Pete Domenici obit

Pete Domenici, Long a Powerful Senate Voice on Fiscal Policy, Dies at 85

He was not on the list.

Pete V. Domenici, the former six-term Republican senator from New Mexico whose mastery of budget and tax issues and energy policy made him one of the Senate’s most influential members, died on Wednesday in Albuquerque. He was 85.

Steve Bell, his longtime chief of staff, said the cause was complications of abdominal surgery. Mr. Domenici died at the University of New Mexico Hospital.

He had long struggled with frontotemporal lobar degeneration, a progressive disease of the brain that causes forms of dementia. He announced in October 2007 that he would not seek a seventh term because of the disease. During his last full year in office, 2008, he often appeared visibly weakened in public appearances.

In 1972, Mr. Domenici (pronounced doe-MEN-ih-chee), a strong supporter of nuclear power in his home state, the site of the first atomic explosion, became the first Republican elected to the Senate from New Mexico in 38 years.

But he was little known nationally until 1981, when he was named chairman of the powerful Budget Committee in the wake of the Republican takeover of the Senate and Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.

A fiscal conservative, Mr. Domenici set out to help fulfill Reagan’s election-year promise to balance the federal budget. But it was a goal he would not achieve, as the federal deficit ballooned during the Reagan years.

Mr. Domenici supported the conservative theory that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. But he went on to grapple with the president himself, as well as with Republican colleagues in the Senate, on the long-term fiscal consequences of the White House’s proposed tax cuts and increases in military spending, questioning whether they might spur inflation and defeat any chances of balancing the budget.

Congress passed steep tax cuts in 1981, and critics of the legislation said the reductions only deepened the federal deficit and fueled a subsequent recession. Reagan agreed to a huge tax increase in 1982 to reduce the deficit, and the economy began to rebound.

Mr. Domenici also sparred with Democrats over their counterproposals to increase Social Security benefits and expand other entitlement programs.

In fiercely partisan and ideological budget debates during the 1980s, he was lauded for his steadiness and credibility in helping to draw the opposing sides together to reach budget agreements and enact them into law.

It was not until the boom years of the 1990s that Mr. Domenici, in concert with a Democratic White House under Bill Clinton, succeeded in writing two balanced-budget agreements, the first in more than four decades. In doing so he clashed with the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, a Republican, calling Mr. Gingrich’s proposed tax cuts under his “Contract With America” agenda fiscally irresponsible.

His bipartisanship made him one of the most respected members of the Senate. “Mr. Domenici enjoys a universal reputation as one of the Senate’s hardest-working, most intelligent and most intense members,” The New York Times said in an editorial in May 1995.

In a documentary film about Mr. Domenici made by a New Mexico PBS station, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: “There’s no one in the Senate, or in the House of Representatives, that can make the case like Pete Domenici can, and make it as convincingly and as powerfully as he does. And whenever he does, the U.S. Senate just responds overwhelmingly.”

Mr. Domenici spent four years as chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy after the 2002 midterm elections. He was regarded as Capitol Hill’s foremost authority on nuclear power and a friend to the industries that supplied and used nuclear generating equipment.

Besides being the site of the first atomic explosion, in a test in 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico is home to two national laboratories, an underground atomic-waste repository and a privately owned uranium enrichment plant. A network of government and private nuclear installations employs more than 20,000 state residents. Scientists at Los Alamos called Mr. Domenici “St. Pete” for his ability to direct federal funding their way.

He also exerted influence on the Appropriations and Indian Affairs committees, helping to earmark funds for the settlement of Indian water disputes and land claims. And he pushed for giving mental health parity in health insurance coverage, a matter that affected him personally: One of his eight children had schizophrenia.

That cause was embraced by the Senate in 2008 when it passed mental health legislation as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, which steered billions of dollars to banks, insurance companies and automobile makers during the financial crisis of the late 2000s.

When he left office in January 2009, after 36 years on Capitol Hill, Mr. Domenici had become the longest-serving senator in New Mexico history. He was succeeded by Representative Tom Udall, a Democrat and a son of Stewart Udall, a former congressman from Arizona and the interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Mr. Domenici’s near-spotless political career was blemished in 2008 when the Senate Ethics Committee admonished him for creating an “appearance of impropriety” by telephoning David Iglesias, a top federal prosecutor in New Mexico, at home shortly before the 2006 midterm elections.

Mr. Domenici’s call, in which he asked about an impending indictment, was made only weeks before the Department of Justice, in December, dismissed eight United States attorneys, including Mr. Iglesias, a move that congressional Democrats said was a political purge by the Republican administration of President George W. Bush.