The big challenge came when Ronald Reagan’s commission proposed a whopping 50 percent increase for public servants in all branches of government a year later in December 1988. Chaired by the former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, a well-known Washington insider, the bipartisan commission said that in an age of inflation public pay failed to keep up. The raise would cost Treasury about $300 million. Representatives would receive $135,000 a year instead of $89,500. Speaker Wright’s salary would go up to $175,000. The commission reduced the sting for taxpayers by proposing that the generous salary hike be tied to a ban on honoraria and strict limitations on how much federal officials could earn from other kinds of outside income.
Common Cause thought the trade-off was worth it. Fred Wertheimer liked the total ban on honoraria, currently limited to 30 percent of salaries, and saw the package as the first step toward more comprehensive ethics reforms. “Honoraria fees,” Wertheimer said in a press release, “represent one of the most insidious ethics problems in government today. In fact . . . there is no ‘honor’ involved . . . when money is used by special interests to obtain political access and influence and when elected representatives in Congress actively seek and accept the payments.”4 Members of Congress earned $9.8 million in honoraria in 1987, a combination of speaker fees from a range of groups and organizations, the majority of them private, and payments that were offered to legislators in exchange for their attending breakfast meetings, lunches, and retreats. Legislators were even paid to take tours of corporate headquarters. Wertheimer was outraged when interest groups compensated legislators whose support they needed upward of $25,000 (more commonly, $1,000 or $2,000) to participate in some kind of manufactured event.5 This preeminent reform organization announced its support for the raise.
But the Right smelled blood. On December 14, one day after the commission unveiled its recommendations, David Keating, the executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, denounced the hike. The 150,000-member National Taxpayers Union was a conservative organization devoted to low taxes and low spending. Regarding the pay raise, Keating complained, “Is it too much to ask today’s Congress and high-ranking government officials to freeze their pay for a few years while the federal budget is being brought into balance?”6
Conservative talk radio hosts chimed in to denounce the pay raise as a uniquely bad idea. The pivotal interview took place on WXYT-AM in Detroit on December 6, ten days before the 215th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. During the discussion with the fiery, red-bearded, flannel-shirt-clad host Roy Fox, a caller named Tony from Roseville, Michigan, chimed in to express his outrage. Fox loved what he heard from Tony. The veteran talk show provocateur, who yelled into the microphone every chance that he could, had spent thirty years on air railing against big government. He had started out when he was eighteen years old at a small station in Henderson, Kentucky, owned by the mayor, where he honed a broadcast mixing news, music, and talk with his pet parakeet, who interjected sounds in the background as he read commercial announcements. Fox had lived the nomad-like existence of radio hosts, moving from one station to the next across the Midwest. While hosting on a small station in Akron, Ohio, Fox mastered a new format of pure talk radio that was being popularized in New York by Bob Grant and in California by Joe Pyne, whose aggressive back-and-forth conversations attracted sizable audiences. Fox imported this provocative style to the Midwest.7 Fox heard his caller’s suggestion that listeners send tea bags to members of Congress with a message, attached on the string, saying, “No pay increase.” At first, Fox thought that it was a “moronic idea.” But overnight he changed his mind. The next day he instructed his audience to write on tea bags, “Read My Tea Bag: No 50% Raise!” along with their names and home addresses, and then send one to their legislator and another to the president. Fox’s wife, Mary, upped the ante by faxing out information to about a dozen hosts in major markets around the country urging them to repeat the message as well.8 David Keating took a short break from his vacation in San Diego to appear on more than thirty shows.9
The conservative opponents of the pay raise found unexpected support from a prominent figure on the left. The consumer advocate Ralph Nader, now a leader of his own nonprofit, Public Citizen, blasted the salary increase proposal as outrageous. In contrast to Fred Wertheimer, Nader was a reformer with far less faith in government. As a product of the 1960s counterculture, he took inspiration from grassroots civil rights and antiwar activists who exposed the hypocrisy of both political parties and the ways that powerful interests tainted democracy. Nader dismissed the commission’s recommendations to reporters. Not even a deal that adopted honoraria reform satisfied him. “They don’t need it, they don’t deserve it and they shouldn’t receive it,” Nader said.10 “You don’t say, ‘Honorariums are bad; stop being bad people and we’ll make it up to you.’ They’re separate reforms.”11
Like his conservative counterparts, Nader took to the airwaves. He was bemused that the most receptive audiences were the listeners of right-leaning programs such as The Jerry Williams Show, a popular Massachusetts radio program. Known as the “Dean of Talk Radio,” Williams made his name by attacking Michael Dukakis and championing the kind of blue-collar populist conservatism that Gingrich had been enthralled by ever since his childhood in Harrisburg. As part of his “Stop the Salary Grab” campaign, Nader announced the phone numbers of Speaker Wright and Minority Leader Robert Michel, with both Nader and Williams imploring listeners to call their offices.
This was the precise moment when talk radio was coming into its own. In 1987, under pressure from President Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the fairness doctrine, a 1949 regulation that had required television and radio shows to provide equal airtime for all sides of a political debate. Many on the Right opposed the doctrine (though not all, including Gingrich, who thought that the rule should be preserved). Conservatives who were opposed to the doctrine believed that liberal voices dominated television and radio under the guise of objectivity. With the doctrine eliminated, radio and television hosts could opine on anything, and station owners, should they be of a mind to, could promote their particular political views unimpeded, 24/7. Radio and the budding cable industry would never be the same. There was an explosion of conservative talk radio shows after the doctrine was abandoned, with personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, whose show became nationally syndicated in 1988, shaking up the airwaves.12
The congressional pay raise was a perfect issue for this new Wild West. Conservative hosts pummeled their opponents without the requirement to be “fair.” The impact was immediate. Whenever someone like Roy Fox or Jerry Williams raised the issue, the phone lines lit up. Many other regional hosts picked up on Fox’s call for a “Tea Bag Revolution,” and within a week a national movement had been launched as thousands upon thousands of tea bags arrived on legislators’ desks. “We were on the phone to each other every day,” as one radio host described it. “It was like managing a political campaign.” At one point, he added, “we got hold of Jim Wright’s fax number. I called the other stations, and we buried him under a blizzard of paper.”13
From his regal quarters on Capitol Hill, Speaker Wright was blindsided by the ferocity of the opposition. Conservative activists were familiar with the world of talk radio, a medium that had been popular for decades as the Right searched for alternatives to the mainstream press.14 But most of Washington’s elected officials had not paid much attention. Neither Wright nor his colleagues believed that talk radio was a serious medium. If it wasn’t in The New York Times or on the CBS Evening News, they thought, it probably didn’t matter.
Gingrich, ever alert to trends and opportunities, however, was more attuned to what conservative talk radio had to say. He actually supported the raise, agreeing with the commission that it was needed to recruit good people to public service, but he certainly didn’t mind watching the heat it generated for the Speaker. Gingrich remarked that the pay issue
had “sparked a level of anti-Congress feeling that is more intense than any other political feeling since Watergate,” a comparison that he liked to make whenever possible because it automatically elevated the seriousness of the controversy for the generation who suffered through Nixon’s downfall.15 The pay raise fit his narrative about the heavy-handed Democrats trampling on the will of the people. The California Democrat Vic Fazio, who supported the raise and was one of Wright’s top defenders on the Ethics Committee, recalled, “We became cartoon cannon fodder for trash television and for talk radio. . . . We fell prey to the deception of the rabble rousers.”16
On January 6, President Reagan endorsed the commission report and inserted the pay raise into his budget, likely with the understanding that it would raise hell for Wright. The antiunion president, who famously said that government was the problem, was now on record as favoring paying legislators and civil servants more generously. But he had also laid down a no-win challenge to lawmakers. The decision was theirs. Under pressure, Senator George Mitchell of Maine, a former federal judge and the cerebral new majority leader, with the agreement of Minority Leader Bob Dole, announced that the Senate would vote on the bill. The raise would not go through before each senator stood up to be counted.
The stage was set for a showdown between a Democratic-controlled Congress and the American public. To many Watergate-era journalists, the right-wingers seemed to have a point. Why should congressmen enrich themselves? They were not Wall Street moguls or real estate investors but rather public servants. Several news magazines declared their opposition to the size of the proposed raise and called for accountability in the House, where Wright had not said yet whether there would be a vote. Without one, the raise would be automatic. Time magazine reminded readers that the extra financial benefits that legislators received were “cushy enough to provoke the envy of all but the best compensated private executives.” With Newsweek using terms like “cowardice” and “duplicitous” in its reporting, it also branded Speaker Wright the “wagon boss of the gravy train” for members who “enjoy a wide range of perks from lavish pensions to cheap haircuts.” The Washington Post called the raises “too generous” and complained that they were being enacted through a “no-fingerprints” process.17 According to Gallup, even when Americans were informed that the raise would be connected to a strict ban on honoraria, 82 percent surveyed said they were against the increase.18 And congressional offices were flooded with negative letters and faxes. One postcard showed a picture of a pig with text that read, “Re: your obscene pay raise—Piggies that do nothing but get fatter and fatter get gobbled up at the next meal.”19
Members of Congress got an earful whenever they traveled as well. While attending church in his home district of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the Democratic representative Brian Donnelly and a group of other male congregants were preparing to become godfathers. Right in the middle of the service, a fellow godfather-to-be leaned over and hissed in Donnelly’s ear, “You better vote on that raise, and do it this week!”20
The Colorado Democrat Patricia Schroeder warned the Speaker that he needed to take this uprising very seriously. With 80 percent of Americans “flaming mad” against the measure, the recently departed “Teflon” president, Reagan, would not “take the heat” for the House passing the increase; the Democratic Party would. “Make no mistake about it,” Schroeder predicted. “The raise will be blamed on each and every Democratic [sic] in the Congress. I suspect Lee Atwater is already cutting the commercials, substituting the ‘obscene Democratic pay raise’ for Willie Horton.”21 One of the most vicious and infamous ads from Atwater’s 1988 Republican campaign focused on a paroled African American named Willie Horton who assaulted and raped a woman while on a weekend furlough.
Caught in a political trap, Wright made matters worse. At the very moment he was counting on his colleagues to beat back the ethics scandal, he deflected responsibility on the pay raise issue. In an unorthodox move, he distributed a survey to House members to see how they felt about the raise, asking whether they would accept a lower amount and whether there should be a vote. In Wright’s mind, if the results revealed that a significant number of legislators wanted the raise, he could use the data to make the case that he was simply fulfilling the members’ will and take himself off the hook.
Members were furious. By asking for their opinion, he was implicitly putting some of the burden for the decision on the backs of his colleagues. “When you’re elected speaker or majority leader or majority whip you are expected to absorb heat on behalf of the members on tough issues,” one Democratic staffer bluntly complained. “Everyone understood the questionnaire as an attempt to pluralize the heat. And people felt burned.”22 Republicans could only laugh that Wright had thrown his fellow Democrats under the bus.
On February 2, the Senate voted against the raise by 95 to 5. All eyes were now on Wright. Would he let the raise go through and take the heat? Or would he call for a vote? Wright floated the idea of the House voting for a 30 percent raise, but that would not provide cover for Democrats as the issue continued to simmer. The Democrat Les AuCoin of Oregon said the tension was unlike anything he had seen in his fourteen years in the House. “People are ready to pick up a brick or pick up a rifle. It goes much deeper than the raise, the dollars. This has crystalized a perception [of Congress] that we have the rulers and the ruled,” and that citizens felt an “inability to control events.”23
In Los Angeles, KFI station producers reported that their callers wanted to speak only about the pay raise. “All I have to do is go on the air and say pay raise, and the phones light up, especially now when people sense that we may be close to victory,” said the host of a morning talk show in San Diego, Mark Williams. He admitted, “I’m not doing journalism here, I’m doing an activist talk show.” The representatives of the Tetley tea company offered Houston listeners a monthlong supply of their product to anyone who joined the Tea Bag Revolution. Talk radio, meanwhile, charged onto the national stage, with Roy Fox, identified as the creator of the Tea Bag Revolution, becoming one of the biggest media sensations in the country.24 The late-night talk shows piled on. During one monologue, Jay Leno, guest hosting for Johnny Carson on NBC’s Tonight Show, joked, “Congress said if we give them a 50 percent pay raise they won’t go out on the road and give speeches. You know what? Why don’t we give them 100 percent pay raise and shut them up altogether!”25
Days before the raise would go into effect unless the House voted against it, Democrats handed their opponents more ammunition. On February 3, 140 House Democrats, along with their families, arrived at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station to depart for their annual retreat at the grand Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, their suitcases bulging with vacation clothes and sporting equipment. Lobbyists made $6,000 contributions to subsidize the train that would transport the legislators. When the legislators walked to the track to board their Amtrak train, they were greeted by protesters with posters reading, HOUSE OF GREED! and WRIGHT IS A CROOK! The protesters chanted, “You can run but you can’t hide,” as the members headed out in their nineteen-car train.26 Majority Whip Coelho tried to deflect the bad optics by joking, “Once a year, Democrats try to live like Republicans.”27
Over the next two days, television cameras captured legislators on horseback, playing tennis, and lining up for drinks at a catered dinner as they listened to orchestral music. There was Mississippi’s Mike Espy picturesquely ice-skating in the mountains with his two children, while Connecticut’s Samuel Gejdenson splashed in the resort’s heated pool with his kids. “Around the corner,” wrote one reporter, California’s Norman Mineta waited “his turn for a bowling lane” while Dan Glickman of Kansas “finished a class of low-impact aerobics. Most of yesterday’s appointments for mineral baths, massages and manicures were made long before the 140 House Democrats arrived for their annual retreat. . . . Look for no apologies here from lawmakers enjoying a posh weekend—partly subsidized by lo
bbyists—at a time when there is an uproar about an impending 50 percent congressional pay raise.” Karen Hosler of The Baltimore Sun quoted the Maryland Democrat Benjamin Cardin, taking a pause during a tennis match with another Democrat, as saying, “Congress has got to go on doing its business,” seemingly oblivious to the irony behind his words.28 The reporters told readers about the Saturday night diner gala, during which House Democrats dressed up in kitschy 1950s costumes, dancing the Peppermint Twist and the jitterbug—Coelho turned out to be masterful at the latter. The eighty-eight-year-old Claude Pepper was reported to have lit up the dance floor boogying to Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher.”29 But the radio show hosts Roy Fox and Mike Siegel certainly understood and gleefully shared the Greenbrier’s phone number with listeners, as did other radio hosts. The resort’s switchboard lit up with hundreds of calls.30
Wright was caught off guard by the tumult. He had been through several pay raise battles throughout his career, starting in his first term. On each occasion, the dynamics had played out the same way. Congress considered a raise, opponents kicked and screamed, and then the salary hike went into effect even if there were a few stumbles along the way. Everyone eventually moved on. Wright learned from Speaker Rayburn in 1955 that the job of the legislator was to be firm when constituents complained. The party leader took the heat while the rank and file stood behind him. Like the other times, Wright assumed that once the pay raise kicked in, Congress would move on to other matters.
What the Speaker didn’t grasp was how much had changed in the years since Reagan had become president. The conservative movement was reshaping the political landscape, turning politicians into villains in the public imagination through their campaign to delegitimize the federal government. The movement’s allies on Capitol Hill were mobilizing to bring down the Democrats. Every example of the Democratic majority misusing their power—real or perceived—would be paraded around the news media as further evidence of how the party had abused its power.
Burning Down the House Page 20