Was the "Republican Revolution" Always a Scam? Or Did It Become One?

I highly recommend reading Andrew Ferguson's account of GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff's nefarious career in the Weekly Standard. Some of this is a clip job, but not all of it, and Ferguson pulls no punches on Abramoff or on his coterie, which includes Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. I had not realized before that Abramoff was not just this decade's State-of-the-Art Washington Sleazeball (to borrow the title of an unforgettable 1985 profile in the New Republic of Roger Stone by a veryyoung Jacob Weisberg), but in fact was deeply immersed in the culture of movement conservatism and the battles to take control of institutions like the College Republicans that brought Reed, Norquist and Karl Rove together. (Ferguson does not mention Rove.)

The core of the story is this: Abramoff and his partner, former DeLay aide Michael Scanlon, milked Indian tribes for hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying expenses in support of their gambling interests, most notably being hired by a Louisiana tribe to prevent a rival Texas tribe from opening a casino, and then turning around and successfully pitching their services to the abused Texas tribes. Ferguson notes that Reed, "is far more famous, and far more careful with his reputation. As a pillar among conservative evangelicals and an ardent foe of gambling, Reed refuses to take casino tribes as clients." So, therefore Reed was hired to do the work of closing down the Texas casinos by "riling up our pastors," though paid by Abamoff and Scanlon with funds from the Louisiana tribes. There is much more to the story, some of it shocking even to those incapable of being shocked and some of it hilarious, such as a "think tank on the beach" in Rehoboth, MD, through which millions were funneled.

Ferguson admirably does not treat this case as a matter of a pair of rogues, but as a parable for the Republican power structure. He concludes by quoting Norquist, from 1995:

"What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs," Norquist said. "Then this becomes a different town."

It was a bold statement, typical for the time, but even then it raised a question we now know the answer to: Would the Republicans change Washington, or would it be the other way around?

The answer, Ferguson insists, is that the noble ideals of the Republican Revolution were ultimately corrupted by Washington:

Stripped of its peculiar grossness, Abramoff's Indian story really is just another story of business as usual in the world of Washington lobbying... That closed, parasitic culture of convenience--with its revolving doors, front groups, pay-offs, expense-account comfort, and ideological cover stories--is as essential to the way Republican Washington works, ten years after the Revolution, as ever it was to Democratic Washington.

I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. The Republicans did change Washington; they made it fundamentally and profoundly more corrupt. There was plenty of corruption in "Democratic Washington," but even leaving out the "peculiar grossness" of this one, you won't find anything remotely comparable to this in the decades of Democratic control. (The first sentence of Ferguson's paragraph above is actually kind of funny. It makes you want to come up with parallels, like, "Stripped of its peculiar grossness, the Manson Family was just another story of a close-knit group of people.")

Nor is there anything in this story to support the idea that something changed between 1995 and today, that an idealistic dream became corrupted. This kind of corruption was built into the Gingrich/DeLay/Norquist/Rove/Abramoff/Ney syndicate from the very beginning, and it got worse only as its ability to exercise power grew unchecked.

Like the idea that there is a "Social Security crisis," the unchallenged assumption that pre-1994 "Democratic Washington" was a cesspool of corruption has been a protective shield behind which the Republicans operate with impunity. It will take some time to break this down, but it is about time for Democrats to stop apologizing for Speaker Jim Wright's $55,000 book deal 15 years ago, and start talking about Reform, Reform, Reform.