The Issues
Though he’s from the generally conservative state of Tennessee and is a member of the generally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, Cooper restricts that conservatism to economic issues. “Cooper and his fellow Blue Dogs don’t like measuring by the ‘trillion,’” Washingtonian Magazine wrote in 2009. He supports abortion rights and gun control. During his first stint in Congress, he supported a law banning smoking on airplanes, despite the fact that the district he represented at the time included a number of tobacco farmers. “I’m not anti-tobacco,” Cooper said. “I’m anti-cancer. … [I’m] anxious to keep [my constituents] alive as long as possible.”
The Blue Dog voted with the Democratic Party 90.5 percent of the time in the 110th Congress. His support for trade agreements has consistently pitted him against labor unions, and his 1994 health care bill challenged President Bill Clinton’s proposal and was unpopular with the party leadership. He spent his first stint in Congress on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he worked closely on the Clean Air Act. He is currently a member of the Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The Budget
Cooper is first and foremost a budget hawk. Cooper preaches pay-go, which requires all spending to be offset with revenue from taxes. He says the government could save billions of dollars by revamping health-care programs and could recoup nearly a trillion dollars more by closing loopholes in the tax code. He is constantly finding ways to save money. In his first stint in Congress, he added a provision to a 1991 highway bill that allowed states to pass laws mandating helmet use on motorcycles and seat belt use for automobiles. He predicted that it would save 11,000 lives annually and save up to $5 billion in annual medical costs.
On his congressional Web site, Cooper has a 60-page PowerPoint presentation dedicated to explaining the federal deficits. In it, he complains that more than half of the government’s money goes to “insurance” programs like Social Security and Medicare. He cites a 2005 Government Accountability Office study that said if the current trend continues, all of the government’s money will be dedicated to pay down interest on the debt.
The Economy
Despite his strong stance on fiscal discipline, Cooper twice voted for the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street in the fall of 2008. Calls to his office from constituents overwhelmingly favored voting against the bailout, and a friend of Cooper told the congressman he would personally raise money for Cooper’s opponent if he voted for the bailout. But Cooper said the money was necessary to buoy the economy. “We’ve got to take a deep breath and put this into perspective,” Cooper said. “What is the most important thing here? It’s saving the economy.”
Cooper originally voted against the stimulus bill, but voted for the slightly smaller version of the bill when it came back through the House. He said the vast majority of money would be spent in the next 18 months and said Congress would have to focus on the deficit once the economy rebounded. "The key thing is we have to get this economy going," Cooper said. "I think you're going to see a significant boost from this bill. Spending money is painful — very painful — but sometimes necessary."
Health Care
Cooper turned heads in 1994, when, as a relatively junior congressman from Tennessee, he put forward a health care bill to compete with the one President Bill Clinton proposed. Cooper’s bill, which he dubbed “Clinton Lite,” took out requirements that employers pay a large percentage of the premiums for their workers, thus removing the requirement that it be a universal plan. Cooper said he would use the surplus from lower costs created in his plan to cover the uninsured. Cooper’s plan received support from dozens of congressmen, but Cooper was also criticized by people who said he was raising large sums of money for re-election from insurance companies while pushing a plan they favored.
Cooper said he hopes to get a universal health care bill passed early in Barack Obama’s first term as president. He supports a plan put forward by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah) that would see the government require and oversee private health insurance for all citizens. Health insurance would be portable, so you could bring it from job to job and could continue your coverage even if you are unemployed. Citizens could choose from all the available insurance companies, and it would be illegal for insurance companies to reject anyone who wants to be included.
He is also a supporter of health insurance "co-ops" as a means for citizens to access affordable private plans. He cites the success of the co-ops that currently govern most of America's electricity grids as evidence that the plan is workable.
"A co-op is used over three quarters of the land of America," he told MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "It's a creature of the New Deal. It's worked pretty well over all the country for seventy or eighty years."
Ethics
Beginning in 1991, Cooper refused to accept money from political action committees because he said they had too much influence. During the 1994 Senate campaign, Thompson criticized Cooper’s anti-PAC pledge as toothless, saying it did not make him “a hero on the issue.” When Congress voted to give pay raises to its members beginning in 1991, Cooper donated the money to a scholarship fund at Middle Tennessee State University. He also publishes all the earmarks he seeks on his official congressional Web site, and he announced early in 2009 that he would not seek any earmarks for fiscal year 2010.
Early Work
Cooper was concerned about urban smog and acid rain even early in his career and was influential in passing the Clean Air Act of 1990. At the time, Reps. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) were deadlocked on the bill. But Cooper joined the “group of nine” moderate Democrats who worked to find a solution. Cooper tried to get timetables for reduction of emissions for utility companies written into the bill and he proposed paying for it with a tax on how cleanly the utilities burned coal. Some timetables were included in the law as was Cooper’s suggestion to give companies flexibility on how they met the standards.
Cooper was also active in trying to reduce “pocketbook” expenses, such as rising costs for television, phone service and electricity. He wrote legislation requiring long-distance phone carriers identify themselves and tell consumers rates for certain calls from airports and hotels, where long-distance calls can be particularly expensive.
