The Power That Was
Moss Adjusts to Diminished Authority
 Thomas W. Moss Jr. By Robert A. Reeder/TWP |
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 25, 1998; Page B01
Virginia House Speaker Thomas W. Moss Jr. still stands on the dais like a king, a six-foot bear of a lawmaker whose oversized gavel has often seemed to reflect his power, as well as his stubbornness.
But the Norfolk Democrat, who like so many Democratic speakers before him has ruled with a gentlemanly iron fist, is a chastened man these days. His quips aren't as lighthearted as they used to be, his rulings as indisputable. It's still his House, but often it doesn't feel like it.
After 32 years in a chamber ruled by Democrats, the 69-year-old Moss is watching his party's dominance fade.
A rising Republican tide has created a virtual deadlock in the 100-seat House, forcing Moss and other Democrats to do what he once thought preposterous: share power with the GOP. Moss was nearly overthrown in the legislature's opening week, and after he was elected speaker, his attempt at an acceptance speech was shouted down by angry Republicans.
It's given Moss a painful lesson in humility -- and a long list of folks to knock.
Moss blames Republicans who came up with what he sees as a fiscally irresponsible plan to cut the property tax on cars -- a plan that pushed James S. Gilmore III to victory in last fall's governor's race. He blames the media, which he says didn't do enough to convince voters the tax cut is a scam.
But most of all, Moss blames a Northern Virginia Democrat named David G. Brickley, whom Moss, through clenched teeth, calls "Judas Brickley."
"He's a Judas," Moss said, refusing to use Brickley's real name. "And he was purchased for so many pieces of silver."
Brickley, a former state delegate from conservative eastern Prince William County, was the first of two Democratic lawmakers to accept a high-paying job in Gilmore's Republican administration.
Brickley's defection was part of a chain reaction that opened up General Assembly seats for Republicans, helping them draw nearly even with Democrats in the House and win an outright majority in the 40-seat Senate for the first time.
Moss won another two-year term as speaker, but the rancorous battle for power in the House that began Jan. 14 was a signal that Republicans could likely win a majority in the House in the 1999 elections.
Those who know Moss say that it would be difficult for him to give up the status and perks of being speaker in a GOP-controlled House and that he might retire rather than run again in 1999. He is a symbol of an era of Democratic dominance, they say, an era that seems to be ending.
"I think he'd much rather go out as speaker than to go out sitting at the end of the table," said Del. V. Earl Dickinson (D-Louisa), co-chairman of the Appropriations Committee and a 26-year House member.
"Tom loves the trappings of power," said William H. Wood, a University of Virginia political analyst. "He certainly doesn't want to be in the minority. I can't imagine Tom running for reelection unless the Democrats have a good chance of holding the House."
Moss's troubles this session have been a comedown for a man who virtually has been unchallenged since taking leadership of the House in 1991.
For Moss, his approach was an extension of the way powerful Democrats such as E. Blackburn "Blackie" Moore, John Warren Cooke and A.L. Philpott had run the chamber for a quarter-century.
Moss called the shots, naming lawmakers to -- and tossing them from -- committees that handle legislation and the budget. When the House erupted two weeks ago, Moss seemed as disappointed by the abandonment of the chamber's traditional decorum as he was by the politics of the Republicans' power play.
"I've never seen that kind of display in 32 years in this body," he said. "It was deplorable."
Now, although Moss continues to make committee appointments, he is guided by a power-sharing agreement that guarantees Republicans parity on House panels.
During interviews in his spacious sixth-floor corner office in the legislative building and in his red-carpeted suite on the Capitol mezzanine, the silver-haired lawmaker showed flashes of humor and anger as he took stock of the session's early days and his three decades in politics.
He would not say whether he will run for office again, but in the next breath, he acknowledged the Republicans' increasing strength.
"I doubt that they would reelect me speaker if I come back again," he said. But, he added, he'd adjust if he believed he had to.
"I have a very good knowledge of how things are run," he said. "And I can tell you, there is nobody in that House who knows any more about the rules than I do. I think I can still be very effective in what I do."
Moss seemed nonchalant about the suggestion that if he won office again in 1999, he might have to trade the office suites designated for the speaker for a cramped hallway office. Anything, he said, would be "far better" than what he started with when he first arrived in Richmond in 1966: no offices at all, and a secretary shared with several other members.
Moss is one of the remaining symbols of the state's longtime Democratic dominance, but he began his political career as a rebel.
In his first campaign in 1965, he ran against his own party's segregationist establishment -- the conservative political machine of Harry Flood Byrd. Moss ran radio ads featuring chirping birds and the slogan, "Get Norfolk out of the Byrd Cage."
It was a defiant stance that got him elected but left him an outcast in the House, where Byrd's machine assigned him to obscure committees that had not met since Reconstruction.
"They were used as a dumping ground for dissidents, a concentration camp-type punishment," Moss said.
"I came here the hard way. I know what it's like. I've been there," said Moss, who dismisses any notion of a parallel between the way he was once exiled "like a leper" in Virginia's House and the dismissive way some critics say he has treated Republicans in past sessions.
"When Moss ran for office as a young Democratic liberal, he ran against the Byrd machine," said Del. John A. "Jack" Rollison III (R-Prince William). "And now he has become that organization. The irony is tremendous."
Moss doesn't see it. He defends his actions in past years, saying he inherited a committee lineup with few Republicans in positions of power and tried to "even the power out a little" by adding Republicans to panels as seats opened up.
"But it's awfully hard to keep my caucus happy when I have the right to give out the plums, and I give them to Republicans," he said.
"Maybe nobody believes it, but it's my philosophy to be harmonious with Republicans and treat them fairly," he said, tapping his fingers on his Capitol office desk. "I'm human too, you know. . . . I'm not so stupid to not realize you have to change."
For a while there, it appeared he did not think he would have to change. Barely a month ago, he virtually ruled out the possibility of any power-sharing with the GOP. Then Brickley bolted. "I felt personally betrayed," Moss said with a sniff. "He did it for purely selfish motives."
Brickley, who now makes $95,000 a year as director of Gilmore's parks department, declined to respond. "I'm not going to comment on what I hear secondhand," he said. "I'm a Democrat in a Republican administration, and I'm loving it."
Moss acknowledged that the fallout from Brickley's departure -- a House with 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans and a GOP-leaning independent -- made power sharing inevitable.
"I would rather have had the majority," he said. "But I'm also a realist. I know that since we don't, we have to negotiate. And we did."
House Democratic leader C. Richard Cranwell (Roanoke), who lost his "majority leader" title after the GOP's special election victories, said that "it hasn't been an easy time for Tom" but that Moss is handling his new role.
Cranwell said: "He has not flickered when the heat's on."
