Chapter 119: Counterattack

1995

Before John and Helen left for their trip, we had a big party for them at a banquet hall in Timonium. It was a large group of us, people from the company, political types from all over the district and from elsewhere in Maryland, other friends and neighbors, and Allen and Rachel both flew in with their families. Prior to this John had met with me and introduced me to his handpicked replacement, an attorney just a few years older than me, Tucker Potsdam, who had been a tax lawyer with the Buckman Group and didn’t take to the corporate life and the killer hours it occasionally involved. Now he was hanging out his own shingle as tax lawyer and private equity manager. We were going to continue with the fig leaf of independence from active management of my investments. I would talk to the new guy, who would talk to my trustee. Perfectly legal, at least by Congressional standards.

The party turned out to be ... strange. Nobody wanted to say the obvious, that we were having a party and talking about a dead man walking. At one point I was sitting at a table with Allen Steiner, John’s son and an old pal from Boy Scout days, having a drink. He asked, “Does this feel more than a little weird to you?”

“I’ve never been to a funeral where the guest of honor was walking around the room,” I answered.

Allen snorted out a laugh and coughed out a bit of his drink. “It’s bizarre, all right!” He coughed a little and then drank some more.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” I told my boyhood friend. “I mean, a guy develops feelings for the first man who bails him out of jail.”

That caused Allen to start laughing and coughing again. “Will you stop it? If I keep laughing and inhaling my drink, I’m going to end up in the box before my dad!”

“Hey, I’m just saying, I have history with him.”

He nodded. “Yeah, there were times I was even a little jealous, you know? I was three thousand miles away, and you were still back here with Dad. It sounds stupid now.”

“Allen, you must know, you and Rachel ... Listen, my picture was out in the lobby. Yours and Rachel’s were on his desk!” I protested.

He waved it off. “Hey, don’t sweat it, I know that. I’m just saying, Dad feels the same way about you. I mean, he sat me and Rach down the other night and reviewed the wills and stuff. Good Lord! He’s worth $60 million! He told us he wouldn’t have had a fraction of that if he hadn’t gotten in with you and your company.”

“He earned every cent! I wouldn’t be where I am without what he did for us.” I replied. “It wasn’t just me, not by a long shot!”

“All I’m saying is that when the time comes, you know...” He glanced over at where his parents were sitting, with a guilty look on his face. “Well, you know ... he’d appreciate it if you said a few words. Mom and Rachel would, too.”

I nodded. “I’d be honored. Hell, there’ll be so many people wanting to say nice things about your father, I’ll need to beat them back with my cane!” I drained my glass. “Christ, he’ll probably end up on some tropical island in the South Pacific and outlive us all.”

Allen drained his own glass. “I’ll drink to that!”

In Washington Newt and the Gang of Eight (now Seven, since Rick had moved up in the world) began to get a lesson in practical politics from one William Jefferson Clinton. I was expecting it, even if the others weren’t, and it was still a shock. Some of the others were reeling, and Newt was truly pissed that Slick Willie wasn’t rolling over and playing dead like a good Democrat should. Clinton laid low for the first couple of weeks of the new session, allowing us to introduce one of our Contract bills every day. When asked, as he invariably was, he simply promised to work with the new Congress and the new Congressional leadership to forge legislation that was both bipartisan and able to move the country forward. Very innocuous stuff.

To what extent he was trying to lure us into a sense of false security I’m not sure. While he wasn’t screaming, some of his key lieutenants were. The ones I heard the most from were Dick Gephardt and Dave Bonior, both of whom were experienced, thoroughly tied into the moneymen, and as crooked as the day was long. The Republican takeover of Congress was an unnatural event, ranking right up there with having sex with dead donkeys, and needed to be reversed. They immediately began taking our legislation and picking it to pieces in the hopes of destroying it entirely. Even better, if they could destroy it, they could then trumpet how the Republicans had failed in our Contract with America and should be sent packing at the next election.

Some of the bills were easy pickings for them. The two most obvious items were John Boehner’s Balanced Budget Act and my Rebuilding America Act. These were the two bills most likely to be compromised by the Dems - and everybody else, for that matter! Both were major spending bills and allowed an infinite number of ways for a Congressman to loot the Treasury on behalf of his constituents, or contributors. Sometimes it is something innocuous and cheap (by government standards) such as the Federal funding of yet another corn museum in Iowa. Other times it can be ridiculously extravagant projects like the ‘bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska, which ran almost a third of a billion dollars, and connected the mainland to a town with only fifty residents. This is pork barrel politics at its most nitty and gritty. Remember the mighty word ‘earmark.’

I warned John and the others what was going to happen, and that if we tried to stop the process, we would get nothing but heartache. The best we could accomplish was to control and influence things, and keep the lid on the more ridiculous stuff, by throwing spotlights on them, as necessary. We also had to control our own side, who now that they were in positions of power wanted to get their own blessing of pork.

Some of the bills were going to be shitcanned. After a few weeks of review, the word came down that Clinton was going to flat out veto my Defending the 2^nd Amendment bill. He had just signed the Brady bill into law in the last session and here we were trashing it. While I hadn’t touched the section on requiring background checks on handgun purchase, we had totally wiped out the ban on assault weapons and replaced it with a piece on limiting magazine sizes and were violating states’ rights on the permit issue. Worse, I was both a murderous bastard (no, Bill didn’t call me that, but he came close, citing my ‘proclivity to shoot first and ask questions later’) and calling me a shill for the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which I wasn’t even a member of. I simply shrugged and began finding enough votes to override the veto. I could do that in the House; the Senate was much more questionable. I would need to line up sixty-seven votes there and might have to accept a watered-down bill to manage that.

All the other stuff, tort reform and welfare fixes and social security and such, they would do the rope-a-dope technique. Every little bit would be fucked with and delayed, and modified so much as to be unrecognizable, in the hopes that we would drop the hot potato before they could get Clinton to veto it. Some of it they figured would die of its own weight. We would never get enough Congressmen to sign off on any meaningful Congressional reform, so Bill could stand back and look statesmanlike and sorrowful when we couldn’t even get our own house in order.

Newt and the Majority Leader and Whip, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, were taking a more laid-back approach to some of this. Newt’s big plan wasn’t so much the legislation as the spectacle and effect. He had used the Contract with America to take back both houses of Congress. If we got the legislation to pass, so much the better. We had a big meeting with the Gang of Eight and the Republican leadership of both the House and the Senate in February and got our marching orders. Newt and Bob Dole were working on driving a stake through Clinton’s heart for the next election. Generalship on the various bills he was leaving up to DeLay and those of us with our names on the bills.

The biggest change between now and the first time through on this for me was that this time we already had the Senate lined up. On my first trip through, Newt had only handled things in the House, and didn’t have any decent support in the other house. Since nothing can go to the President until both houses pass it and cobble something together, this added months to the process. This time we had started much earlier. We had brought some Senators in on things. We had Senate versions of all our bills ready to go the same day we dropped the House bills into the hopper. By April we had most of the bills passed, sometimes over Democratic screaming, but passed. (Well, not Congressional Reform or Tort Reform, they would probably never pass!) Now it was up to Bill Clinton to either sign them into law or veto them.

Clinton had ten days to sign them into law or veto them. If the Congress went out of session before he could sign them, they were effectively vetoed. (This is known as a pocket veto and is a useful tool to get a law passed that nobody really wanted and then get the President to dump it. You simply wait until the end of the session, pass it, and the President just ignores it until the clock runs out. Congress has managed to do something about whatever without really doing anything.) We didn’t give him that luxury. He waited nine days before giving the chop to most of them. Surprisingly, the Rebuilding America Act he let pass, probably because there was sufficient Democratic pork in it. I tried to control it, even going as far as pulling an all-nighter in the committee conference room with the Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Larry Pressler, during final markup. Still, we had plenty of pork for everybody.

I did not envy John Boehner and his Balanced Budget Act, or John Doolittle and his Business Tax Reform Act. Doolittle had promised that his focus was on eliminating loopholes and tax shelters. He was promising to lower rates if we eliminated loopholes and shelters. Everybody liked the first part of that, but not so much the second. Then again, if Boehner could close the budget gap, which had been over $200 billion last year, we could afford lower rates. It had been done the first time through, why not do it again?

Meanwhile I tried to get home and be father and husband. One of the benefits of having a driver and security detail was that it made it easier to haul Charlie and his bike to various races. When I started with increased security and drivers, I bought a Ford F-150 with a hitch package, and a small enclosed trailer to carry his bike. Then, with one of the drivers hauling the gear, the family could follow in a second people-mover minivan. In neither life had I ever learned to drive while towing something, but I could usually find a driver who had learned somewhere. Charlie was now competing outside of Maryland as well, in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia.

Charlie was making a real name for himself now, and was interviewed at a race in Hedgesville, out near Hagerstown but just across the border into West Virginia. He was named along with several other junior riders in a piece on ‘Pros of the Future!’ I commented to Marilyn later that what he really liked about the magazine was the pictures of the pretty girls standing next to the motorcycles. My wife rolled her eyes but didn’t argue. Our little boy was growing up and showing decidedly heterosexual tendencies.

I sat down with him one evening after a Boy Scout troop meeting, one where he seemed a bit listless and disinterested. “What’s with you and the Scouts?” I asked.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“You, tonight. You didn’t seem all that thrilled to be there.”

Charlie grimaced. “It’s not the Scouts. Next month we’re doing a camping trip down to someplace in Virginia. Some place called Winchester or something.”

I nodded. “That’s in the Shenandoah Valley. Very nice area. Should be fun.”

“Yeah, but that’s the same weekend as a race in Pittsburgh. I mean, I mentioned that to you, right? You said I could go and all.” Charlie was sounding a touch whiney.

“Okay, settle down. Sure, you probably said it, and that’s fine with me. You need to decide. You can’t do everything. School’s the most important thing, and if you don’t bring your grades up and keep them there, there’s no racing anyway.” Charlie looked horrorstricken at the thought but nodded mutely. “After that, you need to decide what you’re going to do. If you can’t do both the racing and the Scouting, you need to decide. You can’t do them both half-assed. You need to figure out what’s important to you.”

He nodded again, lost in thought, so I kept on. “What about school? You were on the JV football team last fall, right? Do you plan to keep playing sports? Can you do that, too? Do you expect your mother to take you to all these places and still manage to come down to Washington? She’s also taking your sisters to do their stuff, too.”

“Uhhhh...”

“Well, we don’t need an answer now, but you need to start planning. You need to think about what is important to you. Nobody, not even me, can do everything,” I told my son.

He didn’t say much, so I sent him off to think. Marilyn came through from the kitchen at that point and saw his somber face. She asked, “What’s with him? He looks like his dog just died.” Dum-Dum took that opportunity to jump up and try to lick her face. “No, Dum-Dum, not you!”

I had to laugh at that. I rubbed Dum-Dum’s head and she jumped into my lap and lay down for a nap, well deserved after a long day of sleeping. Then she farted and both Marilyn and I had to rub our watery eyes! “It wasn’t me!” I protested.

“No, even you don’t smell that bad. Oh, Dum-Dum, what have you been eating?” Marilyn sat down in her chair and Dum-Dum jumped across to her lap, eliciting an “Ooof!” from Marilyn.

“I told Charlie he has to set some priorities. He can’t keep racing and doing Scouting and doing afterschool sports. He has to make some choices.” I explained our conversation.

She sighed and agreed. “I know! I mean, there’s his sports and the girls in Brownies and ballet and his Boy Scouts and the church and...” She finished with a line I had heard before. “I need a wife of my own!”

I let her run down for a bit before interrupting. “Marilyn, you’re as bad as the kids. You need to make some priorities. You can’t do all this stuff either. You have to tell the kids what you can do and then stick to it! Unless you want to hire a nanny...”

“NO!”

“ ... then you need to get serious about your schedule. You can’t keep up like this. You’ll kill yourself!”

As I expected, Marilyn protested that it really wasn’t that bad, that she could do everything she needed to. It was an argument we had had before, both in this life and in my last. She refused to believe she couldn’t do everything. At home this usually meant a long list of projects she would start and then never finish. Time management was not Marilyn’s strong suit. I sighed and half nodded to her. The only way this would end was when the kids all moved out and we were on our own. “We just need to sell the kids off,” I said, which elicited a laugh from Marilyn.

Just then Holly came wandering through. I looked over at her and asked, “When’s your birthday?”

My daughter gave me an odd look. “July 23.”

I nodded solemnly. “Just like last year. And you’ll be how old?”

“I’ll be eleven.”

“Excellent. Only seven years to go,” I announced.

“Seven years to go to what?”

“Seven years to go until you’re eighteen and I can kick you out the door!” I jumped out of my chair and chased her around the living room. Holly started squealing and ran away, to be joined a moment later when Molly came out. Then Dum-Dum jumped up and hopped around on Marilyn’s lap. After a couple of minutes, the twins ran squealing down the hallway and their bedroom door slammed shut.

Marilyn rubbed the dog’s belly which made her settle down. “Do we have to wait until they’re eighteen?” she asked.

“Why wait! We’ve got twenty-five acres here. If we dig a deep enough hole, nobody will find them!” I went into the kitchen to make dinner.

By August I got a phone call from Helen Steiner that I had been dreading. I had been checking with Tucker Potsdam and a few of the people around the Buckman Group all spring and summer. John Steiner had told us that after the going-away party none of us would see him until the funeral, and he had been true to his word. After their round the world trip, they had returned home, puttered around a few days, and then had flown to Europe for an extended tour and vacation. They stayed in Europe until the beginning of July, when John’s health began completely falling apart, and the cancer and pain had spread too much. They came home, and he had hospice begin treating him at his home. He passed away the second week of August.

As I promised him, I was one of his pallbearers, and spoke at his memorial service. I don’t remember what I said, I had written words down, but never bothered taking them out of my coat pocket, and simply spoke from the heart. Nobody seemed to notice, and everybody had a good cry. In the audience, I saw my father sitting, but I had been closer to John than I had been to my dad. We didn’t talk. That made it doubly worse for me. I realized that not only one of my oldest friends was dead, but to me, my father was dead also. I drank more than I should that night, sitting in my office at the house.

Then it was back to work. Back in D.C. the American Renaissance Institute came into being. Marty found a guy named Porter Boardman over at the Cato Institute who wanted to move up in the world and passed his name along to Bob Seaver. We had Bob sound him out on a few things and began funding things. The only people who knew what I was doing were Seaver and Marty, and we wanted it kept that way. The ARI was set up as a think tank devoted to ‘common sense’ ideas, somewhat libertarian, which was how Porter was found. The ARI would have a board of directors and a fundraising staff, they could hire lawyers and lobbyists, and start trying to influence things.

I wasn’t sure how this would play out, but Seaver promptly got Boardman to hire a law firm registered as lobbyists to start pushing to pass D2A. His line was that a major funding outfit wanted it passed. Initially this was just a junior lawyer and a staffer sitting in on some of our meetings at the Heritage Foundation. Still, you had to start somewhere. Ultimately, I’d be able to go to my think tank, just like a regular Congressman, propose some ideas, have them actually write the legislation, and then hire the various lobbyists as needed. If the money flowed, nobody would care. We budgeted five million that first year.

A big part of getting things passed is ‘counting noses’, determining who will vote which way and why. We had enough House votes to override, but not in the Senate. As much as I detested working with them, we needed the NRA to bend over and get butt-fucked. The only way I was going to get this passed was to repeal my repeal of the assault weapons ban. This was simply foaming-mouth anathema to them, and the restraint on magazine capacities of over ten rounds wasn’t much better. The only thing they really liked was the demand for reciprocal permitting and the ‘shall issue’ requirement (and they really liked those parts, which made some of the other stuff acceptable.) Again, I had the House lined up, but digging up ten Democratic Senators was going to be tough - as in, expensive. There would be a lot of campaign contributions for this one.