WASHINGTON -- Fate, and unfinished House business, played a mean trick on House Speaker Tom Foley. Defeated on Nov. 8 after 30 years in Congress, Foley came back to preside over the House of Representatives one final time as it met in special session to vote on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
Foley could easily have ducked the task. He could have remained home in Spokane, Wash., where voters brushed aside his seniority and influence in favor of a Republican political neophyte named George Nethercutt who said he wanted to be "a listener, not a speaker." Or he could have let someone else preside, which the speaker routinely does.
Instead, Foley opened the session, and his first official duty was to swear in and welcome to the expiring 103rd Congress a new Republican congressman from Oklahoma named Steve Largent. The newcomer actually was elected to the 104th in which Rep. Newt Gingrich is slated to be the first Republican speaker in 40 years, but Largent got a jump in seniority because Republican Rep. James Inhofe, whose seat he won on Nov. 8, was elected to the Senate and resigned early from the House.
There was a time when a just-elected member of Congress by tradition was only seen and not heard for at least the first year of his tenure. But Largent stepped up to the microphone in the well of the House and Foley sat back in the Speaker's chair and endured a probably unintentional slap as the newcomer pledged to provide -- as a freshman! -- "bold leadership that doesn't have to accept things as they are."
The new congressman gave a brief version of the Republican campaign pitch for change that was so startlingly successful three weeks earlier in sending Foley and 34 other House Democrats into retirement.
To any readers who have escaped the Sunday afternoon madness of professional football for lo these many years, Steve Largent is the longtime and now-retired wide receiver of the Seattle Seahawks who holds the National Football League record of at least one catch in 177 consecutive games. Largent is about to experience the same sense of being a has-been that has already hit Foley, because another veteran wide receiver originally with the Washington Redskins but now playing for the New York Jets, Art Monk, is expected to tie that record next Sunday and break it the week after.
After Largent finished his brief remarks and a couple of other House members made one-minute observations on GATT, Foley turned over the gavel to a stand-in. It was an anti-climactic moment in a distinguished legislative career for a man who had restored a considerable measure of dignity and civility to the speakership in 1989 after the unceremonious ousting of his flamboyant Democratic predecessor, Jim Wright of Texas, amid allegations of shady dealings.
Foley obviously had hoped to have more than the five years as speaker that his Washington state constituents allowed him. In the midst of the term-limits fervor sweeping the country, Foley joined a lawsuit that successfully blocked a term-limits initiative passed by the voters in Washington state, and they paid him back by defeating him.
In his last campaign, his opponents charged that he had "sued his own constituents," an allegation that greatly angered the usually placid Foley. He noted that although the term-limits initiative had passed statewide, the voters in his 5th Congressional District had twice voted against it, so he really was supporting their position.
Nethercutt, trying to counter Foley's indisputable clout in Congress, suggested in the final days of the campaign that he would come into the House with unusual clout himself if he arrived as the Republican David who brought down the Democratic Goliath. That remains to be seen, but the odds are against it for any freshman.
Tom Foley in 30 years built up the sort of experience that opponents of term limits say would be wasted if such limits were imposed. An irony of Foley's departure is that he argued that voters if they chose could impose them every two years, at the ballot box, and they proved him right.