“My God, we're not going to be like them," cried a member of the House Republican leadership, upset over the recently proposed gutting of the House ethics rules, as quoted in The Washington Post.
He was referring to the arrogant Democratic congressional majority of the late 1980s and early '90s. Remember “them”? Those complacent, blinkered politicians had grown bloated by decades of unchecked power, and their autocratic and corrupt ways supposedly provoked the popular revolt that swept the Republicans to the majority in 1994.
As another chastened GOP staffer lamented at the time of the recent ethics imbroglio, “It took Democrats 40 years to get as arrogant as we have become in 10."
This story arc is now such conventional wisdom that even the Democrats' own erstwhile leaders parrot it: Commenting on the same ethics changes, former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle noted that “this is exactly what got Democrats in trouble in the late '80s and early '90s.”
This is getting old. Republicans have long peddled the moral-equivalence line in order to rationalize their behavior in the majority as just deserts and to characterize all Democratic complaints as sour grapes. The mainstream acceptance of the notion that the Jim Wright-Tom Foley era was some cesspool of moral lassitude and institutional autocracy only serves to frame contemporary Republican practices as a natural progression in a political cycle, a version of politics as usual. It behooves Democrats seeking to revive their party's fortunes through a reformist appeal to challenge this received wisdom -- not the least because, in fact, it's utter nonsense.
There are two components of the majority “arrogance” one hears about: autocratic rule and corruption. On both counts, the claim of moral equivalence between the later Democratic majorities and the modern GOP congress is unfounded.
Regarding institutional tyranny -- the use of procedural powers to squelch deliberation and marginalize minority input -- a brilliant Boston Globe series on the modern Republican Congress should have silenced the moral-equivalence crowd forevermore. As reporter Susan Milligan and her team documented in October, by any and all measures of majority autocracy, the modern GOP brooks no comparison. Conference committees added 3,407 pork projects -- never subject to any debate or amendments -- to the 2004 appropriations bills, compared with 47 additions to the final budget passed under Democratic control a decade ago. The House leadership allowed floor amendments for about half the proportion of all legislation last year that the Democratic majority allowed to be amended in the final Congress it controlled.
Let's recall just a few things that the Democrats did not do, even during the tenure of their most aggressive and partisan modern speaker, Jim Wright. They did not sic the Capitol police on a group of the minority members attempting to confer in an empty room, as the Republican Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas did in 2003. They did not exclude non-pliant Republicans from negotiations on conference reports, as Republicans now do to them as a matter of course. Their leadership did not make it an explicit rule never to put bills to a vote that lack support from “a majority of the majority” -- that is, a majority of the members of the party in control -- as Speaker Dennis Hastert has done. In 1987, Wright kept the floor vote on a budget-reconciliation bill open for 10 minutes after the customary 15 minutes had elapsed so he could coax a Democrat to flip his vote; enraged Republicans clung to that gambit as the crowning example of Democratic tyranny for years afterward. Such abuses of the clock are now routine under Republican rule; during the 2003 vote on the Medicare prescription-drug bill, the leadership kept the voting open for more than three hours.
As for corruption, the longevity of the notion that the later Democratic years were a morally benighted era in Congress is a testament to Newt Gingrich's insight -- one he gleaned well before most Republicans -- that the surest way to gain a congressional majority is to tear down the institution in the eyes of the public. He and his band of bomb-throwing backbenchers (called “the jihadists” by their more moderate party colleagues) began waging relentless public-relations assaults on the Democratic leadership in the early 1980s, hounding then-Speaker Tip O'Neill before unleashing an all-out vilification campaign against O'Neill's successor, Wright. Gingrich spent years convincing the press that Wright was “the least ethical speaker in the 20th century,” filing dozens of charges with the House Ethics Committee and countless investigatory fishing expeditions that eventually yielded one serious ethics complaint: a $55,000 book deal exploiting a loophole in the House rules concerning outside income. (Careful readers take note: Wright's $55,000 book deal is not to be confused with Gingrich's $4.5 million advance in 1995 on two books that were to be published by the Rupert Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, just as critical telecommunications legislation was pending in Congress.)
Wright's successor, the far more mild-mannered and bipartisan Tom Foley, became one of dozens of electoral casualties from a political scandal that Gingrich concocted -- in the refreshing words of The New Republic's Michael Crowley -- “almost out of nothing.” Perhaps you've heard of the House bank scandal of 1991-92? In his most recent book, How Congress Evolves, political scientist Nelson Polsby sums up the affair as “a comic-opera fiasco that the news media, skillfully abetted by a group of enthusiastic Republican members, pumped up into a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung.” The bank was an in-house cooperative from which -- here was the scandal part -- many members routinely took out no-interest loans against their monthly paychecks, a practice that was perhaps unseemly but involved “only money already earned and belonging to individual members,” in Polsby's words. In conventional memory, the House bank scandal is the crown jewel of Democratic decadence; it is actually the crowning masterwork of early-period Gingrichian demagoguery.
Plenty of ethical lapses and pay-to-play lawmaking took place under the Democratic majorities. But Republicans, upon taking the reins in 1995, were immediately more corrupt. The relationship between lobbyists and legislators became instantly more incestuous. (And I do mean “instantly”: On January 3, 1995, two days before the Republicans were to take official control of Congress, Tom DeLay gathered a large group of industry lobbyists into his new office and inaugurated a deregulatory lobbying-lawmaking collaboration called Project Relief; it was the start of a very beautiful friendship.) The Republican leadership has raised the value limit on lobbying gifts by about tenfold while easing restrictions on free junkets. Lobbyists have a more direct involvement in the writing of legislation than they ever did under the Democrats. The willingness to eviscerate ethical safeguards and oversight emerged more gradually under Republican control, but, particularly as DeLay consolidated his power over the course of the late '90s and into George W. Bush's first term, emerge it did.
All this shouldn't be very surprising. The insurgent energy of the conservative movement still undergirds the ruthlessness and tenacity of the GOP leadership, while the party's pro-business ideology ensures a far more holistic and thoroughgoing marriage of K Street and Congress than was ever the case under the Democrats, who always had countervailing ideological impulses and interest-group pressures to mitigate their corporate cronyist tendencies. All in all, it really is a whole new ballgame in Congress, a level -- and a quality -- of institutional abuse, cronyism, and corporate looting that recalls the Gilded Age far more than the Foley Era. Republicans haven't fallen from grace, and they haven't lost touch with their roots; they are governing as they are wont to govern. If Democrats want to cast themselves as a reform party, this is a point they'll need to press upon the public. It's best not to get distracted with misplaced apologies.
Sam Rosenfeld is a Prospect Web writer.
