Roll Call
December 7, 2006
Joseph K. Dowley, Special to Roll Call
Much has been said and written recently about the strong message sent by voters in the midterm elections — that the incessant partisan bickering in Washington, D.C., must stop, that dealing with the “tough issues” must come first and that Congress must return to what is perceived by some as its past “civility.”
A good portion of the public is genuinely fed up with reports of petty, even embarrassing, exchanges between Members of Congress that appear to emanate less from policy differences and more from personal and party rivalries. During the campaign, and in recent days, some of the new leaders of Congress have responded to this concern, particularly incoming House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.). I anticipate that there will be additional efforts at bipartisanship, at the inclusion of the minority in shaping legislation and at achieving a level of collegiality that has been missing in the House for a long time. I certainly hope so.
Let’s be clear: “Civility” in this context does not mean that either party is going to stop taking strong — even strident — positions, especially on core issues. Congress always has been a rough-and-tumble place with sharp Member-to-Member exchanges in committees and on the floor.
Occasionally, irritations over substance or process have flared so hot that the parties involved had to be physically restrained. (This writer was described in the 1987 book “Showdown at Gucci Gulch” in just such a scene, when Ways and Means was considering the Tax Reform Act of 1986). Congressional lore back to our earliest days is full of skirmishes and scuffles, even duels, over strongly held points of view. Let’s face it, for the most part the place is not particularly suited for the meek and humble.
It may be a sign of the times that some people now refer to the 1980s as the “good old days” — an era when civility reigned. I chuckle a bit when I hear that. As I recall those years, there were lots of tough, pitched battles between Congressional Democrats, the Reagan White House, the Treasury Department and a Republican-led Senate, not to mention between committee chairmen and their leaders, and between Members and their chairmen.
If civility is defined as an atmosphere of dispassionate, forbearing and calm deliberation of issues, with all involved dedicated exclusively to what is best for the public, then I think it is safe to say very few of us who were there would think of that era as particularly civil.
I think, however, that the voters’ recent expression of discontent involves something else. Back in the 1980s at Ways and Means, whether a lobbyist wore a D or R on his or her chest made a lot less difference than it does now. Normally, what mattered more than party affiliation was the issue itself, the industry being represented, the advocate’s personal credibility, an understanding of what was “doable” and maybe even the ability to offer creative solutions.
In recent years, the D or R label largely has determined which committee offices of the Longworth House Office Building you could enter, and at times whether your problem even would be addressed. Blame it on the K Street Project (and its precursors), or maybe on campaign finance, on clients hiring advocates in the firm belief that party affiliation always trumps substantive knowledge, or on the repeated press accounts of personal rancor and mutual discourtesy along party lines.
Whatever the reason, the result has been a fairly rigid, and unproductive, political separation of inputs to lawmakers. Tough, complex issues of the kind the public wants addressed generally arise without regard to party, and neither party has a natural lock on the answers. To the extent that the chief operating principle has been that party matters more than substance, the public had every right on Nov. 7 to send a strong message of disapproval.
“Governing” is what the voters’ message is all about. Both parties ignore that signal at their peril. The electorate is far ahead of the natural presumption that because one party was replaced, free license is now given to the other party to repeat the practices of recent years.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), the Ways and Means chairman I worked for in the 1980s, knew the value of input from both sides, and of currying bipartisan support to enhance ultimate enactment prospects. The minority’s role was not simply to help make a quorum.
Often, when we brought measures to the floor, at least some influential Members of the minority would have a “buy-in” because they had participated in fashioning the legislation. They could explain in positive terms to their party colleagues why certain decisions were made, and in so doing they demonstrated they weren’t being ignored. Working in that environment was fun. More Members had a piece of the action, and most of us thought it resulted in better lawmaking.
Mr. Rangel will be hard-pressed to stick to his instinct to revamp what has been a sharply partisan culture, perhaps by members of his own committee caucus who were shut out for so many years. I suspect he will persevere, however, and if he and his colleagues in the leadership do, then Ways and Means — and the House and the public — will be the better for it.
Joseph K. Dowley, a partner at the law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge, was chief counsel of the House Ways and Means Committee in the mid-1980s.