In My Time (50 page)

SHORTLY AFTER I WAS elected, the Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert, and soon-to-be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas, asked to see me. Bill was an old friend and colleague. We’d both been political scientists before being elected in 1978, and now he was about to head one of the most powerful committees in Congress. It was a position that carried with it the rights to some of the best space in the Capitol. Bill and Denny told me that they knew I had an office on the Senate side of the Capitol, but they considered me a man of the House and wanted me to have an office on the House side as
well. Bill gave me two offices to choose from, and I picked H-208, just off the House floor. During most of my ten years in Congress, it had been Danny Rostenkowski’s office, and I had never seen the inside of it. Now, the space was mine.

To my knowledge, no vice president before or since has had an office on the House side of the Capitol, and I used it for meetings with House members when we were working on key pieces of legislation. I also hosted buffet dinners there before presidential addresses to Congress, including the annual State of the Union. The tight security surrounding a presidential address means that most people who sit in the chamber have to arrive hours before the speech. Lynne and I invited the cabinet and Republican congressional leadership to join us for dinner on these occasions, then shortly before the speech was to start, they could file in to take their seats in the House chamber. This tradition ended in 2006 when the Democrats regained control of the House and Charlie Rangel became the new chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He reclaimed the office—as I’d expected he would.

Beginning the first Tuesday I was in office, January 23, 2001, I was invited to attend the weekly Senate Republican policy lunch on the Hill, and throughout my eight years as vice president, I tried to make it to this lunch whenever I was in town. I was grateful for the senators’ hospitality since as an institution the Senate does not always take kindly to vice presidents, who have a foot in the executive branch as well as in the legislative. When Lyndon Johnson was about to become vice president, he laid out a plan to preside over Democratic caucus meetings in the Senate that infuriated many of his colleagues. “I don’t know of any right for a vice president to preside or even be here with senators,” one of them declared. In the end, Johnson did not preside—or even
attend very often
. Harry Reid made it clear that my successor, Senator Joe Biden, would not be welcome—which is too bad. I found these sessions to be important for building relationships and alliances and for getting things done.

With with members of the Senate on the North Portico of the White House. As president of the Senate, I worked hard to develop relationships with my senate colleagues, and with members of the House of Representatives, that would help us accomplish our legislative agenda. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

I seldom spoke at the caucus lunches, though occasionally, if there was a particularly important issue on the agenda or if I’d been asked
by the Republican Senate leadership, I would say a few words. For the most part, I preferred to listen, not to lobby for administration positions. I wanted the Republican senators to view me as an ally in the West Wing—and to continue to invite me to their weekly sessions.

The relationships I had in both houses of Congress meant I was often the first person in the White House to hear if there was a problem. I’d get a call from Speaker Denny Hastert or Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, for example, giving me a heads-up if a piece of legislation was going off the rails. It was a very effective way, most of the time, to make sure the White House and Republicans on the Hill were on the same page.

Much has been written about my advocacy of a strong executive, and it is true that I am a firm believer in protecting the president’s prerogatives, especially when it comes to the conduct of national security policy. But I loved my time in Congress, and I will always consider myself a man of the House. My respect for that institution and my understanding of how Congress works, including the pressures that individual members feel, was important as I worked to get George Bush’s legislative agenda enacted.

We needed every Republican vote as the 107th Congress opened in January 2001. Not only had we just triumphed in one of the closest presidential races in history, but the Senate was deadlocked with fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats. My tie-breaking vote as vice president gave the Republicans the majority. Trent Lott, the majority leader, and Tom Daschle, the minority leader, worked out an arrangement for evenly dividing up seats on committees, but each committee was chaired by a Republican.

SECURING TAX RELIEF WAS one of our most important campaign promises, and we proposed reform across the board for what would become the largest tax cut since 1981. It was our belief that taxes ought to be as low as possible, especially when it came to those elements of the tax code that affected savings and investment, economic growth, and job creation. We wanted to reduce rates on capital gains and interest and dividends, as well as lowering overall income tax rates for the American people. We believed, as do most conservatives, that the
estate tax should be eliminated or significantly reduced. We saw it as fundamentally unfair, because it represents double taxation for those who have to pay it.

Because there was a significant budget surplus, there was bipartisan support for a tax cut of some size, but the Democrats, particularly in the Senate, wanted a much smaller package than we did. On April 3, 2001, I cast my first tie-breaking vote and stopped a Democratic effort to reduce the size of the tax cuts. On April 5, my tie-breaking vote returned money to the tax cut package for relief of the marriage penalty. I also took part in the negotiations with Senate Republicans and Democrats over the ultimate size of the package. Sitting in Trent Lott’s office on April 4, I picked up a napkin imprinted with “Office of the Majority Leader,” took out my pen, and wrote out the two numbers representing what we wanted—$1.6 trillion—and what the Democrats wanted—$1.25 trillion. In between the two numbers, I wrote, “1.425 trillion,” and I circled it. Ultimately, we would be successful in securing a package of $1.35 trillion in tax relief for the American people. The package included a phased-in reduction of the estate tax, with elimination in 2010. All the tax changes were passed as part of the budget reconciliation process, which exempted them from filibuster, but also provided an expiration date.

As the tax cuts were set to expire in 2010, they were, fortunately, extended for two more years. Although the estate tax was reinstated by President Obama, the current law allows for a five-million-dollar exemption, more than seven times the exemption allowed before President Bush acted.

In the midst of the debate over tax cuts, it looked as though the Republicans might lose their one-vote majority. As we debated the budget resolution throughout the spring of 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont made clear that he wanted significantly increased funding for special education programs. Although we were increasing the education budget, we weren’t allocating the funds the way Jim wanted, and he threatened to switch parties, which would put the Democrats in control in the Senate.

I know Jim cared deeply about the education program he was proposing,
and even though he ended up switching parties, he kept his commitment to us to vote for the final tax cut package. In the end, I think his decision to switch had more to do with the committee chairmanship that Tom Daschle offered him than with anything else. In the Senate committee chairmanships are normally decided purely on seniority—the longest-serving member of the majority party on any committee traditionally becomes the chairman. But it was so important for the Democrats to get Jeffords to switch, Tom Daschle moved him to the head of the line and made him chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. With his party shift, every chair of every Senate committee also shifted hands as the Democrats took control.

We worked hard to prevent Jim from switching, and certainly weren’t pleased when we failed. But as I look back now, I believe that Jeffords’s switch actually contributed to our victory in the 2002 midterm elections. He put the Democrats in control, but their margin was so narrow there was very little they could actually get done. Their inability to show any real accomplishment hurt them and helped us when the voters went to the polls a little over a year later. The president’s poll numbers were also high, near 70 percent, and when the midterm results were in, we had increased our majority in the House by eight seats and gained two in the Senate, thus returning that body to Republican control. The last time a president’s party had gained seats in both houses of Congress in the first midterm election of his term was when FDR was in office in 1934.

IN 2003 THE PRESIDENT proposed a second major round of tax cuts, and I again spent a good deal of time securing the votes we needed to get them passed. Even though we had enlarged our majority in the House and taken control of the Senate, the task wasn’t easy. While all Republicans favored a tax cut, there were a few who didn’t want to go with the $550 billion the president was proposing. They were worried about the deficit, a concern I generally appreciated. I have been quoted as saying around this time that “deficits don’t matter” and citing Ronald
Reagan to bolster the case, but of course I thought deficits mattered. I just believed that it was important to see them in context, to note that while Ronald Reagan’s dramatic increases in the defense budget and his historic tax cuts did push the deficit from 2.7 percent of the gross domestic product in fiscal year 1980 to 6 percent in fiscal year 1983, his spending on defense helped put the Soviet Union out of business, and his tax cuts helped spur one of the longest sustained waves of prosperity in our history. The result was a peace dividend, increased federal revenues, and, eventually, lower deficits.

In 2003, with the deficit just 1.5 percent of the GDP and the economy in the doldrums, the tax package the president proposed certainly seemed justified to me, but Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio thought it was too large. Chuck Grassley, needing their votes on a budget resolution, agreed to a cap of $350 billion on the tax package, a deal to which Majority Leader Bill Frist gave his blessing.

But no one told the House leadership, and they were thoroughly irritated when the deal became public. House passage of a $550 billion tax cut on May 9 did nothing to ease their aggravation, because now a conference between the House and Senate was looming. How could you have a conference, House leaders wanted to know, when one of the leading conferees, Senator Grassley, had already announced a limit?

The president invited all the players for a drink on the Truman Balcony on May 19, 2003. Speaker of the House Denny Hastert was one of those who enjoyed the fine view from the balcony that evening, as were House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley. The president talked about his tax cut plan, which would speed up rate reductions scheduled for coming years and eliminate the individual tax on dividends. The point of it was to promote economic growth, and he wanted to get it in place fast, by Memorial Day at the latest.

Denny Hastert, one of the most even-tempered, easygoing men I’ve ever known, then spoke up—and his exasperation with his Senate colleagues was pretty obvious. He recommended to Majority Leader Frist
that since Senator Grassley had already staked out a position, he should not be appointed to the conference. There was silence as the group on the balcony calculated the number of improprieties Hastert had just committed. There was, first of all, the House telling the Senate what to do and added to that was the insult of anyone daring to propose that the Senate finance chairman be denied a seat on a tax bill conference. And, then, of course, Senate Finance Chairman Grassley was sitting right there.

I knew that Hastert was doing more than just sending a shot across the bow. He’d phoned in the last couple of days to tell me that House members were saying they wouldn’t go to conference with Grassley. They were thinking about sending a bill with a higher number back to the Senate and telling the senators to take it or leave it.

Bill Frist had also called me. Senators were getting their backs up at the idea the House was trying to “jam” them, he said, and personal animosities were running high. Could I step in and help broker a deal?

I was happy to do it. I certainly understood the institutional rivalries at work, and I knew the people involved well. Finance Chairman Grassley and House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas were barely speaking. There was a report that a meeting between them grew so heated that Thomas stomped out of his own office. I liked and admired both men. Chuck is a down-to-earth and decent man who still works his Iowa farm. I remember at least once calling him and reaching him on his cell phone while he was out driving his tractor. He has a stubborn streak, but it has served him and his constituents pretty well over the years. Thomas, who’s from Bakersfield, California, loves to legislate, and he brings a very sharp mind to the task. An ex-academic like me, he is famously prickly, but we had known each other since we had both been elected to the House nearly a quarter century before and enjoyed each other’s company.