(From the July 1990 issue of The American Spectator.)
In the wake of what was once called the Reagan Revolution, free-market supporters are today waging a holding action in Congress, trying to resist the majority’s bent for re-regulation, higher taxation, protectionism, and increased spending. Not that the situation is necessarily bleak. To the degree that the White House will assist with the veto, all it takes is a committed one-third to sustain the gains of the late 1970s and early 1980s (such as they were).
Getting that third isn’t so easy, however, particularly when many members of Congress who could survive politically as principled foes of statism—even to the point of resisting pork-barreling for their constituents—nevertheless become creatures of Washington. What follows is an attempt to identify the most wasted opportunities on Capitol Hill: the politicians who could rise above baser considerations but don’t.
We’ve limited the search to Republicans, because Democrats are presumed to be under such pressure from the party’s leadership, particularly on substantive matters disguised as procedural votes, that they cannot reasonably be expected to part consistently from the majority line. And we’ve looked only at the House of Representatives; the Senate, for a variety of reasons, doesn’t draw the philosophical battle lines as clearly. One reason for that is that members elected statewide tend not to have the “safe” electoral base that allows for a resolute record. In that regard, we’ve used a 58 percent or higher vote in the district for the Bush-Quayle ticket in 1988 as the threshold for determining what is hospitable territory. The last criterion is why you won’t find some familiar GOP contras—the Sylvio Contes, Claudine Schneiders, Bill Greens, and Constance Morellas—on this list. We’re not demanding suicidal heroism, only a livable fidelity to smaller government. An assumption underlies the scoring here. Each vote is evaluated simply on its face—does it expand or contract government? No account is taken of the various second-order strategies, be they those of “Big Government Conservatives” or “Opportunity Society” wedge-players who believe that certain forms of statism can head off or cure worse strains. Such scheming may have selective merit, but it does not lend itself to objective measurement, and besides, over the course of many votes a politician’s true inclinations ought to be evident through the haze of occasional heresy.
“Wet” is a term of disparagement that American politics has picked up from Britain, where it’s applied to Conservative MPs who lack the courage of Maggie Thatcher’s convictions. In the U.S. under Ronald Reagan the term evolved to “squishes.” Here, then, is a Squish List of a dozen members who met the criteria above and yet have voted for bigger government on more than half the roll calls monitored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute from 1985-89. Following them, we mention a collection of folks who are moist enough to risk moderation mildew.
Charles (Chip) Pashayan of California’s San Joaquin Valley has been tilling the Washington soil on behalf of his farmers for six terms. Sometimes that means plowing under the common interest of agriculture in free trade in favor of a special constituency, such as when he followed the cotton growers’ line and twice voted to override presidential vetoes of textile protectionism. He also voted to override Ronald Reagan’s veto of a highway pork bill— apparently Mr. Pashayan likes the asphalt lobby. He also was friendly to Charles Keating’s interests, and contributions from the S&L ne’er-do-well may give this Rules Committee member trouble this fall.
Matthew J. Rinaldo is a nine-termer from New Jersey whose district ranges from Elizabeth to Summit. He is the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce subcommittee from which Edward Markey of Massachusetts stirs up so much trouble as chairman. Too often, Mr. Rinaldo is along for the ride. Both want further regulation of the securities and broadcasting industries. Mr. Rinaldo once praised John Shad for his cost-cutting at the Securities and Exchange Commission, but has been selling unfettered finance short of late. He also is loud about fuel-oil price jumps, and wants to prevent U.S. consumers from buying some foreign luxury autos on the “gray market” that don’t meet all the regulations put on our homemade vehicles. And, not to miss a beat, he was one of the leading panderers to the Social Security “notch babies.”
World War II may never have ended for Helen Delia Bentley. The cantankerous third-termer from suburban Baltimore was part of the infamous Toshiba sledge-hammering caucus outside the Capitol a few years back and hasn’t stopped swinging at foreign products, particularly Japanese goods, since. And it’s not just to protect her local shipbuilders and steelmakers. She doesn’t like Sony getting into Hollywood, and she even antagonized the district’s longshoremen by battling the imports that help to keep them employed. Mrs. Bentley now has emerged as the effective leader of what amounts to the Maryland Republican party, vanquishing the New Right (or at least the non-protectionists among that wing).
Jim Courter escaped inclusion in the depressing dozen only by his decision to leave Congress (we only touch live wires). But there is more bad news from New Jersey: a couple of go-along, get-alongs named Dean Gallo and James Saxton. Theformer sits on the Appropriations Committee and is thus in better position to do damage, but Mr. Saxton was a one-man army in trying to spare Fort Dix, in his district, from the first round of domestic base closings. Mr. Gallo, from a well-off suburban district, has courageously sought higher pay for federal employees in expensive areas. Mr. Saxton of the Pine Barrens, meanwhile, was beefing about his own pay, which he noted will rise only slightly under the raise he helped to enact last year. Alas, his voting score hasn’t been rising at all.
Hamilton Fish, Jr. of New York is the son of an Old Right congressman and father of a left-wing Democrat who failed to win his own House seat in 1988. The incumbent is in the middle of the Fish clan politically as well as generationally. Which is not to say he is a mainstream Republican. Rather, in his more than twenty years in office, he’s emerged as a fairly reliable ally of the public sector. And it’s not just pandering to interests in his district— he is co-sponsoring with Ted Kennedy a bill to override the Supreme Court’s limits on racial favoritism, and he has been a big backer of statehood for the District of Columbia. Who knows— with his voting record he might run for senator there.
When the Wall Street Journal took dead aim at Joseph McDade of Pennsylvania, shortly after he was elected to a 13th term in 1988, with a front-page story detailing a criminal investigation of kickbacks from some Pentagon minority set-asides, he looked like a goner. But no charges have been filed and Mr. McDade is still engaged in the perfectly legal racket of buying votes. With seniority on the Appropriations Committee, he’s positioned to be an all-star porker, and it’s difficult to find any beats he’s missed. Water projects, college research grants, historic preservation, veterans facilities, rail museums—you name it (you got it). Of course, Mr. McDade must relax occasionally, and for that there are expenses-paid junkets to the NCAA’s Final Four basketball tournament (courtesy Ocean Spray) and a Placido Domingo concert (General Dynamics). Bravo, Giuseppe!
Arthur Ravenel of South Carolina was prepared to join the Democrat party last year until Lee Atwater interceded to keep him in the GOP ranks. Or, at least nominally in. With his advocacy of shooting down suspected courier planes and machine-gunning the survivors, he might be a commando in the Bush-Bennett drug war, but don’t let that Charleston drawl fool you: he’s been a peacenik when it comes to battling big government. Sometimes his rhetoric even gets flowery, as when he explained his freshman-year desertion over the 1987 highway-bill veto with the quote, “You can bet your spring petunias that this congressman will vote to override. President Reagan, he ain’t gonna be running in ’88, but I am.” Mr. Ravenel’s pork-barrel interest in that matter was a $15 million bridge to the coastal island communities that were themselves creatures of federal largesse and would be back at Uncle Sam’s door after Hurricane Hugo struck the following year.
Curiously enough, what nearly drove Mr. Ravenel to a more honest registration was Don Young of Alaska. A House member since 1973, Mr. Young pulled rank on the Interior Committee, where he looks out for the resource industry while the South Carolinian has other fish to fry. Mr. Young also is quite attentive to Alaska’s slew of federal employees. Fortunately, he is not considered a major player despite his seniority.
First elected to Congress when John Kennedy was President, James H. Quillen of Tennessee is an occasional brake on social spending but for the most part a deal-cutter in the pork-belly trading pit. A onetime small businessman, he now helps oversee the congressional conglomerate as ranking Republican on the powerful Rules Committee. “Jimmy” Quillen is, well… the current Almanac of American Politics tells it best: “For theories of the convergence of high-tech and traditional values, for free market economics or long-range political strategies, he has no interest at all. This is a bread-and-butter politician, interested in doing things for his district, and concerned with protecting and strengthening his own position as its representative.”
Richard Nixon’s congresswoman, Marge Roukema of New Jersey, unseated an incumbent in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 sweep but she’s been AWOL from the cause ever since. The ranking Republican on the housing subcommittee, she fights to protect Community Development Block Grants and increase aid to vagrants. “If we were doing to animals what we are doing to the homeless on our streets,” she once allowed, the Humane Society “would be mounting a campaign against us.” She is equally solicitous of those with second homes, shooting down a Treasury trial balloon not long back with a petition demanding that the mortgage-interest tax deduction not be changed in any way, shape, or form. Rep. Roukema, a former teacher, fancies herself a fiscal conservative (she was vocal about the deficit back when the Washington press was hysterical about it) but her bleeding heart is obviously elsewhere.
Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania is the last and perhaps most mystifying of our dirty dozen. In office barely three years, he appears to identify socially with the young Turks of the party caucus and not with the old horse traders. Yet his voting record smells as if he’s been sweeping out the stables. Surely there aren’t enough jackasses on the Swarthmore College faculty to explain this as a district problem, although Democrat Bob Edgar was elected from it five times before moving on to lose a statewide race (Mr. Weldon had nearly ousted him from Congress in 1984). He was once a mayor, which may be a clue, and the district is certainly on Mr. Weldon’s mind—he’s fought to protect the Philadelphia Navy Yard and to keep Dick Cheney from stopping production of the V-22 “Osprey.” But his primary passion appears to be fire safety in the Capitol, a carryover from his days as a volunteer firefighter. If that means curtailing the volume of member “newsletters” backing up outside the mail room, great, although on the general undesirability of a congressional conflagration, reasonable men could differ.
When there is weakness in the ranks, you always have to look to the top for part of the explanation. The Republican leadership in the House has long been the focus of grumbling by activist conservatives. Indeed, all of them have CEI scores barely above the party mean of 64 percent —all except GOP Conference chairman Jerry Lewis of California’s Inland Empire, that is. Despite a cake-walk district, Mr. Lewis can’t even vote right three times out of five. He played a big role in dooming reform of the Davis-Bacon wage floor on public works in the last session.
Bob Michel of Illinois personifies for many the squishy nature of the minority hierarchy, yet his scores turn out even higher than those for Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma and Newt Gingrich. Leadership positions don’t necessarily entail compromises with principle, we must note—Vin Weber of Minnesota and Bill McCollum of Florida well outperform the mean. However, Henry Hyde, a prospective replacement for Mr. Michel and another conservative favorite, also scores below the current minority leader.
State delegations tend to travel in packs, and to drag up or down the scores of marginal members. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan aren’t fertile ground for economic libertarianism. Florida, Texas, and California turf, on the other hand, braces up the wavering. Therefore, it is disappointing to find Bill Lowery of San Diego so weak on pork-barrel and other budget issues.
Some members who’d been bottom-fishing for a while managed to float up on a tide of rising partisan resolution in 1989—John Paul Hammerschmidt of Arkansas, for example, and Hal Rogers of Kentucky, Joseph R. Skeen of New Mexico, and Richard T. Schulze of Pennsylvania (he fights imports of foreign mushrooms). Mr. Hammerschmidt nevertheless perniciously acted to clear his committee for takeoff of legislation to block foreign investments in U.S. airlines (in the end, the bill remained grounded). These four all come from districts where Bush-Quayle were boffo.
Other Republicans from ideological strongholds persisted in their political androgyny through 1989, but have managed to maintain CEI voting records above the 50 percent cutoff we’ve used for our Squish List. A weak year in 1990 could put them on the dishonor roll next time around. They are John Myers of Indiana, John Rowland of Connecticut, Bill Schuette of Michigan (a candidate for the U.S. Senate this year), Amory Houghton of New York, and Stan Parris of Virginia. (Mr. Houghton, a scion of the Corning Glass fortune, pointed the way with his observation that the plant-closing bill wasn’t so bad because big businesses already had notification policies.
Doug Bereuter of Nebraska and Sid Morrison of Washington occupy a special category of members from marginally Republican districts with even more marginally free-enterprise voting records. Finally, some Republicans sport such disgustingly dirigiste voting records that they deserve mention even though their districts gave Bush-Quayle less than 58 percent—but still a majority—of the vote. These include Robert J. Davis of Michigan, Christopher Shays of Connecticut (a new Lowell Weicker?), Olympia Snowe of Maine, Christopher Smith of New Jersey, Frank Horton of New York, Ralph S. Regula of Ohio, and Lawrence Coughlin of Pennsylvania.
Bad as this lot may be, the nature of congressional incumbency these days means that most all of them will be around for as long as they wish, monopolizing seats that in most cases could be turned into bastions of resistance to nineties-style statism. Of course, should a limit on terms somehow be enacted… One gets a sense from this sampling of what good it could do—and not only in dislodging Democrats.
This article appeared in the July 1990 issue of The American Spectator.
