BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
In one respect, the people of Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, have had it pretty good. The same goes for the residents of Prudenville, Lake George, and Big Rapids.
They’ve had Dave Camp represent them in Congress. They may have not always taken him seriously. He’s never quit looking like he’s twelve. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee formally hung Camp’s portrait on the wall of the main hearing room. I’ll bet if you brushed in more blonde hair it wouldn’t look much different from his high school yearbook picture.
Camp is a long way from high school, however. In fact, he is retiring from the House of Representatives, after more than a quarter-century of public service. He is capping his career as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the oldest and arguably the most powerful committee in the history of the country.
Camp is not just leaving behind his likeness on the wall. He is also leaving behind a cause he has championed since assuming the chairmanship of the Committee—historical and transformational tax reform. He introduced and championed the most comprehensive tax reform legislation in 20 years.
Regrettably, tragically, inexcusably, Congress failed to follow his lead.
Since the last real tax reform in 1986, there have been 4,400 new provisions added taking up 44,000 pages of the tax code. The code is ten times the size of the Holy Bible, where in one-tenth the space and divine inspiration, you get simplicity, reason, enlightenment, and the promise of reward for virtue. None of these are offered in the tax code.
About 40 percent of the population doesn’t pay any income taxes, and the other 60 percent are either paying way too much or too little. The federal, state, and local corporate tax burdens are the highest in the world, making it more difficult for U.S. producers to compete. The tax code is one of the worst inhibitors to small business and the jobs they create. Simply put, it is a modern American embarrassment.
Not only is the tax code a mess, our whole tax system is broken. Americans spend over $160 billion and about 6 billion hours a year trying to comply with the tax code. The average American taxpayer works well into April just to earn enough to pay his/her tax liability.
Yet the tax system is riddled with fraud and tax collections are inefficient and wasteful. You’ve heard the stories. The IRS once sent nearly 24,000 refunds totaling over $46 million to a single address. Over the last 10 years the IRS erroneously sent out an estimated $132 billion in refunds to false claimants.
So, the reasons to reform the code are clearly more numerous than the excuses not to.
What is just as clear though, is none of that matters. Chicken Little politicians, public policy constipation, and polarizing partisan gridlock have left tax reform on the waste heap, along with reforms in immigration, energy, trade, entitlements, and education, all pillars of economic security for most Americans.
In American politics, politicians like Dave Camp–responsible, intelligent, honest, hard-working legislators–are too often condemned to political obscurity, imprisoned someplace in the bowels of the Capitol where the press never goes and the old sandstone walls are so thick the screams of anguish can’t be heard. It is there where legislators wonder aloud about why they were elected and mumble incoherently about open rules, amendments, substitutes, conferences, authorizing, appropriating, and motions to recommit.
They kept taking Camp there, but he kept escaping.
He stiffly and persistently climbed and re-climbed the steps to tax reform. He negotiated with his Senate counterpart, Democrat Max Baucus of Montana and went on road trips with him; set up bipartisan working groups, consulted with private sector stakeholders, produced three discussion drafts, held listening sessions with Republicans, and conferred with his resistant Republican leaders. And after each step, he was relegated back to obscurity. They looked at Camp and saw Quixote.
When he introduced his latest version of reform, a 1,000-page bill, the antagonists– from the barons of Wall Street to the progressives and libertarians in Congress– unsheathed their wooden swords. They gave the impression Camp had morphed from Don Quixote into the Prince of Darkness.
Nevertheless, despite the carnival barking in Congress and hyper-ventilating by the media, the Camp concept of real tax reform has survived. His likely successor is talking it up, as is Speaker John Boehner, an original supporter who now lists it among his top five priorities for the new Congress.
The Camp model will be back on the agenda next year because it is like its sponsor – a model of good governance in a time when so few want to practice it. It is a tribute to the kind of republicanism the founding fathers had in mind, and a textbook example of how the legislative process and legislators are supposed to work. “If at first you don’t succeed….”
The whole tax reform exercise has always been a real profile in courage and political grit. Tax reform is such an exercise in imperfection and uncomfortable compromises. It is just tough. Puritanical politics today is like a finally tailored suit with a silk handkerchief in the pocket. Tax reform is a pair of overalls and barnyard work boots.
Camp and several other retiring members like Tom Latham of Iowa and his fellow Michigander Mike Rogers leave behind them in Congress a great, though not glamorous record of legislative and political achievement and constituent service. What they leave is an important model for others to follow, a model built on personal character, political integrity and a professional work ethic that emphasizes doing what they were sent to Washington to do: make good public policy, do what you can to improve the lives of your constituents, make the country stronger, safer and sound, and don’t care so much about who gets the credit. Oh, yeah, and don’t screw up.
“I have always believed in good policy and that it was my job to try and make Washington work,” Camp said when they hung him high in the hearing room. He seldom ventured from that belief, tackling welfare reform, trade issues and that for which he said he is most proud, childhood adoption and foster care.
If more voters in more places like Mt. Pleasant would use the Camp model for selecting their public servants, and if the media would focus more on the builders rather than the wreckers, more on the policy rather than the theatrics, Congress would function better and the country would be better for it. Why don’t they do that?
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.