Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (51 page)

Because I was as passionate as ever about improving the world—making it conform more to my values—I remained convinced that pragmatism in the pursuit of my ideals was morally compelled. This meant that it remained essential to analyze the political context in which I would now be working.

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My first full year of retirement was 2013. This was also a year when the progress of LGBT rights and regress of economic fairness were more evident than ever.

In June, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and allowed federal benefits for same-sex couples. It also upheld same-sex marriage in California, albeit on a technicality. Apart from the predictable anti-LGBT diatribe from the homophobic Justice Scalia, these pro-gay decisions elicited little public reaction. Less than a week later, I was able to add Jim to my federal retiree health plan.

The way ahead on LGBT rights was clear enough. With public opinion on our side, and same-sex marriage spreading from state to state, we could continue to press forward on all fronts: pursuing judicial victories secure in the knowledge that they were unlikely to be overturned by popular votes, and using the political process to make further advances at the state level. (Regrettably, it will still require a Democratic president, House, and Senate to put ENDA back on the national agenda.)

Gratifyingly, the progress we’ve made fighting prejudice at home has also increased our ability to fight prejudice abroad. We took a first step in 1994, when we allowed victims of homophobia in other countries to win asylum. Subsequently, Obama’s State Department came to include anti-LGBT persecution as a ground for complaint in its human rights statements. We have not been as successful as I hoped in protecting the victims of brutal prejudice in Africa, and discrimination in Russia. But our government has at least put itself on record on the right side of these issues.

Overcoming public opposition to government will be harder and more complicated. The task for liberals is to find some way to bridge the large gap between public support for government programs in particular and majority disapproval of the idea of government in general.

At the very least, the response to the government shutdown in October 2013 proved encouraging. As in 1995, Republicans found that closing down the government was highly unpopular once voters recognized what it meant in practice, program by program. This led to an amusing spectacle. Legislators who had forced federal agencies to shut their doors were now denouncing those very entities because their work was not getting done. The party soon abandoned the shutdown tactic altogether.

The right’s efforts to shut government down have failed. But is there any way to win public support for the more vigorous government we need? Obviously my ideas on this score will have no appeal to those who are philosophically against an expanded public role. Opposing the Bush administration’s plan to avert economic collapse in 2008, Congressman Thaddeus McCotter conceded that it might very well work to end the immediate crisis. Even so, he warned, “As the free market is diminished your freedom itself is diminished.” Invoking “the Bolshevik Revolution” in his closing remarks, he summarized the philosophical view of the antigovernment side: “It has always been the temptation in a crisis especially to sacrifice liberty for short-term promises of prosperity.” Fortunately for the country’s ability to survive the crash, most voters did not deem the right of financial institutions to engage in reckless derivatives transactions essential to their personal freedom. This does not guarantee that the reform will survive intact. But the near defeat of the 2014 omnibus appropriations bill because it included an amendment making a relatively small change in the regulation of derivatives demonstrates that opponents will face a very hard fight if they attempt a significant regulatory rollback.

I respect the intellectual consistency and moral integrity of those who oppose regulation on principle. I also take comfort in my conviction that they represent a fairly small minority of the electorate, and that there is potentially a strong majority composed of two other segments. First there are my fellow liberals who tend as strongly in the opposite position—given the complexity of our society, and the inevitable tendency of the free-market system to generate more inequality than is economically necessary or socially tolerable, maintaining a decent quality of life requires an expansion of the public sector along with private economic growth. The second group is open to the claims of both philosophical camps. These are the voters whose disillusionment with government is precisely that—the angry reaction of people who favor effective collective action in many areas of our common life but who have been so disappointed by government’s inadequate performance that they have lost faith in it.

This critical bloc of voters is disaffected from government not because they don’t believe it should play an active role, but because they are disappointed that it hasn’t played an effective role. The biggest single reason for this is that conservatives have made sure that there is not enough government revenue for it to succeed. Compounding the problem for the progovernment position is the self-reinforcing nature of this situation. The angrier voters become with government for not meeting their expectations, the more they vote for politicians who are philosophically opposed to an extended public sector role and support cutting taxes. This obviously results in government becoming even less able to deliver, which leads to more antigovernment voting.

This dynamic helps to explain the conservatism of so many lower-and middle-income white men. These voters have seen their relative economic position seriously eroded by the global economic shifts of the past thirty-five years, and they hold the government largely responsible. They believe that given its levers for directing the economy, the government could have prevented their exclusion from the fruits of economic growth if the people running it really wanted to. Even worse, when government does intervene in the economy, it often seems to subordinate their economic interests to other goals. One of these goals is helping “others”—providing job preferences and subsidies to racial and ethnic minorities, illegal immigrants, and others they may deem suspect. The government is also faulted for elevating environmental concerns over the need for jobs that pay decent wages.

The white males who used to vote for Democrats have not become philosophical opponents of an active public sector. They dislike much of what they perceive that the government is doing, but they are even angrier at what it is refusing to do—adopt policies that will reverse the harm they have suffered from the economic shifts of the past decades.

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Reversing these voters’ antigovernment sentiments is the challenge for liberals. It requires adopting measures that will reduce inequality. This leads to a crucial first question: How is it possible to expand popular programs without raising taxes on the middle class? Fortunately, there are two golden opportunities to do just that: reduce the military budget and end criminal penalties for drug users. They are both twofers—they save money not by cutting back on things we should be doing, and from which society benefits, but by reducing expensive government activity that often does more harm than good.

By the time I arrived in Congress, I agreed with those who believed we were spending more on defense than necessary. But our differences concerned a billion here or a billon there, not the nation’s basic strategic structure. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, for the first time in fifty years we did not face any hostile power that represented an existential threat to our survival as a free society. Reacting to this, President Bush began a significant reduction in military expenditures that continued through the Clinton administration. The rationale for this approach was ably summarized in November 1991 by a man with unquestioned credibility on the issue:

Perhaps the most important single issue we face in defense is how to provide the American people with a peace dividend, and still preserve our national security. I believe that this is possible if we double the present rate in cuts in our defense expenditure, and shift from a Europe and nuclear-oriented strategy to one based on power projection … It is my hope that this plan can be translated in FY1993 into reductions in the budget deficit and taxes that will be of direct benefit to the American taxpayer.

The author, Senator John McCain, then provided a specific set of proposals for how to implement this and noted the significant cost savings it would produce.

To be specific, the end of the Cold War means it is possible to double the rate of cuts in real defense spending that the Bush Administration planned in early 1991, and to go from an average cut of 3 percent in annual defense spending during FY1991–FY1997 to a rate of 6 percent.

Neither Bush nor Clinton brought defense spending down to the levels my congressional allies and I—and indeed John McCain—wished for. Even so, the savings they achieved helped Clinton and the Republican Congress balance the budget in his second term, and even contemplate paying off the national debt entirely.

With little dissent, policy makers reversed the course of military spending after the mass murder of Americans on September 11, 2001. The virtually unanimous national resolve to cripple Al Qaeda meant full support for the war that became necessary when the Taliban regime announced it would continue to provide Osama bin Laden safe haven. Domestic spending on security also began a steep upward climb, with the establishment and generous funding of the Department of Homeland Security. But the administration’s response to bin Laden’s assault went far beyond formulating an effective response to this new threat. With Dick Cheney playing an unusually influential role for a vice president, the neoconservatives scored a great victory: They won public acceptance of the notion that terrorism poses as grave a danger to our national existence as we faced from Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1940s, and from the thermonuclear-armed Soviet Union in subsequent decades.

It doesn’t. The terrorists are no better morally than these earlier enemies of freedom. But they are not remotely equal to them in their capacity to harm us. The false equivalency between a network of murderous fanatics who have no ships, planes, heavy armaments, or secure home territory and alliances of heavily armed nations with populations in the hundreds of millions has been the source of a serious, damaging distortion in our national security policy.

The first great manifestation of this was the Iraq War. The invasion was the worst single policy decision any U.S. president has ever made, with its terrible cost in human lives—American and other—and its deleterious effect on our standing in the Middle East. By the later years of Bush’s term, the military budget had swollen from $400 billion a year in 2001 to $700 billion—$200 billion allocated for the two wars, and an additional, greatly excessive $500 billion for the regular military budget. When Speaker John Boehner suggested that paying our country’s debts was a favor he was doing for spendthrift Democrats, I responded that he had voted to put much more debt on the books than I had. (He had supported both the increased military spending and Bush’s trillion dollars of tax cuts.)

Worst of all, most of the increased defense spending was irrelevant to the new threats at hand. If nuclear submarines carrying MIRVed missiles and similar weapons were useful against terrorists, our battle would probably be over. We have a lot of them and they don’t have any.

As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on for years, the national mood began to shift. In every post–World War II election but one, Democratic candidates were careful to reaffirm their commitment to a high level of defense spending. In 2004, John Kerry made his valiant combat record a major part of his presentation at the Democratic convention, but even that was not enough to insulate him from a vicious, demagogic, inaccurate but sadly effective assault on his record.

It was therefore a sharp reversal of recent history when Obama was elected president in 2008 while a war he had voted against was still being waged. His opposition to the Iraq War was a great political asset. It helped him win the nomination against Hillary Clinton, who had voted to authorize the invasion. It helped him again in November against John McCain, who had been one of the most vocal advocates of increasing our commitment in Iraq, and who differed sharply with Obama’s pledge to end our participation. (A position he reaffirmed when Obama carried out his promise—belatedly, in my view—in 2011.)

By 2012, voters had become even more resistant to arguments for a larger military establishment and increased deployments to combat terrorism. When Mitt Romney asserted in a debate that the defense budget was dangerously small, citing a decrease in the number of combat vessels from World War I levels, Obama’s response was ridicule: He equated his opponent’s argument with a nostalgia for cavalry horses and bayonets. In a campaign in which Obama’s debate performance was uneven, this was widely regarded as one of his best moments. That impression was reinforced on Election Day when the swing state of Virginia, where combat shipbuilding is a major economic activity, voted Democratic.

My last session in Congress gave me further evidence that curtailing military spending had become politically popular. In 2011, two amendments were offered to reduce the House Appropriations Committee’s proposed defense budget. One was offered by me, the other by Mick Mulvaney, a freshman Tea Party member from South Carolina. Both of our amendments lost. After the votes, Mulvaney approached me and proposed that we collaborate on one amendment the next year. We did, with his name going first. Given the fast pace of action when votes are being tallied on the floor, some members decide what to do largely on the basis of who is the main sponsor—his or her name is indicated on the electronic scoreboards at the end of the chamber. With liberal Democrats already predisposed to support us, we knew that having Mulvaney’s name rather than mine on that board would be helpful.

We won, 247 to 167, with 158 Democrats and 89 Republicans taking our side. The cut we endorsed was not as big as either of us would have liked, but it was still extremely significant. It was the first time in all my years in the House that a majority of members voted to lower the defense spending levels recommended by the Armed Services Committee. More important for the future, there was a large minority of conservative Republicans—including Tea Party members—whose commitment to deficit reduction and skepticism of intervention into the affairs of other countries made them supporters of a realistic—i.e., reduced—military budget. To the surprise of neither Mulvaney nor me, the Armed Service Committees of the House and Senate ultimately restored the funds we’d cut. But our win was an important indicator that ever-increasing military budgets would no longer be reflexively accepted. I believe our success helped persuade congressional hawks to abandon their plan to insulate the military from the pain of the 2013 budget sequester.