In 1994, the law firm of Preston Gates & Ellis sent out a press release hailing its new partner, Jack Abramoff, who "developed and maintains strong ties to Speaker Newt Gingrich." National Journal reported: "The GOP victories in 1994 transformed [Abramoff] into a valuable asset as law firms recruited activists with connections to the new Gingrich team."
Gingrich, representing a congressional district of suburban white flight from Atlanta, touted himself as a cosmic thinker and Napoleonic military strategist. On a large easel, in one of his lectures, he described himself as "Teacher of the Rules of Civilization." Born Newt McPherson, Gingrich was the stepson of an abusive Army officer. He married one of his high school teachers and later handed her divorce papers in her hospital room while she was recovering from cancer surgery. He left teaching at West Georgia College to enter politics. A secret 1960s wannabe, he identified the enemy as "the Great Society countercultural model" and the goal as a Conservative Opportunity Society (the name of a group he founded).
The House Republican whip, Dick Cheney, quietly sponsored Gingrich's rise. Gingrich's method was to accuse congressional Democrats of scandal and manipulate the press into covering it. "I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty," he said. And he boasted, "We are engaged in reshaping the whole nation through the news media."
After Gingrich whipped up a commotion against Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright, forcing his resignation over a union's bulk buying of copies of his memoir, Gingrich's staff was caught smearing the new speaker, the gentlemanly Tom Foley, as a closet gay, which he was not. Then Gingrich fostered a furor over the House members' bank, a kind of credit union from which they had always drawn loans against their paychecks. It was, political scientist Nelson Polsby wrote in his book "How Congress Evolves," "a comic-opera fiasco that the news media, skillfully abetted by a group of enthusiastic Republican members, pumped up into a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung." Several of Gingrich's Republicans were caught up in this pseudo-scandal and quit Congress, but he was willing to step over their bodies.
After the Republican sweep in 1994, Gingrich held a mad celebration featuring people dressed as the cartoon Power Rangers and Rush Limbaugh. One new Republican member, Sonny Bono, who had fallen from grace as a celebrity, warned Gingrich to guard against hubris.
The failed professor, now speaker, sent his aides and followers for training to U.S. Army training and doctrine centers at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Fort Monroe, Va., and called himself CEO. He suffered from mood swings of extreme highs and lows, bouncing from grandiose schemes to uncontrollable sobbing. He instructed his aides, "You guys have to tell reporters if they're going to cover the Republicans now, they need a romantic view of history."
Almost at once, he took a $4.5 million book advance from Rupert Murdoch's publishing house, HarperCollins, and just as quickly in the resulting controversy was forced to give it back. For Murdoch, the ridiculously exorbitant advance was chump change, considering his stake in telecommunications legislation.
DeLay, a former exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, who referred to the Environmental Protection Agency as the "Gestapo," was the new House Republican whip. What became the K Street Project, melding Republicans and lobbyists, was launched immediately, in January 1995. Initially, DeLay called it Project Relief. He gathered 350 industry lobbyists to work closely with his staff to write legislation to halt regulation. "They have the expertise," DeLay explained about the lobbyists who were recruited to draft bills he proposed. Even before the Republicans had won control in 1994, DeLay met for lunch with 30 or 40 corporate lobbyists every Tuesday in the boardroom of the Independent Insurance Agents of America. These lobbyists financed his race for Republican whip, and even before the brand-new Congress met to vote on its leadership, DeLay had wrapped up his position. Among the Republican leaders, he was the only one with his own independent power base. And Project Relief made its power felt at once. Within a month after the new Republican Congress was sworn in, it voted for a 100-day moratorium on all federal regulation of industry.
DeLay compiled a book listing every industry political action committee, more than 400, marked either "friendly" or "unfriendly," depending on their contributions. "See, you're in the book," he said to one lobbyist as he showed him his PAC listing. DeLay kept the book on a coffee table in his office. On the wall hung a bullwhip. He was the enforcer of Gingrich's rule: "If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules." In 1995, DeLay met privately with more than 400 of the Fortune 500 companies, explaining why it was in their interest to abide by "our rules." By then, the Republicans had raised twice the amount of campaign money as the Democrats. The tobacco companies topped the big givers.
Project Relief morphed into the K Street Project. "We don't like to deal with people who are trying to kill the revolution," DeLay said. Law firms, trade associations and industries that hired Democrats were ostracized. "You need to hire a Republican," DeLay told these Washington outfits. And the business groups also had to kick in campaign money, lots of it. DeLay personally sent letters to PACs telling them exactly how much money they had to contribute and to which Republican candidates and committees. The K Street Project merged corporate interests with the Republican Party; served as an employment agency for activists and staffers, who were turned into lobbyists; and converted the lobbyists into writers of legislation, and the service sector of Washington into a bank for the party.
In November 1995, Gingrich demanded that President Clinton agree to massive cuts in Medicare and nearly equally massive regression tax cuts for the wealthy, and when Clinton refused, he shut down the federal government, for the first time in U.S. history. Medicare, he was quoted as saying, should "wither on the vine." Then, after reopening the government and conducting negotiations with Clinton, Gingrich forced another shutdown. "I don't care what the price is," he said. But the consequence was his discrediting. Most of the "Contract With America," the manifesto the Republicans ran on in 1994, was never enacted.
Next page: DeLay gave his assent to the plot against Gingrich