The freshmen - new members of Congress for 1995

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by Rich Lowry

RENOWNED for his imperious cigar waving, Texas Democrat Jack Brooks for years walked the halls of Congress with the swagger of the invulnerable. Last summer, he barred Repressentative Bill McCollum, the Republicans' designated negotiator, from talks on the crime bill, yelling, "Get out of here, Mac!" every time McCollum tried to enter the room.

During the televised Iran--Contra hearings in 1987, Brooks, then an 18-term congressman, held forth in his usual hectoring style, and people outside Washington got a chance to watch him in action. "I was appalled by his behavior," says Steve Stockman, an accountant at the time. "I resolved that as long as Brooks continued to run, and as long as I'm alive, I'd continue to run against him."

In 1990 Stockman mounted a long-shot candidacy that failed even to win the Republican nomination. Two years later he got his chance against Brooks and finished strong, taking 43 per cent of the vote. That told him he could win the next time around. In 1994 he converted his home into his campaign headquarters. He knew he was drawing blood when Brooks felt it necessary to respond to one of his campaign flyers with a TV spot. Outspent roughly 6 to 1, Stockman beat Brooks by 8 points, winning his congressional seat on the Gingrich plan: victory on the third installment.

In Washington, the easygoing Stockman has been treated to non-stop admonitions from conservative groups that he'd better not "sell out," that it was their issues that got him here. "I don't think you're going to see me on the sidelines being a squish," Stockman says with a chuckle. So uninterested is the Texan freshman in traditional Washington "governing" that he'd prefer to be back on the campaign trail, slaying some other liberal giant. For now, he'll content himself with trying to figure out a way to abolish the Internal Revenue Service.

"For the first time in my life I've felt like a liberal," quipped former Representative Vin Weber after a weekend at the congressional freshman orientation sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America. "And it feels good." Peppered with unconventional politicians like Stockman--about half of the 73 freshmen have never held elective office before, and less than a third are lawyers--the GOP's newest members are a true departure. Not only are they conservative, they are determined to act on their convictions, quickly and without compromise.

Longtime activist Paul Weyrich, president of National Empowerment Television, has been involved in orientations for Republican freshmen since 1972. "Inevitably," says Weyrich, "we would hear from the audience of justelected members, 'Well, that's interesting, but let's be practical about it. Maybe you guys live in an ivory tower, but we've got to survive.'" Even in 1992, one Heritage Foundation speaker making the case for cutting congressional perks got a cold reception from new members anxious to preserve their means to re-election. This year the same speaker got complaints from freshmen that he "was not radical enough. Why not do away with all franking?"

The future success of the GOP in Congress may well depend on these, its newest and most eager members. In the most obvious sense, if most of the freshmen don't return to Washington in 1996, neither will the Republican majority. But more fundamentally, the freshmen are the revolution of 1994. It's no exaggeration to say that talk radio and the grass-roots groups that have had such an impact on Washington during the last year now have 73 of their listeners and members taking congressional seats. (Rush Limbaugh calls the freshmen the "dittohead caucus.") If they--and their constituents--aren't satisfied with the pace of change this year, the Republican revolution will have betrayed its makers.

Preening?

THIS standard does put a lot of faith in a group of untested politicians. "Their preening and chest-pounding," writes political analyst Charles Cook, "suggest that some in the group think of themselves as the cavalry, arriving just in time to save democracy in general and Congress in particular from certain death." The freshmen, of course, have yet to cast a tough congressional vote or get a real taste of the Washington power they vow to eschew. But the new Republicans survived often vicious campaigns by clinging to the raft of antigovernment ideas embodied in the Contract with America. Notes Weyrich: "This group says, 'We came for a purpose. We didn't expect to be elected. We got elected because we stood for something.'"

Capitaol Hill heard similar talk just two years ago, when a Democratic freshman class nearly as large (63 members) as 1994's GOP crop came to Washington in the spirit of Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith. One of the premier reformers was Ohio Representative Eric Fingerhut, who with fellow freshman Karen Shepherd (Utah) pushed for bold changes in the committee system. To no avail. "The leadership was unwilling to challenge the power of the individual committee chairs," says Fingerhut. "Speaker Foley believed if you took on these internal issues, there'd be so much resistance, so much blood on the floor ... that it would have made progress impossible on the substantive issues." The Democratic fiefdoms remained intact, helping slow, among other things, the march toward health-care legislation (five different congressional committees had jurisdiction). In the end, the 103rd Congress had little to show for itself--and neither did its freshman class. "Our leadership didn't get the fact that they wouldn't be in the majority if enough of us didn't succeed," says Fingerhut. "They took down a generation of new congressmen."