The Texas Six-Pack
Texas broke with tradition when it sent six new Republicans to Congress. Now the six are breaking a few traditions on their own.
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“Because of the nature of the modern Democratic party in the House, which is essentially an ostrich, ideological left-wing party combined with bossism, in order for people like Jim Wright to rise, they have to be willing to move to the left. So what you now have is a guy from Texas who represents the New York-California left-wing viewpoint but who brings enough pork barrel home to Texas to get reelected. I think that as people in Texas understand better the ideological cost, you’re going to have more and more people faced with the choice, ‘How much do I really want the next piece of pork barrel and how much am I willing to have my beliefs systematically betrayed?’ And I think what they’re going to say is they want a congressman who’s effective in getting pork and is able to represent their viewpoint.”
That sort of ad hominem rhetoric used to be largely off-limits in Congress, but Gingrich has made it the basic coin of the realm. The McIntyre affair has helped raise the emotional ante to new highs, so when Barton is asked if he agrees with Gingrich’s assessment of Wright and the Democrats, he is only slightly more circumspect. “A reasonable individual could reach that opinion based on the objective facts in this case,” he says. As a reasonable person, is that the opinion he has reached? “I haven’t reached it yet, but I’m close to it,” he says.
The six freshmen Republicans came to Congress from diverse and largely unconventional backgrounds. But in terms of politics they’re basically six peas from the same conservative pod.
Barton is an A&M industrial engineering graduate whose only government experience was as a White House Fellow in 1981. DeLay, 38, served three terms in the state Legislature and ran Albo Pest Control in Stafford before succeeding Ron Paul, who stepped down to run for the Senate. Armey, 44, was an economics professor at North Texas State University and had never run for office before taking on incumbent Tom Vandergriff in the Twenty-sixth District. Sweeney, 29, had worked in various government jobs, most recently as a White House aide, before challenging incumbent Bill Patman in the Fourteenth District in South Texas. Combest, 40, worked as an aide to senator John Tower from 1971 to 1978 before returning to Texas to run an electronics distributing company. He was elected to succeed Democrat Kent Hance after Hance gave up his Nineteenth District seat to run for the Senate. Boulter, 43, is an Amarillo oil-and-gas attorney whose only experience in politics before he defeated incumbent Democrat Jack Hightower in November had been a stint on the Amarillo city commission. Of the six, DeLay is the only one with elective experience at a level as high as state representative.
That diversity doesn’t carry over into ideology. They’re young, energetic, telegenic conservatives who were swept up by the Reagan-Gramm Texas landslide. “We are all what you would consider the new young right,” says DeLay. “We’re all very conservative.” To varying degrees, each one is outspoken about cutting federal spending and favors a conservative, pro-life, prayer-in-schools social agenda. For what it’s worth, the Democrats they ran against generally supported the same things. The six have enough in common that one firm, the conservative Southern Political Consulting, ran campaigns for three of them (Boulter, Armey, and DeLay) and helped draft a fourth (Sweeney) to run. Two of the firm’s principals head the staffs for Boulter and Armey.
Sweeney, Boulter, and Armey, the three who beat incumbent Democrats, were aided not just by the top of the ticket but also by Christian New Right groups that poured money into Texas to try to paint the incumbents as dangerous free-spenders with the social agenda of New York Democrats. Trying to paint Vandergriff, Patman, and Hightower as wild liberals is akin to painting a giraffe black and white and trying to pass it off as a zebra. But the Reagan-Gramm tide was strong enough in Texas to do some pretty remarkable things.
House Republicans, who have suddenly seen their numbers and influence soar, are understandably enthusiastic about the additions to their ranks. “This group, by virtue of their strengths and credentials, has the potential to change the political landscape in Texas both in terms of national input and their effects on the Texas political scene,” said Dallas Republican congressman Steve Bartlett. “This group of ten Republicans as opposed to the traditional five portends a political revolution in Texas.”
Democrats tend to be less impressed. “They’re a bunch of knee-jerk right-wingers who have a pat answer for every complicated question,” said one Democratic congressman. “To them, you’re either a right-wing Republican or you’re a bad guy.”
Traditionally, House freshmen have limited themselves to doing their committee work, putting their staffs together, and running back to their districts enough to get reelected. Not so this time around. There’s something of an antic quality to the Texas freshmen that reflects the uncharacteristically emotion-laden nature of the current session and the increasingly polarized nature of the House.
Conservatives like to think of Washington as the seat of liberal evil, but what is most striking about Washington today is the proliferation of conservative activity. That is most apparent in the media like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s far right daily, the Washington Times (NICHOLSON’S COLD-BLOODED MURDER WAS LAWFUL, SOVIET EMBASSY SAYS), and farther right tabloids like the Washington Inquirer (JFK TREACHERY REVEALED—FREEDOM FIGHTERS WERE DOUBLE-CROSSED), which give every jogger the latest in conservative thought. You don’t even have to walk into the offices of most congressmen to see how they stand. The conservative activists all have posters—conceived by Barton and his staff—on their doors, featuring an empty chair, the words of the U.S. Constitution, and the slogan “Seat McIntyre. He Won!” The Democrats have their own poster, featuring a Republican elephant sitting on a stuffed ballot box. Its slogan reads, “Cut the Rhetoric, Count the Ballots.”
When the six new Republicans from Texas came to town, fresh from what were mostly come-from-behind, upset victories, they found themselves on the crest of a heady conservative wave. They also found themselves in the middle of the one institution in Washington least susceptible to that tide. Despite the Republican gain of 16 seats, Democrats in the House outnumber Republicans, 253 to 182. That’s 10 more seats than the Democrats had when Ronald Reagan entered the White House. What you have in the House is the conservative wave hitting a Democratic wall. There’s something telling in the different ways the six Texas freshmen have reacted to hitting that wall.
Armey and Barton have staked out the least-conventional political turf. So far, it has probably done them more harm than good, but the dissidents have so much strength and the anger over the McIntyre affair is so broad that there’s plenty of breathing space on the Republican right wing. “I think every Republican in the House was outraged by the blatant abuse of majority power in the Indiana race,” says Congressman Tom Loeffler, the relatively moderate House chief deputy whip for the Republicans and a possible gubernatorial candidate against Mark White.
Armey, who may be the most doggedly conservative member of Congress, has voted against legislation with such numbing regularity that he has already been dubbed Doctor No. For example, when the House voted on a so-called whistle blower bill to reward federal employees who ferret out waste and inefficiency, the count was 413-1. Guess who the one was. “They are employed to do the best job they can for the American people, and they shouldn’t be paid extra,” Armey said later. “I considered this a bribery, but in a larger sense I saw it as a smoke screen. Every congressman in America can go home and say, ‘I voted for a cost-cutting measure.’”
The highlight if his tenure so far has been an acrimonious dispute with Speaker Tip O’Neill, the devil of all devils in the Republican cosmology, over an Armey-sponsored resolution condemning the Soviet Union for the shooting of Major Arthur D. Nicholson. The bill was pulled from the House calendar in late April in what Democrats said was a routine move that would have delayed it a few days. In fact, two other bills were pulled the same day. But Armey saw it as a sinister and capricious maneuver to quash the resolution. He took to the House floor, saying, “If Mr. Gorbachev is testing our resolve, let’s show him we’ve come to play hardball. If Mr. Gorbachev is seeing just how far he can push us, let’s call his bluff.” He got his resolution back on the calendar, and his exultant staff crowed that the boss had gone eyeball to eyeball with Tip, and Tip had blinked. Such are the epic struggles of the Ninety-ninth Congress.
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