“Part of it is that Reagan’s programmatic agenda is simply not the majority agenda,” Richard Darman, a senior first-term Reagan White House aide and later deputy Treasury secretary candidly conceded in 1986. “And the American political system is telling him, ‘Look, we like you. You’re an icon. You represent almost everything we ever loved about America. You’re from the Midwest. You went West. You made money but you’re still a small-town boy. You love the girl; the girl loves you. You’ve been a hero of all these different kinds. You survived an assassination. You sure seem to love our country. You make everybody feel good.’ That’s Walter Bagehot’s nineteenth-century English notion of the monarchy, consistent with the living symbol of the nation’s whole history and values and all of that. That’s all a plus.
“But the curious thing about Reagan,” Darman went on, “is that even though all of this is much loved, his constitutional amendment to ban abortion is opposed seventy to thirty. His constitutional amendment to balance the budget can’t get through Congress. His constitutional amendment for prayer in schools runs against the majority feeling. His desire to privatize big hunks of government is not the majority view. All Reagan budgets have been dead on arrival with the exception of the ’81 budget. The House of Representatives is particularly in touch with the people. And with power fragmented and information floating widely in the system, anybody anywhere who tries for too long to run against the majority simply will not hold power. To govern, a president has to move toward the middle.”14
Those observations were true enough, although they pin too much on Ronald Reagan’s shortcomings. He has been a president given to delegating great authority to others, undisturbed at allowing chunks of power to slip away, as demonstrated by the bold adventures of Rear Admiral John Poindexter and Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North on the covert Iranian arms deals.
But the root causes of the modern power float lie well beyond Ronald Reagan—in the political transformations of the past fifteen years that have altered the power game and the way our nation is governed. They await the presidents who take their oaths of office through the rest of this century.
2. The Power Earthquake of 1974: The Impact of Reform, Money, and Television
The Washington establishment has been blown wide open.
—Tommy Boggs, lobbyist
The political fault line from the Old Washington power game to the New Washington power game was 1974.
To most Americans, 1974 was the memorable year in which Richard Nixon was driven from the White House by the Watergate scandal. But Watergate is now behind us and what is far less well remembered—even though it is more enduring—is that 1974 was also the year that climaxed a political earthquake. It was an earthquake that shook the established power structure of the American political system.
Forces which had been pulling at the threads of power for several years finally ripped apart the tighter weave of the old power structure. The old political game was shoved aside, and a new game took over. The political context for governing changed. That transformation dramatically altered how power works in Washington. And the impact is still with us today.
After decades highlighted by periods of presidential dominance from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt, Congress finally revolted, and not just for the moment: Changes were made that would affect how we are governed for a long time to come. Angered by Lyndon Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s intentional confrontations over government spending, and Nixon’s abuses of power such as illegal wiretapping and using the Internal Revenue Service to go after political enemies, an assertive Congress rose up to challenge not just Nixon but the presidency as an institution. As The Wall Street Journal observed in 1973, Nixon “aroused a snoozing Congress and made it mad.”1
Congress seized for itself the legal authority and the expertise to insure that its challenge to the chief executive would be permanent. As if that were not upheaval enough, the House of Representatives also assaulted the citadel of the old congressional power system—seniority—and then balkanized its own power: It created scores of “subcommittee governments,” each taking charge of a slice of federal policy.
That same fateful year of 1974 also gave rise to a big class of new House Democrats, who shook the foundations further by throwing out several established power barons.
As these three upheavals were happening in Congress, a fourth change was occurring in the basic power system in Washington: The power of political parties, which had provided a critical glue, a vital force for cohesion in American government, was being dissolved by a highly mobile, independent-minded, ticket-splitting electorate.
The weakening of the parties and the trend toward a more wide-open power system was hastened by the mushrooming importance of television—and of its political offspring, a new generation of video politicians whose medium was the tube rather than the political clubhouse.
Finally, the increased fragmentation of governmental power set off a political gold rush among thousands of special interest groups, all of whom were bent on panning the new streams of power for nuggets, and were well enough heeled to buy their way into the New Washington power game.
To be sure, the fundamental structure of the old political system was still standing and many old habits remained. No one had torn up the Constitution. But within the basic framework, the rules of the power game had been rewritten, and the old power relationships had been dramatically shaken up. What emerged was a more fluid system of power, one which made the American political system harder to lead than just a couple of decades ago.
For one thing, the sheer volume and velocity of political activity became staggering. The profusion of activity took a quantum leap since the 1960s and especially in the phenomenal growth decade from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Everyone flocked to Washington: trade associations, health and welfare groups, labor unions, businesses, environmentalists, lobbyists for cities, counties, states, right-to-lifers and freedom of choice advocates, consumer groups, political consultants, pollsters, public relations firms. They all moved in. Politics became a full-time industry for tens of thousands of people. In addition, millions of grass-roots voters poured into Washington when their pet issues came up. Voters inundated Congress with oceans of mail, and Congressmen sent back their own unbelievable volumes of mail. The growth of activity in every area was exponential—and it swamped the political system.
Watergate was the epicenter of that political earthquake, but the tremors of reform had been rumbling through the political parties and through Congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For a decade, a climate of congressional bitterness and mistrust had developed toward the executive branch. It was fed by the Vietnam War; it was confirmed by the confrontations with President Nixon over money—Congress had legally voted to spend money on domestic programs, but Nixon impounded the money and defiantly refused to spend it. This atmosphere of distrust was climaxed by the investigation of the Nixon campaign’s criminal break-in at the Democratic headquarters located in the Watergate complex, and by disclosures of the multimillion-dollar Nixon campaign slush funds, financed by wealthy corporations.
In revolt, Congress vigorously asserted its authority and its independence from the White House and then armed itself for a prolonged seige against the executive branch. In reaction to Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam without any congressional declaration of war, Congress in 1973 passed the War Powers Resolution requiring any president to obtain congressional approval for commitment of American forces to a combat zone for more than ninety days. Alarmed by Central Intelligence Agency operations such as attempts at assassinating foreign leaders, Congress asserted new oversight authority, requiring notice of all CIA covert operations. To check presidential authority further, Congress demanded that all executive branch agreements with other countries—those below the status of formal treaties—get Senate approval. All these restrictions hemmed in presidential power.
In rea
ction to the taint of Nixon’s corporate campaign slush funds, Congress voted for public financing of presidential elections. In reaction to its own budget conflict with President Nixon, Congress passed the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, to bar future presidents from refusing to spend what Congress voted. That law also set up a new Congressional budget process and established the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to produce independent analysis of the economy and budget; Congress no longer had to depend on administration economists.
That single change—an independent Congressional Budget Office—was crucial, and symptomatic. Such congressional power was unthinkable in the era of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. When I arrived in Washington in 1962, Congress simply accepted the administration’s economic figures. Arguments were over policy, rarely over the facts. From a distance, the significance may be hard to appreciate. But when Congress got its own economic experts and facts, the executive branch was much more often thrown on the defensive.
“The creation of CBO was of fundamental importance in terms of the way power operates in Washington,” insisted Stuart Eizenstat, who felt its power as domestic policy chief in the Carter White House.
“One can trace from the time of the New Deal through the early and mid-parts of the Nixon Administration, a clear, gradual, perceptible increase in presidential power relative to the legislative branch,” Eizenstat pointed out. “The creation of CBO began to redress the balance of power. It did that via one fundamental way—it ended the president’s monopoly on information, on budget forecasts, on economic forecasts. The fact is that the CBO staff has been consistently more accurate on their economic forecasts, their deficit projections, than the executive branch has.
“What does that mean? It means that the president says, ‘Look, I think we’re in a four-and-one-half-percent growth year and therefore that leaves room for more spending’ or ‘that enables us to cut the budget’ or ‘that enables us to spend more on defense’ or, if you’re a Democratic president, more on domestic policy. And CBO says, ‘No, we think that growth is going to be three percent.’ And therefore you’ve just lost something on the order of $20 billion [in tax revenues for the budget].”2
Beyond that, CBO can kill new proposals or force drastic revisions merely by giving realistic cost estimates. Eizenstat recalled that in 1977, Joseph Califano, then secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, proposed modest changes in welfare programs, introducing some new elements and offsetting their costs with efficiencies in existing programs. Overall, Califano reckoned the added cost at about $5 billion in 1978.
One morning after the legislation had gone to Congress, Eizenstat was struck by a newspaper headline: CBO TO CARTER—WELFARE REFORM $17 BILLION. The CBO staff, then led by Alice Rivlin, a liberal Democratic economist, had dismissed Califano’s efficiencies as largely fictional. It pegged the annual cost of Califano’s proposals—in full operation—at $17 billion.
“The second I saw that headline,” Eizenstat recalled, “I said, ‘Our program’s over. There’s no way the Congress is going to pass what they think is a $17 billion welfare-reform proposal.’ ”
The same sort of thing happened to Reagan. The CBO constantly challenged White House economic projections that were tilted to make Reagan’s budgets look better. On the 1987 budget, CBO accused the Reagan administration of understating what the Pentagon would spend by $15 billion. With the higher CBO figure, congressional Republicans as well as Democrats put a tighter squeeze on the Pentagon. It was a dramatic illustration of how the seemingly innocent capacity to make calculations changed the balance of power between the White House and Congress.
The CBO’s new clout epitomized the effort by Congress to build its own expertise on everything from farm programs to Star Wars, because members of Congress did not trust the executive branch to give them the straight story. Congress expanded the personal staffs of individual senators and House members and the committee staffs in both houses; it created the CBO, added to the research service of the Library of Congress, and expanded other support agencies. Overall, congressional staff jumped from about 11,500 to more than 24,000 between 1973 and 1985, as Congress armed itself to lay seige to the executive branch.3
But simultaneously, the House of Representatives overturned its own power structure. Mainstream congressional Democrats had bridled for years at the seniority system and the power baronies it gave to conservative committee chairmen from the “Solid South.” The Democratic Study Group (DSG), the powerful informal caucus of House liberals, felt squeezed between the committee barons and a president whom they did not trust. According to Dick Conlon, the DSG’s executive director, the DSG set a strategy in late 1969 for breaking up the old baronies.
In 1971 and 1973, they pushed through changes in the rules of the House Democratic Caucus, establishing more democratic principles.4 The reformers took powers from the old oligarchy and turned them over to the Democratic Caucus as a whole, and also to the speaker, secure in the knowledge that with Carl Albert as a weak speaker, they did not have to worry about that post. Then in early 1975, reinforced by seventy-five freshman Democrats elected in 1974, the reformers ousted three long-entrenched committee chairmen: Wright Patman of the Banking Committee, F. Edward Hebert of Armed Services, and W. R. Poage of Agriculture.
Of course, the seniority system did not disappear entirely.5 In 1986, North Carolina’s Jesse Helms won a seniority fight in the Senate. But the system in the House was dramatically altered by the 1974 upheavals. After that, no other power baron could dare to act as dictatorially as in the past. The spirit of ’74 flared again in 1985: Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat, led a coalition of mostly younger members to overthrow Mel Price, the Armed Services Committee chairman. Then Aspin leaped over seven senior committee members to take the chairmanship himself. Aspin’s own power was challenged two years later. Although he managed to hang on, this challenge and counter challenge reminded all committee chairmen they could not afford to ignore rank-and-file members.
Even more significant for the long run, the House Democrats in 1974 had adopted “the subcommittee bill of rights” which decentralized power in the House, radically changing the way the power game would be played from then until now. In a stroke, it took power that had largely rested with the barons, the chairmen of the twenty-two House standing committees, and parceled out a healthy share of that power to 172 subcommittees. The number of subcommittees suddenly mushroomed in 1975, later to recede. But the more important change was the way things worked. In the old game, the power barons kept choice subcommittees for themselves and parceled out a few subcommittee chairs to allies, usually by seniority. Now, suddenly, junior Democrats, backbenchers, could seek reelection as subcommittee chairmen and then, as chairmen, they could hector the administration, bargain with high officials, push their pet ideas, or simply grab publicity. They could hire staff and run hearings. They had turf to protect and small subgovernments to manage. Many of them were aggressive and freewheeling, no longer under the thumb of full committee chairmen.
Even reformers such as Morris Udall, the veteran congressman from Arizona, sometimes groaned at what they had done. There were so many new subcommittee chairmen that Udall once joked to me that when he passed some junior Democrat whose name he’d forgotten, he would simply say, “Good morning, Mr. Chairman,” knowing that roughly half the time, he’d be right, because just about half of the House Democrats were chairs of committees or subcommittees. Power had sprawled that widely.
Less dramatically, but just as surely, the dispersal of power hit the Senate, too. “We have proliferated the number of committees and subcommittees, the number of staff, the number of floor amendments, the number of cloture votes, the number of roll call votes, the number of fiscal processes,” asserted Indiana Republican Senator Dan Quayle, summing up a Senate study in late 1984. Actually, the subcommittee surge had ebbed by then, and the numbers had declined from peak levels in the mid-seventies. But still Quayle, like many others, was dismayed. “We
have trivialized the matters with which we are concerned,” Quayle charged. “We use our processes more and more to emphasize small issues rather than large ones, and that is turning the Senate away from its historic function as the focus of national debate.”6
It was more a matter of changing political style than mere numbers. Individual senators had become more aggressive about pursuing their own agendas, disrupting their own leaders. In late 1985, Senator Tom Eagleton, a three-term Democrat from Missouri, protested in exasperation that the Senate was suffering from “unbridled chaos.” He objected strenuously to independent-minded members launching so many filibusters—more in the last seventeen years than in the previous 170—and frequently blocking votes on legislation with endless amendments.7 Quayle objected that one defense-funding bill was subjected to 103 amendments, fewer than ten of which he found “substantive.” In his folksy way, Senator David Pryor of Arkansas complained of the paralysis of the Senate. “Being in the Senate,” he told my colleague, Steve Roberts of The New York Times, “is like getting stuck in an airport and having all your flights canceled.”
In sum, proliferation of power in Congress, and loosening discipline, have made it far harder for any administration or any congressional leaders to pull together coalitions to pass major legislation. Votes have to be gathered up much more laboriously; it takes marathon bargaining. The White House cannot count on simply striking a deal with a small coterie or working out a tax compromise, say, with Wilbur Mills, who reigned for years as the lord of tax legislation from his throne as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In the old Washington power game, when Mills gave his word, he could deliver his committee and that virtually assured passage in the House. But in the new Washington power game, committee majorities are far from automatic. A chairman such as Danny Rostenkowski (who now holds Mills’s seat) is influential, to be sure. But almost every member of Rostenkowski’s committee has to be won over individually, and each member’s pet provisions have to be accommodated. That takes months of one-by-one negotiating.
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