by Matt Taibbi
This lights-out technique was actually pioneered by another Republican, former Commerce Committee chairman Thomas Bliley, who in 1995 hit the lights on a roomful of senior citizens who had come to protest Newt Gingrich’s Medicare plan. Bliley, however, went one step further than Sensenbrenner, ordering Capitol police to arrest the old folks when they refused to move. Sensenbrenner might have tried the same thing in his outburst, except that his party had just voted to underfund the Capitol police.
Thus it is strange now, in the Rules Committee hearing, to see the legendarily impatient Sensenbrenner lounging happily in his witness chair like a giant toad sunning on nature’s perfect rock. He speaks at length about the efficacy of the Patriot Act in combating the certain evils of the free-library system (“I don’t think we want to turn libraries into sanctuaries”) and responds to questions about the removal of an expiration date on the new bill (“We don’t have sunsets on Amtrak or Social Security, either”).
Such pronouncements provoke strident responses from the four Democratic members of the committee—Doris Matsui of California, Alcee Hastings of Florida, Louise Slaughter of upstate New York, and McGovern of Massachusetts—who until now have scarcely stirred throughout the hearing. The Democrats generally occupy a four-seat row on the far left end of the panel table, and during hearings they tend to sit there in mute, impotent rage, looking like the unhappiest four heads of lettuce ever to come out of the ground. The one thing they are allowed to do is argue. Sensenbrenner gives them just such an opportunity, and soon he and McGovern fall into a row about gag orders.
In the middle of the exchange, Sanders gets up and, looking like a film lover leaving in the middle of a bad movie, motions for me to join him in the hallway. He gestures at the committee room. “It’s cramped, it’s uncomfortable, there isn’t enough room for the public or press,” he says. “That’s intentional. If they wanted people to see this, they’d pick a better hall.”
Sanders then asks me if I noticed anything unusual about the squabbling between Sensenbrenner and McGovern. “Think about it,” he says, checking his watch. “How hard is it to say, ‘Mr. Sanders, be here at 4:30 p.m.’? Answer: not hard at all. You see, a lot of the things we do around here are structured. On the floor, in other committees, it’s like that. But in the Rules Committee they just go on forever. You see what I’m getting at?”
I shrug.
“It has the effect of discouraging people from offering amendments,” he says. “Members know that they’re going to have to sit for a long time. Eventually they have to choose between coming here and conducting other business. And a lot of them choose other business. That’s what that show in there was about.”
Amendment 2
As he waits for his chance to address the Rules Committee, Sanders is armed with not one but two amendments. The measures are essentially the same, both using identical language to prohibit warrantless searches of libraries and bookstores. The only difference is that the amendment Sanders is trying to get past the committee would permanently outlaw such searches under the Patriot Act. The second amendment takes a more temporary approach, denying the Justice Department funding in next year’s budget to conduct those types of searches.
This kind of creative measure—so-called limitation amendments—are often the best chance for a minority member like Sanders to influence legislation. For one thing, it’s easier to offer such amendments to appropriations bills than it is to amend bills like the Patriot Act. Therefore, Sanders often brings issues to a vote by attempting to limit the funds for certain government programs—targeting a federal loan here, a bloated contract there. “It’s just another way of getting at an issue,” says Sanders.
In this case, the tactic worked. A month earlier, on June 15, the House passed Sanders’s amendment to limit funding for library and bookstore searches by a vote of 238–187, with 38 Republicans joining 199 Democrats.
The move wasn’t a cure-all; it was a short-term fix. But it enabled Sanders to approach the Rules Committee holding more than his hat in his hand. With the June vote, he had concrete evidence to show the committee that if his amendment to permanently alter the Patriot Act were allowed to reach the floor it would pass. Now, if Tom DeLay & Co. were going to disallow Sanders’s amendment, they were going to have to openly defy a majority vote of the U.S. Congress to do so.
Which, it turns out, isn’t much of a stumbling block.
While Sanders was facing the Rules Committee, House leaders were openly threatening their fellow members about the upcoming vote on CAFTA. “We will twist their arms until they break” was the Stalin-esque announcement of Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe. The hard-ass, horse-head-in-the-bed threat is a defining characteristic of this current set of House leaders, whose willingness to go to extreme lengths to get their way has become legend. In 2003, Nick Smith, a Michigan legislator nearing retirement, was told by Republican leadership that if he didn’t vote for the GOP’s Medicare bill, the party would put forward a primary challenger against his son Brad, who was planning to run for his seat.
Members who cross DeLay & Co. invariably find themselves stripped of influence and/or important committee positions. When Representative Chris Smith complained about Bush’s policy toward veterans, he was relieved of his seat as the Veterans’ Committee chairman. When Joel Hefley locked horns with Dennis Hastert during the Tom DeLay ethics flap, Hefley lost his spot as the House Ethics Committee chairman.
In other words, these leaders don’t mind screwing even their friends any chance they get. Take the kneecapping of Arizona Republican Jeff Flake, whose surrender on the Patriot Act issue paved the way for the trashing of the Sanders amendment.
Flake, who sits on Sensenbrenner’s Judiciary Committee, had been one of the leading Republican critics of the Patriot Act. He was particularly explicit in his support for sunset provisions in the law, which would prevent it from being made permanent. In April, for instance, a Flake spokesman told the Los Angeles Times, “Law enforcement officials would be more circumspect if they were faced with the prospect of having to come to Congress every couple of years and justify the provisions.”
When Sanders offered his amendment to deny funding for warrantless searches, Flake was right there by his side. But now, only a few weeks later, Flake suddenly offers his own amendment, aimed at the same provision of the Patriot Act as Sanders’s but with one big difference: it surrenders on the issue of probable cause. The Flake amendment would require only that the FBI director approve any library and bookstore searches.
It is hard to imagine a more toothless, pantywaist piece of legislation than Flake’s measure. In essence, it is a decree from the legislative branch righteously demanding that the executive branch authorize its own behavior—exactly the kind of comical “compromise” measure one would expect the leadership to propose as a replacement for the Sanders plan.
Flake clearly had made a deal with the House leadership. It is not known what he got in return, but it appears that his overlords made him pay for it. Before the final vote on any bill, the opposition party has a chance to offer what is called a “motion to recommit,” which gives Congress a last chance to reexamine a bill before voting on it. When the Democrats introduced this motion before the final vote, the House Republican leadership had to ask someone to stand up against it. They, naturally, turned to Flake, the chastened dissenter, to run the errand.
Flake is a sunny-looking sort of guy with a slim build and blow-dried blond hair. He looks like a surfer or maybe the manager of a Guitar Center in Ventura or El Segundo: outwardly cheerful yet ill-suited, facially anyway, for the real nut-cutting politics of this sort. When it comes time for him to give his speech, Flake meanders to the podium like a man who has just had his head clanged between a pair of cymbals. The lump in his throat is the size of a casaba melon. He begins, “Mr. Speaker, I am probably the last person expected to speak on behalf of the committee or the lead
ership in genera . . .”
When Flake mentions his own amendments, his voice drops as he tries to sound proud of them—but the most he can say is, “They are good.” Then he becomes downright philosophical: “Sometimes, as my hero in politics said once . . . Barry Goldwater said, ‘Politics is nothing more than public business . . . You don’t always get everything you want.’”
It is a painful performance. Later, commenting on the Flake speech, Sanders shakes his head. “They made him walk the plank there,” he says.
Flake denies he cut a deal to sell out on the Patriot Act. But his cave-in effectively spelled the end of the Sanders amendment. The Republicans point to the Flake amendment to show that they addressed concerns about library and bookstore searches. Essentially, the House leaders have taken the Sanders measure, cut all the guts out of it, bullied one of their own into offering it in the form of a separate amendment, and sent it sailing through the House, leaving Sanders—and probable cause—to suck eggs.
Amendment 1 Redux
Late in the afternoon, after waiting several hours for his turn, Sanders finally gets a chance to address the Rules Committee. His remarks are short but violent. He angrily demands that the committee let Congress vote on his amendment, noting that the appropriations version of it had already passed the House by fifty-one votes. “I would regard it as an outrageous abuse of power to deny this amendment the opportunity to be part of this bill,” he shouts. “We had this debate already—and our side won.”
In response, Republicans on the committee cast a collective “whatever, dude” gaze. “Sometimes, you can engage them a little,” Sanders says later. But most of the time it works out like this.
Shortly after Sanders finishes his remarks, the Rules Committee members scurry to begin what will be a very long night of work. To most everyone outside those nine majority members, what transpires in the committee the night before a floor vote is a mystery on the order of the identity of Jack the Ripper or the nature of human afterlife. Even the Democrats who sit on the committee have only a vague awareness of what goes on. “They can completely rewrite bills,” says McGovern. “Then they take it to the floor an hour later. Nobody knows what’s in those bills.”
A singular example of this came four years ago, when the Judiciary Committee delivered the first Patriot Act to the Rules Committee for its consideration. Dreier trashed that version of the act, which had been put together by the bipartisan committee, and replaced it with a completely different bill that had been written by John Ashcroft’s Justice Department.
The bill went to the floor a few hours later, where it passed into law. The Rules Committee is supposed to wait out a three-day period before sending the bill to the House, ostensibly in order to give the members a chance to read the bill. The three-day period is supposed to be waived only in case of emergency. However, the Rules Committee of DeLay and Dreier waives the three-day period as a matter of routine. This forces members of Congress essentially to cast blind yes-or-no votes to bills whose contents are likely to be an absolute mystery to them.
There is therefore an element of Christmas morning in each decision of the committee. On the day of a floor vote, you look under the tree (i.e., the Rules Committee Web site) and check to see if your amendment survived. And so, on the morning of July 21, Sanders’s staff goes online and clicks on the link H.R. 3199—USA PATRIOT AND TERRORISM PREVENTION REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005. Twenty of sixty-three amendments have survived, most of them inconsequential. The Sanders amendment isn’t one of them.
On a sweltering Tuesday morning in the Rayburn Building, a bookend location in the multibuilding home of the House of Representatives, a very long line has formed in the first-floor corridor, outside the Financial Services Committee. In the ongoing orgy of greed that is the U.S. Congress, the Financial Services Committee is the hottest spot. Joel Barkin, a former press aide to Sanders, calls Financial Services the “job committee,” because staffers who work for members on that committee move into high-paying jobs on Wall Street or in the credit-card industry with ridiculous ease.
“It seems like once a week, I’d get an e-mail from some staffer involved with that committee,” he says, shaking his head. “They’d be announcing their new jobs with MBNA or MasterCard or whatever. I mean, to send that over an e-mail all over Congress—at least try to hide it, you know?”
On this particular morning, about half of the people in the line to get into the committee appear to be congressional staffers, mostly young men in ties and dress shirts. The rest are disheveled, beaten-down-looking men, most of them black, leaning against the walls.
These conspicuous characters are called “line standers.” A lot of them are homeless. This is their job: they wait in line all morning so some lobbyist for Akin, Gump, or any one of a thousand other firms doesn’t have to. “Three days a week,” says William McCall (who has a home), holding up three fingers. “Come in Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Get between twelve and forty dollars.”
When a photographer approaches to take a picture of the line, all the line standers but McCall refuse to be photographed and cover their faces with newspapers. I smile at this. Only the homeless have enough sense to be ashamed of being seen in Congress.
In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it’s difficult to tell whether it’s the companies that are lobbying the legislators or if it’s the other way around.
Amendment 3
Across the Rayburn Building on the second floor, a two-page memo rolls over the fax machine in Sanders’s office. Warren Gunnels, the congressman’s legislative director, has been working the phones all day long, monitoring the Capitol Hill gossip around a vote that is to take place in the Senate later that afternoon. Now a contact of his has sent him a fax copy of an item making its way around the senatorial offices that day. Gunnels looks at the paper and laughs.
The memo appears to be printed on the official stationery of the Export-Import Bank, a federally subsidized institution whose official purpose is to lend money to overseas business ventures as a means of creating a market for U.S. exports. That’s the official mission. A less full-of-shit description of Ex-Im might describe it as a federal slush fund that gives away massive low-interest loans to companies that a) don’t need the money and b) have recently made gigantic contributions to the right people.
The afternoon Senate vote is the next act in a genuinely thrilling drama that Sanders himself started in the House a few weeks before. On June 28, Sanders scored a stunning victory when the House voted 313–114 to approve his amendment to block a $5 billion loan by the Ex-Im Bank to Westinghouse to build four nuclear power plants in China.
The Ex-Im loan was a policy so dumb and violently opposed to American interests that lawmakers who voted for it had serious trouble coming up with a plausible excuse for approving it. In essence, the United States was giving $5 billion to a state-subsidized British utility (Westinghouse is a subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels) to build up the infrastructure of our biggest trade competitor, along the way sharing advanced nuclear technology with a Chinese conglomerate that had, in the past, shared nuclear know-how with Iran and Pakistan.
John Hart, a spokesman for Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn (who would later sponsor the Senate version of the Sanders amendment), laughs when asked what his opponents were using as an excuse for the bill. “One reason I got,” Hart says, “was that if we build nuclear power plants in China, then China would be less dependent on foreign oil, and they would consume less foreign oil, and so as a result our oil prices would go down.” He laughs again. “You’d think there would be more direct ways of lowering gas prices,” he says.
Oddly enough, Coburn, a hard-line pro-war, pro-life conservative who once advocated the death penalty for abortion doctors, is a natural ally for the “socialist” Sanders on an issue like this one. Sanders frequently looks for c
osponsors among what he and his staff call “honest conservatives,” people such as California’s Dana Rohrabacher and Texas libertarian Ron Paul, with whom Sanders frequently works on trade issues. “A lot of times, guys like my boss will have a lot in common with someone like Sanders,” says Jeff Deist, an aide to Representative Paul. “We’re frustrated by the same obstacles in the system.”
In the case of Westinghouse, the bill’s real interest for the Senate had little to do with gas prices and a lot to do with protecting a party member in trouble. Many of the 5,000 jobs the loan was supposed to create were in Pennsylvania, where Rick Santorum, the GOP incumbent, was struggling to hold off a challenger. “Five billion for five thousand jobs,” Sanders says, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s a million dollars per job. And they say I’m crazy.”
This morning, with the Senate vote only a few hours away, the lobbying has kicked into very high gear. That lobbyists for Westinghouse are phone-blitzing senatorial offices is no surprise. Somewhat more surprising are reports that the Ex-Im Bank itself is hustling the senatorial staff.
“Technically speaking, government agencies aren’t allowed to lobby,” says Gunnels. “But they sure do a lot of informing just before big votes.”
The document that has just spilled over the Sanders fax line is printed with a cover sheet from the Ex-Im Bank. It looks like an internal memo, sent by Ex-Im’s “senior legislative analyst,” Beverley Thompson.
The document contains a series of cheery talking points about the Ex-Im loan to China, which taken together seem to indicate that the loan is a darn good idea. Nowhere does the document simply come out and say, “We recommend that the Sanders amendment against this loan be defeated.” But the meaning is fairly clear.
One odd feature of the document is a notation at the top of the page that reads, “FYI—this info has not been cleared.” In government offices, documents must be cleared for public consumption before they can be distributed outside the agency. What this memo seems to suggest, then, is that the recipient was being given choice inside info from the Ex-Im Bank, a strange thing for the bank to be doing out in the open.
