Tiberi has role in ‘fiscal cliff’
Monday, December 17, 2012
By Jessica Wehrman
WASHINGTON — As President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner wrangle toward what all sides hope is resolution of the “fiscal cliff,” Rep. Pat Tiberi waits for the moment when he can weigh in.
Tiberi, a six-term Republican from Genoa Township, is a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, the powerful panel with jurisdiction over the tax code. He’s chairman of the panel’s subcommittee on select revenue measures — i.e., taxes. If Boehner and Obama do anything with taxes — and indeed, a series of expiring tax cuts are the cornerstone of the fiscal cliff — Tiberi undoubtedly will have his fingerprints on whatever answer passes out of the Republican-led House.
What Tiberi wants is comprehensive tax reform. Like his GOP colleagues, he opposes tax-rate hikes but is willing to consider limiting deductions and closing loopholes in order to raise revenue. He hopes the sides can strike a deal to temporarily extend current tax rates with the idea of tackling comprehensive reform next year.
“This is an opportunity,” he said, saying Democrats on the committee agree. “This is the time to do it.”
Bruce Cuthbertson, a former aide to Tiberi who has known him for 30 years, said if anyone can help to find a solution to the nation’s complicated tax woes, it might just be Tiberi.
“He is a very good student,” he said.
Others have noticed. As Congress has wrestled with the fiscal cliff, Tiberi, who tends to keep a relatively low profile, is popping up regularly in stories, being quoted in The Washington Post and on National Public Radio. Reuters, meanwhile, grilled him about Boehner’s leadership. Leaving a Republican conference meeting last week, he was encircled by reporters eager to question him about negotiations.
Tiberi, said former Rep. David Hobson, R-Springfield, “understands what a truly small business goes through.” He describes the lawmaker as someone who’s “not a chest-thumper,” who is good in his “ability to work with all types of groups to arrive at a solution.”
Not all are fans. Dale Butland, a Democratic consultant from Ohio, said it’s unlikely Tiberi will bring anything to the table other than traditional Republican opinions. “Historically speaking, Pat Tiberi has been a reliable vote for the Republican position,” he said. “He’s almost robotic.”
It’s a high-profile place for a lawmaker who has tended to avoid the limelight, preferring instead to make his mark in a hearing room or behind closed doors. Tiberi, 50, is considered a close ally of Boehner’s. And he credits his politics — in fact, his career — to Gov. John Kasich, whose old congressional district Tiberi now represents.
Tiberi, the son of Italian immigrants and the first in his family to graduate from high school, grew up in a Democratic family that wasn’t particularly interested in politics. The first time he truly thought about politics was when he was a high-school junior. One of his classmates asked the teacher how they knew whether they were Democrats or Republicans.
The smart-alecky answer: “If you’re white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and your parent belongs to a country club, you’re a Republican.”
“We all looked around like, ‘oh, I guess we’re all Democrats,’ ” Tiberi recalled.
Tiberi later went to Ohio State University, where he took a political-science class that required students to take an internship and write a paper. Tiberi was assigned to Kasich’s district office.
The elder lawmaker turned out to be an eye-opener for Tiberi.
“He wasn’t my idea of a Republican based on this white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, rich, country club, ‘listens to classical music’ description that this teacher talked to me about,” Tiberi said. “He was young. He was just a cool guy.”
The first time Tiberi traveled with Kasich, Kasich drove, blaring AC/DC on the car radio.
“I thought, ‘Man, this guy listens to the same music and he’s a Republican congressman,’ ” Tiberi said. “It broke my entire image of what a Republican congressman is.”
On the last day of his internship, Tiberi was cleaning out his desk when Kasich approached him.
“He said, ‘we loved having you, we know you’re working your way through school, we’d like to make an offer for you to come work for us part time,’ ” Tiberi said.
“He’s a workhorse, not a showhorse,” Kasich said of his former staffer, adding that “he’s done a lot of his homework on the entire tax code, and the more information you have, the more accurate you are, the more power you have to influence.
“He’ll be effective at being able to build alliances with people who may not share his philosophy,” he said.
Tiberi went on to work on Kasich’s staff for years before leaving to sell real estate and, ultimately, serve in the Ohio General Assembly from 1992 to 2001. When Kasich decided not to run for re-election in 2000, Tiberi ran and won his mentor’s old seat with nearly 53 percent of the vote. He’s been re-elected ever since. Tiberi decided early on that he wanted to serve on Ways and Means. He initially was placed on the Financial Services Committee — a great fit for an Ohio congressman, but one where Tiberi was sixth in seniority among the slew of Ohio lawmakers who served on that committee.
So Tiberi bided his time. When Portman left to become trade ambassador, Tiberi threw his name in the mix for Ways and Means. He lost his first bid, in 2005. But in January 2007, he finally won a seat, thanks in part to Boehner.
Five years later he’s still there, and, depending on what happens, poised to become a key player in whatever solution Boehner and Obama reach.
“It’s a great committee,” he said. “It deals with all the big issues. The tax code touches everything. It touches health care. It touches energy. It touches everything.”
Original Article: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/12/17/tiberi-has-role-in-fiscal-cliff.html