Billy Tauzin: K Street’s Drug Kingpin

The Louisiana Democrat-turned-Republican, congressman-turned-lobbyist and, apparently, White House partner-turned-snitch has a way of making things work out well for him, even if that means leaving a string of jilted ex-partners behind.

A reliable workhorse and a hail-fellow partner according to those who served with him on Capitol Hill, Tauzin has never let old bonds get in the way of new alliances when it is in his interests.

This summer and fall, as the drug industry’s top lobbyist, Tauzin is once more in the center of the fray. He finds himself cozying up to a president who used him as a whipping boy during the campaign and is derided as an appeaser by his former GOP House colleagues. On top of all that, he appears to have wounded his new partners by spilling the details of a closed-door deal between the drug industry and the White House.

Health care reform will be the proving ground of Billy Tauzin the lobbyist. Will he win once again?

  These days, Tauzin has detractors on both sides of the debate. Some liberals, hoping for a dramatic overhaul of the health care system, see him as a corporate hijacker of reform. Some conservatives see him as a sellout to big government.

But none of his former Capitol Hill neighbors is surprised that Tauzin seems to be succeeding. “He’s certainly a doer,” said one former Republican staffer who worked with Tauzin on a handful of issues. “He’s a confident, affable guy who you’d figure to rise up the ranks of not only one, but two conferences while he was in Congress.”

It’s a unique accomplishment for Tauzin, and one that reflects a trait you could call either “flexibility” or “opportunism.” He was a leading Democrat — assistant majority whip — until 1995, when Republicans took control of the House. Tauzin then left his party for the GOP, where he quickly rose in the GOP ranks and became deputy majority whip within weeks of his party switch.

This raised charges of a backroom deal — that Tauzin had bolted because of a promised leadership slot. “Usually a whip is someone who has demonstrated party loyalty, party credibility,” political analyst Stuart Rothenberg said at the time, “and is someone who knows the players on that side.”

As Capitol Hill turned uglier when George W. Bush became president, Tauzin became a top target of partisan name-calling. “With Billy,” one GOP leadership staffer said, Democrats’ anger “almost seemed like an ex-spouse.”

More important than his leadership post in the 1990s was Tauzin’s four-year stint as Republican chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. There he sponsored and passed out of the House an ambitious telecommunications overhaul, and he carried the ball for President Bush on an energy bill. Neither of these bills ever became law, but they both went as far as Tauzin could take them.

Never simply a functionary, Tauzin actively sought to accumulate more power and media attention. After Enron’s collapse, Tauzin conducted made-for-TV investigations into the energy giant and its accountant, Arthur Andersen. Tauzin even went on “Good Morning America” to preview a hearing his committee was conducting later that day. He also made public hay about investigating the insider trading incident that landed Martha Stewart behind bars.

He was a prolific chairman “big on growing [the commerce committee’s] jurisdiction,” according to one Hill staffer who worked with him. He clashed with House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas over who would oversee the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill.

While Thomas was famous for being personally prickly, Tauzin — and this is part of his success as a lobbyist — makes people like him. “A nice Southern guy,” one conservative Hill staffer said. “Affable” and “well-liked,” another said.

True enough, but Tauzin was no pushover. One former House staffer said Tauzin, when running the commerce committee, rarely gave marching orders to committee Republicans, “but when he did, you better be with him.”

When he was acting as a field marshal for the Medicare prescription drug bill, Tauzin upset the true believers on both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives were outraged that their party was creating a new federal entitlement. Liberals fumed that the bill prohibited Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate prices with the drugmakers. Detractors on both sides thought the bill amounted to corporate welfare for the drug industry.

When Tauzin announced just weeks after its passage that he was retiring, the speculation immediately began: Would he cash out to the drugmakers?

Sure enough, Tauzin is today the chief executive officer of the drug companies’ lobby (see box). He has aggressively used his position to put himself in the middle of the reform debate.

Tauzin visited the White House in March, twice in May and twice in June, according to White House counsel Gregory Craig.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Tauzin returned in July for high-stakes negotiations with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and other aides. Meeting in the Roosevelt Room just off the Oval Office, the drugmakers and the White House cut a deal.

Come August, thanks to Tauzin’s loose lips, rumors began flying about what happened at the meeting. Then Tauzin confirmed to a Los Angeles Times reporter that the White House “blessed” a deal in which the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America pledged to spend $150 million on a public relations campaign in support of a reform bill and to give discounts that could save seniors $80 billion in drug costs over a decade.

Just what the White House promised in return was never quite clear in the ensuing barrage of anonymous memos, quasi-denials and backtracking. But the talk of a White House-PhRMA deal enraged many liberals and put the White House on the defensive. Did Tauzin, the pragmatic Beltway veteran, make a misstep? Did he gush too much to a reporter?

He has always been known to speak his mind. For instance, at a 1995 commerce committee hearing weeks after he became a Republican, Tauzin attacked his erstwhile party mates as “demagogues.” The Republican chairman forced him to apologize, striking the comment from the committee record.

Similarly, in 2001, after his Republican colleagues from Florida voted to block oil and gas drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, Tauzin called the vote “pretty immoral.”

So was a brash politico mouthing off? Or was there some calculation behind his revealing — and possibly overstating — a deal?

Whatever his motives and whatever the details of the deal, Tauzin’s letting the cat out of the bag ignited a furor — once again — on both sides. House Minority Leader John Boehner, Tauzin’s former colleague, sent an open letter addressed, simply, “Dear Billy.”

“When a bully asks for your lunch money,” Boehner wrote, referring to the Obama White House, “you may have no choice but to fork it over. But cutting a deal with the bully is a different story, particularly if the ‘deal’ means helping him steal others’ money as the price of protecting your own.”

Tauzin is famously likable, but he is not mainly concerned right now with making — or even keeping –friends. His job is passing health care reforms mandating and subsidizing drug coverage, and blocking some of the Left’s policy proposals that could bleed the industry.

Some congressmen who cash out to K Street take sinecures and coast on their large salaries. Tauzin’s always been a workhorse. On health care, he’s got a long, tough haul ahead.

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