by Matt Taibbi
“The nays have it!” the green-faced Terry shouted.
The majority side of the floor collectively slumped in its chairs and stared forward, open-mouthed. Their half of Congress looked like a bar on Landsdowne Street after Bill Buckner. It was the Republicans’ first loss on an appropriations vote since 1995, ending one of the longest political winning streaks in the country’s history—and the beginning of what was looking more and more like the bloody collapse of Republican rule in Washington.
The backdrop for the vote on the bill—known colloquially as “Labor H”—involved a compound fracture within a Republican Party badly wounded by legal woes and the declining poll numbers of George Bush.
The latter fact became a pressing issue in Congress on the election night of November 8, when Republicans suffered defeats in two critical states, losing the governorships of both New Jersey and Virginia.
But in the most telling November 8 result, incumbent St. Paul, Minnesota, mayor Randy Kelly, a Democrat who endorsed Bush, was whipped by another Democrat, Chris Coleman, who won by almost 70 percent; polls showed that nearly two-thirds of voters wanted to punish Kelly for his support of the president.
Once everyone saw that Bush could not be counted on to deliver coattail victories, Hill lawmakers began scrambling to distance themselves from the more unpopular aspects of Bush’s agenda. In the House, this resulted in a three-way split within the Republican Party.
On the one hand, there suddenly appeared to be a dissenting group of socially liberal Republicans—most hailing from northern states with significant minority and organized-labor presences—who were hostile to Bush’s tax cuts, to the war, and to some cuts in social spending. This bunch, called the moderates or the “Tuesday group” (an incorrect nickname; they actually meet on Wednesdays), includes Republicans such as New York’s Sherwood Boehlert, Connecticut’s Rob Simmons, and Iowa’s Jim Leach.
Then there were the hard-liners, also called the “true conservatives,” who organized in opposition to the Bush administration’s long record of unchecked spending. This group, which on the whole opposes social expenditure of any kind and would like to see programs such as Medicaid eliminated, has wide support and a strong organization in the House. Calling itself the Republican Study Committee, the group is led by the unsmiling, pencil-necked congressman from Indiana Mike Pence, and it has forced a showdown with the old Republican leadership of the House over spending for the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
The RSC has unveiled a plan called Operation Offset, which would pay for Katrina by making commensurate “offsets” in House spending through cuts in social programming. In a bucking of superficial unity that would have been unthinkable a year ago, the RSC publicly threatened to force a vote on the House leadership seats if Operation Offset were not instituted.
The latter issue is the last key factor in the Republican troubles, for the third group in the new three-sided Republican Party—the Bush-loyalist old guard still nominally in charge—is in complete disarray. Majority Leader Tom DeLay is under indictment and has been forced to step down temporarily. His interim replacement, Missouri’s Roy Blunt, looks like he will be sucked into the Jack Abramoff scandal and Speaker Hastert has his own Abramoff problems.
Therefore, the Bush coterie in the House is battered and staggering and, as a result, has been scrambling in recent weeks to pull off the difficult task of satisfying both dissident factions within its ranks. With regard to the Labor H bill, the Republican leadership bowed to pressure from the conservative wing and not only implemented widespread spending offsets but agreed, no doubt with a significant measure of physical agony, to an across-the-board ban on earmarks—those tossed-in local pork projects, stuffed in the anus of appropriations bills, that are the staple of the congressional political diet.
While the last-minute spending cuts were largely what doomed the bill, with most of the “moderates” voting nay—Arizona’s Rick Renzi rejected the bill because of cuts in rural-education funding—the party also lost a few Bush loyalists who couldn’t swallow the loss of their beloved earmarks. One of those was Thomas, the Ways and Means chairman. What he couldn’t swallow was a last-minute change in the law that moved up a ban on the use of Medicaid funds to pay for erectile-dysfunction drugs—a step that would result in a $90 million offset.
Thomas—who besides having his fling with a Pharma lobbyist received $112,619 in campaign funds from the pharmaceutical industry in the 2004 cycle—couldn’t brook passage of a bill forbidding the state to pay for ED drugs.
In other words, Thomas couldn’t vote without Viagra. If there is a better metaphor for the Republican troubles, I haven’t heard it.
But the Republicans would return to form late that same night with the passage of their controversial budget-reconciliation package.
The victory had all the trappings of a DeLay win in a major vote. One, it was conducted in the middle of the night, so that the smarmy process could be viewed by the minimum number of people and/or reporters. Two, it was a narrow win: 217–215. The one- or two-vote victory has been a hallmark of the DeLay method: compromise as little as possible on your pork and your social cuts, fuck ’em if they don’t like it, and win by one vote if you have to, holding the floor open for three hours if needed.
Third, the bill was an Orwellian monstrosity in the classically DeLay-ian mold. The shepherd of such hilariously named bills as the Clear Skies Act (for a bill partially repealing Clean Air) and the Healthy Forests Act (easing restrictions on commercial logging) this time had come up with the Deficit Reduction Act of 2006, a bill that added $20 billion to the deficit. Even in this desperate time for the party, and with the budget already heavily burdened by spending on the Iraq war and Katrina, the DeLay leadership team is still clinging to a plan to implement $70 billion in new tax breaks, with more than half being extended to citizens with incomes over $1 million. To pay for that $70 billion in new shortfalls, DeLay and Co. came up with this Deficit Reduction Act, which cut funding from programs for the very poorest citizens—mainly from Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans.
It took tremendous balls for DeLay to push this bill, given his situation, but he had an ace in the hole: himself. For the night vote, DeLay returned to the chamber to play the role of floor assassin, replacing Blunt and Dreier and Hastert, who’d failed that same assignment earlier in the day.
Watching DeLay wade through a crowd of his own party members during a critical vote is an awesome thing, a nature show worthy of Sir David Attenborough. DeLay moves through the aisles like some kind of balding incubus, and as he passes Republican members instinctively turn their backs on him, not wanting to be caught in the Gorgon’s gaze (or, more to the point, be threatened with the loss of a chairmanship or reelection funding).
The Democrats had this vote won—until DeLay approached a pair of Republicans who had voted nay: Steven LaTourette of Ohio and Maryland’s Wayne Gilchrest. DeLay leaned over and spoke for a few minutes into both sets of ears. I looked up at the board and watched Gilchrest’s red mark turn green; then I saw DeLay walking away from LaTourette, with the latter sighing and pulling out a vote-changing form.
“They broke his arm!” a reporter in the gallery shouted. “They broke his arm!”
A few minutes later the gavel struck and the Republicans had won. But it was a hollow victory. DeLay and his goons were still on top, still together—but they were headed for a nasty divorce.
It has gotten so bad for Republicans around Washington that even their usual trump play—the dirty kick in the balls—has abandoned them. It wasn’t long ago that Republicans could pull a Roy Cohn and pin the scarlet letter even on legless war heroes like Max Cleland and get away with parading them through the public arena as commies and traitors. But when they tried the same thing in Congress on the day after the budget bill, trotting out feckless freshman Representative Jean Schmidt (a wrinkly, witchlike woman with
a penchant for dressing like a harbor buoy) to denounce war critic and Vietnam veteran Representative John Murtha as an unpatriotic coward, the ploy blew up in their faces almost immediately. The whole country reacted with an audible collective retching sound, “Mean Jean” was savaged on SNL, and she had to spend three days hiding from reporters; meanwhile, Murtha spent the weekend getting fellated by Tim Russert and other media heavies, who feted the Democrat as though he were a cross between Audie Murphy and the pope. Overnight, it seemed, Republicans had lost a yard off their fastball.
The party has been riding a terrific formula for political success in the past five years: don’t compromise, crush your enemies, ruthlessly enforce discipline, and then keep the soldiers happy by handing out campaign money and George Bush largess at election time. While everyone was winning, the internal contradictions were kept well hidden. Even the hard-line deficit hawks and Goldwaterites didn’t seem to mind racking up $3 trillion in new debt over five years, just as long as Georgie could produce a W for them by making a few appearances before the polls opened.
Now Bush is stumbling around Washington with spears sticking out of him, and his soldiers are running for the hills, looking for a fresh horse to ride. The old days of everyone in the party getting laid and paid are over. The fatal hidden paradox of Bush’s political success has finally come back to bite him, exposing this damning riddle. How do you give away the entire national treasure and also keep the fiscal conservatives in your party happy? It should always have been impossible; now it really is.
In a meeting last week, the conservative RSC showed the finale of The Bridge on the River Kwai to celebrate the defeat of the $230 million Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere” pork project rammed into a highway bill over the summer. When the bridge over the Kwai exploded at the movie’s end, the crowd of GOP congressmen cheered. Republicans celebrating the death of a Republican bridge.
Could any Republican, much less one hundred of them, have pulled a stunt like that in public a year ago?
No way. The party’s over, George.
The Magical Victory Tour
While Iraq burns, the president keeps playing the same old song
December 29, 2005
December 7, 10:44 a.m., the sixty-fourth anniversary of Pearl Harbor day. I’ve just woken up with a line of drool on my face in the back row of a ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., where any minute now President George W. Bush will give the second address of his barnburning four-speech “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” tour.
There are no T-shirts for this concert tour, but if there were the venue list on the back would make for one of the weirder souvenirs in rock ’n’ roll history. U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, November 30, no advance publicity, closed audience: check. Here at the Omni, December 7, again no advance warning, handpicked audience, ten reporters max (no one else knew about it), with even the cashiers in the hotel’s coffee shop unaware of the president’s presence: check. Dates three and four, venues and dates unknown for security reasons: check and check.
This is how President Bush takes his message to the people these days: in furtive sneak-attack addresses to closed audiences of elite friendlies at weird early-morning hours. If you want to catch Bush’s act in person during this tour, you have to stalk him for days and keep both ears open for last-minute changes of plan; I actually missed the Annapolis speech when I made the mistake of briefly taking my eye off him the day before.
Here at the Omni I showed up early, determined not to repeat my mistake. I was not going to miss the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, no sir. But for all my preparations I did almost screw it up again. I fell asleep an hour before the event and awoke only in the middle of the introductory remarks by Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the stodgy, status quo think tank hosting the event. I pried my eyes open just in time to see Bush, looking spooked and shrunken, take the stage.
Bush in person always strikes me as the kind of guy who would ask a woman for a hand job at the end of a first date. He has days where he looks like she said yes, and days where the answer was no.
Today was one of his no days. He frowned, looking wronged, and grabbed the microphone. I pulled out my notebook . . .
A few minutes later I felt like a hooker who’s just blinked under a blanket with a prep-school virgin. Was that it? Is it over? It seemed to be; Bush was off the podium and slipping down the first line of the crowd, pumping hands for a minute and then promptly Snagglepussing toward the left exit. By the time I made it five rows into the crowd he had vanished into a sea of Secret Servicemen, who whisked him away, presumably to return him posthaste to his formaldehyde tank.
I looked down at my notes. They indicated that Bush had opened his remarks by comparing the Iraq war to World War II (“We liberated millions, we aided the rise of democracy in Europe and Asia. . . .”). From there we learned that we were fighting an enemy without conscience, but all was not lost, because the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Iraq. Of course there had been setbacks, because in the past after we took a city, we left it and the terrorists would just take it back again. But we’ve stopped doing that now and so things are better. In conclusion, Senator Joe Lieberman visited Iraq four times in the past seventeen months and, goddamn it, he liked what he saw.
In the Obey Your Thirst/Image Is Everything era of American politics, Bush’s National Victory campaign is a creepy innovation. It features the president thumping a document—the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”—that was largely written not by diplomats or generals but by a pair of academics from Duke University named Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Essentially a PR document, the paper is basically a living political experiment, designed to prove that Americans will more readily accept military casualties if the word “victory” is repeated a great many times in public.
“This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency,” Gelpi told the New York Times. “The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion.”
In other words, this was really a National Strategy for Victory at Home. It was classic Bush-think. Instead of bombing the insurgency off the map, he bombs the map—in lieu of actually fighting the war, a bold strategy, to be sure. But would it work?
Both the record and my notes indicate that the audience applauded on two occasions. The first came after the line “And now the terrorists think they can make America run in Iraq, and that is not going to happen so long as I’m the commander in chief.” My notes say, “Scattered but by no means unanimous applause.” The second time came at the end of the speech, after the last line, “May God continue to bless our country.” This time the reaction was more enthusiastic, but at least one person—me—was clapping because it was over.
The Council on Foreign Relations was good enough to pass out a list of the expected attendees at the speech. Here are some of the names that one could find in Bush’s audience: Frank Finelli, the Carlyle Group; Adam Fromm, office of Representative Dennis Hastert; Robert W. Haines, ExxonMobil Corp.; Paul W. Butler, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld LLP; Robert Bremer, Lockheed Martin Corp.; Scott Sendek, Eli Lilly and Co.; James H. Lambright, Export-Import Bank of the United States.
The point is obvious; Bush’s audience was like a guest list for a Monster’s Ball of the military-industrial establishment. And even in this crowd full of corporate lawyers, investment bankers, weapons makers, ex-spooks, and, for Christ’s sake, lobbyists, the president of the United States couldn’t cook up more than two tepid applause lines for his Iraq policy—and one of those was because he was finishing up and, one guesses, freeing the audience to go call their brokers.
God bless George Bush. The Middle East is in flames and how does he answer the call? He rolls up to the side entrance of a four-star Washington hotel, slips unobserved into a select gathering of the richest fat
heads in his dad’s Rolodex, spends a few tortured minutes exposing his half-assed policies like a campus flasher, and then ducks back into his rabbit hole while he waits for his next speech to be written by paid liars.
If that isn’t leadership, what is?
Not many people in the Omni audience hung around to be interviewed when it was over. The few who did make themselves available tried to put a brave face on the situation.
“Well, he did the best he could under, uh, difficult circumstances,” said council member Jeffrey Pryce.
Did he detect anything new in the new strategy?
“No,” he said, shrugging. “But he’s in a tough spot.”
I’d been following the national tour for more than a week. If the reception at the Omni was stale, that was nothing compared to how it was going over in the White House briefing room. On the day before the Omni speech, I actually worried that gopher-faced administration spokescreature Scott McClellan might be physically attacked by reporters, who appeared ready to give official notice of having had Enough of This Bullshit.
In fact the room at one point seemed on the verge of a Blazing Saddles–style chair-throwing brawl when McClellan refused to answer the cheeky question of why, if we weren’t planning on torturing war-on-terror detainees in foreign prisons, we couldn’t just bring them back to be incarcerated in the United States.
“I think the American people understand,” McClellan said, “the importance of protecting sources and methods, and not compromising ongoing efforts in the war on terrorism . . .”
When a contingent of audibly groaning reporters pressed, McClellan shrugged and tried a new tack. “I’m not going to talk further about intelligence matters of this nature,” he said.
A reporter next to me threw his head back in disgust. “Oh, fuckin’ A . . .” he whispered. The room broke out into hoots and howls; even the usually dignified Bill Plante of CBS started openly calling McClellan out. “The question you’re currently evading is not about an intelligence matter,” he hissed.
