In My Time - Dick Cheney [165]
I knew that Hastert was doing more than just sending a shot across the bow. He’d phoned in the last couple of days to tell me that House members were saying they wouldn’t go to conference with Grassley. They were thinking about sending a bill with a higher number back to the Senate and telling the senators to take it or leave it.
Bill Frist had also called me. Senators were getting their backs up at the idea the House was trying to “jam” them, he said, and personal animosities were running high. Could I step in and help broker a deal?
I was happy to do it. I certainly understood the institutional rivalries at work, and I knew the people involved well. Finance Chairman Grassley and House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas were barely speaking. There was a report that a meeting between them grew so heated that Thomas stomped out of his own office. I liked and admired both men. Chuck is a down-to-earth and decent man who still works his Iowa farm. I remember at least once calling him and reaching him on his cell phone while he was out driving his tractor. He has a stubborn streak, but it has served him and his constituents pretty well over the years. Thomas, who’s from Bakersfield, California, loves to legislate, and he brings a very sharp mind to the task. An ex-academic like me, he is famously prickly, but we had known each other since we had both been elected to the House nearly a quarter century before and enjoyed each other’s company.
I went to visit Bill in his Ways and Means Committee office on the afternoon of May 21, 2003, and we spent some time reminiscing. We agreed that nobody would have believed it back in 1979 when we were freshman members of Congress that the two of us would be sitting here in 2003, he the chairman of Ways and Means, one of the most powerful positions on the Hill, and I the vice president. Then Bill walked me through where the House was on the tax bill, including the fact that there was great interest in seeing a cut in capital gains included in the final bill. The president’s proposal was to eliminate the individual tax on dividends, but Bill didn’t think that would fly.
The House had grudgingly come down in its number to a cut of $350 billion and had a tentative deal on that with the Senate, but the bill also included outlays for state assistance and child-credit refunds, which Chuck Grassley thought he needed to get the conference bill through the Senate. That ran the top number up to $382 billion, setting off Senator Voinovich, who decided that the spirit of the $350 billion cap had been violated. I got him to come over to the Ways and Means Committee office, and after what the Washington Post correctly called “a tense meeting,” there was a deal: tax cuts of $320 billion and reduction of the capital gains tax as well as the individual tax on dividends to 15 percent. That left room for the sweeteners the Senate needed and the whole thing still came in under the $350 billion limit.
I went over to the Senate to get sign-off from Chairman Grassley and Majority Leader Frist and helped work out a few other details that day and the next. By the time I took my seat as president of the Senate on May 23, I felt I had earned my keep. And when I cast the tie-breaking vote to ensure the bill’s passage, I was sure I had. On May 28 President Bush signed into law the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.
The Bush-era tax cuts helped grow the economy and create jobs, and I was glad to see them extended in December 2010 for two more years. If the Obama administration had reversed course and let tax rates rise across the board, the results would have been devastating.
DURING MY FIRST WEEKS as vice president I had another obligation to fulfill. The previous October, as the campaign was winding down, our whole family was out on the road fulltime. After one late-night rally, my six-year-old granddaughter, Kate, climbed into the seat