Takeover (21 page)

But it was even worse if you were a lobbyist or interest group—you allegedly had to make sure that you hired one of DeLay’s friends or someone who would play ball with him; otherwise your issues were likely to be declared DOA by the majority whip.

DeLay was able to pull this off by co-opting what had been a private initiative to get the business community behind the conservative agenda of lower taxes and less government—the so-called K Street Project, which later became infamous for its association with Jack Abramoff.

Conservatives had long criticized the national business community’s established organizations and various industry and trade associations for the craven influence peddling in which they engaged by hiring former liberal Democratic members of Congress and Hill staffers as lobbyists.

These individuals would cash million-dollar paychecks and then often work harder lobbying their new employers to support the Big Government policies of Democrats on Capitol Hill than they did trying to get their former congressional colleagues to reduce taxes and regulations to free the job creation engine of our free enterprise system.

However, in the hands of the Capitol Hill’s establishment Republican leaders, the idea quickly morphed from what Tom DeLay said was “just following the old adage of punish your enemies and reward your friends,” into what many observers said was “a pay-to-play system.”
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And the cash at stake was and is colossal: Back in 2004 federal lobbyists spent $2.1 billion, and that rose to $2.8 billion for lobbying by 2007, according to political watchdog
opensecrets.org
. In 2010, during the height of the battle over President Obama’s health care overhaul, more than $3.55 billion was spent on lobbying. Now that Obamacare has passed and the establishment seems to have
accepted it as just another cost of doing business that’s trended down somewhat, “only” $3.28 billion was spent on lobbying in 2012.

This pay-to-play mentality permeated the entire fabric of the GOP Capitol Hill establishment, so decisions weren’t made on the basis of conservative principles; rather, they were made on the basis of whose friend was asking or if the right lobbyist was advocating the project.

The result was a complete breakdown of the system of checks and balances that should have restrained the growth of spending and the size of the federal government with Republicans controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

What this means for future generations of American taxpayers is best illustrated by the passage of the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit.

About an hour before sunrise on November 22, 2003—5:53 a.m., to be exact—the Republican members of the House of Representatives showed what they were made of.

After Republican leaders kept the House in session through the night, members of Congress finally caved in to pressure from the White House and the GOP leadership and approved President Bush’s Medicare prescription drug program. The legislation passed the entire House by a vote of 220 to 215 (204 Republicans approving, 25 opposed) and sailed into law.

By that narrow margin, they increased the future indebtedness of the already-bankrupt Medicare program by $8 trillion.

This was, in effect, a new entitlement at a time when existing entitlements were already threatening the economic health of the nation, and it represented the largest increase in the welfare state since the Great Society of Lyndon Baines Johnson. This was an abuse of our children and grandchildren, who will be paying for this monstrosity the rest of their lives.

In the Senate, on the key vote that decided whether the program would pass, two Republican senators voted no. Not fifty-two. Not forty-two, or thirty-two, or twenty-two, or twelve.

Two. John McCain and Chuck Hagel.

President Bush and Karl Rove wanted a Medicare drug prescription bill for one simple reason: to bribe the nation’s senior citizens to vote for Bush in the 2004 election. To their way of thinking, a prescription drug bill, no matter how reckless it was economically, was the way to win over a voting bloc that traditionally has been up for sale to the highest bidder in presidential elections.

The bribery strategy may have worked for 2004, but long-term it boomeranged.

Discontent with the results of the drug prescription “entitlement,” structured as it was to appease the big pharmaceutical companies, was so intense, it ranked as one of the top reasons Democrats took over Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. (I am reminded of the Democratic strategists who thought the Clintons’ health care plan in 1993 would seal a Democratic majority for a generation, then watched as the GOP took both the Senate and House of Representatives in 1994.)

Back in 2003, Bush’s Big Government Republicans were bragging how they had made great strides with the senior community, and as evidence, they pointed to the support given by the American Association of Retired Persons, now known simply as AARP.

AARP is a corporation that sells insurance and provides discounts and other benefits. It is influential because of its mailing list, its publications, and the fact that some politicians and the media treat it as “the senior citizens’ lobby.”

It is no such thing.

AARP doesn’t determine its positions based on the opinions of its members; its high-paid, left-wing Washington staff represents no one but itself.

The AARP
Policy Book
touts the group’s liberal views on a plethora of issues, including capital gains taxes, the marriage penalty, gun control, a balanced budget constitutional amendment, and—get this—estate taxes.

The group denies that there is a crisis in Social Security, now
or in the near future, and states, “For years, each political party has accused the other of raiding the Social Security trust funds. In fact, no one has raided the funds.” In the past AARP provided a letter to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, which was read on the floor of the Senate, opposing an amendment to the budget bill to require that Social Security surpluses be used only for retirement purposes.

AARP is the epitome of Washington corruption, taking its members’ hard-earned money and using it for causes they oppose and that are against their best interests. Not surprisingly, AARP stood with Rove in supporting the prescription drug scheme. Not surprisingly, AARP, to which the Bush White House had given great credibility, turned around and played a leading role in quashing Republican efforts to reform Social Security.

What makes Republicans’ behavior on the prescription drug issue even harder to accept is the tactics they used to get the measure passed; these tactics included outright lies and even bribery. Members of Congress were told that the cost of this new welfare scheme would be no more than $400 billion over ten years. Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, calculated a higher estimate, $534 billion for the first ten years, but he was told he would be fired if he blew the whistle.

Most House votes last about fifteen minutes. House leaders kept this one open for three hours overnight, resulting in that final vote at 5:53 in the morning. Egged on by greed for power and by lots of coffee, the GOP leadership kept hammering away at conservative resistance until it got the votes it needed.

Conservatives voting no were restrained from leaving the floor of the House until they could be pressured into changing their votes. “Doormen” were stationed at exits to make sure they couldn’t escape. Congressmen Jerry Moran (KS) and Charles Norwood (GA) managed to outmaneuver them and got away, but Jo Ann Emerson (MO) had to hide on the Democratic side, crouching down to avoid being seen by the Republican search team—Emerson was eventually
found and switched her vote to “aye” under pressure from the party leadership.

The weekend the Medicare Part D bill was about to be voted on, I attended a conservative event at the Breakers hotel in Florida, where Tom DeLay was present. When I discussed it with DeLay and urged him to hang tough against this vast expansion of government, he deceptively avoided getting his fingerprints on the bill—and certainly never gave any indication that it would be he who was breaking arms and legs to get the last few Republican votes to pass the bill only hours later.

I’m not kidding. This was your Republican-controlled House of Representatives I’m talking about—Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Majority Whip Roy Blunt—not Boss Tweed and some nineteenth-century Tammany Hall ward heelers.

The lowest point involved strong-arm tactics against Michigan Congressman Nick Smith. Smith was retiring after that session of Congress, and his son Brad was one of five candidates running to succeed him. Majority Leader Tom DeLay offered to endorse Smith’s son and raise money for him in exchange for a “yes” vote.

According to testimony by a Republican staffer, Rules Committee chairman David Drier of California offered to find Smith’s daughter a job as an actress in Hollywood. (Drier denied this.) Congresswoman Candice Miller, a fellow Michigan Republican, cursed Smith for voting no. To his credit, Smith stood firm.

The late conservative columnist Robert Novak reported that, “after Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.” Other Republicans voting against the bill were told that they were endangering their political futures.

Major contributors warned then representative Jim DeMint they would cut off funding for his Senate race in South Carolina. A Missouri state legislator called then representative Todd Akin to threaten a primary challenge against him. Duke Cunningham, as you may recall, later went to prison for taking bribes.

DeMint, by the way, stood firm against the bill, and became Senator DeMint, now president of the Heritage Foundation, the nation’s largest conservative think tank. Akin stood firm against the bill, and was reelected in 2004 with 65 percent of the vote and earned the gratitude of many conservatives who continued to support him even after his verbal stumbles brought down his 2012 Senate campaign. They are proof that you don’t have to cave in to spending pressure, or “go along to get along.”

Had a Republican president been facing a Democratic Congress intent on doubling the budget over the course of just a few years and enacting a vast, new, unfunded, or at least underfunded, entitlement program, there’s no doubt that the president would have pulled out all the stops to defeat such a raid on the taxpayers—including vetoing the bill or at least rescinding some of the spending.

But President Bush, faced with a runaway Republican Congress, did no such thing.

During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton. Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 12.5 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 53 percent.
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During President Bush’s first five years in office, the federal budget increased by $616 billion. That’s a mammoth 33 percent jump in the size of the federal government in just his first five years! To put this in perspective, this increase of $616 billion is more than the entire federal budget in Jimmy Carter’s last year in office. And conservatives were complaining about Big Government back then! How could Bush, Hastert, DeLay, Boehner, Frist, McConnell, and company look us in the eye and tell us they are fiscal conservatives when in five short years they increased the already-bloated government by more than the budget for the entire federal government when Ronald Reagan was assuming office?

Now, the excuse we hear most often goes something like this: “Federal spending has increased because of the War on Terror. In
time of war, spending has to increase, just as it did during World War II and the Cold War.”

In the eyes of the military-industrial complex and their neo-con allies on Capitol Hill, the implication is that you’re unpatriotic if you complain about spending a few more dollars, or several hundred billion dollars. This is a total cover-up of the real situation, as I’ll now show you.

First, there is an assumption that the Pentagon and Homeland Security budgets should be sacrosanct. But the Pentagon is spending much of its budget on expensive weapons systems that are unsuited for fighting Al-Qaeda, or for the kinds of wars we are likely to fight in the foreseeable future. And there are tens of billions in appropriations the Department of Defense cannot account for. As for the Department of Homeland Security, it has quickly become the largest bureaucratic mess outside of the Pentagon, and we saw what we got for our money when Hurricane Katrina struck. It is past time for conservatives to realize, acknowledge, and act as if the Pentagon, military, Department of Homeland Security, and Justice Department are part of the government and subject to the same waste, fraud, and abuse issues that plague all government programs.

Second, whatever one thinks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, demanding that the Pentagon and the military be run efficiently and with an eye for the same kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that has been found at GSA, the IRS, and other agencies of the federal government isn’t unpatriotic, so it is time to admit that the argument that the increase in federal spending can be blamed on the War on Terror is a smokescreen.

Don’t believe me?

Let’s look only at discretionary domestic spending. This covers all the other departments of the government, from agriculture and education to human services and the environment and all the rest. These are the areas that take up most of the time on Capitol Hill. Because they are discretionary (not entitlements
that are automatically paid out by a preset formula) and domestic (nothing to do with national defense), they should be the easiest to cut or freeze.

Not a chance.

Discretionary domestic spending, adjusted for inflation: