Cajun butterknife

National Review, Dec 31, 1997 by Bernadette Malone

WASHINGTON, D.C.

'Look, my difference with whoever you've been talking to . . . whoever prompted the article . . . is not one of philosophy, it's one of tactics," argues Bob Livingston, the House Appropriations Committee chairman, who repeatedly during our interview returns to the idea that his enemies have prompted NR's interest in him. He's wrong, but it's an understandable mistake -- Bob Livingston has a lot of enemies. "He hates us all," confides a prominent conservative Christian lobbyist. A senior Republican strategist charges, "His sellouts have been the most blatant."

The 6'4" Livingston is notorious for temper tantrums and arm-waving orations on the House floor, but his staff has counseled him to stay calm during our interview. Dressed down for the congressional recess in khakis and a blue and white striped shirt, he dismisses his critics with a wave of his hand and an armada of statistics. Four-foot-high charts detail how spending trends under his reign are more frugal than those in the 1960s. He produces a three-page list of his "Legislative Accomplishments" that brags "Repealed Section 155 of the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA)," among other obscure but laudable items. Livingston makes an impassioned case, however, that the most important part of his job is passing legislation.

"I gotta get my bills through," he booms, sitting in his homey top-floor suite in the Rayburn House Office Building before a window framing the full frontal view of the U.S. Capitol dome. "I mean, that's the bottom line," he says, warming to his subject. "You count the number of bills I passed this year and you count the number of bills anybody else passed this year. I passed 21; [Commerce Committee Chairman] Tom Bliley probably came in second with 5 or 6, maybe a few more . . . and then everybody else is below that!"

Perhaps no other congressional Republican has felt the tension of governing more directly than Bob Livingston. With a lifetime score of 88 out of a possible 100 from the American Conservative Union, he has been a conservative stalwart ever since arriving in Congress in 1977 from suburban New Orleans. A passionate anti-Communist, Livingston filed charges with the House Ethics Committee against leftist Rep. Ron Dellums's staff for collaboration with the Marxists in Grenada in 1985. A practicing Catholic, he opposes abortion, gays in the military, and laxity toward crime.

So conservatives rejoiced when, in November 1994, Speaker Gingrich forsook seniority and selected from the Appropriations Committee the fifth-ranking but most fiscally responsible man to lead the "College of Cardinals" -- the powerful group of congressmen who decide how to divvy up the spending approved by the Budget Committee. Finally, Republicans thought, an Appropriations Committee chairman who would focus on saving money rather than spending it.

Their first disappointment came when Livingston decided to retain a large number of Democrats on the committee staff. "You can't even get a return phone call from anyone on the Appropriations Committee staff," complains one senior aide who works with them regularly. Livingston emphatically denies that his Democratic employees are a problem: "I can't tell you that there are no Democrats that are partisan but they're all professionals." (His most reviled aide, staff director Jim Dyer, is actually a Bush Republican disdainful of earnestly conservative causes.)

Livingston eliminated 297 federal programs and saved $50 billion in the 104th Congress. But since then the famous "Cajun Scalpel" that Livingston brandished in a flourish in one of his first meetings in 1995 has grown blunt. He is at open war with Republican freshmen and sophomores. And his relations with the House leadership are rocky at best (more than once during the interview Livingston obliquely criticized Majority Leader Dick Armey for his political strategy). Livingston has been bent by the institutional pressures of his committee, which appear to be stronger than anyone's philosophy and represent a long-term obstacle to the enactment of a conservative agenda.

"Bob Livingston has done a darn good job given the position he's in," says a well-respected conservative who works with him. But Livingston has had a direct role in some conservative disappointments. His aversion to conflict with the Senate and the White House makes him reluctant to include Republican policy priorities in his spending bills -- even though he usually supports them himself. For example, when conservatives tried to cut from one appropriations bill money that routinely finds its way to overseas abortion clinics, Livingston bawled out a young female staffer who was involved in the effort. Behind the scenes, he balked at House Republicans' insistence on defunding the National Endowment for the Arts, and he protested a plan to ensure that Democrats would not cheat Republicans out of congressional seats by manipulating the 2000 Census. Livingston includes each of the resulting uninspiring compromises in his trophy case of achievements.