Ann Marie Buerkle leads the 25th Congressional District in a new direction
The New Times Interview
Syracuse’s freshly minted congressional representative had just returned from a seminar for new members of Congress at Harvard’s Kennedy School when she sat down at her DeWitt office on Dec. 3 for an interview with The New Times. Conservative Republican Ann Marie Buerkle, who early last year was given almost no chance of unseating one-term Democrat Dan Maffei, won a cliffhanger on Nov. 2 by 648 votes and now heads for Washington, D.C., as the first woman to represent the 25th Congressional District.
Onondaga Hill resident Buerkle, a 59-yearold attorney, nurse and grandmother, heads to the nation’s capital as part of the wave of conservative reaction to the past two years of Democratic control of both houses of Congress. The 25th District—a bastardized result of the 2000 Census and shrinking population—comprises all of Onondaga County, the northern portion of Cayuga County, all of Wayne County and the northeastern corner of Monroe County.
A native of Auburn, Buerkle’s climb to her latest elected position has been gradual: Raising six children and managing a legal career were her primary areas of focus. She ran unsuccessfully for the County Legislature in 1980, and served a year as an appointed member of the Syracuse Common Council before losing that seat in November 1994. Until last year, Buerkle was best known to many as a passionate crusader against abortion from her days as a spokesperson for Operation Rescue. For the past 13 years, she has served as an assistant attorney general for New York state, representing Upstate Medical University.
With so many serious issues facing the country, we set out to find out just who this woman representing our district really is.
Q: Can you tell me a joke?
A: Can you tell me a joke? No I’m a terrible joke teller, can’t remember them, can’t tell them. {Staffer Liza Lowery adds: “But you appreciate a good joke.”}
Q: Last movie you saw?
A: I haven’t seen a movie in a year since I started campaigning.
Q: Wow. What do you have in your sights?
A: {Shakes her head} I don’t even know what’s out there. This {campaigning} was a full-time plus job.
Q: So I guess the next question, about the title of your favorite TV show, is not going yield much either…
A: Sorry to be so boring. If I have time I’m usually on the phone catching up with the kids. I’ve got six kids and five of them are out of the state, and 11 grandchildren.
Q: What kind of music do you listen to?
A: I like country, I love patriotic music, I’m the butt of all my staff’s jokes.
{“Dixieland,” says Lowery.}
Q: Jazz?
A: I like Joe Whiting, listened to him for years.
Q: You’ve been accused of a lot of things. One of your friends has accused you of being a marathoner. Tell us about that.
A: I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C.
Q: Inside the Beltway?
A: {Laughs} How appropriate. I ran it twice, with my brother, who is a retired Marine Corps colonel. We did it together. I’m not a fast runner—slow and steady.
Q: Are you still in that kind of running shape?
A: No, this campaign has gotten in the way of a lot of my routines. One of my goals is to get back in shape for that run, the last weekend of October.
Q: One of the issues from the campaign was the taxes. {Buerkle owns a strip mall on Kasson Road in Camillus which owes $25,850 in unpaid property taxes to Onondaga County. Maffei campaign ads accused her of loaning money to her campaign while failing to pay her taxes. Buerkle con tended that the taxes were her tenants’ responsibility, and that she has entered into an installment plan to pay the taxes.} Is that all done, paid off, taken care of?
A: It’s not any different than it was during the campaign. A payment plan was set up with the county so that the tenants could pay the taxes off monthly.
Q: Why don’t you just take care of it, so it doesn’t hang on as an issue? The tri-part lease doesn’t remove the obligation of the property owner to pay the taxes, right?
A: No, you’re right. It’s a triple net lease. It’s their responsibility. I paid for it for them one time. I went into my 401k and took the money out. The county is willing to set it up this way. It’s a win-win for everybody. The county gets their money, the tenants stay in business, and the taxes get paid.
Q: But you have to keep explaining…
A: I’m happy to do it.
Q: Former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and Republican former Sen.
Alan Simpson, co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, recently released their proposal to balance the federal budget within five years. Deficit reduction was a big part of what we heard in your campaign—cutting spending. What do you see in this report that has merit?
A: It just came out yesterday {Dec. 2}, and I haven’t had a chance to take a good look at it, but I understand that there are some things in there that have merit. I understand that they came out with some suggestions that were better than a lot of people thought they might be. But I need to look at it as a whole. I’m not sure if it goes far enough; I need to verify it.
Q: There’s an old saying that everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Your campaign was about how Washington needs to change, but when you read some of these reports, what they are saying to us is that we need to change. So we’re looking to Washington, and they’re saying, it’s partly what we’ve become accustomed to. How do you, as a leader, communicate back to us what we need to do to change the way things are in this country? 
A: Well, I think, when Washington comes up with a plan that is viable, has economic growth in mind, a plan that doesn’t hurt small businesses, then we need to come back to the district and explain it to the American people. There was an election on Nov. 2 and the America people spoke. They are concerned about the future of this country because of the debt and the deficit, that’s part of the responsibility that we bear and, as you say, there may be some unpleasant pieces to it. The American people care dramatically about their country, they love their country and the election was a clear statement of that. Once we put together a plan that truly reduces spending, reduces the size of government, reduces the deficit, then we have to have an honest discussion with the American people.
Q: Well, we’ve certainly gotten used to government spending, so I want to ask you about some specific things in this district. For example, the Technology Garden downtown {a business incubator run for years by the Chamber of Commerce} was helped by money brought home by former Rep. Jim Walsh. A: I think the bigger question is: Is it still relevant, is it still effective? No. 1, could this have gone through the appropriations process? I think that’s the big discussion about earmarks, that they’re not put in at the end to entice someone to support a bill. There will be a discussion about earmarks. Two weeks ago House Republican leader John Boehner {now speaker of the House of Representatives} promised us a moratorium on earmarks, and that every bill would be looked at for these earmarks and for spending that isn’t consistent with what the role of the federal government should be. Q: So, what do you think about the Tech Garden? A: I don’t know enough about it.I don’t even know the amount of money…I can’t speak to that.
Q: The Syracuse Neighborhood Initiative is another signature piece of Jim Walsh’s legacy. {Walsh brought $50 million in federal money to SNI over eight years to improve housing in a number of Syracuse neighborhoods.} A lot of people credit that money with making a huge difference in neighborhoods, the West Side, Tipp Hill, the North Side. It’s an earmark. Do you think that was money well spent? A: Again, I think you mentioned earlier the election of Nov. 2 and the concern that the American people have, and just as in any household you may have done things one way when you were earning a certain amount of money, but when you lost your job or got a reduction in your salary, you began to change the way you did things in your household.That’s gotta be the realistic approach that government has to take. It’s not going to be business as usual. This country has a deficit of $1.5 trillion; this Congress failed to pass a budget. We can’t go on the way we’re operating now, this Congress has to make changes, and a discussion of earmarks is certainly going to be, as we have already heard from leader Boehner, a part of that.
Q: So, you don’t have a specific comment on the Neighborhood Initiative funding? A: No, without knowing the term of the earmark, how it’s going to be spent; it just wouldn’t be prudent for me to. On its face it seems like a good thing, but there will be decisions that this Congress and our government need to make in order to get this country solvent again. Q: Do you want to comment on whether you would support federal funding for the Say Yes to Education program in Syracuse? A: Um, and I’m sure you’re alluding to the question of my whole position on education…
Q: No,
I’m specifically asking about Say Yes to Education because it seems so
central to the city’s plans for revitalizing the city. A: I
think there is some merit to it, the colleges that have come on board. I
was part of it. The Bar Association, we went in and they trained us to
be part of it because the program is comprehensive and you are in the
schools and you counsel the families and you usher families through the
legal system. And I was part of that with the Onondaga County Bar
Association, so I think it has merit, and if the colleges are allowing
that incentive for kids I think that is a good thing. Q: Do you want to comment on whether you would support federal funding for it? A: I
think for me to sit here and commit one way or another is a mistake.
Going back to my original comment, we need to look at what’s going to
make us fiscally solvent, and be willing to talk about all the options
that will reduce the deficit and the debt that this country faces. Q: When you say all the options, that’s not including, I assume, raising taxes. A: Correct.
I don’t think that in this fragile economy coming out of this
recession, for us to raise taxes, that doesn’t work and it hasn’t
worked. The worst thing we could do right now for small businesses and
for American families is to raise their taxes. I’ve been a strong
proponent of keeping the tax rates where they are, extending the current
tax rates for all Americans. Q: So
would you insist that there be corresponding cuts? If we want to
balance the budget and the revenue projections show a drop of X dollars,
would you insist that cuts of X dollars be in place? A: We’ve
talked about potential cuts, and we have to reduce the spending. In the
conversation about making those tax rates permanent, we haven’t talked
about how many jobs will be created. What is the advantage of not
increasing taxes on small businesses and the people who create jobs?
That number hasn’t been measured adequately, and that’s where we’re
going to offset the cost of not raising taxes.Q: Would you support letting taxes rise on people earning more than $1 million a year? A: So many small businesses file a subchapter S personal income tax return and their gross revenues may be $1.5 million, it may be $2 million, but the net is far lower than that. To raise taxes on them, it hurts what we need to do to get this economy moving again. Americans are not about class warfare, we should extend those tax rates to all Americans. Q: What is your position on extending unemployment benefits? A: I think if you’re going to do that you have to have an offset, you have to have a cut somewhere, because unlike making the tax rates permanent, this is a cost. The only way I could justify it would be if there were corresponding cuts.
There are people who are unemployed and they do need our help. We have to ask ourselves: If we are providing unemployment benefits for two years, are we disincentivizing people from actively looking for a job?
The bigger issue is we need to get jobs back on track. We’ve got to help these small businesses.
Q: Help me understand this. If I’m a small-business owner, I get a tax cut, so I can invest, and hopefully generate jobs. But if I’m a worker, and I get a $300 or $400 check and spend it, isn’t that going to generate more economic activity? Isn’t that going to create jobs? A: It doesn’t create jobs. You can’t compare it to a small-business owner hiring more people, buying equipment. That’s more investment-type spending. I’ve heard Nancy Pelosi make that argument. Q: If you’re spending your check, you’re creating demand for milk—we have dairy farmers here. A: I think the substantial gain would be for small businesses to not raise taxes. The greater bang for the buck would be the tax cut. Q: Let’s talk about health care reform. You have been in the health care field in two different careers. You have said you would work to defund it and repeal it. Mitt Romney was a supporter of yours. The health care plan we have is substantially like the one he put in place in Massachusetts. If it’s good enough for Mitt Romney, why isn’t it good enough for Ann Marie Buerkle?
A:
Because if you look at Massachusetts, I think you’ll see they’re
struggling. My problem, my most fundamental problem, is that the
government shouldn’t run health care. Philosophically it’s not how the
United States of America should work. This bill is not going to contain
the cost of health care and this is not going to contain it. That’s why
we embarked on this whole thing—to keep the cost of health care
contained. The Congressional Budget Office says it’s going to going to
increase costs by $1 trillion over 10 years. It doesn’t talk about tort
reform. Q: What percentage of the costs of health care do you think would be controlled by tort reform? A:
You hear different figures of up to 40 percent, you hear 20 percent,
but we can all agree that it would help to contain costs by preventing
doctors from practicing defensive medicine. In hospitals, as well: Why
do four tests when one test will do it? We’re just being defensive. Q: It’s because it’s pay for services—that’s how we’re structured. A: It’s because we’re practicing defensive medicine. If one test shows there’s no tumor in her brain, they try a dye-injected test, then they ask, “What if?” The mentality is defensive.
We didn’t talk about health savings accounts in this bill.
This bill discourages health savings accounts.
This bill doesn’t make health insurance portable, doesn’t let us buy health insurance across state lines. The pre-existing condition is another thing that they talk about. We already had that in New York. So you get this 2,000-page bill that doesn’t do a whole lot in terms of reducing the cost of health care, in fact just the opposite. It isn’t to say that we don’t need health care reform, it’s to say that the responsible way of governing would have been to take this in incremental pieces, figure out what’s going to be the most effective and go from there.
This 2,000-page bill, it became famous in Nancy Pelosi’s words, “Pass the bill so we can find out what’s in it.” That just not responsible governing.
Q: You can say that the tax cuts need to be put in place to give certainty to small businesses. If you put the health care bill up for grabs, doesn’t that create uncertainty for small businesses? A: I don’t think we have created certainty for small business with this bill. We still haven’t fleshed out everything that is in this bill. This gets rolled out in 2014, some parts sooner than that. I talk to small businesses {and they ask}, “If I hire two more people does that bump me up to another group? Does that now change what I have to pay?” Q: What is the answer? A: Well, we don’t know because there is so much uncertainty. Q: Is it uncertainty or is it confusion? Because on something like health care, which is so big, the public relies on leaders to provide us with an explanation. What we hear on both sides is not explanation, but charges. Is the bill confusing or are the politics confusing? A: I think we’re all going to sit back and wait to see how Health and Human Services regulates it. It’s the same with the financial regulation bill.This is just the statute. Now we’re going to see how they regulate it. Which is why it would have been easier to regulate if we did it in small bites. Uncertainty is the enemy of business, because you’re frozen and you don’t know what the regulators are going to do. You freeze up, even if you have capital.
Q: During the campaign you said that health care was done against the will of the American people. Now polls show that we are evenly divided on the issue of repealing health care reform. The Congress that passed it was elected, and I didn’t understand the claim that an elected Congress was going against the will of the people, but it was made. If the polls are showing that we are evenly divided on health care, is it fair for this Congress to take it as a mandate to tear it apart, or repeal it or defund it? A: Many Republicans ran on the issue of health care reform and we don’t see this bill as that. Many Americans will agree that the cost of health care is too high and it continues to go up, and we need to figure out how to decrease that. That’s the first thing we discuss. Creating 18,000 IRS positions doesn’t decrease the cost. The steps they have taken don’t decrease the cost So what are we going to do? If we can say these five things—increasing the use of health savings accounts, buying over state lines, tort reform, portability, decrease the cost of health care—then the majority will be happy.What this bill does is insert the government in health care. Whenever the government is involved, it’s never efficient, it’s never costeffective, it’s never efficient.
Q: What about the Veterans Administration? A: I think if you talk to the VA it could be a lot more efficient. The majority of times when the government is involved it’s not as efficient as it could be. Inserting the federal government, philosophically I’m not comfortable with it, but it’s also not efficient. Let the free market go.
Q:
Besides veterans, the group that is happiest with their health care are
Medicare recipients. That’s clearly a government program. How do you
feel about Medicare? A:
Medicare is a government program, but it’s the private sector, the
physicians, they’re the ones. It’s not like government-sponsored health
care, it’s just the government paying for it. When you go to your
physician there’s a patient-physician relationship and it’s as if it
were private. Medicare is paid for by government; it’s like private health care. The deception on this health care bill is what it’s going to do to seniors and the availability of medical services. Physicians are already sending out letters.
They didn’t take care of the whole Medicare reimbursement for physicians. They’re talking about reducing reimbursement by 22 percent in January. Who in their right mind is going to run a business if they can’t meet their costs?
Q: Again you come up with “we’re gonna cut the cost, but not this cost.” A: Medicare is going to be part of that difficult discussion. Going back to how a family does business when that changes. Q: As far as your work in the attorney general’s office is concerned, you were appointed by a Republican. You’re seen as a fairly partisan figure, but you have served two Democratic attorneys general, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, plus Republican Dennis Vacco. How does that work? A: When Eliot Spitzer came in, he kept the bureau chiefs. I worked in a small unit that works for the Upstate Medical Center. Upstate Medical Center was my only client. We oversaw the monies. Upstate is a state hospital and money owed to it belongs to the state, so we oversaw that, we did contracting with insurance companies, we pursued payment on behalf of the hospital, we handled Medicare, Medicaid, workers’ comp. Q: So how do you do that, how do you work for Spitzer, Cuomo and Vacco? A: To his credit, Eliot Spitzer looked at my performance. He did not let politics get in the way. I know Democrats went to him and suggested that he get rid of me. We generated revenue. The year I left we generated $46 million for the state of New York. But he looked at my performance and he kept me on. I give him credit for that. Andrew Cuomo, I don’t know where it got in the discussion with him, but he kept my boss and he kept me. Q: In the city of Syracuse, where you did not find a majority, the participation on Election Day of people of color was almost invisible. We have a city that is almost majority minority. How are you going to reach out to those mostly poorer communities, the organizations of people of color and minorities? A: We will reach out and we did reach out to minority groups. We met with the Frederick Douglass Society. We spoke to a group of African- American pastors on the Southwest Side. Q: Which group was that? A: Chester Seals {of Soul Healing Ministry Church of Syracuse} organized it. We talked about the message from Frederick Douglass about changing the way we do business and really reaching out and helping the blacks in this city. I would expect that we would continue this effort.I know what’s out there. I have volunteered through the Bar Association. People come through the door and they have no jobs, no money. We have to reach out to them. We have poverty. We met with the Vietnamese community on the North Side. We took out an ad in {the African-American newspaper} CNY Vision.
I think it’s very important to note that Republican conservatives are stereotyped as politicians who don’t care about the poor and the indigent. I disagree with that. Our approaches vary, but we care. We can be their voice, help them do better. I talk about good public education, vouchers, charter schools. We have to arm them with the tools that they need.
Q: On the issue of global warming, during the campaign a contingent of local scientists came out, they were not happy with things they thought you were saying. Who are the scientists who inform your view on the issue of climate change? A: I think that when I sat there in that debate and it was taken right out of that debate, it was taken right out of context. Q: Who are the scientists that inform your view? A: We look at the whole e-mail scandal that was going on in England.There was clearly evidence that was destroyed that was in favor of an opposing side to this whole global warming. Cycles come and go. There is global warming, but the bigger question is: Is it humans that are causing this? And I think that is where the debate still lies. I think politically it’s been decided, but I don’t think scientifically it has.
Q: Have you met Dr. Cornelius Murphy, the president of SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who criticized you for a reference to the global warming “myth” during the campaign? A: No, but I will. Q: Are there scientists that you have consulted with who back your view? A: I have not. Q: Do you think Roe v. Wade is settled law? A: I don’t think it is settled law. Q: Would you like to see congressional action to overturn it? A: I think it will be the Supreme Court. A case will go to the Supreme Court and it will be discussed there. In the Congress we should control the federal funding for abortion. There is an amendment, the Hyde Amendment, and this health care bill seeks to overturn that, and that’s what I’m opposed to.I am opposed to congressional funding for abortion.
Before and after: On Election Day, Ann Marie Buerkle made the requisite visit to Our Lady of Pompei’s spaghetti supper (below), while a month out from Election Day, she met with a reporter; note the photo of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on her wall.
