Remembering Marion Berry

       Steve Barnes

It wasn’t the “nimrod” business that flashed into my mind at word that former U.S. Rep. Marion Berry had died. Nor the Gillett coon supper, the annual January evening assembly in Arkansas County, a scholarship fundraiser held just across the way from Berry’s farm, that every politician regarded as mandatory. And not his “aw-shucks” demeanor and molasses drawl.

No, it was that moment some 15 years ago at the Governor’s Mansion, where Berry was speaking to the Political Animals Club. It was memorable then and, given recent developments, even more so now, and would have been even had he not succumbed to illness on May 19 at age 80.

But first the nimrod stuff, because it caused Berry a wee bit of trouble and prompted newsrooms across Arkansas (and, surely, elsewhere) to consult their dictionaries. The episode arose from a floor debate on a spending bill that Berry, then in his eighth year representing largely rural east Arkansas, had helped birth. He was a proud Blue Dog, Berry, one of the House Democrats who stressed fiscal conservatism, especially when it did not adversely impact their districts. A Republican colleague from Florida went to the well of the House to lambaste the legislation as a budget-buster.

In a near rage (a condition not unfamiliar to Berry) the Arkansan strode to the podium and cut loose. The Floridian, a florid Berry declared, reminded him of another critic of the bill — him, over there, on the Republican side of the aisle, that “Howdy Doody-looking nimrod.”

It was not an everyday appellation, “nimrod,” certainly not to the generation then overseeing U.S. news organizations. Webster offered two primary definitions. The first explained that Nimrod was a storied biblical warrior, which quite obviously was not the application Berry had intended. The second listed meaning suggested multiple synonyms: fool, dolt, idiot, moron, goofus, etc.

Actually, Berry’s nimrod comment was of a piece with his larger exposition. The Congressional Record documented, verbatim, Berry in high dudgeon. Staring at the GOP members, “I am absolutely amazed at you boys over there,” Berry snarled. “I wonder what you are going to be when you grow up. For you to come to this floor and attack the Blue Dogs on fiscal responsibility demonstrates an unparalleled display of ignorance, stupidity, or just down-hard foolishness. I do not know whether you cannot add or subtract. I do not know what your problem is.”

It was a breach of House decorum, and earned Berry a slap on the wrist from the leadership. Neither his outburst (he later apologized to the House) nor the Speaker’s reproof is believed to have damaged Berry: He never won less than three of every five votes, and in his last race, in 2008, he was unopposed.

So that’s the nimrod thing. As for the coon supper — it’s for a good cause, it’s as bipartisan as the times permit; and if you’ve never tasted, or tested, the namesake protein, you can have my ticket.

To that comment by Berry at that Mansion luncheon: In the first years of the century anger was building on the farther reaches of American conservatism, giving rise to the Tea Party movement and then the House Freedom Caucus. The demand was for lower, much lower taxes and less, much less government spending. Partly to mollify the more vociferous of the anti-Washington component, GOP leaders began to decry “earmarks” — language in an appropriations bill that requires a federal agency (the Corps of Engineers, say, or the Pentagon) to spend a specific amount of money on a specific project, maybe a dam or a military base. Earmarks did not increase spending beyond the limits of the larger appropriation bill but the vast majority of Americans didn’t know that. Sensing a valuable political theme, House Republicans condemned them as waste and abolished earmarks when they regained the majority in 2010. Fearing their vulnerability, the Democrats who then governed the Senate soon followed suit.

But there was Marion Berry of Gillett, casually, almost nonchalantly allowing that he liked earmarks, that they had done wonders for Arkansas and that he had every intention of continuing to work them into as many spending bills as he could. So there.

Berry’s death was front-page news statewide, properly so. His obituary appeared a few days after an account of the earmarks that four of Arkansas’s six Washington delegates, all Republicans, are seeking. Sen. John Boozman and Reps. Steve Womack, Bruce Westerman and Rick Crawford (Berry’s successor) have requested almost $700 million for projects they say are worthy.

The ban on earmarks lasted about a decade. That chuckle you hear, that’s Marion Berry.