THE WRONG STUFF
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reviews
the dubious career of Speaker Jim Wright
Washington PEOPLE who work on Capitol Hill have known for years that the most powerful staffer in Congress was once a violent criminal. Nobody dared to make too much of this. The man dispensed patronage on behalf of Jim Wright, the oleaginous and vindictive Speaker of the House. But now that Mr Wright is a political ruin the Washington Post has suddenly found it newsworthy to expose the character of his protege.
In 1973 John Mack was working in a shop when a young woman came in to buy some window blinds. He lured her into a storeroom where he smashed her in the head with a hammer, stabbed her in the chest, and cut her throat. Assuming she was dead, he got rid of the body and then Went off to watch a film. 'I blew my cool for a second,' Mack explained later. The Woman survived and Mack was sentenced to 15 years. Jim Wright interceded with the sheriff and got Mack out of prison after hvo years by sponsoring him for a parole job in the Congress. At the time Mack's brother was married to Wright's daughter. Mack's extraordinary ascent was more than nepotism. He was the perfect instru- ment for Speaker Wright's regime of threats and intimidation. In Congress, Mack was known as the 'Enforcer'. In 1987 when Wright was defeated by one vote on a crucial tax bill he sent Mack out to the locker rooms to find an immediate convert. Shortly afterwards Mack returned with a Texas congressman in a virtual half-nelson and pushed him up to the Speaker's podium where he was soon persuaded to change his vote. The Speaker then did something unheard of in the history of the Congress, worthy only of a banana repub- lic. Since no bill can be brought up for a second vote in the same day he adjourned the House at noon and declared a new legislative day five minutes later.
The House Speaker is not to be confused in any way with the ceremonial Speaker of Parliament. Mr Wright is the active leader of the Democratic Party, infinitely more important than a presidential candidate like Michael Dukakis. All the majority seats in the House Rules Committee are in the personal gift of the Speaker. This committee serves as the final filter for all bills before they go to the House floor, and it can modify, delay, or even kill legislation entirely. The Speaker also controls the allocation of committee seats and can cripple the careers of insurbordinate con- gressmen by shunting them into dead-end slots. At the same time the House as a body has amassed more and more power at the expense of the President. It has turned itself into a rival administration — for which it is utterly unsuited by both its composition and its lack of coherent pur- pose — by using subcommittees to oversee and dictate even the tiniest details of executive action. The Speaker has become a sort of co-president.
There is no thread of principle or phi- losophy in Mr Wright's 34-year career in the House. He defended racial segregation in the 1950s, strongly supported the Viet- nam War in the 1960s, then turned into a liberal in the 1970s when the left wing took over the Democratic Party. All his life his name has been associated with petty rack- ets that skirt the law, beginning in 1947 with a lottery for which he was investigated for wire fraud. He might have got away with the hubris that comes from unchecked power if it hadn't been for a young Republican congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, who was so enraged by the partisan chicanery of the Speaker that he launched a crusade to unseat him. As the allegations piled up, the House Ethics Committee could no longer resist pressure for an enquiry.
The momentum has become unstopp- able. Mr Wright has been charged with 69 violations of House rules. They include some ingenious schemes. Mr Wright pub- lished a collection of his speeches which he sold in blocks of a thousand books to the Teamsters, the New England Life Insur- ance Company and a property developer from his constituency in Fort Worth, among others. In some cases Mr Wright told lobbies to buy the books in lieu of a speaking fee because he had already ex- ceeded the limit on honorariums. Since few patrons actually requested delivery the same books could be sold over and over. Mr Wright got 55 per cent royalties on each copy, courtesy of his publisher, Carlos Moore, who had just received $305,000 in business from Mr Wright's campaign.
The Ethics committee report paints a portrait of a grasping, sordid, bullying little man, and it will surely finish him. But it is not a fair way to treat a man. There is the germ of totalitarianism in the recent Amer- ican practice of unleashing an investigator, backed by a large staff and unlimited resources, to comb through the entire past of a public figure in search of a crime, any crime. It so easily lends itself to political abuse.
Since the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, the Democratic Congress has used special prosecutors to harass and destroy officials in the executive branch, especially ideological conservatives like Reagan's Attorney General, Edwin Meese. (Mr Meese, incidentally, was found innocent, though it was too late to save his name.) A variation of this was used to smear John Tower earlier this year, when sweeping and anonymous allegations in an FBI report were leaked to the press by Demo- cratic staffers, so tarnishing Mr Tower's reputation that the Senate could then justify voting against his appointment as defence secretary.
The procedure has got out of control and it is beginning to backfire on the Congress. At a mere hint of wrongdoing by a Demo- crat there are now howls from the Republi- can side and demands for an enquiry. If this dampens enthusiasm for the politics of scandal, it represents a major shift of power to the White House, since over the last eight years of successful Republican government, the chief instrument of a Democratic Party with an exhausted ideology an a crisis of faith has been accusations of 'sleaze', to which their caterwauling allies in the media have lent themselves, wittingly or not.
Beyond this the Republicans are not likely to gain much from the fall of Speaker Wright. Tom Foley, a gentlemanly Catho- lic lawyer from Washington State, is sure to take his place in spite of vile rumours circulated, probably, by agents of Wright himself. Coming up behind Foley is a whole generation of bright, well-educated, clean young Democrats with quasi-pacifist views and a talent for disguising how radical they are. The new Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, is a sample of the infuriating new breed, a sort of Kin- nock who gets away with it. These post' Vietnam Democrats hate spending money on defence and instead court the national- ist vote by sounding tough on trade, tougher perhaps than they really are. Unfortunately, the man who might succeed Foley as Majority Leader, Richard Gephardt, is determined to outlaw trade surpluses. If the House of Representatives becomes any more protectionist than it already is it will soon play havoc with the affairs of the world.
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