The idea seemed so right, so obviously necessary, that even a Congress known for its partisanship had to get on board.
Or so U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta thought of his proposed Disaster Loan Fairness Act, which he came up with after September flooding devastated dozens of businesses in his congressional district.
The proposed law says that after a natural disaster, a damaged small business could get a 1 percent federal loan to rebuild, a rate far lower than the free market.
"I'm going to tell you there wasn't anybody that I talked to, Democrat or Republican, that when I explained (the bill), they didn't think this was a great idea," said Barletta, R-11, Hazleton. "When I talk about the fact that we gave Pakistan $215 million for flood disaster relief, zero interest, no payback, but yet we're going to charge Americans 6 percent interest? How is that fair?"
Introduced in late September, the bill picked up 23 co-sponsors, Democratic and Republican, and was referred to the House Small Business Committee, where it remains "a great idea" unfulfilled.
Barletta will run for re-election this year, and starting in 2013, the 11th congressional District will encompass a large part of Northumberland County - now part of the 10th - from Sunbury east and south.
Seated behind his desk in his downtown Hazleton congressional office, the mayor-turned-congressman rubs his forehead in frustration, even though a freshman congressman getting a bill passed is rare.
"In the campaign, I said Washington was broken and that was the feeling from an outsider looking in .., but now being somebody who's been there a year, I'm convinced it's broken," Barletta said.
Using an argument hotly disputed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats who say Republicans are the obstructionists, Barletta said the House Republican majority could have fixed Washington further if it weren't for balky Senate Democrats.
Frustrating freshman class
In his first year in office, Barletta has been part of an aggressive, right-leaning freshman class of 87 Republicans who have, at times, frustrated even their leader, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio.
For example, during negotiations on raising the nation's debt-limit last July, the freshman class, many of them with Tea Party roots, thought its proposed spending cuts too small and forced House Republican leaders to recalibrate.
"I think we pushed them further than they might have gone on their own," Barletta said.
Democrats portray him and the House Republicans as too far to the right.
"The first year of Rep. Lou Barletta's Republican Congress is marked by extreme partisanship and unbending protection of Big Oil and the ultra wealthy," Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a recent statement. "Barletta and House Republicans have spent this first year in chronic chaos - failing to protect the middle class or create jobs."
But Barletta argues he's really a moderate Republican who did his best to "get what we could," knowing Democrats control the Senate and White House.
Through Dec. 31, Barletta had voted with his party 92 percent of the time, up 2 percentage points from early August. Excluding Mr. Boehner, who rarely votes, 129 of the other 242 Republicans who were House members for at least part of 2011 voted in a higher percentage with their party than Barletta, according to an analysis of members' voting records listed on the Washington Post Congressional Votes database. Another 83 Republicans voted in a lower percentage with their party than Barletta. The other 30 voted with the party at the same rate as Barletta.
By comparison, former Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a Nanticoke Democrat, voted with his party 97 percent of the time in his last term in office. Excluding then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 140 of 268 Democrats who served part of the term voted at a 98 percent or higher rate with their party. Another 44 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted at the same party-line rate as Kanjorski and the rest at lower rates.
In a separate measure, one based on co-sponsorship of bills, Barletta is a "moderate Republican follower," according to GovTrack.us, whose evaluation Barletta cited.
Party man on key issues
But on the key Republican agenda matters, generally anything related to cutting spending, repealing health care reform or drastically altering Medicare to save it, Barletta sided with his party. On spending, Republicans have changed "the culture of Washington" and he's been a part of that, he boasts.
"In the beginning of the year, ... nobody was talking about cutting spending, including the president of the United States," Barletta said. "The argument then became about how much to cut."
Though he has stayed loyal to his party far more often than not, Barletta said he has shown a willingness to stray from Republican orthodoxy. Widely known for fighting illegal immigration as Hazleton's mayor, Barletta organized an eight-member freshman immigration caucus separate from an existing one. He fought - successfully, so far - a Republican committee chairman's measure to block cities' attempts to enforce their own illegal immigration employment laws. He also co-sponsored a tax-credit bill to encourage the use of vehicles run on alternative fuels such as natural gas.
The alternative fuels bill earned the scorn of the Northeast Pennsylvania Tea Party, which launched a telephone campaign criticizing him for government interference in free markets. Barletta argues the energy market isn't free because Arab oil-producing states dictate prices, despite decades of presidents promising to reduce dependency on foreign oil.
"With natural gas, we have a real opportunity to finally do that. And in Pennsylvania, we could be the leader," he said, referring to Marcellus Shale gas.
He also, at first, opposed Republican-sponsored disaster relief in the middle of the worst flooding in northeast and central Pennsylvania in decades. But Barletta, who opposed the bill at the time because it did not provide enough funding, said he wanted a firm commitment to full flood-relief funding, a promise of leadership help in passing his disaster loan bill and he wanted Boehner to see flood damage first hand, he said. He got all three, though the loan bill remains pending.
In mid-November, Boehner visited the Bloomsburg area, where the inability to qualify for a federal flood-control project risks the closure of the Autoneum North America Inc. plant. The company, which makes automobile upholstery and employes 700 people, is considering moving because of repeated flooding.
"We're talking about bringing manufacturing back. How about keeping manufacturing that we already have?" Barletta said.
Fighting the flood
Barletta said he is fighting to change the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' criteria for evaluating a flood-control project to factor in lost jobs and other economic factors rather than just damage prevented, and for an end-to-end study of the Susquehanna River and its flood plain.
The flooding, he said, "changed my life."
"I still, in my (Washington) office, have the pictures of the homes and the total destruction and watching people take their life's memories out to the sidewalk and dump them. Photos of their children, standing there while senior citizens told me they just can't do it any more, they don't even want to go back in their home again," Barletta said. "I never thought I was going to be a flood congressman, but this was the turn that it took."
Barletta said he's proven his responsiveness to local needs and he's all about open government.
After a staff member left the impression for about a week last June that only accredited media could record his town hall meetings, Barletta said anyone could. He points to hosting five town hall meetings, two telephone town halls and 10 roundtables with leaders from various sectors.
Though none of the bills he has sponsored has passed - typical for a freshman congressman - Barletta succeeded in getting the Pittston post office named after State Trooper Joshua D. Miller, who was killed in the line of duty in June 2009.
But what Mr. Barletta and many congressman might be judged by during the election this year is what they did to produce jobs. In an economy still struggling to recover from the 2008 collapse, economic uncertainty is uppermost in the minds of Americans.
Barletta said House Republicans have done plenty, passing more than two dozen bills that would curb regulation, lift bans on offshore oil drilling, free up trade with Colombia, Panama and Korea and take other steps.
Bill impasse
Most of the bills remain unpassed because the Senate has refused to act on them.
"And that's where the system is broken," Barletta said. "In a perfect world, if you and I were trying to negotiate on something, that's exactly what we would do. If I gave you something and said, 'Take a look at this' and you don't like it, well, then change it, amend it, send me something back, give me another opportunity to find the common ground where we could pass something. But if you're going to take it and throw it in a drawer, we're not going to get anywhere."
Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said Democrats have passed bills "that will actually create jobs."
"Republicans have wasted their time with Tea Party-driven bills that independent economists say will fail to create jobs," Jentleson wrote in an e-mail. Republicans could have the Congressional Budget Office evaluate their bills for how many jobs they produce, but haven't "because they know they don't actually create jobs."
Barletta said nothing will change until Republicans control the White House.
"I think Barack Obama is a very charismatic man, he's a great orator. I think he has very little executive experience, and I think it shows. He has very little business experience, his policies are simply not working and they're not going to work," he said.