How Carter stopped Playing Politics and Started Having Touble With Congress
Jr:, FT: Merrill
How Carter Stopped Playing Politics and Started Having Trouble With Congress by ET: Merrill, Jr: Judging by the huge majority he has on Capitol Hill, Jimmy Carter’s White House ought to be...
...For actual business purposes, only about 250 members got heavy attention- 150 loyal conservative allies and about another 100 willing to talk business over the pork-barrel...
...For the first time in eight years, liaison officers in the Cabinet departments really do run their own shows...
...Making it work meant having a sophisticated vote-trading operation conducted through the House liaison office-an operation that depended on each congressman having a one-on-one (and thus private) relatiohship with a particular White House lobbyist...
...Nixon, of course, couldn’t do this because the Democratic majority of the House was generally hostile to him and its leaders trapped between the White House and an increasingly restless Democratic caucus...
...Grants and contracts are a congressman’s lifeblood in his home district, while local electorates are relatively indifferent to broader questions of national policy...
...each of the three liaison aides deals with four Cabinet departments (including the proposed Department of Energy) and with any of the 435 House members who happen to fall within his “issue cluster” at a particular time...
...The lack of a White House votetrading aperation makes it more difficult for Carter to push his legislative program through Congress, but it is consistent with his open approach to government...
...He also saw close cooperation with the new and strengthened Democratic leadership as critical to harmony between the executive and legislative branches, and recognized that a coercive vote-lobbying operation conducted out of the White House and directed at the rank and file could jeopardize an effective 30 working relationship with the leaders...
...Nixon’s effort to glue together a winning coalition in the House was aided greatly, if unintentionally, by a key liberal Democratic reform-the recorded teller vote, which was adopted in early 1971...
...In order to guarantee the one-on-one relationship, the aides divided their “clients” on a geographic basis-one handled Southerners, one Northerners, and one Westerners...
...Nixon knew that because the Congress was overwhelmingly Democratic, his relationship with it had to be coercive...
...While Ford retained the House liaison office as a one-on-one operation, he was never able to mold a majority coalition and had to settle for government by veto...
...Those who were most cooperative with the administration, like most of the Republicans and the Southern Democrats, found their districts attracting disproportionately large flows of federal money...
...Carter’s difficulties with Congress are certainly well-publicized-every week there’s a new example of a favorite program gone awry on the Hill-but they’re usually chalked up to his outsider status, or his staffs inexperience in national politics...
...the recorded teller reform made this easier...
...if the leadership falters, Carter is left with sharply reduced power to use carrots and sticks to influence the legislation he needs to accomplish his goals, The days of buying off congressmen with federal projects and penalizing voters by slowing or canceling those projects for distant reasons of policy are over...
...Before the recorded teller vote, it was impossible to trade effectively on a one-on-one basis...
...28 with the members of the House the way Nixon did...
...Usually, how-office remained a well-kept and powerful secret-perhaps because its staff members were available and reliable off-the-record sources to Hill reporters...
...Occasionally-but very occasionallyhints of the secret of Nixon’s success would leak out...
...While previously members voted on amendments by parading anonymously through teller lines, under the new system the vote of every congressman could be recorded on every amendment that came up on the floor...
...Carter’s road to wide House support for his programs is mainly through the House leadership...
...By trading policy stands for grants, congressmen were gaining a great deal and losing very little in terms of their chances of reelection...
...These changes have made a close on e- o n- on e relationship between White House liaison officers and House members virtually impossible, and the close coordination of legislative patterns difficult except through presidential consultation with top congressional leaders...
...His recourse in moving a balky Congress is to take issues directly to the people, which has yet to be proven as an effective way to influence legislation...
...When Carter took office, he wanted to eliminate the cynical horse-trading of the Nixon era and return some of the lobbying power to the departments...
...instead, the administration had to rely on the House leadership to deliver the votes on key amendments...
...In addition, instead of the White House having the power to confer all the government’s blessings, that power is far more decentralized...
...In 1971 The New York Times ran a story saying congressmen were being threatened with the removal of their districts’ HUD grants if they didn’t deliver to the administration on a key Vietnam vote...
...To put it simply, the office is structured so that it is impossible for Carter to play politics F. T. Merrill, Jr...
...Very few issueoriented liberals ever had any dealings with the White House lobbyists...
...that is, he had to get the Congress to support programs that by natural inclination it would have voted down...
...The deterioration of the Nixon presidency and the huge 1974 Democratic majorities, however, trimmed the conservative/pork-barrel coalition to about a third of the House, or barely enough to sustain a veto...
...He had to go to congressmen singly for persuasion in order to build his coalition in the House...
...In the office’s heyday, each liaison officer oversaw all federal funds and programs-indeed, all federal matters-pertaining to each of his client’s districts...
...These explanations have by now worn thin...
...Four years later, an article in Congressional Quarterly quoted two junior Maine Republicans complaining about similar strong-arm tactics by a White House lobbyist...
...It was an effective system, and it lent itself to coercion of the House into support for programs and policies that did not have the support of the American peoplethe most flagrant example being the war in Indochina...
...In pursuit of these goals, Carter split up responsibility within the office along issues, rather than geographic, lines...
...The office’s normal modus operandi was the skillful manipulation of federal program grants and contracts, which were bartered to congressmen in return for their support for Nixon administration programs...
...The relationship worked out beautifully for Nixon in the early years...
...Under Kennedy and Johnson, key negotiations on legislation were conducted by the President and top e xe cutive-branch officials directly with the leadership and committee chairmen, with the rank and file marching unrecorded through teller lines to support the agreed-upon position...
...A White House liaison officer is no longer in a position to discuss a sewage treatment plant in the context of a foreign aid vote because the liaison aide who handles foreign policy does not also handle environmental issues-and besides, decisions on such matters no longer lie exclusively in the hands of the White House...
...There’s a very specific reason for many of the problems, and it has to do with the seemingly unimportant detail of the way Carter’s House liaison office, the key link in the administration-Congress relationship, is organized...
...served as assistant for House liaison to Carter congressional liaison chief Frank Moore from September 1976 to May 1977 and helped plan the reorganization of the House liaison office described in this article...
...their votes were just not necessary to bring in a majority...
...Because this can be a tricky business, the administration’s lobbying was centralized in the White House...
...On the continuation of the war, levels of military spending and weapons systems funding, cutbacks in domestic social programs, and defeat of environmental legislation, the Democratic Congress went Nixon’s way...
...congressional liaison officers in the agencies and departments were generally considered politically unreliable...
...How Carter Stopped Playing Politics and Started Having Trouble With Congress by ET: Merrill, Jr: Judging by the huge majority he has on Capitol Hill, Jimmy Carter’s White House ought to be having more success in pushing its programs through Congress than Richard Nixon’s, Gerald Ford’s, or even John Kennedy’s-but, mysteriously, it’s not...
Vol. 9 • July 1977 • No. 5
