Washington Perk City

By NANCY GIBBS

Members of Congress expect to be called Honorable, but their claim to that honorific is looking pretty flimsy. First came the check-bouncing scam, when investigators found that lawmakers wrote more than 8,000 rubber checks at their private bank last year, free of charge. Then came word of members' stiffing the House restaurant, where prices are already dirt cheap. Suddenly, talk-show comedians, radio deejays, newspaper editorialists and the mailman were all talking about exactly the same thing: How can members of Congress balance a budget and spend tax dollars wisely when they can't even balance their checkbooks or make good on their meal tabs?

What could be a better invitation to civil-disobedience revolt than watching lawmakers who earn $125,100 travel around the world for free, have massages in the House gym for free, have their cars parked for free and have their tickets fixed, refusing to pay for the few perks that are not granted outright. "If ordinary people did that, they would be charged out the wazoo," says C.T. Anderson, a bartender at Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta, who has heard plenty from his customers. "People are just fed up."

Hoping it would all go away, House Speaker Tom Foley at first declared that check-bouncing privileges would be canceled and members would be required to pay the same penalties as everyone else for overdrawing their accounts. But rather than blowing out to sea, the storm only gathered strength. Last week Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas and Democrat Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio revealed that roughly 300 legislators owed the main House restaurant and catering service more than $300,000, thereby confirming the charge that in Congress there is indeed a free lunch.

With a flutter of contrition, House members voted 390-8 to shut down their private bank, which by this time had been dubbed B.C.C.I., the Bank of Corrupt Congressional Incumbents. Dozens of lawmakers came forward and admitted writing bad checks, offering up the occasional absentminded staffer as a sacrificial lamb. Refusing to release names of all the deadbeats, Foley referred the issue to the House ethics committee. But that move also invited derision at the idea of the ethically blind leading the ethically blind. It turns out at least some committee members, including the chairman, have been named in the scandal.

The furor began when the General Accounting Office revealed that in one year alone, members of Congress bounced 8,331 checks -- 581 for $1,000 or more -- giving themselves, in effect, interest-free loans. Millionaire lawmakers, said investigators, were among the worst offenders, but the habit was shared by Foley, majority leader Richard Gephardt and minority whip Newt Gingrich, which may help explain the lack of enthusiasm for an investigation among any but the most novice Congressmen. "I wrote one check for insufficient funds," said Gingrich, "and deposited funds to cover it within 48 hours." Period.

In some cases, debts of $10,000 and more were rolled over month after month, with no penalties and no interest charged. Sergeant at arms Jack Russ, who is in charge of the House bank, bounced a check for $10,000 in 1989. Republican Phil Crane of Illinois announced that he had heard of one case where a member had bounced a single check for $23,000 in the House bank, while already owing $20,000.

Those who were innocent of any creative financial activity rushed to clear their names in a nasty spectacle of finger pointing. Some asked for letters stating they had never committed any offense or for some official vindication. That turned out to be a bad idea for Democrat David Obey of Wisconsin, who demanded that Foley release a list of delinquent members in the hope that his name would be cleared. Instead, Obey discovered he too had bounced several checks for small amounts during a 12-day period.

Other members would not, as they say, dignify the charges with a response. Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski was particularly forthright. "None of your business," he told reporters. "None of your damn business." One of his staff members explained that Rostenkowski had never bounced a check but viewed any inquiries as "an intrusion into his private affairs." An aide to Democrat Gus Savage of Illinois said, "We're not discussing this at all with the press. If a receptionist had answered the phone you never would have heard from me."

Majority leader Gephardt was at pains to explain that lawmakers had been irresponsible only with each other's money, not the Treasury's. "The public should be aware that no taxpayer funds were used to cover insufficiencies," he said. "The funds of other members of Congress were employed to that end." Meanwhile, Speaker Foley called the reporting on the story "hysterical" and observed that the vast majority of the checks were for very small amounts.

Which is, of course, utterly beside the point. All the posturing just ignored the symbolism. Members of Congress seemed in some cases to be genuinely surprised at the rage the revelations unleashed. Why is everyone interested in this, they wondered, and not my views on the coup in Haiti? All of which served to confirm the impression of a body of lawmakers out of touch with the lives of their constituents and in the habit of placing themselves above the law. This is the Congress, after all, that defends affirmative action and passes laws banning racial discrimination in hiring but then exempts itself from the same guidelines. It was impossible to get all the names of the check bouncers last week because Congress is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act.

Certainly it would be unfair to charge an entire institution with crimes committed by a few. But the real issue here is not about criminal behavior. It is about a congressional culture of privilege and protection that is entirely legal because its members make its laws. And it is about how representatives go about doing their jobs when they are their own employers.

There is no shortage of excuses from those who defend the privileges. Many lawmakers consider public service a personal sacrifice. If they were lawyers in private practice, they could make many times the salary they take home as legislators. They are often required to maintain two homes, attend costly fund raisers for innumerable causes, live in an expensive city, work long hours and go begging to wealthy supporters for the money they need to keep their jobs for two more years. A cheap car wash may not seem much in return.

But this culture of privilege, so stubbornly protected, is not well suited to these hard times. When uninsured workers live in fear that one illness could wipe out their life savings, it is enraging to hear of the House pharmacy dispensing free prescription drugs, not to mention the private congressional ambulance that protects members from the urban nightmare of emergency-room gridlock. When families who know how to squeeze a dollar until the eagle screams still cannot find the money for a haircut, the House barber takes on a special symbolic weight. When young families cannot get a mortgage on a house, the idea of free loans to lawmakers is bound to rankle.

Those members of Congress who ventured back to their districts got an earful last week. "They're supposed to be making policy for the United States, and they can't even keep their checkbooks balanced," said attorney Steve Adams of Naperville, Ill. "For God's sake, who's running the store?" Freshman Republican James Nussle was back in Iowa eating at a local Pizza Hut with his family when a nearby diner asked if he planned to pay by check. Democrat Pat Schroeder, who insists that she has not bounced any checks, says the furor "captures the brick-through-the-window political mood. It shows you how angry people are with the incumbents." She was talking to her father on the telephone at the end of the week, and even he asked if she had been writing rubber checks. "No, Daddy, I didn't," she replied. "I can't believe that even you are asking me about this."

But with the onset of a campaign season, everyone will be asking, as lawmakers are bound to learn in the months to come. No event could have better breathed life into the call for limiting the number of terms a Congressman can serve, a proposal that refuses to die and is bound to land on ballots next fall. But for what it was worth, legislators could take some small comfort in the fact that few people could claim to be perfectly clean. The culture of special privilege, it turns out, is so pervasive that those using the House bank included not only members and their staffs but also journalists who cover Capitol Hill. Maybe it's time to move the nation's capital to Omaha.

With reporting by Ann Blackman and Nancy Traver/Washington