The Picture of Dennis Hastert

Por Chris Lehmann — The Nation » Article

The disgraced former congressman was a better representative of the GOP than the party would like to admit.

Former House speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois attending the unveiling of his portrait at the Capitol on July 28, 2009, in Washington, DC.

The obituaries for former Republican House speaker Dennis Hastert, who died over the weekend, all led with the scandal that justly stained his name at the end of his career—charges of child sexual abuse dating from his tenure as a teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois, in the 1960s and ’70s. After his subsequent resignation, Hastert was convicted on charges of bank fraud stemming from efforts to conceal a series of hush-money payments to one of his former victims; in 2016, he was sentenced to a 15-month prison term, but was released on medical grounds several weeks before serving it out. 

Shortly after Hastert pleaded guilty to the fraud charges, then–Republican Speaker Paul Ryan had his official portrait removed from the Capitol, signaling the GOP’s determination to treat the disgraced party leader as a bad apple—an unfortunate behavioral outlier—best forgotten.

But Hastert’s horrifying predatory past wasn’t his only baleful contribution to our political scene. As a rising GOP power broker, Hastert followed the scorched-earth model of politics practiced by his mentor, former majority leader Tom DeLay. DeLay became majority whip in 1994, and set about transforming the GOP conference into a machine running on ideological orthodoxy and corrupt infusions of cash. His signature innovation was an initiative called the “K Street Project”—a bid to transform the DC lobbying industry into a subsidiary of the Republican Party, demanding that favored firms heighten their PAC contributions to the GOP while stiffing the Democratic opposition. DeLay, who graduated to majority leader in 2003, became a casualty of his own corruptionist political vision; in 2005, a Travis County grand jury indicted him on charges of money laundering, and he resigned from office a year later. He was also a close confrere of superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, also later jailed on fraud and corruption charges, taking the K Street Project’s amoral precepts to their logical extreme.

Hastert served as DeLay’s deputy whip, and he thrived by following DeLay’s cutthroat example. He assumed the speakership in 1999 in the rushed procedural aftermath of still another House speaker sexual scandal involving Robert Livingston, a protégé of Newt Gingrich. Once the Republicans secured new majorities in the 2002 midterms, Hastert made a point of looking out for his scandal-plagued mentor. By 2004, DeLay’s moneyed antics had become so blatant that they ran afoul of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (known today as the House Ethics Committee); it convened a separate subcommittee that endorsed a series of reprimands for the majority leader. Hastert moved with swift dispatch to fire the committee chair, as well as the two GOP members of the bipartisan panel, replacing them with hack loyalists. When three DeLay cronies were indicted in Texas, Hastert got the committee to approve a rule to permit DeLay to continue serving as majority leader after he was indicted.

Hastert also followed DeLay’s example by using the power of his office to engage in corrupt self-dealing. While he served as speaker, he pulled together a series of real estate deals in his home state of Illinois that saw his net worth skyrocket into the millions; during one bitter fight over a long-stalled transportation bill, Hastert saw to it that an earmark created a new highway interchange—unwanted by both local residents and the Transportation Department—a mile away from his land parcels, causing them to escalate still further in speculative value.

Hastert’s most enduring legislative legacy, however, is the notorious “Hastert rule”—the diktat that no legislation would proceed to a floor vote unless it already won the support of the House GOP conference. This might seem like the wonky, technocratic innovation of a former deputy whip, but in reality, it cemented the 21st-century GOP’s reputation for enforcing ideological orthodoxy at all costs—at the direct expense of the negotiations, compromises, and legislative conferencing that made up what House leaders had dubbed, in a show of optimism, “regular order.” As longtime congressional scholar Norm Ornstein writes, “no speaker has done more to relegate regular order to the sidelines than Hastert.”

In combination with the DeLay mantra of using the legislative process to maximize the flow of baksheesh, Haster’s siege on regular order produced some of the ugliest spectacles seen on the contemporary House floor—most notoriously, the vote that Hastert kept open on the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug plan. A scheduled 15-minute canvassing swelled into three hours in the dead of night, as Hastert and his lieutenants bribed and bullied the GOP conference into submission. As Ornstein notes, this was to become the de facto business model for Congress:

Under Hastert, amendments from Democrats and Republicans alike were squelched by a strikingly pliant Rules Committee; conferences were rarely held, and if they were, it was late at night and they were closed to input from all except loyal lieutenants; and provisions were sometimes added to conference reports that had never been in either House or Senate bills without notice to other lawmakers, among other indignities.

Hastert was able to pull all this off largely because, after the scandal-plagued speakerships of Gingrich and Livingston, he presented as a normie heartland Republican, rumpled and affable, to cite the preferred term in most of the pre-scandal media coverage of his speakership. But his brand of corruptionism was no less damaging or toxic than DeLay’s—and in touting his eponymous rule, he fatally set the House GOP conference on the hypervigilant ideological course that’s seen it cannibalize many of his successor speakers in fits of performative purity. And the broad logic of the Hastert rule has fanned out into the party’s electoral strategizing—creating an ever-expanding contingent of bright red gerrymandered districts, custom-made to produce the kind of feckless ideologues that routinely deadlock plans to fund the government—and thereby set up follow-on speaker purges. Given the state of today’s Republican Party, Michael Johnson should strike a blow for historical accuracy and restore Hastert’s portrait to the Capitol.

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

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Fonte: The Nation » Article