The Speaker Bows Out

Jim Wright was tarnished goods when he walked to the well of the House of Representatives Wednesday to tell his side of the story, and he made it worse. The tight grin framing the clenched teeth didn’t work. The defense was as flimsy and crude as he claims the case against him to be. It was a pathetic hour of self-destructive and hopeless rhetoric. But with all that, he could not blot out the poignancy of the final minute of his “allotted time for brief remarks,” actually saying the words that meant resignation from the third highest office in the United States government. No matter how tawdry the months of revelation of his venal turn of mind in matters of personal finance, that took guts because the most believable part of his defense came when he said: “I love this institution.” He made that ring true even though most of the hour was devoted to trying to portray the members of the institution as a lynch mob.

By Wednesday, Wright had no choice. Many Americans outside the Beltway that divides Washington from the rest of the nation are prepared to believe anything malicious about politicians, whether it is fact or fiction. That makes a nice match for people inside the Beltway, who are prepared 24 hours a day to say something malicious, and who themselves make no distinction between what is true and what is just vicious.

The barrage of partisan attacks in Washington had already led to the resignation of Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced) as Democratic whip. Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.), who wants to take Coelho’s place, was in some unspecified trouble over staff matters. There was something malicious to say about nearly everybody else in town. It was time for a dramatic break in the pattern in the hope that Congress could get some work done again.

Wright spoke at one point of the irony of his wife’s once resigning from a House Committee staff to avoid criticism of their both being on the public payroll. A more interesting irony, on which he did not dwell, was that aside from the petty cash arrangements in which he, or his staff, dealt in on the side, he was an effective leader of the House. Congress passed a major highway and transportation bill over former President Reagan’s veto under Wright, approved help for the homeless, improved the food stamp program and worked out a plan for catastrophic health care under Medicare. Of that part of his record, Wright can be proud.

Expanding that record will be up to Rep. Tom Foley (D-Wash.), the odds-on favorite to become Speaker next week when Congress will vote on a successor to Wright, who no matter how successful on legislation leaves behind plenty of work to do. A new Clean Air Act must be put together, starting next week. The budget still must be dealt with in detail, with the balance still to be struck between defense and domestic programs.

Wright also was believable in another part of his farewell speech. The nation cannot afford to have its government paralyzed by the distractions of personal, partisan attacks, a pattern that Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles), whose Ethics Committee investigated the charges against Wright, says is “getting out of hand.” For Democrats, the most important things about Foley are that he is intelligent, articulate and, by all accounts, ethically clean as a whistle. That, too, would help get Congress’ attention away from carving up personal reputations and back to making law.