Dig beneath the surface of the Abramoff affair and you find the deeper scandal within: the systematic corruption by wealthy corporate interests of a once principled conservative movement. The result is a supposedly conservative Republican administration that has trampled every principle that conservatives once held dear: family decision making, privacy, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, limited government, and respect for the rule of law. Instead, George W. Bush and his allies have served their corporate clients by building the biggest, most intrusive, and least responsive government in our history.
Although its roots run more deeply into the recent past, the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, when Republicans captured both houses of Congress, marks the rise of bought and sold conservatism, as business tightened its grip on conservative organizations and the Republican Party. Corporate donors began expecting and receiving value returned for contributions to the American Right, not just the advancement of conservative principles, but direct action to boost profits.
The flagship Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) exemplified this new trend by serving corporate donors as combination think tank, lobbyist, advertiser, and grassroots agitator. With C. Boyden Gray, formerly Ronald Reagan’s White House Counsel, monitoring its work, CSE served corporate priorities. According to information uncovered by the Washington Post, CSE joined with donors from the oil, gas, and coal industries in 1994 to kill a proposed energy tax. CSE opposed a multi-billion dollar federal project to restore the Everglades that threatened cane-growing land, netting it $700,000 from Florida sugar cane companies. CSE received $175,000 from Exxon after it derided theories of global warming as “junk science” and it received $75,000 from the Florida auto rental industry to back legislation that limited renter’s liability from lawsuits. Scores of kindred groups followed the CSE model nationally and locally.
The Gingrich Revolution also spawned a new breed of lobbyist, shown in its most virulent form by Jack Abramoff. The new lobbyists not only siphoned off huge profits for themselves, but also orchestrated flows of big money to targeted officeholders and candidates and to conservative organizations that dispensed travel and perks to opinion-makers and public officials.
Corporate and political interests also came together in the so-called “K Street Project.” According to a previously undisclosed 1998 Republican Party memo, the GOP would pressure lobbying groups “to hire more Republicans; Republican leadership refuses to meet with Dems; make Fortune 500 firms aware of whom they are hiring to represent them in Washington.” Representative Tom DeLay of Texas first led the K Street Project, which prospered after the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and the participation of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
We are all paying the price for unprincipled, bought and sold government. The Bush administration seeks to crash into our family lives and dictate our most private decisions. It launched an unchecked program of spying on Americans and advocates a version of the Patriot Act that violates our civil liberties. It enacted a bankruptcy bill at the behest of credit card companies, an ineffective, confusing prescription drug plan with huge payoffs to pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and an energy bill that subsidies the big oil companies.
This conservative big government makes government costly and ineffective and opens fissures between the wealthy and other Americans. Liberals traditionally use their version of big government to reform society from the bottom up, funding welfare benefits, regulating business, empowering labor and advancing opportunities for minorities. Today’s conservatives begin from the top down, subsidizing business and expanding their global reach, shielding corporations while punishing individuals for bad behavior, enforcing moral codes, and backing powerful military and police forces.
At a time when Democrats often feed at the same corporate trough as Republicans and don’t seem to have compelling alternatives, we need new unflinching leadership ready to take on big government conservatism. That’s why I am running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in Maryland on the theme that there is too much government intruding in our private lives and too little government meeting our needs. I pledge to work for a government that respects our privacy and liberty, supports working- and middle-class Americans, and just says no to wealthy corporate interests. Please check out my home page: Allan Lichtman for Senate.
I am a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate from Maryland and to date the only candidate in our state to go on the record in opposition to the seating of Samuel Alito on the U. S. Supreme Court. See the statement posted last Monday on my home page: Allan Lichtman for Senate.
Based on the record, Alito ought not to be making the constitutional decisions that will shape the next half century of American life.
In evaluating Supreme Court nominees the message is in the record, not the rhetoric. Since the Senate rejected the combative conservative Robert Bork in 1987, nominees have become schooled in appearing inoffensive in Senate hearings, regardless of how they intend to operate as a Justice. Clarence Thomas’s moderate pose, for example, gained him the Democratic swing votes needed for a narrow confirmation victory. Once installed as a Justice, Thomas reverted to his history of conservative activism, anchoring the far right of the Rehnquist Court.
Samuel Alito’s record of memos and opinions demonstrates that he poses a clear and present danger both to women’s rights and to broader liberties threatened by a president who recognizes no legal checks on his power. No matter how temperate Alito may appear in upcoming hearings, Senators should focus on his record and exercise their constitutional option to withhold their consent from this nominee.
Memos from the Reagan era and Alito’s dissent as a Appeals Court Judge in the landmark case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, indicate that at best he would vote to chip away a woman’s right to choose safe and legal abortions and at worst would push to overturn Roe v. Wade. His record further indicates his lack of sympathy for affirmative action, women’s rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and laws prohibiting gender-based discrimination in education and employment.
Alito’s assertion of absolute immunity for federal officials engaged in illegal wiretapping, his denunciation of the Independent Counsel law as a ”congressional pilfering” of presidential power, his call for a presidential interpretation of the congressional intent of legislation, his approval of strip searches without a warrant (Doe v. Groody), and additional dissenting opinions upholding expansive police powers indicate that would likely sustain claims of presidential power to spy on and harass Americans. Simultaneously, other opinions indicate that he would restrict federal power to protect our environment, advance civil rights, and defend people’s health and safety.
If Democrats stick together, they can defeat this nomination just as they defeated efforts to enact the Bush-backed version of the U.S.A. Patriot Act with its restrictions on our civil liberties. No option — including a filibuster — ought to be taken off the table.
The juxtaposition of the Alito nomination and the Patriot Act struggle shows the need for Democratic Senators of principle and backbone. My Senate opponent in Maryland, sitting Congressman Ben Cardin, voted for the Bush-backed version of the Patriot Act. Fortunately, Maryland’s Senators Mikulski and Sarbanes, joined by 95 percent of Senate Democrats and four courageous Republicans stopped the Act cold in the Senate. Maryland and America afford Cardin’s approach of compromising at all costs with the Bush administration.
The U. S. Supreme Court announced this week that it will review the congressional redistricting plan that Rep. Tom DeLay (R) pushed through the Texas legislature in mid-decade to replace an established plan drawn by a federal court. On behalf of congressional Democrats, I testified against the DeLay plan, before the U. S. Department of Justice, the Texas legislature, and the federal trial court.
The Texas case provides the new Roberts Court an historic opportunity to curb the partisan gerrymandering that has extinguished political competition in states where one party draws district lines – a practice that in effect lets legislators choose their voters. The Court could also reaffirm the power of the Voting Right Act to prohibit the dilution of minority voting strength.
The DeLay plan created 20 districts with a super-Republican majority greater than 60 percent, 11 strongly Democratic districts, and one swing district (with a Republican incumbent), based on voting in the 2002 statewide Texas elections. Even if Democrats had achieved a 55 percent statewide majority, 20 of 32 districts would still have included a majority of Republican voters. Thus, the plan forestalled any realistic ability of Democrats to compete for more than a small minority of congressional seats in Texas.
This extreme political bias cannot be explained by what Justice Anthony Kennedy, the likely swing vote in the case, called “legitimate legislative objectives.” To the contrary, as compared to court plan, the DeLay plan weakened adherence to such traditional redistricting criteria as preservation of whole counties or cities, retention of senior incumbents, and unification of communities of interest.
The court plan, moreover, was hardly unfair to Republicans. It included 20 districts with better than 50 percent Republican majorities. However, with usual Republican voters splitting their tickets, Democrats had prevailed in five of these districts. DeLay and his associates drew their plan to avoid such an outcome by consigning incumbents to unfamiliar territory and hiking the Republican percentage of their districts.
The DeLay plan also used minority voters as pawns in their partisan gerrymandering scheme. It dismantled districts in the Dallas/Tarrant County region and southwest Texas that provided minority voters the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice to Congress. His plan also ripped apart seven other congressional districts across in which African-American and Hispanic voters influenced election outcomes, submerging these voters into heavily Republican districts in which they have no influence.
The DeLay plan maximized racial polarization in Texas by dividing the state into Anglo-dominated Republican districts and a relatively few heavily minority Democratic districts. The Texas congressional delegation now consists of 21 Anglo Republicans, 9 Hispanic or black Democrats, and only 2 remaining Anglo Democrats. The plan terminated both political competition and coalition-building between Anglos and minorities.
The Supreme Court could consign the nation to this grim fate by sanctioning the DeLay plan. Or it could seize the opportunity to define clear standards for upholding political fairness and minority voting opportunities in Texas and across America.
The Court, however, could decide the case narrowly, ruling only that the legislature illegally redrew a legally established plan in mid-decade without new Census data to ensure that the new district lines conformed to the principle of one-person, one-vote. If this ruling reinstated the court-drawn plan, it might produce a just result for Texas, but would leave hanging the big issues posed in what could be America’s most important case on legislative politics since the reapportionment decisions of the 1960’s.
I am currently running as a Democrat in Maryland for the U. S. Senate. Maryland and America need a voice for fairness and democracy, not just another member of the club. Check out my ideas: Allan Lichtman for Senate.
The big corporate interests that pumped money into Tom DeLay’s scheme to control the Texas legislature and break precedent by rewriting an established congressional redistricting plan in mid-decade knew full well what they bought in Texas. They bought our government.
A front-page Washington Post story recently exposed a two-year cover-up by Bush appointees in the U.S. Department of Justice, of a memo written by career lawyers which found that a plan crafted by Tom DeLay’s plan for redrawing Texas congressional districts violated the Voting Rights Act by deliberately subverting opportunities for African-Americans and Hispanics to elect candidates of their choice to Congress. Political appointees at Justice overruled the memo’s unanimous verdict and authorized Texas to implement a redistricting plan that destroyed five Democratic districts at the expense of minority voters.
As the expert witness upon whose testimony the career lawyers extensively based their findings, I have long maintained that the real story about Tom DeLay’s recent indictment in Texas goes far beyond the corrupt acts of a single individual.
DeLay’s intervention in Texas state legislative elections was part of a concerted, nationwide Republican plan to control our government through political gerrymandering at the expense of black and Hispanic voters. I have observed this process first-hand as the expert witness, not only in Texas, but also in the court cases challenging Republican congressional redistricting plans in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan.
The DeLay plan thwarted the will of voters by drawing districts to guarantee Republican victories and take over five Democratic seats. To this end, DeLay and his allies cynically and knowingly destroyed the voting rights of millions of African-Americans and Hispanics in Texas.
In the Dallas County area, the plan demolished a 60.5 percent minority district and scattered its voters into five Anglo-dominated, Republican districts in which they have no chance to influence the outcomes of elections.
Lawmakers carved up District 24, held by Rep. Martin Frost (D), at the eleventh hour, behind closed doors at the behest of DeLay staffers, despite objections from their own experts and attorneys that their actions could violate the Voting Rights Act. “We must stress that a map that returns (Democratic U.S. Reps. Martin) Frost, (Chet) Edwards and (Lloyd) Doggett is unacceptable and not worth all of the time invested in this project,” wrote DeLay aide Tom Ellis.
In southwest Texas, DeLay’s plan split heavily Hispanic Webb County, removing some 90,000 Hispanics from Congressional District 23 to ensure that it would elect a Republican opposed by Hispanic voters. His plan dismantled seven other congressional districts across Texas in which African-American and Hispanic voters critically influenced election outcomes, submerging these voters into heavily Republican districts in which they have no influence.”
DeLay’s plan represents the first time, anywhere in America, that majority-minority districts have been dismantled since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.
The previously undisclosed Justice Department memo shows that the process that led to the enactment of this plan was corrupt from start to finish. The process began by pumping illicit corporate money into state legislative elections, continued with a secretly enacted plan that ignored the Voting Rights Act, and proceeded through the overruling of staff attorneys and analysts by political appointees at Justice.
A case challenging DeLay’s plan is now on appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court. It is the most important case affecting the balance of power in Congress since the reapportionment decisions of the 1960’s. If the Court’s uphold the DeLay plan they would sanction the perpetual redrawing of legislative district lines, the replacement of the voter by the line-drawer, and subordination of minority voting rights to partisan gain.
To stand up for voting rights and political fairness among other issues I am running as a Democrat for the open Sarbanes seat in Maryland. Check out my website: Allan Lichtman for Senate.
In explaining his recent vote against an immediate pullout from Iraq, Maryland Representative and senatorial candidate Ben Cardin claimed to be a critic of the Iraqi war, saying, “I have called on President Bush to bring America a plan to bring the troops home safely and responsibly.” In fact, the Congressman’s voting record on the war this year shows that he is one of a small minority of Democrats to vote down the line in support of the president’s position. In 2005, with the chips on the line in Iraq, Representative Cardin voted against a resolution calling for President Bush to formulate a plan for bringing the troops home from Iraq and voted for a resolution authorizing the President to stay in Iraq indefinitely.
*On May 25, 2005 the Congressman voted against the Woolsey Amendment, which simply expressed “the sense of Congress that the President should develop a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq, and submit this plan to the congressional defense committees.”
*On July 20, 2005 the Congressman broke with 65 percent of Democrats to vote for the House Resolution authored by Bush supporter Ros-Lehtinen (R- Florida), which specifies that the U. S. must not withdraw from Iraq until “it is clear that United States national security and foreign policy goals relating to a free and stable Iraq have been or are about to be achieved.” This resolution mirrors President Bush’s position on Iraq; it authorizes him to keep U. S. troops in Iraq indefinitely until he certifies that these vague and expansive goals have been met.
Votes don’t lie. Yet Representative Cardin never mentions, much less explains to the people of Maryland, his votes on the war.
Since announcing my candidacy for the U. S. Senate in Maryland, I have called for a definite plan for a troop withdrawal from Iraq to begin by the end of this year and to be completed next year. Unlike Representative Cardin, I would have voted for the Woolsey Amendment and against the Ros-Lehtinen Resolution.
Check out my website for my position on the war and other issues:
Allan Lichtman for Senate.
Although only a couple of weeks old, the campaign of Republican Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele for the U. S. Senate is already running on empty, devoid of issues, ideas, and proposals to improve the lives of people in Maryland. The press has lavishly covered Steele’s efforts to attract African-American voters. But one searches in vain through the press stories, Steele’s speeches, or his website to find policies and programs addressed to the problems that African-Americans and other Marylander’s face in their daily lives.
Steele’s attempt to move up from second on the ticket to a candidacy of his own is like the scene in the movie Bull Durham, where a pitcher moves up from the minor to the major leagues. The first thing you need to learn when you get to the big time the grizzled veteran played by Kevin Costner tells him, is how to duck questions with clichés: phrases like, “I’m just here to help the team,” “I’ll take it one game at a time.” So far, the Steele campaign has relied on the political equivalent of empty sports clichés.
In his acceptance speech, Steele said, “Washington blames each other for our lack of a long-term energy policy.” Does he support the president’s energy program? If not, what alternative does he propose? He says, “Families are scrambling to pay for next semester’s tuition.” Does he support the cutbacks in student aid proposed by Republicans in Congress? Does he have a plan to make college affordable for students in Maryland? He says, “Families are trying to pay this October’s energy bills.” Does he support the cutbacks in assistance for the less affluent that Republicans are also proposing? Does he have a plan for liberating the people of Maryland from the fossil fuel economy?
As a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, I intend to hold Michael Steele accountable for his failure to address the urgent issues of our time. Check out my website for positions on the issues that Michael Steele ducks:
Allan Lichtman for Senate.
Unlike the response to Hurricane Katrina, the first great scandal of the century remains mostly unknown. This was the disenfranchisement of more than 50,000 African-American voters in Florida’s 2000 presidential election. These were not potential votes struck from the rolls as felons or prevented from reaching the polls. These were voters who actually turned up at the polls and fully expected their ballots to be counted in the election.
George W. Bush will be president of the United States for eight years because the votes counted in
Florida’s 2000 election did not come close to matching the ballots cast by the state’s voters. The result in Florida was not decided by hanging chads, recounts, or intervention by the Supreme Court. As the analyst for the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights I found that George Bush won Florida and the presidency because officials tossed into the trashcan as invalid one out of every nine to ten ballots cast by African-Americans throughout the state. In some counties, nearly 25 percent of ballots cast by blacks were set aside as invalid. In contrast, officials rejected less than one out of every fifty ballots cast by whites statewide.
Unlike the response to Hurricane Katrina, the first great scandal of the century remains mostly unknown. This was the disenfranchisement of more than 50,000 African-American voters in Florida’s 2000 presidential election. These were not potential votes struck from the rolls as felons or prevented from reaching the polls. These were voters who actually turned up at the polls and fully expected their ballots to be counted in the election.
George W. Bush will be president of the United States for eight years because the votes counted in
Florida’s 2000 election did not come close to matching the ballots cast by the state’s voters. The result in Florida was not decided by hanging chads, recounts, or intervention by the Supreme Court. As the analyst for the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights I found that George Bush won Florida and the presidency because officials tossed into the trashcan as invalid one out of every nine to ten ballots cast by African-Americans throughout the state. In some counties, nearly 25 percent of ballots cast by blacks were set aside as invalid. In contrast, officials rejected less than one out of every fifty ballots cast by whites statewide.
Such treatment of a minority group would have raised a worldwide scandal if it happened, for example, to Catholics in Northern Ireland. But because it happened to blacks in the United States, few noticed. Imagine if George Bush had lost in 2000 because one of nine white voters had their ballots disqualified. George Will, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh would have proclaimed the end of civilization as we know it. Instead, the Right cynically suppressed the truth of Florida’s scandal.
But slumbering liberals were no less to blame than militant conservatives for the lack of national attention to an extraordinary injustice to minorities that decided a presidential election. Why no mobilization of protest from the NAACP or the Democratic Party?
If black ballots had been rejected at the same rate as white ballots, more than 50,000 additional black votes would have been counted in Florida’s presidential election. Given that more than 90 percent of blacks favored Gore over Bush, Gore would have won Florida by at least 40,000 votes, carried the Electoral College, and become President of the United States. You know the price the country and world has paid for this injustice.
The failure to reckon with what happened to African-American voters in Florida also meant that our country missed a chance five years ago to confront persisting racism and its consequences. Instead, the suppression of the truth about Florida’s presidential elections upheld the notion that race no longer matters in America and that discrimination ended long ago in the era of the civil rights movement.
It took the second scandal of Hurricane Katrina, to force George W. Bush and his allies to admit “there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region,” with “roots in a history of racial discrimination.” Yet in the weeks since, the president has offered nothing to cope with race, poverty, or anything else that irks America.
Not only in Florida, but across the nation, I have seen first hand the reality of racial discrimination as an expert witness in more than 70 civil rights and redistricting cases. In Texas, for example, I testified against Tom DeLay’s redistricting plan that destroyed the voting rights of millions of African-Americans and Hispanics by fragmenting their communities and scattering minority voters within Anglo-dominated Republican districts. Now I am bringing to electoral politics my experience with civil rights and other issues by running as a Democrat for the open US Senate seat in Maryland. Please check out my credentials and ideas on www.allanlichtman.com. Look for my next diary on a ten point plan to bring full and fair voting to the United States.
The indictments of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are the denouement of a revolution in American government that began with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. With their control of Congress, conservative Republicans began shifting government away from preserving individual liberty and privacy, easing the unequal distribution of income and wealth, and meeting the needs of working- and middle-class Americans. Instead, they fundamentally changed how business was done in Washington to serve the private and partisan interests of legislators and the profits of their corporate clients.
Igniting the Revolution
The Republican Revolution of 1994 began not with New Gingrich’s Contract With America, but the Republican’s cynical destruction of health care reform in the Clinton Administration. In a previously undisclosed memo, entitled “The Moral Equivalent of War,” GOP Representative Dick Armey wrote in 1993:
The failure of the Clinton plan will radically alter the political and policy landscapes. It will leave the President’s agenda weakened, his plan’s supporters demoralized, and the opposition emboldened. Our market-oriented ideas will suddenly become thinkable, not just on health care, but on a host of issues.
Thus, to advance their political prospects Republicans deliberately killed any hope of reforming American health care, leaving the less affluent at the mercy of the market. Today some 45 million Americans still lack health care insurance and tens of millions more are inadequately covered.
The New Think Tanks
A new client and server relationship between corporations and rightwing organizations matured in the 1990s. Corporate donors began expecting and receiving value returned for contributions to right-wing, not just the elevation of conservative principles as in the past, but direct action to boost profits. The flagship Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), for example, served corporate donors as combination think tank, lobbyist, advertiser, and grassroots agitator. With C. Boyden Gray, formerly Ronald Reagan’s White House Counsel, monitoring its work, CSE produced and marketed studies tailored to corporate priorities. CSE joined with donors from the oil, gas, and coal industries in 1994 to kill a proposed energy tax. CSE opposed a multi-billion dollar federal project to restore the Everglades that threatened cane-growing land, netting it $700,000 from Florida sugar cane companies. CSE received $175,000 from Exxon after it derided theories of global warming as “junk science” and it received $75,000 from the Florida auto rental industry to back legislation that limited renter’s liability from lawsuits. Scores of kindred groups followed the CSE model nationally, regionally, and locally
The New Lobbyists
The tightening relationship between wealthy corporations and conservative advocates in the 1990’s produced a new breed of lobbyists different from the operatives who sold inside connections and expertise to the highest bidder. The new lobbyists instead orchestrated the triangular flow of big money from wealthy clients to the lobbyist and then to conservative organizations that dispensed travel and perks to journalists, intellectuals, and policy-makers that lobbyists could not legally provide. The intermediary organizations lobbied directly for client interests and rebated contributions back to the lobbyist. Money from the lobbyist’s earnings and his clients also flowed to the campaign coffers of targeted officeholders and candidates.
Jack Abramoff was the poster boy for the new lobbying. He cultivated a wealthy client base and a special relationship with the National Center for Public Policy Research, and with Representative Tom DeLay. Abramoff’s clients poured millions of dollars into the Center, which funded luxury travel for legislators and opinion makers and rebated more than $2 million to public relations firms and foundations controlled by Abramoff and his business partner, Michael Scanlon, formerly DeLay’s press secretary. Abramoff also donated generously to political action committees that DeLay controlled, hired the congressman’s former aides, and included DeLay in trips financed by his clients and Ridenour’s Center.
The K Street Project
Another undisclosed Republican Party memo written after the 1998 elections documents the so-called “K Street Project,” named after Washington D.C.’s strip mall for lobbyists. The GOP would pressure lobbying groups “to hire more Republicans; Republican leadership refuses to meet with Dems; make Fortune 500 firms aware of whom they are hiring to represent them in Washington.” They sought to redirect K Street’s non-partisan culture to partiality for the GOP. Republican leaders offered companies the inducement of pro-corporate policies, while threatening to deny access to firms that lagged in the hiring of Republican lobbyists. They constructed a shadow political machine of lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations specialists with access to hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash and the power to shape policy without the checks and balances of public review. DeLay first led the K Street project, which prospered after the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and the participation of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
Defunding the Left
The memo further outlined strategy for “defunding the left” by cutting off “sources of hard currency for the Democratic Party,” applying the “model” Ronald Reagan used “for cutting off the flow of hard currency to the Soviet Union.” To block funding from unions, Republicans would push for free trade initiatives and repeal of the Davis Bacon Act requiring the payment of prevailing wages on federally funded projects, among other anti-union measures. To cripple funding from trial lawyers, the GOP Congress would enact “tort reform” and limits on product liability. To weaken the National Education Association, Congress would adopt “school choice.” It would also seek to kill off the legal services corporation and the Public Broadcasting System, while restricting the incentive for contributions to “liberal foundations” by repealing the estate tax.
Ultimately the Revolution that began in 1994 united corporate leaders with Christian moralists to resurrect a conservative consensus that reached fruition when Republicans gained unified control over national government during the administration of George W. Bush. It gave the Right programs and policies to fight for, with fervor unmatched by a Democratic Party still uncertain of its identity. The indictments of DeLay and Abramoff are but one of many signs that the corruption of government is finally catching up with the GOP. The question remains whether Democrats will have the understanding to figure this out and the principles, backbone, and determination to return government to the interests of the people.
I am a professor at American University and a candidate for Senate in Maryland in the model of Paul Wellstone. Please visit my home page: www.allanlichtman.com.
The indictments of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are the denouement of a revolution in American government that began with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. With their control of Congress, conservative Republicans began shifting government away from preserving individual liberty and privacy, easing the unequal distribution of income and wealth, and meeting the needs of working- and middle-class Americans. Instead, they fundamentally changed how business was done in Washington to serve the private and partisan interests of legislators and the profits of their corporate clients.
Igniting the Revolution
The Republican Revolution of 1994 began not with New Gingrich’s Contract With America, but the Republican’s cynical destruction of health care reform in the Clinton Administration. In a previously undisclosed memo, entitled “The Moral Equivalent of War,” GOP Representative Dick Armey wrote in 1993:
The failure of the Clinton plan will radically alter the political and policy landscapes. It will leave the President’s agenda weakened, his plan’s supporters demoralized, and the opposition emboldened. Our market-oriented ideas will suddenly become thinkable, not just on health care, but on a host of issues.
Thus, to advance their political prospects Republicans deliberately killed any hope of reforming American health care, leaving the less affluent at the mercy of the market. Today some 45 million Americans still lack health care insurance and tens of millions more are inadequately covered.
The New Think Tanks
A new client and server relationship between corporations and rightwing organizations matured in the 1990s. Corporate donors began expecting and receiving value returned for contributions to right-wing, not just the elevation of conservative principles as in the past, but direct action to boost profits. The flagship Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), for example, served corporate donors as combination think tank, lobbyist, advertiser, and grassroots agitator. With C. Boyden Gray, formerly Ronald Reagan’s White House Counsel, monitoring its work, CSE produced and marketed studies tailored to corporate priorities. CSE joined with donors from the oil, gas, and coal industries in 1994 to kill a proposed energy tax. CSE opposed a multi-billion dollar federal project to restore the Everglades that threatened cane-growing land, netting it $700,000 from Florida sugar cane companies. CSE received $175,000 from Exxon after it derided theories of global warming as “junk science” and it received $75,000 from the Florida auto rental industry to back legislation that limited renter’s liability from lawsuits. Scores of kindred groups followed the CSE model nationally, regionally, and locally
The New Lobbyists
The tightening relationship between wealthy corporations and conservative advocates in the 1990’s produced a new breed of lobbyists different from the operatives who sold inside connections and expertise to the highest bidder. The new lobbyists instead orchestrated the triangular flow of big money from wealthy clients to the lobbyist and then to conservative organizations that dispensed travel and perks to journalists, intellectuals, and policy-makers that lobbyists could not legally provide. The intermediary organizations lobbied directly for client interests and rebated contributions back to the lobbyist. Money from the lobbyist’s earnings and his clients also flowed to the campaign coffers of targeted officeholders and candidates.
Jack Abramoff was the poster boy for the new lobbying. He cultivated a wealthy client base and a special relationship with the National Center for Public Policy Research, and with Representative Tom DeLay. Abramoff’s clients poured millions of dollars into the Center, which funded luxury travel for legislators and opinion makers and rebated more than $2 million to public relations firms and foundations controlled by Abramoff and his business partner, Michael Scanlon, formerly DeLay’s press secretary. Abramoff also donated generously to political action committees that DeLay controlled, hired the congressman’s former aides, and included DeLay in trips financed by his clients and Ridenour’s Center.
The K Street Project
Another undisclosed Republican Party memo written after the 1998 elections documents the so-called “K Street Project,” named after Washington D.C.’s strip mall for lobbyists. The GOP would pressure lobbying groups “to hire more Republicans; Republican leadership refuses to meet with Dems; make Fortune 500 firms aware of whom they are hiring to represent them in Washington.” They sought to redirect K Street’s non-partisan culture to partiality for the GOP. Republican leaders offered companies the inducement of pro-corporate policies, while threatening to deny access to firms that lagged in the hiring of Republican lobbyists. They constructed a shadow political machine of lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations specialists with access to hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash and the power to shape policy without the checks and balances of public review. DeLay first led the K Street project, which prospered after the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and the participation of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
Defunding the Left
The memo further outlined strategy for “defunding the left” by cutting off “sources of hard currency for the Democratic Party,” applying the “model” Ronald Reagan used “for cutting off the flow of hard currency to the Soviet Union.” To block funding from unions, Republicans would push for free trade initiatives and repeal of the Davis Bacon Act requiring the payment of prevailing wages on federally funded projects, among other anti-union measures. To cripple funding from trial lawyers, the GOP Congress would enact “tort reform” and limits on product liability. To weaken the National Education Association, Congress would adopt “school choice.” It would also seek to kill off the legal services corporation and the Public Broadcasting System, while restricting the incentive for contributions to “liberal foundations” by repealing the estate tax.
Ultimately the Revolution that began in 1994 united corporate leaders with Christian moralists to resurrect a conservative consensus that reached fruition when Republicans gained unified control over national government during the administration of George W. Bush. It gave the Right programs and policies to fight for, with fervor unmatched by a Democratic Party still uncertain of its identity. The indictments of DeLay and Abramoff are but one of many signs that the corruption of government is finally catching up with the GOP. The question remains whether Democrats will have the understanding to figure this out and the principles, backbone, and determination to return government to the interests of the people.
I am a professor at American University and a candidate for Senate in Maryland in the model of Paul Wellstone. Please visit my home page: www.allanlichtman.com.
The real story about Tom DeLay’s indictment in Texas goes far beyond the corrupt acts of a single individual. DeLay’s intervention in Texas state legislative elections was part of a concerted, nationwide Republican plan to control our government through political gerrymandering at the expense of black and Hispanic voters. I observed this process first hand as the expert witness for Democrats in the court cases challenging Republican congressional gerrymandering, not only in Texas, but also in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan.
By pumping money into state legislative races in Texas, DeLay engineered Republican control in 2002 over a previously divided state legislature. He then guided Texas lawmakers into breaking precedent by rewriting mid-decade an established congressional redistricting plan. The DeLay plan thwarted the will of voters by drawing districts to guarantee Republican victories and take over five Democratic seats. To this end, DeLay and his allies cynically and knowingly destroyed the voting rights of millions of African-Americans and Hispanics in Texas.
In the Dallas County area, the plan demolished a 60.5 percent minority district and scattered its voters into five Anglo-dominated, Republican districts in which they have no chance to influence the outcomes of elections. In southwest Texas, DeLay’s plan removed some 90,000 Hispanics from Congressional District 23 to ensure that it would elect a Republican opposed by Hispanic voters. His plan dismantled seven other congressional districts across Texas in which African-American and Hispanic voters critically influenced election outcomes, submerging these voters into heavily Republican districts in which they have no influence.
The big corporate interests behind Tom DeLay knew full well what they bought in Texas. They bought our government. Absent DeLay’s gerrymandering, the Democrats, not Republicans, would have picked up congressional seats nationally in 2004, putting Democrats in a much better position to regain control of Congress next year.
To change these practices in our country I am running as a Democrat for Senator from Maryland. This race matters to the entire nation as Republicans have targeted Maryland’s open seat to help keep their majority in 2006. Check out the ideas on my website: www.allanlichtman.com.