WEB EXTRA
Interview – Peter A. DeFazio, MA ’77, Member of Congress
Peter DeFazio, MA ’77, is Oregon’s longest serving sitting congressman, representing southwest Oregon since 1987. He’s a staunch progressive, known for being outspoken and independent, especially when he opposed the Iraq War and, more recently, President Obama’s compromise with Republicans to extend Bush-era tax cuts. A resident of Springfield, he graduated from the UO with an interdisciplinary master’s degree combining gerontology, counseling, and public administration.
Kirk Bailey, BA ’91, JD ’96, sat down with the Congressman days before the 112th Congress convened. Here’s how it went:
How ‘bout them Ducks? Any reaction to the UO playing in the BCS Championship game?
It’s pretty exciting. I remember when I first came here in 1969 a big game was playing Army or something and losing. So, this is a pretty different world. We had a lot of character, shall we say, in those days, not such a great record.
You are originally from Massachusetts but came to Oregon to attend the UO and got your master’s degree in 1977?
I had sort of a speckled graduate career. The Air Force actually sent me here in a program that no longer exists run by Clancy Thurber and John Gange. They called it the Institute for International Studies and Overseas Administration. It was a two-year program, they had a Ford Foundation grant and one of the great things was everyone in the program got to go for summer term to their area of specialty. Except the year I got here they ran out of money so nobody got to go anywhere. My brother actually came back from Vietnam and came to UO to go to graduate school at the same time. So we came here together. I was sent here by the Air Force and he came back out of the Army and we met here. That was my introduction to the UO and Oregon.
Then about a year and half into that, the Air Force was drawing down the end of the [Vietnam] War and I was offered a chance for an honorable discharge, so I took it. I didn’t have a real military mindset at that point in my life and so I didn’t finish the first program. I kicked around for a little while, and then, finally got re-engaged with an interdisciplinary program. They had an interdisciplinary master’s, so you could structure your own program, which was much better for me. I don’t take well to structured education. So, it was counseling, gerontology, and public administration. We had a school for gerontology then that was quite good, and it was the beginning of the School of Public Administration. So I got my master’s finally in ’77, but I had already left at that point to run a senior citizen program and finished up part time.
What made you stay in Oregon?
When I got to Oregon I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I couldn’t imagine a place so beautiful and ideal. Here I was in Eugene, 60 miles from the ocean and about 70 miles from skiing. I love the ocean and I love the mountains, so when I was a young man I thought this was pretty incredible. And the culture here. People were nice. The check out person would talk to you. When you went to get your driver’s license at the DMV there wasn’t a line a half mile long with a person at the end who would say ‘wait a minute, you misspelled this word or this is wrong – go back to the end of the line, start over again and fill out a new form.’ Here was a place where government functions. I’d go back to Massachusetts, and tell people ‘I bet I could probably get an appointment to see the [Oregon] Governor if I wanted.’ McCall was governor. It’s this open place, small-town kinda thing, it’s really different. So I got here and just fell in love.
What is your favorite memory of your time at the University of Oregon?
O’boy. Favorite memory from my time at the UO? [deep sigh] It was a tumultuous time, so there were demonstrations. I remember being in an economics class in the corner of the building just opposite the bookstore [Condon Hall]. The windows were open. It was a hot fall day. We were sitting up there and there’s this [chant] – “Save French Pete, Save French Pete.” The professor goes over, looks out and says, “Oh, there’s Ken Kesey and a group. I guess they’re going to march down to the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] office. It’s a beautiful day, and it’s a good thing to do, so why don’t you all go along if you want.” So, I did and we marched over to the BLM offices that were on High Street at the time or someplace around there. Then Kesey gets up in this buckskin jacket and starts talking about French Pete. And they had this famous little old lady, she was famous because she drove around in her pickup truck with bags of sugar in the back and whenever she saw a Forest Service truck she’d pour sugar in the gas tank. I’m a month into Oregon and I’ve never seen anything like this before. [Laughs.] Pretty incredible. That was quite an introduction.
So, your favorite memory is a story of the Merry Pranksters?
I don’t know who else from the Pranksters would have been there but I had read his books [Kesey] and was already a fan. I’d never seen him anywhere. Then I go to this demonstration and there he is. And we did save French Pete. So, it was great, and really launched me on environmental preservation at that point in time, the whole French Pete campaign.
You have been described as “Oregon's equal opportunity provocateur." Was that demonstration the beginning?
[laughs] That was definitely the beginning of my activist phase. It went from French Pete and environmental issues at that point in time. Also that was right around the time of the secret war, the bombing in Cambodia. There were big demonstrations. The closing of 13th happened somewhere in there. We had a street fair and then we decided fight to keep the street closed. We built a wall and we’d guard the wall. I can’t remember the whole thing. It’s so long ago. Finally, somehow we did finally get that street closed off to through traffic. I think it was reopened again but then closed again later. I remember being there and building the wall [and] demonstrations in front of the administration building. Ron Eachus was student body president, up front leading the group. In those days, the Lane County sheriff was much more formidable and better staffed than it is these days and there was a whole line of guys in riot gear with giant batons all around the corner, and I thought ‘oh, this probably isn’t good.’ It never did devolve to violence; they just started up some pepper foggers. So, it was a fairly tumultuous time and I would say that started my activist phase.
College costs and tuition are rising while state budgets are decreasing, creating an enormous debt burden on students and families. What do you think of public universities using public funds to create endowments to cover college education costs?
Affordability is becoming a critical barrier. People should be able to go to college on ability to learn, not ability to earn. I borrowed what, in those days, seemed like a lot of money to go to college and graduate school. I graduated with about $10,000 or $12,000 debt and, of course, these days for an undergraduate degree, the average is over $20,000. It starts directing your career path, which I think is very unfortunate, because people have to start thinking about how to pay loans off and work, even if you have more dreams or desires. I think it’s becoming a worse and worse problem. The last bastions have been public universities and it was really cheap when I was going. We’ve got to figure ways to deal with affordability.
The endowments are interesting. It was not that long ago that Congress was threatening the likes of Harvard and saying if they didn’t use their endowments to help students with access and affordability that we might begin taxing endowments. At a number of schools there was a major shift to provide assistance so anybody who could get in, could go – one way or another it would be paid for. I’d love to see us get to that state with the UO and other schools in Oregon. It would take a heck of an endowment, obviously, to get there. That can be one tool that could work. Obviously, it would take a tremendous effort in terms of fundraising. I remember when Dave Frohnmayer started the first big campaign kick-off 15 years ago. I can’t remember the objective, it was far exceeded, but at the time, people questioned how are you going to raise that money? It’s possible but it’s a tremendous amount of work.
The other thing, I do community college scholarships for displaced workers, trying to encourage people to think more about helping the next generation get a leg up and how gratifying it is. Starting with the guy who was a high school dropout, worked in a mill on and off, had a good living, finally he decided he was going to go back to school, and within three years, he had gotten not only his GED and his bachelors, had his master’s degree and became a superintendent of schools and is now superintendent of schools in Ontario. Great story, incredibly gratifying to me, and it wasn’t that much money for me to give. But the return to him was phenomenal.
What achievement (legislative/political) gives you the most satisfaction?
When I was County Commissioner, I got elected in what was then the great depression, the early ’80s, in Oregon. Obviously it wasn’t the duration and depth of this one. When I came to the County everybody was working part time, I think we were open four days a week. Commissioners would be there but the county offices would be closed. At one point the commissioners voted themselves a pay raise, and I said, ‘wow, while people are laid off?’ So I started turning back money. Then when I got elected to Congress, it was same thing. Not long after I got there, Congress voted itself a big raise and I said ‘I don’t think Congress should be taking a big raise when the country is in deficit and we’ve got all these problems.’
So, I first started giving money back to defray national debt. After awhile I decided I could do better by helping individuals who then eventually become tax-paying citizens and then they’ll help pay off the debt, too. So I started doing scholarships. I had fewer community colleges then, so I was doing four community college scholarships and a Presidential scholarship. Now, I’ve got five community colleges so I’m doing ten community college scholarships a year with pay raises I turn back. People I’ve met share their stories about what a difference it made. Legislative achievements are one thing, but when you’ve really made a definitive difference in somebody’s life, that’s incredibly gratifying.
I pride myself on having a very service-oriented, accessible office, and my caseworkers make a difference in people’s lives. When someone comes to my office with a problem if we can’t find an answer, we try to find a useful referral. We do a lot with disability, veterans, seniors, and Medicare problems. I’m really proud of that kind of day-to-day work.
Then, legislatively – my involvement in the Clinton era on county and school payments was critical. Now we are engaged in a whole new iteration of how we go forward with that and what does that mean for critical services in our counties in Oregon, which are now virtually confronted with bankruptcy. We are engaged in a pretty intense dialogue with the Obama Administration over that. Republican takeover of the House may make it a little harder, although Greg Walden is in a leadership position so we’ll see.
On a policy basis it’s more the things were I’ve fought and failed than in the things I’ve gotten done. I think we are so off course, particularly with our economic policies, our trade policies, the bailout of Wall Street and those things. I’ve been noted in those battles and I think I’ve made a difference and moved things but not been ultimately successful.
What was the hardest vote you ever cast?
Issues of war and peace. Not necessarily difficult in that I voted against both the Iraq Wars, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion for me, but to be engaged in the briefings, the lead-up, the debate, and to know that you are part of a group that is deciding to send young men and women off to war, some of whom will not return and some of whom will return grievously wounded and changed.
Those were difficult. There have been three war votes since I’ve been there, two Iraq and then Afghanistan. I had a major impact on the Afghan vote. Bush had originally proposed a resolution that would cover anything after we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. It was very broad - basically giving them discretion to go anywhere, proactively, if you want to have a war somewhere, go ahead. I was very concerned about it. At that point we were still trying to be unified. The Democratic Caucus was struggling with it, this was back when Nancy Pelosi was our Whip, she was at a much lower level. I said, ‘Nancy, all we have to do is write this consistent with the War Powers Act and restrict the language.’ Ultimately, the resolution that passed restricted activities to Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban who’d harbored him and anyone else who directly participated in the attack on the U.S., as opposed to the much broader thing that Bush proposed. So, he had to come back to us subsequently for the war resolution because we’d restricted it. That’s one of those unknown things, working on details of legislation, things that don’t get the headlines, but I played a major role in getting that resolution narrowed to avoid giving [the President] total discretion. I didn’t totally trust the Administration and unfortunately, was all too right.
You represent some of the most liberal and conservative parts of Oregon - how do you do balance those interests?
It’s not easy. It’s a very large, very diverse district, the thirtieth-eighth largest in land area in the Congress. Within that land area you can accommodate some pretty wildly divergent views, concerns, and priorities. It starts above Sweet Home in the Cascade Mountains and then all of Linn County, a lot of Benton, all of Lane, all of Coos, Curry, Douglas, and part of Josephine – from the California border up to Sweet Home and everything in between. So, I listen a lot, I rely on my counseling background and a lot of times a good counselor is someone who listens more than they talk. I get out a lot. I hold town meetings. I even held them at the height of the controversy over the health care bill. We had over 8,000 people come to those town meetings that summer and they were pretty angry. I remember after Douglas County, which we had to move to the fairgrounds and had well over a thousand people, the sheriff came up to me and said, ‘I can’t believe that you held that crowd together. And you didn’t get bated.’
Part of it is treating people with respect, even though their views are very different, listening, and responding very forthrightly. I remember when I was first running for office people would say ‘you’re never going to get elected – you tell people what you think.’ Well, it’s a good thing to tell people what you think because then you don’t have to think about it. I can go to Sweet Home and people will ask me what I think and I’ll say ‘here’s what I think.’ And I can go on over to Corvallis which can be fairly progressive, [or] down to Brookings, or I come to Springfield where I live, and say, ‘here’s what I think.’ You don’t have to think about what you told people. You tell them what your values are and in some parts of the district they agree, and in other parts they say ‘I think you are out to lunch but I appreciate the fact that you’re honest with me.’ I don’t know how many times people say to me ‘I don’t agree with a lot of what you do, but I appreciate the fact that I know where you stand and I’m still going to vote for you.’
How do you feel when you have to make a choice not in line with a significant portion or most of your constituents?
Well, that’s interesting. Particularly, in this last election or during the health-care debate, people [said], ‘Why don’t you do what people want?’ Well, you hired me to get into the guts of these issues and really understand them and make a judgment, maybe try and change them, make them better, but make a judgment in the end whether this is good for the country and for us in Oregon. You don’t have the time or energy to get into things that much, that’s why you hired me. If I did a poll, a lot of times, I’d do things that might seem popular at the time but a little later everyone would [say] ‘whoa - why did we do that?’ For instance, the war in Iraq – remember the crescendo that built up, the ‘cheese-eating frog monkeys’ or whatever they called the French, and all this bizarre stuff that went on? Remember those guys in Portland at some radio station crushing products from France or whatever, just assailing our allies and everything else. My poor person who runs my Roseburg office, she basically didn’t want to go out of the house or go to the grocery store because people were so angry about my vote against the war and thought it was so horrible. And one of the early casualties was from my district. It was really very, very difficult. But later, guess what, people said ‘that wasn’t a good idea, we didn’t need to do that, did we?’ Sometimes you go through a very difficult time, but all that changes. If you tell people why you did it, some people will appreciate it even though they don’t agree.
Another earlier vote would have been on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]. Back then everybody believed what Bill Clinton said, ‘I got hundreds of thousands of new jobs for the U.S., this is going to be great for our economy, we are all going to benefit from it, and it’s going to be good for people in Mexico.’ I said, ‘I really don’t see that here, and actually I think we are going to hemorrhage jobs to Mexico where they can exploit cheap labor over the border and avoid environmental laws; I think it’s going to cause problems in Mexico and we are going to lose jobs here.” I remember it was 70% popular [and] liberals would say I was just a protectionist. Five years later, people said, “you were right, weren’t you?”
I’m not always right, but sometimes you just have faith that you’ve spent a lot of time on this and you understand subtleties that no one else does, and what this is really going to do versus the way it’s represented in the press. And maybe you’re right, and maybe your not, but people respect that on some level.
After Democrats gained House majority in 2006 and Obama was elected in 2008, were you encouraged by the possibilities for a Progressive agenda?
Yes, incredibly excited. We couldn’t believe we had an African-American president. It was a very emotional inauguration. I remember walking on the Mall, it was masses of people when nothing was going on, just wandering around and being friendly. John Lewis [Congressman from Georgia] is a very good friend, he had a guy come up to him, and say ‘you’re John Lewis’ and ‘I’m from Round Hill’ or [somewhere in] one of the Carolina’s, it’s in John’s book. John says ‘I’ve been there once. What do you do?’ ‘I’m the police chief,’ the man replies. And John says ‘I got out of the bus there and I was beaten.’ He was a Freedom Rider, you know. So, they had this incredible interaction. Then [in] this unbelievable kind of coincidence, the guy who actually beat him, who was a city cop or a county deputy, actually asked John if he could come visit. And he did, he came in and he apologized – ‘I’m so sorry.’
So it was this incredible breakthrough, excitement and reconciliation. The potential was phenomenal. And then you get down to the nitty-gritty of governing. And the absurd dysfunction of the US Senate, which I believe, is essentially violating the Constitution of the United States by saying anything that is going to happen in the Senate has to happen by a super majority. We bumped up against that pretty darn quick. And then made some wrong turns.
I think the whole stimulus could have been more effective, put more people back to work. We got diverted into almost splitting it in half. People ask what happened to all of the infrastructure. Actually, 42 percent of the bill was tax cuts and didn’t put anybody to work, and didn’t help anybody get a job. Now, we are doing all tax cuts. We started on supply side theory in the Bush Administration and it hasn’t produced the jobs and now we are still doing it in the depths of a recession. It’s really very frustrating. Unfortunately, things unwound pretty quickly.
After the 2010 election, do you think Americans lost confidence in the Progressive movement and agenda?
No. A truly progressive agenda would have been, like FDR [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] and the Pecora Commission, getting to the bottom of what really happened on Wall Street, having subpoena power, putting some people in prison, and sending a message that would have brought about real reform and reined in reckless speculation.
Obama brought in an economic team that was a disaster – that was there to coddle Wall Street. Larry Summers and Timmy Geithner. They bring in Geithner and I asked, ‘Why Geithner?’ ‘Wall Street is comfortable with him.’ ‘That’s not what we need,’ I said, ‘I want a Treasury secretary who they’re not comfortable with.’ That was the first really sour note - the first thing on the agenda wasn’t straightening out the financial mess, getting to the root of it, and putting some responsible parties away for awhile and getting real reform.
Then, you go on to the stimulus, and as I said, a big portion of it was supply side tax cuts. A minimal amount of it was real long-term investment. All the money is borrowed. People got angry about that and then instead of continuing to focus on the economy and doing my transportation bill to give us a 21st-century transportation infrastructure and begin to catch up with the rest of the world and rebuild, we went off on cap and trade, which was based in Wall Street determin[ing] the future of carbon. I said, ‘have you people been paying any attention for the last two years?’ Have you seen what’s happened with market manipulation in Europe involving cap and trade and secondly, these Wall Street people are salivating. They only had the little housing market – now they’ve got something much bigger to gamble with. They said it’s going to be the biggest thing ever. People really turned sour at that point.
People will argue for years over what happened. Some columnists’ retrospective is that it was Congress and ‘those liberals in the House’ that ran us off the rails. Actually more of it came either from the White House or the obstruction of the Senate that led us down paths that were not a clear expression of truly progressive values. I look at the political spectrum like a horseshoe and you’ll sometimes find progressives down here [indicating one end of horseshoe] with true conservatives [indicating other end], in terms of their objectives. So, I don’t think we ever had a chance. We never did express a progressive agenda, so I don’t think it was rejected. I would not call this health care thing that we did, which is better than the status quo, but I would not call that a progressive vision for health care reform.
What do Progressives need to do over the next two years to advance with voters? To regain momentum?
I had a really interesting reaction to a number of my speeches on the tax bill. I had some truly conservative Republicans who voted against the tax bill say, ‘We generally have a pretty different agenda but we really share your concerns about the amount of debt we’re creating, and about what we are doing about the threat to Social Security, and how about we sit down and talk about a better way to move us toward something that is fiscally responsible.’ There may be some new meeting of the minds in some very strange ways, or different ways, than what we’ve seen so far.
The vision, or lack of vision, the negativity of many of these new members that have been elected, I don’t think that’s going to resonate well with people for very long. What is their positive vision for the country? How is that going to help a young person afford a higher education, for example? They want to roll back the fact that we’ve stopped subsidizing banks and we’re channeling money directly to students with lower price loans through Pell grants and direct student loans. They want to roll that back and go back to subsidizing the banks. Part of it depends on how much they overreach, what our message is, and whether we are offering productive alternatives to what they’re doing.
E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post has written that liberals need to “re-engage the country on what can only be called a spiritual level. […] At its best, [American liberalism] marries a practical, get-things-done approach to government with a devotion to fairness, justice and compassion.” What is your reaction to that?
Well, I’m not very philosophical or spiritual; I agree with the practical. I don’t think we provided a practical definable vision and we failed to defend it. Particularly in terms of the health care bill. We never should have taken the Senate health-care bill. It became take it or leave it. We should have said this doesn’t make sense. Why would you cripple exchanges and make them less efficient? We can provide people with cheaper insurance and we can do away with the monopoly and the anti-trust exemptions of the insurance agency. When I went around to my very angry town halls with 8,000 people on health care, the one thing I could get the single-payer and the TEA Party people to agree on was [whether] the insurance industry [should] be exempt from antitrust law, and they’d say ‘No!’ There are places where we can bring people together and solve real problems with progressive solutions that we haven’t even tried.
Bernie Sanders used to stand up in the Democratic Caucus when he was in the House and point to me and say ‘You should listen to this guy - he gets elected in a district that’s a swing district or a Republican district and he gets big margins and you should listen to him.’ Bernie used to do that and I thought it was pretty funny. Of course, they never did, or sometimes they did. The point is there are a number of us who are progressive who have a much more pragmatic approach and a very different vision. Had we followed that path it would have been clearer to people what we were about and where we stood. It wouldn’t have gotten all muddled up in the Senate health care bill or in the half reform of Wall Street or those sorts of things.
Critics in the 2010 election said your vote in favor of health care reform revealed ‘socialist’ tendencies. Do you think government is overreaching when it tries to do something about these issues?
[interrupts after ‘socialism’] Look, for anybody to call that health-care bill which constrains any competition by the public sector and doesn’t take away the anti-trust exemption of the health insurance industry is something that doesn’t go far enough with any kind of reform in my mind. We should have had national exchanges, we should have had a nonprofit pubic option, and we should have taken away the antitrust exemption of the health insurance industry. [With] all those things, we would have had a less expensive health care system and something that would have been more beneficial for consumers.
This individual mandate is very controversial. The problem is that people who should buy insurance don’t until they get sick. There is another way to deal with that. I call it personal responsibility, but let’s have enforceable personal responsibility. Everybody when they do their taxes would be confronted with a choice: either have health insurance or sign a form, which waives any right to any reimbursement under any government program for any health care you might obtain, and makes your debt nondischargeable in bankruptcy. So, if you voluntarily don’t have insurance, which is now available to everybody at a reasonable price, you incur costs. Everybody who is insured is paying for people who aren’t insured and the government is paying a heck of a lot of money for people who aren’t insured. Government buys half the health care in the country. So, there are different ways we could’ve done this that avoided this screaming about socialism, but the bill itself, in its essence, couldn’t be further from single-payer or even public option or anything that is government-run than it is, and still provide comprehensive coverage. It’s a very marginal piece of legislation.
What would you compromise to gain Congressional approval of your proposal to tax speculative financial transactions?
The country is on a path to catastrophic financial problems, if not becoming Argentina or Greece somewhere down the road. We are much bigger, more diverse, wealth[ier], but our fundamentals are so bad now. Our accumulation of debt is so extraordinary and the willingness of the world to forever finance our debt is questionable.
I think a fair compromise is half of the revenues would go to deficit reduction and half to job creation and rebuilding America. I think that would be a fair compromise that could bring some fiscal conservatives [together with] people who want to see a more active role by the government in putting people back to work and getting us on a path to recovery.
[My proposal] is targeted, with a lot of exemptions, toward speculative activity. In fact, we’ve thought of even simplifying it. And the tax is miniscule – we are talking about 0.02 percent. We had a financial transactions tax from 1916 to 1966 and at the height of the Great Depression, Congress doubled it, from 0.02 percent to 0.04 percent, to pay for rebuilding America and putting people back to work. Our new iteration of the tax, just to make the point, because there is so much bad information out there, would be to [exempt] any asset held for more than twenty-four hours. People don’t realize that 70 percent of the trading on Wall Street is day-trading or second-trading or millisecond-trading. The guy who invested $600,000 against me in the campaign who runs Renaissance Technologies, a mathematically driven fund, in one day the two guys he has watching the computer for him that trades the NASDAQ traded 60 percent of the volume on NASDAQ. Two employees, one computer, and they traded 60 percent of the volume. What wealth did that create, what stability did that create, what did that do for someone with a great idea who wants to build a new company? Nothing. This is just endless speculative activity that is not putting us on a long-term path. They are more actively considering this tax in Europe. Britain has one – 0.05 percent. People say, ‘Oh my God’ everybody will leave America.’ I haven’t noticed anybody leaving Fleet Street because they have to pay 0.05 percent transaction tax. These guys aren’t going to leave Manhattan because they have to pay 0.02 percent.
Another trade-off could be if you want to count [the tax] as revenue, let’s go look for comparable cuts elsewhere in the government. There are plenty of places to cut, particularly in the Defense Department or NASA and other places.
Do you find it hard to compromise?
You know… [hesitates]. I think as a legislator, I’m pretty good at working stuff out. I don’t know if I want to call it compromise. Some of it is mechanics. Some of it is persistence. Some of it is, again back to my counseling skills, listening, hearing what people are saying and saying, ‘we agree where we want to go here but you are really concerned about the way that’s phrased, so how about we do this?’
I remember when we did the bill for the Steens [Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000], we had the big club, which was the Clinton Administration threatening to use the Antiquities Act, that drove the Republicans who were in charge of Congress to the table but we weren’t getting anywhere. Finally one day I said, ‘Look, I’m having Bruce Babbitt, the secretary of the Interior, over and we’re going to take the bill, we’re going to go through it word by word, and we’re going to come up with a compromise or an agreed upon solution before any of us leave.’ Gordon Smith came over, Greg Walden came over, Wyden was in and out a little bit, and a couple other members of the [Oregon] delegation were in and out, and we sat there through votes – ‘Okay, we are on this line, what’s wrong with this word?’ – and we worked our way through it.
I don’t compromise on big values. I’ll fight for them and if I lose, I lose. But to get things done you’ve got to be very pragmatic and willing to work within your value system. I think compromise is kind of a loaded word. To me compromise is when Obama cut out infrastructure, education, school construction, and a whole host of things from the original stimulus bill in order to put in $340 billion worth of tax cuts to get three Republican votes. Now, that was a compromise, a bad compromise.
With fewer moderates in the party, do you see room in the GOP for compromise in the coming two years?
I think there’s some possibility. Their modus operandi in the Senate [has been] Mitch McConnell saying he just didn’t want Obama to get anything done. That fell apart at the end. We are running a $1.7 trillion deficit this year. We are on a very, very perilous path here financially. And so, I think [with] people who want to recognize we’ve got big problems and not pretend all you’ve got to do is cut. If you eliminate the entire federal government of the United States of America outside of its contractual obligations for Social Security and other things, you can’t balance a budget this year. That’s no Defense Department, no border security, no Coast Guard, no prisons, no Justice Department – none of that, it’s all gone. So, you can’t even pretend that [cuts] somehow get us there.
Somehow there has to be some pragmatic compromise if people have a shared goal of putting us on a more sustainable fiscal path, which is going to be a combination of more revenues and you particularly can’t give away more revenues. Every time you have a tax cut you are giving away revenues, you are lowering your income. And we [need] a robust discussion about our spending and our priorities. I think the first three or four months are going to be the new Republican majority feeling their oats in the House and jamming a bunch of stuff through that that they know isn’t going anywhere to make a point. But after that they may want to start really working.
What impact is former Alaska governor Sarah Palin having on American politics?
Well, she’s got her great new little adventure show on Alaska that I saw when I was working out one day. She’s going around giving speeches inspiring to a segment of the society and earning a pile of money doing it. It’s the American dream for her. Hopefully, it won’t evolve into a serious presidential bid but I’ve been saying for quite some time not to underestimate her. I have concerns about what we’ll be confronted with in terms of a choice and what the results of the next election will be.
What impact is the TEA Party movement having on American politics?
It’s driven the Republican Party to the right. Clearly. I think that will be reflected in the agenda in the early part of this House session. John Boehner was never one of the angry radical right wing ones and we’ll just see how he handles that. George Miller from California and Boehner used to work together pretty compatibly on the Education Committee. No Child Left Behind, for instance, that was a bipartisan kind of approach and Boehner was the chair. I think there is a lot of pressure on them to move right. When I see Greg Walden, who’s in charge of the transition, saying ‘they’re teaching us, we’re not teaching them,’ well, it’s going to be interesting and very different.
It’s almost cliché to say Washington D.C. and Congress have become more partisan than in the past What is causing it?
It’s deteriorated every year since I’ve been there in terms of becoming more partisan. I would blame it on two major things. One is the way we do redistricting, where you can carve up and create a district that will give you a predetermined result. What become competitive are the primaries, which accentuates either the left of the Democratic Party or the right of the Republican Party. And then, the money, the influence of the money. It’s really very, very, very ugly now. The American people look at it and they’re dismayed. It’s always good for us to have different values and disagree over issues but it’s hardly like we are even talking about the same planet anymore.
Do you think political contributions and independent expenditures necessarily taint a public servant?
This was a nationalized election and every one of my colleagues who had a competitive race or lost their race had virtually the same ads; and it was all just attacking. I remember my pollster saying, ‘If there was anybody they can’t attack for being in Nancy Pelosi’s pocket, it’s you, the way you voted.’ Well, they did. If you say it with enough money, enough times, people start to believe it, even if it’s totally crazy. Gene Taylor, a friend of mine from Mississippi and a conservative Democrat who didn’t vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker, [faced ads claiming] ‘Gene and Nancy Pelosi – Buddies.’ If you tell a lie enough times, with enough volume and enough sophistication and enough money behind it, you can drive a message. It [causes] thinking people to be discouraged, stay home, and be turned off by the whole thing and it motivates a certain portion.
In my case, a few weeks out it didn’t look so great, [but] the thing that really changed was when we were finally able to identify that it was one guy on Wall Street spending almost as much money to defeat me as he spent on a model train. [H]e wrote a check every week and ran very sophisticated attack ads and after I got some national media around that by outing him and what was going on, money started coming in from places I’d never seen before. I’d be on the Rachel Maddow Show and people were sending money on the Rachel Maddow Show. My own constituents suddenly said, ‘You know, this is an important election and we are going to vote even though we thought we wouldn’t because it didn’t really matter but now it does and we really don’t like the idea of this guy from Wall Street.’ At the end, it was really a reaction to that. We’ve got to find ways to do that nationally. We’ve got to turn the money against the people with the money - as long as we are stuck with this Supreme Court and we can’t do something rational the way other countries do in terms of limiting expenditures.
How does the increase in Western & Southern congressional seats and corresponding loss of Eastern congressional seats, based on the 2010 Census, impact any “East Coast bias” in Congress’ perspective or priorities?
I don’t know that I see an East Coast bias. If you want to look at a bias in the House, it would have been more of a West Coast – California bias because of the Speaker [Pelosi] and her lieutenants, although I suppose she had Barney Frank [D - Massachusetts]. What most people talk about is that it will be to the advantage of the Republicans because the growth is in Republican oriented states. On the other hand, it’s compact urban growth, some of it is Hispanic, and some of it is other minorities so it’s not necessarily a done deal. It’s ultimately going to come down to who controls the legislatures and they can manipulate, they can take a state that should be a 50-50 state and they can pack districts so instead of having 5 and 5 you’ll have 2 and 8; just like they did in Texas when they re-redistricted mid-decade. So, you can do a lot of mischief there. I don’t think it’s going to be good.
I have what’s considered a controversial position on this. I think the Iowa system is better – where they have some retired judges draw up districts on a non-partisan basis. There was an initiative proposed in Oregon along those lines, although there were differing details. Rather than having something that’s scientifically based and computer driven and a foregone conclusion, that’s partisan in its result and accentuates the weaknesses or extremes of both parties, it would be better to have more districts like mine that are truly competitive. You can’t just throw in with one faction of your party if you run in a competitive district. But if you come from some major cities, when the primary is over, it’s over. That’s it. And some of these conservative Southern states, when the Republican primary is over, that’s it – it doesn’t matter who runs on the Democratic ticket.
Finally, why is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington your favorite film?
[laughs] I’ve had that poster up [in my congressional office] for a long time. Those were days when the Senate used to really filibuster. For the life of me, I can’t understand, just once, just once, [why you can’t] make them stay there and talk. If the people who are in the minority are doing something indefensible, expose it by making them stay, day in and day out, and talk about it. When Republicans insisted on adjourning and not allowing unemployment to continue, there were many of us who said to [Senate Majority Leader] Reid, why don’t you stay in session, make a point here. We are here debating because these people do not want to extend unemployment. They called people who are on unemployment ‘lazy’, ‘shiftless’, ‘people who don’t want to work’, they said unbelievably mean and extraordinary and stupid things about people who’ve lost their jobs through no fault of their own and who want to work and are just trying to make ends meet. Expose that. Well, ‘No, oh no, nope, let’s just go home.’ In the old days we used to actually have a process, [like] Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – long fights over issues of public policy that exposed to the nation where people stood. We don’t do that anymore and we are worse off for it.
