Conservatives Without Conscience

Schlesinger, Jr., observed that there is “a pattern of alternation in American history between negative and affirmative government—that is, between times when voters see private action as the best way of meeting our troubles and times in which voters call for a larger measure of public action.” [18] Republicans were ready for negative government. One longtime and highly respected member of the House observed that the GOP rule resulted in a “decline in civility” with “bitter partisan exchanges and mean personal attacks.” There was “antagonism, incivility, and the tendency to demonize opponents,” making it “very difficult for members to come together to pass legislation for the good of the country.”[19] Comity between the majority and minority all but disappeared, and members soon barely even knew one another, as the House held meetings only three days a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday —with most members returning home for long weekends. C-Span, which had begun televising House proceedings in 1979, had made it less necessary for most members to be on the floor of the House, for they could follow the proceedings in their offices. Electronic voting also resulted in members’ spending less time together. This suited the new authoritarian leadership’s aim of tightly controlling the House, for knowing one’s colleagues makes it more difficult to attack them, and authoritarian conservatism is constantly on the attack. They are not backslappers, but rather, backstabbers; they do not serve the public interest, but rather, their own.

Proponents of the Contract with America had claimed the “Democrats’ ironhanded one-party rule of the House of Representatives over the last four decades led to arcane, arbitrary, and often secretive procedures that disenfranchised millions of Americans from representation in Congress,” reported one congressional scholar.[20] Indeed, their long stint in power had given them a hubris, arrogance, and sense of invulnerability that had eroded the effective operation of the House. Republicans, in fact, had a valid complaint, and at the time they took control there was indeed a need for reform. But that is not what happened. If Democrats had run the House with an iron hand, Republicans were employing a iron fist at the behest of their leadership’s autocratic rule.[21] Gingrich lorded over the House. Where power was once decentralized among committee chairmen who had earned their posts and fiefdoms through seniority, Gingrich eliminated the seniority system and had chairmen selected by the leadership, concentrating power in the Speaker’s office.[*] But while Gingrich was autocratic (answering to no one else), he was not dictatorial (imposing his will on others). Dictatorship in the House would not occur until DeLay held full sway, which occurred with Gingrich’s departure. By the time of the arrival of Bush and Cheney in 2001, House Republican leaders had imposed iron-clad controls on “the people’s House,” making it their own, with ambitions of assuming permanent authority.

Accordingly, “[m]ore radical changes, at the expense of democracy itself, have occurred since 2002 under Tom DeLay,” explained the seasoned Washington observer Robert Kuttner, the cofounder and coeditor of The American Prospect.[22] Kuttner was one of the first to write about the authoritarian inclination of these conservatives (although he does not use the term) in a chilling analysis entitled “America as a One-Party State: Today’s hard right seeks total dominion. It’s packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.” Kuttner focused on Congress, more specifically on the House of Representatives, and by 2002, he found, there was good reason to describe DeLay’s operation as a “dictatorship.” He also refuted the Republican claim that when the Democrats were in control they exercised the same leadership style, for what the Republicans have done to the House was beyond anything even imaginable by the Democrats. Kuttner focused on several means employed by the authoritarian conservatives to exercise control. Following I have quoted or paraphrased them, while adding a few thoughts of my own.

Extreme Centralization. The legislative agenda of the House is (and always has been) controlled by the Speaker and the Committee on Rules.[*] Kuttner explained that, unlike their predecessors, Tom DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (whose chief of staff, Scott Palmer, he considered “as powerful as DeLay”) practically write laws themselves. “Drastic revisions to bills approved by committee are characteristically added by the leadership, often late in the evening,” Kuttner observed. “Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be ‘emergency’ measures, allowing them to be considered with as little as 30 minutes’ notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.”

No Amendments. When the GOP took control of the House they promised they would do better than the Democrats, assuring all “that at least 70 percent of bills would come to the floor with rules permitting amendments.” That did not happen; in fact, the opposite occurred. The “proportion of bills prohibiting amendments has steadily increased,” from 56 percent the first year Republicans took control to 76 percent when Kuttner last examined them. Even these numbers understate the situation, Kuttner explained, since “all major bills now come to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments.”

One-Party Conferences. The Republican-controlled Senate has not yet stopped floor amendments, so when a Senate bill differs from a House bill, members are appointed by each body to confer and resolve the differences. Republicans, however, have cut both House and Senate Democrats out of the conferences. The Republicans meet, work out any differences, and then send a nonamendable bill back to each body for a quick up-or-down vote. Kuttner noted that members may be given a day to study bills exceeding a thousand pages, with “much of it written from scratch in conference.” This is a practice that was once considered unacceptable by both parties.

No Legislative Hearings. Obviously, when laws are written in conference committee meetings, they have not been discussed during hearings. Even when hearings are held at the committee level, however, Republicans frequently write laws without any input from Democrats, and they vote down any Democratic efforts to amend legislation in committee. Under Republicans, many laws are literally written by the special interests the laws seek to “regulate,” an extraordinary outsourcing of the legislative process.

Appropriations Bill Abuses. If annual appropriations bills are not enacted, the government runs out of money and must close down. When Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1995, pressuring President Clinton in a game of political chicken that Gingrich lost, lawmakers were notified that the public would not tolerate such games. Appropriations bills must pass—a president dare not veto such legislation, regardless of what objectionable provisions it might contain. Accordingly, Republicans add to these bills an endless array of spending for pet pork-barrel projects. As one commentator noted, Republicans are spending “worse than drunken sailors.”[23] Under GOP congressional leadership, “earmarked” (meaning pork) spending has soared. According to the Wall Street Journal, at the end of 2005 there were a staggering 13,998 earmarked expenses, costing $27.3 billion. When the Republicans took control in 1995 there were only 1,439 earmarked items. Needless to say, there is nothing conservative in these fiscal actions but there is much that is authoritarian about the wanton spending by these Republicans.

In early 2006, Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, both men longtime experts on Congress and partisans for good government, also spoke out about the authoritarianism in the House, in an op-ed for the New York Times: “Over the past five years, the rules and norms that govern Congressional deliberation, debate and voting, have routinely been violated, especially in the House of Representatives, and in ways that mark a dramatic break from custom.” Ornstein and Mann pointed out that House Republicans have far exceeded any overeaching by Democrats. “We saw similar abuses leading to similar patterns of corruption during the Democrats’ majority reign,” they said. “But they were neither as widespread nor as audacious as those we have seen in the past few years.”[24]

Gingrich’s departure from Congress in 1998 changed nothing, for his precedent became the base upon which Tom DeLay built his House, making the operation even more authoritarian. The removal of DeLay from leadership of Congress in a swirl of scandal in early 2006 likewise did not change the undemocratic and highly authoritarian nature of the House, notwithstanding promises by the new leadership to the contrary. The election of John Boehner of Ohio to DeLay’s former majority leader post has changed nothing about the way House Republicans are conducting business. Boehner, like DeLay, has close ties to lobbyists; in fact, he once passed out money from the tobacco industry on the floor. Boehner has been part of the authoritarian power structure of the House for too long. All he offers is a fresh face and a more television-friendly manner.

Despite the increasingly flagrant erosion of once deliberative practices, Democrats have refused to complain. After writing Worse Than Watergate I asked a number of Democrats why they