Capitol Hill's Collapse
GLASS, ANDREW J.
A Formula for Corruption Capitol Hill's Collapse By Andrew J. Glass Washington I came to Washington as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in 1962, a few months after the death of...
...Andrew J. Glass, a longtime NL contributor, is a veteran Washington observer...
...Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution concurs: "Congress was set up as a deliberative assembly...
...Most of the current spate of suggested reforms— term limits, a balanced budget amendment, cutting Congressional staff and perks—skirt the central concern troubling all sides...
...But the system has been ravaged by pressure groups of every stripe...
...They led, as had Rayburn, by rewarding loyalty and, if necessary, punishing disloyalty...
...Rather, it refers to professional activists and pressure groups across the political spectrum...
...These days journalists are relegated to staking out the marble corridors outside the Senate and House chambers...
...By the mid-1980s, during Ronald Reagan's White House tenure, Congress had almost completely transformed itself...
...That could happen if widespread public distaste for the Bush-engineered Iraq war continues to boil...
...The object was a fairer distribution of real power...
...Over the past two decades the fallen have included Texas Democrat Jim Wright (House speaker), California Democrat Tony Coelho (House majority whip), Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich (House speaker), Louisiana Republican Bob Livingston (House speaker), and Mississippi Republican Trent Lott (Senate majority leader...
...Legislators engage those groups by ginning up scores of bills—most of them poorly positioned to be enacted into law...
...a continuing stalemate on immigration policy...
...The Founders made no provisions for lobbyists...
...The public is mobilized...
...Hardeman, who found a perch on Boggs' staff, liked to quote nuggets of wisdom Rayburn would share with incoming freshmen...
...Nowadays, it's the external world that has changed...
...They feel more vulnerable...
...Republicans mustered nationwide resources to unseat Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004...
...Newfound Democratic muscle on Capitol Hill pitted against a lame-duck GOP President would likely engender executive and legislative gridlock...
...The Democrats, who are virtually powerless on Capitol Hill, have been reduced to complaining about Republican excesses and charging that the majority fosters "a culture of corruption...
...Heavily financed business representatives, acting on their own orthrough hired law firms, have turned lobbying into a major Washington industry, dwarfing their labor, environmental and consumer counterparts...
...In the aftermath of Vietnam, the liberal reformers of the mid-1970s hoped and expected that their newfound access to power would allow them at long last to advance legislation in the public interest as they saw it...
...Though it would be a boon to the Democrats in November, a midterm flip is unlikely to alter Congress'hoary qualities...
...Several academic studies reduce the number of "swing" districts to no more than 40 in an "average" year—perhaps 50 should another shift occur of the magnitude of 1974 or 1994...
...It was never located...
...In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's nomination of Lewis Strauss as commerce secretary tied up the Senate for months in a test of wills between Ike and Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson...
...But it is, I would submit, definitely worse off for it...
...As an inexperienced correspondent, I sought the tutelage of D.B...
...an inability to resolve the problem of corporate defined-benefit pension plans underfunded by nearly $500 billion...
...Patience, reason and compromise were their tools in wielding authority...
...Meanwhile, the durable internal stability of the Rayburn era has been shattered...
...During the Vietnam War—as now with Iraq—lawmakers kept ratcheting their criticism but continued to approve funds for carrying on the battle...
...Today, when reporters call the offices of legislative leaders from either side of the aisle, there are few if any D.B...
...One that appears in Rayburn: A Biography—coauthored by Donald C. Bacon and published in 1987, six years after Hardeman's death—advises: "If you tell the truth the first time, you don't have to remember what you said...
...Shortly thereafter, his small plane disappeared during a flight between Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska...
...In any event, a dysfunctional Congress has already allowed Bush to push through tax cuts costing billions of dollars without reining in outlays, giving us a Federal deficit of over $8 trillion...
...We had a system that tended to keep [special interest groups] at a little bit more of a distance...
...Norman Omstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who is a respected Washington insider, accurately sums up the present situation on Capitol Hill: "Getting a majority out of 435 very disparate, independently empowered individuals is extremely difficult to do...
...The Republican-controlled 109th Congress returns in January following a shabby session marked by several dubious milestones: a failure to seriously control spending...
...About the only surefire way to get through is to announce that you are a booker for a Sunday morning network television gab fest and are most eager to get the boss on camera...
...To be sure, the legislative system James Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers devised as a mechanism of checks and balances did leave room for some built-in irresolution...
...the rise of an arcane "budget process...
...The nation's 435 Congressional districts, comprised of roughly 700,000 people each, have been realigned by state legislatures into stout partisan fortresses...
...But at least one factor is the time legislators spend out of town raising funds and genuflecting to VIP constituents...
...In short, the Balkanization of power in Congress has produced an ongoing conflict between actions that benefit individual members and those in the collective interest of the country...
...The subsequent shame of the McCarthy era will long be remembered...
...In the late 1930s, with war clouds gathered over Europe and the Far East, the House under Speaker Rayburn did little to bolster the nation's defenses, despite prodding from President Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...try to bargain out the myriad differences in a vast society such as ours...
...Yet despite the recent sharp drop in poll approval numbers for Bush and Congress, it is doubtful that an electoral comeuppance is in store for the Republicans...
...The indictments of Texas Republican Tom DeLay—until October the House majority leader—are merely the latest in a long series of legislative dethronings...
...and everyone is making demands on their individual members of Congress...
...It was [meant] to refine and enlarge public views—not simply to reflect immediate public preferences, but to...
...They are relentless in their demands on lawmakers and loath to strike the sorts of compromises that lie at the heart of effective legislative dealings...
...Rayburn set a tone for conducting the public's business that endured for nearly 15 years after he died...
...Hardeman, a former journalist who worked for Rayburn as a one-man intelligence service while preparing a biography of the speaker, whom he first met in 1952 when the bald-headed Democrat was rallying Texans behind balding Presidential contender Adlai E. Stevenson...
...Press staffs, down to the most junior intern, are invariably tied up in meetings, enjoying the comfort of voicemail...
...The class of 1974, heavy with liberal Democrats, supplied the votes for change...
...Even Barron's, a citadel of conservative capitalism, frets that "the dysfunctional behavior is starting to worry investors...
...But the rise of subcommittees increased Congress' workload and undermined cohesion...
...Henceforth an expanded list of subcommittees could hold hearings on any subject at any time...
...A Formula for Corruption Capitol Hill's Collapse By Andrew J. Glass Washington I came to Washington as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in 1962, a few months after the death of House Speaker Sam Raybum of Texas, who served in Congress for nearly five decades under eight Presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy...
...Together with his close ally LBJ, Rayburn believed legislators who get along the best go along the most...
...that are now pushed out of a hatred for individual members, and a zeal to remove corruption, actually open up the process to interests even more, make members more vulnerable to them, and lead to a muchbigger problem...
...In an earlier era, when party leaders like Hale Boggs opened their homes and inner sanctums to the press, a reporter came away with a firm grasp of the complex legislative scene—without becoming a sycophant to power...
...George W. Bush is the first President since John Quincy Adams to serve a full term in the White House without vetoing a single measure...
...In 1994, conservatives inherited the elaborate legislative machinery and began to apply it to their own purposes...
...They buttonhole legislators and are gratified if they manage to garner a sound bite or two for their efforts...
...In large part, the lobbyists' ranks have swelled because every legislator is now a target of opportunity...
...The 25 all-powerful committee chairs, feared and resented by most of their colleagues, created or disbanded subcommittees at will, pushing ahead favored legislation and burying unwanted bills referred to their fiefdoms...
...Everyone is organized into a group...
...They even warned against the advent of political parties as debilitating "factions...
...a cockeyed energy policy that denies environmental realities and largely rejects the need for conservation...
...Nonetheless, these measures are useful for spawning electoral endorsements and shaking out contributions...
...and, most critical of all, a shift in loyalties from party to fundraisers, manifested in a network of political action committees...
...An able mentor, Hardeman illuminated the inner workings of the House during JFK's New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society...
...ALONG WITH the seniority system, reporters' easy access to Congressional leaders has vanished...
...Changes begun in the previous decade resulted in the collapse of the venerable seniority system...
...Selective cuts in domestic spending—mostly targeted at lower- and middle-class beneficiaries—have been more than offset by the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, whose long-term price cannot be predicted accurately, as well as spending on the war and homeland security...
...I last met at length with Boggs in 1972, as the Congressional correspondent for National Journal...
...and duck-and-cover posturing over Iraq...
...Following the Watergate scandal, this legislative dike broke...
...After all, as the magazine recently observed, "it's not just Democrats and Republicans who are throwing haymakers at one another: Republicans are at each other's throats as well, and have become the biggest obstacle to their own promarket agenda of tax cuts, less regulation and free trade...
...This has significantly decreased personal contact among them, and Congressmen who do not know one another well inevitably lack an overriding sense of common purpose...
...They give the public what it says it wants, but not what it needs...
...The House leaders who immediately followed him—Democrats John McCormack of Massachusetts, Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Carl Albert of Oklahoma—also shied away from appearing on television but remained accessible to print journalists and visiting political scientists...
...In Mann's analysis, "the public" does not stand for your average Wal-Mart shopper...
...Congressional collegialiry has given way to a take-no-prisoners approach...
...Three decades later, their breakthrough has proved a Pyrrhic victory—and the system still needs fixing...
...Those "reforms" have taken an appallingtoll...
...Historically, irresponsibility and cowardice are no strangers to Congress...
...Hardemans on the other end of line with the savvy to let them know what is really going on...
...Until 1975, the year after I joined the newly formed Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau, Congress' pecking order was determined by length of service...
...Just as it survived the end of seniority, the Republic will survive the demise of freewheeling exchanges between reporters and political heavyweights on Capitol Hill...
...It would be a mistake, though, to become overly nostalgic about the good old days...
...the ease of jet travel and fatter allowances that begat a threeday Congressional workweek...
...The reforms...
...Blame for such performance is not easy to pinpoint...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
