U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi made a swing through north Big Horn County Tuesday, touring the new Cowley baseball field, dining with community and business leaders, touring the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center and paying a longer-than-anticipated visit to Big Horn Lake (see related story).


During a visit to the new Cowley American Legion/Babe Ruth field, Enzi marveled at the new facility as Mayor Roland Simmons and State Sen. Ray Peterson explained the cooperative effort it took to finance the build the facility.


Simmons also noted the new 6-12 school soon to be built, as well as the Cowley Streets highway and streetscape project to begin next year.


“Come back in a year and see what has happened here in Cowley,” the mayor said. “We’re just getting started.”
During his noon luncheon at Lange’s Kitchen, Enzi said he spends much of his time in Washington, D.C. “teaching Washington about the West.” He said he constantly works to adjust formulas in bills so that there is a rural component to the legislation.


The two-term senator said he has a proven track record of working with fellow senators to get bills passed. When he was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he saw 27 bills signed into law, while the average Senate committee passes only three bills every two years.


He said during a recent bill-signing ceremony (he has attended 39 throughout his career as a bill sponsor), President George W. Bush called him the “Bill of the Month Club.”


What’s his success? Enzi calls it his 80 percent rule. He said everyone in the Senate will agree on about 80 percent of bills, and on a particular bill, senators will agree on about 80 percent of the content of the bill. The key, he said, is to take the real sticking points out of a bill if they are holding up the legislation and keep the most important parts of the issue in the bill.


He also said he likes to talk to each and every senator about a piece of legislation he is sponsoring, and once a bill passes the Senate, it goes to the House of Representatives.


“The house likes to fiddle with it, and then you have to convince 435 House members that what the Senate did was right,” he said.


Enzi said he likes to handle important issues one part at a time, and a good example is his bill entitled “10 Steps to Transform Health Care in America.” While the 10 steps are written into one bill – S. 1783 – the key components have been passing as individual bills or as part of another bill.


For instance, he said, legislation to create community health centers in communities passed as a separate bill, while legislation to help providers and nurses pay for their education passed as part of the Higher Education Act.


Next to pass, he said, will be a bill to foster the development and use of health information technology so that a patient’s medical records can be accessed and read by a doctor anywhere in the United States. The technology could save $140 billion per year by eliminating the needless duplication of tests.


Enzi said the bill cleared the Senate once and will soon be passed again. He said it has already gone through the pre-conference process in the House.


Any given piece of a bill like the “10 Steps” bill will have some opposition, so an omnibus bill could have enough opposition to kill it, but he said he can get one piece of a plan passed 85-15.


Enzi said health care was, for months, the top concern expressed to him by his constituents, but the issue has fallen to number two behind energy and the high cost of gasoline and other energy sources.


The world demand for energy is skyrocketing, he said, with the emerging economic giant China buying all the energy it can, including coal from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.


Energy will continue to be a worldwide crisis, he said, topped only by water.


Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada put forth a bill to stop speculation on oil, Enzi said, but if it passes, the practice would simply move overseas.


He also said Reid has stalled an energy bill for four weeks without a vote.


Another thing that has made Enzi successful in getting legislation passed is that he holds round-table discussions on an issue rather than a hearing. In a hearing, he said, differing sides often simply “beat up on each other’s witnesses,” whereas with a roundtable, differing sides interact with each other and borrow portions of each other’s positions.

During a question and answer period, Judy Richards of Lovell commended Enzi for his ability to “work across the aisle” in the Senate to get things done that help Wyoming, including helping rural schools.


“I did form a rural caucus,” Enzi said. “I was surprised by the states that say they are rural.”


North Big Horn Hospital CEO Peter Birkholz asked about the future of Medicare, and Enzi called the future “pretty grim.”


He said the Senate bowed to political pressure by quickly passing legislation so that doctors would not lose 10.6 percent of their Medicare reimbursement, but he said the hasty bill left out many important components of a comprehensive health care bill.


“We were working across the aisle for better solutions to make Medicare more secure in the future,” he said. “We were almost finished and then the Senate got scared. So we did the 10.6 doc fix and left out a lot of things that needed to happen. We ditched a lot of options for a big publicity thing for doctors.”


John Nickle thanked Enzi for seeking a third term, noting that the senator would no doubt like to live closer to family.


“I appreciate it. You’re doing a good job,” Nickle said as the audience applauded. County Commissioner Keith Grant also thanked the senator for his support of public land issues, noting that the Forest Reserve Account is in jeopardy, which would, in turn, place Wyoming’s payments under the Payments in Lieu of Taxes program in jeopardy.


“I can’t believe how fast 11½ years has gone,” Enzi noted.


Another effective technique for getting legislation passed, he said, is working one on one with fellow senators when it comes to promoting a bill. He said he can get a senator to agree with him in about 30 seconds but then must provide the documentation to the senator’s staff.


“Those are some of the tricks of working in Washington,” he said. “Seniority is not just years in office. It’s the amount of trust you build up. I’ve built up a lot of trust over the years.”