Life After Lewinsky

Rep. Ed Bryant looks beyond next year’s reelection to a gubernatorial race in 2002.

by Jackson Baker

ven as the state’s Democrats premeditate some sort of challenge in 2000 to 7th District U.S. Rep. Ed Bryant, the third-term GOP congressman — newly famous for his interrogation of Monica Lewinsky — is looking down the line to another race, one for the Tennessee governorship in 2002.

That makes him one of three prominent Republicans so far — the others are Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout and Bryant’s House colleague, 6th District U.S. Rep. Van Hilleary — to acknowledge an interest in running for the job, which incumbent Don Sundquist plans to vacate after his current term.

PHOTO BY JOHN LANDRIGAN

Ed Bryant

“I’ve been thinking statewide for a while, and it’s clear that Cyndi [Bryant’s wife] isn’t going to move to Washington; so it’s up to me to make a move,” says Bryant, who now rooms in a Virginia suburb with seven other congressmen — three Democrats and four Republicans.

Bryant isn’t taking his reelection next year for granted. He knows he’s on the Democrats’ official hit list for his role as a House of Representatives manager in the impeachment proceedings for President Clinton, and he expects a moderately strong Democratic opponent next year — most likely, State Senator Pete Springer of Centerville, who’s been thinking about a 7th District race since at least 1992.

But the former U.S. Attorney — who in the early ’90s led an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to prosecute U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Sr. of the neighboring 9th District for bank fraud — also knows that his district, which sprawls all the way from the suburbs of Memphis to those of Nashville, is almost as solidly Republican these days as the traditional GOP districts of East Tennessee. And his party’s edge is growing all the time in a district that hasn’t been in Democratic hands since the election of 1972.

All the same, Bryant acknowledges that he’s eyeing the governorship, which — given the nominally greater number of registered Democrats statewide — presents a significantly greater electoral challenge, and, perhaps more surprisingly, the dyed-in-the-wool conservative is prepared to follow the reformist lead of Governor Sundquist and to buck the tide of anti-tax sentiment among Republicans.

“We’ve definitely got to do something different. We have real revenue needs in Tennessee that we can’t satisfy right now,” said Bryant, minutes after he had seen Sundquist receive a shockingly tepid reception from his fellow Republicans gathered at the Adam’s Mark Hotel Saturday night for the Shelby County GOP’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner.

Though Bryant did not specifically endorse the details of Sundquist’s controversial “Tax Relief and Fairness Act of 1999,” he seemed to be in sympathy with its premises, and if the several hundred Republicans on hand at the Adam’s Mark had been able to read the congressman’s mind Saturday night, they might not have given him the two standing ovations he received. (Sundquist, who doggedly — one might even say, courageously — used his speaking time to plug a plan that he must have known was unpopular with his audience, was the sole Republican not to get a standing-O.)

Madness? Maybe, but there’s clear method in it. By floating the notion of a gubernatorial race a year in advance of his next congressional race, Bryant may forestall any opposition at all — the idea being that a truly ambitious Democrat would prefer to wait two years and run for an open seat than to take a shot against an incumbent.

It was the same sort of logic that in 1992 caused several name Democrats — most of whom would end up vying two years later for the right to oppose Bryant — to shy away from a challenge to the man who was then the 7th District’s incumbent. His name? Don Sundquist.

n Though Sundquist remained firm in his commitment to a major tax-reform package (both in private conversation and from the dais of the Lincoln Day dinner, he promised to keep pushing for his proposed uniform business tax), it was increasingly difficult to find support for the plan among GOP cadres.

“Suicide,” said businessman/commentator Gerald Gaia, meaning not only the Sundquist plan but a recent Republican initiative for an income tax in New Hampshire (vetoed, as Gaia noted, by the state’s Democratic governor). Chip Saltsman, the new state GOP chairman and the governor’s handpicked choice for that job, has furiously backpedaled from any appearance of supporting it.

And State Rep. Larry Scroggs, whose initial reaction to the Sundquist proposal had been positive, was now actively distancing himself from it as he planned a race for the state senate next year in the ultra-conservative 32nd District. Other Republican legislators indicated that, at the very least, the payroll-tax component of Sundquist’s proposal would probably have to be sacrificed.

n At a pre-dinner press conference Davis, Bryant, Hilleary, and U.S. Senator Bill Frist all seemed to concur that the Republican Party had been damaged by its long focus on impeachment and that “compromise” should be a watchword of the next Congress. Hilleary made a point of noting that he had been an early adversary of former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was largely responsible for the GOP’s impeachment strategy. Frist would, however, strongly defend to the dinner audience his two “guilty “ votes in the Senate trial as “no-brainers.”

Frist said a presidential decision to support the senator’s current “Ed-Flex” bill or the initiatives of his Medicare Commission would be signals of Clinton’s own desire for compromise.

The Man to See

Political pro Karl Schledwitz, his name cleared, can afford to be visible now.

spent a million bucks to remove a tattoo,” said 47-year-old Karl Schledwitz last week after the family man, former Eagle Scout, and onetime UT-Knoxville student-body president got what he’d been seeking ever since 1987 — exoneration by a federal appeals court panel in a politically tinged case that one of the judges called the most highly publicized trial since the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton in 1925.

It has been 20 years since Schledwitz, then 27 and an intimate of some of Tennessee’s mightiest political potentates, made a fateful bank loan that resulted in two indictments and one conviction. The latter setback came in 1992 when a Greeneville jury adjudged Schledwitz guilty of having illegally channeled his borrowed $1.5 million into a complex stock-purchase scheme on behalf of one of his political benefactors, Knoxville banker Jake Butcher (whose bank had made the loan in the first place).

A young fellow Memphian named Charles Burson was the first lawyer Schledwitz would engage when, eight years later in 1987, he was indicted along with U.S. Rep. Harold Ford and several others for a series of allegedly fraudulent collusions with Jake and C.S. Butcher, both of whom had already been charged and convicted.

Appropriately, Burson — who left the case to become state attorney general and is now Vice President Al Gore’s legal aide — called Schledwitz on another matter Wednesday morning and thus became the first friend to learn of his deliverance.

What do Burson and Schledwitz have in common these days? The Vice President, mainly. Schledwitz has been active in Gore’s presidential efforts, particularly the fund-raising end of it. “I’ve never stopped being involved in political campaigns. I’ve just learned to work behind the scenes in them,” says the man who, as a 24-year-old wunderkind, managed Jim Sasser’s upset win over Bill Brock for the Senate in 1976. He would later manage Jake Butcher’s losing campaign in 1978 for the governorship against Lamar Alexander.

Always a principal in hot statewide campaigns or those of Shelby County, Schledwitz disdained the idea of running himself. “I got all that out of my system working for Sasser and Jake,” he says. He developed a law practice but decided he had to quit it in 1989, when he founded with partner Terry Lynch Southland Capital Corporation, an investment and development firm that has subsequently made him millions. (Overton Square is now a Schledwitz/Southland enterprise.) “It was getting embarrassing having my receptionist at the law office tell callers that I was ‘in court,’ when the fact was I was in court on my own behalf,” Schledwitz remembers.

Schledwitz has never made a secret of his feeling that politics was the reason for his indictment in 1987 by Reagan-era Justice Department appointees. “I was just a pawn in an effort to ‘get’ Butcher and Ford,” he says. But he declines to gloat or to claim victory over his legal adversaries. “I’m not bitter at the prosecutors or the FBI. I believe those guys in their hearts were all doing right.”

It was mainly a matter of the aforesaid tattoo. “A friend told me it was like I had a tattoo on my forehead, this stain from the past. I damn sure wouldn’t have spent a million dollars in legal bills just to get my $3,000 fine back. I had to clear my name.”

Schledwitz was actually tried twice. He, Ford, and lawyer Doug Beaty were acquitted in Memphis in 1993 of federal bank fraud and mail fraud charges. But he took a fall on the nominee-loan charge in Greeneville in 1992. “Being a Butcher ally in East Tennessee back then wasn’t exactly an asset,” Schledwitz says ruefully. Besides the fine, Schledwitz got a probated six-month sentence, due to be served in a halfway house once his appeals were over with.

Seven years and three appeals (two of which went as far as the Supreme Court) later, they finally are. Writing for the majority of the three-judge panel, Appeals Court Judge Nathaniel Jones opined that “the fact [that] one has borrowed more than he or she can repay does not, in itself, establish mail fraud — nor any other crime for that matter.”

Said Jones: “Intent is a requisite of mail fraud. [U]ndisclosed evidence would have invalidated the intent element of the government’s proof against Schledwitz.” The “undisclosed evidence” which resulted in the reversal included strong denials from Jake Butcher, then serving time, that Schledwitz’s loan was part of any prearranged stock scheme.

Besides working backstage for Sasser and for fellow Memphian Bill Morris’ gubernatorial campaign in 1994, Schledwitz played a role in the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign as well. Having long been the “man-to-see” in Memphis for many a major-league politician, the still-boyish-looking Schledwitz is now — after enduring what he calls “one of the longest-running non-capital cases in U.S. history” — free to be seen in his own right.

(Note: Gary Humble, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Schledwitz at Greeneville, has called for a new review of the case by the full 6th District panel.)