DINGELL-LING…AND WAXMAN TOO!!! REAL HOUSE CLEANING
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303880604579405450058012742#printMode
John Dingell announced on Monday that he plans to retire from the House of Representatives at the end of this Congress, and his initial parting shot came with unusual ill-grace. “I find serving in the House to be obnoxious,” the 87-year-old told the Detroit News. “It’s become very hard because of the acrimony and bitterness, both in Congress and in the streets.”
The Democrat from southeastern Michigan was first elected in 1955 and never served in the minority until after the GOP sweep of 1994. He was among those who, Congress after Congress, steadily built the modern administrative state with its vast powers to redistribute income and regulate to punish or reward companies.
In his political heyday as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the 1980s, Mr. Dingell liked to boast that his writ extended to every corner of the American economy. He wasn’t far off. Yet when all economic and cultural questions become political, is it any wonder that politics becomes more acrimonious?
Mr. Dingell may have intended his “obnoxious” barb at the tea party and Americans angry with Washington, but most of those people don’t know how to maneuver through the corridors of power. They can’t afford to hire someone from “the Dingell bar,” the name adopted with an almost civic pride by the Washington lawyers who were well paid for representing businesses caught in the Dingell investigative cross-hairs. Many were his former staffers.
The “Dingell method,” another phrase from the era, was to conduct an investigation, selectively leak what his staff found to a newspaper and TV network (double the media points), then haul the poor business targets for a public grilling before the cameras. The journalists would win prizes for the appearance of enterprise. The CEOs would be advised by the Dingell bar to be obsequious and remorseful whether guilty or not. The acrimony was one-sided.
The political fight for control of the House has been more closely fought since 1994, with Republicans holding it for 12 years, then Democrats for four, and now Republicans for two more terms. This has often meant divided government, which can also be acrimonious.
But no oversight hearings by the GOP of the Obama Administration have been anywhere close to as rough as Mr. Dingell’s road-grading of officials in the Reagan Administration. If the name Anne Gorsuch Burford means nothing to you, look her up on Wikipedia. She ran the EPA from 1981-1983 until Mr. Dingell ran her out of town. Or recall the case of David Baltimore, the Nobel laureate whom the Dingell staff worked with the media to falsely discredit after dragging him into a probe into scientific misconduct.
The irony of Mr. Dingell’s later years is that he was pushed aside by younger liberals from the Watergate generation like Henry Waxman and Ed Markey. Mr. Dingell represented car makers and the United Auto Workers, which often made him less ideological on environmental regulation and cultural issues.
For those sins, Democrats deposed him as committee chairman in 2008 in favor of Mr. Waxman, who recently announced that he will also retire at the end of this Congress. If he and Mr. Dingell are unhappy with our current political distemper, they might consider that this is the House they built.
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