In Washington…hypocrisy is a perennial crime in both parties; if all the city’s hypocrites were put in jail, there would be no one left to run the government.
—Frank Rich
JULY 17, 2003, WAS A TYPICAL SUMMER NIGHT IN THE NATION’S capital. The hot weather matched the political rhetoric. Since he assumed the chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee in January 2001, the irascible Bill Thomas (R-CA) had made a second career out of inflaming the committee’s Democratic minority. Relations were so bad that the Democrats publicly accused Thomas of being a dictator. His performance was the sort of thing that later caused Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) to assert: “[The House] has been run like a plantation…. It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard…. We have a culture of corruption, we have cronyism, we have incompetence….”
The Ways and Means Committee has more impact on the American taxpayer than any other. From the amount of taxes Americans pay to the protection or altering of Social Security and Medicare benefits, it all starts or ends in this committee. Under Thomas, bills in Ways and Means were written by the chairman and his staff without any input from the Democrats. Thomas would call committee meetings and not inform the minority. When the Democrats managed to attend the meetings, the Republican majority routinely ignored them. Democratic proposals to amend committee bills never succeeded during Thomas’s tenure. Committee Democrats complained bitterly to their leadership and routinely blasted Thomas in the press.
On Friday, July 17, 2003, Thomas called the committee to order. The business of the late evening meeting was an important pension bill that would affect millions of Americans and thousands of U.S. companies. In Washington-speak, this type of session is known as a final “markup” of the bill.
The Democrats were fed up with Thomas and itching for a fight. Pensions, which affect so many blue-collar workers, had always been important to Democrats. The revolt was led by Fortney “Pete” Stark, a liberal Democrat from Northern California.
As was his practice, Thomas did not allow the minority to see the bill until the day of the markup. Stark demanded that Democrats be given time to read the complex legislation. Thomas refused Stark’s request, and the pot boiled over. The argument quickly escalated, and months of pent-up anger erupted into shouting and name-calling. Chairs were slammed back, fists were cocked, and some members nearly came to blows. The Democrats ultimately stormed out of the hearing room and went to the committee library to plot their next move.
Thomas called the Capitol Police, whose primary job is to protect members of Congress from outside threats, and ordered them to evict the Democrats from the library. No longtime observer or congressional historian could recall the Capitol Police being used this way in that body’s two-hundred-year history.
Some Democrats refused to leave, putting the police in the embarrassing position of insisting they either vacate or face eviction. For several minutes it looked as if the police might begin arresting members, but calmer heads prevailed and the Democrats finally left.
As news of the confrontation spread, the next day Democrats descended on the House chamber, demanding that Thomas apologize. Representatives from both parties issued withering criticisms of his high-handed tactics. As terms like police state were being thrown around, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi confronted the Republican leadership, calling for a formal rebuke of Thomas.
In the end, Thomas had no choice. “It’s been said that strengths are our weaknesses,” the tearful Thomas declared. “Or as my mother would have put it, ‘When they were passing out moderation, you were hiding behind the door.’” He went on to say, “The visions that each of us has for a better America, different though they may be, all have a right to be heard…. Each of us is elected by the people to be a member. Each of us has an equal right to be here.”
The Democrats were not moved. If anything, they saw his statement as disingenuous and his weeping performance nothing more than crocodile tears. Though seeking to appear apologetic, Thomas stood by his call for police reinforcements: “To reestablish order in the committee, I requested that staff place a call to the sergeant at arms,” Thomas said. “That decision in my opinion was proper and appropriate.”
His cause was not helped when word leaked to the press that Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay had to browbeat Thomas into making a statement. Both men feared the story would make the GOP House majority look like the Democrat majority they replaced in 1994. The ham-fisted tactics of the majority Democrats who were ousted after forty-two years of uninterrupted control prompted Newt Gingrich (like Hillary Clinton a decade later) to compare the House to a plantation.
The “Battle of Ways and Means” will forever stand out as emblematic of this period of bitter polarization. Under the previous Democratic chairman, Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago, the Ways and Means Committee was never a comfortable environment for the then-minority Republican members. But Rostenkowski, even in his most tyrannical days, never called the cops on the minority Republicans.
As anyone who watches C-SPAN or has visited the House in session knows, certain rules of decorum are followed even in heated debates. That’s why you hear things like “As my good friend from Nebraska knows…” or “The gentlelady from Florida is incorrect when she says…” even though you know what they’re really thinking is something like “This fool doesn’t belong here and should be selling used cars with signs that say ‘no credit, no problem.’” So, when this kind of volcanic activity occurs, things are seriously out of hand.
Although the Battle of Ways and Means was colorful and received lots of media attention, polarizing tactics were not limited to the House.
SENATE MINORITY LEADER (NOW MAJORITY LEADER) HARRY REID’S reputation as a highly charged partisan is legendary. Reid, from the tiny town of Searchlight, Nevada, was an amateur boxer in his younger years. Although he left the ring, the instinct to fight never left him. Reid is unapologetic about his partisanship, but on one issue it would come at a high price. It was spring of 2006 and the Senate debated the controversial immigration issue. The House had passed a Republican immigration bill in a special session the previous December that made hiring, or even assisting, illegal immigrants a felony. By spring, the normally restrained Latino community was in an uproar. Demonstrations spread across the country, as millions of Latinos, legal and illegal, protested the House felony bill.
The participation of legal Latinos, many of them U.S. citizens (and voters), raised the political stakes for both parties. George Bush and Karl Rove had aggressively pursued the Hispanic vote in the previous election. Their efforts paid off when Bush received more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. Many believed the House GOP immigration bill was substantially undermining that recruitment effort. Democrats had historically received a strong majority of the Latino vote before the Bush inroads. Republican missteps on the immigration issue, Democrats believed, would bring these voters back.
President Bush had long favored an immigration bill that would allow for a guest worker program and permit most illegal immigrants to pay back taxes and fines, stay in the country, and apply for citizenship. These formerly illegal immigrants would have to go to “the end of the line” behind people who had obeyed the law, but they could hope for eventual citizenship if they worked hard and did not commit any crimes. The GOP base strongly opposed Bush on these provisions, but the outrage in the Latino community convinced Republican senators (and even some House supporters of the felony provisions) to adopt a proposal similar to the president’s.
The McCain/Kennedy immigration bill, sponsored by Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ), was close to what Bush wanted. It was also one of those rare bipartisan efforts, the likes of which had not been seen for years. For a few days before Congress adjourned, McCain/Kennedy was picking up strong support on both sides of the aisle. The White House announced its support for the measure.
The legislation was brought to the Senate floor the day before Congress adjourned for the Easter recess, but Harry Reid was not about to let it pass. The bill had many provisions that President Bush wanted, and the president would get credit for a legislative victory. Reid could not allow that to happen. The stakes in the upcoming election were too high. Arguing that Republicans intended to use amendments to gut the bill, Reid used a parliamentary maneuver and sent the bill back to committee. He anticipated that Republican lawmakers would take significant political heat from home-state voters.
By the time Congress reconvened in early May, it was clear that Reid’s strategy had backfired. Democrats told Reid that any further delay could cause serious problems for their party among Latino voters, who expected the Democrats to carry their water on immigration reform. Republican senators told Majority Leader Bill Frist the bill should pass quickly. Grassroots conservatives, who hated the bill, were turning it into a hot-button issue. Latinos were conducting organized voter-registration drives that Republicans believed would produce more votes for Democrats in the fall election. Most Senate Republicans wanted to get the issue off the table and off the front page.
Reid and Frist knew they had to deal. By mid-May, an agreement was reached to bring the McCain/Kennedy legislation back to the Senate floor. Reid dropped his opposition to amendments, while Frist agreed to include additional Democrats on the conference committee that would negotiate a final bill with the House. Partisan stonewalling gave way to bipartisan consensus. Finding common ground, in the Senate at least, provided both sides a political safety net, but then the House refused to sit down with the Senate. An attempt by the Bush administration to pass a “comprehensive immigration reform” bill failed when talk radio and other opponents managed to organize an effective drive that scuttled it. The immigration bill that finally passed, just prior to the elections, called for a seven-hundred-mile fence on the Mexican border, but provided no funding for the fence, and no solution to the millions of illegals in the country. Such is the price of polarization.
Any further efforts at finding common ground on other issues in the 110th Congress failed. There have been occasional moments in recent years in which partisan politics has given way to genuine and unified concern for the public good. For a brief period after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, bipartisanship rolled down like a cool stream on a hot day. Nevertheless, even that “Kumbaya” moment between the two parties had the feel of a shotgun wedding. It took only a few months of war in Iraq to destroy the unity and return to partisan bickering. By the end of 2002 the parties were once more experiencing irreconcilable differences. By 2003 the bipartisan divorce was final.
As America entered the twenty-first century, polarization was well into its second decade. As a result, a generation of politicians and operatives in both parties had never personally experienced cooperation, bipartisanship, or a meaningful search for common ground. They might have heard about it but rarely had they lived it. The vast majority of political consultants and most of today’s elected politicians have never functioned in anything but a toxic environment. The national party committees have an interest in keeping it this way.