Senate

WASHINGTON - Here is how Philadelphia-area senators voted on major issues last week (House in recess): Senate Surface-transportation programs. Voting 74-22, the Senate on Wednesday passed a bill (S 1813) to authorize federal road, bridge, transit, and highway-safety programs through September 2013 on a budget of $109 billion that would maintain present funding levels. All but $10 billion of the bill's cost would be funded by the Highway Trust Fund, which draws its revenue from the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gasoline tax and the 24.4-cent-per-gallon federal diesel tax. The bill also would employ revenue measures such as higher taxation of Individual Retirement Account inheritances, changes in certain pension-fund calculations, and diversions from a federal fund to finance cleanups from leaking underground storage tanks.

CONCORD, N.H. - Colleagues knew former Sen. Warren B. Rudman for his abrupt manner, but they trusted his expertise. On one matter in particular, though, he wished people would have listened to him: that the U.S. was vulnerable to a major terrorist attack. Rudman left the Senate in the early 1990s but later led a commission that predicted the danger of terrorism on American soil just months before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and called for the creation of a Department of Homeland Security.

HARRISBURG - Proposals to trim the size of the Pennsylvania General Assembly have been floated, and swiftly shot down, for decades. But now there may be some muscle behind that nearly half-century-old idea. Supporters, including Gov. Corbett, House and Senate leaders, and reform-minded backbenchers, say the time is ripe to shrink what, with 253 members, is the largest full-time legislature in the nation. Proponents say a smaller legislature would reduce costs and make government more effective.

A governor, an ex-governor. Senators, House members. Judges, commissioners, council members. Even the vice president of the United States. Nancy Goldberg watched them pass by her Penn Valley property across the street from Har Zion Temple, a large synagogue atop Hollow Road hill, up from the Schuylkill Expressway in Lower Merion. After letting a couple of TV trucks park in her driveway, Goldberg walked out of the house and stood with a phalanx of camera crews waiting to see who was among the dignitaries arriving for the funeral Tuesday morning of former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter.

SCRANTON - Mayor Chris Doherty said Friday that he would not seek a fourth term. "It's time to do other things with our lives," Doherty said. He will remain in office through 2013. The Democrat briefly ran for governor in 2010 after winning his third mayoral term, then dropped out to run for the state Senate, where he lost in the primary. Doherty first took office as mayor of the city of 76,000 people in January 2002. - AP  

Developer Willard G. Rouse 3d said yesterday that he would be willing to raise money to bring the full Congress to Philadelphia this summer to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. Rouse, the new chairman of the Philadelphia Constitution celebration, made the pledge to House Speaker Jim Wright in Washington yesterday, telling him that "if all that would stand between us and making this happen would be money, then I didn't think we had any issues. " The principal problem with getting Congress to Philadelphia is that "the leadership of the Senate has lost some enthusiasm for this, and we've got to rekindle" it, Rouse said in an interview last night.

If President Clinton has created what one impeachment prosecutor called "a cancer . . . in the body politic," most Americans have decided the disease is curable. For the exclusive group of 100 citizens sitting in judgment of the President this week, that's the fundamental truth - one, by the way, that emerged long before the first House member strode into the well of the Senate on Thursday. Mr. Clinton's evasions and torture of the truth in his failed attempt to hide an extramarital affair has harmed himself, his family and his place in history.

I'll confess to being one of the critics of then-Sen. Robert Packwood who had sharp pangs of sympathy when he self-destructed in 1995. The Oregonian was a victim of his own babblings into a diary that revealed his double life as one of the Senate's most respected Republicans and a wallower in the sort of fund-raising that would make a hog blush. He also was revealed as a champion of women's rights whose unwanted and clumsy advances to 17 women were the more embarrassing for the lack of evidence that he ever got to first base.