Chapter 111: Dog Fighting and Legislation

Rick Santorum’s closing comment sounded true. “We are going to start a dog fight over this!” The agenda was that, beginning immediately, we would all get with our staffs and come up with ways to get a full-blown investigation going through the House Ethics Committee. We would each start giving speeches in the well of the House, and with eight of us rotating, we should be good to give a speech every other week. We would start the beginning of the following week.

As the meeting broke, I offered the use of the house as a ‘War Room’ for anything related to this. In case anybody wanted to have a meeting away from one of the Congressional office buildings, just call and I would have security let them in. Then, as I escorted everybody out, I tapped Newt on the shoulder, and he held back for a moment. “I need to see you about a piece of legislation I want to sponsor. When can I do that?”

An eyebrow raised. “And you’re meeting with me and not your committee chairman?”

“I’m sure I’ll meet with him soon enough, but he’s a Democrat, and I want to touch bases with you first.” One of Gingrich’s faults was a personal pride and sense of importance that could cause him to occasionally step on his dick. Better to be nice to him; he had the memory of an elephant!

He nodded in appreciation. “Have somebody call my office tomorrow. I’ll tell my assistant that you’ll be looking for some time.”

“Thank you.”

The next morning, I started writing a speech to give sometime next week. What most people didn’t understand was that when C-SPAN, the television network that covers Congress, is broadcasting a speech, there probably isn’t anybody listening. The cameras are rolling all day long, and Congress is officially in session, but the only time everybody really goes to the main chamber is when there is a vote going on. The rest of the time it’s mostly empty - except for the talking heads hoping to get a good sound bite on the news later in the day. Since everybody wants to make it to the news, and most speeches are predictable and boring, everybody is trying to figure out a way to get on the air.

My focus was going to be two-fold. First, “I used to be a businessman. If I ran a bank the way the Democrats run this one, the bank would be out of business, and I’d be in jail!” Second - “The Democrats say that this is very complicated. Well, every day, the voters have to balance their checkbooks. How complicated can it be?” One way or another, keep hitting them with that message. It’s a business, and a business the voters understand. Some of my counterparts were going to focus on outrage and shame and forcing the leadership to acknowledge the problem. We were also going to investigate any other perks of the job, like the Congressional Post Office, and things like the gym and the barbershop.

I got fifteen minutes to see Newt the following Tuesday morning. When I got there, he had a television in the corner of his office, and it was tuned to C-SPAN. He waved me in, and then hit the volume control on the remote. “Come on, Boehner’s about to speak!” I turned to see my friend begin fulminating about the just released report, outrage spilling from his lips!

“Think that’ll make the evening news?” I asked.

“No, but it’s a good start. You guys keep pushing, and it will get there eventually.”

“What about you? Are you going to speak? Or is this going to cause you trouble?”

He shrugged. “No, this is up to you guys. Eight freshmen Republicans outraged by the behavior of the Democratic party - that plays better than bringing me in on it. As for the trouble, I just don’t know. I probably have a few overdrafts, but the bank is so screwed up, we might not know.”

“That’s going to be one of my focuses. It’s a lousy way to run a business.”

He nodded. “You asked to see me about some legislation.”

“Yes. I’ve been getting some complaints from some constituents. Some of the troops who have been coming back from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have some medical problems and the VA hospitals are just pooh-poohing them. They can’t figure it out, so it must not exist, that sort of thing.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Fatigue, pain, rashes, digestive problems ... I mean, stuff that’s across the board, but that only started after the Gulf War. What if we are seeing the first signs of something like the Agent Orange problem from Viet Nam? Remember how the VA kept downplaying that, it wasn’t a problem, they’re making it up, etc? What if this is the same type of thing? Agent Orange turned out to be a real problem.”

“And you want to do what?”

“Force the VA and the Army medical people to start taking it seriously. Start investigating. I’m not looking for big money, but at least something to make them act like it’s real. Let’s find out, at least,” I explained.

“How much money?”

“For initial research and testing? No idea, but I would imagine $10 to $20 million would be fine. More if they figure it out. The actual treatment would be under the regular VA and Army budgets.” Newt gave a non-committal grunt. He was hard to read at times. “I don’t think this is that outrageous, but I wanted your input on doing this.”

“You’re going to need a Senator to introduce this on that side. Any ideas?”

“I was thinking either Bob Kerrey or John Kerry. They’re both Viet Nam vets, and I want to tie this into the Agent Orange analogy. I haven’t talked to them yet.”

When I mentioned Kerrey and Kerry, Newt grimaced. They were both Democrats. “Why not John McCain? He was over there, too.”

I nodded. “I thought about that, and I can see him as a co-sponsor, but I want something bipartisan. I know you don’t like that, but I’m a Republican in a Democratic district. I have to work with the Democrats, or I’m a one term wonder. Kerrey and Kerry are both highly respected. If I can snag one of them, and tie in some of the other Viet Nam veterans in Congress, we can make it happen. I bet I can get Wayne Gilchrest and Randy Cunningham to co-sponsor in the House.”

“Have you talked to Sonny yet?”

Gillespie ‘Sonny’ Montgomery was the Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. He was a Democrat from Mississippi, and a veteran from World War II and Korea. “Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”

Newt grunted. “Well, start writing something. By that I mean get your staff to figure out which of the think tanks would be best on this. Even something simple will be more than what your staff can write. I don’t see why you can’t get McCain to do this with you.”

“Newt, when I was in business, we had to negotiate deals where everybody ended up happy. It had to be win-win for everyone, or it wasn’t going to work. I have made a whole bunch of money working with people and not against them. It works for me. This banking mess is not going to slam the Senate. They don’t have a bank, just us in the House. This lets me throw them an olive branch. We don’t need to piss everybody off.”

He grunted again. “Well, start writing. Just don’t call anybody on this yet. Let me think about it until next week.”

“Fair enough.” I stood and shook his hand and let myself out. Gingrich was a brilliant tactical thinker, but he was too partisan and didn’t focus on strategy enough. He was the type to burn down the house to kill the rats, and then proclaim loudly and proudly he got rid of the rats, while arguing with everyone who was sifting through the smoldering ashes.

I talked to Sherry and Marty about it the next day and I left it to them to sort out the details. As I told Gingrich, I couldn’t imagine how the price tag on this could get all that big, but I was prepared to be unpleasantly surprised. Was Sonny Montgomery going to be in favor or not? Was I wrong in thinking that the Viet Nam vets in Congress would remember Agent Orange and think this was a good idea, or would they think of the current vets as whiny brats? Would Gingrich go along? I was clueless on this one. Nothing from my future knowledge was helping me.

Newt called me the end of the week. He would let me ask Kerrey or Kerry, but that was it. If neither wanted to be involved, and I wanted to push it, I was talk to John McCain, and good luck getting it through after that. I had Mindy ask for a lunch with Bob Kerrey; I would try him first. I just hoped I didn’t trip over my own tongue if I met the man. He earned the Medal of Honor in Viet Nam. My inherent tendency would be to stand at attention and call him ‘Sir!’

The medical issue, of course, was what was about to be labeled as ‘Gulf War Syndrome.’ I knew enough about it from the future to know it was going to be a major problem for a lot of the vets from the Gulf War. The symptoms were similar to those you get from a sub-lethal dose of some nerve gases, which the Iraqis had, and which we ended up bombing the bunkers of. Low levels got loose and wafted all over the place. At the time, though, nobody really knew about the Sarin gas, and there was enough other nastiness around to make everybody scratch their heads. Was it the first use of depleted uranium shells in tank cannons? There was a rumor that when they impacted enemy armor, they compressed enough to cause gamma ray bursts. What about toxic fumes from all the burning oil wells? What about the guys who used their nerve gas pens on themselves? Did that stuff cause problems? Did it interact with all the stuff they were injected with on the shot line?

It reminded me in a lot of what happened with Agent Orange back in the Seventies. Agent Orange was a chemical defoliant that was sprayed from modified C-123s over the jungle. Spray it on the jungle; a few weeks later, the jungle is dead and dying. You’re left with nothing but bare trees and the bad guys have nowhere to hide. The official word at the time was that this stuff was harmless to humans, which I always thought was a stretch (it kills everything but us?), and the official instructions were to wear the equivalent of HazMat suits when handling it. Still, it was a steamy, hot, and humid jungle, and the grunts using it and being sprayed with it were running around shirtless and damn near bathing with it.

After the war, these guys were coming home with all sorts of dreadful diseases, including cancer, genetic mutations, and neurological problems. The VA and the medical establishment blew all this off as a bunch of shirkers from an unpopular war. It turned out that the manufacturing process made a little understood byproduct called dioxin which, by the way, was astonishingly lethal and dangerous to be anywhere nearby. Major league ooops moment! There were a lot of similarities to this new Gulf War Syndrome.

I got a meeting the middle of the following week with Senator Kerrey, and he was quite gracious. There is a huge amount of mythology about the treatment of Medal of Honor winners. Most active-duty military members come to attention and salute in their presence, and they rank higher for receiving salutes than even four-star generals and admirals - in other words, a general would salute a private with the Medal of Honor, not the other way around. I remember talking to a Marine once who said he knew a sergeant with the medal from Viet Nam. During inspections he would just lay the medal on his bunk, and the officers would pass him by. Then again, most winners are dead, so maybe it’s not a bad idea to be nice to the living ones.

He listened to my explanation and agreed to sponsor a Senate version of the bill, although he wasn’t too sure how well it would go over. I had already given my fulminating speech in the well of the House, and the Democrats weren’t overly amused. I promised to send over a copy of what we were working on, so that his legislative staff could do something with a version of their own. We were calling it the Gulf War Syndrome Research and Relief Act. We’d have to see how it would go.

I understood what Senator Kerrey meant about the Democratic leadership not being thrilled with my speech. You write these things with lots of one-liners and sound bites, in the hope that the networks pick them up, for a ten or fifteen second filler. Both NBC and CBS picked up my comments. “Our voters have to balance their checkbooks at home! Why is it that Democratic Congressmen don’t need to balance their checkbooks? And why is it they don’t want the voters to know this?” ABC didn’t even pay attention to the uproar today. We all expected they would shortly, since Jim Nussle was planning to give his speech while wearing a paper bag on his head, to signify his ‘shame’ for being part of this Congress! The rest of us laughed our asses off when he told us this!

Our actions were going to cause the House Democratic leadership to start blathering about how we were upsetting the apple cart. We didn’t need Newt Gingrich to tell us that there would be complaints about partisan Republican freshmen, who didn’t understand the system, demeaning the dignity of this great institution. That would result in an immediate counteraction, where we would ask what they were trying to hide. If they tried to stifle any legislation as punishment, that would be the next week’s speech, denouncing their authoritarian tactics, and fear of what an investigation would find.

I got a call from Tim Russert’s office Friday morning, after my speech, and was asked to appear on Sunday’s Meet the Press. I, of course, said yes. In this I was lucky, since Jim wasn’t going to do his brown bag thing until next week, at which point nobody would give two shits about me! They would all be clamoring for him! I agreed to show up and was told I was going to be going up against Dave Bonior, the brand-new House Democratic Whip. I had to get my shit together! These guys wanted to bury me, preferably after burning me alive with a stake through my heart.

The best defense is a good offense. If Bonior responded too hard to my frontal assault on the House Bank, I was going to flank him by bringing up the House Post Office scandal. The Postal Inspection Service of the U.S. Post Office had just turned over their report to the House Postmaster, Robert Rota, who had promptly given it to the wife of Tom Foley, Speaker of the House, who was burying it; she was also his Chief of Staff, an interesting variation on working under the boss. If I could get Russert to start questioning Bonior, we could whipsaw the man!

I spent a lot of time on the road that weekend! Friday night I flew home in time to make a pizza and relax with my family. Saturday morning, we had soccer games (boys lost, girls won.) Saturday afternoon I hustled Charlie and his bike to a race in Harford County (he won!) Saturday night I flew back to Washington, so I could appear on Meet the Press, after which I flew home again for the rest of the weekend. I would fly back Monday morning. I was going to have to get a better schedule going because I was exhausted!