The Second Civil War’

‘The Second Civil War’
By RONALD BROWNSTEIN


Preface
A Day in June

After two terms as America’s first president, George Washington used his farewell address to preach the benefits of unity and warn his young nation about the dangers of “permanent alliances” with foreign powers. Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address after his two terms in the White House, urged Americans to restrain the unaccountable power of the “military-industrial complex.”

When Republican Representative Tom DeLay of Texas retired under fire in June 2006 after nearly twenty-two years in Congress, he chose to warn against a different threat: too much cooperation between the Democratic and Republican parties.

This might not have seemed a pressing danger to many in the Capitol or anyone around the country watching the evolution of American political life over the past several decades. On most issues, the two parties now spend most days at each other’s throats. On both sides, the number of legislators who seek to build alliances across party lines, or even dissent from their own party on key votes, is much smaller than a generation ago. Reversing the famous dictum of Carl von Clausewitz, in contemporary Washington politics often seems the extension of war by other means.

DeLay could claim some credit for that condition. A former pest exterminator and Texas state legislator from Sugar Land, Texas, outside of Houston, he was first elected during Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984. Intently religious and devoutly conservative, DeLay always recoiled from the conciliatory, deal-making style that House Republican leaders, led by Bob Michel of Illinois, applied to their relationship with the Democratic House majority in the 1970s and 1980s. But DeLay was also a skilled practitioner of practical politics, accomplished at building the alliances with other members that provide the foundation for advancement in the House. In 1989, DeLay placed a bad bet when he managed the losing campaign of moderate Ed Madigan against Newt Gingrich, the leader of young House conservatives, for the position of minority whip. But DeLay rebuilt enough support to defeat a moderate as secretary of the Republican conference in 1992. And when Republicans gained control of the House and Senate in 1994, DeLay won the whip job himself. (In the process, he defeated the preferred candidate of Gingrich, who had advanced to speaker when Republicans gained control.) When Gingrich stepped down as speaker after the disappointing Republican losses in the 1998 election, and his successor Bob Livingston also resigned amid a personal scandal, DeLay demonstrated his rising power by engineering the election of Illinois Republican Denny Hastert. Four years later, when fellow Texan Dick Armey stepped down as House majority leader, the number two position in the House leadership, DeLay replaced him without opposition. Hastert was never the DeLay puppet some believed, but there was no question that DeLay exerted at least as much influence as the speaker over the direction of the Republican majority in the House.

DeLay operated with a broad vision and a precise attention to detail. He worked relentlessly to tighten the links between the Republican majority and the business community by providing the latter greater access and ability to influence legislation, but he also pressured them to tilt their political contributions more toward the GOP, and to hire more Republicans as lobbyists. Inside the House, his principal priority was to maximize Republican unity and minimize opportunities for Democratic influence. DeLay’s overriding goal was to advance the most conservative agenda possible in a manner that framed the differences between the parties as sharply as possible. He did not fear passing legislation on razor-thin party-line votes; indeed, it often appeared that he preferred bills that pushed to the right so far that they attracted only the bare minimum of votes required to pass. Anything less meant the legislation conceded too much to those resisting the conservative agenda, not only Democrats but moderate Republicans. He was like a meat cutter who prided in his ability to slice closer to the bone than anyone else.

DeLay succeeded to a remarkable extent in imposing his vision. Even though House Republicans operated with a narrow margin of majority throughout DeLay’s years in the leadership, they moved their agenda through the institution much more smoothly than Democrats had with larger margins in the years before the GOP takeover. DeLay was so central to those efforts, he earned the nickname “the Hammer” for his ability to nail down winning coalitions.

In June 2006, though, DeLay seemed to be leaving the House one step ahead of an angry mob. Over the years his hardball tactics had prompted several rebukes from the House Ethics Committee. In the months before his resignation, several of his former aides pleaded guilty to various offenses in an ongoing investigation centered on Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who had earned millions of dollars in fees from Indian gambling interests, and had shared the wealth in the form of contributions and overseas trips directed primarily toward Republican legislators. Questions continued to swirl around DeLay’s own relationship with Abramoff, who pleaded guilty himself to a series of charges and announced his intention to cooperate with prosecutors five months before DeLay’s speech. More pressingly, a prosecutor in Texas had indicted DeLay, accusing him of laundering corporate money through the Republican National Committee to help elect a Republican majority in the Texas state legislature in 2002. (DeLay intended the new majority to redraw the state’s congressional districts in a way that allowed Republicans to win more seats, which is exactly what the legislature did the next year.) The combination of the Texas indictment and the Abramoff investigation led restive House Republicans to demand that DeLay step down as majority leader. When he was stripped of that perch, DeLay decided to walk away from the House altogether, and he resigned his seat.

So DeLay was bloodied when he stepped to the House floor to deliver a farewell speech late on the afternoon of Thursday, June 8, 2006. But he was definitely unbowed. DeLay began his speech with a few conventional observations about finding inspiration in the great monuments to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln on the Washington Mall. Then he turned in a characteristically defiant direction:

In preparing for today, I found that it is customary in speeches such as these to reminisce about the good old days of political harmony, and across-the-aisle camaraderie, and to lament the bitter, divisive partisan rancor that supposedly now weakens our democracy.

Well, I cannot do that because partisanship, Mr. Speaker, properly understood, is not a symptom of democracy’s weakness but of its health and its strength, especially from the perspective of a political conservative.

Liberalism, after all, whatever you may think of its merits, is a political philosophy and a proud one with a great tradition in this country, with a voracious appetite for growth . In any place, or any time, on any issue, what does liberalism ever seek, Mr. Speaker? More. More government, more taxation, more control over people ’s lives and decisions and wallets. If conservatives do not stand up to liberalism, no one will. And for a long time around here, almost no one did.

Indeed, the common lament over the recent rise in political partisanship is often nothing more than a veiled complaint instead about the recent rise of political conservatism.

The problem with Washington, DeLay continued, was not politicians who compromised too little but those who compromised too much. “Now, politics demands compromise,” he acknowledged. But

we must never forget that compromise and bipartisanship are means, not ends, and are properly employed only in the ser vice of higher principles.

It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle.

For the true statesmen, Mr. Speaker, are not defined by what they compromise, but by what they do not.

DeLay was nothing if not forthright. He had built his career on advancing an agenda that sharply separated Republicans from Democrats, often through means that proved as divisive as his goals. At the end of the road, he saw no reason to apologize. If the reluctance to compromise was the true mea sure of statesmanship, future generations would be dismantling statues of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay and erecting them to Tom DeLay.

About three hours after DeLay finished his speech, several hundred people gathered in a ballroom at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. The people in the room agreed with virtually none of DeLay’s views. Most of them considered him an unethical zealot. Yet almost universally they shared his prescription for political success. Just as DeLay wanted Republicans to stand up more firmly against Democrats, the men and women who gathered at the Riviera wanted Democrats to fight more fiercely against Republicans.

The occasion that brought them to Las Vegas was the first convention for readers of the popular liberal Web site Daily Kos. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a former Army officer, had founded the site four years earlier while working as a project manager for a company that designed Web sites. Thousands of people checked in every day to read his latest offerings and the postings from the other “Kossacks,” who congregated on the site to trade political news, share outrage over the latest maneuvers from Bush and congressional Republicans, and demand that Democrats resist the Republican agenda with more fervor and commitment.

In every way the conference measured the widening influence inside the Democratic Party not only of the Kos community in particular but more generally the activists organizing on the Internet through dozens of liberal Web sites, especially the giant liberal online group MoveOn.org. The YearlyKos convention attracted not only readers of the site from around the country, but the cream of the national political press corps, officials from a wide assortment of liberal groups, and an impressive array of Democratic leaders, including the party chairman, Howard Dean, and the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid. Four Democrats at the time considering a 2008 presidential race all made the long trip to Las Vegas. On the convention’s last morning, the assembled Kossacks received validation of another sort when Moulitsas appeared on Meet the Press, the most watched of the Sunday interview shows.

Even with all the big names milling through the halls, the conference, organized by volunteers, had an agreeably ramshackle feel. The hotel looked like it hadn’t replaced its carpets since the Rat Pack roamed Las Vegas. The ceilings were low, the light dim. At the conference itself, most people wore jeans and T-shirts. In a crowded conference room, liberal authors lined up to sign books, and organizers for causes (a group dedicated to organizing “the Christian left,” a campaign to raise the minimum wage) tried to recruit volunteers. One man arrived in a pickup truck covered on almost every available inch with bumper stickers deriding Bush. “When fascism comes to America,” insisted the most pointed of them, “it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” In the hallway before the opening session, one man wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Bush and the words “I’m not with stupid.”

All of this represented a physical manifestation of the fervent opinions that filled the Daily Kos Web site every day. But in other ways the crowd that gathered for three days of speeches, panels, and intermittent comedy routines did not fit many of the expected stereotypes about Democratic Internet activists. They were not especially young (there was more gray hair than ponytails), they seemed to come as much from conservative small towns (Elgin, Texas, or Fremont, Michigan) as the cosmopolitan centers of big city liberalism, and they were not all die-hard liberals (though most clearly were). The unifying thread was their passionate partisanship. Each one that I spoke with over three days saw politics through much the same lens as Tom DeLay: as a clash between political coalitions with views of the world so incompatible that compromise was almost always misguided. The names that provoked the loudest catcalls from the YearlyKos audience were not Bush or any of his Republican allies, but Democrats the crowd thought cooperated too much with the GOP. The declarations that drew the loudest applause were calls for Democrats to fight Bush more fiercely. “We don’t want Neville Chamberlain Democrats,” one speaker insisted. “We want Muhammad Ali Democrats.”

DeLay saw greater partisan conflict as a means of advancing conservative goals. The Kossacks saw more conflict as essential to resisting conservative goals and reviving a left-of-center agenda. Each vision derived energy from the other. The more Republicans pursued the uncompromising ideological agenda DeLay promoted, the more they strengthened the voices in the Democratic Party that opposed any cooperation with the GOP. The more Democratic activists pressured their party to pursue a scorched-earth opposition to the GOP, the more they strengthened the conservatives like DeLay who proclaimed it pointless to seek agreements with Democrats. DeLay and the Democratic Internet activists who gathered in Las Vegas could not have been more dissimilar in almost every possible respect. But each sought to reconfigure their political party to the same specifications— as a warrior party that would commit to opposing the other side with every conceivable means at its disposal. In that they were hardly alone. Among the most ardent activists in both parties, the only cause that attracted bipartisan support in the first years of the twenty-first century was the extermination of bipartisan cooperation. That reciprocal passion has produced a political environment marked by unstinting conflict between the parties and the virtual collapse of meaningful collaboration between them. What this unrelenting polarization of political life means for the parties, the electoral system, and the country is the subject of this book.