Schumer Lists Democrats' New Agenda

Senator Schumer, who concentrated his party's firepower on Iraq during an election in which he masterminded a narrow victory in the Senate, laid out the Democratic Party's less talked about domestic agenda yesterday.

"It's high time that Congress address issues that matter to the average family," Mr. Schumer, who was recently elected no. 3 in the Senate and will oversee the party's policy and strategy, said yesterday in New York.

Although Mr. Schumer presented the raft of policies — which included allowing prescription drug prices to be negotiated; restoring college tuition tax credits; raising the minimum wage, and tackling energy prices — as bipartisan and uncontentious, they immediately ran into trouble from conservatives who said many of the measures would not achieve their aims.

At the top of the Democrats' agenda is legislation that would allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, which could lead to a drop in drug costs for New York's senior citizens, Mr. Schumer said.

However, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, John Calfee, said Mr. Schumer's claim was misleading. Medicare might not be able to bargain for lower prices on all drugs, he said. Mr. Calfee cited certain cancer drugs, for example, for which only a handful of alternatives are available, leaving little room for price negotiation.

He added that driving down the prices of drugs that have a number of substitutes could have a negative effect by stifling research and development, as companies would have little incentive to enter the market if drug prices are too low.

"We look forward to working with Democrats in Congress, but we won't change our goals of keeping taxes low on hardworking families and aggressively fighting the war on terror, including winning in Iraq," a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Aaron McLear, said, though he declined to comment on Mr. Schumer's list of legislative priorities.

Among other proposals Mr. Schumer announced yesterday was the restoration and expansion of tax credits for college tuition, which he said were eliminated in 2005 in favor of billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil companies. "Not only do we want the first $4,000 of tuition to be deductible, but we'd like to raise it to $12,000," he said.

He also said he aimed to raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25 from $5.15 in three steps over a two-year period.

The senator said he hoped to achieve greater energy independence for America through a combination of increasing the percentage of vehicles capable of using alternative fuels and pumping more federal funds into energy-related research. By 2010, 25% of new vehicles sold in America would, by law, have to be equipped with flexible fuel technology, he said.

Mr. Schumer also cited a number of legislative measures aimed at New York City, including more funds for mass transit and the MTA's long-delayed Second Avenue subway, as well as a greater share of Homeland Security funding for the city.

Democrats yesterday said their measures were not intended to be divisive. Mr. Schumer "is not talking about big polarizing, ideological debates here. He is talking about getting real results," Amy Rutkin, the chief of staff for Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, said.

The agenda is intended to unite Democrats around a single program of action, she said. "We have had our moments of what we would call a lack of discipline on message or agenda" in the past, Ms. Rutkin said.