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CHAPTER FIVE

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

—R
ONALD
R
EAGAN

P
oliticians are synonymous with bullshit. It is a truth universally acknowledged that prevarication is practically part of the job description. The last three American presidents have all bullshitted flagrantly and publicly in their own special ways. Reagan thought facts were stupid things, and conjured chimerical scenarios involving wealthy, Caddy-driving welfare queens and air-polluting trees. Bush the elder was more of an omitter, erecting a wall of sentence fragments between his office and his creepy business concerns. Clinton lied about sex and then lied about lying about sex and then dropped bombs on Baghdad during his fib-filled, fib-fueled impeachment. It should be pretty clear by this point in my little screed that I think the current president is a world-historical bullshitter, as his no-bullshit pose—nuance is for pussies!—only makes his bullshit all the bullshittier.

Politicians are among the first people to tell you that politicians are full of shit, decrying their fellows as flip-floppers or flimflam artists or outright liars. It’s no surprise that mudslinging is de rigueur on the campaign trail, and has been, since North America was colonized. Negative campaigning is not a recent invention. But over the past twenty-five years political campaigns have gone beyond simply saying that the other guy is Beelzebub. Now government itself, and in general, is bad. Nobody seems more delighted to describe, in exquisite detail, just how corrupt government is than someone who happens to be running for it, or an elected member of it.

For your consideration: “We propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives. That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.” Splendid! I could use a government with less cumbersome fine print! “Official evasion and posturing”—that fairly rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Testify, soul brother. What young firebrand could have penned this feisty manifesto? I regret to inform you, dear reader, that this stirring invective comes from the preamble to the Contract with America, one of the epic ballads of the ongoing and oxymoronic conservative or Republican revolution.

Ronaldus Magnus, as some conservatives call him, began the popular chorus against government strangleholds on free enterprise. He didn’t come up with it, but he spread the notion that markets do just about everything better than the sucky old public sector. For the freshman Republican Congress of 1994, this kind of anti-government governance was the object of revolutionary fervor. Ten years later, Bush’s reelection, and Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, seem to indicate that the Republican revolution has been a riproaring success, and that the people want a government that wants less of itself—at least in word, if not always in deed. Even though Bush’s policies have generated a very big and costly government, including a whole new department, he talked about his tax cuts in terms of getting government off the backs of the people, and letting the just plain folks have their own money and power. He is using the same sort of sell to push privatizing Social Security. The “ownership society” and “culture of responsibility” are squishy revamps of the language of the Contract.

The Contract was the usual mishmash of deregulation, privatization, and freewheeling free marketeering. But it was wrapped in a rich, creamy coating of rhetoric about personal and fiscal responsibility and government accountability. It called for an audit of the Congress itself for waste, fraud, and abuse. And though Market Good, Government Bad was the first psalm in the book of the conservative revolution, it should be noted that this sort of full-on froth-at-the-mouth was by no means a solely right-wing phenomenon in the nineties. Newt Gingrich wouldn’t have gotten the kind of press that he did, including
Time
’s 1995 Man of the Year cover, had he not glommed on to an anti-government sentiment swirling about the Zeitgeist. Government-hating transcended party lines. You had a spectrum of loathing that stretched from the extreme survivalist build-me-a-compound right all the way to the latest wave of black-clad bohemian malcontents. It was Clinton, representing the long-standing official party of great big government, who declared that “the era of big government is over.”

If you go back to the Founding Fathers, an approach advocated by no less august an historian than Mr. Gingrich himself, you will find an anti-government streak in American democracy right from the get-go. Jefferson, for example, thought the best government was the least government. Thomas Paine’s classic pamphlet
Common Sense
argues that an independent government is simply a necessary evil; it’s either the republic or more British tyranny. Paine certainly isn’t chuffed about government in general. He begins his treatise by differentiating between society and government. Society is the realm of voluntary fellow-feeling, but we need government as well, he argues, to punish the inevitable wickedness that threatens the friendly bonds of social life. If we were all sufficiently endowed with conscience, government would be unnecessary. Alas, we are not, and consequently we must enter a social contract, agreeing to surrender up part of our property to furnish the means of protecting the rest. Paine thought it nonsensical that Americans be subject to some distant, tyrannical king, and instead proclaimed that people should live under the rule of law.

I mention Paine at length because I dig him, but also because of the persistence of the phrase “common sense” in conservative policy agendas. The Harris Conservatives in Ontario called their movement the Common Sense Revolution. One of the provisions in the Contract with America was called the Common Sense Legal Standards Reform Act, which called for “reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.” Not exactly stick it to the king, but tort reform was the sort of thing that passed for a commonsensical notion in governance at the time. And please understand that by “reform,” Newt and company meant “get rid of.” If the first psalm in the book of the conservative revolution was Market Good, Government Bad, the second was, We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules. The freshman Republicans in Congress were hell-bent on doing away with as many ridiculous regulations as possible, thus allowing trade to grow and thrive. They saw themselves as the rightful heirs to Reagan, but this wasn’t just morning in America; this was a revolution, and you were in or out. Congressmen like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay aggressively led the charge to replace the old Liberal Welfare State with the brand-spankin’-new Conservative Opportunity Society. And if they had to totally shut down the government to save the government, as they did in the 1995 budget dispute, so be it.

In March 1995, that latter-day radical Tom, Tom DeLay, struck a pose next to a five-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty swathed in red tape, and began hacking and slashing away at the hated symbol of old-school bureaucracy. When I was rooting around for exemplary Republicans, and began looking at DeLay, the current House Majority Leader and former House Majority Whip, I liked him for a number of reasons. First, he did fun things like cover statues with red tape. Second, he wasn’t as played out and ubiquitous as the Newt. Third, he, and all the lesser Tom DeLays, who share his Christ-and-Mammon creed but lack his diabolical skills, are living proof that I am not paranoid. My most tinfoil-hatted fantasies pale in comparison to the things right-wing radicals like DeLay and his ilk actually say and do. Fourth, and most significant, DeLay is one of the crucial players in the melding of moneyed interests and government.

It would be an understatement to DeClare that DeLay is DeVoted to DeRegulation; “Mr. DeReg” is but one of his nicknames. He is also known as “The Hammer,” “The Congressman from Enron,” and “The Exterminator.” He was known as “Hot-Tub Tom” when he was a multiple martini man, but he has since switched, like Bush, to chugging the Lord. DeLay got the moniker “The Hammer” not for his balloony harem pants or his funny sideways dancing, but for his full-frontal fundraising and no-nonsense way of dealing with Washington’s legion of lobbyists. “The Congressman from Enron” is because Enron gave DeLay some dough. And, though I hate to imply anything so salacious as a simple cash-for-favors quid pro quo, DeLay did seem awfully enthused about exempting Enron from energy trading regulations. “The Exterminator” refers to his career previous to politics. DeLay operated a pest-control business in Sugar Land, Texas, and it was there that he saw the way and the truth and the light. Fire ants were eating Texas, and yet the EPA banned the most effective fire ant–slaughtering agent available to the mass bug murderer at the time, on account of them reckoning it was carcinogenic. Nor could he abide the worker safety laws that required fumigators to wear hardhats during routine termite routs. DeLay swore vengence on the bean counters down in Washington for stifling the spirit of free enterprise, and went into politics, a Capra-corny conservative conversion tale indeed.

Since entering politics, DeLay has been the point man for the We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules movement. He has described the EPA as “the Gestapo of government,” and tried to cut its funding. He also wanted to repeal the Clean Air Act. When a reporter asked him if there were any regulatory measures worth keeping, DeLay replied, “Not that I can think of.” And just so you know that he is keeping the no-rules thing real down home, the district surrounding Sugar Land boasts a Monsanto plant, a BASF chemical plant, an EPA Superfund mercury site, one of the bigger Dow complexes, and air and water quality that are typically Texan in their terribleness.

Remember that incident in Texas in 2003, when all the Democrats fled to neighboring states to block a redistricting vote that would hand the Republicans more seats? That gerrymandering would be more fine DeLay handiwork. He then used his sway within the federal government to interfere in the protest against the gerrymander, contacting the Federal Aviation Administration to track down those wayward Democrats. This last bit of strong-arming is the substance of one of the ethics complaints filed against DeLay in 2004. The other ethics complaints involve DeLay attempting to influence a colleague in a House vote, and his use of inappropriate corporate contributions to fund Republican campaigns through his political action committee. DeLay’s associates are under investigation by a Texas grand jury for the latter transgression as well, and three have already been charged with violating campaign finance law.

Republicans spent the weeks before Christmas vacillating about changing their ethics rules to accommodate the possibility of a DeLay indictment. In January of 2005, the Republicans decided that it would be perfectly fine to strike down a rule that might interfere with DeLay’s position as House Majority Leader, should he be charged in Texas. A few days later, however, they reversed this decision. Given that the ethics rules in question were penned by the revolutionary Republican congress of 1994 in the first place, this vote looked very bad. In fact, it looked so bad that even DeLay thought that his colleagues should reverse their decision. However, at the same time, the Republicans also made another change that effectively scuttles future ethics complaints against DeLay or any other offending congress-critters. The ethics committee will no longer launch investigations if it reaches a tie vote on the complaints. The ethics committee is half Republican, half Democrat. Consequently, members of the committee will have to vote against their own parties to launch investigations, which they are often unwilling or unable to do. The outgoing chair of the Ethics Committee, Representative Joel Hefley, is a notable exception to this rule. Even though he is a Republican, he has been fairly zealous in following up on a variety of complaints against DeLay. Of course, this zeal is one of the reasons why he is the
outgoing
chair of the Ethics Committee. It is rumored that his replacement will be a more obedient and obliging Republican, perhaps a DeLay-friendly fellow Texan.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to DeLay denuding Lady Liberty of that red tape, back in 1995. DeLay did not wield the shears of freedom all by his lonesome. Beside him was the chair of Project Relief, lobbyist Bruce Gates, who had helped drum up support for their most recent victory: a moratorium on government health and safety regulations, which passed the house by a vote of 276 to 146. There had been some four thousand rules in the pipeline, leftovers from the Democrats, and the Republicans wanted to head them off at the pass, or at least stall them until they could pass more comprehensive antiregulatory legislation. When
The Washington Post
inquired as to the propriety of numerous industry lobbyists sitting down in DeLay’s office to draft provisions of the moratorium bill, DeLay maintained that industry had the expertise. Various members of Project Relief, a super-lobby of 350 industry and corporate concerns, dropped by to make sure that their interests would be served by the bill; for example, UPS wanted to make sure that emissions regulations wouldn’t call for a retooling of their fleet of trucks, and Union Carbide was sweating the possibility of facing more fines for failure to report off-duty worker injuries. Once everyone passed the legislation around, and penned a line or two, like some bizarre rich-guy version of that Surrealist party game, Exquisite Corpse, the nice people at Project Relief let loose the lobbying hounds, convincing various Democrats with industries in their districts to come along on the cool new no-rules ride.