Imagine that – Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin on the same side of an issue. Grassley usually sticks with his Republican Party colleagues and Harkin is reliably Democratic, but both of Iowa’s senators agree with a call to put more money into the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

LIHEAP provides grants to help heat the homes of low-income families, people with disabilities and the elderly. According to a recent Harkin newsletter: “Last winter, about 86,000 Iowa households received an average of $317 in LIHEAP assistance.”

That’s not a lot of money to the typical reader of this newspaper, but think about it – the fact that people apply for such a modest level of help tells you how worried they are about their energy bills.

Now we’re looking at a possible 48 percent increase in the cost of heating a home with natural gas compared with last winter. With that in mind, a bipartisan group of senators tried to beef up the program twice in October; after an amendment to the Department of Defense appropriations bill failed, they offered an amendment to the Treasury, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriation bill for fiscal year 2006, adding $3.1 billion to the $2 billion included by President George W. Bush in his budget recommendations. The $5.1 billion total would have matched the figure authorized in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Unfortunately, the amendment received only 53 “yes” votes instead of the 60 needed for final consideration.

Grassley said he asked the president in September to add money to LIHEAP “to address what is likely to be a shortage in funding assistance this winter season for thousands of households.”

Harkin said: “In the coming weeks, when Congress takes up an emergency funding bill to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I will again bring up my amendment to provide an emergency increase in funding for LIHEAP. And I will fight with everything I’ve got to pass it.”

This is one of those moments that help us figure out what kind of country we really want. We can say America is supposed to be a place where you take care of your own problems. At the very least, you should be able to heat your residence.

On the other hand, this is the richest country in the world, it’s the 21st century, and some of us are still threatened by the cold. The rest of us can’t help out?

We can always hope for a mild winter. But that’s really not much of a national policy.