Your Call Is Important To Us

by Penny, Laura

  In March 1995, that latter-day radical Tom, Tom DeLay, struck a pose next to a five-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty swathed in red tape, and began hacking and slashing away at the hated symbol of old-school bureaucracy. When I was rooting around for exemplary Republicans, and began looking at DeLay, the current House Majority Leader and former House Majority Whip, I liked him for a number of reasons. First, he did fun things like cover statues with red tape. Second, he wasn’t as played out and ubiquitous as the Newt. Third, he, and all the lesser Tom DeLays, who share his Christ-and-Mammon creed but lack his diabolical skills, are living proof that I am not paranoid. My most tinfoil-hatted fantasies pale in comparison to the things right-wing radicals like DeLay and his ilk actually say and do. Fourth, and most significant, DeLay is one of the crucial players in the melding of moneyed interests and government.

  It would be an understatement to DeClare that DeLay is DeVoted to DeRegulation; “Mr. DeReg” is but one of his nicknames. He is also known as “The Hammer,” “The Congressman from Enron,” and “The Exterminator.” He was known as “Hot-Tub Tom” when he was a multiple martini man, but he has since switched, like Bush, to chugging the Lord. DeLay got the moniker “The Hammer” not for his balloony harem pants or his funny sideways dancing, but for his full-frontal fundraising and no-nonsense way of dealing with Washington’s legion of lobbyists. “The Congressman from Enron” is because Enron gave DeLay some dough. And, though I hate to imply anything so salacious as a simple cash-for-favors quid pro quo, DeLay did seem awfully enthused about exempting Enron from energy trading regulations. “The Exterminator” refers to his career previous to politics. DeLay operated a pest-control business in Sugar Land, Texas, and it was there that he saw the way and the truth and the light. Fire ants were eating Texas, and yet the EPA banned the most effective fire ant–slaughtering agent available to the mass bug murderer at the time, on account of them reckoning it was carcinogenic. Nor could he abide the worker safety laws that required fumigators to wear hardhats during routine termite routs. DeLay swore vengence on the bean counters down in Washington for stifling the spirit of free enterprise, and went into politics, a Capra-corny conservative conversion tale indeed.

  Since entering politics, DeLay has been the point man for the We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules movement. He has described the EPA as “the Gestapo of government,” and tried to cut its funding. He also wanted to repeal the Clean Air Act. When a reporter asked him if there were any regulatory measures worth keeping, DeLay replied, “Not that I can think of.” And just so you know that he is keeping the no-rules thing real down home, the district surrounding Sugar Land boasts a Monsanto plant, a BASF chemical plant, an EPA Superfund mercury site, one of the bigger Dow complexes, and air and water quality that are typically Texan in their terribleness.

  Remember that incident in Texas in 2003, when all the Democrats fled to neighboring states to block a redistricting vote that would hand the Republicans more seats? That gerrymandering would be more fine DeLay handiwork. He then used his sway within the federal government to interfere in the protest against the gerrymander, contacting the Federal Aviation Administration to track down those wayward Democrats. This last bit of strong-arming is the substance of one of the ethics complaints filed against DeLay in 2004. The other ethics complaints involve DeLay attempting to influence a colleague in a House vote, and his use of inappropriate corporate contributions to fund Republican campaigns through his political action committee. DeLay’s associates are under investigation by a Texas grand jury for the latter transgression as well, and three have already been charged with violating campaign finance law.

  Republicans spent the weeks before Christmas vacillating about changing their ethics rules to accommodate the possibility of a DeLay indictment. In January of 2005, the Republicans decided that it would be perfectly fine to strike down a rule that might interfere with DeLay’s position as House Majority Leader, should he be charged in Texas. A few days later, however, they reversed this decision. Given that the ethics rules in question were penned by the revolutionary Republican congress of 1994 in the first place, this vote looked very bad. In fact, it looked so bad that even DeLay thought that his colleagues should reverse their decision. However, at the same time, the Republicans also made another change that effectively scuttles future ethics complaints against DeLay or any other offending congress-critters. The ethics committee will no longer launch investigations if it reaches a tie vote on the complaints. The ethics committee is half Republican, half Democrat. Consequently, members of the committee will have to vote against their own parties to launch investigations, which they are often unwilling or unable to do. The outgoing chair of the Ethics Committee, Representative Joel Hefley, is a notable exception to this rule. Even though he is a Republican, he has been fairly zealous in following up on a variety of complaints against DeLay. Of course, this zeal is one of the reasons why he is the outgoing chair of the Ethics Committee. It is rumored that his replacement will be a more obedient and obliging Republican, perhaps a DeLay-friendly fellow Texan.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to DeLay denuding Lady Liberty of that red tape, back in 1995. DeLay did not wield the shears of freedom all by his lonesome. Beside him was the chair of Project Relief, lobbyist Bruce Gates, who had helped drum up support for their most recent victory: a moratorium on government health and safety regulations, which passed the house by a vote of 276 to 146. There had been some four thousand rules in the pipeline, leftovers from the Democrats, and the Republicans wanted to head them off at the pass, or at least stall them until they could pass more comprehensive antiregulatory legislation. When The Washington Post inquired as to the propriety of numerous industry lobbyists sitting down in DeLay’s office to draft provisions of the moratorium bill, DeLay maintained that industry had the expertise. Various members of Project Relief, a super-lobby of 350 industry and corporate concerns, dropped by to make sure that their interests would be served by the bill; for example, UPS wanted to make sure that emissions regulations wouldn’t call for a retooling of their fleet of trucks, and Union Carbide was sweating the possibility of facing more fines for failure to report off-duty worker injuries. Once everyone passed the legislation around, and penned a line or two, like some bizarre rich-guy version of that Surrealist party game, Exquisite Corpse, the nice people at Project Relief let loose the lobbying hounds, convincing various Democrats with industries in their districts to come along on the cool new no-rules ride.

  A similar bill, floated in the Senate by Bob Dole, enjoyed the favor and the legwork of a like-minded organization of larger manufacturing concerns, the Alliance for Reasonable Regulation. By “reasonable,” the car makers and chemical companies meant “less,” just as the manufacturers and couriers that made up Project Relief intended to relieve themselves of the burden of excessive regulation. It makes good sense, really. Why go to all the fuss and bother of “bidding defiance to the laws of the nation,” as per Jefferson’s allegations against moneyed corporations, when it is ever so much easier to simply sashay up to the Hill and have those puppies rewritten?

  This sort of folderol bore little resemblance to the legislative process as I remembered it from that Schoolhouse Rock song, “I’m Just a Bill.” The humble singing scrap of paper that made it all the way to Capitol Hill started very differently: The folks wanted a law and called their congressman, who wrote the law. That seems so desperately mid-seventies, as earnest and outmoded as Jimmy Carter or a macramé plant holder.

  DeLay, uncoincidentally, was the second leading fund-raiser for the freshman Republicans in Congress in 1994, bested only by the Newt. He reportedly kept a ledger in his office detailing which lobbies were friendly and unfriendly, based on the amount that their political action committees had given to the Republican machine. DeLay told groups with Democratic ties that they wouldn’t see jack until they hired a Republican lobbyist, because he didn’t want to deal with “people who wanted to kill the revolution.” Ok
ay, whatever you say, Che. This crackdown is sometimes called The K Street Project. And you’ll never guess what little Randy DeLay, Tom’s bro, became when he grew up: a lobbyist, and a mighty successful one, particularly when lobbying his brother, which he did on behalf of a Mexican cement company and a ginormous railroad merger. Yes, all the brothers going to rise up, come the revolution.

  When bipartisan campaign finance legislation became all the rage on Capitol Hill, Mr. DeReg didn’t hesitate to poo on the killjoy rule talk. Money wasn’t the problem, said DeLay; in fact, money was the very lifeblood of the political system. And Newt, even though he crumbled and shook hands with Slick Willie over the promise of a campaign finance reform bill, maintained that all the player-hating analysis was nothing more than a loony expression of socialist disapproval of the free enterprise system. If a stomach-pill manufacturer could pay 100 million dollars to get a message out, quoth the Newt, why shouldn’t we spend that a couple of times over on promoting and producing the political process?

  It is understandable that persons like Gingrich and DeLay, who are so wholeheartedly devoted to the pursuit of funds, would consider them the alpha and omega of political life. When the first, much-ballyhooed campaign finance bill choked, it was on account of nobody wanting to be the first to give up all the sweet, sweet donations. It was like a Mexican stand-off, everyone having unwittingly spent themselves into a state of Mutually Assured Donation. Republicans decried contributions from staunchly Democratic unions: Their dues were extortion, plain and simple, pimped out of blue-collar just folks and funneled to pesky liberal do-gooders, regardless of the political preferences of individual workers. Democrats, meanwhile, decried corporate contributions, but largely because the Republicans were better at soliciting them—and they did not express their disapproval by refusing huge corporate contributions to their own campaigns. Oftentimes, big donors bet on both nags: Enron, for example, skewed Republican in keeping with its Texan roots, but threw an unholy heap of cash at the Democrats as well. I think those rich dudes might be on to something. Maybe next election, I’ll vote for both guys, too. Whichever way the shit goes down, my ass will be covered.

  I don’t know if money is, as DeLay claims, the lifeblood of politics. Maybe he needs to act that metaphor out for me again, like he did with that red tape thing: He could inject a Statue of Liberty with a big syringeful of green ink, to represent the healing effects of cash transfusions on the body politic. I’m not a doctor, but if I had to diagnose the American body politic, I do not think I would write “monetary anemia” or “insufficient fundingitis” on its chart.

  How about calling money the food of politics, as in, “If money be the food of politics, feed on!” The food metaphor works on other levels, too: The body politic can be said to be bulimic. Look at the way voters binge and purge over election cycles, trading Great Society–style liberal largesse for conservatives’ cutbacks and capitalism. Gingrich and company claimed that they wanted the government to go on a diet, but at the same time they were fattening their own party coffers. Binge on contributions; purge the regulations. In with the money, out with the governance. Perhaps DeLay could do a press conference in which he appears before a fridge at midnight, eats a giant cake shaped like the Statue of Liberty, and then throws up an omnibus bill outlawing laws against laws that stop the spread of laws. One of his pals from Project Relief could hold his hair back.

  Project Relief and the Association for Reasonable Regulation were megalobbies, which is to say, lobbies made up of other lobbies. It is hard to estimate exactly how many active lobbies there are in Washington. In 2002, there were more than twenty-four thousand registered lobbyists there, about forty-five for every member of Congress, a ratio that fairly wallops Surf City’s promise of two girls for every boy. Moreover, these estimates merely account for those involved in lobbying at the federal level. There are also thousands of lobbyists pitching woo at the state level, too. Add up all the dough that flows from both levels, and we are talking about at least a billion dollars, maybe even two billion. I leave it to your discretion, Gentle Reader, to judge whether or not the titans of industry would sink that kind of cash into a process that granted them few tangible gains. For example, the most lobby-mobbed issue of the last few years is tax policy. Is it mere happenstance that corporate tax revenues are at historic lows, or is it some damn fine work on the part of influence peddlers?

  Of course, lobbying is only one part of the contemporary political equation. Sure, you can pay a lobbyist to get your message out, but you can also just let the sweet, sweet money speak for itself, in the form of campaign contributions. One of the reasons why campaign finance legislation has been a hot topic for the past few years is that the past three U.S elections have been the most expensive ever, until the next one came along. An amended version of McCain’s campaign finance bill, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), was finally passed in March of 2002, in time for the 2004 election, but it didn’t end up curbing campaign contributions or spending. It merely rerouted the copious cataracts of cash into different kinds of slush funds.

  To understand how this came to pass, a wee history of U.S. campaign finance law might come in handy. The Federal Election Commission rules were written in 1971, and rewritten throughout the seventies, after the Watergate scandal revealed little tidbits like the fact that Nixon got millions of profoundly illegal clams for the 1972 campaign. The 1974 amendments set contribution limits: An individual could give $1,000 to a candidate, and a political action committee could give $5,000. Total individual donations to the party, political action committees, and specific candidates could not exceed $25,000 per year.

  The 1976 Supreme Court decision in a case called Buckley vs. Valeo altered these regulations somewhat, challenging the constitutionality of the 1974 changes to the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA) on the grounds that the rules infringed on the First Amendment right to free speech. The argument was simply that no significant political expression could take place without spending some money. The Court consequently struck down limits on candidate expenditures, family contributions, and self-contributions, paving the way for eccentric billionaire campaigns à la Steve Forbes and Ross Perot. It also ruled that there could be no limits on the expenditures of candidates and their committees, except in the case of presidential candidates who accepted federal matching funds. But the court upheld the FECA with respect to contribution limits, the disclosure process, and provision of federal funds for presidential elections. Justice Warren Burger issued a partial dissent/partial concurrence in keeping with the partial decision, noting that it was paradoxical of the Justices to limit contributions while permitting theoretically unlimited expenditures. He wrote, “The Act as cut back by the Court thus places an intolerable pressure on the distinction between ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ expenditures on behalf of a candidate; even those with the most sanguine hopes for the Act might well concede the distinction cannot be maintained.” Throughout the late seventies, legislators messed with the FECA, trying to retain such distinctions, but by 1979 they further amended it to okay unlimited spending on the part of state and local parties for promotional, get-out-the-vote-type campaign materials, also known as “soft money.”

  Hard money pays for campaign ads that explicitly declare, “Vote for John Q. Public.” Soft money pays for campaign activities that do not use words like “vote” or “elect.” Hard money is regulated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Soft money is not. The beauty and utility of this bumper-sticker-fund provision didn’t dawn on fund-raisers until the late eighties, during the Dukakis campaign. By 1992, both parties had raised about $46.5 million in soft money, versus $219 million of the hard kind subject to FEC regulations. During the 1996 race, soft money tripled, swelling to $150 million, and hard money just about doubled, to $393 million. In the 2000 race, the Republicans raised $466 million in hard money and $250 million in soft money. The Democrats pulled in $275 million in hard money and $245 million in soft money. Thro
ughout 2001 and 2002, Repubs and Dems socked away another $250 million and $246 million, respectively, stashing their soft cash before the November 2002 deadline set by the BCRA.

  The BCRA is not as stringent as the first McCain-Feingold bill, which Jesse Helms and the gang filibustered to death. Soft money is out, but in exchange, limits for hard-money contributions have been raised. Even though the BCRA was a compromise bill, it got tied up in court challenges as soon as it passed. The eighty or so court cases challenging the BCRA were collected under the case name of McConnell vs. FEC. The McConnell in question is Republican senator Mitch McConnell, one of campaign finance reform’s most ardent opponents. He was instrumental in fighting McCain-Feingold, and swore that he would do in the courts what he could not do in the Senate. Republicans seem to adore appealing to the judiciary in this way, their anti-lawsuit rhetoric notwithstanding. McConnell claimed that the BCRA is flat-out unconstitutional, as it contravenes the First Amendment. On December 10, 2004, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the FEC, upholding all the major provisions of the BCRA.

  The BCRA was supposed to set stricter guidelines for campaign contributions and check the tide of soft money. But once the soft-money loophole closed, another campaign-financing entity emerged to keep the sweet, sweet funds flowing. The 2004 election marked the rise of the 527, so named for a section of the tax code. The 527s are tax-exempt fundraising organizations, and they disclose their activities to the IRS, not the FEC. This means they are unregulated by the FEC, which makes them look an awful lot like—you guessed it, chum—soft money. The 527s are subject to some BCRA provisions, like the ones that determine when political ads can be aired, but other than that, they are free to deploy their unlimited contributions as they see fit. When fund-raising was split into hard and soft money, there were two kinds of ads. Hard-money ads were allowed to engage in express advocacy. Soft-money ads could only implicitly advocate for a candidate. Soft-money ads were, for the most part, issue ads, or negative speculation about opposing candidates. The 527 ads in the most recent election cycle went beyond these old categories of express and implicit advocacy, into new realms of hyperbole and character assassination. Consider the 527 organization that got the most political bang for its millions: The Swift Vets and POWs for Truth. These vets didn’t say a thing about Kerry’s policies, or his voting record. Instead, they engaged in innuendo, insinuating that Kerry was a sham war hero, who didn’t really deserve his Purple Hearts. Republicans had the unmitigated gall to question Kerry’s service record, even though their own candidate couldn’t be bothered to show up for all of his draft-deferring National Guard service. This strategy was totally in keeping with the gospel according to Karl Rove: attack your opponent on his strengths, not his weaknesses.