WHEN HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH met with House minority leader Richard Gephardt two years ago to settle committee assignments, there was a problem. Representative Jim McDermott of Washington, the former ethics chairman and one of the most partisan members of Congress, planned to remain the committee’s senior Democrat. Gingrich balked, but Gephardt assured that if McDermott acted up, the Democratic leadership would set him straight.
It hasn’t worked out that way. As everyone knows, McDermott is believed to be the person who leaked to the press tapes of an intercepted cellular telephone call between Gingrich and the Republican leadership. The leak was the explosive culmination of a Democratic effort to undermine the speaker — and forced McDermott to recuse himself from the ethics case.
For the past two years, while David Bonior, the House Democratic whip, has publicly attacked the speaker, McDermott has toiled behind the scenes in the secretive and traditionally nonpartisan Ethics Committee. This made for a highly politicized environment; Republican Jim Bunning cited McDermott’s partisanship as the reason he quit the committee just weeks ago. Congressional analyst Norman Ornstein insists, “McDermott was the wrong person to be in the job.”
There’s a simple explanation for McDermott’s ceaseless assault: Gingrich wants to undo everything the liberal McDermott stands for. Name an issue on which Gingrich has led Medicare, welfare, regulatory reform — and McDermott has been an ardent foe. To say McDermott is “a liberal” is an understatement on the scale of calling Napoleon “a soldier.”
A psychiatrist by profession, McDermott gained notoriety a few years ago when he called the Clinton health-care plan “a special-interest smorgasbord with the insurance industry as the main glutton.” Instead, he favored a Canadian-style system in which government would pay for everything (and anyone guilty of disclosing unauthorized patient information could go to jail for ten years). This played well in his Seattle district, home of the coffee bar and Kurt Cobain. But McDermott’s anachronistic view of government has put a ceiling on his political career: He’s failed in all three of his runs for governor.
When Democrats lost control of Congress two years ago — an event McDermott equated with the death of one’s mother — his anti-Newt mission began. He was an early advocate of hiring an outside counsel to investigate Gingrich. He also criticized the Ethics Committee’s “flawed, ad hoc process” and frequently tangled with Nancy Johnson, the mild-mannered committee chair. Frustrated by the pace of deliberations, McDermott took to the House floor in mid-July and laid out options for how a deadlocked Ethics Committee could proceed. Republicans charged him with breaching the committee’s strict code of secrecy, but McDermott said that because he had never referred to the Gingrich case specifically, there had been no violation.
This willingness to flirt with impropriety meant House Republicans immediately suspected McDermott in the flap over the tape. They’ve long believed he leaks confidential information — he’s the lone ethics member to have vented his frustration with the committee’s direction, and he alone reportedly has not signed a secrecy pledge. Yet he postures as upright. “This [ethics] process is built on trust,” he declared in December 1995. “All we have is the trust in each other’s words.” Oh? As the tape story was breaking, it was McDermott who falsely told the Washington Post, twice, that he had no knowledge of the matter.
McDermott has also come under scrutiny for employing Democratic operative Steve Jost. Described by Newsweek as the speaker’s “most dangerous enemy,” Jost worked for Gingrich’s challengers in the 1990 and 1994 elections and has provided the media with complicated paperwork related to GOPAC and other Gingrich ventures. According to Federal Election Commission records, McDermott paid Jost’s firm $ 14,160 in 1994 and 1995 for fund-raising. Republicans filed a conflict-of-interest complaint with the committee last year, but McDermott was cleared, denying knowledge of the connection between his own campaign and the Jost firm — and blasting the GOP for daring to raise the issue.
No one is quite sure what’s next for McDermott, but it’s obvious he has done Gingrich and the House Republicans a great favor. That his partisanship would get the better of him comes as no surprise. He told National Journal’s Richard Cohen that he tried, unsuccessfully, to resign from the Ethics Committee two years ago because he would have “a responsibility to be nonpartisan,” and in an interview with the Sacramento Bee he darkly warned that “Gingrich should learn to be a gracious winner because what goes around, comes around.” Indeed, what goes around sometimes comes around farther than you expect and proceeds to blow up in your face.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
