Capital Scene: Emptying the Well

IT WASN’T long after freshman Rep. David McIntosh (R., Ind.), former head of Vice President Quayle’s Competitiveness Council, returned to Washington that he got a reintroduction to the self-perpetuating ways of government. “There were a lot of radical environmental groups who were fighting against what we were trying to do [on regulatory reform],” he recalls. “One day we received a copy of an EPA memo written to a lot of these groups, saying, You need to oppose essentially what the Congress is doing in regulatory relief. [We] started to find out most of the people on that memo received grants, and the EPA gives out around $100 million a year in grants. What became obvious was that they were energizing their grant recipients to lobby against Congress on that issue.”

Nine months later, McIntosh’s effort to do something about it—together with Reps. Ernest Istook (Okla.) and Bob Ehrlich (Md.)—has branded him a callous enemy of groups like the American Heart Association and the Girl Scouts and made him the center of one of the more drawn-out, and in its way crucial, fights of the new Republican Congress. The Istook-McIntosh-Ehrlich proposal to limit the lobbying of federal-grant recipients has excited the opposition of almost every defender of the federal status quo: from reluctant House appropriators to hostile senators, from left-wing lobbies to the New York Times. It’s the morality play of the 104th Congress, pitting GOP reformers directly against the infrastructure of the Left.

About the Author

Rich Lowry

Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.

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IT WASN’T long after freshman Rep. David McIntosh (R., Ind.), former head of Vice President Quayle’s Competitiveness Council, returned to Washington that he got a reintroduction to the self-perpetuating ways of government. “There were a lot of radical environmental groups who were fighting against what we were trying to do [on regulatory reform],” he recalls. “One day we received a copy of an EPA memo written to a lot of these groups, saying, You need to oppose essentially what the Congress is doing in regulatory relief. [We] started to find out most of the people on that memo received grants, and the EPA gives out around $100 million a year in grants. What became obvious was that they were energizing their grant recipients to lobby against Congress on that issue.”

Nine months later, McIntosh’s effort to do something about it—together with Reps. Ernest Istook (Okla.) and Bob Ehrlich (Md.)—has branded him a callous enemy of groups like the American Heart Association and the Girl Scouts and made him the center of one of the more drawn-out, and in its way crucial, fights of the new Republican Congress. The Istook-McIntosh-Ehrlich proposal to limit the lobbying of federal-grant recipients has excited the opposition of almost every defender of the federal status quo: from reluctant House appropriators to hostile senators, from left-wing lobbies to the New York Times. It’s the morality play of the 104th Congress, pitting GOP reformers directly against the infrastructure of the Left.