Murtha Turned Against War, but Not Grab-While-You-Can Politics
Walter Shapiro
Senior Correspondent
Posted:
02/9/10
House Democratic titan John Murtha, who died Monday at 77 following complications from gallbladder surgery, was not a congressman cut out for an era of $1.3 trillion budget deficits. As a grab-while-you-can champion of earmarks, Murtha risked becoming a national symbol for old-fashioned congressional greed. Representing since 1974 Johnstown and a time-warp slice of southwestern Pennsylvania – a forgotten blue-collar area where the good old days meant the 19th century – Murtha was an unashamed practitioner of pork-barrel politics. A gruff retired Marine, Murtha believed that his hard-pressed district deserved any federal spending that fell through the cracks of the House Appropriations Committee. And as the long-time take-no-prisoners chairman of the subcommittee that oversees military spending, Murtha was able to make sure that Pennsylvania's 12th district always got more than its rightful share.
No monument better immortalizes Murtha's largesse than the aptly named John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport, an eerily empty facility (three commercial flights per day) which has received $200 million in federal funds in the past decade. On a per-flight basis, that would be the equivalent of pumping $160 billion (roughly the annual cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars) into Chicago's O'Hare Airport. To Murtha, it was a point of principle that the Constitution gave Congress the power of the purse. But it was hard to glimpse a high-minded principle in the way that he took so much of this constitutional power for himself.
If it were not for Iraq, Murtha probably would be mostly remembered by family, friends, congressional colleagues, military contractors, defense lobbyists and his constituents in the 12th district. But Murtha was lovingly placed on a pedestal by the antiwar left and championed by Nancy Pelosi after he dramatically turned against the Iraq War in 2005.
Murtha was the least likely Iraq dove in the liberal congressional aviary. The first Vietnam combat veteran to be elected to Congress (he also served in Korea), Murtha arrived on Capitol Hill with a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts and the hawkish bent of a Marine. An adroit backstage congressional power broker, who avoided the press rather than preening on Sunday morning talk shows, Murtha stunned Capitol Hill when he convened an unexpected November 2005 news conference to announce, "Our military has done everything that has been asked of them. The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It's time to bring the troops home."
The antiwar movement – feeling powerless with George W. Bush's re-election and Republican control of Congress – reacted as if George Patton had morphed into George McGovern. MoveOn.org urged its members to send Murtha "a hand-written note or card" or call his office to say, "I want him to keep fighting. We need him."
Arianna Huffington and the entire Huffington Post turned into a high-decibel cheering squad, portraying Murtha as a cross between Pericles and Adlai Stevenson. As Huffington herself wrote after her newly minted hero's initial appearance on "Meet the Press," Murtha "had a good answer for everything. And in contrast to the usual poll-driven hairsplitting on the show, he offered one stand-up truth after another." John Amato, a musician and blogger, gushed in February 2006, "I had the chance to meet with Rep. John Murtha at a gathering of about 100 people over at Arianna Huffington's house . . . John Murtha is the embodiment of what the term a `true patriot' is."
Okay, antiwar zealots in their raptures over Murtha might be excused their tunnel vision and their lack of historical perspective. But to this day, it is difficult to decipher what Pelosi was thinking when she backed Murtha as her majority leader after the Democrats dramatically won back the House in the 2006 elections. As newspaper columnists and editorial writers obligingly reminded Pelosi, Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1980 Abscam scandal when FBI agents dressed up as Arab sheiks and attempted to bribe unsuspecting legislators. Offered $50,000 to help provide phony immigration papers, Murtha seemingly was torn between his avarice and his political caution. "I'm not interested – at this point," Murtha said as the FBI secretly videotaped the conversation. "You know, we do business for a while, maybe I'll be interested, maybe I won't. . . . [But] it's hard for me to say, just the hell with it."
By choosing Steny Hoyer over Murtha as majority leader by a 149-to-86 margin, the House Democratic caucus saved themselves and Pelosi from future political embarrassment. At the time, Pelosi denied that she had any second thoughts about her endorsement of Murtha, saying, "I'm not a person that has regrets."
Murtha, who ran for Congress in 1974 in the wake of Watergate on the slogan, "One Honest Man Can Make a Difference," ended up as a legislator often investigated but never indicted. The final probe into Murtha's unseemly (although not illegal) conduct ended in December when the Office of Congressional Ethics recommended that an investigation into his questionable ties to a lobbying firm be dropped.
The awkward saga began in November 2008 when federal agents raided the suburban Washington offices of the PMA Group, a lobbying powerhouse specializing in slipping earmarks (narrow congressionally mandated spending requirements) into appropriations bills. PMA just happened to be headed by a former top aide to Murtha on the Defense subcommittee. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, an advocacy group opposed to earmarks, PMA clients (presumably in a burst of gratitude for good government) donated $1.3 million to Murtha's last two re-election campaigns.
Proving a corrupt motivation to campaign contributions is an exceedingly difficult legal proposition, which is why there are ethically challenged members of Congress who are anticipating their international junkets over the Presidents' Day recess, rather than working in prison laundries. But those close to Murtha certainly prospered during his tenure in Congress. The Washington Post reported last spring that a small firm run by Murtha's nephew managed to receive a series of Defense Department subcontracts for warehousing and engineering services without going through the rigors of competitive bidding.
Murtha interspersed his angry denials of inappropriate conduct with his idiosyncratic theories of constituent service. "If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district," Murtha told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last March, using a line that most assuredly was not written by a media consultant.
Murtha's final burst of media celebrity provided a cautionary lesson in the dangers of draping a toga around a politician just because he or she says the right words about a single issue. Before you anoint heroes, at least check out how they sounded while being offered a bribe by an FBI agent dressed in Arab robes.
This article is an adaptation of an earlier story about Murtha that appeared in Politics Daily on May 15, 2009.