Tom Davis Says that Skepticism About Congress Is Good For America
Taqrir Washington
Thomas M. Davis III (born January 5, 1949 in Minot, North Dakota), American politician, is a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, representing the Eleventh Congressional District of Virginia.
He seeking re-election in 2006, and has begun fundraising for a Senate race in 2008
He was Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) from 1998 to 2002. According to The Federal Paper, Davis had less seniority than the other contenders for the Chair but "some Republicans want to reward him" for his work as NRCC Chairman where "Davis supervised a $160 million fund-raising effort.
Taqrir Washington
The one thing that I wanted to start with is that this town, as they say, nothing is coincidence, and the same day of Mr. Abramoff being sentence we have the senate passing the issue with the ethics. It still has a lot of critics and I just wanted to get your take on that. The dynamics of lobbying in this town and why…it seems that the new law asks for more disclosure and yet doesn’t create many rules that would severe a lot of these relationships.
TOM DAVIS
People have the right to petition the government for help. That is the constitutional guarantee in America, unlike a lot of countries. And many times they will band together and hire a lobbyist to be their agent on the Hill and to be able to represent their case. So there is nothing inherently wrong with the lobbying. What there is something wrong with is that somebody is bribing that public official or using that influence improperly to achieve a result. But you know that we pass a lot of laws against bank robbery, and people still rob banks. We pass laws against murder, and people still murder. The thing about Abramoff is that he got caught, he is sentenced on one group of crimes but he has a whole other group of crimes pending underneath him. This is a guy that abused the system and there is an ongoing investigation, the republican administration to get to the bottom of this, and it looks as if there are going to be further indictments. Congress’ reaction to anything like this is “well, we’ve done something wrong, we have to tighten up rules and regulations but you have to understand he is being caught because of many of the disclosures that were already in place under the current law. Having said that, I think that we will do some things to further disclosure and to make it…uh…I hope we don’t over react to some of these things.
TAQRIR WASHINGTON
Do you think that there is a need for additional oversight, or more rigorous oversight?
TOM DAVIS
The best oversight comes from the press. The press can come out there…. Everything that I do is disclosed every year. They can take a look at my disclosure statements, they can look at my campaign contributions, they can look at our votes and they can compare and draw whatever conclusions that they want. My opponents do that. I do that to people that I run against. They lady that I beat in 1994 voted against NAFTA and took $400,000 from the AAFLCIO (??? Might be only one A) and I made that an issue. Maybe she believed it, maybe the AAFLCIO just felt that this is somebody who believed in them and they invested. But if you tie it together it is part of the political process. That doesn’t make it dirty, it doesn’t make it illegal. But those are legitimate objects, I think, for public discourse and (or ‘in’) debate. I don’t think that abolishing private trips is the way to get around that. Many times if I am reliant on a private trip I will never get into Iran. I will never be able to get any information that my government doesn’t want me to get. But I may be able to go with international organization that would take me in there where (or ‘or’) I could get information that I would be able to get otherwise. Doesn’t that benefit my constituents? Is that inherently wrong? I happen to have to disclose that trip and if I cast a vote in any way shape or form it would look like I was rewarding that group for taking me on the trip. Now, obviously going on a trip, having golf outings and having $300 bottles of wine would raise eyebrows. It has to be disclosed and appropriately…that should be…you know those are something that the public wouldn’t like.
TAQRIR WASHINGTON
Do you think that the public has, well not the right, but is it right of them to be so skeptical of the representatives? (inaudible)
TOM DAVIS
I think that a healthy skepticism is always good for the government process. That’s fine we’ve got to be on our toes. If you don’t put those constraints on there the nature of people in general will get lax and it becomes abusive very, very quickly. So, oversight is a good thing. And I think that we will probably do, uh, out of our committee we will have a bill particularly when a lobbyist is meeting with an executive branch department, that meeting has to be recorded. Just who met, not the substance of the meeting, not what was discussed. That appropriately should be private. But the fact that they met together ought to be part of the process. We ought to know that if Jack Abramoff was up there billing clients millions of dollars and was meeting with agencies of the White House, there ought to be a record of that. So the people can say, ‘you met with the White House 32 times or 3 times,’ or whatever. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with disclosing the fact that you are billing your clients for it. The public ought to be aware. So, but I think that on the disclosure side we could do a bit more, but I think that there is a danger of over reacting to this and if there’s no meals involved basically what you are going to have is that you meet somebody at McDonalds for lunch; members don’t have enough in their own pockets to take everybody in the world for lunch. Very often you will meet somebody afterwards and you will sit down and give that person a pitch. We do a lot of it in our office. We usually buy them the Cokes or the sodas or something like that, it is pretty informal. But I don’t know…I mean putting a reasonable limit on that is appropriate. Eliminating all that together, I think that you are making…you are criminalizing the legitimate acts of people petitioning their government.
TAQRIR WASHINGTON
I’ve studied a different topic…this is a two-prong question. With the current White House shake-up and with Mr. Bolton replacing Mr. Card, A) I wanted to get your take on that and B) As the former head of the NRCC, would the polls, not very favorable for the president or the vice president for that matter, from the scandals involving republican leadership… what are the challenges for the upcoming elections… for the party to maintain its effect? (the last word a bit inaudible but I think that is what you said)
TOM DAVIS
First of all I think that Card for Bolton isn’t any kind of shake-up at all… I mean, that’s continuity, these people are all part of the inner circle. Andy Card has been the longest serving Chief-of-Staff in history, I think that he is ready to do something else although he did a good job, and I don’t consider that a shake-up. I just consider that as he’s leaving and that somebody else is moving in now. I don’t know who they’ll move in as head of OMD(?) But he was an original Bush hand. So, I don’t think that that will be classified as a shake-up, I don’t know that that is appropriate for even the White House to view it as a shake-up. A shake-up would be bringing somebody from the outside that has disengaged from the administration for a fresh view or something like that. There is always a nexus between presidential popularity and midterm election results. And, if the President doesn’t help himself I think that the republics will bear the brunt of it at the polls. It is not clear how much in the House or Senate that will bear. First of all, there are not that many competitive House districts when you really take a look at it. The way these districts are designed, the way that the districts are small enough, members can get around the president’s popularity trying to localize the races, or run their own race. You can do that uniquely in America, it is very difficult to do that in other countries where you have parliamentary systems and voting for that member you are voting for a government. Voting for a House member doesn’t mean that you are voting for a republican or democratic government, you are voting for one House member. Senate is a little more difficult because the Senate has much wider constituencies, broader constituencies, more competitive constituencies, and the fact that they are larger makes it harder for Senators to personalize that. And, if a democrat or a republican challenger can get enough money, they can be competitive in those areas, and the winds of change, or continuity, whatever’s blowing, can then be expressed. So, what I think what we’ve seen in recent elections are more turnovers in Senate races than House races. Because of that now the democrats have a problem now this year in the Senate that you have more democratic seats up (?) than republican seats. But if you go race race there five Senate seats that look on the iffy side for republicans and you with a little luck could get two or three other republicans if the tides were…so, there is a possibility on both the Senate and House side of the democrats taking over, but it is a long way from a certainty in this environment.
TAQRIR WASHINGTON
Is the dominance single party, and this has always amazed of American politics and how they try either side of the aisle, dominance a single party…is that a good thing for the democratic process?
TOM DAVIS
Well it’s continuity of policy as opposed to divided policy, but Americans seems to prefer a divided government if you go starting in 1968 with the election of Nixon what you had the majority of the time, about 2/3 of the time you had a divided government. There are a couple reasons for that. One is that the public is…parties are made out of coalitions. These coalitions are patchwork quilted, different constituencies that are sometime dissident within themselves. So, what you end up getting are people who are in the same room fighting for the same party who really have different agendas and who don’t agree with each other on a wide variety of issues that have decided to band together for the purposes of advancing a constituency. Within a republican party, what is a republican? You have people that are republicans because they are very pro business, they are economic laissez-faire. You have people there because of their moral issues, you have people there for historical reasons. Cubans are there over foreign policy issues, east Tennessee because it opposed the rest of the South during reconstruction. So you have different reasons people opt for one party over the other. But many times people who are republicans or are democrats are, frankly, not comfortable with all the elements of that coalition, and so when you divide government you basically put a check on all that. I always say that in 1994 the electorate elected a republican Congress to protect them from Bill Clinton. And, then in 1996 they re-elected Bill Clinton to protect them from the republican Congress. And in the point of fact the voters trade that off. That is not just a national phenomena, that is also reflected in states. Some of your strongest democratic states in the Union, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Maryland, and California, all have republican governors and heavily democratic legislatures. Now it is a different issue matrix, you in Massachusetts you’ve had four straight republican governors and part of that is to protect them from a heavily democratic legislature and they come in sort of a check on the excesses of the legislature. Schwarzenegger today in a poll publishes ahead of both his opponents. His numbers are in the tank, but the democrat legislature are worse. When you have that trade-off across the board, and the majority of the time we have a divided government, the republicans…Bush’s re-election and the re-election of the republican Congress in 2004 was the first time that a government had been re-elected, in other words a party that held the Senate, House, and the Presidency, and it was up for…and part of that was up for re-election, it was the first time that a party had been re-elected to that since 1978, and even in that year the democrats took office. But…does that give you perspective?
TAQRIR WASHINGTON
Yes. Going back to…well one of the subcommittees that you have, and I think probably your committee held a hearing recently about how to maintain…I don’t know if it is an American supremacy…but an advantage in the international arena…economics and so on…A) what do you personally see as some of those challenges? And, B) what type of response would you have to those who would say that post-9/11 the United States have come up with all these barriers that gives at least the impression of following an isolationist policy, yet they want to maintain this leadership in the world arena…you know there are less people coming into the country, students, so on and so forth…
TOM DAVIS
Let me say that I don’t think that you are going to see a period of anyone country trying to dominate militarily in the world today. You’ve never had it for reaches of the world for short periods of time. You had the Romans, you had the Ottomans, you had the Germans, there’s a check…it’s too diverse a place. We are talking about economic domination, which is where America has been, we have the largest GDP outlook in the world, Japan is second, and China may be moving up a distant fourth or fifth. But the economic landscape has changed remarkably from a generation ago. First of all, you have the Pacific Rim which is stepping up fast and furiously onto center stage into the global economy. It is a global economy, there is a lot of denial; it’s not a fad, it is here to stay, it has replaced the old Cold War way of doing things. As for integration, that is a huge part. I think it offers a lot of opportunities for Americans, but it’s also full of pitfalls. Competitiveness is something that we need to shift, our basic institutions have to change if we are to stay competitive. Our taxes, our immigration system, our procurement system, all our major institutions are going to have to change. It all started with the invention of the microchip which brought the world closer and closer.
TAQRIR WASHINGTON
When you say change, are you talking about even a change from the current direction that is the post-9/11 direction?
TOM DAVIS
I don’t, you know…you talked about 9/11, Friedman talks about 11/9 which is the day the Berlin Wall came down. I think that they are equally important for different reasons. The world today is a global economy, it’s here to stay whatever America does. Education is going to be the main driver of that. There is a lot of denial in America about what is going on. People see factories closing down, they don’t understand all of the changes at this point and there has always been a healthy stream of isolationism in America; a resistance to change. We saw it in WWI, we saw it in WWII, and we a re seeing it today economically. But the reality is that it is a global economy and we better get with the program. It’s difficult, it’s similar to driving a racecar where if you are in control, you are not going fast enough. People are crashing and burning everyday, but when you are talking about some of the areas where they were driving camels only a generation ago that’s understandable. And capital is now international in terms of where it’s going and investing and the like. So, it is a changed landscape and America has to adopt and our competitors are staying focused on education. Number one, we are not producing as many scientists and engineers, and knowledge is basically going to drive the economy in the twenty-first century. A hundred years ago oil was driving the economy, and in fact we had the EPA and all the rules and regulations regulating oil, and had we not had them we would have never gotten the stuff out of the ground. But oil did in fact drive most of the economies in the twentieth century around the world and it still drives it in the Middle East to some detriment, I might add, oil rich countries are dysfunctional in terms of their governments. But the oil of the twenty-first century is information, and in fact it is the getting out of the ground, being able to refine it, and getting it to market. It is the companies that are doing that that are going to be leading the economies in the twenty-first century, and that is part of the knowledge that you call knowledge industry, or technology, or whatever you want to call it. The fastest growing economy in the Middle East is Jordan, no oil. But, they are into the technology regime, they’ve changed their IP laws and everything else. Rather than sitting and boo-hoo-ing and whining about it in America, we need to get with the program, understand what we are up against, or focus specifically on the Pacific Rim where your burden structure is very low, where they are very, very focused, where they have tons of information, and they are going to run right past us. And that means we have to look at our tax laws to keep us competitive, the way we educate people, and our immigration laws. People come over here to study. Over half the scientists and engineers in graduate schools in this country are foreign born. You want to keep them here if knowledge is going to drive the economy. There is just a lot of trepidation out there of ‘Oh what am I going to do?’ about jobs, you know that kind of a thing. We need to focus on that. You know if a hundred years ago, with the disappearance of the family farm is that who’s going to feed Americans? Farms were breaking up. We have much less farmland than we did a hundred years ago and we are producing more food than ever. And the sons and the daughters of our farmers, where are they? They are computer scientists, they are software engineers.
