Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (27 page)

I was determined to do what I could to correct both institutions. I soon learned that my subcommittee chairmanship gave me the de facto power to block the financing of both institutions—if we exercised that power aggressively. My talented staff director, the economist Sydney Key, proposed two specific amendments to the World Bank’s rules. The first was to create an independent inspection panel to investigate complaints from aggrieved citizens of any country where the bank was implementing a project. The second was to make the bank’s project deliberations open for public inspection.

The bank protested indignantly, and somewhat smugly pointed out to me that under its charter, individual legislatures could not command such policy changes. Treasury Department officials told me that they agreed with the bank: I had no authority to do what I was attempting.

I agreed. “I know that I cannot make you implement these policies,” I told the bank and its supporters. “But it is also true that you cannot make me give the support you need to get the funding you need.” I also made it clear that I would not assume that they would faithfully carry out any agreement we made. For that reason, I would support authorizing their funds one year at a time, rather than in three-year chunks as had been the practice.

“You can’t do that,” they said once again. “The funds have to be voted all at once” according to applicable law. My response was one I find surprisingly effective and too rarely used by others:
Show me where it says I can’t do it that way.
They couldn’t. So I did. And the results were as good as I could have hoped.

In 2013, I was invited by the World Bank to give the keynote speech at an event honoring the twentieth anniversary of the inspection panels, which have proved their worth. Never believe anyone who says, “I hate saying I told you so.” Saying “I told you so” is always enjoyable and one of the few pleasures that becomes more enjoyable with age.

*

In 1994, the Republicans took control of Congress in a landslide victory that had sweeping consequences. When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House the next year, he was determined to change the rules to his benefit. Gingrich had begun his leadership drive some years before by disparaging Bob Michel, the mainstream conservative minority leader. Gingrich believed that the GOP would never take over the chamber as long as Michel treated Speaker O’Neill as a friend with whom he could disagree without rancor. He believed that Democrats should not be described as reasonable, patriotic, honest people who had incorrect policy views, but as immoral, corrupt, treasonous hacks who threatened the nation’s future.

He was very successful. Few, if any, nonpresidents in our history have had such a powerful impact on the political system. His tactics did not cause the Republican off-year landslide in 1994. Negative reactions to the Democrats’ health care, tax increase, and gun control legislation played a bigger role in the short term and, as I will argue at greater length later, white working-class Americans’ unhappiness at government’s failure to alleviate rising inequality was the broader cause. But Gingrich’s flamboyant attacks played a significant role, and more important, other politicians believed that they did.

It took a while for Democrats to respond appropriately. Many of my colleagues had never been in a legislative minority and were stunned to find themselves the objects of what they correctly believed to be wholly unjustified vituperation.

After the hustler incident, I feared that the political advantages I’d brought to the national debate were gone and that my irresponsibility had turned my “differentness” from an asset into a liability. My concerns were largely dispelled when Richard Gephardt, the House minority leader, and David Bonior, his whip, encouraged me to take the lead in countering Gingrich and his proposed Contract with America on the House floor. While none of my colleagues would be coming to me for relationship advice, their confidence in my political judgment, and in my standing with their constituents, had suffered no permanent damage.

I was delighted to honor the request. Ever since I’d been a delegate to the National Student Association congress in the early 1960s, I’d been an ardent student and practitioner of parliamentary procedures. I arrived in Congress knowing that Northerners, especially liberals, had a reputation for ignorance of the House rules and for being stymied by Southerners—usually described as “wily”—who used those rules to block liberal measures.

Learning the House rules gave me a comparative advantage because the great majority of my colleagues did not study them—apparently Southerners had become less “wily” over the years. In the House, unlike the Senate, the rules do not give minority members the ability to block legislation, but they do make it possible to slow things down and to raise issues the majority prefers to muffle. Delay and exposure allow the minority to make its political points more effectively than would otherwise be the case.

While I wanted to continue my work on international financial institutions, it was clear that I could be more successful in fighting Gingrich if I exercised my seniority to become ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee’s Constitution Subcommittee. From that position, I spent much of 1995 and 1996 waging parliamentary guerrilla warfare against provisions of the Republican Contract with America, especially the balanced budget amendment and congressional term limits.

As the lead Democrat on the subcommittee, my job was not simply to defeat the proposals but also to provide a way for Democrats to vote against them without suffering political damage. Both the balanced budget and term limits measures were very popular. Our response was to offer alternative versions of each amendment—and it was here that knowledge of the rules became essential. We used parliamentary tactics to force the Republicans to take a stand on whether the balanced budget amendment would apply to Social Security. If it did, cuts in benefits for seniors could be required by the amendment’s enforcement mechanisms. This approach did not lead to Gingrich’s defeat in the House, but it provided a politically defensible position for Democrats in tough districts who wanted to vote no. Most important, our framing of the issue helped ensure the amendment’s failure to pass the Senate.

We had fun on the term limits issue. There was an honest difference of opinion among term limit advocates over how many terms House members should be allowed to serve. While most House Republicans thought a six-term limit for representatives was reasonable, a militant group of citizens insisted on a three-term tenure. We gleefully added to the confusion by announcing that if term limits were going to be instituted, they should be made retroactive—lest we be accused of putting into effect new rules from which we were exempting ourselves. We underlined the point by having John Dingell, a twenty-term veteran, sponsor the Republicans’ original amendment. When he did so, he sarcastically thanked the GOP sponsors for supporting term limits that took effect only prospectively, meaning that his service could extend for twelve more years. (In 2014, he announced his retirement after his thirtieth term.) In the ensuing disarray, all of the term limit bills were defeated—indeed, term limits were the most prominent provision of the Contract with America that did not pass the House.

Before the battle with Gingrich, I had enjoyed my reputation as an articulate, impassioned liberal with a talent for belittling my opponents. But I privately regretted that my public image made me seem more interesting than serious—an entertaining, unconventional advocate, lacking the gravitas required for a true national leader. I hoped that my new efforts demonstrated that it was possible to be funny and serious at the same time.

*

Fighting Gingrich was gratifying, but quarreling with the Clinton administration was not. I was disappointed when the president reacted to the 1994 elections by renewing his efforts to distance himself from liberalism. His highest legislative priorities were to cut back one of our few income transfer programs for the very poor—Aid to Families with Dependent Children or, in the hated word, “welfare”—and to seek a balanced budget deal with the Republicans that would have mandated cutbacks in other domestic programs as well.

Just as troubling, Clinton became the presidential tiebreaker in a thirty-year-long debate between John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Kennedy’s call to “ask what you can do for your country” affirmed the moral value of collective action to improve the quality of our lives. Reagan’s assertion that “government is the problem” was the rallying cry for those who regarded the public sector as the thief of the people’s money. In Clinton’s first two years, he raised taxes, especially on the wealthy, mandated family and medical leave, invigorated environmental protection programs, and fought to expand health care. True, he argued that he would correct traditional liberalism’s flaws by making the government more efficient. But while I did not subscribe to most of that critique, this was a debate within the progovernment camp about how—not whether—to advance collective action.

So I was wholly unprepared for Clinton’s State of the Union address in January 1996, when he resolved the Kennedy-Reagan impasse and set the agenda for his reelection campaign and presumably his second term by declaring, “The era of big government is over.” No presidential utterance has come to me as a more unpleasant surprise. Years later, when Republican congressman Joe Wilson shouted “You lie” at President Obama during one of his State of the Union speeches, the House voted to rebuke him for his breach of decorum. Even though I agreed that Wilson’s outburst was inappropriate, I abstained on that vote because regulating speech, including that of my colleagues, is something I do not choose to do. Indeed, I have considerable affection for the British House of Commons, where heckling leaders is business as usual. If I’d been in the House of Commons when Clinton announced the end of big government, I would have done some heckling of my own. “What country are you describing?” I would have bellowed.

I did pose that question, belligerently, to some of his staffers immediately after the speech. “Did I sleep through the big-government years?” I asked. I recognized no period during my service in Congress that his words remotely described.

As I calmed down—not entirely, as this passage makes clear—I realized that the “New Democrats” allied to Clinton were pursuing a strategy that would not work. Their plan was to accommodate antigovernment sentiment in general while attempting to increase government in the particular. But there was a logical flaw: A whole cannot be smaller than the sum of its parts. This is true of the political world no less than the physical one.

If I’d been a graduate student, I could have set out to write a dissertation on the disconnect between people’s distaste for government and their attraction to its manifestations. But there is one key difference between the profession I forsook and the one I pursued: If your job requires very large numbers of people to vote for you, triumphantly pointing out to them how confused they are is not the likeliest path to success.

The understandable but regrettable reluctance of even progovernment elected officials to confront the growing antigovernment trend in public opinion was decidedly counterproductive. It strengthened the hand of those who opposed government programs on ideological grounds by giving them a more appealing basis for their opposition. Conservatives in the 1990s and since have sometimes conceded that it would be a good thing if we could accomplish the goal of a particular piece of legislation—only to add that, unfortunately, the fact of government’s inherent incompetence made this a false hope, almost certain to end up, as per Reagan, causing more problems than it alleviated.

I confronted the appeal of that strategy in 2009, when conservative public opinion expert Frank Luntz counseled Republicans on how to block our financial reform bill. In his thoughtful, comprehensive book on that bill,
Act of Congress
, Robert Kaiser quotes Luntz’s formula for opposing any significant legislative changes: “Washington incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support.” As Kaiser accurately summarizes it: “To defend this do-nothing position, Luntz wrote, Republicans could depend on voters’ distrust of all government programs and officials.” It is true that in this case we were able to defeat the do-nothing position, but only because America’s worst economic crisis in eighty years, and the anger it stimulated against the financial sector, created a powerful demand for action.

When advocates of government action fail to make their case, the result is a frustrating negative feedback loop. The fact that major advances in public policy are so rare exacerbates the antigovernment attitudes that form the biggest barrier to such advances. The public’s thwarted desire for increased government efforts in the particular reinforces the public’s anger at government in general.

I dwell on this point because I firmly believe it explains why the “government stinks” attitude is so prevalent among two sectors of the population that should be influential supporters of a stronger public sector: advocates on the left, with an ideological commitment to a larger government role, and white middle-and working-class men, who have been the victims of the growing inequality in our economy over the last forty years.

The first group is numerically less significant but is important in shaping the national dialogue. Even though most of its members continue to vote in a progovernment fashion, their efforts often work against the results they seek. By angrily denouncing government’s failures and inadequacies, they unintentionally but effectively reinforce the general public’s hostility to government activity of any kind. Too often they fail to differentiate between a government that is hamstrung by its conservative critics and the actions of those critics themselves, which have created the problem.

For most of my career in the House, I regularly had mutually unsatisfactory meetings that followed the same general script. Representatives of groups seeking more money for medical research, or public transportation, or affordable housing, or education, or nutrition, or poverty programs, or aid to cities, or similar causes, all of which I supported, would ask me to help increase government spending on their particular priority items. My answer was almost always that I agreed with their goal but that little was likely to be accomplished unless they could help me increase the overall federal funds available for them
and
for others. Otherwise, I would note, more money for food stamps might impinge on funding for home health care; increased cancer research dollars could compete with more work combating Alzheimer’s; increased resources for affordable housing might come at the expense of adequate support for the Women, Infants, and Children program.