The House of Representatives is not on speaking terms with itself.
Disarray is not an epidemic here. It only seems that way. As George Bush sorts out his new administration, the Senate recovers in palsy-walsy fashion from the recent unpleasantness over John Tower.
Besides, spring is in the offing, and the Federal City`s adopted baseball team, an hour away in Baltimore, is in action.
Inside the House, however, it`s strictly Mudville.
Speaker Jim Wright is already being talked about in the past tense, the House ethics committee`s noose tightening around his neck. And the atmosphere in the House is, well, tense. When Wright rose last Thursday to defend himself on television, one House Democrat, ostensibly a supporter, described the speaker`s performance as follows:
”He went on TV and spent 20 minutes explaining to people all the things he didn`t do wrong. It was simply awful.”
Brows are furrowed, lips are curled. It has been a difficult 1989 for the 435 occupants of House seats. While there has been talk in other parts of town of a kinder this and a gentler that, the House is mired in partisan wrangles, whirling in interparty struggles and waiting for the next delivery of bad news.
”This isn`t a nursery school,” said Rep. Bill Gray (D., Pa.) after Wright`s statement. ”This is a political institution. A very political institution.”
In January, the House tore itself apart over the preposterous 51 percent federal pay raise recommended by a commission established by Ronald Reagan.
The Senate, the federal judiciary and elements of the bureaucracy panted after the money as readily as any representative. But it was left to the House to sort out the recommendations and to absorb the abuse from the letter-writers, do-gooders and radio talk-show hosts holding hunger strikes in protest.
It was an utter botch, with every federal pocketbook winding up empty. Wright played the heavy, forcing a vote on the pay hike that cost the House members and their spouses every penny of that 51 percent.
What was startling about the pay debate in the House was the degree of institutional self-loathing demonstrated. It is an emotion that manifests itself often in the House.
You think you dislike members of Congress? You`ve got nothing on the earnest men, and a few women, who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get themselves sent to Washington, only to expend their energy denouncing their own workplace.
House members, particularly Republicans mired in the minority for most of the last two generations, revel in demeaning their own enterprise.
During the Iran-contra hearings in 1987, many members of the congressional investigating committee plowed through their alloted television air time demeaning the role of the legislative branch in the making of foreign policy.
Despite all that stuff in the Constitution about the three branches of government and the power of the purse, many members of the modern-day House believe their role is to stay low to the ground and out of the way of the president. And to get re-elected, of course, which they do at the rate of 98 percent each election cycle.
Sounds like a decent job. Yet during the pay-raise flap, a posse of members rose to their wing-tipped feet and celebrated their own worthlessness. The House didn`t deserve a raise because it was the cause of everything from the national debt to the budget deficit to Geraldo Rivera. The House didn`t deserve a raise because folks back home in the congressional districts didn`t live on that kind of money. The House didn`t deserve a raise because the new President wanted austerity, even though Bush backed the pay raise.
Signs of this internal contradiction are easy to spot. Rep. Newt Gingrich (R., Ga.), recently elevated to House leadership by his Republican colleagues, dislikes Congress the way lawyers hate plain English.
The new minority whip recently wrote the foreword to a book produced by a right-wing think tank. Title? ”The Imperial Congress.”
Only the barons of the House, men like Majority Leader Tom Foley and Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D., Ill.) and a few other committee chairmen, admit to finding much worth in the life of the congressional body. And, it must be said, some of that worth relates to the economic benefits of long service.
So no one much likes the House, it seems, but, come Election Day, everyone wants to stay there. Or get themselves elected to the Senate.
