Conservatives Without Conscience

As a result of the embarrassing indictment of Tom DeLay and the guilty plea of the man with whom he had worked most closely on K Street, Jack Abramoff, Republicans were forced to take a few preemptive measures. Those campaigning for his job as majority leader—Representatives Roy Blunt (R-MO), John Boehner (R-OH), and John Shadegg (R-AZ)—all pledged to lighten up on the K Street Project’s extortion racket. Yet Roll Call reported that all of them were, at the same time, relying on their K Street contacts to help them win.[41] Even friendly observers acknowledged that Republicans were doing little to change their ways. “The truth is that none of this will truly reduce corruption any more than the previous lobbying reform did,” according to the editors of the Wall Street Journal. “If the Members were serious about reform,” the Journal advised, “they’d put in place rules that restrict themselves. They could insist, for example, that at least three days pass after final legislation is drafted, so they could actually read the bills before they vote on them. Or they could eliminate ‘earmarks,’ which have proliferated under GOP rule and are now a preferred way that members pay off lobbyists.”[42]

Once Boehner became majority leader, even the proposed cosmetic changes were dropped, and it was back to business as usual. Republicans have, for all practical purposes, effectively imposed one-party rule on Washington. “It is breathtaking,” said Thomas Mann, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution. “It’s the most hard-nosed effort I’ve seen to use one’s current majority to enlarge and maintain that majority.”[43] Republicans have accomplished one-party rule by “patronage, cronyism and corruption,” observed Paul Krugman of the New York Times,[44] who might well have been describing Jack Abramoff’s mantra.

Abramoff, who contributed mightily toward one-party dominance, is another poster boy for Double High authoritarian conservatism, a disposition that has been evident from the outset of his career. He entered Republican politics at a relatively high level, through the College Republicans. In 1980, while an undergraduate at Brandeis, he met Grover Norquist, who was then an MBA student at Harvard. The two teamed up, with Abramoff taking the more visible role as head of the Massachusetts Federation of College Republican Clubs, and produced over ten thousand youth votes for Reagan. This turned out to be a significant contribution, because although Reagan carried Massachusetts, it was by only three thousand votes.[45] After graduation, Abramoff and Norquist headed for Reagan’s Washington, and in 1981, Abramoff sought the chairmanship of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC), spending ten thousand dollars of his personal funds to campaign for a job that did not pay much more. To win the chairmanship, Franklin Foer of the New Republic reported, “Abramoff and his campaign manager, Norquist, promised their leading competitor, Amy Moritz, the job of CRNC executive director if she dropped out of the race. Moritz took the bait, but it turned out that Abramoff had made the promise with his fingers crossed. Norquist took the executive director job.”[46] The jobs brought prestige to two young conservatives on the make and plugged them into the Republican Party power network. At that time, heavy-hitting conservative millionaires, like beermeister Joseph Coors and Nixon’s former treasury secretary, William Simon, were providing increasingly large sums of money to attract young people to conservatism. Abramoff would serve as CRNC’s chairman from 1981 to 1985, one of the longest terms since the founding of the organization in 1892.[47]

“The [College Republican National] Committee is the place were Republican strategists learn their craft and acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like disorganized children,” Foer wrote of his firsthand look at the “importuning, backstabbing and horse trading” of the 2005 contest for its chairmanship. “Walking through the halls of the [2005] convention,” Foer reported, “it was easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the [2000] Florida recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth [in 2004]. Republicans learn how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another first.” Grover Norquist advised 2005 conventioneers, “There are no rules in a knife fight.”[*][48]