Reagan & Co: Innovation

If the Karl Rove White House took it to new levels, with ever more numerous and creative methods, it was the Reagan administration that pioneered the use of the Executive Branch to destroy federal regulatory agencies from within.

The most publicly visible Republican tactic has been the old fox-guarding-the-henhouse: heading agencies with corporate figures whose previous careers were based on fighting regulation by the very same agencies.

This Birchite innovation kicked off with Reagan's 1981 appointment of James Watt, as Secretary of the Interior.

Watt came from running the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a Coors-financed operation challenging environmental regulations. Watt was also a harbinger of Republican things to come, in being a Christian Dominionist and bigot, publicly vocal about his ideology.

In The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s, Paul Slansky has lots of quotes—

[1981]
2/5 Testifying before Congress, James Watt is asked if he agrees that natural resources must be preserved for future generations. Yes, he says, but he can't help adding, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."

[1982]
6/17 Interior Secretary James Watt warns the Israeli ambassador that if "liberals of the Jewish community" oppose his plans for offshore drilling, "they will weaken our ability to be a good friend of Israel."

7/21 James Watt announces his five-year plan to open a billion acres of US coastline to oil and gas drilling.

[1983]
1/19 "If you want an example of the failures of socialism, don't go to Russia. Come to America, and see the American Indian reservations."
—James Watt failing to endear himself to native Americans

8/13 Addressing a church group in Anaheim, James Watt compares those who fail to speak out against abortion to "the forces that created the Holocaust" by offering no resistance to Hitler.

Slansky also compiled these undated quotes—

Reagan on Watt:
"I think he's an environmentalist himself, as I think I am."

And from Watt himself:

"We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber."

"I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans."

"Maybe we can get Mrs. Reagan to wear a coyote coat."

"I speak in black-and-white terms without much gray in my life. I see problems without the complexity that is confusing to a lot of people."

"A left-wing cult dedicated to bringing down the type of government I believe in."
—James Watt describing environmentalists

"I think Americans now have the best Secretary of the Interior they've ever had."
—James Watt defending his policies on Nightline

In spending public funds, Watt exhibits a government hater's usual ethical standard:

12/14 [1981] "Mr. Reagan has the White House. I have Arlington." — James Watt justifying his decision to hold two private cocktail parties at Arlington Cemetery's Lee Mansion at the taxpayers' expense

For Reagan, this will be Watt's worst blunder:

4/5 [1983] James Watt bans rock music from the upcoming Fourth of July celebration at the Washington Mall because it attracts "the wrong element." Though the words "Beach" and "Boys" do not pass his lips, the story somehow becomes that Watt has attacked the Beach Boys.

But all is soon forgiven:

4/7In the face of support for the unmaligned Beach Boys from George Bush and Nancy Reagan, James Watt rescinds his rock music ban. As a souvenir of his gaffe, President Reagan presents him with a plaster foot with a bullet hole.

Watt finally resigned Oct. 9, 1983, following negative coverage of his describing an agency panel: "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple."

Before Watt's departure, his damaging legacy was securely in place at Interior. His crowning achievement was to create the Minerals Management Service: administered by Interior—without external scrutiny—to enable disastrous pro-corporate policies like our lack of off-shore drilling oversight.

Watt's tenure is a gift that keeps giving—like those 1980s economic and foreign policies that Robert Parry calls "Ronald Reagan's 30-Year Time Bombs."

Judging from the Wikipedia section on "Later Life," Watt's post-government life has been about what one would expect.

There was a slap on the Republican wrist:

In 1995, Watt was indicted on 25 counts of felony perjury and obstruction of justice by a federal grand jury. The indictments were due to false statements made to a grand jury investigating influence peddling at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which he had lobbied in the mid to late 1980s. On January 2, 1996, as part of a plea bargain, Watt pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of withholding documents from a federal grand jury. On March 12, 1996 he was sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and perform 500 hours of community service.

I haven't found anything further, as to what "community" he "served," but I did find something from a few years back: TBogg on Watt and "those 18 felony counts he dodged." TBogg looks back at, among other things, Robert Scheer's 1996 column on Watt's day in court.

Of the trial—and Watt's mouthing off that God would provide justice—Scheer's column asks (and answers): "Who Needs Divine Intervention? The Watt case shows how bilking the poor can be both lucrative and apparently legal."

Scheer takes the measure of our godly former official—

... once forced out of office ... he did what any good believer in downsizing the federal government would do: he ripped it off. He became a consultant to developers looking to cash in on HUD money. Watt had been in the Reagan Cabinet and was on intimate terms with the hapless Samuel Pierce, who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Watt didn't claim any expertise in urban housing, but he knew how to use a telephone. He got $300,000 for a couple of phone calls to HUD on behalf of a Maryland developer.
...

Watt, in his own testimony before a House subcommittee, conceded that he was in the influence peddling business and that it was quite profitable. Referring to $100,000 he made from a project in Puerto Rico, he said of his developer client, "That's what they offered, and it sounded like a lot of money to me, and we settled on it."

Former independent counsel Arlin M. Adams claimed that the investigation of Watt enabled the federal government to recover $10 million intended for low-income housing in the Virgin Islands that had found its way into rich people's pockets.

In the end, Watt's penchant for erasing computer files may have been his salvation. When questioned if he had a memorandum of talks with Pierce on a housing project, he stated: "I intentionally don't make such memoranda so that lawyers like you won't be able to get them." So much for divine intervention.

As TBogg's post also notes, the judge in the case was this guy. Who more recently has taken care of Republican business in blocking stem cell research.

The talkative and ground-breaking Watt also was ahead of a current trend: well-connected right-wingers openly inciting violence—

During a March 1991 dinner event organized by the Green River Cattlemen's Association in Wyoming, Watt said, "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used."

And, as expected, there is Watt's crowing about having been a trailblazer for the Cheney administration:

In a 2001 interview, Watt applauded the Bush administration energy strategy and said its prioritization of oil drilling and coal mining above conservation is just what he recommended in the early 1980s. "Everything Cheney's saying, everything the president's saying - they're saying exactly what we were saying 20 years ago, precisely ... Twenty years later, it sounds like they've just dusted off the old work."