Boston Globe report on Congress

The Boston Globe has performed a great overdue service with its three-part series detailing exactly how repressive of democracy and dissent the Republican congressional majority has been. The whole series deserves reading, and provides a lot of detail, both statistical and anecdotal, to support some points that I've made here over the past few months.

The big question that the series has raised in many quarters is, How much is this just revenge (in both senses of the word "just") for the horrible way that Democrats treated Republicans before 1994?

Eight or ten years ago, I would have been sympathetic to this question. The Republican takeover was a big deal in my life -- I would have been in line for a pretty interesting job running the staff of a Senate subcommittee had the Democrats retained control, and more importantly, it was obviously a terrible setback for the issues I cared about. But I also acknowledged that the arrogance of the House Democrats, who behaved as if they controlled that institution by some sort of divine sanction, had all but brought the disaster down on their own heads. I remember a conversation a few months before that election with a top staffer for the House leadership. We were working together on a provision of the giant crime bill that year that would have guaranteed a huge new investment in after-school programs (at a time when after-school programming was almost unknown), in the name of crime prevention. We had a disagreement about a detail in the amendment, and I pointed out that if her view prevailed, we might lose the support of several Republican Senators who were the key allies. "Since when do we give a shit about Republicans?" was her response.

Sure, this attitude was partly the cause of the Republican takeover, and for a while, some Democrats could console themselves that it was their just deserts. But that's a decade ago!! Despite their promise of institutional reform, the Republicans turned themselves into the House Democrats almost immediately, and then they kept going and going and going. In several respects, beyond the statistics marshalled by the Globe, the current situation is not remotely comparable to the pre-1994 Democratic hegemony:

First, a point I've made often, the current Republicans not only repress dissent from Democrats, they also force their own partisans to march in lockstep. The fact is that with tiny exceptions, either a moderate Republican like Chris Shays or a principled conservative is as thoroughly irrelevant as Los Angeles Democrat Henry Waxman. That was never true under Democratic rule, largely because until fairly recently, there were plenty of Blue Dog Democrats and others who maintained their independence and were willing to defy a Democratic president or align with a Republican president, as they did to pass Reagan's 1981 budget and tax proposals. That's not "bipartisanship," but it was more democracy and more give-and-take than under the current regime. What makes the current majority members willing to be lapdogs remains one of the great questions in my mind.

Second, the Democrats' control of the House had no analogue in the Senate, which depended entirely on bipartisan cooperation. Any Democrat who worked in the Senate during the period of Democratic control from 1986-1994 would be familiar with the question, "Who's your Republican?" In other words, if your boss wanted to introduce a bill and have it be taken seriously, or offer an amendment on the floor, or win some quiet concession in a negotiation, the very first thing you would need to find is a Republican cosponsor or ally, preferably more than one and preferably not always Senator Chafee! (That's why retaining the Republican supporters of after-school funding in the 1994 crime bill mentioned above was so critical: we had not only Senator Danforth of Missouri, but also Senators Domenici and Stevens, who were perceived as "real" Republicans.) I can't say for sure, but I have the feeling that "Who's your Democrat?" is not the first question asked when a Republican wants to introduce a bill or amendment.

Third -- and this goes without saying -- in the Democratic era, members of Congress got comfortable, a little greedy, and cut some corners. Speaker Jim Wright wrote a self-serving memoir and sold some copies of it to lobbyists. They used the House "bank" to get advances on their pay, and a few engaged in some real embezzlement. It's all trivial, though, compared with bribing members on the House floor to change their votes, blackmailing industries that hire Democratic lobbyists, and then one by one cashing out themselves for the biggest lobbying jobs they can find. (It's amazing to me that Democratic members of Congress like Waxman, George Miller, Ed Markey and others keep at it, even though they are completely without power, even though they have to work every bit as hard as when they were in power, late nights, weekends back in the district, etc., and it is the Republicans like Billy Tauzin and Jim Greenwood who cash out as soon as they have punched the clock with whatever chairmanship puts them in the best position for the $400,000/year job with country club membership.)

This is yet another example where, if there was once perhaps a case for some moral equivalence, it has long passed.