Simpson’s ambivalent exit captures some of the paradoxes at work in the capital On the one hand, he thinks the revolution hasn’t gone nearly far enough on the all-important issue of entitlements. “Under the vicious Republican plan of breaking the teeth of old people, Medicare will avoid going broke in 2002,” he says, taking sarcastic aim at demagogic Democratic charges. “Instead it will go broke in 2009. Nothing’s really changed.”
But there’s something about the new culture of the place that annoys him. Simpson’s had a bellyful of “bug-eyed zealots.” One day this year he walked into a critical meeting with other members of Congress and saw some unfamiliar faces. “I said, ‘Who are these eats?’ One said, ‘I’m from the Cato Institute [a right-wing policy lobby] and I drafted this bill.’ He’d brought this creature to life like Dr. Frankenstein.”
So nothing’s changed in Washington-and everything. That leaves something profoundly different, beyond the expansion of the smoking section of the House dining room. But what? At a minimum, the old bipartisan Washington social scene that comfortably dominated since World War II is splitting open like stale sourdough. “It used to be choose-up-sides during the day, but not after hours. There was a great congeniality,” says longtime Washington hostess Jayne Ikard. “That’s all gone.” Most soirees are now fund-raisers. There’s little sense of shared enterprise. Whatever the eventual budget compromise-the word itself is still literally banned within the House GOP majority as soft–Washington is more polarized than anyone can remember.
But has the structure of the place really changed? On one level, only the players are different. When Democrats ruled, lawyers for the AFL-CIO -and the Sierra Club helped write laws. Now it’s Cato or the National Federation of Independent Business. But there’s certainly a new brazenness on the GOP side. Freshmen actually line up to listen to a fellow named David Rein- of the Beer Wholesalers Association instruct them on how to solicit contributions from panting special interests. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a former pest exterminator (he says “DDT is as safe as aspirin”), shows NEWSWEEK a booklet called “The Top 400” that details exactly how much the largest PACs have given. If they don’t contribute to Republicans–in fact, if the lobbyists themselves aren’t Re-publican-they don’t get in the door.
These elephants never forget. Big Business reps are excluded from strategy sessions for supporting Democrats in the past; even the chamber of commerce is still slightly suspect after working with the Clintonites on health care. And for a crowd that believes in leaving business alone, the new leadership can be rather nosy. Last spring, House Majority Leader Dick Armey sent out a mailing on official congressional stationery to CEOs of 82 large corporations endorsing a recent right-wing study that placed them “among the companies that support expansion of the welfare state” because they contributed to “liberal advocacy groups.” Among the groups that the CEOs were advised to avoid supporting: the American Cancer Society and the Anti-Defamation League.
So the Republicans are gorging on PAC money, just as the Democrats did when they were in charge. Business as usual? Maybe not. The lobbying-registration bill that passed last week was a major step in ending the age-old Washington seam where lobbyists masquerade as mere “lawyers.” And the recently passed gift ban will–de-spite some loopholes-curtail the golf trips and fancy meals with lobbyists.
As the unanimous passage of the lobbying bill showed, once reform measures are allowed a floor vote, they can make it. A fascinating schism within the Republicans is opening up on restricting PACs and requiring that most campaign money be raised in-state. “All this reformer stuff is nothing but self-flagellation,” says DeLay. The other view is articulated by Zach Wamp, a House freshman, who argues that failure to adopt campaign-finance reform is the “Achilles’ heel” of the entire revolution.
On most issues, the 78 GOP House fresh-men-the vanguard of the radical Republicans-are remarkably disciplined. In the old days, if a new congressman like Jon Christensen of Nebraska was publicly embarrassed in a messy divorce, he’d go hide for a while. Instead, Christensen welcomes a reporter to a meeting he’s holding with a lobbyist and explains just how gung-ho he is about his small-business agenda. “I call up a legislative assistant and say, ‘This is Congressman Christensen. Can I get your boss aboard?’” A member of Congress lobbying someone else’s staff-now that’s revolutionary.
Perhaps the biggest change of all is that it’s simply cool to be conservative in Washington. Tip O’Neill once nicknamed House renegades Newt Gingrich, Bob Walker and Connie Mack the “Three Stooges,” a title they bore for years as a badge of honor. Now they and their army of white-shirted brethren represent a kind of Geck Chic. Grover Norquist, a brainy antitax activist whose right-wing politics and pocket protectors rendered him a social outcast at Harvard in the 1970s, now hosts some of the hottest parties in Washington.
Norquist and his fellow revolutionaries believe at bottom that large chunks of the federal government should eventually be padlocked and everyone shipped out to Trenton and Sacramento or the sainted private sector. But for now, it’s the broadminded old-timers who are leaving. The radicals are going to stick around to make sure they’ve dynamited the place.
