All of a sudden, Tom DeLay is back on his heels after a slew of fresh allegations have even Republicans gossiping about his political viability. But it would be foolish to count DeLay out just yet (and not just because of his strangely effective transformation into a pious crusader for Medicaid-supported coma victims). The roller coaster of bad press the House majority leader has ridden since the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct slapped him with three admonishments last fall might obscure the extent to which DeLay's day-to-day power remains durable and far-reaching. Yet he is still capable of moving institutional mountains to serve his own purposes.
Indeed, DeLay pulled off just such a feat a few weeks ago, an illustrative demonstration of strength that was too "inside baseball" to get much attention outside of the various specialized congressional papers. The Hammer reshaped one of the most important power centers in Congress for the sake of a single hometown interest, and in doing so he underscored two things: that the scandals currently dogging him have refocused his attention on the need to shore up support back in his district, and that the institutional power he has amassed over the course of the last 10 years allows him to accomplish that very task with ruthless bravura.
In both the House and the Senate, the chairs of the appropriations subcommittees, who control the purse strings for all domestic discretionary spending, are known as “the cardinals,” and for obvious reasons -- they are powerful, prestigious lawmakers occupying supremely coveted positions. As C-SPAN.org once put it, the cardinals "are held in awe, respect -- and perhaps a certain degree of fear.” They have historically enjoyed enormous autonomy from party leaders -- but, in the House, DeLay and Speaker Dennis Hastert have managed to break that autonomy quite decisively.
Even so, in the last few years DeLay had been frustrated by a recurring tug of war in the huge Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies (commonly called VA-HUD) in the House: NASA -- whose Johnson Space Center lies in DeLay's Houston district and is a major employer in the area -- kept losing out to housing interests and, especially, to veterans programs in the scramble for annually appropriated funds. Last year DeLay came very close to scuttling the entire massive fiscal year 2005 omnibus appropriations bill because NASA's full $16.2 billion budget request was shortchanged by $300 million.
So he decided to transform the House Appropriations Committee. By reshuffling and streamlining the jurisdictions of the various subcommittees, and reducing their total number, DeLay could ensure that NASA no longer had to compete with veterans and housing for money. DeLay proposed such an overhaul to the House GOP conference late last year, justifying it on ideological grounds: Restructuring the subcommittees, he argued, would help curb spending on traditionally Democratic priorities, like housing.
To be sure, DeLay is a specialist at aligning hard-right ideological ends with his own practical political interests. David Helfert, spokesman for the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, explained to me last month the ideological rationale's appeal to conservatives: “One person who's watched this for a long time said to me, ‘What you're seeing is them group the haves in one set of bills and the have-nots in the other, and the have-nots will end up fighting for the scraps.'”
But Helfert ultimately agreed with Scott Lilly, former House Appropriations Committee staff director and a current Center for American Progress senior fellow, who believes that this all boils down to a single parochial concern for DeLay (and that the rest is mere ideological window dressing). “I've been told by Republicans who've been negotiating with him that in the end, the only thing he really wants is to get NASA out of VA-HUD,” Lilly said. “He did not want to get caught simply proposing that … so he wrapped it up in all this other rhetoric.”
In any event, DeLay made support for the overhaul a necessary condition for consideration in the hotly contested race for House Appropriations Committee chair in January. The winner of that race, Jerry Lewis, proceeded to institute a slightly moderated version of the overhaul in early February, reducing the number of subcommittees from 13 to 10. The realignment smashed the VA-HUD subcommittee and scattered its constituent parts among the other panels, liberating NASA from funding competition with housing and veterans' interests once and for all.
Deposing three House cardinals was an impressive enough feat, but the big hurdle was the Senate. If the Senate Appropriations Committee refused to engage in a similar overhaul, the appropriations process later in the year would be a logistical fiasco. Yet there was virtually no interest among Senate committee members, let alone the Senate's cardinals, for reforming their committee; they didn't appreciate being pushed around by their Republican counterparts in the other chamber, and took particular umbrage at feeling pressured to capitulate to what was so clearly a parochial ploy by the House majority leader. As panelist Larry Craig told Roll Call in early February, “I don't think we ought to be reorganizing as an attempt for a power play.”
It seemed unlikely that the Senate would cooperate. Kit Bond, the longstanding chair of the VA-HUD subcommittee, was fiercely determined not to lose his turf to the whims of the Hammer. Nevertheless, after protracted haggling, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Thad Cochran announced on March 3 a Senate overhaul that didn't follow the House's plan point for point but did eliminate the VA-HUD subcommittee -- precisely what DeLay had sought all along. (Bond moved over to head up the newly expanded transportation panel, pushing the other cardinals into a game of musical chairs to take up new subcommittees.)
Let's step back and take stock of what occurred here: Simply to protect a parochial interest, the Hammer muscled through a major revamping of the most powerful and historically independent committee in the House of Representatives, strong-armed the Senate's counterpart into cooperating with the overhaul, and eventually managed to force all the Senate cardinals into an unwelcome scramble for new turf.
To those eagerly anticipating DeLay's downfall in the wake of mounting bad press, it's worth considering what this little power play signifies. Republicans' tenure in power has greatly accelerated a long-standing institutional trend in Congress -- the curbing of committee chairs' independence and the centralization of power in the party leadership. DeLay in particular has proven ruthlessly effective at reshaping the institution to serve his interests, both ideological and parochial, and to protect his own power. As outside pressure mounts, who doubts that DeLay will seek to exploit that institutional power to the hilt to keep himself alive?
Sam Rosenfeld is a Prospect Web writer.
