I waved him quiet for a moment and then turned back to the others. “Okay, it sounds official. Start making your plans. When we get the word we can move, we want to do it quickly and cleanly and efficiently. Get with Marty on what we need to do, and let me know how I can help you.”
Around us the room erupted into a gabble of noise again. The Longworth Building hadn’t been bad, but Rayburn was a lot more modern and had a lot more amenities. I motioned for Marty to follow me into my office, and he did so, trailed by Sherry Longbottom. I eyed her curiously, and she said, “I wanted to see you, Congressman. You should probably be here, too, Marty.”
I leaned back against my desk and said, “All right. Is there a problem, Sherry?”
“Well, yes and no. I mean, not for me, but I needed to let you know. You see, I’ve been offered a position over at the Heritage Foundation.”
I smiled and nodded. I wasn’t terribly surprised. Sherry ran my legislative staff, so she had been involved with the bills we had written with the Heritage Foundation for the Contract. They must have seen in her the same abilities I had seen! “And for probably twice what you’re making here?” She gave a shrug and a smile at that. I looked over at Marty. “You know about this?”
He shrugged and smiled too. “I caught a whiff of something, but can’t say I knew about it. I’m not surprised, though. Are you?”
“No.” I turned back to Sherry. “When do they want you?”
Sherry looked relieved by my obvious acceptance of this. “The beginning of December. They wanted me sooner, but I needed to give you some time to replace me.”
I smiled at her. “I can’t replace you. I can only find somebody else and hope they’ll do as good a job as you did. Who in your staff can move up to your slot, and who do we get to replace them? I’d prefer to move somebody up rather than bring in somebody new.” The three of us made some plans, and after a bit, I shooed them out. “Make sure we have a nice going away party and have a cake I can get a piece of.” I told them.
Sherry was the first senior staffer I had lost. I had replaced a couple of very junior people prior to this. I wasn’t surprised though. Sherry was very good at her job, and most Congressional staffers are trying to move up the ladder into the private sector. The system had an incredible potential for abuse and corruption, but she couldn’t be blamed for playing the game by the rules she didn’t create. I just smiled and shook my head, and asked Mindy to get me a meeting with Gingrich at his pleasure. We had a lot of details to go over about the new session.
When I did meet with Newt, I got another thank you from him for helping with the Contract. I was out of both Science and Veterans Affairs, and was in Armed Services. He would let me pick which subcommittee I wanted, and I promised to let him know in a few days. Armed Services was one of the important committees, and a regular Congressman could make a lot of money by knowing about pending appropriations bills. That wasn’t an issue for me, but maybe I could make the services more efficient. I had some potential in the committee, too, because since the election I was about a third of the way up the seniority ladder. After only four years, I was one of the seasoned veterans!
I also stroked his ego some, by referring to him as ‘Mister Speaker.’ He liked the way that sounded! You could almost see his dick getting hard. Terrible mental image. In some ways, the biggest problem we had going forward was to keep Newt from self-destructing. He had immense talents and brainpower, but an ego and self-image to match. Right now he was damn near at the peak of his political power. He had just managed to thoroughly hose the Democrats, was about to be named Speaker of the House, and had a raft of legislation to be brought to the floor.
Unfortunately, Newt was matched up against probably the wiliest politician of the age, Bill Clinton. I don’t think the nation had seen a politician of his caliber since FDR. Now it was the two of them going head to head. In my previous life, where I had just been a spectator of all of this, Newt had really thrown his weight around for the next few years, and ultimately shut down the government in a spending showdown with Clinton. Clinton came out of it smelling like a rose, and Gingrich ended up in big trouble. He wore out his welcome in only four years and found himself voted out as Speaker, and then left the House in disgrace. Could I change that? Should I change that? Did my presence in Congress now mean things would be different?
Back in my office, I was talking to Marty about the legislation we would be bringing out. The plan was that once we were all sworn in again, and the House was back in session, we would keep the pressure up by introducing a new bill every day. I had the two bills that I was going to introduce. In both cases I was going to make sure I had a little speech prepared. While it would be too much to hope that the TV news would pick up even one for a soundbite, the odds were that they would focus on what we were doing with the Contract.
“What do you think Clinton’s going to do about them?” asked Marty.
I shrugged. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee… He’s going to bob and weave for a bit, and then try to bury them or whatever. Some he’ll sign, after trying to highjack them. Others he is just going to veto, and hope he can get away with it. Hell, some of them are going to end up at the Supreme Court!”
“You think?”
“For sure. The line item veto, for instance, that’s a clear break in the rules for the legislative branch versus the executive branch. Likewise, at least one or two of the states will sue over D2A. That will be a states’ rights issue.”
“Too bad we don’t have a lobbyist we could hire for these things,” he said with a laugh. “We could lobby for our own legislation.”
Marty just tossed that off in passing, but as he did, it felt like lightning had just struck. I was quiet, and he was quiet, and we looked at each other in awe. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked me.
“You’d better tell me what you’re thinking,”, I said eagerly.
“I’m thinking why don’t we set up our own lobbying outfit!”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too!”
“Look, it’s your money, but you don’t seem to mind spending it. What if you funded a lobbying group?” he asked.
“Could I do that? Is it legal?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I can tell you this much, it would have to be buried deeper than a coal mine! Nobody, and I mean nobody, can know about this, or it destroys whatever chance you have of making it work! You can’t be seen to be buying your own legislation. You’d become a laughingstock overnight!”
“Holy shit! Are you serious? We could do this?” I asked him. “How much would it cost?”
Marty gave me an incredulous look and raised his hands palm up. “No fucking idea. Could you raise the money without anybody catching on?”
“I think so.”
“Un-fucking-real! Let me look into this…”
“Quietly!” I interjected.
Marty nodded. “… and I’ll talk to you about it.”
That night I called John Steiner and asked to meet him quietly at the office in Hereford the next day. That morning I drove in to the office and said hello to everybody, and then John and I went into his office and lowered the Cone of Silence. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I need to set up some untraceable cash, probably a few million. Nothing about it can point at me. How do we do that?”
My friend gave me a strange look. “Excuse me? What are you up to now?”
“I was talking to Marty about something, and we want to try something, and to do it we are going to need some laundered money. Can we do it?”