Senate

Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison's landslide victory over Democratic Sen. Bob Krueger has to be cause for concern among Democrats in the states where their incumbents' terms expire next year. Senator Krueger is not a great vote-getter, but he was never swamped like this in his previous losses. Senator-elect Hutchison got 67 percent of the vote. She emphasized her opposition to new taxes and criticized President Clinton and his party for not proposing greater spending cuts. The president's unpopularity seems to be catching.

Sen. Hank Brown, R-Colo., has proposed an investigation to )) find out who leaked Anita Hill's FBI interview and her confidential statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. George Mitchell, D-Maine, the majority leader, says he also supports such an investigation. We trust he means it. He may be conflicted. The leaker is almost surely a senior Democratic senator or a member of such a senator's staff.Some critics of the leaking of the statement and the interview blame the press for reporting what was in the documents.

Legislators gave a skeptical reception yesterday to an advocacy group's claim that state funding to help children at risk of academic failure is going instead to teacher salaries, heating bills and other general expenses. Advocates for Children and Youth briefed lawmakers on a report the group released last week saying that while the state has sent an extra $500 million to school districts to help educate at-risk students, the districts are spending less money on programs targeted to them.

WASHINGTON -- Even for those who have grown accustomed to grotesque numbers in politics, the $34 million Jon S. Corzine is spending to win a Democratic nomination for the Senate in New Jersey seems a little outlandish. It is, as you may have guessed, the new record for a Senate campaign, passing the $30 million mark established by Michael Huffington in a California campaign six years ago. But Mr. Corzine has accomplished this feat just competing in the primary Tuesday. Mr. Huffington frittered his money away in both capturing the Republican nomination in a primary and then losing the general election to Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

WASHINGTON -- If President Bush still has any reservations about how irate average investors are about the revelations of corporate corruption and greed, the Republican members of the U.S. Senate clearly don't share them. They voted in lockstep with all Democratic senators for the tough reforms crafted by Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, which the president had declined to embrace in his news conference and Wall Street speech on corporate misdeeds. After the 97-0 vote Monday, Mr. Bush put the best face on the breaking of GOP ranks.

IN A cynical attempt to make Bob Packwood a scapegoat for generations of congressional sexism, the Senate Ethics Committee put Americans on notice: No private diary is safe from government investigators.Ironically, the recently established constitutional right to privacy, which forms the basis for all the pro-choice law in this country, is being undermined by panicky senators determined to punish one of their own for boorish behavior in a previous era.Do you keep a diary? More of us should: It not only lets us blow off steam and articulate private thoughts that would be impolitic or libelous if said out loud, but it also preserves memories and reveals our youthful selves to our aging selves.

Two months too late, Richard L. Thornburgh has resigned as attorney general to run for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania. It is two months late because he let his intentions be known in June, yet remained in his sensitive post until it suited his political purposes to begin an active campaign.As was predictable, this insensitivity to the need for justice administered without any appearance of a conflicting personal political interest stained the reputations of Mr. Thornburgh and the department.

SEVEN YEARS AGO, I attended the inaugural symposium of the Carter Presidential Center of Emory University in Atlanta. It was called ''A Middle East Consultation,'' a mundane title that in no way captured the vigorous, illuminating dialogue that it spurred between various diplomats, academics and other pooh-bahs from this country and abroad.The very fact that the affair was co-chaired by two former living presidents -- Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford -- gave it a certain uniqueness and stature that set it apart from the run-of-the-mill, think-tank colloquies where pedagogues and pundits regularly suck their thumbs and furrow their brows over global agendas.

California, with a population and budget bigger than most nations, has a disproportionate thirst for cheap government water, and other states resent it. Within California, the dispute over federally supplied water divides north from south, farm from city, but lawmakers who represent the state at large are politically bound to defend the costly status quo against cuts by outsiders.Thus the disappearing clout of California's U.S. senators is a serious liability as Congress considers dozens of bills aimed at either boosting drought relief or slicing water subsidies for the state.

Washington. -- The Senate was part of the Founders' plan to provide republican remedies for problems to which republics are prey. In a republic, the people are sovereign, but the immediate desires of the people can conflict with the long-term interests of the republic.The Senate was designed to facilitate the reconciliation of those desires and interests. Thus it reflects the Founders' distrust of unmediated majority rule. But today the Senate is a far cry from what the Founders intended, and what some liberals suddenly want it to be.Since last November's elections the House has acted with the sort of dispatch the Senate disdains.