Surprising Pete Hoekstra investigates big labor

Insight on the News, Oct 20, 1997 by Stephen Goode

The tough chairman of the House Education and the Workforce subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations has his eye on the Teamsters, runaway bureaucracy and problems of big government.

In January 1969, Pete Hoekstra (pronounced Hook-stra) played the cornet for his Holland, Mich., high school band in Richard Nixon's first inaugural parade. Now he's a third-term Republican congressman from Michigan's 2nd District, which runs along the east coast of Lake Michigan.

In an extraordinary primary campaign in 1992, Hoekstra, then a vice president at Herman Miller Inc., spent $55,600 to defeat the incumbent Guy Yander Jagt, who spent $725, 000. Hoekstra is an independent-minded congressman who has angered the House Republican leadership by staking out his own course on issues. He was one of the conservative House members responsible for a broadside called The Myth of the Magical Bureaucrat, and more recently its spinoff, A Journal of Ideas. The first, Hoekstra tells Insight, was an attack "on the notion that if you hire a bureaucrat and create a program with a nice-sounding name, you've solved the problem." The Journal of Ideas, edited by Hoekstra, is a discussion of how to deal with the problems of big government, with essays by the likes of Reps. Dick Armey and John Kasich.

Hoekstra now heads the Education and the Workforce subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, a position empowering him to look into the wrongs and excesses of American education and the nation s labor unions.

Insight: You've become very interested in the current campaign-financing scandal that involves the Teamsters?

Pete Hoekstra: What you've got is tax payers' money being used for a tainted election within the Teamsters, and when you start connecting the dots it also becomes very obvious that there were a number of congressional elections that have been tainted through the illegal laundering of money.

I'm focusing on this whole Teamsters thing. It's unraveling faster than what you can keep track of. People are pleading guilty. I'm expecting that there's going to be more indictments coming.

There are a couple of things that make the Teamsters thing very different [from standard accusations of misuse of campaign-finance funds]. No. 1 is that a lot of people say, `Oh you all do it! It's the pot calling the kettle black!' The difference here is the majority of us don't do it with taxpayer money.

It's one thing if you accuse people of taking from soft money or from hard money -- funds contributed privately. The public doesn't understand the difference between soft and hard and all these kinds of things.

They do understand taxpayer money. They do understand if you say, `Oh, by the way, do you know that you paid $20 million for that illegal Teamsters election?' So it's now like, `Wait a minute, Wait a minute! Why did I pay?'

It becomes personal at that point. It's not the same as some unknown wealthy person giving the party $100,000 or $1 million. Now, it's `You used my money to do illegal things.'

The second point here is that there are people pleading guilty. This no longer is a partisan thing with Republicans saying, `Democrats did this,' and Democrats saying, `Republicans did that,' and you've got charges going back and forth and people sitting around saying, `I wonder who's right and who's wrong? Are they both crooks?' Now, there are people pleading guilty.

Insight: You had a very successful business career. You're a family man. Why go into national politics?

PH: I think I might have gotten the 40-year itch and just kind of said, `Maybe I do want to do something else and, if I do want to do something else, what would that be?' Somehow I caught this wild hare that said, `Maybe I ought to run for Congress.'

I ran it by my wife and she didn't lose any sleep over it because she didn't think I actually would do it or that if I did there was any way I could win.

I had some definite things I disagreed with that were going on in Washington. It was just the frustration of saying I don't really like what is going on in Washington and I really believe the incumbent is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Insight: You ran an interesting campaign in '92, when you defeated the Republican incumbent in your district, Guy Vander Jagt, who was well-liked and had been in office nearly three decades.

PH: I had to wait for redistricting. I didn't even know if I'd be in the right district. But everything worked its way out, and I decided to run. It was a 12-week campaign and I worked full time at my job the first eight weeks, then took vacation time for the last four.

Most people ignored me for about nine weeks, then three or four weeks before the primary they actually started to pay attention. I biked my whole district, which gave people a different impression of the kind of representative they might have.

During the campaign, I drove a '63 Rambler, which is the first year Mr. Vander Jagt came here. It was like I was saying, `This car was new in 1963, Vander Jagt got elected in 1963. It's time for a change.'