The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine - Hardcover

Continetti, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038551672X ISBN 13: 9780385516723

Publisher: Doubleday, 2006

Synopsis

What happens when ideologues obtain power? The K Street Gang is the inside story of how a group of self-styled Republican reformers succumbed to the temptations of power, becoming even worse than the Democrats they had been elected to replace. Now, some of those very reformers, including Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, are under investigation, their careers and reputations tarnished by the very system they helped to create.

The story begins in 1994, when a landslide victory led to the first GOP-controlled Congress in forty years. The Republicans had it all: a visionary leader in Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a program for reform in the Contract With America, and a bonafide electoral mandate. They pledged to shrink government, reform politics, and drain the swamp of public malfeasance. Ten years later the Republican party finds itself embroiled in crippling scandals that have already brought about the fall of House majority leader DeLay and may reach all the way into the White House.

In The K Street Gang, you'll meet DeLay, the brazen ideologue and prodigious fundraiser who invited lobbyists to run amok in exchange for campaign contributions; Jack Abramoff, the conservative activist who left a troubled career in Hollywood for a new beginning as a Washington lobbyist, only to fleece his clients out of millions of dollars; Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition whose principles took a backseat to his business interests; Grover Norquist, the fiery antitax activist who provided intellectual ammunition for the Republican takeover of the lobbying industry, only to see the lobbyists take over his party; and Adam Kidan, a down-on-his-luck Republican businessman who engineered the scam of a lifetime-one that had deadly consequences.

You'll learn how Grover Norquist helped arranged meetings between George W. Bush and men who are now alleged to be Islamic terrorists; how a former lifeguard rose from beachbum to aide to one of Washington's most powerful congressmen to high-powered and extremely wealthy lobbyist, and how he lost it all; and how a routine audit of an obscure Indian tribe's finances has led to a widespread public corruption investigation that threatens the political futures of half a dozen congressmen and the political future of the Republican Party.

In The K Street Gang, Matthew Continetti takes us behind the headlines to meet a group of young idealists who came to Washington to do good and ended up staying to do well. It's about the perils of power and the high cost of greed. Above all, it's about how the American conservative movement began as a cause, turned into a career and ended up as a racket.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Continetti is a staff writer at the Weekly Standard. His articles and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Doublethink. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

When Matthew Continetti took a job at the Weekly Standard a few years ago, he was a young conservative committed to denouncing big government. But Continetti was surprised by what he found in the nation's capital: Republican operatives were "getting rich off conservative power," leaving Washington a city "on the brink of major scandal."

It's not on the brink anymore. As Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay dominate the political headlines, Continetti has written a hastily assembled but timely account of GOP corruption -- instigated, he writes, by "K Street Conservatives" who have shed their movement's libertarian heritage and become enthralled with power and the pursuit of personal wealth. The K Street Gang carries additional weight because its charges come not from a liberal author or even a nonpartisan reporter but from a card-carrying conservative. The book is arguably the most detailed chronicle to date of how some of Continetti's erstwhile allies made a wrong turn in the past decade.

The fiasco began, he argues, when Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was elected House majority whip in December 1994, just one month after the GOP won control of both houses of Congress. DeLay was interested not in promoting small-government conservatism but in tightening his party's grip on power. He flung open the doors of the Capitol, working with lobbyists to raise money to reinforce his majority while giving big business its cut. Republican lawmakers inserted pet provisions into bills, and the size of government actually expanded -- flying, Continetti notes, in the face of the GOP's traditional Reaganite agenda.

Enter Jack Abramoff, an ex-Hollywood producer who financed B-movie flops before joining the law firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds in late 1994. DeLay was about to create golden opportunities for men like Abramoff -- and the tycoon-turned-lobbyist took full advantage.

According to Continetti, Abramoff's stock in trade was wrapping his clients' causes in anti-government-meddling rhetoric. Abramoff saw the Northern Mariana Islands as "a free-market utopia" (in Continetti's phrase) and arranged junkets there for DeLay and other conservative lawmakers, many of whom relaxed at the Hyatt Regency and played golf. DeLay called the Marianas "a perfect Petri dish of capitalism" and insisted that they should not be subjected to federal labor laws.

Abramoff had plenty of unsavory companions on K Street. When the conservative activist Grover Norquist wanted to raise funds in 1999 for his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, he asked Abramoff (a friend from their days as College Republicans) to plug a "$75K hole in my budget"; Abramoff leaned on his Indian clients to donate money to Norquist's organization.

The hypocrisy was rampant. Continetti writes that the principles of former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed "appear to be no match for his profit margins." Faced with legislation in Louisiana that would have reduced the proceeds to one of Abramoff's Indian gaming clients, Reed deployed what he described as "pro-family forces" to defeat the bill.

Some of DeLay's former aides -- most notably Michael Scanlon, a DeLay press secretary turned lobbyist -- made bundles working with Abramoff. Adopting a scheme called "Gimme Five," Scanlon signed contracts with Abramoff's clients and kicked back proceeds to Abramoff -- without telling their clients that the two men were working together. At one point, Abramoff e-mailed Scanlon to ask whether he could "smell the money?!?!?!" The question had to have been rhetorical: Scanlon at one point was spending $17,000 per month to rent an apartment at Washington's Ritz-Carlton and using a helicopter to visit his $4.7 million mansion in Rehoboth Beach, Del. All told, Abramoff and Scanlon made more than $66 million over three years while doing what Continetti calls shoddy work for their Indian tribe gaming clients -- and while Abramoff was referring to them in e-mails as "troglodytes" and "monkeys."

Unfortunately, Continetti's account feels unfinished: These scandals are still unfolding, after all. Some of his terms are also confusing, his biographical sketches of his antiheroes are too cursory to put the scandals into their proper context, and his narrative jumps inconsistently from one scandal-laden episode to the next. Moreover, according to Continetti's endnotes, his book is based almost entirely on e-mails previously released by the Senate's Indian Affairs Committee, criminal complaints against Abramoff and others, and newspaper and magazine articles chronicling the Abramoff saga, including the groundbreaking, Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces by The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt, James V. Grimaldi and R. Jeffrey Smith.

Still, Continetti's book is useful because it suggests that conservatives are now more ensnared than ever: DeLay's GOP remained in power in part because he so successfully figured out how to work with K Street to keep it there. Now that DeLay has announced his resignation from Congress and Abramoff and other "K Street Conservatives" have entered guilty pleas in federal courts, the right's struggle to regain its credibility will remain one of the outstanding questions of American politics for years to come. Can conservatives repair the damage done by the K Street scandals? Continetti suggests that they have their work cut out for them.

Reviewed by Matthew Dallek
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE
THE DECEMBER REVOLUTION

TOM DELAY AND THE RISE OF THE K STREET CONSERVATIVES

This is a crime story.

It begins in October 1993, more than a year before Republicans took over Capitol Hill, when Illinois Republican Bob Michel, the House minority leader, announced that he would retire at the end of his term. Michel was eighty years old. He was first elected to Congress in 1956. His face was streaked with wrinkles, he wore thick glasses with lenses the size of car windshields, and he had little hair. He looked like a relic.

In a way, he was a relic. Michel’s career almost perfectly traced the decline of the Republican congressional majority. By the time Michel retired from Congress, the last year Republicans had controlled the House of Representatives was in 1954. That was two years before he had been first elected to represent Illinois’s 18th District. Michel had come to Congress just when his party was on the way down.

Yet, as the party declined, Michel rose through the ranks. He became minority whip in 1975, and minority leader in 1981. In both jobs he shepherded Republican legislation through the House as best he could. He was often referred to as an “institutionalist”– someone who exploited the rules and regulations of the House for tactical gain. But more often than not conservatives referred to him as an “accommodationist”–someone with no sense of overall strategy who was all too eager to make deals with the House Democratic leadership.

Michel was soft, conservatives grumbled. He was afraid to take a stand against the Democrats, who, after decades in power, had grown decadent and corrupt. And Michel knew, too, that the younger a Republican House member was, the more he was itching for a fight with the opposition. As Republican representation in the House had shrunk, it had also become more conservative–far more conservative than Michel. At the press conference announcing his retirement Michel admitted he was “much more comfortable” in the Washington that existed “when I first came to Congress.”(1)

One of Michel’s harshest critics–and the frontrunner to replace him–was Newt Gingrich, who had represented Georgia’s 11th District since 1979, and who had been elected minority whip in 1989, after Dick Cheney left that post to serve as President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense. Gingrich was Michel’s opposite in almost every way. He was fiercely ideological, tirelessly combat­ive, and endlessly inventive. Before he entered electoral politics, Gingrich had been a history professor, and so his mind, he said, was attuned to the faint vibrations that signaled the rise, decline, and renascence of civilizations.
Also, unlike Michel, whose midwestern Republicanism had its roots in 1950s budget-cutting and isolationism, Gingrich was a true Reaganite. He was a supply-sider who thought that lower marginal tax rates would spur economic growth and increase tax revenues. He believed in American power, a strong national defense, and standing up to the tyrannical Soviet Union. And though his conser­vatism was not religious, he was nonetheless a cultural warrior, and thought that a libertine Boomer elite, reared in the student revolts of the 1960s, governed the country from the coasts in an increas­ingly out-of-touch manner.

Gingrich was also famous. His political celebrity had been grow­ing for some time. He had first gained prominence in the early 1980s, when he used after-hours “special orders” speeches, broadcast live on the C-SPAN television network, to harangue the House Democratic leadership. He led ethics crusades against Democratic Speakers Tom Foley and Jim Wright. He argued that the Democratic Congress was plagued by scandal–scandals at the House bank, scandals at the House post office, scandals at the highest reaches of congressional power–and that only a thoroughgoing purge would set things right. He tried to combine the wisdom of a public intellectual with the guile of a public official. A simple conversation with Gingrich would be inevitably laced with references to Napoleon, science fiction, Churchill, the futurist authors Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Franklin Roo­sevelt, and Peter Drucker. He preached a transformative politics that would break the old systems of the past and help move America for­ward into the Information Age. Gingrich was the first example of the paradoxical species that would eventually proliferate throughout Washington: the progressive conservative.

He was an ideologue. But Gingrich could also be incredibly charming, at least to Washington conservatives, who swooned whenever the minority whip gave a speech about rescuing American civilization from liberal elites, unleashing the dynamism of the American economy through tax cuts and deregulation, and chang­ing the culture of Washington so that power rested with the Ameri­can people, not special interests. And all of Gingrich’s speeches and articles, delivered at conservative think tanks and retreats and reprinted in the pages of the small conservative magazines, had one thing in common: They would usually end with assurances that one day, perhaps sooner than people thought, there would be a congres­sional Republican majority.

But this would not happen, Gingrich argued, as long as someone like Bob Michel ran the House Republican caucus. It came as no surprise, then, that within hours of Michel’s announcement on October 4, 1993, Gingrich had, in turn, announced his candidacy for minority leader. It was no contest. As minority whip, Gingrich had already rallied a majority of the conference to vote for him– more than a year before the Republicans would hold leadership elections in December 1994. Michel allies were left in the dark. A new power was rising in the Republican party, one that was uncom­promising, loud, and visionary.
The problem was, the actual rising power wasn’t Gingrich. In fact, Gingrich’s rise was so stunning, his personality so polarizing, his visage so ubiquitous, that his quick elevation to minority-leader-in-waiting obscured another fissure in the House Republican lead­ership. That fissure was opened by the race to replace Gingrich as minority whip. And the man who won that race, which began the same day Gingrich locked up the post of minority leader, was ulti­mately to have more power on Capitol Hill than Newt Gingrich ever dreamed of having.

It is in the nature of revolutions that they consume their most passionate advocates. The vanguard’s ideals are replaced by the fac-tion’s brass knuckles. The chain of events that Robespierre set in motion led to his death by guillotine in 1794. Trotsky fled from Stalin and met his fate with an ice pick to the head in Mexico in 1940. The dynamics of political revolutions in a constitutional republic such as the United States are nonviolent, but the parallels between political insurgencies remain. One group comes to power pledging reform; the reformers’ newfound power attracts a troop of opportunists and hangers-on; the opportunists eat away at the reformist impulse from within. Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revo­lution would turn out to be no different.

Three candidates ran to replace Gingrich as minority whip, yet only two really mattered. (Florida representative Bill McCollum always trailed the others.) In one corner was Gingrich’s longtime ally Robert Walker, the fifty-one-year-old congressman from Penn-sylvania’s 16th District. Walker had been Gingrich’s chief deputy whip–responsible for “whipping up” support on key votes–since 1989. He had the requisite experience, and he was committed to Gingrich’s ideals and programs. His association with Gingrich began long before he joined the whip team. With Gingrich and Minnesota Republican Vin Weber, Walker had cofounded the Con­servative Opportunity Society in the early 1980s, a sort of in-house think tank that sought to tilt the Republican caucus to the right.

With Gingrich, too, Walker had pioneered the use of after-hours speeches on C-SPAN. In Walker’s case, however, this sometimes proved to be embarrassing: Once, as he delivered a televised special orders speech, House Speaker Tip O’Neill ordered the C-SPAN cameras to pull back–revealing that Walker was speaking to an empty chamber. But such embarrassment did little to hurt his relationship with Gingrich, who had often said that Walker was his “closest personal friend in the House.”(2) Loyalty mattered, after all.

In the other corner was Tom DeLay, the forty-seven-year-old rep­resentative from Texas’s 22nd Congressional District. DeLay was an experienced politician and a hard-core conservative. It was his fury at Texas’s environmental regulations that led him to run for the state legislature in 1978. It was his distress at the burdens the Federal government placed on business–more regulation, heavy payroll taxes, an intrusive Internal Revenue Service–that sparked his run for Congress in 1984. Caught in the Reagan whirlwind, DeLay came to Washington at a time when free enterprise, not gov­ernment, was sexy. Clearly DeLay would sympathize with business interests. He was one himself.

In December 1992, DeLay had been elected secretary of the Republican Conference. In a House filled with scalawags, layabouts, and diehards, DeLay was unusual in that he combined the convic­tions of an ideological conservative with the street smarts of a machine politician. When DeLay first arrived in Washington, he had quickly aligned himself with Bob Michel. The move made sense at the time–above all, DeLay wanted to be close to power–but within a few years it became clear that it was damaging his career.

This was because DeLay had made allies with the old guard. He had sided with pols who were on their way...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 038551672X
• ISBN 13: 9780385516723
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288