by Matt Taibbi
The Sanders office has seen this kind of thing before. In the summer of 2003, it received a very similar kind of document purportedly from the Treasury. Printed on Treasury stationery, the document contained, like the Ex-Im memo, a list of talking points that seemed to argue against a Sanders amendment. The issue in that case involved a set of new Treasury regulations that would have made it easier for companies to convert their employees’ traditional pension plans into a new type of plan called a cash-balance pension plan.
Among the companies that would have been affected by the regulations was IBM, which stood to save billions by converting to this new system. And guess who turned out to have written the “Treasury Department memo” that was circulated to members of Congress on the eve of the vote?
That’s right: IBM.
“It was hilarious,” recalls Gunnels. “The Treasury Department logo was even kind of tilted, like it had been pasted on. It looked like a third-grader had done it.”
Persistent questioning by Sanders’s staff led to an admission by the Treasury Department that the document had indeed been doctored by IBM. The company, in turn, issued an utterly nonsensical mea culpa (“We believed that we were redistributing a public document that we had understood was widely distributed by the Treasury”) that has to rank as one of the lamer corporate nonapologies in recent years.
It seemed obvious that the company had acted in conjunction with one or more Treasury employees to create the phony document. But no Treasury employee has ever been exposed, nor has IBM ever been sanctioned. “They turned the case over to the Inspector General’s Office,” says Gunnels. Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s chief of staff, adds, “And they’ve done absolutely nothing.”
So long as the investigation is still open, Gunnels explains, there is no way to request documents pertaining to the case through the Freedom of Information Act. “That investigation will probably stay open a long time,” he says.
Every time Congress is ordered to clean up its lobbyist culture, its responses come off like leprechaun tricks. For instance, when the Lobby Disclosure Act of 1995 ordered the House and the Senate to create an electronic lobbyist registry system, so that the public could use the latest technology to keep track of Washington’s 34,000-plus lobbyists and whom they work for, the two houses only half complied.
The secretary of the Senate created an electronic database, all right, but what a database. The system was little more than a giant computerized pile of downloadable scanned images of all the individual registration forms and semiannual reports. The Senate system, however, was a significant improvement over the House system. The House responded to the 1995 law by entirely ignoring it.
All of Washington seems to be in on the lobbyist leprechaun game. News even leaked that corporations had managed to convince the local sports teams the Wizards and the Capitals to create special courtside or rinkside tickets. The tickets would not be available to the general public but would have an official list price of $49.50 and could be purchased by corporate customers. Why the low list price? Because congressional rules prohibit gifts to congressmen with a cost above fifty dollars.
Amendment 4
The Ex-Im amendment was not the only victory Sanders had scored on the government-waste front that month. In fact, just two days after he passed the Ex-Im amendment, Sanders secured another apparent major victory against a formidable corporate opponent. By a vote of 238–177, the House passed a Sanders amendment to cancel a $1.9 billion contract that the Federal Aviation Administration had awarded to Lockheed Martin to privatize a series of regional Flight Service Stations.
Several factors went into the drafting of this amendment. For one thing, the FAA-Lockheed deal would have resulted in the loss of about 1,000 jobs around the country from the closure of thirty-eight Flight Service Stations, which are basically small regional centers that give out weather information and provide some basic air-traffic assistance. Thirty-five of those projected job losses would have come from a station in Burlington, Vermont, so in opposing the deal Sanders was behaving like a traditional congressman, protecting his home turf.
But there were other concerns. The FAA deal was an early test run for a Bush policy idea called “competitive sourcing,” which is just a clunky euphemism for the privatization of traditionally government-run services. Sanders is generally opposed to competitive sourcing, mainly on cost and quality grounds.
Beyond that, Sanders sees in issues like the Westinghouse deal and the Lockheed Martin deal a consistent pattern of surrender to business interests by Congress. Too often, he says, Congress fails to tie government assistance to the company’s record in preserving American jobs.
“I have no problem with the argument that we should help businesses out,” Sanders says. “But if you go to these hearings, no one ever asks the question ‘How many jobs have you exported over the years? If we give you money, will you promise not to export any more jobs?’”
He laughs. “It’s funny. Some of these companies, they’ll be straight with you. General Electric, for instance. They come right out and say, ‘We’re moving to China.’ And if you ask them why, in that case, you should subsidize them, they say, ‘If you don’t help us, we’ll move to China faster.’”
Given how powerful Lockheed Martin is on Capitol Hill—the company even has the contract to maintain the server for the computers in Congress—the Lockheed vote was surprisingly easy. Maybe too easy. On the surface, it looked like traditional politics all the way, with Sanders applying his usual formula of securing as many Democratic votes as possible, then working to pry loose enough Republicans to get the vote through. In this case, the latter task proved not all that difficult, as Sanders had natural allies in each of those Republican representatives with targeted flight stations in their districts.
When the vote sailed through by a comfortable margin, however, Sanders didn’t celebrate. Sometimes, he says, a vote like this one will pass easily in the House precisely because the leadership knows it will be able to kill it down the line.
“I don’t want to accuse my fellow members of cynicism,” he says, “but sometimes they’ll vote for an amendment just so they can go back home and say they fought for this or that. In reality, they’ve been assured by the leadership that the measure will never make it through.”
And if an offending bill somehow makes it through the House and the Senate, there’s always the next and last step: the conference committee. Comprising bipartisan groups of conferees from the relevant House and Senate authorizing committees, these committees negotiate the final version of a bill. Like the Rules Committee, it has absolute power to make wholesale changes—which it usually does, safely out of the public’s view.
With a measure like Sanders’s Lockheed amendment, the chances were always going to be very slim that it would survive the whole process. Among other things, President Bush responded to the passage of the anti-Lockheed amendment by immediately threatening to veto the entire Transportation budget to which it was attached. (Bush made the same threat, incidentally, in response to the Ex-Im amendment, which was attached to the Foreign Operations budget.)
“Now the conference committee has political cover,” Sanders says. “It’s either take them out and restore that loan and that contract or the president vetoes an entire appropriations bill—and there’s no funding for Foreign Operations or Transportation. There’s really no choice.”
In the case of the Lockheed amendment, however, things never get that far. Despite the amendment’s comfortable victory in the House, weeks pass, and the Sanders staff cannot find a senator to sponsor the measure in the upper house. Though the staff still has hopes that a sponsor will be found, it’s not always that easy to arrange. Especially when the president threatens a veto over the matter.
As for the Ex-Im amendment, the Sanders gambit against it perishes on that Tuesday afternoon, July 19, as the Senate wallops the Coburn ve
rsion of the amendment, 62–37. According to Gunnels, the key vote ends up being cast by Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada.
“It was still close, around 24–23 or so, before Reid voted,” he says. “It looked like a lot of Democrats were waiting to see which way he would go, him being the minority leader and all. As soon as he voted no, a whole slew of Democrats followed him and the amendment was dead.”
Reid’s predecessor as minority leader, Tom Daschle, was a marionette of the banking and credit-card industries whose public persona recalled a hopped-up suburban vacuum-cleaner salesman. In the wake of the Daschle experiment, Reid is the perfect inheritor of the Democratic leadership mantle: a dour, pro-life Mormon with a campaign chest full of casino money. Trying to figure out his motives on this vote proved no less difficult than figuring out what the Democratic Party stands for in general.
When I call Reid’s office, spokesman Jim Manley initially refuses to offer an explanation for the senator’s vote. He seems weirdly defensive about the issue, and we go back and forth on the matter for a while before he finally reads a statement explaining—or purporting to, anyway—his boss’s vote on the China loan.
“As with questions raised about other transactions involving China, legitimate concerns are at issue,” he reads. “But rather than Congress intervening in one transaction after another, what we really need is a coherent and comprehensive policy to address the emergence of China as an economic threat. This administration has failed to develop a China policy . . . and this utter failure has fueled congressional and public unease . . . Got that?”
“Um,” I say, copying it down. “Sure. Wait—if the problem is that there’s no comprehensive policy for China, why give them $5 billion to build nuclear plants? Why not give them, say, nothing at all?”
Silence on the other end of the line. Finally, Manley speaks.
“This administration has failed to develop a China policy,” he repeats coldly. “And this utter failure has fueled congressional and public unease . . .”
In the end, after just a few weeks, every one of Sanders’s victories was transformed into a defeat. He had won three major amendments and would likely have won a fourth, if the Rules Committee had permitted a vote on his Patriot Act measure. In each case, Sanders proved that his positions held wide support—even among a population as timid and corrupt as the U.S. Congress. Yet after passing his amendments by wide margins, he never really came close to converting popular will into law.
Sanders seems to take it strangely in stride. After a month of watching him and other members, I get the strong impression that even the idealists in Congress have learned to accept the body on its own terms. Congress isn’t the steady assembly line of consensus policy ideas it’s sold as but a kind of permanent emergency in which a majority of members work day and night to burgle the national treasure and burn the Constitution. A largely castrated minority tries, Alamo-style, to slow them down—but in the end spends most of its time beating calculated retreats and making loose plans to fight another day.
Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. Who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a reason.
“It’s funny,” Sanders says. “When I first came to Congress, I’d been mayor of Burlington, Vermont—a professional politician. And I didn’t know any of this. I assumed that if you get majorities in both houses you win. I figured, it’s democracy, right?”
Well, that’s what they call it, anyway.
Bush vs. the Mother
On the president’s doorstep—a dead soldier, an aggrieved
housewife, and the start of something big
September 8, 2005
Crawford, the home of President George W. Bush, is a sun-scorched hole of a backwater Texas town—a single dreary railroad crossing surrounded on all sides by roasted earth the color of dried dog shit. There are scattered clumps of trees and brush, but all the foliage seems bent from the sun’s rays and ready at any moment to burst into flames.
The moaning cattle along the lonely roads sound like they’re begging for their lives. The downtown streets are empty. Just as the earth is home to natural bridges, this place is a natural dead end—the perfect place to drink a bottle of Lysol, wind up in a bad marriage, have your neck ripped out by a vulture.
It is a very unlikely place for a peace movement to be born. But that’s exactly what happened a few weeks ago, when an aggrieved war mom named Cindy Sheehan set up camp along the road to the president’s ranch and demanded a meeting with the commander in chief.
Sheehan’s vigil began on Saturday, August 6, and was originally a solitary affair. Her twenty-four-year-old son, Casey Sheehan, was killed way back in April 2004, when he was one of eight marines struck down in an ambush in Baghdad’s Sadr City.
Sheehan’s demand was that Bush meet with her and explain to her what, exactly, her son had died for. The demand, and the accompanying solitary vigil, began as a simple, powerful, unequivocal political statement—the unarguably genuine protest of a single grieving individual. It was a quest that began on a moral territory almost beyond argument. How could anyone quibble with a mother who’d lost her son?
But Sheehan quickly became more than just the Next Big Media Thing, a successor to Kobe, Laci, and Michael. Her campsite became the epicenter of a national antiwar movement that until recently had been largely forgotten. By the end of a full week of media insanity, it seemed fit to ask if anything was left of that original simple message—or if something else had taken its place.
I arrived in Crawford early in the afternoon on Thursday, August 11, the sixth day of Sheehan’s vigil. The campsite, dubbed “Camp Casey,” was a small row of tents lining the side of a road cutting through a bleak stretch of singed ranch land, some three miles from the president’s compound. There were about a hundred people there when I showed up, a large chunk of them reporters—whose presence, clearly, the protesters had already adjusted to. Along one row of tents, a small group of sunbathing young activists was trying out a new cheer for KCEN, the local NBC affiliate.
“C! I! N-D-Y! She deserves a reason why!”
On the other side of the camp was Sheehan herself, a tall, deliberate, sad-looking woman with sun-lightened hair and a face red from the afternoon heat. I didn’t get within ten feet of her before I was intercepted by a pair of young women from the feminist antiwar organization CodePink. Alicia and Tiffany had apparently assumed the role of press secretaries; Sheehan was already operating on a rigid media schedule.
Throughout my stay in Texas I would run into a steady stream of young volunteers who seemed to consider it a great honor to be able to announce that “Cindy is too busy to talk with you right now.” A solemn code of Cindy-reverence quickly became a leitmotif of the scene; preserving the sanctity of Sheehan’s naps, meals, and Internet time became a principle that the whole compound worked together to uphold.
On my first night at the camp, a protester parked too close to a gully and her car slipped into a ditch. While a bunch of us tried to extricate it, pushing the car as its wheels spun, one protester leaned over to another.
“Blame George fucking Bush!” he said, pushing.
“I blame George fucking Bush for everything!” was the answer.
They were kidding, but we still didn’t get the car out of the ditch that night. If the pre-Sheehan antiwar movement had a problem, it was stuff like this. The movement likes to think of itself as open and inclusive, but in practice it often comes off like a bunch of nerds whose favored recreation is coming up with clever passwords for their secret treehouse. The ostensible political purpose may be ending the war, but the immediate occupation for a sizable percentage of these people always seemed to be a kind of rolling adult tourist at
traction called Hating George Bush. Marches become Hate Bush cruises; vigils, Hate Bush resorts. Hence the astonishingly wide variety of anti-Bush tees (Camp Casey featured a rare film-fantasy matched set, home at various times to and ), and the unstoppable flow of Bush-themed folk songs. If you spend any amount of time involved with peace protests, as I have, you very quickly start to notice that Hating the President just seems like a little too much of a fun thing for too many of your brothers-in-arms.
Then again, here as in the rest of America, there’s no shortage of folks who spend too much time sick with the opposite disease, Loving the President. In downtown Crawford, the two groups are separated by a Mason-Dixon line. While the anti-Bush protesters congregate at a Zonker Harris–style commune called the Crawford Peace House, the pro-Bush crowd has a meeting place in a giant gift shop called the Yellow Rose.
It’s a striking visual scene. On one side of the railroad tracks running through town there’s a creaky old house, bedecked with peace signs, that looks like the home of the Partridge family. A few hundred yards away, across the tracks, is the Yellow Rose—a patriotic storefront drenched in red, white, and blue whose entrance is obscured by a Liberty Bell, flanked by two huge stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. Together, the two places look like a pair of rides in a Crossfire theme park.
Early on my third day I was browsing in the hat section of the Yellow Rose when a clerk approached me.
“Excuse me,” I said, holding up two Old Glory mesh hats. “Which of these do you think looks more American?”
She smiled and walked away. A friendly feeling welled up inside me. Within five minutes I was talking to store owner Bill Johnson, a fanatical Bush devotee with a striking resemblance to frozen-sausage king Jimmy Dean. I introduced myself as a Fox TV booker named Larry Weinblatt and told Bill I wanted to bring Sean Hannity down to do a whole show with Sean standing between the Ten Commandments tablets. Bill was all over the idea.