Phil Gramm - United States Senate

United States Senate

In 1984, Gramm was elected as a Republican to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate. He defeated Congressman Ron Paul, former gubernatorial nominee Henry Grover, Robert Mosbacher, Jr., of Houston, and several of other contenders in the primary. He then faced the Democratic nominee, State Senator Lloyd Doggett of Austin in the general election for the right to succeed retiring Republican Senator John G. Tower. Gramm polled 3,116,348 votes (58.5 percent) to Doggett's 2,207,557 (41.5 percent). Gramm was the first U.S. Senate candidate in the history of Texas to receive more than three million votes.

Gramm served on the Senate Budget Committee from 1989 until leaving office in 2003. Gramm and Senators Fritz Hollings and Warren Rudman devised a means of cutting the budget through across-the-board spending cuts if deficit-reduction targets were not met. They were successful in making the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act law, although portions were ruled unconstitutional. In the years following the passage of the Act, other sections were largely superseded by other budget-controlling mechanisms.

In 1990 Gramm failed in an effort to amend the Iraq International Law Compliance Act of 1990. An earlier amendment to the act, the D’Amato Amendment, prohibited the US from selling arms or extending any sort of financial assistance to Iraq unless the President could prove Iraq was in “substantial compliance” with the provisions of a number of human rights conventions, including the Genocide Convention. After reading the D’Amato Amendment, Gramm introduced his own amendment to counter the human rights sanctions in the D’Amato Amendment. Gramm’s amendment would have allowed the Bush administration to waive the terms of the D'Amato Amendment if it found that sanctions against Iraq hurt US businesses and farms more than they hurt Iraq. In the end, the bill passed the Senate without Gramm's amendment only a week before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Gramm won his second Senate term in 1990 with a victory over Democratic State Senator and former Fort Worth Mayor Hugh Parmer. Gramm polled 3,027,680 votes (60.2 percent) to Parmer's 1,429,986 (37.4 percent), again receiving more than three million votes.

Between 1995 and 2000, Gramm was the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. During that time he spearheaded efforts to pass banking deregulation laws, including the landmark Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which removed Depression-era laws separating banking, insurance and brokerage activities.

As a senator, Gramm often called for reductions in taxes and fraud in government spending. He employed his "Dickey Flatt Test" ("Is it worth taking it out of Dickey's pocket?") to determine if federal programs were worthwhile. Richard "Dickey" Flatt owns a family run printing business started by his father and mother in Mexia, Texas, and is a longtime Gramm supporter". In Gramm's eyes, Flatt embodied the burdens that a typical Texas independent small businessman faced in the realm of taxation and government spending.

Gramm ran unsuccessfully for the Republican Party nomination in the 1996 presidential election, for which he had raised $8 million as early as July 1994. Although he began the race with a full war-chest and tied for first place with Dole in the 1995 Iowa Straw Poll, his campaign was fatally wounded when in an upset he lost the Louisiana Caucus on February 7, 1996 to Pat Buchanan (the final delegate count was 13–8). New Orleans Times Picayune political columnist Otis Pike noted the loss could be traced to the passion of the supporters for Buchanan compared to those for Gramm. "Gramm should have won the Louisiana caucuses – but didn't, because the religious right turned out to vote in larger numbers." This poor showing in a state adjacent to Texas plus placing 5th in Iowa's caucuses resulted in Gramm's withdrawal from the contest on the Sunday before the New Hampshire primary. He threw his support to senatorial colleague Robert J. Dole of Kansas. Gramm, a proponent of free trade, also lashed out at Republican Patrick J. Buchanan, arguing that Buchanan was a "protectionist".

After exiting the presidential race, Gramm defeated Victor Morales of Dallas in November 1996 to win his third and final term in the Senate.

Gramm was one of five co-sponsors of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. One provision of the bill is often referred to as the "Enron loophole" because some critics blame the provision for permitting the Enron scandal to occur.

In 2002, Gramm left his Senate seat (effective November 30) a few weeks before the expiration of his term in hopes that his successor, fellow Republican John Cornyn, could gain seniority over other newly elected senators. However, Cornyn did not gain additional seniority due to a 1980 Rules Committee policy.