John Dingell: A power-mad bully finally ends his reign of terror

When you’ve relied on a bully to protect you for more than a half-century, I suppose you could start to confuse the bully’s self-serving protection racket for something virtuous. So it seems we can best explain Michigan’s swooning praise of Congressman John Dingell, who apparently has decided congressmen should not serve too many terms lest they become taken with their own power.

After 58 years, it’s time to return to the private sector and let a young, up-and-coming newcomer — oh, I’m sorry, I mean his wife — occupy the seat. But it just won’t be the same, and for that, the residents of 49 states and no small number of Michiganians will give thanks. To many in Michigan, Dingell was the guy who protected the Big Three from foreign competition and excessive CAFE requirements, and did the bidding of the United Auto Workers on Capitol Hill. He was the guy who brought home the bacon to a state far too dependent on it. He got elected by a pedigree — his father had held the seat since the early 1930s — and he gained “clout” by refusing to retire. What most of America will remember is Dingell’s willingness to use that clout ruthlessly, with no regard to the rights of those he bullied, and with no concern about the limits of a congressman’s authority. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal recalls the bad old days when Dingell used his chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to browbeat pretty much anyone he wanted, for any reason or for no reason at all:

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The “Dingell method,” another phrase from the era, was to conduct an investigation, selectively leak what his staff found to a newspaper and TV network (double the media points), then haul the poor business targets for a public grilling before the cameras. The journalists would win prizes for the appearance of enterprise. The CEOs would be advised by the Dingell bar to be obsequious and remorseful, whether guilty or not. The acrimony was one-sided . . . But no oversight hearings by the GOP of the Obama administration have been anywhere close to as rough as Mr. Dingell’s road-grading of officials in the Reagan Administration. If the name Anne Gorsuch Burford means nothing to you, look her up on Wikipedia. She ran the EPA from 1981-1983, until Mr. Dingell ran her out of town. Or recall the case of David Baltimore, the Nobel laureate whom the Dingell staff worked with the media to falsely discredit after dragging him into a probe into scientific misconduct.

Last year I reported for DBusiness Magazine on the long, painstaking ordeal Dingell inflicted on a group of Detroit-based, African-American developers who go by the name Made In Detroit. The men purchased property Downriver with every reason to believe they would be able to develop it. But that’s when they ran into Buzzsaw Dingell, who had apparently fished on the site as a boy and didn’t like the idea that it might be developed. And when John Dingell has a problem with something, it matters not at all that he has no legal authority to do anything about it. Dingell gets what he wants by scaring the hell out of people. From that story:

To hear Merriweather tell it, the partners had no idea what they were up against. But they found out when they visited Dingell at his office in Dearborn a few months into the approval process. “I wish I’d had a tape,” Merriweather says. “John told us point blank, ‘I don’t care about jobs. I don’t care about helping the economy of Trenton and Gibraltar. The only thing I care about is the environment. Period.’ And the federal government did everything they could to sabotage this project.”

The developers were able to prove Dingell’s complicity in the sabotage of the project to such a degree that they obtained a rare $5 million settlement from the federal government, but it didn’t do them much good after Dingell drove them into bankruptcy and rendered their investment in the property worthless. This is the real legacy of John Dingell, who always favors the expansion of federal power and always makes sure to use his clout in Congress to then apply the government’s influence over everyone and everything to get the outcome he wants. He may have afforded a degree of government protection to a Michigan industry that apparently can’t survive without it, and by doing so he may have bought himself a career in Congress nearly as long as many people live. But if your individual rights ever stood in the way of the expansion of federal power, chances are John Dingell steamrolled over you without remorse, or browbeat you, or falsely accused you of something and then had his staff leak the accusation to the media. John Dingell’s retirement comes 58 years too late, and if Michigan is really going to keep the seat in the family by electing his wife, then Michigan deserves the scorn it will get from the rest of the nation for doing so.