Breaking away - conservative Democrats

National Review, April 3, 1995 by Rich Lowry

BILLY TAUZIN is ebullient. The Louisiana Democrat watched his party sustain catastrophic losses in the 1994 elections. Former House barons got tickets to obscurity. The President sank into semi- retirement. Hundreds of staffers landed in the streets. A recent New York Times headline declared: ``Democrats in Denial Stage of Grief.'' But Tauzin bounces into the stately Rayburn Room just off the House floor, all smiles.``It's liberating,'' says Tauzin, a compact man wearing a tie with a swirling, colorful print.

``The ideas that keep me in Congress, that keep me excited about my job here, are now coming to the floor.'' He has just watched the House pass, 301 to 128, his amendment to property-rights legislation, part of the hundred-day march Tauzin and other conservative Democrats have been happy to join.For years, Tauzin & Co. marched in place. ``When I went to the Rules Committee,'' he recalls, it ``was packed with liberals. And when I asked for a rule to let me take property rights to the floor, they always said no. But Mr. [Gerry] Studds [a liberal from Massachusetts] would come to the same meeting and say, 'I want my bill to come up, and I want all these waivers,' and they'd say, 'OK.' That's the way it was.'' No more. Many of the major elements of the Contract with America that have passed the House so far -- the Balanced Budget Amendment, limits on unfunded mandates, risk-assessment requirements, securities reform -- were championed in previous Congresses by conservative Democrats.In the new climate, Tauzin and other like- minded Democrats (23 in all) have formed ``the Coalition.'' They mean to put distance between themselves and the Democratic leadership, while forging a bloc of swing votes that can wring concessions from Republicans. On the one hand, Coalition members are angering their 181 Democratic colleagues. On the other, they're trying to pull Contract items centerward -- irritating the right wing of the Republican conference -- and cooperate with a GOP that ultimately wants to see them lose their seats. It's the kind of tight spot only someone like Billy Tauzin could relish.Eager to touch his listener's arm before making a particularly animated point, Tauzin is the Cajun politician par excellence, a deal maker and backslapper who's as shrewd as he is warm. He entered the Lousiana legislature in 1971 and was quickly pegged as a comer who would inherit the Cajun vote from Governor Edwin Edwards. ``He was seen from the first day he walked in there that here's the new Edwin Edwards, from the way he dressed, the bon vivant, the way he engaged people,'' says John Maginnis, publisher of the Louisiana Political Review. ``He was even better at Edwards than Edwards.'' When Tauzin won his congressional seat in 1980 it was with Edwards's backing.The split came in 1987. Tauzin decided to run for governor, thinking he had an understanding that the scandal-plagued Edwards would step aside. Edwards ran anyway. When Tauzin decided to stay in the race, it became a duel for the Cajun vote that Tauzin lost disastrously, finishing fourth in a five-man field with just 10 per cent of the vote. A bitter loss that saddled him with substantial debt, the 1987 race brought a sharper edge to Tauzin's politics.IN 1993 he turned that edge against Bill Clinton and the Democratic leadership. Tauzin, with close ties to the oil and gas industry and a bayou district badly hurt by federal wetlands and endangered-species regulation, had always had conservative inclinations. But his full conservative fury wasn't unleashed until after he voted for the BTU energy tax. ``He tried to explain it by saying he understood that it was going to be changed in the Senate,'' says Richard Baudouin, editor of the Times of Acadiana. ``But that kind of explanation doesn't go down well.'' Tauzin got hammered at home, without getting the cover he expected from the White House. It seems he'll never let the Administration forget it.After the November elections, Tauzin publicly flirted for weeks with switching to the Republican Party. The indecision probably hurt him. But soon he formed the Coalition, and he was more in the midst of things than ever. ``It's kind of a trademark of Billy that he was able to position himself as someone who is the leader of something,'' says Maginnis.That something could be crucial to House Republicans. ``We have a 240-seat majority in the House of Representatives, not 230,'' says one leadership aide. ``The 240 is 230 plus 25 conservative Democrats minus 15 moderate Republicans.'' So far Republicans have been united enough and have wooed enough other wayward Democrats that those extra votes haven't been decisive. But that could change when the tough budget votes come. And until then the Coalition can deliver veto-proof majorities.What constitutes the possible will be the chief point of contention between Republicans and the Coalition. Already, Tauzin is taking hits from the Right. He succeeded in narrowing the takings provision in the Contract -- which requires compensation for landowners whose property value is diminished by federal regulation -- to cover only wetlands, endangered species, and a handful of other laws. The American Landrights Association activated its fax network in an attempt to head off Tauzin's effort. ``Tauzin has been saying in speeches for years that the Fifth Amendment doesn't say 'nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation, comma, except for the Endangered Species Act,''' says Jonathan Adler, associate director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. ``But apparently he does believe that it says 'comma, except for the Wild and Scenic Rivers program, the Historic Preservation Act, and many other federal programs.''' Though a group of about a dozen moderate Republicans had written to Newt Gingrich complaining about the takings language in the Contract, the amended version of the bill passed so overwhelmingly (277 to 148) that it's not clear the revisions were necessary.This struggle will be played out repeatedly. Tauzin recently worked to modify the securities-reform bill introduced by Chris Cox (R., Calif.), making it closer to a version he had sponsored last year. The Coalition's first major policy offering is a welfare-reform proposal that emphasizes work and jettisons Contract provisions like cutting off young unwed mothers. But on welfare Republicans are less likely to entertain Coalition objections, knowing that nothing they do will get them to veto- proof majority.It's the Democrats who need the Coalition most. After the slaughter of moderate Democrats in November, if the conservatives go, the party will be left with nothing but Henry Waxmans and Pat Schroeders. The Democratic leadership should be courting the conservatives, but instead it is snubbing them. Democrats refused to appoint Gary Condit, the California Democrat who championed the unfunded-mandates legislation, to the conference committee reconciling the House and Senate versions of the bill, even after Republicans offered to create a special slot for him. Some staffers of Coalition members have been told by Democratic committee staff that perhaps they shouldn't attend staff meetings.Tauzin is not too upset by his isolation from fellow Democrats. He can speak with a twinkle in his eye of being ``a narrowing, shrinking minority in a shrinking minority'' because he knows that's the place to be in a Democratic state that leans conservative and rewards independence. His minority could disappear from the Democratic Party entirely, and he'd still be well positioned to win the seat of retiring Democratic Senator Bennett Johnston in 1996. Where the extinction of their Center - Right would leave the Democrats is less clear -- but wherever it is, they'll be having less fun than Billy Tauzin.