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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Armey takes his free-market ideology seriously enough to wear a tie emblazoned with the image of eighteenth-century free-market economist Adam Smith and is one of the few congressmen willing to take on almost any program. He favors phasing out Social Security, for example, and replacing it with alternatives in the private sector. Armey is regarded as intelligent and hardworking, but even some Republicans wonder if he’s too much of an ideologue to be effective. When asked about him, one Texas Republican political consultant simply sighed and said, “God, what an embarrassment.”
If Armey represents the intellectual edge of the conservative surge, Barton seems to have the most visceral anti-Washington bias. He has voted no almost as often as Armey, and he gives off the sense of a right-wing version of the Jimmy Stewart character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. While Boulter, Combest, and Sweeney, with largely agricultural districts, voted for loan relief for farmers, Barton voted against it. “One of the raps on me already is that I don’t pay much attention to the conventional political wisdom,” he says. “The conventional political wisdom is that the way you get reelected is, you do something called pork barrel. Well, number one, I’m not smart enough to explain away politically pragmatic votes, and number two, I don’t want to anyway. I’m thirty-five years old. I’m going to vote what I think is right. I’m going to stay in touch with the people that elected me and make sure that I take care of what their constituent needs are and two years from now, if they don’t agree with me, they can get ’em a political congressman.”
Barton has a huge amount of energy and seemingly ingenuous charm, but in a world where first impressions tend to stick, he’s in danger if being pigeonholed as a Gingrich acolyte. He did poorly in committee assignments, and like Armey, he may have a hard time being effective unless the Republican dissidents gain control of the party.
The freshman who has been the most successful thus far is probably Combest, the one who has made the least noise. Partly because of his service with Tower, he is viewed as the savviest of the six. He won the assignment he wanted on the House Agriculture Committee, where he is already thought of as one of its best-informed members. He’s also considered a protégé of Loeffler, the most influential Republican in the Texas delegation. With only a few months and a handful of votes behind them, it’s impossible to make definitive judgments, but there is some sentiment on both sides of the aisle that he has the brightest future of the six in Washington.
Boulter may be the biggest surprise. With his reedy voice and nervous demeanor, he has less in the way of superficial political skills than the others. But he has probed to be one of the most conspicuously successful freshmen so far. He won a major committee plum when he secured a seat on the House Budget Committee. Later, he and Florida congressman Connie Mack collected 146 Republican signatures on a petition telling President Reagan that they would back his veto of any legislation that increased taxes. Boulter, as much as any of the six, is a product of the religious New Right. “My main thrust here,” he says, “is to reform our laws around traditional Judeo-Christian family values.” But his voting record has been more flexible than might have been expected. Texas provided five of the only nineteen votes in the House against emergency food assistance to Ethiopia. Boulter and Combest were the only members of the Six-pack to vote for it. He has been active in COS without being seen as a creature of it. He has also gained a reputation in his district as a ferocious worker.
DeLay, like Combest, has managed to blend political instincts with conservative politics. “My opponent called me a right-wing crazy,” he says. “He called me an extremist, a right-wing extremist. I just thanked him for it.” But he was an effective mainstream legislator in Austin, and he has shown similar political skills in Washington. His biggest coup was to gain a seat as the only freshman on the GOP Committee on Committees, which helped select committee assignments. The position immediately made him the most influential member of his class.
Sweeney won the most surprising victory, upsetting Democrat Patman, a veteran of 24 years in South Texas politics. Sweeney also seems the most purely political of the six. At 29, he is the second-youngest member of the House, but he talks of his political experience as if he’s a wizened veteran. Clearly his most valuable attribute in Washington is raw energy and chutzpah. He won a seat on the prestigious Armed Services Committee by camping out on congressmen’s doorsteps at six in the morning to make his case. On the other hand, he has gained some notoriety for his problems in paying off $66,000 in unsecured personal bank loans that apparently skirted the edge of federal campaign laws.
When he describes his victory over Patman, he sounds like a political media planner plotting out campaign image strategy. “We were able to say, ‘When you read about Texas, this guy’s personified it. He’s a small-town boy with smalltown roots. He was a high school quarterback who put himself through college,’ that sort of junk. I’m part of that renewal of America’s belief in itself. People were empowered and emboldened in 1984 to believe that there was something better that America could become, and there was a regeneration of that hope and opportunity as opposed to the pessimism and despair that personified Jimmy Carter.” Maybe. But Sweeney’s race wasn’t the most uplifting one ever run. His campaign literature touted his background at the University of Texas law school and said his work had been published in the Texas Law Review. In fact, he dropped out of law school and never had anything published in the review. He dismisses Patman as “pretty slow-footed, pretty sleepy, a guy who never sponsored a major piece of legislation in a quarter century.” But besides his energetic campaigning, the main factors in his victory were the Reagan-Gramm sweep and a last-minute flood of Christian right-wing literature that badly distorted Patman’s voting record. “He’s very flexible,” says Patman. “I think he’d be a Chinese Communist if it would further his cause. I don’t think you can be in politics long without some measure of integrity, and I think he has none.”
If the Six-pack’s agendas are already becoming more diverse than their campaign rhetoric, it shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s one thing to ride a conservative wave when words like “budget cuts” have the allure of mystic incantations. It’s another to leap to make those cuts at the expense of your constituents. When last seen, Boulter was knocking on doors with a group of Panhandle oilmen who were in town lobbying to keep the current oil depletion allowance and deductions for intangible drilling costs.
The fact is, the House has never been a bastion of ideology. Even at a time of $180 billion budget deficits, Congress will spend at least $970 million this year. Armey and Barton may eschew any helpings of federal pork, but they’ll be in a distinct minority if they do. Current turmoil aside, the long-term question confronting the Six-pack is whether they’re betting on the right horses. The battle isn’t just between Democrats and Republicans. It’s also between the traditional Republicans, many of them—such as embattled House minority leader Bob Michel of Illinois—from the Frostbelt, and the Young Turks—like Gingrich—from the Sunbelt. If there’s a true realignment under way, the Texas delegation could become a powerhouse again, only a Republican one. Witness the five of its six freshmen who got plum committee assignments. Conversely, if the conservative tide ebbs, the Six-pack could look as dated as the early-seventies Democrats with modish long hair and sideburns, who saw the country turn the other way.
For now, the only sure result of the current rancor and guerrilla warfare in the House is that it’s almost impossible to get anything done—an odd strategy for Republicans swept into office to enact President Reagan’s programs. The only sure winner is Gingrich, who has gone from being a junior congressman to a national figure merely because if his facility for churning out inflammatory quotes.
But the biggest peril facing the Six-pack may not be Tip O’Neill or campaign debts or rapacious Democrats. It could be the First District of Texas, where a special election must be held to replace Democratic congressman Sam Hall, who is retiring to take a federal judgeship. If Republican Edd Hargett wins, he will become the seventh freshman Republican. After a few short, stormy months, the Six-pack would be out of business. Seven-Up, anyone?
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