Mr. Outsider - Rep. Richard K. Armey

National Review, Oct 15, 1990 by William McGurn

THREE WEEKS after President Bush announced he was "thinking anew" about his "no new taxes" pledge, tight-lipped House Republicans gathered behind closed doors inside the Rayburn building to consider their own next move. After an hour-and-a-half debate, they passed by an overwhelming 3 to 1 margin a resolution "oppos[ing] new taxes and all tax-rate increases as a means of reducing the federal budget deficit." It was a gutsy call. Not only would it embarrass the President, it was the last thing in the world Minority Leader Bob Michel wanted to see. Michel had hoped to kill the resolution by shunting it off to the Policy Committee for eternal debate, but under conference rules anyone with fifty signatures on his motion can bring it forward. This time the yeas had it.

The man behind the resolution was Dick Armey, the fifty-year-old economics professor turned congressman who in only three terms in the House has, to the delight of conservatives, proved himself a Texas bull in the Capitol china shop. Since coming to office in 1985, Armey has pushed through a bill closing down unnecessary U.S. bases (he has on his wall a picture taken at the bill-signing ceremony, which shows him as the only congressman standing behind the President the others didn't want to go near the bill), has challenged federal funding for the arts 'do it on your own dime and your own time" is a favorite maxim), and has now set his sights on agricultural subsidies, pointing out that in the Agriculture Committee "there's no such thing as Republicans or Democrats, just those from corn states, those from wheat states, those from dairy states, and so on."

What makes Armey's achievement all the more stunning is that he has managed it while remaining the consummate outsider. Indeed, over the foyer door in his office in the Cannon building hang his father's spurs, a homespun declaration of independence from Beltway fashion. Rarely is he invited to the White House for a chat. Unlike colleague Newt Gingrich (R., Ga.) and his fellow Texan, Senator Phil Gramm, he is not in on the summit talks. He's not inclined to make the sort of compromises on pork said to be necessary to get legislation through. Yet at a time when George Bush and his GOP summiteers have called into question the credibility of the last decade of Republicanism, it is Dick Armey and his allies who will help bring the party back to the straight and narrow-largely because he saw it coming from the outset.

"When the summit started, the President clearly had a higher standing among the American people than anyone else," says Armey, sporting his usual Adam Smith tie and with a copy of George Gilder's Microcosm on his desk. "By calling a summit, all he's done is elevate people scarcely known outside their own districts to the same level as himself.

"Then he turned around and appointed [Senate Majority Leaderl Dick Gephardt to chair the thing. To me what this did was define a process that favored the Democrats and sacrificed the only advantage we had: the President's prestige."

It didn't help that both Gingrich and Gramm were on board, and though not committed to the product-Gingrich has repeated that he will walk if they come up with a bad deal-they were by definition tied to the process. Both have come under attack from conservatives, as it's become clearer that the reason for putting them on the team was not to hear their views on taxes but to get their imprimatur on any tax increase. That has become all the more obvious now that the summit has broken down into a mini-summit between the Administration and the top leaders of both parties, excluding what the New York Times called "the more partisan participants." That's Beltwayspeak for conservatives.

This latest move has only strengthened Gingrich's hand, in that he has extricated himself from this losing process by breaking with the Bush Administration and unveiling his own pro-growth, low-tax program. Gramm, by contrast, has virtually defected to the other side, which earned him the ultimate Washington accolade-"pragmatis"-in a Wall Street Journal news story. With an election coming up, his greatest fear is that any sequester will be labeled the Gramm sequester.

But in the end it has arguably been Armey who has carried more clout than either of these two in the summit process. Although the White House tried to downplay the significance of the resolution, Representative Leon Panetta (D., Calif.), chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee and a summiteer, complained on CNN's Newsmaker Saturday that Armey had "sent a torpedo into the negotiations" just at the point where they were about to talk tax increases. Unfortunately, subsequent events demonstrated that Armey's torpedo didn't sink the Good Ship Summit, but it was not without lasting effect. "The resolution demonstrated that Dick Armey is a leader in Congress and that the GOP is unwilling to sit by and fund George Mitchell and the national Democrats' insatiable appetite for tax increases," said Ed Rollins, cochairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.