ASK TRENT LOTT WHETHER HE will do the job of Senate majority leader differently from Bob Dole, and he will invariably remark, “The torch has been passed but the flame is the same.” This may be appropriately deferential toward Dole, but it’s not entirely accurate: At the all-important staff level, the passing of the torch means the empowerment of a small group of highly capable, solidly conservative staffers. Their rise comes at the expense of a clique of moderate aides whose influence enabled like-minded GOP senators to exercise power disproportionate to their numbers. The shift presages a more conservative, politically oriented Senate agenda that will be in closer harmony with the activist inclinations of the Republican House.
As Dole departs, so does Sheila Burke, his renowned chief of staff. Her legendary influence — Dole once told Hillary Clinton, “If you and Sheila can agree [on health care], I’ll vote for the plan” — derived from her boss’s status and her expert understanding of numerous domestic-policy issues. But her power also came from her close relations with a small group of ideological sympathizers occupying some of the most powerful staff positions in the Senate. These included Lindy Paull, William Hoagland, and Keith Kennedy, staff directors of the Finance, Budget, and Appropriations committees, respectively. Like Burke, they are all Capitol Hill veterans in their mid-forties who understand their portfolios keenly and are slavishly devoted to their work. More significantly, they share a none-too-subtle disdain for conservatives — whom they lampoon as “full-mooners” and “wing nuts” — and a desire to temper what they take to be the excesses of the congressional Republican agenda.
But with Dole gone and Lott in place, Burke’s allies are without a voice in the leadership. Instead, power has been transferred to such “full-moonets” as Dave Hoppe, a former chief of staff to Jack Kemp, and Kyle McSlarrow, who ran for Congress in 1992 and 1994, declaring half-jokingly, “I supported Reagan in the ’76 primaries and have moved right since then.” Alongside them will be a group of activist, results-oriented Reaganite staffers unified by their recent efforts to foist conservative policies on a moderately inclined Senate.
For 18 months, from the time the GOP captured the Senate in 1994, conservatives grew frustrated as they saw their favored causes undermined by the Burke faction. Burke in particular became a conservative bogeyman, pilloried in such outlets as the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review (while also benefiting from a strong liberal backlash — the New York Times Magazine published a sympathetic cover story on her and a new book by Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis contains a fawning 38-page profile). But because Burke and her gang had a constituency of moderate bosses personally close to Dole — Bob Packwood, Pete Domenici, Mark Hatfield — they could claim that in moderating GOP legislation they were simply doing their jobs. Now that those remaining lack similar access to Lott, they’re on the periphery. Gone are the days when their proximity to Burke meant that their proposals frequently found their way into legislation; no longer are their slots among Roll Call’s 50 most powerful staffers assured.
Illustrative of the way things used to be is last ear’s fight over welfare. Right-wingers wanted legislation to promote marriage and teen abstinence, targeting the steady rise in out-of-wedlock births. But they encountered an unexpected roadblock: fellow Republicans. Because welfare was assigned to the Finance Committee, Paull, as staff director, was charged with drafting the legislation. Between working for a moderate, pro-choice senator like Packwood and having a partnership with a moderate, pro-choice staffer like Burke (herself a former Finance Committee staff director), Paull unsurprisingly came up with a moderate, pro-choice-oriented bill that failed to address the conservatives’goals. When Dole pushed for the bill’s passage at Burke’s behest, even some of those who had endorsed him for president, like Sen. Lauch Faircloth, publicly complained that it was bad legislation. Dole was ultimately forced to delay its consideration until conservative provisions were added.
This experience highlights another frequent conservative complaint: that moderate staffers were so policy-driven, they frequently lost sight of ballot- box politics. Hoagland, for example, led the group in questioning whether tax cuts of the size favored by conservatives could be financed. (His political vacuity is the stuff of legend: It was he who, as an obscure Agriculture Department staffer, declared that ketchup should be counted as a Trent vegetable in school-lunch programs, causing the Reagan administration much grief.) More recently, top Republicans in both chambers have been trying to neutralize the budget as a campaign issue by sending the president a continuing resolution. But Appropriations chairman Hatfield, at the urging of his staffer Keith Kennedy, has been resisting the idea.
Conservatives will be satisfied with the new cadre of leadership staffers, who are pledging to be more inclusive, quicker in decision-making, and politically shrewder. The majority leader’s chief of staff is Hoppe, a sharp Notre Dame graduate whose 20 years in Washington include over a decade on the House side. Having maintained close ties to the current House leadership, he will help end one of the GOP Congress’s persistent problems: divergent House and Senate agendas. Dole, and Burke, rarely told anyone of their plans, short- term or long. Senate aides say Hoppe lacks Burke’s ego and aloofness and is expected to keep staffers informed of pending activities, while also opening up the decision-making process. This approach should diminish the internal feuding that often forced members to go public with their complaints. So too is policy expected to have a more conservative edge: Hoppe has been arguing recently that Dole’s attempts to compromise on abortion risk alienating the social conservatives whose votes are critical to Republicans.
Complementing Hoppe are two of his colleagues from Lott’s staff, Bill Gribbin and Alison Carroll, along with McSlarrow, a Dole holdover. Others attaining influence are Doug Badger and Eric Ueland, who guided policy and politics for Sen. Don Nickles at the GOP Senate Policy Committee (Nickles has replaced Lott as whip); Margo Carlisle, chief of staff to Sen. Thad Cochran; Mitch Bainwol, chief of staff to Sen. Connie Mack (who will be replacing Cochran as number three in the leadership next year); and Jade West, the new staff director of the policy committee, who is well respected for her previous service to the (conservative) Senate Steering Committee.
Tensions are perhaps inevitable among this highly motivated group, but a certain esprit de corps was demonstrated by a June 25 group dinner at the tony Capital Grille. Deep divisions between Burke and other GOP leadership staff meant that no such dinner had been held since the Republicans seized the Senate.
What does all this mean for the moderate trio of Hoagland, Kennedy, and Paull? By virtue of their staff-director positions, they still wield power, particularly now, as fiscal concerns dominate the legislative calendar. And the Senate is still the Senate: Committee prerogatives often take priority over leadership ones. But with no Burke-like figure in the majority leader’s office to do their bidding for them, coupled with the fact that their bosses aren’t particularly close to Lott, the next few months will be the moderates’ swan song. One Capitol Hill sage characterizes it this way: “They will go from making policy to implementing it.”
So the era of moderate Republicanism in the Senate has all but ended. And in the event of a Dole victory and a GOP retention of Congress, these newly empowered conservative staffers will suddenly find they have more influence than they know what to do with.
by Matthew Rees
