http://www.opinionjournal.com/column.../?id=110007875
Whence Abramoff?
The Spend and Collect Beltway Party really knows Jack.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, January 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Jack Abramoff. Jack Abramoff. Jack Abramoff. Once the hunt's on, some names sound to the scandal born. Tongsun Park, Charles Keating, Elizabeth Ray, Fannie Fox, Susan McDougal. Now comes Jack, the central figure in what Beltway Democrats are trying to build into a bonfire that will burn down Republican control of Congress. Every time someone tells Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid that he, too, took money from Jack's clients, he starts jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin yelling, "This is a Republican scandal!" Harry Reid, Harry Reid. One could get used to that.
Poll after poll says the public thinks both parties are equally corrupt. It depends, of course, on what the meaning of corruption is. If by corrupt you mean lobbyist sleaze, quid pro quo, the pork barrel, earmarks to nowhere and grossing out even the public's generally low expectations, then yes, both parties are equally corrupt.
But it gets worse. Congress legislated the system that now exists. Congress planted the seeds back in the '70s for what is revolting you now with two enactments--the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Both were marketed as reforms.
The first law turned political Washington into a trillion-dollar industry camouflaged as the federal budget. The second ensured that sitting members of Congress and K Street lobbyists would become the entrenched management of that industry. Compared to this, Enron is a kindergarten game.
This is a history worth knowing and retelling. It all came to life amid another famous scandal, Watergate, and the most famous such name of all, Richard Nixon.
Nixon's impeachment is wholly linked in history to the Watergate scandal. But in fact, his battles with the Democratically controlled Congress over spending authority also greased his fall. As had Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon tried to control Congress's spending by "impounding"--refusing to spend--specific appropriations.
Congress itself had tried various gimmicks to stanch the Great Society's costs, such as "spending ceilings." None worked, as indeed no gaggle of legislators will discipline themselves. Nixon resorted to the blunt club of impoundments. Congress went bananas. This battle, fought inside the partisan cauldron of the Vietnam War, led to the oddly named 1974 Budget Control Act, which purposely eviscerated presidential control over individual spending items, such as an earmark. To kill a "bridge to nowhere," a president has to veto the entire highway bill. Ditto defense pork and so on.
The 1974 act did give the president "rescission" authority--a request not to spend money on a project. But the law also said that if Congress never took a vote to affirm the rescission, the money went out the door. Absurd, but that's current law. Congressional Quarterly, in a 1982 study of the struggle over spending control, quoted a budget official then predicting the future: "What we're talking about here is congressional government--and chaos."
But they weren't done. In 1974--the start the Long Era of Chaos in our politics--Congress claimed it was curing the abuses of Watergate by mandating that no individual could contribute more than $1,000 to a candidate per election. So of course candidates were going to need a lot of "individual" contributions to finance a modern campaign. Thus was born the current co-dependency between members of Congress who hold the power to confer federal spending and Washington lobbyists who have the power to bundle campaign contributions in PACs and such for incumbent earmarkers.
A friend who was part of this world back then described it for me recently: "If you lived in Washington in those years, the change was dramatic. We moved to California in 1973. Returning to visit in 1976, the evening landscape had changed completely. There were fund-raisers everywhere. Friends who were congressmen were stopping at two or three cocktail parties an evening, touching base with single-subject organizations who had established PACs in reply to the 1974 reforms. We knew a caterer; her life had changed." Her business today is probably a publicly traded company, so vast has the industry of Beltway spending and campaign-contribution collecting become. Washington today is enervated by it.
Fixes are possible. Put simply, reverse the "reforms" of 1974.
Abolish the individual limits on campaign contributions but require public disclosure on the Web. Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala recently proposed making this the basis of creating a new campaign-finance system. But beyond this lies the question of whether Democrats and Republicans want to fix Washington. Are they really separate parties, or just one entity--the Beltway Party?
I don't see how the Democrats have any practical or ideological incentive to stop the federal government's inexorable 70-year-long growth. This is what they want--more. For them, the Abramoffs of the world are reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh. By contrast, the Blunt-Boehner-Shadegg fight for the House leadership is an ideological argument over what Republicans should be amid a federal establishment that metastasized after the 1974 changes.
The failed 1974 Budget Act, which released the earmark and spending ghouls, makes clear that some workable form of presidential spending control has to be in the game. Presidential line-item veto power would require a constitutional amendment. Real rescission authority would help, but that has to pass through Congress and maybe a court challenge. Oh gosh, I almost forgot. Unlike from 1960 to 1994, the Republicans control Congress, and arguably all three branches of government. Does that matter? We'll find out this November and in 2008, when Republicans will either vote or sit.
I wish President Bush would put this issue of what Washington has become into his State of the Union speech Tuesday. My guess is he won't, recalling what happened when Richard Nixon tried to fight both a major war and the party that controls Congress, which for the foreseeable future looks like it will be the Beltway Spend and Collect Party.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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