How the Democrats Learned to Love the Three-Martini Lunch
Rowe, Jonathan
How the Democrats Learned to Love the Three-Martini Lunch by Jonathan Rowe In the early 1960s, while the nation was opening its eyes to poverty in the "Other America," it was also discovering the...
...Vic Fingerhut, the pollster, found that between 60 and 70 percent of "Reagan Democrats" in nine northern states agreed with such populist themes as closing tax breaks for the rich...
...Nobody knows exactly how much revenue is at stake, but it's clearly in the billions of dollars...
...In one case, a lobbyist for Nevada gambling casinos arranged for Harrah's at Lake Tahoe to pay for a five-day trip by a senior staff member, James Healy, and his wife and two children...
...You begin to forget that there is anything wrong with it...
...At a simpler level, these occasions tend to preempt a congressman's or staff member's time...
...Back in Washington, there are ample opportunities for Congressmen to avail themselves of the tax-deductible expense account world...
...Common Cause magazine recently detailed the "crown suites" at Dallas Cowboy football games (renting for $30,000 to $125,000 apiece), the $100 million spent on parties at the Superbowl, the competition between Time and Newsweek to throw the most lavish bash at the Republican and Democratic conventions...
...James Mosher of the Medical Research Institute of San Francisco estimates that businesses purchase 12 percent of the retail alcohol in the country, and that the deductions for these purchases alone cost the Treasury up to $5 billion a year...
...This cynical attitude encourages cheating up and down the line...
...executive in mind...
...Since Carter left office, the Democrats haven't shown any greater enthusiasm for the issue...
...But should the government subsidize this behavior, especially on the all-important supply side...
...The House weakened Kennedy's proposal, an at the urging of Democrats like Russell Long and Robert Kerr (as in the Kerr-McGee oil con glomerate), the Senate caved even further...
...Cabin cruisers, country club memberships, and the like could still be written off if used "primarily" for business purposes...
...A vice president of Diners Club called the IRS crackdown "tremendous...
...Yet, in 1982, it was Senator Bob Dole, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who secured an amendment, in the wee hours after the lobbyists had gone home, to cut in half the deduction for expense account living...
...Under Eisenhower, the IRS had begun to tighten up its enforcement of these deductions, and when John F. Kennedy took office, he vowed to make tax cheating by the rich one of his crusades...
...Taxpayers underwrite luxury lunches so the busboys get to cart away the dishes...
...The overwhelming majority of taxpayers eat lunch without being able to deduct their meals as business expenses," this official said...
...The labor movement's adamant defense of tax-free fringe benefits is another boost for T & E deductions: "There's a feeling that [those deductions] are part of the fringe benefits issue, and that makes members wary," a House staff person said...
...Watered down to the point where they had no impact," is how Gerard Brannon, a Treasury economist at the time, describes the resulting restrictions...
...How does it advance business to muddle the mind...
...but it's also important to consider who the Democrats have become...
...The more records they need the better off we are!' Pizza Huts vs...
...There's also the matter of bureaucracy...
...Despite the high potential of three martini lunches as an issue, the Democrats aren't talking about it very much any more, just as they aren't talking much about broader populist themes...
...To be sure, not every utterrance of this group has been a master stroke of public relations...
...According to George Will, the head of the 400,000-member Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union once called the deductability of expense account entertainment a "human rights" issue...
...Representative Jacobs recalls a Ways and Means mark-up session in the mid-seventies at which a Republican offered a proposal to prohibit lobbyists from deducting the cost of entertaining members of Congress...
...When you talk about expense account lunches, you are hitting Washington where it lives...
...The National Restaurant Association contended during the Carter years that the typical business lunch consisted of a hamburger or sandwich, french fries, vegetable, and salad, all for $3.98...
...it is almost an act of disloyalty to speak of people trying to solve problems on their own...
...They'd be spent on something else, which would mean jobs and potential union members in other industries...
...The plan would have done a Democrat proud...
...even his own party didn't take him seriously...
...But Carter was no more successful than Kennedy had been...
...Long demanded of Michael Blumenthal, Carter's Treasury secretary, at a committee hearing...
...An hour on a plane trip together" with a lobbyist is "as significant as them spending 20 days together in Washington" was how Rostenkowski's staff explained the business purpose of the chairman's outings...
...A trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, Havana, Cuba, or some other place has always been opportune to attend some New Year's Day bowl game or other affairs, yet the trip was to see some concern about selling ." An IRS study found that nearly half of all deductions involving travel and entertainment ("T & E") needed adjustment...
...Business deals should be concluded in the office, where they belong," said the president of a company on Long Island...
...T]he time has come," Kennedy said in a special message to Congress, "when our tax laws should cease their encouragement of luxury spending as a charge on the Federal Treasury...
...A New York saloon-keeper by the name of Andrew Ziomek, speaking for the National Licensed Beverage Association, warned that without the federal subsidy, business now conducted at taverns "will be relegated to hotel rooms and park benches...
...It separates the people in the bleachers from those in the sky boxes, the families at Pizza Hut from the diners in the revolving restaurants atop the new office towers...
...Richard Gephardt, a main conference organizer and emerging House leader, seemed surprised at this reaction, and in a way, his surprise is understandable...
...Deductions for entertainment would be abolished...
...You don't want to think the Republicans really believe the populist rhetoric some of them are spouting...
...Closing these and other loopholes would finance a tax credit for new investment, said JFK...
...But these occasions work in subtle ways to acculturate a congressman and dull his zeal for reform...
...Finally, the committee voted it down...
...Perhaps equally important is the culture of Washington, the Democratic establishment in particular, and the "prestige press" which is its reference point and mirror...
...Reform could relieve some of the burden of paperwork on the private sector...
...one Democrat in particular tried to "laugh it out of committee" by adding silly amendments, Jacobs recalls...
...Editorially, the Washington Post supported the president, but in some quarters there was bemusement and condescension...
...The tax-beaters know they will probably get away with it...
...In another episode, a lobbyist arranged for Healy and a fellow senior staff member to visit offshore mining operations in the Gulf of Mexico...
...In effect, members declared their whole life a deductible business expense of close to $20,000 a year...
...The vacationers view a videocassette lecture before taking off for a day on the beach or the slopes...
...Between November 1981 and April 1982, The Washington Post reported, Rostenkowski "spent at least 45 days as a guest of various trade associations, corporations and individuals at such resorts as Florida's Doral Country Club and Boca Raton Hotel and Club," and others...
...Apparently, the deliberations at the Greenbrier did not include lines like that...
...Numerous studies link excessive drinking to the use of alcohol on the job and flit rise up the executive ranks...
...Andy Jacobs of Indiana, one of the few members of Congress who raises the issue today...
...One ski seminar for business executives, sponsored by a company called Resorts Seminars of Snowmass Village, Colorado, featured a video lecture by Senator William Proxmire, the Senate's legendary skinflint...
...and many others...
...It's a free country, and people can drink if they want to...
...Staff went along—with their spouses—to address the gathering...
...There's a natural tendency to want to be invited back...
...And even if some business people did eat out less often, those dollars wouldn't fall into the ocean...
...The Congressional Research Service determined that the restaurant industry would continue to grow more rapidly than the economy as a whole even if Carter's reforms were enacted...
...There will probably be some labor leaders, as well as a Democratic senator or senior congressman lunching with a lobbyist...
...They buy baseball or hockey tickets without being able to enjoy the luxury of business-related sky boxes...
...In effect, he was proposing to exchange loophole-induced waste for productive investment, and the whole endeavor reflected the spirit of his promise to "get the country moving again ." "All these World War II guys were coming to Washington," recalls Mortimer Caplan, Kennedy's IRS commissioner and now the lead partner in a prominent Washington tax law firm...
...That's business, my friend ." But is it necessarily good business...
...You also might see former DNC Chairman Chuck Manatt, a prominent lawyer whom Ralph Nader calls "a man for all seasons—all four of them" for his proclivity for dining at expensive establishments such as the posh Washington hotel by that name...
...It was a sensible proposal that could have underscored the different priorities of the two parties and dramatized the president's failure to ask any sacrifice of his country club friends...
...The lobbyist might be paying...
...The industry has also learned how to touch the right buttons...
...Issues become personalized, identified with warm times in congenial surroundings—with people who, unlike many constituents, show the congressman the respect he feels he deserves...
...Providing dire warnings of what's ahead, the staff members get to feel virtuous about their free week-end away, just as congressmen get to feel they have earned their trips to Boca Raton and honoraria when they give a twenty minute speech to an interest group there...
...Lobbyists can become a kind of peer group for those who associate with them too often...
...Whatever the impact of these pleasant experiences upon one's actual positions on issues, T & E becomes a routine part of life for people on the Hill...
...They may cost the party the opportunity to make the tax simplification issue its own...
...In 1978, Nation's Business, a house organ of the U.S...
...I was taken out all the time!' Said another, "It's disgusting ." Quality Time It would be naive to think that members of congress—Democrats or Republicans—or their staffs are bought off on particular issues by fancy dinners and golf week-ends...
...while a] truck driver cannot deduct his .$1.50 sandwich," he seemed to be borrowing his lines from JFK...
...In the more mundane realm of Washington freebies, House members refer to lobbyists who buy them dinner as "live ones" and "angels," as in "I'm meeting a live one at Duke Ziebert's tonight!' Even House staff get their share...
...But as the long-time majority in the House, they've had more than their share of the providers' attention...
...They talk on fishing boats, but they don't take the deduction for cruise seminars...
...An Internal Revenue Service report regarding one especially adroit businessman captured the mood: "One thing is ever-present with this taxpayer," the report said...
...The purpose, the lobbyist said later, was to demonstrate to Healy that casinos are not "something out of a George Raft movie where black-shirted individuals speak in `dese and dose and dems...
...There were requirements for more record-keeping--a nuisance for most businesses but a cause of delight for at least one...
...Put him in a limosine and he's warm...
...In practice, says Daniel Halperin, a Treasury attorney in the Carter administration, enforcement is "just impossible" and everybody knows it...
...Does he go through them one by one, track down the parties involved, and try to ascertain whether the executive vice present really discussed business before taking that associate and his wife to the Broadway show...
...Chamber of Commerce, queried readers all over the country on the issue, and may have been surprised by some of the responses...
...Let the kids diet When candidate Jimmy Carter deplored the "disgraceful" tax laws that let a business executive "charge off a $55 lunch...
...On one occasion, a lobbyist for the American Council of Life Insurance took a whole group of staff to the Washington premiere of "Return of the Jedi ." "The staff got as used to going downtown as the members did," a former House staff member recalls...
...Rostenkowski is not known in the corridors of Congress as a man with an itch to limit expense account deductions...
...And as the "party of the people," this attention has been most dangerous...
...To impart this knowledge, the hotel paid more than $3,000 in air fare, rooms and meals...
...Jonathan Rowe is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...But a cadre of Democrats, including Tony Coelho, the chief fundraiser for the party in the House, have been ambulance chasing among potential victims of tax reform in the oil and gas, real estate, and other industries...
...The expense account meal stretches an executive's time," the magazine protested in a news story, possibly with a Time Inc...
...A man who makes a business transaction tends to profit by it," he wrote...
...The long battle over life insurance taxation last year was something of a movable feast...
...But with the Democrats' help, it's at least becoming a contest...
...Many suspect a religious and regional predjudice," Sidey wrote...
...Early last March, 140 House Democrats boarded a chartered train for a much publicized weekend at the pricey Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to discuss the future of their party...
...It seems about to speak again on tax simplification—a great populist issue...
...And meals could be written off as long as the setting was "conducive to a business discussion," whether or not business was actually discussed...
...His experience is limited...
...They make you feel valued, like you are somebody important:' a staff member said...
...Without tax-deductable entertainment, business now conducted in taverns `will be relegated to hotel rooms and park benches.' —A spokesman for the National Licensed Beverage Association The new law did, however, make more work for lawyers, who advised executives on the necessity of talking a little business before going off duck hunting...
...While the party doyens are counseling "moderation," it's actually economic populism that appeals to this group...
...You see this disjunctive thinking when a Walter Mondale sets himself up to earn almost $1.5 million in legal retainers, consulting fees, and fees for sitting on corporate boards during the three years preceding his run for the presidency [see "How Mondale Makes His Money," June 1984...
...This individual was not a Democrat...
...A prime example was Time magazine, where the issue is of more than passing interest...
...Put a guy you're doing a million-dollar deal with in a taxi and he's cold," says Irving "Swifty" Lazar, literary agent for Richard Nixon, Arthur Schlesinger, and others...
...Another example was the attempt by Congress in 1981 to vote itself a pay raise by the subterfuge of allowing members almost limitless deductions for their Washington living expenses, even if they maintained no residence in their home district...
...The T & E industry grows apoplectic at this suggestion...
...Meanwhile, Democrats in the House were busy putting together their "alternative" to the president's tax cut bill, which contained delights for just about every interest group under the sun—including the ones that consume those expense account lunches In 1984, Congressman Pete Stark, a Democrat of California, won approval of a limitation on write-offs for luxury cars...
...There was a little tightening around the edges, but the expense account meals and most of the associated entertainment were safe...
...In candid moments, even business people express reservations regarding expense account living...
...Kennedy personally visited the IRS to rally the troops—the first president ever to do so, Caplan says...
...Lessons from Russell Long Democrats are hardly the only party in Washington that enjoys the T & E circuit and has seen to its preservation...
...In 1981, for example, Senator Gary Hart proposed a bill that would have cut the deduction for expense account eating by 30 percent and used the revenues to help the school lunch program...
...These are not people who eat in cheap cafeterias...
...Part of the problem is the restaurant, hotel, liquor, and kindred industries—the three-martini complex— which have lined up solidly behind the deductible lunch...
...For example, you might see Democratic lobbyist-fundraisers such as Tommy Boggs and Bob Strauss dining with oil industry clients (they'll probably be independents, the "little guys...
...Rostenkowski's hosts picked up his airfare and expenses totaling $10,000 and—either themselves or through affiliates— provided him with $15,000 in campaign contributions...
...Company president Alfred Bloomingdale, who was a close friend of president-to-be Ronald Reagan's, explained: "We supply the records...
...Shmoozing with the 'little guys' There is more at work here than the organized self-interest of the three-martini complex and its employees...
...Now you can't keep them out...
...Ten years ago you'd seldom see a reporter in a high end restaurant," a Washington attorney told Common Cause magazine...
...The bottom line does speak, however...
...While disclosing Rostenkowski's business-funded golf vacations the Post also revealed similar excursions accorded the top Ways and Means staff...
...more likely, they are squeezed in for 20 minutes on a hot and hectic day...
...Only two senators cosponsored the measure...
...How the Democrats Learned to Love the Three-Martini Lunch by Jonathan Rowe In the early 1960s, while the nation was opening its eyes to poverty in the "Other America," it was also discovering the way the wealthiest in the land were living high at the taxpayers' expense...
...After all, as Lazar lets on, the whole point of expense account living is not to enhance business judgment, but to diminish it...
...This could do for Republicans what Social Security did for the Democrats," says Jeff Bell, the Republican strategist who opposed Bill Bradley for the Senate seat in New Jersey the first time around...
...But like the Democrats, the labor movement has constituency problems...
...The idea was not greeted with enthusiasm...
...But the issue really reflects on the integrity of the tax system itself: how do you enforce all these regulations...
...Walk into any of Washington's finer restaurants at noontime, and you are likely to find, elbow-to-elbow with the bankers and trade association executives, the chieftains of the party of the little man...
...Rostenkowski, also to his great credit, seems determined to redeem himself by taking the right side on the issue...
...But the industry has both money and clout...
...Tax reform advocates like the young lawyers from Nader don't get quality time like that...
...Caplan calls the regulations relating to expense account living "horrendous" in their complexity, and the recordkeeping these require might be similarly described...
...Since this is money the government doesn't have, it really means that the nation is going deeper into debt to help pay for cocktails in the "crown suites!' This issue could appeal to those ethnic and white southern voters that the Democrats so desperately need to win back...
...The much-maligned "special interests" are partly to blame...
...It would help stop special interest tax finagling because once the room is clean, every speck of dust will show...
...At least some Republicans see the potential...
...The IRS's well-publicized manpower problems prompt the kind of open flouting of the law represented by advertisements promising tax-deductible vacations for executives and doctors in Hawaii or Vail...
...asks Rep...
...But by and large, the issue has been slipping quietly out of sight, at least on the Democratic side...
...Not all partake, but many do...
...News and World Report called it, and according to the Treasury, an estimated $1.5 billion per year was going untaxed...
...Somehow, the party leaders have come to think that "policy" is disconnected from where they get their money and how they spend their time...
...But last November the Republicans were at it again...
...The tales adduced from- the IRS files in support of this proposal demonstrated that little had changed since the mild reforms of the early sixties...
...And so would the speech given in Washington on April 15—tax day—by a prominent public official...
...Excise taxes on beer and wine, for example, have not been increased since 1951, and in 1984 dollars, the tax on wine is sixteen cents per gallon, compared to seventy-nine cents at the height of the Depression...
...At the Greenbrier, the Democrats were only doing collectively what many of them have been doing individually for years...
...Simplifying the tax laws would get the government off our backs by relieving us of the chore of serving as bookkeepers and accountants for the IRS...
...when Hart introduced it as an amendment to other legislation, the bill mustered but 30 votes, suggesting that it probably would not have carried even if the Democrats controlled the chamber...
...It's just the way its done," a staff member says...
...A business person could still write off football or theater tickets as long as he talked business before or afterwards...
...There were hints of this in the way the media responded to Carter's proposals to cut expense account deductions...
...There was much dismay in party circles at revelations that General Motors, Exxon, and other large corporations, which had representatives in attendance, footed much of the $150,000 bill...
...almost everybody in his time in Plains ate lunch at home...
...When journalists join in the expense account feasting, it reinforces a sense that such activity is acceptable, even expected A good many in the Democratic establishment are themselves part of this expense account world...
...Much of this extravagance is subsidized by income tax deductions, and therefore by higher taxes from you and me...
...Instead of sitting at Scholl's Cafeteria discussing how to eliminate the worst real estate tax shelters, staff might be out addressing the syndicators...
...Caplan conjures up the scene of an IRS auditor confronted with tens of thousands of expense vouchers and receipts at a single company like Xerox...
...When Strauss took over the Democratic National Committee after the McGovern debacle in 1972, he buried its prodigious list of 600,000 small, direct-mail contributors and deliberately oriented the party towards wealthy givers like his law firm's clients...
...In a column entitled "In Defense of the Martini," Hugh Sidey chided the Georgia bumpkin in the White House...
...Perhaps most important of all, cracking down on expense account living could be good for American business...
...For line staff, there is lunch, of course, and dinner, theater, baseball games, ballet, weekend conferences at fashionable resorts as well...
...It was Richard Darman, deputy secretary of the treasury, as buttoned-down and blue-suited a Republican as you will find...
...W were going to do it right—play it right down the middle...
...the Reagan Treasury Department issued a draft tax reform proposal that hit T & E deductions in a way reminiscent of the Kennedy proposals of the sixties: deductions would be limited to $10 per person for breakfast, $15 for lunch, and $25 for dinner, including tax and tip...
...Consider, for example, the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax laws, including those pertaining to deductible T & E. it may come as no surprise that Ways and Means is a center of the action, and Dan Rostenkowski, the committee chairman, has set the pace...
...Besides, does anyone really believe that Swifty Lazar would try to clinch that million-dollar deal on a park bench over a brown-bag lunch if he couldn't pass along half his tab to the taxpayers...
...Our job— this was unspoken but it was clearly there—was to scare the pants off these people concerning what Congress might do to them next year, so they'd feel they had to hire this lobbyist again:' this staff member said...
...the businessman who deducted more than $8,000 for his daughters debut because it enabled him, he said, to meet the right people...
...There was no difference between Democrats and Republicans" on the issue, attorney Halperin recalls...
...You see it when the party that began the Peace Corps and Vista lets the Republicans make "volunteerism" their own issue...
...They touched a chord, and when he took office, Carter proposed cutting the deduction for "business" lunches in half and eliminating, among other things, the write-offs for club dues and entertainment...
...Kennedy announced a tough package of reforms, including a cap on deductions for food and lodging on business travel and an end to deductions for yachts, hunting lodges, and other forms of recreation and entertainment...
...Thus organized labor finds itself on the side of one of the more egregious forms of trickle-down economics in the land...
...Why must government pay...
...A representative of the Dunes Hotel and gambling casino in Las Vegas complained that "it's the aggressive, successful businessman .who will be hurt the most...
...At a time when executive salaries are soaring, taxpayer-subsidized perks for these same overpaid individuals are a graphic symbol of an emerging class system in American life: those who pay their way and those who "write it off...
...A small glass, too The restaurant industry, one of the few that does not face foreign competition, is a dubious candidate for government subsidy...
...The trip also included seats in the governor's box at the New Orleans Superdome for the semifinals of the NCAA basketball tournament and dinner at Antoine's...
...a Treasury speech does not make a realignment, and you don't see the bankers and executives jumping the GOP ship...
...Look, the next time you see the president, tell him this: Senator Long says that entertainment is to sales what fertilizer is to agriculture—it increases the yield ." Dole's amendment was dropped in conference with the House...
...Asked about the three-martini lunch issue, Murray Seeger, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, said, "We would never touch it," adding how important the restaurant workers' union is to the federation...
...It did so in the special-interest smorgasbord called the Democrat's 1981 tax bill...
...I felt that it was worthwhile for my staff to go down and see just what the technicians would be telling us," Rostenkowski explained...
...Moreover, a Roper poll found that 65 percent of the public backed the president on the issue...
...The Republicans are not the party of the people yet...
...In Democrats' eyes, the press is vaguely sympathetic—certainly sophisticated and stylish...
...As important as their editorial positions is the role of the media as a participant on the Washington scene...
...A customer has a sense of elation eating dinner at '21: a feeling of gaiety going to a play...
...Forgetting the link between collective and individual virtue— between policy and practice—Democrats seem to see the former solely in terms of government programs...
...It's hard to see how the fate of either the labor movement or the economy as a whole hinges on the ability of the Ritz to charge $3.50 for a glass of orange juice...
...At most, reducing the deduction might force very elegant restaurants to lower their prices somewhat, which is how free enterprise is supposed to work...
...What bothers me," said an executive from the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, "[is that] it's the hospitality industry, the largest employer of unskilled labor in the U. S. This argument carries special weight with the Democrats when it comes from the union, even though workers in other industries have little reason to want to subsidize the bosses' lunches...
...crown suites' The hundred-dollar expense account lunch would seem to be just the kind of emotive issue that Democrats so desperately need today—a way of saying to the vast majority of Americans, "We're on your side...
...that what they stand for is disconnected from what they do, and that a weekend at the Greenbrier at corporate expense is not going to show up somewhere in the bottom line...
...What's all this nonsense about the three-martini lunch...
...One staff member recalls a week-end seminar at a Virginia mountain resort that a prominent lobbyist arranged for the real estate interests he represented...
...Tony Fen wick provided research for this article...
...Vincent Sardi, the owner of Sardi's restaurant in New York, once propounded that "breaking bread is a traditional way of doing business...
...The write-off class is reaching new levels of ostentation...
...A rogues' gallery of well-to-do tax cheats appeared on the pages of the weekly newsmagazines: the undertaker who deducted $35,000 for maintaining a yacht on the grounds that he had to entertain clergymen and others in an atmosphere more pleasant than that of his mortuary...
...The slogan, 'It's Deductable' should pass from our scene...
...Dole's record on the issue is not unblemished, but he compares quite favorably to his Democratic predecessor, Russell Long, who helped undo the Kennedy reforms...
...Even the assistant manager of the Golden Ox restaurant in Kansas City had reservations...
...It no longer appears in the alternative budget of the Congressional Black Caucus, nor was it mentioned in the 58 single-spaced pages of the 1984 Democratic platform...
...Caplan recalls that in the brouhaha surrounding the Kennedy proposals, a number of executives told him privately that while they were opposing the administration in public, they were grateful for the excuse to get tougher with their more profligate employees...
...But since they had made the law retroactive, the members had one year's worth of deductions safely in hand...
...It's in the Bible...
...The Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union had warned that a crackdown would jeopardize the jobs of more than 100,000 members...
...This is especially .true when alcoho' is involved...
...Journalists with major publications and networks command considerable respect in Washington...
...People are willing to play the audit lottery," a staff member of the House Ways and Means Committee concedes...
...It is "something that every voter can benefit from" Democrats Bradley and—to his credit— Gephardt seem to understand this, having introduced a simplification bill of their own...
...The beneficiaries of T & E were hardly pleased by the new gung-ho spirit in town...
...The "expense account scandal," U.S...
...When the press caught on to this maneuver, there was the predictable outcry, and Congress backed down...
...If Democrats can't get too excited these days about fat cats dining at Le Pavillion at taxpayer expense, one of the reasons may be that some of those fat cats are themselves...
Vol. 17 • June 1985 • No. 5
