Hangin' with the houseboyz - congressional staffers

Washington Monthly, June, 1992 by Christopher Buckley

Think the guys you elected are dangerous? Meet the arrogant young staffers running the show . . .

Pity the book(*1) that comes out in May 1992 with the subtitle Blowing the Lid Off Congress. Does any Congress with a national approval rating of 17 percent and up to its neck in a check-kiting scandal have a lid left over its head? Squalid and appalling as Jackley's revelations are, this deft account of the grosser realities in democracy's sausage works, based on the author's 12 years as a congressional staffer, or "Hill rat" as they call themselves, may no longer have the ability to dismay. The collective voice being raised these days is that of Casablanca's Captain Renaud, shocked--shocked!--to learn that congressmen are perkmongers and slobs when it comes to balancing their own checkbooks, never mind that they've overdrawn the nation's by $4 trillion in the last 12 years. The more's the pity, because this is an important book deserving a wide audience.

Touted as the Liar's Poker of Capitol Hill, Jackley's account does live up to the publisher's flackery. It entertains as it damns. The author grew up as a Special Forces brat, which equipped him, at least at first, with the temperament and moxie to take his hill. His eventual A-Funny-Thing-Happened-On-The-Way-To-Damascus moment came when his second child nearly died in infancy. The experience concentrated his mind. Suddenly his mighty press secretarial labors on behalf of his boss, Texas Democratic Congressman Ronald Coleman, a man with the ethics and moral courage of a hookworm--and apologies to hookworms everywhere--fell into the proper perspective. And thus he came to burn his bridges with a vengeance.

Like the mini-masters of the universe portrayed by Michael Lewis in his staff-level expose of Salomon Brothers, the Hill rats Jackley chronicles learn self-importance at a very callow age, usually right out of college. At one point, Jackley explains to a fellow Appropriations Committee rat that the title of Lewis' book derived from Salomon big-wig John Gutfreund's dare to a colleague to play a single hand of the game for a million dollars. The staffer snorts, "A mil? One lousy mil? I can do ten mil with report language and not even have to ask the chairman." Jackley notes, "That may or may not have been true, but his disdain was palpable." He quotes another rodent: "Lord Acton was only half right. Power might corrupt, but absolute power is a blast."

Up on the Hill, quotations from classical antiquity are just palimpsests for graffiti. Parliamentarian Edmund Burke's lofty admonition to the electorate in 1774, "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion," is hootingly dismissed by a Democratic committee chairman: "Burke got his ass sent packing home." A quote from our own classical past is inverted to become the Hill rat's credo: "Ask not what your member can do for the issue, but rather, what the issue can do for your member."

There, in a way, you have it all, the sum teleology of Capitol Hill: self-preservation. (I know, I know, you're shocked--shocked--to hear it.) But mammon is in the details, and the details are delicious. Jackley makes us witnesses to wonderful sights: Coleman conniving to get press mileage out of a devasting Mexico City earthquake; cowering under his blankets at home--literally--during the invasion of Panama so he won't have to make a statement by voting; scheming to vote against a good bill that he actually favors, once he's assured that it is going down to defeat. My personal favorite--and who knows, perhaps it will also appeal to the Internal Revenue Service--is when he angrily demands an interest-free loan to cover his overdraft at--you guessed it--the House bank, and then doesn't report the free interest to the IRS. A scoundrel, you say? Not to the voters of Texas's 16th district, who have reelected him time after time--the last two, unopposed. Profiles in Courage this ain't.

How could Coleman get away with all this? Brace yourself for another shocker: largely by ingratiating himself with the now deposed and disgraced speaker of the House, Jim Wright. This got him a seat on the all-powerful Appropriations Committee, from which all pork flows. Representative Coleman is nothing if not representative. He does exactly what his constituents want him to--namely, steal from the voters of other districts. Rep. Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, since 1977 the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, stated this iron law of politics in an admirably candid moment when he said, "All anyone ever wants is a special advantage over the next fellow. Understand that, and you've understood the intent of every law ever passed."

All the gentleman from El Paso asks in return from his constituents--aside from interest-free loans and free plants from the Botanical Gardens--is permanence. Something about being a congressman must have changed for the better in 200 years--perhaps the food. In 1790, only about half of House members ran for reelection. In 1988, 94 percent did. And they did well. Ninety-eight percent of them got reelected. In 1990, the reelection figure plunged to 96 percent. Amidst the current hullabaloo over kited checks and legislative gridlock, that percentage may change in 1992, but after reading this book, I wouldn't bet the farm on it. "Let's face it," gloats one Republican member, "you have to be a bozo to lose this job."