by Alan Murray
Like Bentsen, most other members also were cautious. Chafee, a reformer by inclination, worried aloud that the 25-percent plan took away the most precious deductions enjoyed by the middle class. George Mitchell of Maine, also a reform-minded member, made perhaps the most telling point: The 25-percent rate was too low, he said; rich people should continue to pay a proportionately larger amount of their income to Uncle Sam than the less-well-off paid, and the progressive rate structure should be maintained. The income-distribution tables that accompanied the 25-percent plan proved Mitchell’s point with a vengeance; the benefits fell heavily upon the highest-income Americans.
Bradley took the lead in saying that Mitchell’s problem could be fixed. He had faced the same problem in fashioning his own plan, and he had solved it. Bradley-Gephardt kept an even distribution of the tax burden among income groups and still had a very low top rate. What’s more, Bradley argued, the Packwood proposal, like his own, had the advantage of placing 80 percent of all taxpayers at the lower of the two tax rates.
Russell Long was far less enthusiastic. During his fifteen years as Finance Committee chairman, Long was considered one of the most wily manipulators of the legislative process in Washington. He was the master of compromise and political deal-making, and he had little inherent interest in reform schemes that would do away with the tools of his trade: deductions, exclusions, and credits. When the respected Long spoke, his colleagues listened.
Long argued that a Bradley-Gephardt-like plan would unravel if even a single preference were preserved. He compared it to a suit of clothes with a single, loose thread: one tug and the whole garment could come apart. So spare a system, he maintained, was not politically possible. The senator also began pulling on one of the plan’s central threads. The deduction for state and local taxes, he argued, should not be eliminated as the 25-percent plan recommended. It was the taxpayers’ constitutional right, he said.
Packwood disagreed with Long. The committee needed a new approach, he said. The old one, which involved giving away tax breaks to buy reform, had simply failed. “We tried that and it didn’t work,” he said. “We tried to take care of everyone’s interest in the plan, and once that was done, everyone’s interest became more generic and nonregional. Now I would like to try something revolutionary and see what happens.” Bradley also rebutted Long. The panel, he said, should set some goals and do its best to move toward those goals. The result would be tax reform.
Packwood ended the meeting by asking for permission to take another crack at the radical plan, to solve some of the most serious problems voiced by the committee that morning. They would meet five days later, the following Tuesday, he said, to look at a revised proposal. “If the committee says no, we’ll try again with a stripped-down bill,” he said. “We can’t sell anything on the Senate floor without Finance Committee support.”
Packwood and Diefenderfer were encouraged. The comments at the meeting, as well as some whispered conversations afterward, indicated, to their surprise, that the radical approach had considerable support among the members. Diefenderfer called Darman to report the good news. He and Packwood were beginning to see the outlines of a “core group” they could count on to help them write a tax-overhaul bill. Their initial list of potential core group members included Packwood, Danforth, Chafee, Wallop, Bradley, Mitchell, and Moynihan. These four Republicans and three Democrats would form the nucleus for fashioning a plan that Packwood hoped could win a majority on the twenty-member panel.
At the conclusion of the Thursday meeting, Packwood asked his members to return the sheets of paper he had handed out. They were highly sensitive working documents and might cause a stir if disclosed to the lobbyists and reporters outside the exec room. The plan’s distribution of tax cuts, which was skewed to favor the wealthiest people, was a particularly sensitive point. Indeed, during the meeting, David Pryor of Arkansas called the 25-percent plan “creative,” but suggested that it “shouldn’t go public now.”
Secrets are seldom safe in Washington, however, especially in the inbred tax village. Newspapers carried details of the 25-percent plan the next day, including the damning income-distribution figures. Packwood was deluged with questions and complaints. He knew he would have to say something to answer to the outcry.
On Friday morning, Diefenderfer called Brockway to say there was going to be a press conference that afternoon. “You’re going to have to go up there and present this,” Diefenderfer warned him, and Brockway knew immediately what that meant. More staff-bashing was on the way. Packwood needed a fall guy, and Brockway had been selected.
Packwood and Brockway faced the overflow press conference together. At first, Packwood tried to defuse the tension of the event with some levity. A summary of the 25-percent plan that his staff had handed to reporters contained a mistake. The listings for “joint filer” and “head of household” were confused, so that one of the headings read instead, “joint head.” Packwood quipped, “Joint head is not a bisexual toilet.”
The joke flopped. Reporters began to shout questions to Packwood, who looked extremely uncomfortable under the hot camera lights. Was he abandoning his first tax plan? Did he really want to get rid of all those deductions? Why did he want to give rich people such a big break?
Packwood ducked all of those questions. The plan, he said, was not his own. It was Brockway’s. It would be “easier to ask Dave to come up here and answer those questions,” he said. Time and again, he stepped away from the bank of microphones, trying to shift attention to the slightly dazed director of the Joint Taxation Committee.
The chairman’s evasiveness did not work. Each time Packwood tried to walk away from the microphones, reporters called him back. Packwood was forced to make other, even more lame, excuses. The plan, he said, was not a “specific proposal,” but merely part of an “educational process” for his members. In sum, he did everything he could to distance himself from the plan. It was not a courageous display; he was disowning his own creation.
Just a week earlier, he and Diefenderfer, over two pitchers of beer, had decided to be bold and try the 25-percent solution. Now, faced with the task of defending that decision, Packwood flinched. Instead of taking responsibility for his scheme, he did the political thing—he tried to blame someone else.
Brockway was accustomed to rough treatment from lawmakers. They were his bosses, and he had come to understand that he made a better—and far easier—target for them than their colleagues made. “When all else fails, blame the staff” seemed to be the motto of many members of Congress. During the Ways and Means markup, so much abuse was heaped on Brockway’s head that a fellow staffer gave him a crash helmet.
The forty-two-year-old Brockway was Congress’s top tax brain. As director of the Joint Committee on Taxation, he headed a staff of forty nonpartisan economists, attorneys, and accountants whose offices were scattered on both sides of the Capitol. It was a joint committee because its staff was overseen by members of both the House and the Senate. It served as a reservoir of in-house tax expertise for the entire Congress, especially the two tax-writing committees. Joint Tax aides shaped and analyzed every change in tax law proposed by their bosses and often came up with suggestions themselves. Their revenue estimates on the changes were gospel. In tax reform, an exercise driven by revenue estimates and income-distribution charts, Joint Tax pronouncements were crucial.
Brockway was an unlikely leader for such a serious organization. His father was the chairman of W. W. Norton & Company, the publishing house, and he grew up in the affluent suburbs outside of New York City. He had a lust for life that did not extend into the classroom; he was the kind of kid who found learning easy, but playing around more fun. He was a self-described “wise ass.” Despite frighteningly high standardized-test scores, especially in math, his high school recommended that colleges reject him because of his chronic discipline problems.
Cornell University ignored the advice and soon regretted it. At the end of his sophomore year,
Brockway was academically ranked 848 out of a class of 849 students. He was asked to leave. “Up until I was nineteen, I was the happiest human in the history of the universe. Life was a gas. Everything was just great,” Brockway says. “I just didn’t have any self-discipline. I didn’t study. I didn’t show up for classes. I was goofing off and having a good time.”
He was told that he had only a touch-and-go chance of ever being allowed to return, but the dean of students was sympathetic. He saw in Brockway that special intensity that was evident to anyone who had contact with him. He also saw in Brockway a bit of himself: The dean, too, had been thrown out of school once. He told the young man that what he needed to get himself square was a stint in the army. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Brockway did what he was told and joined up—along with his roommate, Gene DuBose, who had also been tossed out.
Brockway spent three long years, 1963 to 1966, “keeping the Russians away,” as he put it, working as a radio-teletype operator in Germany. “I was at war with the army the whole time I was in there,” Brockway recalls, “but by the time it was over, I could actually do sufficient work to get by and had a certain sense of responsibility. It took the piss and vinegar out of me. You never knew when somebody would send you to jail for failing to blouse your pants over your own boots.”
He returned to Cornell a reformed character. In two years, he completed two and a half years’ worth of credits and was accepted into Cornell’s well-regarded graduate program in history, where he envisioned himself studying to become a professor of European history, but his old buddy DuBose changed all that. During the summer, he saw his former roommate at a party in Manhattan. DuBose had finished his first year at Harvard Law School and was accepted on the law review. He told Brockway that he was crazy to study for his doctorate in history. He, too, should go to Harvard Law.
Brockway thought the idea was absurd. It was already the middle of the summer, too late to apply for law school, but DuBose told him he would handle everything with the admissions office. This came at an opportune time for young Brockway; he was having second thoughts about whether history was his calling. He paid a visit to his history professor at Cornell, and found him in his office in the library stacks. That was where the man spent his life, Brockway realized, but that was not where the spirited Brockway wanted to spend his. “History I love,” he thought, “but a life sitting in a library is not my personality. I want action.”
So Brockway applied to Harvard Law School. Because his application was made so late, and the chances for its acceptance were so small, the school waived the usual application fee.
Fortunately for Brockway, Harvard gave special weight to scores on the standardized tests at which Brockway excelled. In August, they sent him a telegram of acceptance. “The fates were dictating that I ought to do that,” he concluded. Besides, he thought, going to law school would put off growing up for another three years.
After graduation, Brockway joined a law firm in New York, but once again his restlessness prevailed. “Going to be a lawyer was an accident, not an objective,” he told himself. “I want to spend a little time doing something of greater significance.”
On February 1, 1976, he joined the Joint Committee on Taxation. He had long had an interest in broad policy issues, and he knew the reputation of the Joint Committee. He applied for a job and was hired. He spent five years as its expert in international taxation—one of the driest and most arcane topics in the dry and arcane tax repertoire, but also one of the most hotly lobbied. Brockway came to love the excitement of the tax-writing world. “It was the greatest thing that ever happened. Ideal. I couldn’t have asked for anything more,” he says.
In 1981, when Bernard “Bob” Shapiro left as staff director to join the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse, Brockway was made deputy director. And when Mark McConaghy, Shapiro’s successor, also joined Price Waterhouse in 1983, to establish a kind of shadow Joint Tax Committee there, Brockway took over the real one on Capitol Hill. The position had a great tradition. For many years it was held by Larry Woodworth, a brilliant tax expert and patient teacher to any interested party. For more than a decade, Woodworth was considered the most influential staffer in Congress.
Brockway came into this position in the midst of a tumultuous period. At one time, the Joint Tax Committee was the preeminent voice on taxes in Congress. The tax-writing staffs of the Ways and Means and Finance committees were small and relatively unimportant. But during the 1970s, congressional committee staffs and personal staffs grew like Topsy, largely in reaction to the Nixon administration’s cavalier treatment of Congress. When Dole took over as chairman of the Finance Committee in 1981, he beefed up its staff even more. In response, Ways and Means bulked up as well. The Joint Committee, which grew little during this period, saw its influence diminish.
In Congress, staff size is often a measure of clout. A member with a large staff is a member with large influence. By this gauge, the importance of almost everyone had grown dramatically. From 1947 to 1985, the number of staff members of standing congressional committees rose to 3,045 from 399, a 763-percent increase. During the same period, the number of staffers on Ways and Means rose to ninety-four from twelve, and staffers on the Finance Committee increased to fifty-three from six. The number of aides on members’ personal staffs also increased gigantically. In 1947, there were 2,030 personal aides in Congress; in 1985, there were 11,665.
The raw numbers alone do not fully express the growing power of staffers. Indeed, elected members routinely groused that the staff possessed the real power in Congress. In a world growing increasingly complex, members were rarely experts on any single topic, and their talents were usually spread very thin. The only experts were the staffers. They briefed their bosses on the substance of any given initiative and often recommended what course of action to take. Particularly in the blindingly complicated subject of taxation, staff aides, called legislative assistants, functioned almost as personal priests to their bosses. Their advice carried tremendous weight, particularly in a town filled with so many contrary views and lobbyists who were willing to market them.
Aggressive staffers dominated much of the legislative process. They controlled the information, and that was what drove events. “Senators, I fear, are becoming annoying constitutional impediments to the staff,” Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, once complained. “Someday we may just allow the staff to vote and skip the middle man.” Political scientist Michael Malbin even concocted a phrase to express this phenomenon: staff entrepreneurialism.
During tax reform, Darman was among the critics of staff participation. He contended that the lawmakers, left to their own devices, were far more willing to compromise and accommodate than were their aides. When aides were allowed into private drafting sessions, he contended, positions solidified and progress slowed. He derided this interference by legislative aides as “L.A. democracy.”
Whatever their drawbacks, congressional staffers contributed greatly to the legislative process. The hardworking tax staffs, both on the tax committees and in the personal offices of the tax writers themselves, were among the Swiss guard of aides on the Hill. Rob Leonard on Ways and Means and William Wilkins on the Finance Committee’s minority staff were as savvy tax attorneys and legislative operators as could be found anywhere. The Ways and Means tax staff included some able veterans who outshined the relatively green staffers brought in by Packwood on the majority staff of the Finance Committee. Nearly everyone worked seven days a week at all hours for interminably long stretches of time in order to make tax reform possible.
Brockway and his staff were not beholden to any single member. Their job was not political, and their bosses were many. They were sometimes suspected of having their own agenda, and that agenda did not always seem to jibe with those of the lawmakers they worked with. Packwood, in particular, distrusted the Joint Committee because of the staff’s preference for tax reform. Indeed, one of Packwood’s most famous shouting matches with
staffers was a public dressing down of Randy Weiss, Brockway’s deputy. During an open Finance Committee hearing in 1984, Packwood accused Weiss, one of the most sincere and best-liked aides on the Joint Committee, of lying about the position of a fringe-benefit lobbying group. It was a cruel and embarrassing scene that soured many aides on the blustery lawmaker.
So when Packwood hung Brockway out to dry at the press conference on the 25-percent plan, no one who knew the temperamental chairman was too surprised. Many of Brockway’s friends took great delight in addressing him afterward by a new name: “Senator Brockway.”
Despite his shoddy treatment, Brockway knew that he had a job to do. The chairman’s attempt to distance himself publicly from the 25-percent plan, Brockway believed, masked an interest in making it work. Brockway also knew that he and his people were the only ones in Congress with the expertise to do that. Diefenderfer could not do it, and John Colvin, Packwood’s top tax aide, having been blamed for the failure of the first plan, was now largely being cut out of the picture. Packwood’s pinning responsibility for the plan on Brockway, therefore, was true in one respect: All that stood between Packwood and failure was Dave Brockway and the Joint Committee staff.
Brockway’s task was to turn the 25-percent solution, which still had elements that were politically unacceptable, into a tax plan that could pass muster in the committee and in the Senate. The top rate had to remain close to 25 percent, in order to retain the interest of conservatives like Wallop; in addition, at least some of the most popular middle-class deductions, such as those for mortgage interest and charitable contributions, had to be retained. That left Brockway with a double challenge: He had to find a way to raise the revenue to pay for the lower rates and retained deductions, and just as important, he had to make sure the sharp rate reduction did not cause the plan to unduly favor the wealthy. Ultimately, he struck on two obscure, but vital, twists of tax policy that solved his problems.