WASHINGTON’S MOST FORMIDABLE LIBERAL

Waxman was mad because he’d failed to block release of the report, and he isn’t accustomed to losing. In fact, he’s the most formidable and successful liberal in Washington and has been for most of the last 15 years. He’s smart, intense, partisan, highly ideological, and works harder than almost any other member of Congress. During congressional recesses, when nearly all House members are in their districts holding town meetings, he stays on Capitol Hill and eats lunch in the dumpy Rayburn cafeteria. When Congress is in session, he is sometimes the only member to attend meetings where staffers negotiate a bill’s fine print. “He’s not someone you take lightly,” says Clinger. Indeed, Waxman has fought relentlessly to expand Washington’s role in regulating tobacco, the environment, and health care. In the process, he’s scored more legislative victories than any other member of Congress in recent memory.

When the fund-raising investigation started earlier this year, both Waxman and Rep. Dan Burton, the Republican who chairs the House inquiry, made soothing noises about bipartisanship. But conflict was inevitable. There’s a world of difference between the two men. Waxman is a short liberal Jewish lawyer from Los Angeles, while Burton is a tall conservative Protestant from Indianapolis who never finished college. If they were stranded on a desert island, they’d find nothing in common.

The moment Burton started to assert his authority as chairman, Waxman began denouncing the investigation as partisan and designed to bring down the president. He complained about everything from committee funding to the minority’s role in deposing witnesses. Yet he rejects the Republican charge that he’s acting as an adjunct defense counsel for the White House, citing his criticism of Clinton aides for failing to produce subpoenaed videotapes and his early call for an independent counsel.

Waxman’s efforts to inoculate himself against the patsy charge have been clever, but as evidence of his independence they ring hollow. In the past eight months, he’s had little to say about Reno’s failure to appoint an independent counsel, and he hasn’t expressed much concern about the Justice Department’s hapless investigation. Any doubts about his ties to the White House were settled when it was learned that Don Goldberg, once a top committee aide close to Waxman, had gone to work for White House spinmeister Lanny Davis. So while Waxman denies he’s doing the administration’s bidding, he concedes that his role on the committee is “to point out how partisan and unfair the investigation has been and to show that it’s not legitimate.”

One way he’s done that is by flooding Burton with letters complaining about the conduct of the investigation. These letters, some 45 of them, range from subpoena requests to charges that Republican investigators have been unprofessional. Released to the press, they help set the terms of the debate. Nothing is too trivial to complain about. In one letter, Waxman griped that Burton’s investigators had “knocked loudly and persistently” on the door of a potential witness in Los Angeles and that they had resembled characters from the movie Men in Black.

By contrast, Waxman shows blithe unconcern about the 60 people under investigation in connection with alleged fund-raising violations who have fled the country or taken the Fifth Amendment. He acknowledged in an interview that these people’s refusal to cooperate “makes it impossible to find out all the information that we would want to know about the campaign financing.” Asked what the committee could do, he said meekly, “I don’t know. . . . We could ask them to come back.” Yet even if they decided to come forward, said Waxman, “I’d certainly be skeptical about whether they ought to cooperate with this particular committee’s investigation.” Waxman wouldn’t be so passive if 60 tobacco executives took the Fifth or decamped to a foreign country.

Sure enough, when it comes to trying to discredit witnesses damaging to Democrats, his passivity recedes. Consider the conduct of Waxman’s staff toward David and James Wang, witnesses in the Asian fund-raising affair. David Wang, a Taiwanese-born American citizen living in southern California, has acknowledged meeting with Democratic fund-raiser John Huang and giving him two $ 5,000 checks made out to the Democratic National Committee, then receiving $ 10,000 in cash from a John Huang associate. That’s illegal. Because the transaction involved Huang, a key figure, the Justice Department supported securing Wang’s testimony through a grant of immunity. Waxman voted for immunity on September 24, but for a different reason: David Wang, he said, had been put in “possible legal jeopardy” because Burton’s staffers had questioned him without an attorney present.

This is where things get interesting. On October 3, two Waxman staffers, Kenneth Ballen and Christopher Lu, called Wang’s father, James, who was alleged to have been present at the meeting with John Huang. Wang senior had no attorney present during the phone call, but that didn’t stop Waxman’s staffers from questioning him. They thought they heard him say he had not attended the meeting with Huang — his English is limited — at which point they faxed him a statement to sign confirming this. But their game of “gotcha” caught up with them when James Wang refused to sign the statement, turned it over to his lawyer, and instead signed a statement affirming that he had in fact been at the meeting with John Huang. How did Ballen and Lu respond to this embarrassing turn of events? At a committee hearing a few days later, they distributed a statement repeating the assertion — despite Wang’s explicit denial — that James Wang had not attended the meeting with John Huang.

This behavior is emblematic of how Waxman and his staff have approached the investigation. They seem to be more interested in undermining the committee than uncovering fund-raising abuses that might implicate Democrats. In addition to Ballen and Lu, Waxman’s top lieutenants are his veteran Capitol Hill staffers Phil Barnett and Phil Schiliro — known to GOP aides as “the Phils.” They’ve succeeded because they know how committee investigations work, and a sympathetic press is working alongside them. But Waxman also looks more successful than he’s actually been by contrast with Burton, who has had to delay hearings, has been overruled by committee Republicans, and, most embarrassing, had a major staff shakeup in July. Waxman never tires of raising these issues — who can blame him? — and this has damaged Burton’s already-questionable reputation.

The irony in Waxman’s staunch defense of the administration is that Bill Clinton has done more to pull the Democratic party away from Waxman-style liberalism than any other Democrat in the past 25 years. When I put this to Waxman, he didn’t buy it, saying he hasn’t been a “staunch” defender of Clinton and noting that he and the president agree on some things, disagree on others. Sure enough, it’s no secret that Waxman — like nearly all liberals — has been chagrined by Clinton’s modest domestic agenda. The most striking example is health care. For years, Waxman was an enthusiastic advocate of overhauling — nationalizing — the health-care system, and seven of his staffers worked on the administration’s health-care task force. But as a cosponsor of Rep. Jim McDermott’s proposal for a Canadian-style universal system, he was deeply disappointed with the mish-mash Clinton proposed. Since then, the regrets have only multiplied.

Waxman doesn’t shy from calling himself a “liberal Democrat,” and he rarely supports legislation opposed by liberal groups. Distraught over how the ” liberal” label was being used to malign Michael Dukakis in 1988, he wrote a ringing defense of liberalism for the Los Angeles Times a few days before the election. This puts him well to the left of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council — a group Clinton led while he was governor of Arkansas but whose only idea Waxman cites with approval is “reinventing government.”

Unlike many other white Democrats, Waxman hasn’t had to move to the center to keep getting reelected. Jews and gays are heavily represented in his Los Angeles district, while Republicans are not (last year, Waxman’s GOP opponent endorsed Clinton). The district, which includes ritzy Bel Air (where Ronald Reagan lives) and Hancock Park, is filled with salmon-eating socialists from the entertainment industry. The median value of a home — $ 500,000 — is the highest of any congressional district in the country. And while Waxman himself is not given to glitz, he can be personally pleasant, contrary to the conservative caricature.

Waxman got started in electoral politics in 1968, when he trounced a 26- year incumbent assemblyman in a Democratic primary at the age of 28. After six years in Sacramento, he breezed into the U.S. House in the Watergate class of 1974. Representing a district with hordes of wealthy people who like to dabble in politics, Waxman has no trouble raising money, which he quickly learned he could use to his benefit in Washington. Following the 1978 midterm elections, he defeated the more senior Richardson Preyer for the chairmanship of the Commerce Committee’s Health and Environment Subcommittee by doling out a total of $ 24,000 in campaign funds to other members of the subcommittee (including Al Gore).

This willingness to take on the Democratic establishment became one of Waxman’s trademarks. He and Howard Betman, a former California assemblyman now in Congress, dominated Democratic politics in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. They helped elect numerous liberals to the state legislature and Congress, and they came within a whisker of getting Berman elected speaker of the state assembly in 1980.

But the Waxman-Berman machine is dead. Its candidates in the two 1992 Senate Democratic primaries — Mel Levine and Gray Davis — both lost. Berman is now in a more competitive district that requires him to spend more time on constituent work and less on liberal activism. But the main reason for the machine’s decline is that Waxman’s interest in national issues like tobacco and health care exceeds his interest in the often-grubby world of California politics. “I’ve distanced myself from that,” he told me. “I didn’t see any reason to be so involved in deciding the Democratic primary when there are a lot of good people who ought to win.”

Waxman’s dexterity in defending the Clinton administration and his mastery of the money chase risk overshadowing the most important thing about him: his legislative acumen. “During my years in the House, I don’t think I ever dealt with anyone who was as prepared as he was,” recalls former representative William Dannemeyer, a conservative Republican who regularly tangled with Waxman. “Dealing with Henry was one of the more frustrating experiences in my life.”

It’s easy to see why. Waxman was one of the first to jump on the anti- smoking bandwagon, and he has waged a personal crusade against the tobacco companies, culminating in the famous 1994 hearings when he had a group of tobacco executives testify under oath that they didn’t believe smoking caused cancer. On environmental issues, Waxman used his subcommittee chairmanship to help pass a regulation-heavy Clean Air Act in 1990, after years fending off attempts by the committee chairman, John Dingell of Michigan, to pass a watered-down bill.

But Waxman’s greatest influence has been on health care, especially Medicaid, the government health program for the poor. When he arrived in Congress, total spending on Medicaid was slightly less than $ 13 billion. By fiscal 1996, that number had spiked to more than $ 161 billion. Not all of the increase is thanks to Waxman, but he’s done more to raise Medicaid spending than any other member of Congress. With states picking up roughly 40 percent of Medicaid costs, he has been a loathed figure among governors.

Asked how he’s been so successful, Waxman deflects the credit. “Whatever I’ve accomplished legislatively I’ve accomplished with Democrat and Republican coalition votes.” The reality is a little different. Throughout the 1980s, when most of the Medicaid expansions were implemented, Waxman maintained a staff that simply knew more about Medicaid than anyone else on Capitol Hill. And even though Republicans controlled the executive branch, Waxman’s staff often outflanked them, partly by cultivating contacts among the career employees at agencies like Health and Human Services. It was said that Waxman’s aides had forgotten more about Medicaid than any other Capitol Hill health experts ever knew.

Also key to the equation was Waxman himself. When fighting for Medicaid provisions, “he was like a little kid who would hold his breath and turn blue in the face until you agreed to give him what he wanted,” says one Republican staffer. Sometimes he won his Medicaid expansions through the normal, public budget debate, but once he and his aides mastered the arcana of the budget process — particularly the allimportant “reconciliation” stage — they were able to secure major policy changes without subjecting them to close scrutiny. “Fifty percent of the social safety net was created by Henry Waxman when no one was looking,” says Tom Scully, a top Bush administration health-care aide. Waxman acknowledged the point in 1989 to health-care reporter Julie Rovner: ” The reality is, reconciliation has become the way to adjust to the politics and policy of the budget. It’s become the only place we can make policy changes.”

Not only did Waxman understand budgeting, he was a master of timing. He would frequently spring his proposals on budget negotiators at the last minute and then warn them that he had enough Democratic support to defeat the entire package if his changes weren’t made. That’s what happened in 1990: In the closing hours of the budget talks, a bipartisan group of staff negotiators assented to Waxman’s demands so as not to see all their work torpedoed by some seemingly minor changes to Medicaid that would cost “only” a few hundred million dollars.

Since the Democrats lost control of Congress, Waxman has been forced to trim his sails. Instead of championing Medicaid expansions, he’s obliged to operate within the priorities of the Republican majority. Despite his ideological ferocity, for example, he worked with conservative Commerce Committee chairman Tom Bliley last year to pass the Safe Drinking Water Act and a pesticide bill. Liberal pressure groups didn’t think much of the legislation but kept quiet after Waxman and his staff told them they wouldn’t get anything better from a Republican Congress.

This cooperative spirit has yet to carry over to the committee investigating the Clinton fund-raising machine. Indeed, Waxman’s combativeness is so great that he’s repeatedly put up a stronger defense of the White House than the White House itself has put up. Investigate Webster Hubbell’s involvement with the Lippo Group? Clinton officials reluctantly agreed to let Republicans do this. Not Waxman. He’s consistently objected to this line of inquiry. His obstinacy raises the question whether he simply enjoys making life difficult for Republicans. In fact, says Waxman, there are many other things he’d rather be doing than tussling with Dan Burton. “I don’t consider this a very productive use of my time,” he told me. The White House surely would disagree.

Matthew Rees is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.