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TRUE BELIEVERS, PLEASE RISE
October 28, 2003
Congressional Republicans need to schedule a meeting with the mirror this morning. The agenda item is their soul, and the questions to be addressed are: Why did I run for Congress? Was it to engage in the same pork barrel politics that marked the last decadent days of the Democratic majority?
The occasion for this meeting is Speaker Dennis Hastert's effort to ram through an Air Force tanker deal for the Boeing Corporation. This deal isn't just shady -- it's the Encyclopaedia Britannica of shady. It's as if somebody spent years trying to gather every single sleazy aspect of modern Washington and cram it all into one legislative effort.
It's sort of awe-inspiring when you stop to think about it.
Under the deal, the U.S. Air Force would lease 100 refueling tankers, modified Boeing 767's, from an entity controlled by the Boeing Corporation. There are intelligent people in Washington who believe the U.S. needs a new fleet of tankers, to refuel jets over places like Afghanistan. But the details of this particular deal have been shredded by the murderer's row of green-eyeshade, independent-auditor acronym organizations: the O.M.B., the C.B.O., the G.A.O., the C.R.S. and the I.D.A.
The main critique is that it is ridiculously expensive to lease planes, rather than buy them. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the leasing option will cost taxpayers an extra $5.6 billion, though scandal connoisseurs will appreciate that the deal also involves the use of "special purpose entities," the accounting mechanisms used by Enron executives in their glory days.
But the content of the legislation is as pure as the driven snow, compared with the way it has been pushed through Washington. The chief Air Force official pushing the deal was Darleen Druyun. As The Washington Post reported yesterday, Druyun has recently left the Air Force and gone to work for Boeing. She sold her $692,000 northern Virginia home to a Boeing lawyer. Her daughter works for Boeing. None of this may be illegal or even wrong, but is this what makes you proud to be an American?
This is a major contract, but there was no big competition. There was no big study of alternative ways to modernize the fleet. According to U.S. News & World Report (this process has been like a full employment act for investigative journalists) Boeing was given the unusual opportunity to help define the specifications for the plane. Recently released e-mail suggests that some Air Force officials worked intimately with Boeing officials, sometimes to rebut criticisms from other Pentagon officials.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska went around the normal committee process and inserted the deal into a defense appropriations bill during a closed meeting of conferees. According to The Post, in the month before he made that move, Stevens received political contributions from 31 Boeing executives at a fund-raiser in Seattle.
Two Republicans, John McCain and Phil Gramm, fought this thing from the start. The conservative columnist Robert Novak condemned it.
So Boeing rallied the lobbyists. Senators from Kansas and Washington, the states that stand to benefit, began lobbying. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. kicked in, with unions running ads against McCain. And crucially, Dennis Hastert lobbied the White House.
In recent days Senator John Warner has moved to minimize the travesty. He has pushed a deal that would have the Air Force lease only 20 planes, and purchase, less expensively, the other 80.
But there are larger issues. First, this whole mess started because the Air Force can't pay for new tankers up front, so it tried to push back the costs by leasing. Maybe it's time to stop trying to run a Bush foreign policy on a Clinton defense budget?
More broadly, this Republican majority is beginning to lose the idealism of youth and settle for the spoils of middle age. John Kasich used to rail against corporate welfare. Has that fire burned out entirely?
If this deal goes through, it will be a sign that all those fine young crusaders who campaign as fearless fighters against the ways of Washington are slowly but corrosively turning into the sort of creatures they despise.
It almost makes one miss Newt Gingrich.
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