Revolution Ends
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The House Republicans revised their ethical rules last week to protect the political perch of their majority leader, Tom DeLay, who may face indictment from a district attorney back home in Texas.
Existing rules would have forced Mr. DeLay to step down if indicted. So Republicans changed the rules.
Different people had different reactions to the move. Some reeled at the hypocrisy; others were merely repulsed by the cynicism. Myself, I wiped away a silent tear, struck by the poignancy of the moment.
Poignancy? Yes, indeed. For many of us, this is already a poignant season in Washington. The place is awash in nostalgia.
Exactly a decade has passed since the capital was caught in the dizziest period anyone then could remember. Against all odds, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.
As a veteran conservative journalist said then, shouting over the din at one of the parties that began election day 1994 and seemed to go on for months: “This is everything we’ve ever dreamed of.”
And now, on its 10th anniversary, that original “Republican Revolution” is definitively over. The rules change last week, with its transparent opportunism, seals the deal. The 2004 House Republicans have become true successors to the sclerotic, in-bred 1993 House Democrats they came to town to unseat.
Does this sound overdramatic? Maybe. After all, there have been other moments over the past decade when Republicans made plain that they had succumbed to the same power lust that corrupted the old guard of House Democrats.
Some of those moments came early on. The class of 1994 was swept into office in a whirlwind of libertarian passion, or so its members thought. They pledged to dismantle at least three federal departments – Commerce, Education and Energy – and a host of the smaller alphabet-soup agencies that stand as symbols of the government’s comprehensive busybodyism.
Despite assurances to the contrary, some of us who covered the “Republican Revolution” were skeptical about demolishing the departments. But surely the National Endowment for the Arts – to cite one overripe example – would go.
“The NEA,” said a statement issued by the House leadership in 1995, “shall cease to exist in two years.”
Almost two years to the day after issuing that statement, House Republicans held a hearing designed to gather support for increasing the endowment’s budget. As the NEA chairman at the time, Jane Alexander, said: “Wow.”
I had the same reaction when, in 1996, House Republicans passed a resolution pledging to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, as a marker, they said, of their continuing revolutionary zeal.
The resolution was notable for two reasons. First, the idea was stunningly radical. Second, most of the members who voted for it must have known it wasn’t going to happen.
Thus was a crucial point reached in the evolution of House Republicans: They managed to appear crazy and cynical at the same time.
The cynicism grew. House Republicans abandoned federalism, one of the party’s bedrock principles, by imposing on all 50 states national standards for, of all things, drunk driving and – you’ll think I’m kidding but I’m not – the water flow in household flush toilets.
In 2002, they perfected their imitation of the old Democratic leadership by voting themselves a pay raise late one night after most reporters went home, and then sending out then-Majority Leader Dick Armey to justify it like so: “Congress didn’t vote themselves a pay raise. What Congress did was not vote away their diminished cost-of living increase.”
No Democratic leader, circa 1993, could have put it more appallingly.
In the interest of fairness – not one of my abiding interests, I confess – we should note that the Class of 1994 had some successes. Under President Clinton they goaded Congress into passing a significant reform of federal welfare and agricultural programs. They also rewrote internal House rules and restrained spending enough to balance, briefly, the federal budget.
As last week’s favor to Mr. DeLay shows, though, internal House reforms are easily undone when it’s deemed convenient. The agriculture reform of 1997, which pushed farmers toward a free-market system, was effectively undone by a new “reform” in 2002.
Spending restraint vanished, too. The Department of Energy, which the Class of 1994 hoped to abolish, has seen its budget balloon 37.7% since President Bush took office, according to an analysis by Veronique de Rugy of the American Enterprise Institute.
Indeed, those early successes, temporary as most were, are as suggestive as the failures.
They show that what motivated the Republican Congress of the 1990s was less a commitment to fiscal conservatism or limited government than a partisan urge to frustrate a Democratic president. With Clinton out, and a Republican president in, all countervailing pressure to federal micromanagement has vanished.
Which brought us to the sorry spectacle last week. Along with my friend’s optimism from 10 years ago – “Everything we ever dreamed of” – I was reminded of another quote from the lawman in the great movie “The Untouchables,” whose obsession with jailing Al Capone drives him to do things he thought he would never do:
“I have broken every law that I had sworn to uphold, and I have become what I beheld.”
Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.