McCain spikes career of Senate staff critic

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 15, 2002 | by Martin Edwin Andersen

One day Winslow Wheeler, a consummate insider on the U.S. Senate staff, wrote a white paper titled, "Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Laces Post-Sept. 11 Defense Bills with Pork." It made its way into the Wall Street Journal and a U.S. News & World Report probe of war profiteering. It was on the mark, but it was to end Wheeler's distinguished career.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he wrote, referring to the classic Jimmy Stewart film, presented a reassuring image, but on issues of national defense it's an image of the past. Mr. Smith is long dead, and no one in Congress, not even those who pose as reformers, has any regrets. They're far too busy with something much more important: taking care of No. 1. There he threw a punch to the jaw: "For elected politicians, the all-consuming goal is re-election, if not advance to higher office.... The goals selected by senators and congressmen to advance their personal agendas are sometimes disguised as national-defense programs; at other times they are simply hidden--usually poorly, but long enough to get passed--from the public. These goals frequently necessitate dropping other less-important objectives, such as strengthening our armed forces or equipping them better at reasonable cost."

He kept on letting them have it: "In some happy situations personal agendas and the national interest coincide; when they don't, the choice is almost always in favor of personal interests.... The effectiveness of any U.S. war against terrorism is eviscerated as Congress drains massive amounts of defense and antiterrorism funding from the war-fighting parts of the defense budget to pursue self-promotion in the form of useless trash."

For more than 30 years Wheeler worked on national-security issues for four senators from the two major parties and for the General Accounting Office (GAO). From 1996 to his resignation July 1, Wheeler was senior Budget Committee analyst for Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.).

During that time, Wheeler learned a lesson that came straight from Frank Capra's 1939 tearjerker in which the untested but honorable Sen. Jefferson Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, defeats a corrupt political machine by filibustering a smarmy land deal hidden in the recesses of a Depression relief bill. The failure of congressional oversight of the defense budget is not a failure of the U.S. constitutional system, Wheeler noted, "which provides all the tools that willing stalwarts need to prevail. Instead it is simply the failure of individuals. Things do not engage in ethical failure; people do."

On Sept. 17, his admirers threw a party on Capitol Hill to celebrate Wheeler's legendary support for military readiness through the targeting of "pork-barrel" spending in the defense budget. A participant in the drafting of the War Powers Act of 1973, Wheeler was hailed as one of the key players in the military-reform movement of the 1980s, and in the 1990s as a critical voice at the GAO questioning service-inflated claims about Operation Desert Storm's air campaign.

Because of his acumen in military strategy, insights into even the minutiae of the Department of Defense (DoD) budget and disgust with the smoke-shrouded high-wire acts of Capitol Hill budget "overseers" Wheeler was much prized as a source for reporters. His identity cloaked in the pseudonym "Spartacus" the Roman slave who rebelled against his masters, Wheeler often took up his own pen to lampoon some of the porcine Flying Wallendas of Capitol Hill.

It was a self-styled tribune of antipork politics, however--Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)--who ended Wheeler's congressional tenure. In his white paper, the budget specialist accused McCain ("The Mr. Smith Who Isn't") of being a "pork enabler" and a "press-release paper tiger." Wheeler pointed out that, although McCain denounced a $20 billion Air Force scheme to issue 10-year leases to Boeing for refueling tankers and then subsidized the company's refitting of them as commercial planes, McCain engaged in "pure cosmetics" in supposedly fighting the deal, "unilaterally disarming himself."

"With a war going on, the [fiscal year 2002 DoD appropriations] bill was `must' business," Wheeler noted. "A filibuster or other delay tactic unless and until some concessions were made in favor of a better bill would have come at an exquisitely painful moment. The time to wring some concession out of the grisly appropriators had arrived.

"Any number of parliamentary maneuvers by Sen. McCain could have stymied the passage of the bill. Just starting a good, old-fashioned, Sen. Jefferson Smith-type filibuster would have given rise to 99 audible senatorial groans. These and other actions were available to Sen. McCain, if he were serious about waging a real war against pork in a time of national emergency. He chose to do nothing."

Wheeler's charge that McCain merely fiddled with reform of the congressional pork empire made the Arizona Republican bum. Gratuitously "outed" as Spartacus by media columnist Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, Wheeler quickly was placed on administrative leave after McCain complained to Domenici, and later was eased out of his job. In September, Wheeler joined the Center for Defense Information (CDI) as a visiting fellow. When the watchers caught up with him at the Capitol Hill soiree, he said that his duties at CDI included producing a book on military reform.