Curt Weldon: The Troublemaker

Weldon: Unplugged
Curt Weldon was lost. One morning in April, en route to a hotel in Northern Virginia to give a speech on the defense budget, he took a wrong turn and ended up in the Pentagon parking lot. Getting from point A to point B in Washington is one thing that Weldon concedes he doesn't always get right.

As Weldon drove around the vast concrete field, his passenger suggested that he stop a Pentagon police officer and ask him to escort a member of Congress. "Yeah, I never like to do that," Weldon replied. Eventually, he found an exit, and then the hotel.

Weldon never commits his speeches to paper. As he stood outside a hotel ballroom waiting to go on, he asked the event planners if there were any particular points they wanted him to cover. All were inclined to let Weldon decide. The 100 or so attendees had come expecting a wonky recitation on the finer points of Pentagon budgeting. Let it rip, Curt.

The woman who introduced Weldon called him "one of our greatest patriots on the Hill." When he chaired the House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, he visited 24 bases in 15 states over 40 days as part of the Base Realignment and Closure process, to help decide which ones should be shuttered or moved. His staff called it "the Weldon Death March."

"Mr. Weldon is desperately dedicated to BRAC, even though it hurts his district," the emcee said. "He does what is right."

"I remember that trip," Weldon told the crowd. He went to bases all over the country, saw military housing "that you wouldn't put your worst enemy in." There were buildings with raw sewage on the first floor. Schools with asbestos. This tour wasn't about "going out meeting and dining with admirals," he assured. It was about seeing where people lived. Weldon has chaired every subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. If he wins re-election, he stands a chance, finally, in 2008, of becoming chairman.

Weldon launched -- unscripted -- into an eloquent and bracing speech about defense spending. The lead was classic Curt: "We're at a train wreck that I predicted in the mid-'90s would happen." Weldon is a former schoolteacher, but his speeches are surprisingly devoid of lecturing. It's as if he expects that his audience, if they've come to hear him, already know the basics. He moves quickly over complex, dense terrain, and reminds listeners that he has been here before.

Weldon explained that, over the past 15 years, Congress and the White House had decreased military spending as a percentage of the federal budget. But during the 1990s, the number of troop deployments had risen dramatically, to 38. From the end of World War II to 1991 -- not long after the Berlin Wall fell -- U.S. troops headed into battle just 10 times. Concurrently, there had been a "radical proliferation" of WMD, he said, from China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Russia, the country about which Weldon is probably Congress's foremost expert -- as he frequently reminds people.

More facts. The U.S. Navy had gone from a 585-ship fleet to a 283-ship fleet. Now some were saying that Congress should increase the budget even more. "You've got to understand that's not going to happen." Entitlement spending is eating up so much of the budget that 60 cents of every dollar is off the table, he said. Ordinarily, one might expect the heir apparent to the chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee to tell an audience of defense contractors that the military coffers runneth over. But, as Weldon gladly admits, "I don't bullshit people."

"We have a massive problem," he told the audience. "And Democrats and Republicans have been the source of that problem." The heads in the crowd nodded.  "Congress doesn't like to make the hard choices," he said. After his Death March, he knew that the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which is in his district, was on the block. "They had hundreds of workers," he said. "I was the only member of my delegation to support closing" the facility.

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