Tom Davis: Can Earmarks Fix Congress?

“In my district, I wasn’t just Tom Davis—I was ‘Mr. Woodrow Wilson Bridge.’ I was the guy who closed Morton and got 3,000 acres donated to the county. Those were the kinds of tangible efforts where people may not like my party, but they saw some redeeming qualities in me to keep me around.”

A member of the famous “Class of 1994,” Tom Davis represented Virginia’s 11th congressional district from 1995 to 2008. During his time in Congress, he served as Chair of the House Oversight Committee and Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Since his retirement in 2008, Congressman Davis has taught classes about politics and government at George Mason University, and he now serves as Director of Federal Government Affairs for Deloitte LLP. He spoke with Merion West editor Erich Prince about being a member of the Class of ’94, the actual day-to-day job of being a member of Congress, and how earmarks could be used as a unifying force in Congress.

Congressman, good afternoon. I read your March piece in Politico, “Are Democrats Facing their Own Tea-Party Style Reckoning?” In the piece, you talk about coming into Washington as part of “the Class of ’94.” Obviously, much has been written about the Class of ’94. What was that climate like when you were first entering Congress?

In many ways it was like today, except we’d been in the wilderness for forty years. Republicans hadn’t had the House in forty years, and I think a lot of them had given up hope. The House was the institution of Democrats.

This was part of a longer-term movement. It had started long before this, but it galvanized the ’94 election, where we started to move away from our balance-of-power system into more of a parliamentary style, even though the structure of government remained fundamentally federalist. But Gingrich was there to polarize things and make the referendum an absolute referendum on the Clinton Administration and on the Democrats’ control of all levers of government. He did that by having Republicans en masse oppose things Democrats were doing, and it led Republicans into the leadership of the House and the Senate.