Michael Crowley wrote a follow up article titled
How Democrats Can Overthrow the House: Learning from Newt. Crowley describes Rep. Bell's complaint against Tom De Lay and the reaction of Bell's fellow democrats:
But, when Bell filed his complaint, he found that, however much his Democratic colleagues railed against DeLay, they were nervous about taking him on. "Privately, it was 'You're my hero,'" he sighs. "But no one wanted to be publicly supportive. When we looked for people to make public declarations, it was awfully quiet." Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi were quick to tell reporters that they had not encouraged Bell's action.
The obvious lesson about the Democratic party:
Bell was only a freshman, and he was learning an important fact about today's House Democrats. While they may boil with outrage at the actions of House Republican leaders, there are limits to what they are willing to do. Many Democrats, especially older ones with memories of a more civil time in Washington, are squeamish about flamethrower politics. For seven years, they had observed an informal ethics "truce" with Republicans, and they were loath to shatter it.
Republican tactics and success at shuting the Democrats out of the process are so egregious that Newt Gingrich has complained.
While Republicans comprise a mere 53 percent of the House, they afford the House's 201 Democrats virtually zero power. Although Republicans promised to bring glasnost to the House when they toppled a heavy-handed Democratic majority in 1994, today they rule with an iron fist. Floor debates are kept to a bare minimum. Democrats have almost no role in writing legislation and are rarely allowed to offer amendments, even when--especially when--their proposals enjoy majority support.
Republicans think nothing of ramming through huge bills that have just come back from the printer. "It's crazy what's going on here," says Democrat Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. "Christ, you've got bills coming to the floor that no one reads." Republicans sometimes treat Democrats as if they don't really belong in the House at all. In one defining 2003 moment, House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, doing his best impersonation of an East German commissar, actually summoned the Capitol Police after a dispute over procedural fairness led Democrats to walk out of a hearing. Things have gotten so bad that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led these Republicans to power a decade ago, has urged them to "loosen up" the legislative process and allow Democrats more say.
Is it perhaps time for the Democrats to take a little bit stronger approach to their role as opposition party?
Let the message gurus recalibrate and the bold thinkers brainstorm new ideas. But, with Republicans preparing an assault on Social Security, the program Democrats hold most dear, it may be time for drastic measures. That is to say, as long as Republicans deprive Democrats of any parliamentary power, Democrats should consider fighting back by extra-parliamentary means--going beyond the standard parameters of legislative debate and attacking Republicans not just on issues but on ethics, character, and their management of Congress itself. In other words, it may be time for Democrats to burn down the House in order to save it. "I believe that the Republican majority has acted in such a dictatorial fashion that a full-scale revolt is the only solution," says Democratic consultant Howard Wolfson, who has been a House aide and executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (dccc). "It's hard to compromise with somebody who has their heel on your neck." Adds an aide to a senior House Democrat: "Beneath the surface, you're seeing an almost desperate anxiety among Democrats to throw some punches. The challenge is: How do you organize it?"
Crowley makes an interesting suggestion for the hardball tactics Democrats need to adopt:
For answers, Democrats might look to an unlikely role model: Newt Gingrich.
There were, of course, many factors behind the Gingrich revolution that would topple the Democrats 15 years later. But there is one that today's Democrats could replicate: Gingrich's knack for ruthless, all-out partisan warfare--even if it means turning public opinion against Congress as an institution and offending leaders of their own party.
This strategy was simple enough. As Gingrich put it in 1992, until the "systemic problem" of the House was ended, "we will simply go through cycles of finding corruption, finding a scapegoat, eliminating the scapegoat, and relaxing until we find the next scandal." Gingrich didn't care that Republican leaders of the time found him uncouth--just as senior Democrats were wary of Chris Bell's ethics crusade. "Be gentlemanly, and once you've made your point, get on with the business of governing," was the motto of Bob Michel, then the House GOP leader. But, in Gingrich's view, gentlemen were political losers.
One of Gingrich's core insights was that the press loves ungentlemanly conduct. "The number-one fact about the news media," he once explained, "is that they love fights. When you give them confrontations, you get attention"--a rule that undoubtedly holds true to this day. Gingrich also understood that no confrontation gets more ink than a nasty, personal one. As The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, would later write, "Gingrich filled ... the need for a colorful combatant who could be counted on to denounce the ruling Democrats in the harshest terms."
The conclusion Gingrich correctly drew was that a well-orchestrated media campaign could bring down even the most powerful Democratic leader--which could begin the downfall of the entire Democratic majority. By the mid-'80s, he had chosen as his first target no less a figure than the House speaker himself, Jim Wright, whose personal finances were the subject of rumors and innuendo. For months, Gingrich hounded the Washington press corps and editorial boards around the country with every scrap of information he could find to support his (highly quotable) claim that Wright was "the least ethical speaker in this century." The relentlessness of Gingrich's pursuit became a story of its own, as chronicled in John Barry's The Ambition and the Power, an exhaustively detailed 1989 account of Wright's rise and fall:
John Barry wrote an entire book about Gingrich's tactics that could supply insights to the Democratic party. Crowley supplies the Democrats' reaction to Gingrich's tactics and the results for the Republican party:
Democrats fumed. Representative David Obey of Wisconsin grumbled that Republicans "would rather embarrass the majority than move the consensus; they will do whatever is necessary to deny Clinton a political victory." And, to the very end, House Republican leader Bob Michel complained about Gingrich's tactics, grousing just before his retirement about House members who liked "trashing the institution."
Gingrich may not have been popular among the House's old bulls. But, by the fall of 1994, it didn't matter. Republicans picked up a stunning 52 House seats. Gingrich, once considered a taboo-breaking maniac, would become the first Republican House speaker in 40 years.
The more things change the more they stay the same:
A decade after Republicans shattered their majority, many Democrats still think like David Obey. They view their GOP foes as crude barbarians who defile the House's historic dignity. But there is a growing sentiment among Democrats that it is time to stop scorning the Gingrich revolutionaries--and the DeLay reactionaries who have inherited Newt's legacy--and start imitating them. Chris Bell, for instance, told me that he had plowed through all 768 pages of The Ambition and The Power as he prepared his complaint against DeLay, looking for inspiration from Gingrich's tactics. "The parallels are striking," he says. "It seems the Republicans are now guilty of all the abuses they were complaining about at the time."
If turnabout is fair play, then Democrats should charge ahead on GOP ethics. The list of credible charges against leading Republicans is beginning to look like a Washington version of Tony Soprano's rap sheet.
Crowley runs through a laundry list of charges that everybody here already knows about and turns to some possible tactics:
Democrats could weave individual outrages like these into a broader theme of accountability. They might argue that 1980s-style permanent incumbency has returned to the House, where just two of 435 non-redistricted incumbents were defeated last November, and where nearly a third as many members have died in office (eight) since the 2000 election as have been voted out (25). That lack of accountability has allowed Republicans to become co-opted by Washington, allowing ethics to slide, pork to multiply, deficit spending to explode. Why, those arrogant Republicans can't even build a visitors' center without wasting hundreds of millions of dollars!
Does a Total War strategy have any resonance?
Total war against the House GOP would also require a new killer instinct when it comes to floor battles. Some Democrats cling to a quaint desire to "work with" their moderate Republican colleagues. But such partnerships typically do more harm than good. For instance, it was an amendment sponsored by ultra-liberals Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders that added an instant $300 rebate to the first of George W. Bush's tax cuts. Of course, the checks went out with a letter crediting Bush--making it seem like they were his idea and swelling support for his policy. Democratic amendments can also help vulnerable GOP moderates looking for bipartisan cover back in their own districts. "Democrats will [team up] with moderate Republicans like Chris Shays or Rob Simmons, and these guys go back to Connecticut and say, 'Well, I worked with my [Democratic] friend Carolyn Maloney,' and no one blames him for voting with DeLay," says a House legislative aide "We have to stop legislating. They end up stripping out this stuff in conference anyway." Republicans will be especially desperate for such Democratic cover when it comes to Social Security. It's time for Democrats to adopt George W. Bush's motto: You're either with us or against us.
Sounds about right to me, but the
sensible centrists of the DLC can't bring themselves to impose sanctions for even the most egregious betrayals of party principles:
Of course, that will require intense party discipline. Here Democrats could learn something from the current House GOP leadership, which last week announced that it was ousting House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Christopher Smith merely because he complained about proposed cuts in veterans spending. By contrast, at virtually the same time, Democrats announced that their new ranking member on the House Agriculture Committee would be Minnesota Representative Collin Peterson--one of the most Republican-friendly Democrats in the House. In 2003, Peterson cast a heretical vote for the GOP prescription-drug bill. He has often failed to pay his caucus dues and has even been the subject of recent party-switching rumors. Democratic leaders gave him the prized committee post anyway, claiming that he had promised to be a "team player" in the future. "Democrats are wimpy about holding each other accountable," grouses one House Democratic leadership aide. "There's always a lot of talk ... but there are no repercussions."
Rep. Collin Peterson is also a prominant member of the Faint Hearted Faction that is playing footsie with Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. Democrats also retain a quaint timidity about tainting their image.
Democrats also fear, understandably, that militant tactics will get them branded as obstructionists. The defeat of Senator Tom Daschle, who was savaged for blocking the Bush agenda, suggests that red-state Democrats could pay dearly. But Democrats may well have to make short-term sacrifices in the name of long-term gains. Gingrich's House bank crusade cost some Republicans their seats--but the party won a majority a few years later. And the recent entrenchment of incumbency through gerrymandering suggests that only a national tide sparked by bold action--and not cautious, incremental gains--can return the Democrats to power.
Perhaps most significantly, there's a strong psychological resistance among Democrats to burning down the House. Many senior Democrats, especially those who came of age in gentler political times, believe in a civics-class tradition of governing. "What [the Gingrich years] were about was truly very destructive in terms of the institution of Congress itself," says Rosa DeLauro, a member of the House Democratic leadership. "We come here to create good public policy. We don't come here to destroy the institution, we try to make it work, and work better." Adds Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern: "I worked as a staffer before becoming a congressman, and I have great respect for this place. And there isn't a day I don't feel privileged to work here. And it drives me nuts to see those guys tearing down what this place is all about."
With a couple of minor exceptions the Democrats still entertain delusions of bi-partisanship and institutional integrity.
Democrats say that top caucus leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Bob Menendez, and Charles Rangel tend to share such sentiments. They have fond memories of the "gentlemanly" philosophy of Bob Michel. But several Democrats say there is a growing generational gap in the House, in which some younger members--and many staffers, some of whom have been meeting informally to plot a more radical strategy--are beginning to chafe. "Pelosi is a 'proper' person who believes in rules and order, and who loves the institution," says a Democratic aide. "Almost everyone who was here before 1994 has that problem." It was noteworthy that it took a freshman like Chris Bell to finally go after DeLay. Others who call for more confrontational tactics include junior members like Michael Capuano of Massachusetts and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. The generational divide isn't absolute: 75-year-old Louise Slaughter of New York is emerging as one of the party's most scalding voices about GOP ethics, while Emanuel, perhaps the House's most influential young leader, is "not of the view that the road to the majority is destruction," he says. "I am of the view that the road is proposing and initiating ideas."
I don't think the Democratic party gets it. Even Rep. Rahm Emmanuel thinks the road to success for Democrats is "proposing and initiating ideas." They still think they are the majority party.
For now, that view carries the day. Democrats say Pelosi listens to colleagues who want to fight in more extreme terms, but the caucus' overarching strategy remains unchanged. But then, Newt Gingrich emerged from beneath a leadership uninterested in bitter partisan warfare. Perhaps a group of junior Democrats will simply rise up on their own--recognizing, as one House Democratic aide puts it, "This is all-out war. They have an all-out war mentality, and I think we need to get one." Newt would have concurred.
I think a lot of us are banking on Howard Dean being able to inspire and fire up the Democratic party. After reading this article and watching the Democratic response to the PR blitz on Social Security that is just getting warmed up, I have my doubts about whether there is any force known to man that is capable of waking up the DLC centrists.
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