by Jim Geraghty
Every once in a while, after a particularly difficult week, Humphrey and Wilkins would tell their wives that they would be late, and headed off to the bar at the Willard InterContinental hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Wilkins had finished his first brown liquor when he exclaimed, “Adam, why does it seem like the hiring of one guy is the fate of the world for us?”
“Because it’s a priority to Congressman Hargis,” sighed Humphrey.
“You realize he’s losing his marbles, right?” Wilkins asked. “The last time I spoke to him, he referred to Cheney as the Defense Secretary.”
“We’re at war with Iraq, the president is named Bush, and that burly Austrian is making another killer robot movie,” Humphrey said. “I think some historical confusion is forgivable.”
“ ‘Historical confusion’? Adam, Hargis is going senile!”
“Perhaps.” Humphrey shrugged. “But thankfully as a congressman, he’s in an environment where few will notice and it will have minimal impact on his work.”
“We’re in the very best of hands.” Wilkins rolled his eyes. “You know he’s hapless without his staff. At some point we should eliminate the middleman and just have the congressional chiefs of staffs cast the votes. It would be a bit fairer, since the staffers do most of the work. Let the voters know who’s really calling the shots.”
“Oh, life for the Hill staffers is fairer than it used to be,” Humphrey said. “Sure, they’re young, working exceptionally long hours, could lose their jobs at any time if their boss is defeated or keels over, but at least now they have the promise of a payoff after a distinguished period of service.”
“Nobody goes to work on Capitol Hill to get rich,” retorted Wilkins.
“No, but how long can you work modest five-figures and no job security, surrounded by those in the finest of suits and the Burberry scarf, the Cartier leather briefcase, the glint of light shining off their Rolex, heading off to their expense-account lunches at the Palm or the Monocle? Oh, that’s right, there’s a gift ban for staffers—we can’t even pick up the check for lunch. The average salary for a lobbyist is three hundred thousand dollars, and lobbying the government is a two-billion-dollar-per-year industry. It’s only fair that hardworking congressional staffers be given a chance to enjoy a piece of the pie.”
On Capitol Hill, the increasingly haggard Congressman Nick Bader was attempting to end a meeting with some wunderkind former Health and Human Services undersecretary who was about to launch a quixotic bid to run for governor of Louisiana. The young policy wonk was undoubtedly bright and knew his policy backward and forward, but Bader could barely understand him, between his unimaginably fast speaking pace and his unexpectedly thick Louisiana drawl. He contemplated recording the aspiring governor’s remarks and later playing it back at half speed, just to make sure he understood him correctly.
“Well, look, I’ve really got to get to this committee hearing,” Bader said, picking up his pace and hoping the skinny Indian-American couldn’t walk as fast as he spoke. “I think you’ve got some great ideas, and I’ll be happy to help you out with a fundraiser or something, but I’ll warn you, I’ve been here a long time and changing the way Washington works is a hell of a—”
“OfcourseinWashingtonhistoryalwaysrepeatsitself;that’swhywehavetobepromotingreformsinthestatesandtheroleoffreemarketreformmindedallieslikeyourselfistoensurethatthefederalbureaucracydoesntgetintheway;believemeIknowhowhardthiscanbewhenIwasatHHSIkeptrunningintobrickwallafterbrickwallsometimesoutofstatusquosometimesoutofresistancetoconservativeeffortstobringmarketplaceforcestohealthcarearenaandIthinksomeofitwasjustasenseorperhapsahopethatiftheyignoredmeIwouldgoaway;ImeanIwasmuchyoungerthanmostundersecretariesandnobodycouldbelieveIhadalreadyruntheLouisianaDepartmentofHealthandHospitalsinadditiontoabipartisancommissiononthefutureofMedicareandtheLouisianaUniversitySystem,” the aspiring governor began.
The meeting would have gone on forever if the pair hadn’t nearly walked into a tall, pale, menacing figure in a black suit, Drake Gully. The gaunt staffer for the House Republican leadership glared briefly at the man occupying Bader’s attention.
“Catch ya later,” Bobby Jindal said, and he disappeared down the hall.
Bader, however, had seen Gully’s conversational intimidation techniques before and was unimpressed. “My day just gets better and better,” he said with a roll of the eyes. “So what do you want?”
A lesser man might be ashamed of his lisp, but Drake Gully made it work for him.
“We could ussse your asssistansss …” Gully began. “Our friendsss are hearing that Hargisss is attempting to get one of hisss former ssstaffers into the lobbying ssshop of the pesssticide producersss …” He put a long, skinny arm around Bader’s back. “We need to reinforss the message to industriesss like thisss one that they should be always thinking of our … Republican friendsss and their ssstaffersss firssst.”
“Oh, you mean your noble crusade to end the unbearable injustice that not enough of the good lobbying jobs are going to Republican staffers, huh?”
“Pre-sssisssely.”
Bader wriggled out from Gully’s attempted reacharound. He was tempted to imitate Gully’s s hisses, but thought better of it. “I’m going to say this slowly, so that even you can understand,” Bader jeered. “When I look at the gargantuan monstrosity that is our federal government, and the disaster that is Washington, the absolute last problem on my mind is that not enough of our staffers are getting cushy perches in Gucci Gulch!”
“Thisss iss a priority for Majority Leader DeLay,” Gully said emphatically.
“I can’t believe any majority leader worth the title would spend one frickin’ minute worrying about penny ante crap like this!” Bader exclaimed, eyes bulging. “What the hell do I care about who hires who? I thought the whole point of our side was that we didn’t want the government meddling in that stuff! Jesus Christ, we’re going to war, we’re on alert for al-Qaeda, the debt’s over six trillion dollars, and you’re worried about who gets to sit in the nicest booth at the Palm?”
“Your lack of cooperation with our requessst will be … noted,” Gully said threateningly.
“You note that, and then you take that note, and stick it up your—”
Gully, offended, turned away.
But Bader remained indignant. “You tell him if he keeps focusing on crap like this, there won’t be a majority to lead!”
Humphrey was beaming the next time he appeared in Steiner’s K Street office, a few weeks later.
“I have a solution,” Humphrey said.
“I thought you might,” Steiner said warily. “Let’s hear it.”
Humphrey leaned forward and gave a confident smile. “Pay him.”
Steiner threw up his hands. “Then I incur the wrath of DeLay, Norquist, and the rest. Can’t do it.”
“I didn’t say hire him, I said pay him.” Humphrey raised an eyebrow, pleased with his own cleverness, but Steiner just looked at Humphrey in absolute incomprehension.
“You mean hire him to do some other non-lobbying job?” Steiner asked.
“Oh!” Humphrey brought a fist to his mouth. “That could work, too! But considering the risk that DeLay and his K Street Goon Squad might object to him having any actual duties, I think the best option is to simply pay him and not have him do any actual … work.”
“Why would I pay somebody to not work? That’s insane.”
“Do you know how many farmers are paid by the government not to farm in order to ensure price stability?”
Steiner’s balding mug contorted from incredulity to a stifled outrage. “I am not going to pay a six-figure salary to somebody
to just stay away from the office! Even I have to justify my expenses!” He pounded a fist on the desk, but Humphrey just gave him an oh-come-now look.
“I mean, periodically!”
Humphrey wouldn’t give up the sales pitch. “Conrad, how many parties are represented on Capitol Hill?”
“Are you going to give me the Bernie-Sanders-is-technically-a-Socialist speech again?”
“There are three parties—the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Appropriators, and that last one is, far and away, more powerful than the others. Surely, the happiness and continued cooperation of Congressman Hargis—a man capable of steering billions in government spending!—is worth a modest six-figure sum. Think of the return on investment! Hiring Austin for a modest $110,000 per year or so simply makes good business sense!”
Steiner sat back in his chair. “This is stupid.”
“This is the price of doing business.”
Humphrey smiled as Conrad Steiner let out a long, resigned sigh, a signal his opposition was rapidly evaporating.
* * *
30 This strange threat and standoff indeed occurred about a day before the Iraq War began. As Wikipedia summarizes, “The U.S. Park Police cordoned off a large area on the Mall extending from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. Several nearby government offices were also evacuated and major traffic arteries in the area were closed, which caused massive jams and paralyzed traffic across the Washington metropolitan area for four consecutive rush hours.” He kept the police away for forty-seven hours, then surrendered and was sentenced to sixteen months in prison.
31 Continetti, The K Street Gang, p. 50.
32 Continetti, The K Street Gang, p. 45.
11
AUGUST 2006
U.S. National Debt: $8.5 trillion
Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $257.8 million
No one knows precisely why terrible things happen, or why so many warning signs get ignored.
Many of the 9/11 hijackers ran into U.S. law enforcement multiple times before the attacks—mostly getting speeding tickets and citations for failure to produce a driver’s license—but only Zacarias Moussaoui was locked within a prison cell on that awful September day.
Germany’s intelligence service claims that it warned the U.S. government that they doubted the credibility of one of their key sources on the Iraqi programs for weapons of mass destruction, an Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball.”
New Orleans had an evacuation plan, but city officials scrapped it as Hurricane Katrina bore down upon the city in 2005.
And in 2006, a wind blew north from Mexico. A rare and unexpected variation of the periodic weather pattern El Niño, known as La Suegra, sent winds up from the Baja Peninsula across the southern border into California.
That spring, Mexico’s northern territories had a particularly virulent strain of a weed called “cheatgrass” blooming. The common name cheatgrass comes from western farmers who thought they had been given impure seed when the weed appeared in fields. The weed, also known as drooping brome, had been present in nearly every state for years, but was largely manageable; cheatgrass is an annual—it lives for only one year/growing season and then dies.
However, as weeds go, cheatgrass is a pain in the tuchus. It has no natural biological predators. It sucks away water and moisture with a ruthless efficiency, squeezing out the roots of other plants. The weed is highly flammable and exacerbates the risk of wildfires.
And in the summer of 2006, it cropped up all over the farms of California. Ordinarily, this would be a high-priority matter for both the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species and its state-level equivalent.
But part of the problem came from the name of the Golden State’s band of weed watchmen, the California Regional Invasive Species Information System, known as CRISIS.33
Many of the memos sent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s field offices in California referred to the reports as a “crisis,” and when the initial memos generated little response in Washington, concerned USDA employees e-mailed that it was a “CRISIS!” Of course, the Agency of Invasive Species employees in Washington scanning the e-mail headers thought it was simply referring to the acronym.
Memos were ignored. Meetings proceeded at the regular pace.
Meanwhile, the spores continued to be carried by the wind, settling on the farms and fields of the Golden State, and letting their little roots settle into the soil. In time, those roots started digging down and grabbing every bit of water they could.
Within weeks, it was clear that the cheatgrass epidemic was going to have a particularly deleterious effect on two of California’s most important, indeed iconic, crops: the grapes of wine country and marijuana. Entrepreneurial-minded craftsmen of the other “weed” had taken to growing large fields of marijuana in the least-traveled corners of state, national, and public parklands, lands that state and federal lawmakers had loudly insisted must be kept off-limits to drilling or other forms of economic exploitation. While the oil and natural gas companies honored the regulations they deemed so wrongheaded, a small army of marijuana growers used the lands to generate millions in profitable crops, entirely tax-free.
Outside California, the cheatgrass crisis was mostly lost in the shuffle of screaming headlines about a series of natural and manmade disasters: Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on the Gulf Coast, increasing casualties in Iraq, the collapse of a mine in West Virginia, the demotion of Pluto from the ranks of the planets, and the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
For the wine crop, consumers noticed a couple dollars’ increase in bottles; for a while Trader Joe’s customers griped about the sudden appearance of “Four Buck Chuck.”
The sudden spike in marijuana prices also spurred a little-remembered Snoop Dogg lyric:
Don’t know who’s behind this dirty deed
Somebody’s jackin up the price of my weed
While the story was largely ignored outside California, across the country, late-night copy editors rejoiced at the opportunity to use “weed” puns in headlines.
SEPTEMBER 2006
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was asked by a California reporter whether she felt the federal government was responding sufficiently to the cheatgrass woes of farmers in her home state.
“No, no, not at all, and it’s another failure of this administration,” Pelosi said, her face frozen in an expression of wide-eyed shock and horror. “This just shows that we need to create a federal agency to be on alert for the threat of invasive species.”
At that precise moment, separately, on opposite sides of Independence Avenue, Agency of Invasive Species Administrative Director Adam Humphrey and Congressman Nicholas Bader choked on their lunches.
“Are you kidding me?” Bader exclaimed to a Republican colleague whom he deemed insufficiently enraged about Pelosi’s comment. “They’ve been around since the Carter years, and Pelosi didn’t even know they existed!”
His colleague shrugged. “There are a lot of things Nancy Pelosi doesn’t know.”
Bader shook his head. “No, what I mean is, here’s a government agency with one friggin’ stupid little mission, and they completely dropped the ball on it. Actually, they didn’t just drop the ball, they Bucknered it!”
“So you want to grill the agency’s managers?”
“I want to throw their shiftless, unaccountable bodies on a Foreman Grill, yes,” Bader said. “Watch them sizzle and pop.”
“Talk to Carrington. He’s on the Oversight committee, and he’s the member whose district would probably be most affected by all this.”
Bader groaned at the thought.
Congressman Theodore Roosevelt Carrington and Bader had served in Congress together for twelve years, but had barely spoken. Bader was a suburban budget hawk, always banging on about pork and earning accolades from the Cato Institute and other small-government groups, hanging with folks like Ron Paul of Texas, Floyd Flake of New
York, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and in earlier Congresses, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina.
Carrington ranked among the chamber’s least conservative Republicans, with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 51.102 out of a possible 100. To the extent he associated with any of his Republican colleagues, he hung around with Mike Castle of Delaware, Tom Davis of Virginia, and Teddy Van Voorhees VII of New York.
Carrington came from the oldest of old money and had more or less inherited his seat on the reputation of his family’s good name and philanthropic work in Northern California. Nicknamed “the congressman from Merlot,” Carrington was the last person in the world Bader wanted as an ally on a crusade like this.
After Pelosi’s comments, the cheatgrass crisis finally got a bit more national coverage; the bottom of the front page of the Wall Street Journal featured one of those pointillism portraits of the weed.
“This is brutal,” groaned Lisa Bloom, recently promoted to the agency’s communications director.
Lisa had finally achieved that long-sought career step, and Jamie Caro-Marcus was now director of event planning, a title she enjoyed. Ava, however, told her friends she was on the verge of leaving government work for good. She had been writing freelance pieces on government policy and technology—careful to avoid reporting about anything she did at the Agency of Invasive Species, but her knowledge and outlook were clearly shaped by her day job. Payment by payment, pleased editor by pleased editor, Ava felt confident she was close to finding a fulltime writing gig.
Within the sanctum of Humphey’s office, Lisa and her bosses just began to grasp the public relations disaster that had suddenly befallen the agency. She read aloud the first sentence from the jump page: “State agriculture officials say that the slow-moving federal response to the cheatgrass crisis is only the latest and most dramatic example of a pattern of failures from the USDA’s Agency of Invasive Species.”