By Christopher Hayes
February 11, 2009
The House of Representatives is a body that produces few stars, but Jim Cooper of Tennessee is a household name inside the Beltway. David Brooks has called him "one of the most thoughtful, cordial and well-prepared members of the House." He is viewed by the well-funded budget-hawk constituency as one of its most articulate advocates. Among his colleagues he has a reputation as a wonk and an intellectual--he even teaches a class at Vanderbilt University on health policy--and as the philosopher for the caucus of forty-nine conservative House Democrats known as the Blue Dogs. He gives off the slightly martyred air of someone who believes himself to be smarter than the people he works with.
In the past few weeks Cooper has emerged as the dissident-in-chief among House Democrats (a role he's been rehearsing since 1994, when his refusal to pull his "compromise" healthcare proposal helped kill the Clinton plan). Cooper was one of eleven Democrats--ten of them Blue Dogs--to vote against Obama's stimulus package. A few days after the vote, Cooper caused a stir when he suggested to a local radio station that Obama's aides had encouraged him to vote against their bill, a statement he had to walk back the next day.
When I spoke to Cooper the week after the vote, he defended it as counterintuitively pro-Obama, cast against "certain Congressional old habits and bad practices. A lot of our colleagues have not gotten the change message." He expressed frustration with the speed of the process, as well as the fact that the leadership had forgone the normal committee mark-ups, saying that members were "just told how to vote."
If that was the case, I asked Cooper, why had he voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program little more than a week after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sent a three-page proposal up to the Hill asking for $700 billion? "We were told," he said, "and I believed at the time, that the TARP money was a genuine national emergency."
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For most of the Clinton and early Bush years, the Blue Dogs weren't much of a factor. But after the 2006 midterms, the caucus grew dramatically from thirty-seven members to forty-seven, and the Blue Dog PAC became a financial juggernaut, raising more than $2.6 million (lots of it from corporate PACs) for the 2008 cycle.
While the Progressive Caucus is larger and more integrated into the House leadership, the Blue Dogs are arguably more effective. This is partly because of the drawbacks of size: the bigger you are, the harder it is to achieve consensus, and as a result Progressive Caucus members rarely take positions en masse. Blue Dogs, on the other hand, have limited their membership to 25 percent of the House Democratic caucus and take official positions on bills only if they have the support of two-thirds of their members. (In the 110th Congress, that was only six bills, including a corporate average fuel economy standards [CAFE] bill, the war funding accountability bill and the bipartisan FISA compromise.)
This allows the Blue Dogs to operate more like a junior parliamentary coalition partner than the loose federation that is the Progressive Caucus. "They're organized," a progressive Representative's chief of staff told me. "When you're dealing with the Blue Dogs, you know you're dealing with an entity that has a very narrow focus--but that they have a structure that says they can deliver votes, and they know where all their members are going to be." This meant that in the 110th Congress, they could "control outcomes of votes."
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Everyone understands that Democrats attempting to represent conservative districts have to convince their constituents that despite the D next to their name, they hear them, understand them and share their concerns and worldview. But to do this they've chosen to invest a tremendous amount of political capital in something that, well, no one cares about. In a recent national poll of priorities, the deficit/debt came in a distant sixth, after regulating the financial industry, ending the war in Iraq and healthcare reform. This could be because the national debt as a percentage of GDP is well within post-World War II norms. A Democratic Congressional candidate who unsuccessfully challenged a Republican incumbent in a conservative district in the South put it to me this way: "Nobody brings up the deficit. Ever."
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For all their cohesiveness, positive press and legislative leverage, the Blue Dogs haven't produced a ton of legislative accomplishments on their signature issue. On the two most massive expenditures of the last Bush years--the Iraq War and the financial bailout--they've offered little organized resistance. The offsets on the issues on which they've been able to enforce pay-go--like the tax increases to pay for the new GI bill, which the Blue Dogs peg at $63 billion--pale in comparison with the cost of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and the bailout, which have cost more than $1 trillion over the past two years.
Where Blue Dogs have perhaps been most effective is in helping Republicans pass legislation and blocking or diluting progressive legislation. During the months-long debate in 2006 over the Military Commissions Act, which was crafted explicitly to deny the right of habeas corpus to enemy combatants, many Blue Dogs supported the bill (against the directive of the Democratic House leadership), and ultimately twenty-three of thirty-seven voted for it. And it's not just on national security issues that they've played this role. In 2007 Representative Brad Miller proposed legislation that would have amended bankruptcy law to allow judges to alter home mortgage terms, a reform seen by many Democrats as necessary to reduce the number of foreclosures. But according to National Journal's online Congress Daily, "bankers...knew exactly whom to go to in order to stop the bill in its tracks: the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate-to-conservative Democrats." Sixteen
members of the caucus signed a letter objecting to the legislation, prompting it to be pulled from consideration on the floor. As of this writing, it has yet to pass the House.
Positions like this have convinced many progressives that Blue Dogs are little more than bought-and-paid-for agents of big business. One corporate lobbyist explained the Blue Dogs' fundraising prowess this way: companies say to themselves, "Blue Dog Democrats are probably going to be more business-friendly, so let's give them more campaign contributions.... You get elected, you join the Blue Dogs...the money comes flowing." Individual fundraising is then amplified by contributions from the Blue Dog PAC, much of it from large corporations like UBS ($10,000), Citigroup ($10,000) and Coca-Cola ($10,000).
As much as politicians hate to be accused of being influenced by money, the Blue Dogs haven't necessarily gone out of their way to disabuse people of this notion: at last year's Democratic National Convention, the Blue Dog reception (with open bar!) was sponsored and paid for by the telecom industry, which was feeling generous after forty-five of the forty-seven members voted to grant it immunity from civil suits for collusion with unlawful domestic spying.
In late February, Obama will host a "fiscal responsibility summit," which the Blue Dogs will be attending, an event they demanded as the price for their (reluctant) cooperation with the stimulus bill. On the agenda is "entitlement reform," the longstanding dream of the Concord Coalition and the Peterson Institute to shrink the social welfare state [see William Greider's article on page 11]. The full roster has yet to be announced, but it won't be surprising if Cooper is one of the headliners.
It's unclear in just what direction the summit will go, but in Washington, the perception of power is indistinguishable from actual power. And if the Blue Dogs don't have much of the latter, they have the former in spades.
The majority of the Blue Dogs voted for the stimulus package the first time around and will likely do so again when it comes out of conference committee. But their leverage is more rhetorical and political than legislative. By continuing to reinforce the notion that nonmilitary spending is pork, favors to special interests, they lend credence to a deeply entrenched conservative Beltway critique of government--that its biggest problem is that it provides too much to its citizens.
Cooper captured this sentiment perfectly in explaining his opposition to the stimulus. He was skeptical about some of the spending--notably for expanded Medicaid eligibility pools--saying it wouldn't last just two years but would extend into the future. When I asked why, he said, "Once you hand out Snickers bars, people tend to want more Snickers bars."
This kind of rhetoric obscures the deeper questions of what government should provide, and which groups get squeezed when the screws are tightened. Under Cooper's framing it's all Snickers bars. So when conservative Democrats and so-called moderate Republicans in the Senate, with the support of the Blue Dogs in the House, cut $100 billion from the stimulus package, they left in an estimated $36 billion new home tax credit whose benefits would skew heavily toward the upper middle class and wealthy, while cutting $98 million in school nutrition programs for poor kids.
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