Conservatives Without Conscience

Abramoff began his relationship with the tribes by getting himself hired as their Washington lobbyist. (His arrangement with each tribe was a little different, but the pattern was the same.) Abramoff handled only tribes that had casinos, because they were making enormous amounts of money. Once the tribes hired him, he told them they also had to retain Michael Scanlon, Tom DeLay’s former press secretary. Scanlon, who was not registered as a lobbyist (and thus not required to report to Congress) but a political and communications consultant, would help tribal members win elections to their tribal councils, and once friendly members ran those councils, both Abramoff and Scanlon began billing them extravagantly for an array of activities. What Abramoff failed to mention to his clients was that he also received 50/50 kickbacks from Scanlon. The New York Times reported that “Abramoff and his sidekick not only bilked Indian tribes of up to $66 million; they also mocked them as ‘monkeys’ and ‘morons.’”[*] But there is nothing kind-hearted about authoritarians, particularly when they are busy manipulating.

Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, and their cohorts are all conservatives and are all authoritarians. One of the more remarkable traits of such individuals is their ability to get away with so much before they are called to task, which can partially be explained by authoritarian followers’ being attracted to such personalities and ready to be led by them with no questions asked. But sooner or later, the Double High authoritarian personality, in particular, seems to more or less self-destruct as a result of endless aggression and a lack of conscience. While possession of an authoritarian personality does not necessarily lead to their downfall, if past is prologue, their insatiable desire for power, combined with remarkable self-righteousness, enables them to easily cross the lines of propriety, and the law.

Authoritarian Conservatism in the U.S. Senate

While most of Abramoff’s relationships were with members of the House, he also worked with senators, but the Senate, so far, is not an authoritarian body, so the problems he created for the House are not likely to be as serious for the Senate. This is not to say that there is no authoritarianism in the Senate, for it is growing there as well, as Republicans, who would like to extend their power in the Senate in a fashion similar to what they have in the House, are oblivious to the fact that by doing so they would make the Senate into a mini–House of Representatives, thereby fundamentally changing the interaction between the inherently cautious Senate and the more impulsive House. Under the Constitution, each house of Congress makes its own rules. With each new Congress, the House reconstitutes itself, adopting new rules with a majority vote. The Senate, however, considers itself a continuing body, because each senator serves for six years and only a third of the Senate stands for election at any given time. A two-thirds vote, or the approval of sixty-seven senators, is therefore required to change its rules.

Because of its smaller size, with only two senators representing each state, the Senate has always allowed for more open and extended debate than the House of Representatives, which serves to protect minority views or, in effect, to prevent a tyranny of the majority. The first recorded occasion when a minority senator used extended debate to defeat a proposal was in 1790; the senator was arguing against moving the location of Congress from New York City to Philadelphia. Between 1820 and 1860, lengthy debate in the Senate became something of a common procedure for protecting the views of the minority party, and by 1856, it became a right when it was formalized in the Senate’s rules.[56]