“He earned every cent! I wouldn’t be where I am without what he did for us.” I replied. “It wasn’t just me, not by a long shot!”
“All I’m saying is that when the time comes, you know…” He glanced over at where his parents were sitting, with a somewhat guilty look on his face. “Well, you know… he’d appreciate it if you said a few words. Mom and Rachel would, too.”
I nodded. “I’d be honored. Hell, there’ll be so many people wanting to say nice things about your father, I’ll need to beat them back with my cane!” I drained my glass. “Christ, he’ll probably end up on some tropical island in the South Pacific and outlive us all.”
Allen drained his own glass. “I’ll drink to that!”
In Washington Newt and the Gang of Eight (now Seven, since Rick had moved up in the world) began to get a lesson in practical politics from one William Jefferson Clinton. I was expecting it, even if the others weren’t, and it was still a shock. Some of the others were reeling, and Newt was truly pissed that Slick Willie wasn’t rolling over and playing dead like a good Democrat should. Clinton laid low for the first couple of weeks of the new session, allowing us to introduce one of our Contract bills every day. When asked, as he invariably was, he simply promised to work with the new Congress and the new Congressional leadership to forge legislation that was both bipartisan and able to move the country forward. Very innocuous stuff.
To what extent he was trying to lure us into a sense of false security I’m not sure. While he wasn’t screaming, some of his key lieutenants were. The ones I heard the most from were Dick Gephardt and Dave Bonior, both of whom were highly experienced, thoroughly tied into the moneymen, and as crooked as the day was long. The Republican takeover of Congress was an unnatural event, ranking right up there with having sex with dead donkeys, and needed to be reversed. They immediately began taking our legislation and picking it to pieces in the hopes of destroying it entirely. Even better, if they could destroy it, they could then trumpet how the Republicans had failed in our Contract with America, and should be sent packing at the next election.
Some of the bills were easy pickings for them. The two most obvious items were John Boehner’s Balanced Budget Act and my Rebuilding America Act. These were the two bills most likely to be compromised by the Dems — and everybody else, for that matter! Both were major spending bills, and allowed an infinite number of ways for a Congressman to loot the Treasury on behalf of his constituents, or contributors. Sometimes it is something relatively innocuous and cheap (by government standards) such as the Federal funding of yet another corn museum in Iowa. Other times it can be ridiculously extravagant projects like the ‘bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska, which ran almost a third of a billion dollars, and connected the mainland to a town with only 50 residents. This is pork barrel politics at its most nitty and gritty. Remember the mighty word ‘earmark.’
I warned John and the others what was going to happen, and that if we tried to stop the process we would get nothing but heartache. The best we could accomplish was to control and influence things, and keep the lid on the more ridiculous stuff, by throwing spotlights on them as necessary. We also had to control our own side, who now that they were in positions of power wanted to get their own blessing of pork.
Some of the bills were going to be shitcanned. After a few weeks of review, the word came down that Clinton was going to flat out veto my Defending the 2nd Amendment bill. He had just signed the Brady bill into law in the last session and here we were trashing it. While I hadn’t touched the section on requiring background checks on handgun purchase, we had totally wiped out the ban on assault weapons and replaced it with a piece on limiting magazine sizes, and were violating states rights on the permit issue. Worse, I was both a murderous bastard (no, Bill didn’t actually call me that, but he came close, citing my ‘proclivity to shoot first and ask questions later’) and calling me a shill for the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which I wasn’t even a member of. I simply shrugged and began working on finding enough votes to override the veto. I could probably do that in the House; the Senate was much more questionable. I would need to line up 67 votes there, and might have to accept a watered down bill to manage that.
All the other stuff, tort reform and welfare fixes and social security and such, they would do the rope-a-dope technique. Every little bit would be fucked with and delayed, and modified so much as to be totally unrecognizable, in the hopes that we would drop the hot potato before they could get Clinton to veto it. Some of it they figured would die of its own weight. We would never get enough Congressmen to sign off on any meaningful Congressional reform, so Bill could stand back and look statesmanlike and sorrowful when we couldn’t even get our own house in order.
Newt and the Majority Leader and Whip, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, were taking a more laid back approach to some of this. Newt’s big plan wasn’t so much the legislation as the spectacle and effect. He had used the Contract with America to take back both houses of Congress. If we got the legislation to pass, so much the better. We had a big meeting with the Gang of Eight and the Republican leadership of both the House and the Senate in February, and got our marching orders. Newt and Bob Dole were working on driving a stake through Clinton’s heart for the next election. Generalship on the various bills he was leaving up to DeLay and those of us with our names on the bills.
The biggest change between now and the first time through on this for me was that this time we already had the Senate lined up. On my first trip through, Newt had only handled things in the House, and didn’t have any decent support in the other house. Since nothing can go to the President until both houses pass it and cobble something together, this added months to the process. This time we had started much earlier. We had brought some Senators in on things. We had Senate versions of all our bills ready to go the same day we dropped the House bills into the hopper. By April we had most of the bills passed, sometimes over Democratic screaming, but passed. (Well, not Congressional Reform or Tort Reform, they would probably never pass!) Now it was up to Bill Clinton to either sign them into law or veto them.
Clinton had ten days to sign them into law or veto them. If the Congress went out of session before he could sign them, they were effectively vetoed. (This is known as a pocket veto and is a useful tool to get a law passed that nobody really wanted and then get the President to dump it. You simply wait until the end of the session, pass it, and the President just ignores it until the clock runs out. Congress has managed to do something about whatever without really doing anything.) We didn’t give him that luxury. He waited nine days before giving the chop to most of them. Surprisingly, the Rebuilding America Act he let pass, probably because there was sufficient Democratic pork in it. I tried to control it, even going so far as to pull an all-nighter in the committee conference room with the Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Larry Pressler, during final markup. Still, we had plenty of pork for everybody.
I did not envy John Boehner and his Balanced Budget Act, or John Doolittle and his Business Tax Reform Act. Doolittle had promised that his focus was on eliminating loopholes and tax shelters. He was promising to lower rates if we eliminated loopholes and shelters. Everybody liked the first part of that, but not so much the second. Then again, if Boehner could close the budget gap, which had been over $200 billion last year, we could afford lower rates. It had been done the first time through, why not do it again?