republicans broadly oppose Murray’s aims and say they welcome any budget fight in which they can be on the side of no new taxes or spending.
“The budget that the Democrats passed under her leadership raises a trillion in new taxes, it doesn’t cut spending at all, in fact it increases spending over time, and it never, ever, ever balances. It continues massive deficits in perpetuity. In my view, that is a budget that is contrary to the views of the American people,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has joined a GOP effort to block Murray’s motion to engage in budget talks with House Republicans.
Republicans are confident they have the upper hand in the budget battles, but Murray has engaged in uphill fights over the arc of her career.
A former stay-at-home mom and educator, Murray’s entry into politics was sparked by a state legislator who dismissed her as a “mom in tennis shoes” when she was advocating against school budget cuts. Decorative tennis shoes still adorn the shelves of her Senate office.
A term in the Washington state Legislature led to a 1991 U.S. Senate campaign announced in the climate of Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination in which he was accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill. She was a member of 1992’s historic “Year of the Woman” when four new women were elected to the Senate. She is now 16th in Senate seniority and the fourth-ranking member of leadership under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a top ally.
At 62, the median age in this Senate, Murray is a frequent subject of Capitol Hill speculation as a contender for whip, the No. 2 leadership post, or even Democratic leader. No woman has ever achieved those posts in the Senate.
If Murray harbors greater ambitions, she is reserved when asked about what other roles she sees herself playing in the Senate. “I have never planned my life saying, ‘What am I going to do 10 years from now?’ I’ve taken the opportunity to take advantage of what challenges I’ve been handed,” she said.
– USA Today
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