Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (31 page)

By the mid-1990s, our progress was not confined to poll numbers. Our legal position was better too. Starting with Wisconsin in 1982 and Massachusetts in 1989, states began including us in their antidiscrimination laws. Moreover, the Defense of Marriage Act did not prove to be a potent wedge. To my knowledge, no Democrat was defeated because of his or her opposition to the bill. The GOP would not initiate another anti-LGBT legislative effort until 2004.

Not for the first time, my political reading of the status of our struggle was more optimistic than that of many in our community. And once again I believe that subsequent events have validated my view. This was not merely a theoretical debate. It was directly relevant to deciding where we should put most of our energies. If I was correct, then we ought to step up our participation in the political process—we should register to vote, let our representatives know what we wanted them to do, and then, following the classic and still valid political maxim, reward our friends and punish our enemies with votes, contributions, and organizing.

The logic of the opposite opinion—that the “system” was stacked against us and in the control of those determined to keep us unequal—called for direct action instead of electioneering. “You want to play nice with the system,” I was told scornfully. “We know that power never grants rights without struggle, without our making the establishment so uncomfortable that they have to give in.”

Such a preference for demonstrative over electoral politics was often reinforced by a badly flawed reading of the careers of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They did rely on marches, sit-ins, and other forms of physical protest to put moral pressure on their opponents, who claimed to believe in the democratic principles Gandhi and King were invoking against them. And they sought to disturb the status quo so that it would be less socially disruptive for officials to accommodate them than to continue to repress them. But neither of these great leaders chose this route in preference to using the votes of their millions of followers to gain their ends. They engaged in direct action precisely because this was the only method available to them—Indians in the British Empire had no right to vote on their situation, and African Americans in the American South had that right in theory but hardly in practice. Once they gained full access to the ballot box, they sensibly made that their main focus.

When LGBT leaders cited Gandhi and King, I offered my own counterexample—the National Rifle Association’s great success in dominating the policy debates about gun control, despite being in a minority on the issue in every national poll I have ever seen. As I enjoyed pointing out, especially to those LGBT activists who decried my lack of “militancy,” I have never seen an NRA public demonstration. They do not have marches. There have been no NRA mock shoot-ins to rival the die-ins staged by AIDS activists. And those liberals who try to comfort themselves with the notion that the NRA wins legislative battles because of their vast campaign contributions are engaged in self-deceptive self-justification. The NRA wins at the ballot box, not in the streets and not by checkbook.

The NRA does what I have long begged my LGBT allies to do, at first with mixed results, and more recently with much greater success. They urge all of their adherents to get on the voting rolls. They are diligent to the point of obsession in making sure that elected officials hear from everyone in their constituencies who opposes any limits on guns, especially when a relevant measure is being considered, and they then do an extraordinary job of informing their supporters of how those officials cast their votes.

It was necessary for us to make our presence known publicly when our fight started in the early 1970s, because our anonymity was an obstacle to gaining support. It is impossible to generate sympathy for people who are largely invisible. To return to the comparison to race, African Americans never had to worry that white people didn’t know they were there or that discrimination existed. While racism has done far more damage than homophobia, LGBT teenagers faced a problem that heterosexual African Americans did not: breaking the truth to their parents. No teenager ever had to endure the emotionally fraught task of informing her parents that she was black. Once the public became aware of our existence, however, the situation changed. The case for putting demonstrative politics first became defunct.

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Even as they refrained from assaulting LGBT rights, the Republicans did try to gain political capital out of racial resentment. In early 1996, they sought to repeal the federal mandate supporting affirmative action. As the senior Democrat on the Constitution Subcommittee, I was happy to take the lead in blocking the effort—with the Clinton administration’s full support.

At first, I was pessimistic. The Republicans needed only a majority vote to succeed. But they had one vulnerability. The man who had turned the military ban debate against us now offered my side its best chance—Colin Powell.

Powell was one of the most popular men in America, and he had flatly stated that he would never have become a general were it not for affirmative action. No quota bestowed his rank on him, Powell made clear. Rather, he was able to win promotion on his merits only because affirmative action had given him the chance. The military officials who selected candidates for promotion to higher office were required to cast a wide net for candidates. This was exactly how we believed the process should work.

I wanted Powell to testify before the subcommittee. To our great frustration, he refused—not in so many words, but by claiming one scheduling conflict after another. Even so, he did issue a strong statement reiterating his claim that he would never have achieved high office if affirmative action were banned—as the Republican bill before the subcommittee planned to do. Committee and subcommittee proceedings are usually predictable, and occasionally all but scripted. But in this instance there was some real drama. One of our GOP members, Michael Patrick Flanagan, was an accidental congressman. To everyone’s surprise, he’d defeated one of the most powerful representatives in history, Ways and Means chair Dan Rostenkowski, after Rostenkowski had been weakened by corruption allegations.

Henry Hyde, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, was eager to promote his fellow Irish Catholic Chicagoland Republican’s career by putting him on the committee. In light of this relationship, Flanagan cast one of the most courageous, morally driven votes I have ever seen in the House. After assimilating Powell’s description of how affirmative action affected him, and listening carefully to a thoughtful debate on the subject, Flanagan broke with the other Republicans—including a startled Hyde—and voted with all of the Democrats, creating a tie in subcommittee. At that point I was convinced that we could block the effort, because other Republicans would also refuse to disregard Powell’s strong statement. To avoid further parliamentary moves that might revive the bill in subcommittee, I consented to pass it along to the full committee with no recommendation. The fact that the bill did not pass in the subcommittee, combined with the powerful example of Colin Powell, amounted to a death notice. Hyde took no further action that year and instead allowed the bill’s most ardent defenders to try again the next year, when it was tabled on a bipartisan vote. In that situation, tabling the bill meant killing it.

Defending affirmative action gave me the chance to reaffirm my deep commitment to the second of the three questions famously articulated by Rabbi Hillel. My work for LGBT equality represented my answer to his first question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Combating racial prejudice and its lasting effects was my fervent response to his second question: “If I am only for myself, what am I?”

But even justly revered sages do not get everything right. Hillel’s third question—“If not now, when?”—can be misleading. The proper reply is “It depends.” That is, it depends on how likely you are to succeed; on whether it will be more helpful to your cause to try and fail, or to hold off for more propitious circumstances; on the impact of settling temporarily for partial success; and on what you can do to improve your chances of ultimate success. The hard truth is that correctly answering these subordinate questions will sometimes mean that “now” is not the right time at all. From the founders of the NAACP to A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and Thurgood Marshall, African American leaders consistently resisted the temptation to try to do it all at once.

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I was delighted to cooperate with the Clinton administration on protecting affirmative action. In other realms, however, our relationship was suffering. Any hope that Clinton’s assault on “big government” was mostly a reelection impulse faded quickly as he began negotiations with the Republicans over the budget, with the announced goal of deficit reduction. Since Republicans were no more supportive of raising taxes now than they’d been when they unanimously opposed the increases of 1993, I assumed this meant that cutbacks in already inadequately funded programs were on the table. My assumption turned out to be wrong—it was overly optimistic. Clinton proceeded to agree to a fiscal package that, as
The New York Times
reported, contained “some of the largest tax breaks in decades,” including inequality-expanding reductions in the capital gains and inheritance taxes. To keep the bill weighted toward budget balance, these were offset by a large drop in Medicare funding—$115 billion over the life of the bill. In truth, subsequent events would mitigate the effects of those cuts, making them more of a nuisance than a serious problem. The bill required an annual calculation of what was called the “sustainable growth rate” for Medicare providers, with the fees they received being cut back each year accordingly. In a strong demonstration that my colleagues’ appetite for cuts is far greater in the anticipation than in the reality, those reductions have never been implemented. In every year since 1997, my colleagues have either passed a bill to reduce the cuts severely, or to forgo them altogether.

While the budget negotiations were still going on, I drafted a letter to Clinton imploring him not to abandon his party’s principles, and solicited signatures from my fellow liberals. As it became clear that we were having no impact on the process, we held a press conference to complain. When a reporter asked what response we had received to our letter, I answered that we had not gotten any because we had sent it to “The Democratic President of the United States” and the post office classified it as “addressee unknown.”

When the package was completed, I charged that paying for inheritance tax cuts by reducing Medicare spending effectively elevated the claims of rich dead old people over those of sick, living middle-class ones. Other Democrats, most notably House minority leader Dick Gephardt, also opposed the bill. But as I knew would be the case, we had no effect on the outcome. The bill passed by large majorities in both houses. Even so, I was not merely venting. I hoped that by criticizing Clinton in the most wounding and attention-getting way I could, I would maximize my influence over his future moves. Ballplayers do not argue with the umpire so that he’ll change the decision in question. They want to be on his mind when he makes the next one.

When the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997, I found myself at odds with the administration again. With Indonesia, South Korea, and other allies on the brink of collapse, the administration had to ask Congress to approve a renewed American commitment of funds for the IMF. As a result, House minority whip Dave Bonior—a longtime IMF critic—and I were in a good position to advance our goals.

First, we wanted the IMF to stop working as the enforcer of what had become known as “the Washington consensus.” This was the prevailing doctrine that developing countries should follow rigidly orthodox fiscal policies. The Clinton administration Treasury Department typically advised crisis-prone countries to reduce government spending, raise taxes—usually in a regressive manner—and protect capital investment from any obstacles, such as regulations.

In addition to taking on “the Washington consensus,” we also wanted Indonesia to curb its human rights abuses. Very specifically, we demanded that the Indonesians end their violent repression of their labor movement and release their most prominent union advocate, Muchtar Pakpahan, from prison. Along with my two colleagues who also represented large numbers of Portuguese Americans, Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island and Dennis Cardoza of California (himself of Portuguese ethnicity), I further insisted that our government do everything we could to end Indonesia’s oppressive and increasingly brutal rule over the people of East Timor.

East Timor had been a Portuguese colony for three centuries, and in 1975 when Portugal finally relinquished control, the Indonesians took over by force. To my pleasant surprise, the Portuguese Americans in southeastern Massachusetts regularly included this issue among the concerns they wanted me to pursue. Adding support for East Timorese independence to my conditions for supporting the IMF bill allowed me to achieve every legislator’s dream—taking a moral stand that was also a deeply appreciated constituent service.

Even though the administration disagreed with our concerns, its need for a bill ultimately outweighed its objections. Meanwhile, the Indonesians found that their need for IMF funds outweighed their insistence on continuing to rule East Timor. The ultimate result was that pressure from the American government, and from many others, persuaded the Indonesians to grant full independence—and we gave the bill funding the IMF the support it needed to pass.

That legislation also included a binding requirement that our representative to the IMF board support the establishment of “core labor standards.” The Clinton administration was not happy with our meddling. But we never contemplated intruding in other countries’ affairs to the extent that “the Washington consensus” did.

By mid-1998 I was concerned that my relations with the Clinton administration might become less cordial than I wished. I did not want to weaken the president politically, especially with Vice President Gore likely to be running on his record in the 2000 election. After twelve years of dealing with Republican administrations, I also found it politically helpful and personally pleasant to have friends in the executive branch. I had never felt penalized by the administration for my differences. But I did not want to cross a line that I knew had to exist somewhere.