B. U. G. S.

Ok, richard, let me give you a couple of insides on how to stop things in the House.

John had four or five congressmen who took turns being in the House ALL the time. If you ever read the Congressional record on the House side, you will constantly see the phrase, “”Without objection, we will dispense with the reading of the minutes” or “Without objection” we will do this or that.

The costs to a member who DOES object are staggering. Everybody there is running for reelection all the time, or else they are in leadership positions and are trying to get something done. Everybody needs to get back to their home districts. With 435 members, the most precious thing in the House is TIME.

But John made it very clear that if anything were proposed relating to a Martin Luther King holiday, he and his coterie would jam House business solid untit it was off the floor. He jammed other legislation that way, but he alone always denounced MLK onthe Floor, and when he died the MLK Holiday was passed within weeks.

Since I was the best known staffer for John Ashbrook, this made me delightfully unpopular.

So how did John survive the rule that a congressman who was that hard core and stopped the business of the House wouldn’t be ostracized?

The reason was that everybody was terrified of John Ashbrook. You can back a respectable conservative down, but John was not reasonable, John was not respectable.

You can hold the nastiest mob in the world at bay with a shotgun, because somebody has to take the first blast. Nobody wanted John’s first blast.

Three times the Republican legislature of Ohio tried to redistrict John out of his seat. His majorities kept growing. His last reelection took place in a redrawn district which had been seventy percent Democratic. He won 73% of the vote.

Another method John used was also based on his happiness at being disliked. “Give me the last three days of the session,” John said, “And you can have the rest.” At the end of the session, everybody needed to get home. After each redistristricting John needed to get home. He faced one tough reelection campaign after another. But John would hold them there when EVERYBODY, not least conservatives, wanted to “give a little” so they could get back to their districts.

But in conference committee and on the floor, John discovered something wonderful. He wouldn’t let them go home, so THEY would be the ones to “give a little.” Understand this term “a little” in the sense Everet Dirksen talked about inhis famous quote, ” a billi0n here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.” That billion was nothing to senators like Dirksen who were playing politics, but it was what John was there for.

John gave me an honored place in this game. I was considered New Right and hard core, and nobody seems to check history, so it was assumed by some that I was responsible for John’s irrational behavior. Lord, how I wish they had been right!

When a staffer would hear that I was behind some holdup — John was doing this DECADES before I got there — the staffer would call me about being “reasonable.” I would then give him a short lecture about how I kept telling John, though I admired the man deeply and loved him personally, that I felt John was a just a little bit of a wimp.

John referred to me as “My pet redneck.” He was SO delighted to have somebody who had a reputation for making HIM a loose cannon. I don’t think I have ever been happier in any role I played in politics.

John and I did not constitute a combination any rational person would expect to back down, and they had to go home SOMETIME.

There were more tactics that would require more explanation than any of us want, like amendments that could delay things.

I spent twenty-four hours a dayfor two days formulating amendments to a farm bill I knew nothing about. I HAD to stop House business until the weekend. The Parliamentarian can simply declare that an amendment is not relevant to a bill and declare it out of order, so I had to learn the whole history of this farm bill and put in amendments that WERE relevant.

Naturally, the leadership wanted to stop us from adding amendments. But the process of STOPPING you from adding amendments, if properly handled, can drive the leadership nuts.

The point is that this is not a torchlight parade. The point is that this is REAL power and REAL billions of dollars.

You can back them down, but you have to know what you are doing. Nobody is scared of a screamer. Everybody is scared of a loose cannon who knows the game.

Once I was at Trader Vic’s Restaurant with John when House Speaker O’Neal came in. John told the waiter to take him a drink at his expense. The waiter came back and said, “That’s the first and last thing I will ever get from John Ashbrook free.”

It was.