Let us
remember Johnnie M. Walters, who died last week.
He has been
forgotten, though people should honor what he did. I do.
In 1972, he
was the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. He had been picked by President Richard M.
Nixon for that job. The president probably
thought he should be so happy to have the title that he would follow orders.
“I want to be
sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch,” Nixon said, “that he will do what he’s
told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after
our enemies and not go after our friends.”
Walters
succeeded a commissioner who would not obey Nixon. But nobody told this unknown tax lawyer from
South Carolina that he had a special set of instructions from the president.
Still, the
wheels were grinding. John Dean, the
White House counsel, searched for “how we can use the available federal
machinery to screw our enemies.”
A good way,
it turned out, was to get the IRS to carry out tax audits of “enemies.” Dean called Walters to the White House and, in
1972, gave him Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” As a Senate staff member and campaign official
for Sen. George McGovern, Nixon’s election opponent, I was on the list.
Walters
balked. The Watergate scandal involving the Nixon campaign break-in at the
headquarters of the Democratic National Committee was public, and Walters
warned Dean that using the IRS for political purposes would create a far bigger
scandal. But Dean insisted.
The IRS commissioner
told Treasury Secretary George Schulz of his orders, and Schulz advised him to lock
the list in his safe. Three days later,
Schulz was ordered to fire Walters if he did not cooperate. Schulz’s own job was at stake.
Walters
turned the list over to the staff chief of the congressional committee
overseeing the IRS. He told the staffer
that he could judge that the IRS did not go after anybody on the list.
His actions
halted Nixon’s audit plan. As Nixon’s
new term began, Walters was gone from the federal government.
I have always
been grateful to Walters for not exposing me to an IRS witch-hunt. We all should be grateful to Walters, a man of
great integrity in a sensitive government position, who had the courage to
stand up to the president.
This story is
relevant today, because efforts go on these days to “use the available federal
machinery to screw” somebody’s “enemies.”
The actions are not as downright illegal as Nixon’s, but they may be as threatening
to the American political system as was the “enemies list.”
Each house of
Congress can freely adopt its own rules, no matter how far from the original
and customary understandings that worked well for about two centuries. In recent years, those rules have been
applied to “screw” political opponents rather than to produce good government.
Senate
Democratic leaders have blocked GOP proposals to amend pending
legislation. By this simple action, any
possibility of compromise has been lost.
The majority
Democrats could almost certainly defeat any proposed amendment, so it is
difficult to justify this blocking action other than as a way to prevent possible
embarrassment for their senators stemming from their opposition to an enemy
amendment.
The flip side
is the radically expanded use of the filibuster by Republicans who have
insisted that any important matter takes 60 votes to pass rather than the simple
majority set by the Constitution.
To prevent
the president from avoiding the filibuster by making appointments to federal
office when the Senate is in recess, the Republicans keep the Senate in phony
sessions to prevent the enemy, the Democratic president, from making recess
appointments
In eight
years, President George W. Bush made 171 recess appointments. All could have been blocked by the Democrats,
but none was. In almost six years, Obama
has made 32.
Last week,
the Supreme Court said that the Republican recess tactic was
constitutional. But the Democrats had
already blunted its effect by changing the filibuster rule to require only a
simple majority to end debate on most appointments.
Also last
week, Speaker John Boehner announced he would ask the House of Representatives
to authorize a lawsuit against President Obama for having failed to obey the
law. Because Congress cannot pass such a
bill without presidential action, this move is pure harassment of the enemy.
The
“available federal machinery” is certainly being used to “screw” somebody. Unfortunately, it’s the people who suffer
when the spirit of Johnnie Walters dies.
