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Detroit \u2014<\/em>\u00a0At the height of his powers as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in October 1991, Representative John Dingell (D., Mich.) was feted by 800 Washington lobbyists \u2014 representing Morgan Stanley, AT&T, Merck, and more \u2014 who laid out $600,000 to honor the ruthless congressman nicknamed \u201cTorquemada.\u201d I was a young journalist in D.C., and the glitzy Washington Hyatt Regency event was called a \u201cTribute to John Dingell.\u201d Any other town might have called it a shakedown.<\/p>\n On Monday the 88-year-old Dingell announced his retirement. His media and political allies celebrate him as a populist man of the middle, but the reality of who he is couldn\u2019t be more different. Over his record 57 years in Congress, Dingell has been one of the key architects of centralizing regulatory power in Washington to the benefit of big-business lobbyists \u2014 and to the detriment of the little guy.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re one of the thousands of coal miners who lost their jobs to EPA emissions edicts in recent years, or if you are one of the millions of Americans who have lost their health insurance because of Obamacare, John Dingell deserves some of the thanks. His 1990 Clean Air Act, passed in defiance of Congress\u2019s own environmental findings, laid the groundwork for today\u2019s job-killing EPA power grabs. A longtime advocate of socialized medicine who introduced a nationalized-health-care bill every term that he was in Congress, Dingell was at Barack Obama\u2019s left hand when the president signed the 2009 Affordable Care Act, the darling of Big Hospital and Big Pharma. The ACA has ripped through Americans\u2019 health coverage like a tornado.<\/p>\n A decade after my first encounter with Dingell, I landed at the\u00a0Detroit News<\/em>\u00a0and since then have frequently crossed his path. Also nicknamed \u201cBig John\u201d for his once-imposing 6\u20323\u2033 frame (he has become stooped in later years, relying on a cane for support), he is a soft-spoken, engaging man with a quick wit. When it comes to federal power, however, he has been a single-minded bully.<\/p>\n From emissions mandates to the mother of all regulations, Obamacare, Washington\u2019s powerbrokers now rule vast swaths of America\u2019s economy thought unimaginable when Dingell took office in 1955. In 1990 he led revision of the federal Clean Act At, which brought new controls over coal-burning utilities in the name of reducing acid rain. The legislation defied the scientific conclusions of Congress\u2019s own ten-year National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) study, which found that claims of lake acidification were overblown and that the proposed regulations to reduce it were excessive.<\/p>\n Ignored by Dingell\u2019s committee and his champions in the press corps, the study was shelved, and the expensive regulations passed anyway. Ironically, Dingell has lately lamented the EPA\u2019s use of the same Clean Air Act to unilaterally regulate carbon dioxide, a measure that comes at enormous expense to his backyard auto industry. But the seeds were planted by Dingell himself, as were the roots of today\u2019s massive lobbying apparatus.<\/p>\n Many of those lobbyists come from Dingell\u2019s own staff, part of the permanent government of influence peddlers who then return to influence\u00a0him. Dingell\u2019s legend was that he regulated \u201canything that moves, burns, or is sold.\u201d And so, at the Dingell tribute in 1991, Merck bought a table for $7,500 because few could do more than Big John to destroy Big Pharma.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pashas of the Ottoman Empire protected their subjects in return for the right to claim all that they owned,\u201d wrote Paul Gigot in the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0in 1991. \u201cA true congressional pasha doesn\u2019t need to enrich himself, since he never faces a competitive election. Instead he has his favorite charities. Mr. Dingell\u2019s \u2018tribute\u2019 was a fund-raising benefit for the Center for National Policy,\u201d a Democratic think tank.<\/p>\n Washington power and gerrymandered districts have given rise to congressional dynasties. Dingell succeeded his father and will likely be succeeded by his wife, Debbie, whom Dingell met when she was, yes, a GM lobbyist.<\/p>\n There is no better example of Washington\u2019s centralization of power than the Affordable Care Act, perhaps Dingell\u2019s most enduring legacy. President Obama honored the socialized-health-care advocate with a prominent role in his Oval Office signing of Obamacare, a bill written by the health industry\u2019s biggest players. The ACA has wreaked havoc in Dingell\u2019s home state,\u00a0costing thousands of jobs<\/a>\u00a0at Stryker, a medical-device maker, forcing a move toward part-time workforces in venues as diverse as fast food and city governments, and\u00a0forcing the cancellation<\/a>\u00a0of tens of thousands of insurance policies. \u201cIt\u2019s affordable, quality health insurance made available to everyone,\u201d Dingell wrote in a recent constituent e-mail even as the non-partisan Office of the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has concluded that premiums will increase for two-thirds of American small businesses.<\/p>\n A credulous\u00a0Detroit Free Press<\/em>\u00a0reported this week that Dingell was stepping down because of his frustration with Washington partisanship. \u201cThe words \u2018compromise\u2019 and \u2018conciliation\u2019 should not be considered dirty words in Washington,\u201d Dingell says. Yet his precious Obamacare was rammed through on a straight partisan vote. It\u2019s a fitting Washington legacy for a self-declared populist dealmaker who has overseen a Washington that is more partisan and more tilted to special interests than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Detroit \u2014\u00a0At the height of his powers as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in October 1991, Representative John Dingell (D., Mich.) was feted by 800 Washington lobbyists \u2014 representing Morgan Stanley, AT&T, Merck, and more \u2014 who laid out $600,000 to honor the ruthless congressman nicknamed \u201cTorquemada.\u201d I was a young journalist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14384"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14384"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14386,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14384\/revisions\/14386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}