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BOOK REVIEW/’Fight Club Politics’ pulls punches against GOP House dictatorship Juliet Eilperin, Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives (NY: Rowman and Littlefield in cooperation with Hoover Institution, 2006) 168 pages, $19.95 By Roger Bybee Despite its promise to hammer Washington, DC’s appallingly nasty politics, Juliet Eilperin’s Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives turns out to be a badly-overrated featherweight relying on a sneaky right hook. From Eilperin’s appearance on Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” program, many NPR listeners may have mistakenly conclude that Fight Club Politics was an insightful expose of the under-handed House Republicans’ tactics and both parties’ overly-partisan rhetoric. The state of democracy has become so weak, she warns that “the current rates of House turnover may equal historic rates of turnover in the Politburo,” thanks to re-districting designed to protect existing House members.
These “bullet-proof” incumbents are detached from the real responsibilities of running the nation and unwilling to cooperate across party lines, reflecting a near-total loss of civility. “Both parties acknowledge that politics in the House is more about strategy than governing,” she informs us.
But apart from a few informed observations, Fight Club Politics actually amounts to a flimsy whitewash of the Republicans’ strong-arm tactics in devastating democracy in the House. Where Eilperin could easily be revealing how the GOP’s dictatorial reign has served big donors like the drug industry and firms that charter themselves in Bermuda to avoid US taxes, she offers up only safe conventional wisdom about the equal sins of each “extremist” political party.
Notably absent from Eilperin’s book is any account of the Republicans’ infamous “K Street Project,” spawned by then-Whip Tom DeLay, strategist Grover Norquist, and now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The K Street Project involved harnessing corporate interest groups, their lobbyists and law firms ever more tightly to the Republican Party. In this way, the Republicans could more efficiently convert (mostly) legal payoffs by big campaign contributors into rapid policy paybacks from DeLay and Co. This kind of efficient loop between payoffs and paybacks has demanded an unprecedented bending of House rules and more fundamentally a distortion of democracy by the Gingrich-DeLay generation of Republicans.
The Republicans’ dictatorial regime in the House has included numerous spectacular episodes: the pharmaceutical-friendly Medicare drug bill that required outlandish violations of House rules (including a vote held open nearly three hours instead of the requisite 15 minutes); the extreme top-down centralization of leadership under Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert and their crew, with severe punishments for dissenters; the corporate-funded gerrymandering of Texas that produced seven additional Republican House seats although opposed by Justice Dept. lawyers as a violation of minority voting rights (for Eilperin, the entire matter is reduced to the Democrats being merely “out-maneuvered”); extra-heavy GOP stacking of committees, the exclusion of Democrats from discussions on bill-writing, and the fact that 85% of House bills in 2004 prohibited any amendments that could potentially embarrass the Republicans.
Some of Fight Club’s most glaring distortions arise from Eilperin’s separation of the obviously partisan styles of combat prevalent in the House of Representatives from the momentous stakes involved. Thus, she detaches the House Republicans’ all-out trampling of traditional House rules and procedural democracy from the slavishly pro-corporate agenda they have been tenaciously fighting to enact.
The essence of the Republican strategy has been explicitly to neuter the Democratic minority, cutting off the traditional capacity of the minority to participate in discussions, debate and offer amendments. Grover Norquist, a central figure in shaping Republican strategy from his perch at Americans for Tax Reform, once smirked, “Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant. But when they've been 'fixed,' then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful." (Predictably, the quote does not appear in Fight Club Politics).
Despite the enormity of fundamental Republican infringements on democracy within the House, Eilperin nonetheless concludes, “Democrats have been waging a daily war in Washington, against the GOP as unrelenting and nearly as virulent as that of their counterparts on the other side of the aisle.” Feeble evidence is marshaled to back up this claim, or her patently false assertion that the Democrats are equally “extreme” and “ideological” as their Republican counterparts.
Eilperin’s comfortable brand of conventional wisdom—both parties are extreme and uncivil and do bad things, so we need a less partisan approach and more competitive districts—simply ignores the reality of the past 12 years since Newt Gingrich and Co. regained a Republican majority. As documented in superb work like the 2004 Boston Globe series by Susan Milligan and Robert Kuttner’s “America As a One-Party State” article in American Prospect (Feb. 1, 2004), the Republicans have engaged in a no-holds-barred holy war in the interests of major corporations and the wealthy. The GOP jihad has been fueled by unprecedented amounts of strategic campaign contributions from America’s richest 1% including corporate CEOs, an issue neglected entirely by Eilperin. While fixated on redistricting as a force insulating incumbents from their constituents, she ignores the role of campaign contributions (less than 1% of Americans provide 80% of campaign donations) in consolidating incumbents’ power.
Eilperin continually appears oblivious to the clear linkage between the Republicans’ undemocratic tactics and their dedication to provide government favors to narrow corporate interests funding their campaigns. Eilperin even promotes the heroic stature of Rep. Billy Tauzin, former chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Tauzin’s main claim to fame is crafting the Medicare drug bill to the specifications of the drug industry (including a ban on drug imports from lower-priced Canada and explicitly prohibiting the federal government from negotiating drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries) before taking a job as president and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, at a reported $2 million per year. When Tauzin’s appointment was announced, opponents of the drug bill exploded. “A chief architect of he Medicare prescription drug legislation is now going to represent the chief beneficiary of the bill,” fumed Rep. Henry Waxman.
Seemingly untroubled by this blatant payoff to Tauzin for placing the profits of Big Pharma ahead of the needs of desperate senior citizens, Eilperin portrays the ever “civil” Tauzin as unfairly accused of corruption by the Democrats because the written record suggests that the representative negotiated the post after the bill was passed. But for Eilperin, the Democrats were unfairly harsh based on the written record of PHRMA’s overtures to Tauzin, utterly neglecting the virtual certainty that Tauzin’s courting by the industry’s sophisticated lobby would conducted to avoid leaving a paper trail. Bizarrely, Eilperin details the gentlemanly Tauzin’s plan to restore “civility” to the House.
Ulitmately, when it comes to analyzing Washington politics, Fight Club Politics is punch-drunk after too many hits of much conventional wisdom and, in the memorable words of Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront,” is destined for “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee, Wis. Writer and activist. He can be reached at winterbybee@earthlink.net.
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