The Nation's Pulse / Jim Wright's Wrongs
Lindberg, Tod
Jim Wright's Wrongs by Tod Lindberg / n the torn-up note found in his brief- case after he turned up dead, an apparent suicide, Vince Foster offered this parting reflection on life in official...
...Some have done quite well: North Carolina earned $5.4 million on sales of $51.2 million in 1994, and Texas has made money from prison industries in every year since it began its modem labor program in 1963...
...The only possible exception is the book deal...
...Although the committee took the unusual step to hire outside counsel to investigate the formal complaints against Wright, it circumscribed the counsel's jurisdiction to the specific areas of violations alleged in the complaints, seemingly preventing a full-scale inquiry into the speaker's wheeling and dealing...
...We do not know if Foster considered himself already ruined, or was worried about someone ruining him...
...T he centerpiece was Wright's book deal, a scheme to keep extra money flowing into his personal wallet despite the cap on honoraria...
...Instead, Wright's staff promoted bulk sales to organizations that wanted Wright to speak to them...
...And while a life lived wholly admirably and above reproach offers a defense that Jim Wright certainly did not have at his disposal, there is still the lingering question of whether, in the fetid air of scandal season in Washington, innocence is really good enough...
...and a rule capping "outside earned income" per calendar year at 30 percent of a member's salary...
...The speaker's total take from the scheme from 1984 to 1987 was $54,600—all of it in sham "royalties" that violated House rules on gifts, outside income, and disclosure...
...But Wright, pressured by overwhelmingly hostile public opinion as his ethics prob lems worsened, had brought the matter to a floor vote in February...
...And every day, there are some—in Congress, in the press, in advocacy groups, in public-policy non-profits—who dream about the next ruination...
...It went down ignominiously—and so, eventually, did Wright...
...Party-line votes yielded no result, since the committees are composed equally of Democrats and Republicans...
...By early 1989, press accounts were raising matters not even touched on in the Phelan report...
...Wright's ignominious resignation of the speakership in 1989 marked the start, in a way, of Gingrich's meteoric rise—so it would be good sport if the same kinds of charges brought Gingrich down as well...
...once again, Gingrich and other Republicans warned of a possible committee whitewash...
...Wright had been allowed to buy into his investment after the well was known to be productive, but at the price reserved for the risk-takers in the initial drilling, who obviously did not know whether the well would be commercially successful...
...Jim Wright's Wrongs by Tod Lindberg / n the torn-up note found in his brief- case after he turned up dead, an apparent suicide, Vince Foster offered this parting reflection on life in official Washington: "Here, mining people is considered sport...
...Moore formed the Madison Publishing Company (which published nothing else before or since), took the collection of speeches compiled and edited by Wright's congressional staffers, and printed 20,000 copies of the slender volume with a cover price of $5.95...
...The Phelan report shows they were anything but...
...In the ordinary course of events, congressional ethics committees were places where even fairly heinous behavior resulted in no more than a rap on the knuckles...
...Gingrich, moreover, finally settled on a royalty-only arrangement in which he bears the entire risk for the success or failure of the project, and reaps a financial reward in exact proportion to the book's commercial value...
...by David Frum Support for Wright among his Democratic colleagues had already been dwindling over the derailment of the con gressional pay raise, which they under stood would take effect without a vote...
...But Wright was apparently less fond of plaques and Fertilizer Institute pen-and-pencil sets than he was of money...
...This financial detour happened numerous times in 1985 and 1986—with the National Association of Realtors, Ocean Spray, the Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association, and others...
...The book was auctioned, for example, and other publishers bid in the millions for it...
...Any fair reading of the history of Jim Wright and the current charges against Newt Gingrich supports but a single conclusion: the sum total of everything that has been alleged against Gingrich over many years, predating his ascendancy to the speakership, even if it is all true, is nothing next to Wright's misconduct...
...This idea provoked some skeptical harumphing from prison administrators, for in fact prison labor has not recently proved a great success...
...But because the amount is not large next to Gingrich's $4 million, Wright's sins mayseem a bit small-time now...
...A private contractor could have provided the chairs within six weeks at a price of $54 each...
...One of them—an interest in a Texas natural gas well—was worth around $90,000...
...Wright arranged for a long-time member of his entourage—William Carlos Moore, a former bag man for Jimmy Hoffa at the Teamsters union who had done prison time in the 1970s for income tax evasion—to publish a vanity collection of Wright's speeches entitled Reflections of a Public Man...
...The deal took advantage of an exception to the limit on "outside earned income": royalties from 46 The American Spectator August 1995 the sale of books don't count against it...
...0 I t's amazing: some 1.5 million able-bodied people are now enjoying free housing, free meals, television, libraries, educational services, and gymnasiums, all without working and all at the expense of the American taxpayer...
...These gifts included a number of interest-free or sweetheart loans and use of a condominium and townhouse in Fort Worth...
...Barely a week before, the Orange County Register had printed a searing denunciation of the largest employer of convict labor in America: the California Prison Industry Authority...
...Wright's wife was given use of a car and an $18,000-a-year job from Mallightco, a partnership between Mallick and Wright for which Betty Wright, according to Phelan, did no work...
...And the committee selected as counsel Richard J. Phelan, a well-heeled, well-connected Democrat from Chicago...
...Wright also received some $150,000 in unreported and improper gifts from a long-time Texas friend and business partner, George Mallick...
...Phelan also concluded that in 1986 and 1987, "Wright improperly used his position in the House leadership to exercise undue influence on the actionstaken by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to control the burgeoning savings and loan crisis in Texas and elsewhere...
...Among many examples found by the Register: California State Polytechnic University in Pomona wanted 213 chairs to outfit a new computer lab...
...That $4 million book deal, for example—how could that fail to remind us of Jim Wright's own book deal, one of the central points in the ethics charges that brought him down...
...Wright signed the check over to Madison Publishing, which then returned $1,650 to him—his 55 percent royalty...
...People are not ruined for sport in Washington, though those doing the ruining seem to enjoy themselves...
...a rule prohibiting the acceptance of gifts whose value totaled more than $100 in a calendar year from someone with "a direct interest in legislation before the Congress...
...Tod Lindberg is editorial page editor of the Washington Times...
...Six weeks after the Phelan report was made public, he announced his resig nation during an emotional speech on the packed House floor...
...Phelan delivered a 279-page report that concluded there were some 116 instances in which Wright had broken House rules...
...Once again, it didn't happen...
...There was cronyism and mutual back-scratching, and a judicious application of sheer clout for the benefit of friends, business partners, and contributors...
...The violations were neither minor nor technical...
...Here, people are ruined for political reasons...
...Bookstores were not exactly overrun with customers eager to get their hands on a copy, but the book was rarely available in stores anyway...
...And when questioned, Gramm's staff admitted that they had undertaken no research at all into the practicality of the senator's commitment...
...Anonymous speculation from Capitol Hill that Wright might not survive began to mount as the ethics committee met in March behind closed doors to consider the still-secret Phelan report...
...Although the committee did not accept all of Phelan's conclusions—including the more volatile ones related to the distinction between legitimate "constituent service" and "undue influence" with respect to regulators—it voted unanimously to issue a five-count "Statement of Alleged Violations" that cited sixty-nine instances in which Wright broke The American Spectator August 1995 47 House rules...
...A brief review of the fall of Jim Wright seems in order, then, if only to see what standard for ethical lapses he set...
...But no one has proffered a shred of evidence that this is the case, and there is much to suggest the contrary...
...That was careless of Gramm...
...Gingrich and the Republicans decried the whitewash they thought was sure to follow...
...The book scheme is the best remembered part of Wright's fall...
...The atmosphere had all the characteristics of a media feeding frenzy...
...The California prison system is the largest in the nation...
...In a May address to the National Rifle Association, presidential contender Phil Gramm denounced the absurdity of this government-run hospitality business, and proposed that the federal government should attempt to defray half the cost of the federal prison system by putting prisoners to work...
...Insistent allegations by Gingrich and others that Wright violated these rules led to an inquiry begun in June 1988 by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct—the ethics committee...
...instead, the university was required to pay $92 per chair to the prison industries authority—and to wait nearly a year...
...Perhaps the most entertaining was the Fertilizer Institute, which had expressed a nice, ethical desire "to do something," as the Phelan report quoted the company, in conjunction with a speech Wright was giving—perhaps presentation of a memento of the occasion "such as a plaque, or small gift, et cetera...
...As an added irritant, California was also employing hundreds of non-convict shop foremen, superintendents, and salesmen—and paying them wages well above those earned by comparable employees in the private sector...
...tries cost the state more money than they brought in—despite their being a monopoly with average wages of 56 cents an hour, factory space that's practically free, and no taxes or benefits to pay...
...Ethics complaints about the Speaker are seemingly endless, and there is a delicious irony in the fact that it was Gingrich who launched the unrelenting, incendiary ethics attacks on Jim Wright, one of his predecessors...
...Unfortunately, in five of the past twelve years, California's prison indusDavid Frum is the author of Dead Right (New Republic/BasicBooks...
...And while a $3 million profit was turned in 1993-94, that $3 million forced even bigger hidden costs onto the taxpayer, disguised in the ridiculously high prices paid by the state agencies that must buy from the prison-industry monopoly...
...He was over the 30 percent limit, so the university received $3,000 worth of books...
...Most of these dreams today center around Newt Gingrich...
...As in the case of "moral equivalence" between the United States and the Soviet Union, this doctrine is a real self-esteem booster for those who would consider it distasteful to pick a side...
...The urge to protect one's own is usually overwhelming...
...There were questions about how blind the speaker's blind trust really was, and about instances in which Wright suddenly reimbursed corporations for travel that had taken place years before...
...Call it "scandal equivalence"—the idea that one fishy-smelling book deal is the same as another when you come right down to it, and that every ethical breach or crime a Republican pins on a Democrat has an equal and opposite ethical breach or crime a Democrat can justifiably pin on a Republican...
...N one of the other forty-one states that use prison labor has compiled a record as bad as California's...
...Wright was to receive an astonishing 55 percent royalty on each book sold...
...On April 17, it also made Working for the Man the full Phelan report public...
...For example, he spoke at Southwest Texas State University in October 1984, according to Phelan's report, and received a $3,000 check in return...
...Gingrich did seem to strike it rich with that deal, and if in fact it had been part of a secret arrangement with Rupert Murdoch—whereby Gingrich would use the speaker's office to benefit the owner of HarperCollins—then it would have been a grave matter indeed...
...They looked like nothing so much as a pattern of routinely corrupt behavior—of a politician's noting how well political power attracts money, and holding out his hand accordingly...
...But North Carolina's $5.4 million profit does not make much of a dent in the $360 million the state spends each year on its prisons...
...W hen Wright was speaker, among the rules of conduct for members were a statutory ban on honoraria of more than $2,000 per speech, appearance or article...
...They were wrong...
...It seems, then, that Vince Foster was wrong...
...Aided by a monopoly on state purchasing, Prison Industries, as the California authority is known, is a big business, with total sales of some $135 million in 1993-94...
...There is simply no evidence of a Wright-like pattern of behavior in which public office was exploited, day-in and day-out, for private gain...
...Prison Industries," the Register concludes, "has a history of providing shoddy, overpriced products...
...the state holds nearly twice as many prisoners as the federal government, and at more than twice the expense...
...We do know, though, that the ranks of the ruined in Washington are legion...
...And Texas's achievement of putting 8 percent of the 48 The American Spectator August 1995...
...The "small gift" ended up being a purchase of $2,023 of Wright's Reflections, of which $1,112.65 went to Wright...
...All they had to do to qualify for this deal: kill, rob, or rape somebody...
...p helan concluded that Wright had received a number of unreported gifts...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
