Salmon’s 2nd swan song:
Rep. Matt Salmon walks away from a decade in Congress defined by gridlock
He first went to Congress in 1994 and honored his termlimit pledge. He returned in 2012, and now Arizona’s Matt Salmon reflects on his two stints in Washington as he once again packs his boxes for home.
Matt Salmon is leaving Congress much the way he joined it a generation ago: with boxes packed and big problems all around.
The five-term Republican still sees government intruding deeply in the lives of its citizens. There are long-term funding questions about Social Security. And the top corporate income-tax rate stands where it was when Salmon was first elected in 1994 with hopes of cutting it.
Now, Salmon also laments the hyperpartisanship that has especially gripped the Senate, where filibusters routinely scuttle even popular bills, and executive overreach by presidents, particularly the current one.
After a career spent under two Democratic presidents, Salmon sees a few victories, a lot of problems averted by smart opposition and an uncertain future for the country. He is trading his work on budgets, entitlements and international affairs for a more pressing future back in Mesa with his wife, children and grandchildren.
“My moment of truth, as Hemingway would put it, was Christmas last year. It was the first time that all of my children and grandchildren were together for seven years,” Salmon said. “As I looked around, I thought of all that I had missed . ...
“Life’s over before you know it. That’s when it hit me.”
Salmon is genial and principled. He leaves Washington well-liked, but with relatively few legislative achievements — an epitaph suitable for most of his peers on both sides of the partisan aisle in an era of divided government.
He first went to Washington as part of the storied Class of ’94, an unprecedented wave of success for Republicans sent to battle then-President Bill Clinton. Salmon returned to Congress after the 2012 elections to fend off President Barack Obama’s priorities.
If Democratic presidents helped ignite his congressional career, perhaps his most memorable achievement is helping depose two Republican speakers of the House. A man who battled his own party in pursuit of conservative purity exits just as Republicans are set to control all the levers of federal government, including their largest numbers in the House under a Republican president since the beginning of the Hoover administration in 1929.
He again will miss a chance to go on the legislative offensive.
In a 2013 interview with the Hill, Salmon said his second stint would be purposeful. “I didn’t come to just be a congressman again,” he said. “I came to make change.”
Four years later, as he prepared to leave Washington, it was unclear what effect Salmon had.
In his entire congressional career, Salmon was the prime sponsor of one bill that became law and wasn’t primarily responsible for repealing any other laws, according to Library of Congress records. That 1999 bill set aside $25 million annually for the government to help combat computer crime.
Salmon said congressional work is more than legislation.
“You have to look at things in total. You have to look at the things you were able to stop and the collective things that you do,” he said. “You have to look at the constituent work. It’s so far beyond bills.”
Hampered by gridlock
U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, R- Ariz., followed Salmon in representing the East Valley for six terms in the House. He said Salmon helped the GOP achieve its legislative priorities at times when that was hard to do.
“Particularly the first six years he served, it was divided government. There wasn’t many who had signature pieces of legislation,” Flake said. “You play on defense when you’re in that situation.”
Even so, Salmon joined Republicanled changes to welfare, helped balance the federal budget and shaped trade deals, Flake said. “He was in the middle of that, very much a part of that.”
And “when (then-House Speaker) Newt Gingrich and others kind of abandoned the revolution, Matt stood up. That was a tough thing to do,” Flake said.
Salmon said his second stint “was a lot more unproductive,” something he mainly blames on Obama’s lack of relations with Congress.
Salmon and Obama both favor the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal scuttled, at least for now, by Presidentelect Donald Trump’s opposition to it.
“Here I am the chairman of the AsiaPacific subcommittee and he couldn’t even pick me out of the crowd. I’ve never been in his office. I’ve never met with him,” Salmon said of Obama. “Much to my surprise, the (senior) Democrat on Appropriations, Nita Lowey, chimed in and said, ‘Join the club.’ ”
Congress has largely ceded its powers to the White House, he said, in part by passing nebulous bills that allow the president to expand them to an unrecognizable degree and in part by failing to accomplish once-routine matters, like timely annual budgets. In the Senate, the filibuster “is used at the drop of a hat anymore,” Salmon said.
“We’ve passed thousands of bills in the time I’ve been there that do nothing but collect dust over in the Senate,” he groused. “One was a bill I had dealing with education that passed the House unanimously, and Obama said he would sign it into law if it got to his desk. It would have helped our veterans more than anything, giving them college credit for their experience . ... It never went anywhere in the Senate.”
Pressing China
Among his more memorable efforts, Salmon sought during his first stint to have Ronald Reagan’s face added to Mount Rushmore. One of his more satisfying accomplishments was helping gain the release of Yongyi Song from Chinese imprisonment.
Yongyi was an academic researcher in Pennsylvania who was arrested in 1999 during a visit to his native China. Yongyi was collecting information on China’s brutal cultural revolution; that country said he was spying.
Salmon, who speaks Mandarin, joined a delegation that urged Yongyi’s release in January 2000. He hailed the release as “proof that engagement works.” Others suspected China did so to ease its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization.
Yongyi, now a professor of library science at California State University in Los Angeles, said his personal desire for freedom doesn’t alter the policy implications of close dealings with Beijing.
“Matt always says this is the success of engagement,” Yongyi said. “I think this is only partly true. You also need confrontation . ... Matt is a great man. Sometimes he can’t imagine how evil the Communist Party is. They’ll never change.”
Seventeen years later, Yongyi said the U.S. is far more dependent on Chinese goods and hasn’t achieved meaningful improvements on human rights.
Salmon, who now chairs the House subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, agrees.
“I’ve got to tell you I was wrong,” he said of China. “Human rights are no better off, and maybe in some ways are worse off than they were. China’s become a lot more belligerent” with U.S. allies in the region.
Salmon has used his committee perch to press China for a better record on business, economic and human-rights issues.
For Salmon, there is still hope a Trump administration will look more favorably on other pieces of unfinished business.
Specifically, Salmon wants to make it easier to purchase silencers for firearms, prevent the release of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes that would disqualify them from entering the country, and lengthen prison sentences for illegal immigrants who re-enter the country after being deported.
Salmon also wants the 28th Amendment to the Constitution to bar Congress from exempting its members from the laws they pass.
In each case, Salmon strongly supports the proposed measures, and each has gained little traction, at least for now.
‘The true believers’
Salmon was in some ways more involved in shaping the overall direction of the congressional agenda than on specific matters.
Linda Killian, author of “The Freshman: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?” said Salmon was one of the more ideologically driven members of Congress.
“My overwhelming memory of him is he was a very nice guy. He was very committed to what he cared about, but a very nice guy,” she said. “He was part of the group of what I called the true believers. ... This was the group that was loud and proud. They were always at the press conferences. They were always bucking leadership. They were always fighting for principle.”
From term limits to balanced budgets to smaller government, Salmon and his closest colleagues pushed Democrats hard and Republicans even harder.
Early in 1995, the House held a vote on imposing term limits. Gingrich and the GOP leaders ensured the bill contained enough objectionable features to kill it, Killian said.
Afterward, Salmon fumed about a senior Republican opposing the termlimits bill.
“I decided all bets were off. If he can speak his mind, I can speak mine,” Salmon told Killian. “I know the leadership wasn’t happy with me, but they didn’t elect me; my voters did.”
It was the kind of approach that endeared him to many constituents but likely undermined his effectiveness in Washington.
After the 1996 elections, Salmon sought a seat on the House Commerce Committee, one of the more prestigious committees in Congress. GOP leadership assigned Salmon to the lower-profile International Relations Committee. Meanwhile, J.D. Hayworth, a fellow freshman friendly to then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, won a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
Making the apparent snub worse, Salmon had helped Hayworth win a tight re-election race.
Still, Salmon was among those in the Class of ’94 who vowed to limit himself to three terms in Congress. That decision may have been rooted in principle, but it also made it easier to hand better assignments to allies who figured to remain over self-imposed lame ducks.
Salmon acknowledged his limited pull years later.
“For those out there that expect me to ever get appointed to some major committee, stop holding your breath. It’s not going to happen, because I’m a fighter,” Salmon said in a 1998 radio interview.
Challenging leadership
In January 1997, Salmon publicly favored having Gingrich step aside as he battled an ethics probe that ultimately led him to pay a $300,000 penalty. It was a position that briefly put Salmon in the national spotlight.
By March, Salmon was among a dozen House Republicans secretly plotting to oust Gingrich as speaker. That effort collapsed in midsummer, and Gingrich held onto the House gavel until he resigned after the GOP’s stunning midterm losses in 1998.
Eighteen years later, Salmon was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of about 40 conservative lawmakers who represented the rightmost flank of the GOP. Four of Arizona’s five Republican representatives are viewed as members of the group, which began in January 2015.
The caucus grew out of the disenchantment many Republicans felt about deals struck by then-Speaker John Boehner and Obama. After the 16-day 2013 government shutdown, Boehner pushed back against some of the most conservative members of his party in an effort to maintain control of the group as a whole.
By 2015, the House Freedom Caucus openly challenged Boehner.
In July, one of its members sought to “vacate the chair,” a radical parliamentary move that could have toppled Boehner. That failed, but the caucus pushed ahead with demands for another showdown with the Obama administration over eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the organization that provides reproductive health services, including abortions.
By early September, Salmon was among those predicting insurrection in GOP circles. “There will probably be some real fights between us and leaders of our own party. It’s probably going to get really ugly. And it may even result in a change in some of our leadership,” Salmon said at the time. Days later, Boehner quit. “I don’t regret any of that,” Salmon said of his battles with leadership. “It was the right thing to do.”
Boehner’s departure became essential after he repeatedly sidelined his members in critical negotiations, Salmon said.
“When you have one person who basically works with his staff to create all the policies and laws that go into one big, ugly omnibus ... at the end of the year with little or no input from congressional members, that’s a broken process,” he said.
Looking back, Boehner’s fall may have been the pinnacle for Salmon.
Four days after Boehner announced his resignation, Salmon told U.S. Sen. John McCain he wouldn’t challenge him for the Republican nomination in 2016. Less than five months after pondering pursuit of a six-year Senate term, Salmon said he wouldn’t seek another two-year House term, either.
Instead, he leaves content to have been an outlier, someone who pushed his party in an effort to shape better policy.
“I don’t disagree that a lot of the good solutions end up in the middle, but you don’t get to the middle if only one side’s hurt,” he said. “If you don’t have those outliers, then you never have a good conclusion.”
“I didn’t come to just be a congressman again. I came to make change.” REP. MATT SALMON, R-ARIZ. IN 2013 INTERVIEW WITH THE HILL, EXPLAINING THAT HE WANTED HIS SECOND STINT IN CONGRESS TO BE PURPOSEFUL