Tom DeLay saw the 1994 election as an opportunity to gain his own place within the Republican leadership. DeLay played politics like bridge, always thinking several tricks ahead. Knowing he would not have Gingrich’s support if the GOP took control of the House, and that Gingrich would be Speaker, DeLay figured out that the way to get his own place at the top of the pecking order was to win the position of majority whip by helping Republican candidates win the seats needed to take control of Congress. Gingrich was already running such a program, but after a decade in the House DeLay had one of the best fund-raising Rolodexes in Washington, and was more effective, providing both money and expertise to Republican candidates. “DeLay hired an experienced political consultant to direct his giving and advise the candidates he was backing. Mildred Webber was DeLay’s handicapper and bag woman, picking races where he could get the most bangs for his bucks and delivering checks to candidates,” his biographers report.[16] DeLay traveled to twenty-five states for fund-raisers, offering one-on-one guidance to fledgling campaigners. Many candidates were both pleased and startled by how much DeLay knew about them. DeLay’s office became something of a concierge, and DeLay a consigliere, for the new House Republicans. In the end, DeLay helped eighty candidates win their 1994 elections, so when it came time for this freshman class to select a majority whip, he had a lock on their hearts and minds. Even Gingrich was too wary of DeLay’s well-known “mean streak” and “ruthlessness” to try to block him.[17] DeLay won the leadership post easily, defeating Gingrich’s candidate. Gingrich ultimately figured out how to channel DeLay’s ambition, and the men put personalities aside and got on about the business of running Congress their way.
Immediately, there was a new tone to House proceedings, as Gingrich and his lieutenants imposed authoritarian rule. It was not merely payback time for the Democrats, for Republicans wanted to build a permanent majority in America, and a one-party rule. In The Cycles of American History Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., observed that there is “a pattern of alternation in American history between negative and affirmative government—that is, between times when voters see private action as the best way of meeting our troubles and times in which voters call for a larger measure of public action.”[18] Republicans were ready for negative government. One longtime and highly respected member of the House observed that the GOP rule resulted in a “decline in civility” with “bitter partisan exchanges and mean personal attacks.” There was “antagonism, incivility, and the tendency to demonize opponents,” making it “very difficult for members to come together to pass legislation for the good of the country.”[19] Comity between the majority and minority all but disappeared, and members soon barely even knew one another, as the House held meetings only three days a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—with most members returning home for long weekends. C-Span, which had begun televising House proceedings in 1979, had made it less necessary for most members to be on the floor of the House, for they could follow the proceedings in their offices. Electronic voting also resulted in members’ spending less time together. This suited the new authoritarian leadership’s aim of tightly controlling the House, for knowing one’s colleagues makes it more difficult to attack them, and authoritarian conservatism is constantly on the attack. They are not backslappers, but rather, backstabbers; they do not serve the public interest, but rather, their own.
Proponents of the Contract with America had claimed the “Democrats’ ironhanded one-party rule of the House of Representatives over the last four decades led to arcane, arbitrary, and often secretive procedures that disenfranchised millions of Americans from representation in Congress,” reported one congressional scholar.[20] Indeed, their long stint in power had given them a hubris, arrogance, and sense of invulnerability that had eroded the effective operation of the House. Republicans, in fact, had a valid complaint, and at the time they took control there was indeed a need for reform. But that is not what happened. If Democrats had run the House with an iron hand, Republicans were employing a iron fist at the behest of their leadership’s autocratic rule.[21] Gingrich lorded over the House. Where power was once decentralized among committee chairmen who had earned their posts and fiefdoms through seniority, Gingrich eliminated the seniority system and had chairmen selected by the leadership, concentrating power in the Speaker’s office.[*] But while Gingrich was autocratic (answering to no one else), he was not dictatorial (imposing his will on others). Dictatorship in the House would not occur until DeLay held full sway, which occurred with Gingrich’s departure. By the time of the arrival of Bush and Cheney in 2001, House Republican leaders had imposed iron-clad controls on “the people’s House,” making it their own, with ambitions of assuming permanent authority.
Accordingly, “[m]ore radical changes, at the expense of democracy itself, have occurred since 2002 under Tom DeLay,” explained the seasoned Washington observer Robert Kuttner, the cofounder and coeditor of The American Prospect.[22] Kuttner was one of the first to write about the authoritarian inclination of these conservatives (although he does not use the term) in a chilling analysis entitled “America as a One-Party State: Today’s hard right seeks total dominion. It’s packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.” Kuttner focused on Congress, more specifically on the House of Representatives, and by 2002, he found, there was good reason to describe DeLay’s operation as a “dictatorship.” He also refuted the Republican claim that when the Democrats were in control they exercised the same leadership style, for what the Republicans have done to the House was beyond anything even imaginable by the Democrats. Kuttner focused on several means employed by the authoritarian conservatives to exercise control. Following I have quoted or paraphrased them, while adding a few thoughts of my own.
18.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
19.
Lee H. Hamilton,
21.
For example, William M. Welch, “We Exposed Our Souls in Late-Night Gingrich Debate,”
*
Not long after Gingrich’s authoritarian approach became evident, a reporter for the