April 16, 2006
 
BOOK REVIEW / COMMENTARY: ‘The Hammer Comes Down: Political Junkie Book with Implications for All Voters; Lord Acton Was Right about Power Corrupting; Some Suggestions for Campaign Reform
 
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
 
Tom DeLay is who all of us want to be when we grow up.— Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, introducing the then majority leader to a 2003 convention of wildly cheering College Young Republicans (from “The Hammer Comes Down”).
 
Hinton, WV (HNN) – The obvious target audience for “The Hammer Comes Down: The Nasty, Brutish, and Shortened Political Life of Tom DeLay” by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid (PublicAffairs paperback, $13.95, 336 pages, index) is the hard-core cadre political junkies who watch C-Span morning, noon and night and probably know a lot about the former majority leader and indicted politician already.
 
Thomas Dale DeLay, who stepped down as majority leader after he was indicted last September in Travis County (Austin) Texas (an appendix contains complete information on the indictment by Travis County D.A. Ronnie Earle), recently announced he wasn’t running for re-election from his base in Sugar Land, Fort Bend County, near Houston. The paperback version of the 2004 book “The Hammer” is timely because DeLay and his associates and friends Mike Scanlon and Jack Abramoff and dozens of others will continue to make news.
 
The authors cover a lot of territory in this book and some of it will be of interest only to the aforementioned junkies and fans of the blood sport known as Texas politics. This is too bad, because the book displays for all to see the major faults of the modern American political system.
 
It’s a system characterized by continual fund-raising, out-of-control lobbying, often by former members of Congress who can quadruple their salaries by moving to the K Street lobby mills and law firms – not to mention former staffers like Scanlon, who – before he entered a world of legal woe – managed to make millions in lobbying efforts with Abramoff and on his own. A Google of Scanlon turns up fresh instances of the corrupting influence of campaign contributions to politicians in Alabama and elsewhere. Chapter 10: “K Street Kingpin” details the power DeLay exercised over the lobbying industry in the District.
 
After leaving the staff of DeLay, R-TX, Scanlon was running Capitol Campaign Strategies, a public relations firm that shared clients with Jack Abramoff, the convicted lobbyist at the center of the federal investigation. One of the clients that Abramoff and Scanlon shared was the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, whose casino interests in Philadelphia, Miss., feared an expansion of gambling next door in Alabama, according to the April 14, 2006 Birmingham (Alabama) News.
 
The section about DeLay’s efforts to rid Texas of white Democratic politicians is probably of interest mostly to Texans, but it shows his lust for power. Unlike veteran U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan D-WV, who went from having credit card balances of $100,000 in 2000 to today owning million dollar properties on Bald Head Island, N.C., DeLay’s houses in both Sugar Land and the Washington area are modest, with his place in Washington being almost on the poverty level in the superheated housing market inside the Beltway, according to the authors.
 
As in real life, which is almost always messy and disorganized, “The Hammer Comes Down” is more or less a collection of chapters in the political life of Tom DeLay. There’s a chapter on the Marianas (Saipan), which details the virtual slavery sweatshops that produced “Made in the U.S. garments for Wal-Mart and other retailers. Ken Lay of Enron also figures in this chapter, with the failed Houston company headed by friend-of-DeLay Lay at one time on the fast track to build a power plant on Saipan.
 
The authors recount his run-ins with President George W. Bush, who is undoubtedly delighted that the former pest exterminator from the Houston suburbs will return to Texas; Bush, according to the authors, blames DeLay’s independence of and contempt for Bush for many of his problems in Congress. I’m not so sure DeLay will return to Sugar Land: If he dodges the Ronnie Earle bullet – a big if: he may end up on K Street himself.
 
There’s also an account – beginning on Page 259 -- of the complex relationship between U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, and DeLay. McCain is every liberal’s favorite conservative and Dubose and Reid are Texas liberals of the Ronnie Dugger (Texas Observer) and Molly Ivins persuasion. In fact, Dubose wrote two excellent books about Bush and Rove with Ivins.
 
Mention the “Keating Five” to today’s political junkie and his or her eyes glaze over. I was in the thick of it, covering real estate at the Los Angeles Times, when the S&L scandal broke in the 1980s with Southern California as the ground zero. Savings and loans were virtually eliminated in the wake of the massive scandal that involved the sainted McCain.
 
Here is the excellent Wikipedia account of the scandal:
 
“The Keating Five (or Keating Five Scandal) refers to a Congressional scandal related to the collapse of most of the Savings and Loan institutions in the United States in the late 1980s.
 
”Following the deregulation of the banking industry in the 1980s, savings and loan associations (also known as thrifts) were given the flexibility to invest their depositors' funds in commercial real estate. (Previously, they had been restricted to investing in residential real estate.) Many savings and loan associations began making risky investments. As a result, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the federal agency that regulates the industry, tried to clamp down on the trend. In so doing, however, the FHLBB clashed with the Reagan administration, whose policy was deregulation of many industries, including the thrift industry. The administration declined to submit budgets to Congress that would request more funding for the FHLBB's regulatory efforts.
 
”In 1989, the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, Calif., collapsed. Lincoln's chairman, Charles H. Keating Jr., was faulted for the thrift's failure. Keating, however, told the House Banking Committee that the FHLBB and its former chief Edwin J. Gray were pursuing a vendetta against him. Gray testified that several U.S. senators had approached him and requested that he ease off on the Lincoln investigation. It came out that these senators had been beneficiaries of $1.3 million (collective total) in campaign contributions from Keating.
 
”This allegation set off a series of investigations by the California government, the United States Department of Justice, and the Senate Ethics Committee. The ethics committee's investigation focused on five senators: Alan. Cranston (D-Calif.); Dennis W. DeConcini (D-Ariz.); John H. Glenn Jr. (D-Ohio); John S. McCain III (R-Ariz.); and Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Mich), who became known as the Keating Five.
 
”The ethics committee's special counsel concluded that of the five, Glenn (a former astronaut) and McCain (a former Prisoner Of War) were not substantially involved in the influence-peddling scheme. Indeed, it was believed at the time that the Democratic party, which at the time controlled the Senate, wanted McCain -- the only Republican in the group -- to remain a target of the investigation in order to avoid the impression that the scandal was only a Democratic problem. As Glenn's involvement with Keating was equivalent to McCain's, the only reason that Glenn was made a subject of the investigation was to keep McCain in the suspected group. After months of testimony revealed that all five senators acted improperly to differing degrees, the senators continually said they were following the status quo of campaign funding practices. In August 1991, the committee concluded that Cranston, DeConcini, and Riegle's conduct constituted substantial interference with the FHLBB's enforcement efforts and that they had done so at the behest of Charles Keating. The committee recommended censure for Cranston and criticized the other four for "questionable conduct."
 
”As it happened, Cranston, who was nearly 80 years of age, had already decided not to run for re-election in 1992. DeConcini and Riegle continued to serve in the Senate until their terms expired, but they did not seek re-election in 1994.
 
”Glenn did choose to run for re-election in 1992 and it was anticipated that he would have some difficulty winning a fourth term in the Senate. However, Glenn handily defeated U.S. Rep. R. Michael DeWine for one more term in the Senate before retiring in 1999.
 
”McCain also remained in the Senate and he made campaign finance reform a key legislative interest. The scandal was followed by a number of attempts to adopt campaign finance reform -- spearheaded by U.S. Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) -- but most attempts died in committee. A weakened reform was passed in the first year of President Bill Clinton's first term of office. Substantial campaign finance reform was not passed until the adoption of the McCain-Feingold Act.”
 
Yes, West Virginia, there is a Mollohan-DeLay connection. The mostly toothless tiger called the House Ethics committee, which the liberal New York Times called in an editorial “inert and feckless…a laughable oxymoron” has Mollohan as its ranking Democrat. Dubose and Reid call the Ethics Committee “a chickenshit operation” on its “best days.” Dubose and Reid add: “If you can count on anything in Washington, you can count on the Ethics Committee doing nothing.”
 
Mollohan, a member of Congress since 1982, is being investigated because of his real estate and financial dealings. In a statement, he said he has never benefited personally from the more than $180 million he appropriated to a group of five West Virginia nonprofits. The story about federal probes into the Fairmont, WV native’s financial affairs first appeared on the front page – above the fold – of the Friday, April 7, 2006 Wall Street Journal.
 
Follow-up stories quickly appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
 
The Times editorial goes on to say: “Republican partisans, looking to counter their own ethical problems, question how in the course of just four years Mr. Mollohan managed to become a millionaire while in Congress. The lawmaker denies any corner cutting, citing legitimate investments in a soaring real estate market. But clearly Mr. Mollohan deserves immediate scrutiny — if only Congress were up to that task.”
 
The editorial adds that “the ethics committee was immobilized by Republican leaders back when Representative Tom DeLay ran into trouble in 2004. It has gathered more cobwebs than courage…. If Democrats seriously seek the anticorruption edge in the coming elections, they had better force Representative Mollohan to quit the panel. More important, both parties have little time left to show some spine and approve a vital proposal, now bottled up, to create an independent integrity office. It would have the power to investigate dicey legislative dealings and enforce standards for a Congress now in ethics denial.”
 
Unfortunately, the McCain-Feingold Act barely scratches the surface of campaign reform. An independent integrity office, as The Times calls it, would be a start. But many observers, including your humble reviewer, believe it’s time to bring in term limits. I would limit members of the house to four terms or eight years and members of the Senate to two terms or 12 years. As it stands, it’s virtually impossible to dislodge an incumbent, since many voters buy into the belief – false, I think – that while Congress is rotten to the core, our particular member of the House or Senate is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
 
Before term limits were adopted in the California legislature, it ranked as one of the worst in the nation. It’s a little better now and term limits have helped. About lobbying, I would have the “independent integrity office” adopt rules making any monetary contribution, free travel – including the infamous golf trips of DeLay, Abramoff and others – strictly forbidden. As Dubose and Reid note (Page 288), DeLay and Abramoff succeeded in giving “golf a bad name.” Any violation would lead to instant dismissal from Congress: One strike and you’re out. All campaigning would be publicly financed and would be limited to a few weeks before the election, as in most of the world’s democracies. Private campaign contributions, “soft money,” and all the rest of the corrupting influence of money would be banned.
 
Publisher’s web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com