by John W. Dean
“His greatest strength was his audacity,” remarked Jeff Bell, who has known Abramoff since his days at Citizens for America.[54] But this characterization vastly understates Abramoff, as the two indictments to which he pleaded guilty in 2005 attest. Abramoff’s scam to purchase a fleet of SunCruz Casinos ships by faking a wire transfer of $23 million to close the $147.5 million transaction was more stupid than audacious, for it was inevitable that his cash contribution would be discovered missing. That scam alone resulted in a five-count indictment for fraud, with one count of conspiracy; Abramoff pleaded guilty to everything except conspiracy. Abramoff’s fleecing of his Native American clients also transcended audaciousness. When the Senate Indian Affairs Committee discovered his scheme, its members were at something of a loss to describe it. Senator John McCain observed that people had been stealing from American Indians since the sale of Manhattan Island, but “what set [Abramoff’s] tale apart, what makes it extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit.” Straining to find words to describe Abramoff’s activities, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said that they were representative of “a cesspool of greed, a disgusting pattern, certainly, of moral corruption…a pathetic, disgusting example of greed run amok.”[55]
Abramoff began his relationship with the tribes by getting himself hired as their Washington lobbyist. (His arrangement with each tribe was a little different, but the pattern was the same.) Abramoff handled only tribes that had casinos, because they were making enormous amounts of money. Once the tribes hired him, he told them they also had to retain Michael Scanlon, Tom DeLay’s former press secretary. Scanlon, who was not registered as a lobbyist (and thus not required to report to Congress) but a political and communications consultant, would help tribal members win elections to their tribal councils, and once friendly members ran those councils, both Abramoff and Scanlon began billing them extravagantly for an array of activities. What Abramoff failed to mention to his clients was that he also received 50/50 kickbacks from Scanlon. The New York Times reported that “Abramoff and his sidekick not only bilked Indian tribes of up to $66 million; they also mocked them as ‘monkeys’ and ‘morons.’”[*] But there is nothing kind-hearted about authoritarians, particularly when they are busy manipulating.
Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, and their cohorts are all conservatives and are all authoritarians. One of the more remarkable traits of such individuals is their ability to get away with so much before they are called to task, which can partially be explained by authoritarian followers’ being attracted to such personalities and ready to be led by them with no questions asked. But sooner or later, the Double High authoritarian personality, in particular, seems to more or less self-destruct as a result of endless aggression and a lack of conscience. While possession of an authoritarian personality does not necessarily lead to their downfall, if past is prologue, their insatiable desire for power, combined with remarkable self-righteousness, enables them to easily cross the lines of propriety, and the law.
Authoritarian Conservatism in the U.S. Senate
While most of Abramoff’s relationships were with members of the House, he also worked with senators, but the Senate, so far, is not an authoritarian body, so the problems he created for the House are not likely to be as serious for the Senate. This is not to say that there is no authoritarianism in the Senate, for it is growing there as well, as Republicans, who would like to extend their power in the Senate in a fashion similar to what they have in the House, are oblivious to the fact that by doing so they would make the Senate into a mini–House of Representatives, thereby fundamentally changing the interaction between the inherently cautious Senate and the more impulsive House. Under the Constitution, each house of Congress makes its own rules. With each new Congress, the House reconstitutes itself, adopting new rules with a majority vote. The Senate, however, considers itself a continuing body, because each senator serves for six years and only a third of the Senate stands for election at any given time. A two-thirds vote, or the approval of sixty-seven senators, is therefore required to change its rules.
Because of its smaller size, with only two senators representing each state, the Senate has always allowed for more open and extended debate than the House of Representatives, which serves to protect minority views or, in effect, to prevent a tyranny of the majority. The first recorded occasion when a minority senator used extended debate to defeat a proposal was in 1790; the senator was arguing against moving the location of Congress from New York City to Philadelphia. Between 1820 and 1860, lengthy debate in the Senate became something of a common procedure for protecting the views of the minority party, and by 1856, it became a right when it was formalized in the Senate’s rules.[56]
In 1917, during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the Senate adopted a rule permitting a “cloture vote,” which provided that a vote of two thirds of the body could end a filibuster. A two-thirds vote on a matter before the Senate typically represents close to a national consensus, and by placing this rule on the books, it was assured that a small minority could not defeat the overwhelming will of the American people. Nonetheless, the Senate did not invoke the provision even once from 1927 until the early 1960s. Senators were reluctant to vote for cloture because they wanted to keep the right for themselves, and did not wish to incur the wrath of a colleague by imposing a cloture vote on another senator or group of senators who felt so strongly about a matter that they were willing to mount a filibuster. Jimmy Stewart’s 1939 portrayal of a heroic use of the filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—in which Stewart’s character, Jefferson Smith, takes on corruption in the establishment but is ultimately silenced by cloture—influenced the public’s support of the filibuster and opposition to cloture votes. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, however, it became problematic when Southern senators used it to block the passage of civil rights legislation addressing basic rights for African Americans to education, voting, housing, and public facilities. When the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was tied up for seventy-four days, newspaper and television coverage of this bigoted Southern intransigence outraged Americans, and public opinion insisted that it be broken and the act passed. After that episode, the Senate changed its rules. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, a mild-mannered Montana Democrat, developed a system to preserve the Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate without tying the Senate into procedural grid-lock. Mansfield in effect introduced the modern filibuster.
For decades before the advent of Mansfield’s system, in order to conduct a filibuster a senator had to be recognized by the presiding officer and then had to maintain the floor by talking. Because one man (or woman) can talk for only so long without sitting, eating, sleeping, or addressing other human necessities, the senator running it was permitted to yield to a colleague to continue it, thus operating like a tag team. Groups of senators would agree in advance to relieve one another to prevent loss of the floor and to make it possible to continue round-the-clock. They would sleep on sofas in the Senate cloakroom; some even wore a device known to long-distance bus drivers as a motorman’s pal, enabling them to relieve themselves without leaving the Senate floor. Thus, whenever there was a filibuster, all other Senate business came to a halt until they either got the unwanted proposal removed from the Senate’s agenda or a cloture vote ended it.
Mansfield’s proposal changed all this. The Senate, by long tradition a highly collegial body, does most all of its business, of necessity, by unanimous consent. Under Mansfield’s “two-track” system, the Senate agreed, by unanimous consent, to spend its mornings on the matter being filibustered, and afternoons on other business. Professors Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky pointed out in a study that this system worked for everyone. On the one hand, the two-track system strengthened the ability of the majority to withstand a filibuster by enabling it to conduct other business. On the other hand, it made it easier for the minority, which no longer had to hold the floor continuously to prevent something less than a
supermajority from cutting it off. In time, the mere prospect of a filibuster became enough to block consideration of a given matter. Based on successive changes of the Senate rules, the supermajority needed for a cloture vote was reduced to a vote by sixty senators. Thus, when a senator informs the leadership of plans to filibuster—and the leadership knows that he or she has the support of at least sixty senators and, therefore, the ability to invoke cloture and override the threatened filibuster—the matter will not even go to the floor for a vote. The modern filibuster has therefore become silent, since its mere threat results in stopping a debate in its tracks.
Because the filibuster is a negative procedure, and one that frustrates the will of a simple majority, those trying to force something through the Senate with something like a “one-vote victory” will often complain about how the minority is tying up the Senate. While such opposition has given it a bad reputation, the minority party must be able to rely on it to prevent the tyranny of a bare majority. In its present form it is, in essence, a minority veto. To overcome it requires a supermajority—a supermajority the Republicans do not currently command. Accordingly, authoritarian conservatives in the Republican ranks of the Senate, many of whom once served in the House, where a simple majority always prevails, want to change the rules. But because they do not have the two-thirds support necessary for doing so, Republicans are prepared to rely on a parliamentary gimmick that would drastically change the nature of the Senate, by eliminating the Senate’s unlimited debate for judicial nominees, which could then be extended across-the-board. It is so radical, and with such potentially devastating consequences for this traditionally highly cooperative and collegial body, that it is viewed as certain to create the equivalent of a “nuclear winter,” and for that reason it is called the “nuclear option.”
The possible use of the nuclear option first arose when the Democrats lost control of the Senate following the 2002 election, and President Bush started sending it increasingly hard-right nominees for federal judgeships. Democrats decided that their best option was to do what Republicans had done when Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House. During the 1968 presidential campaign, President Lyndon Johnson nominated two liberal justices for Supreme Court seats, proposing to move Abe Fortas from associate justice to chief justice and then to place Homer Thornberry in Fortas’s seat. Senate Republicans filibustered the Fortas nomination, which gave the next president, Richard Nixon, the opportunity to appoint a new chief justice. But when Democrats adopted that strategy and started filibustering Bush’s lower-court nominees to prevent him from packing the federal judiciary with right-wing judges and justices, conservatives became furious. Republicans refused to treat this as fair play, even though during the Clinton presidency, Senate Republicans had blocked votes on judicial nominations by simply refusing to process them, which meant some sixty Clinton nominees never even had a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But when Democrats sought to block Bush’s nominees, Republicans refused to treat this as fair play.
Here is how the nuclear option would work, as explained by The Hill, the newspaper that covers Congress. Rather than seek a vote to change the rules of the Senate, which they would lose since they do not have a two-thirds majority, Republicans would seek a ruling from the presiding officer of the Senate—most likely Vice President Dick Cheney, who is the president of the Senate—that Rule XXII, the cloture vote rule, does not apply to so-called executive matters such as judicial nominations submitted to the Senate by the president, but only to legislative business. Republican senators would likely argue that filibustering the president’s business, which consists of matters on the “executive calendar” such as nominations and treaties, would be a violation of the separation of powers. Needless to say, such a procedural ruling would be contrary to long practice, but Cheney would almost certainly give the GOP members exactly what they want, and Democrats would have little recourse. It takes only a simple majority to override a ruling of the presiding officer, but the Democrats do not have one. Nor could the Democrats follow the Killer D’s example in Texas by simply walking out, for the fifty-one Senate Republicans could run the Senate in their absence with more than enough senators for a quorum.
To date, the nuclear option has not been exercised, although Senate majority leader William Frist was ready to pull the trigger before a group of seven moderate Republican senators joined with seven Democrats to prevent the authoritarian conservatives from imploding the Senate.[*] The Gang of Fourteen (sometimes called the “Mod Squad” because they are all moderates) reached an agreement, which they executed in writing, that eliminated the use of the nuclear option—at least temporarily.[57] The gist of their understanding was that the seven Democrats would not vote with their party on filibustering judicial nominations except in “extraordinary circumstances,” and the Republicans in turn agreed not to vote with their party and the Republican leadership for the exercise of the nuclear option. (By subtracting seven votes from either side, the moderates, in essence, took control.) It was basically a good-faith effort, since only a few details were worked out, including that the Democrats would prevent further filibustering of three of Bush’s nominees. It was a perfect example of the way the Senate should work, using the give-and-take of compromise. The Gang of Fourteen has continued to meet, but their agreement is binding only for the 109th Congress, which will end in January 2007. Authoritarian conservatives in the Senate will likely try the nuclear option again if Republicans control the Senate in 2007, should Democrats try to use the filibuster on judicial nominees. Needless to say, there is nothing conservative about destroying Senate precedent and tradition, but then, authoritarians are not troubled with conscience, even if they call themselves conservatives.
The Authoritarianism of the Senate Leader: Who Wants to Be President
It was Senate majority leader William Frist who led the Senate to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Frist had been a well-known heart transplant surgeon at Vanderbilt University’s hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, before he was elected to the Senate in 1994. Before becoming majority leader he had made almost no serious news whatsoever since arriving in Washington, although he was occasionally featured in human interest stories. He provided emergency care for the man who shot a Capitol Police guard, and, in turn, was shot by the guard; and after the anthrax attacks in the Senate, his explanation of how the deadly poison worked was enlightening.
A December 31, 2001, profile in Newsweek described him as “brainy and intense, confident to the point of arrogance,” “a daredevil by nature,” “ambitious, eager to be noticed, [but not] a team player at heart—and White House strategists know it.” His seemingly iconoclastic independence was appealing, and many welcomed his selection by his Senate peers to replace Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) as majority leader. After being told by an insider that if Vice President Dick Cheney’s health took a serious turn for the worse, Bill Frist was at the top of Bush’s list to replace him, I decided to read the hagiography by Charles Martin, Healing America: The Life of Senate Majority Leader William H. Frist, M.D., which revealed that Frist has been slated to be president of the United States since he was only a few days old.
It is a novel story. It seems that when Bill Frist was busy campaigning for the Senate in 1994, his associate, Dr. Karl VanDevender, was responsible for running the Frist Clinic, which recently had admitted a longtime Frist family employee, the trusted yardman, housekeep, and handyman, whom they affectionately called “Mr. John.” On election night Karl VanDevender was monitoring Mr. John, who was fading fast of kidney failure. At one point in the evening, as VanDevender kept an eye on the television and reported the returns, Mr. John whispered his last words. “Dr. Karl,” he said, “since the day this happened, more than forty-four years ago, I’ve only told two people—my pastor and my wife.” VanDevender brought a chair to Mr. John’s bedside and leaned in close to get every word of Mr. John’s astonishing story.
Soon after Bill Frist’s mother brough
t him home from the hospital, she appeared on the front porch carrying a baby basket with Bill sound asleep in it. He was only a few days old. Bill’s mother said she wanted to go down the street to her sister’s house, and she asked Mr. John to wait with baby Bill until she returned. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” she promised, and off she went. “So I sat down on the porch next to the boy,” Mr. John continued, “and no sooner had she left than a bright light came down from heaven. An angel wrapped his golden wings around the baby and said, ‘John, don’t worry about this baby. He’s going to be fine.’” Mr. John caught his breath and finished reporting the angel’s words. “‘One day, he’s going to be president of the United States.’” With this, Mr. John took another deep breath, and added, “That Senate race? That ain’t nothing. He’s got that in the bag.” Mr. John died that night, shortly after learning Bill Frist had defeated an eighteen-year incumbent, Democratic senator Jim Sasser.[58]
With his laserlike mind, Frist makes Bush and Cheney look like filament bulbs near burnout, and their authoritarianism was troubling enough. Frist is Richard Nixon with Bill Clinton’s brains, and Nixon was no mental slouch. Frist is without question a social dominator, and dominators, obviously, cannot hide their tendency to dominate. No one describes Bill Frist’s dominating personality better than Frist himself in his first book, Transplant: A Heart Surgeon’s Account of the Life-and-Death Dramas of the New Medicine. The memoir opens with Frist at the top of his game as a cardiac surgeon, and it is clear that in the operating room, he is the man in charge. He called himself a good quarterback, a position he played at a private high school. It is immediately clear that Bill Frist has always been a driven individual—a born dominator and seeker of power. As the “youngest of five children,” he wrote, he could “hardly help but be a demanding little tyrant.” Frist says of his kindergarten years, “I ruled not just over my family but over my friends—or should I say subjects—who always opted to come to my house.”[59] In the lower grades, “I longed to be first in everything, to be king of the hill, the grammar school capo di capi. I imagine I was quite insufferable. I hated—and often too quickly abandoned—anything at which I did not excel. I sought out whatever made me feel useful, different, and in control. I felt most comfortable with slightly younger boys who could look up to me, admire me…. I resented anyone my age who was more popular, bigger, faster, or smarter. I was jealous of them. I feared them. They might take over.” In high school, he acknowledged he “became a deadly serious overachiever,” with his “raging hormones of adolescence” spawning “an urge to excel and a desire to lead.” He was class president for three of four years, yearbook editor, quarterback of the football team, and voted most likely to succeed during his senior year.[60]