From the WSJ Opinion Archives
POTOMAC WATCH
Armey Heads for
A Free-Market
Retirement
The House majority leader can now leave on his own terms.
The era of the free-market Texas economics professor in Congress may be about to end.
First Phil Gramm announced earlier this year that he won't be running for Senate re-election, and now Majority Leader Dick Armey is contemplating his own retirement next year after 18 unlikely but momentous years in the House.
Mr. Armey didn't return a phone call, but sources close to the Texan say his decision to retire could come as early as this week. Late yesterday he was confiding to his colleagues, including Speaker Dennis Hastert, about his potential plans. The Texas filing deadline looms, and Armey confidants say he has been contemplating the move for weeks.
"He thinks now is a good time. He can leave on his own terms," says one source who has talked to the second-ranking Republican in the House. "The leadership is working, the House majority seems safe and George Bush is in the White House." It's also fair to say that, at age 61, he has sometimes shown signs of fatigue; many of his long-time staff have already moved on to other things.
Mr. Armey's retirement would mark the end of one of the more improbable careers of congressional consequence. In his mid-40s he was a political nobody running the economics department at the University of North Texas (in world-famous Denton). Then in 1984 he ran against the odds and beat an incumbent, 51% to 49%. When he first arrived on Capitol Hill, the elite media lampooned him as a wacky professor who slept in his office.
But he quickly emerged as a leader of the conservative insurgents who toppled the complacent GOP minority in the early 1990s and then took control of the entire House in 1994. Newt Gingrich was always the main political operative, but Mr. Armey cared more about ideas.
Even as a backbencher, he forged right-left coalitions to trim farm subsidies. His idea for a military base-closing commission remains the only way anyone has found to reduce Pentagon waste. He was the main writer of the Contract with America, which included the welfare reform that will go down as Congress's signature achievement of the 1990s.
Above all, Mr. Armey's passion has been free-market economics. He made the flat-tax a hot prospect before Steve Forbes did, at least in GOP ranks. He's had some success pushing the International Monetary Fund to reform its anti-growth advice to poor countries. And he pushed, almost single-handedly, for a school-voucher experiment for the District of Columbia's trapped poor children. More recently, he has privately urged his colleagues to reject a fiscal "stimulus" bill that lacks marginal-rate tax cuts.
It's no stretch to say that without Mr. Armey's ideas Republicans in the later Clinton years would have had no ideas at all. His critics will say many of these causes have now crested short of success. But it's just as accurate to say that many of them, especially tax-cutting, have become staples of GOP policy. Mr. Armey rose in House ranks by opposing George H. W. Bush's tax increase in 1990, but now George W. Bush mimics Mr. Armey on tax policy.
The biggest blot on his career is his involvement in the botched 1997 "coup" against then-Speaker Gingrich. He protested long beyond the point of credibility that he wasn't somehow part of the plotting. The fact that he survived Mr. Gingrich's 1998 fall shows he had his own independent power base, but the coup's lingering bad taste cost him any chance at becoming speaker himself.
Mr. Armey's retirement would be one more sign of the House GOP's transition from insurgency to incremental governance. As they've become more cozy with power, fewer House Republicans share the Armey passion for smaller government. Many members also dislike him as a TV spokesman because his opinions are too bluntly conservative ("the invisible foot of government"). He lacks Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle's talent for being pleasantly implacable.
Mr. Armey's potential successors are another sign of this transition. Majority Whip Tom DeLay might decide to advance one spot in the leadership, but he's more vote counter than idea man. Mr. DeLay's protege, Roy Blunt of Missouri, could also make a run, though he's also a pure politico. A more intriguing (and popular choice among members) would be 45-year-old Ohio Rep. Rob Portman, a conservative on the Ways and Means Committee who is both policy savvy and media polished. Other possibilities include Rules Chairman David Dreier of California, Oklahoma's J.C. Watts and Budget Chairman Jim Nussle of Iowa.
Perhaps the biggest question is who would carry the tax-cutting, economic growth agenda once Mr. Armey leaves. About two-thirds of all House Republicans have been elected since 1990, so few recall much about Reaganomics. Most don't know a bad tax cut (rebates) from a good one (marginal income-tax rates). There are a few younger exceptions, notably Wisconsin's Paul Ryan and Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, but they lack the seniority to bid for the leadership.
They and other young Republicans could do worse than learn from Mr. Armey if next year is in fact his last in Congress. The lessons of his career are that ideas matter, that risk-takers are rewarded and that the way to make a difference is to believe in something and fight for it.
Mr. Gigot is the Journal's editorial page editor.
