EP. 16 — WHISTLEBLOWERS

(Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.)

Weston Wamp: I’m Weston Wamp and this is Swamp Stories, brought to you by Issue One.

Former Rep. Sue Myrick: So I said, "I'm not going to do it; kick me off my committee.”

Weston Wamp: Is it true that there are overtures made to you that you could just avoid the whole thing by switching parties?

Former Amb. Connie Morella: Oh, absolutely.

Former Rep. Sue Myrick: I had one other experience where the administration came into my office, because I was opposing a key bill that they wanted to get passed. The person came into my office, sat down in a chair, and looked at me and said, "Okay, what will it take?" That was it, and of course, I told them the same thing, my vote's not for sale, but my point in saying that, Weston, is that it literally happens all the time, and I imagine it still does.

Weston Wamp: 74% of employees who step forward as whistleblowers get fired for calling out illicit activity within their company. And according to the same research presented in Fraud Magazine, virtually all whistleblowers faced some kind of retaliation, even if they’re not fired.

For obvious reasons, a lot of the most important whistleblowers are former employees.

Joe Johns: One of the founders of Cambridge who is now spilling the beans in an interview this morning on all of this.

Bianna Golodryga: The former employees believe unsafe practices were used on young patients.

Gayle King: John Hargrove was a senior killer whale trainer at SeaWorld in San Diego and San Antonio for 14 years. He says that audiences were not awre of the consequences that come with keeping these orcas in captivity.

Weston Wamp: Once you're off the job, an employer loses leverage to keep you quiet. And the truth often comes out. 

For ages, this has been true in Congress. If you stick your neck too far out while you’re in Congress, you invite the wrath of your party’s leadership. But former members of Congress often speak openly — calling spades often on their own party. But almost universally, former members of Congress will complain about how the Swamp works. The excessive fundraising, the transactional relationship between Capitol Hill and K Street. Former members will even explain that the ethics committees often just sweep things under the rug to protect other members.

But never before had former members of Congress organized to call out the real nature of their former job. Until 2015, when Issue One launched the ReFormers Caucus.

Now it’s 200 whistles strong, and this bipartisan group of 200 former members of Congress, governors, and cabinet members have some pretty interesting stories to share. And if you threaten them with retaliation, well, they’re former politicians, so what do they care?

This is episode 16: Whistleblowers.

Former Sec. Ray LaHood: We are all former elected officials, Republicans and Democrats, who believe in bridging the divide.

Former Rep. Zach Wamp: To restore and reform our democratic republic.

Former Rep. Claudine Schneider: And that is why we have gathered here.

Former Amb. Tim Roemer: As I look around this beautiful hall, I feel the weight of the moment. Voters, American citizens, they all believe our system is contaminated with dark money — an avalanche of secret money.

Former Rep. Claudine Schneider: We all know about the lack of transparency.

Former Rep. Vic Fazio: Our democracy is in tatters.

Former Rep. Martin Frost: There are some people both at home and abroad who seek to discredit democracy by distorting our own press and manipulating social media.

Former Rep. Zach Wamp: One party tribalism has actually begun to set in.

Former Rep. Robert Inglis: Let’s watch Fox or let’s watch MSNBC and let’s see what our tribe believes.

Weston Wamp: The 200 former elected officials that make up the ReFormers Caucus come from nearly every walk of life. From all fifty states. Liberals, moderates, conservatives. Among the group’s former Democrats in Congress are former Senator Bill Bradley and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Former Sen. Tom Daschle: That's the problem. And that's part of why Congress is so dysfunctional today is that they just don't spend the time legislating. People leave on Thursday, they come back on Tuesday, they try to govern on Wednesday these days, and you can't run a country this complicated with the challenges we face and spend so little time doing so.

Weston Wamp: Daschle represented South Dakota in the senate, serving as both minority leader and majority leader. Bradley, on the other hand, came to the senate representing New Jersey after a hall of fame career with the New York Knicks. 

Former Sen. Bill Bradley: You've got to break this bond between policy and money. I look at history. There've always been moments in America where we didn't things were possible, and yet they became possible. That was what the abolitionists were all about, that's what the suffragists were all about, that's what the Civil Rights movement was all about. We can do these things in America. That's the magic of our system, that the people can actually affect change as long as they believe they affect change. And quite frankly, if we don't find the answer, the future's not going to be bright for America.

 Weston Wamp: Their message today is just about the same. But imagine in 1970, Bill Bradley won an NBA championship. In that same year, Daschle was an Air Force intelligence officer during the Vietnam War. 50 years later they’re both members of the ReFormers Caucus, advocating many of the same reforms to fix our political system after their own storied political careers ended in divergent parts of the country.

Like a lot of former employees, it just came time to tell the truth about how messed up things had gotten.

To dive deeper, I got on the phone with another duo in Issue One’s ReFormers Caucus — two Republican women: Congresswoman Connie Morella from Maryland and Congresswoman Sue Myrick of North Carolina.

Morella grew up in New England, Myrick in the Rust Belt. And though they were both Republicans, Morella’s rating from the American Conservative Union in the last year in office that they both served together was a 24, Myrick’s was a 96. They didn’t always agree while they were in Congress, but they’ve both have chosen to tell hard truths about how broken Washington is.

Former Rep. Sue Myrick: Well, I think when you're in Congress, you experience things all the time that you think, "Wow, this doesn't really work." There were a couple of things with me. One, I, along with another member, very strongly, publicly, nationally, literally, opposed a transportation chairman who had enlarged his committee to 70 people so he could pretty much get what he wanted, frankly, and just an astronomical amount of money in the bill that he wanted to pass. So we went out public and fought it.

When we got to the point where they were trying to get the bill passed, I had someone come into my office and say to me that they really wanted my vote on the bill and that they would give me, I believe it was, $10 million. I haven't gone back to check, honestly, but several million dollars for the outer belt, if I would support the bill, and I simply told them my vote wasn't for sale, which infuriated them, of course.

Weston Wamp: Sue Myrick is a woman of firsts. She was the first female mayor of Charlotte before becoming the first congresswoman from North Carolina. The kind of independence and perspective she sought to maintain during her 18 years in the swamp is what we need more of in Washington. 

Former Rep. Sue Myrick: The problem with so many members is they sell out as soon as they get there. They're promised things, they're taken to dinner, they're wined and dined, whatever it may be, and they get corrupted by the system. I paid my own way if I went to dinner with anybody who was a lobbyist or someone that can be considered like that because I didn't want to be beholden to anybody. I had an attitude the whole time I was in office that, look, I have another life.

Weston Wamp: You might ask, “How much does the voice of a former politician matter?” Well, one politician, maybe not a lot. 10? You might be getting somewhere. 100? That’s pretty hard to ignore. But 200 former members of Congress all working together to clean up Washington is historic. It has not happened before.

Two years ago the caucus convened nearly 50 of its members in person for a summit in Philadelphia that featured addresses from historians Jon Meachem and Joseph Ellis. In the five years since its founding, the ReFormers Caucus has aggressively advocated for the five principles that unites them: To promote transparency and disclosure, to increase participation in elections, to reduce pay-to-play politics, to strengthen enforcement of existing laws, and to improve government integrity.

Former Congressman and Ambassador Tim Roemer, who co-chairs the Reformers Caucus along with Congresswoman Morella and, my father, former Tennessee Congressman Zach Wamp, explains why it’s different when former members are leading reform efforts.

Former Amb. Tim Roemer: One, is that these ReFormers know the game. They know how it’s played for good or bad. And they then know how to get results. When we meet with current members in the House and Senate, we’ve been in their shoes. We know what they’re thinking. We know the pressures on them, but we also know what buttons to try to push to get them to act to change and reform and get our country moving in a better direction today.

Weston Wamp: The ReFormers Caucus has helped broker partnerships from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to the Freedom Caucus in the Republican Party. It’s the steady drumbeat of 200 former members calling out a broken system that holds members of Congress hostage to fundraising expectations. And that’s turned elected officials, our legislators, into taxpayer paid professional fundraisers. Former Congresswoman and Ambassador Connie Morella calls its a scourge.

Former Amb. Connie Morella: Money always was an ingredient in campaigns. No doubt about it, but it's accelerated to the point that it is atrocious and very frightening that it has such a hold on what people may learn, what they may know and how they vote.

It also means that the time that is spent by members of Congress raising the money for themselves, for their own campaigns so that they can look credible and viable, but also for the party. I mean, I can remember even when I was in Congress that they would give me a list and say, "Go over to the RNC, Republican National Committee, and make these calls. And, if you didn't, either your name was listed as not bringing in any money or if it's not listed because you hadn't done anything. It might mean some particular issue you're interested in might not get a hearing or people would, of your party, the leaders would frown on the fact you're just not doing your thing. It is far worse now. Right now, I think about 40% of a member's time is spent raising money. Do the members like doing it? They don't, but they do it because they feel they have to. I think that's a scourge on legislating that we have money as the big key issue. It also means that many times members of Congress spend more time with groups that can raise money so that they can have that support. Again, that's not an equal playing field with listening to all of you.

Weston Wamp: When you talk to former members of Congress, they often say the exact same things even if they haven’t talked to each other in years. In my conversation with Myrick she echoed Morella almost verbatim.

Former Rep. Sue Myrick: And then they started assigning amounts that you had to raise X, Y, Z for the committee. It doesn't matter if you're Democrat or Republican, it works the same way. In addition to what you need for your race, you have to raise sometimes millions of dollars over and above that to contribute to the committee that helps other members, blah, blah, blah. And it got to the point where, to me, it was unsustainable, and finally, my last two years that I was there, I just went to them, frankly. I said, "I am not going to do it. I can't spend this much time." You'd have to spend hours a week making phone calls, and it takes time away from what you should be doing, and I just didn't believe in it anyway. So I said, "I'm not going to do it; kick me off my committee. It's okay, but I'm not going to do it."

Weston Wamp: Frankly, sometimes the utter brokenness of our political process is only clear after the fact. And undoubtedly that draws many of the former members of Congress that serve in the Reformers Caucus.

But for Morella, the underbelly of Washington was crystal clear before she had left office. A notable moderate Republican, representing a left-leaning district in the DC area, she had to battle every election year. And finally, it was the once-in-a-decade redistricting process after the 2000 census that taught her how vicious a game gerrymandering can be. 

Weston Wamp: Is it true that there are overtures made to you that you could just avoid the whole thing by switching parties?

Former Amb. Connie Morella: Oh, absolutely. Even by members of Congress and members of the Democratic Party in Montgomery County, they said, "We will make sure you don't have an opponent in the primary." But, you know, my feeling about that was, first of all, as a minority in the party, I was eight years a minority in the minority party. I was eight years a minority in the majority party. You can see, I've always been sort of the moderate who would go wherever I felt it was important. I felt that if I were to change, people would say, like they did with Arlen Specter, "Hey, she changed because it was more convenient for her." And those people who had helped you in the party to which you belong would say, "Oh, she's a traitor. She left us.” Those from the other party would say, "Can we trust her? She's doing it selfishly, not for the sake of the country."

Weston Wamp: A sad reality of Washington in the last few decades is that nearly anyone who served there can tell cringeworthy stories of the powers that be offering them money for reelection, appointments, or just political protection if they fold their principles like a tent.

And I suppose that’s at the heart of why the ReFormers Caucus has such camaraderie. Almost regardless of where they came from or what they do for a living now, former members of Congress experienced the same declining standards and the same increasing influence of money. 

As I wrapped up my conversations with these two women, who come from far different wings of the Republican party, who were opposed on many of the defining political issues of their day, they were speaking the same language.

Former Amb. Connie Morella: George Washington, who wrote rules of civility and decent behavior when he was a young guy, rule number one, I think is so important. It is when in the company of others, deal with respect, show respect for those who are present, show respect, that is civility. That is what the civility caucus is trying to do. If you show respect, you can disagree, but you can find some things in common and you can understand. You can learn and then you can lead.

Weston Wamp: Myrick picked up where Morella left off about the need for civility.

Former Rep. Sue Myrick: You want to see the country be a country like I grew up in, I think you grew up in, where people still were nice to one another. They helped one another. You had communities where people work together. You had, for instance, when I was mayor, I had a Democrat city council, I'm a Republican, but we left our politics at the door. When we were elected, we worked together as a group for the betterment of the city, and so of course, I expected more of that when I came to Congress. It's a lot different up there as you know. I guess I'm an eternal optimist, but I just believe that there's goodness in the American people, and I believe that there are enough people who will stand up for what they believe to vote the right way for the things that they want to see done.

Weston Wamp: Ambassador Roemer sums it up well why Myrick’s optimism is needed now as much as ever, and why democracy reform affects everyone.

Former Amb. Tim Roemer: Everybody is increasingly concerned about our democracy functioning to be a voice for the little guy and the small business owner, whether they be in Tennessee or Indiana. And this 200 group ReFormers Caucus knows how to get those changes, knows how to encourage current members to act on reform, and, most importantly, knows how to execute on results to get the country moving in a better direction to protect our democracy, to continue to change as our Founders taught us. We have to keep up with the times, we have to keep changing to reflect current challenges and problems, and we have to make sure democracy is key and at the top of that list of changes and reforms.

Weston Wamp: You can learn more about the ReFormers caucus at IssueOne.org/ReFormers. And there you can see which former members of Congress from your state are involved.

On the next episode of Swamp Stories we are going to look at the worst nightmare for our republic come the first Tuesday in November.

Thanks for listening to Swamp Stories, presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better? Rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host, Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, producers Evan Ottenfeld and Sydney Richards, and editor Parker Tant from ParkerPodcasting.com. Swamp Stories was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas, and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

HOW TO LISTEN