Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (14 page)

That would be quite a mouthful to explain to the folks back home. Jim Jordan and his fellow RSC retreat buddies were not happy with the new proposal. Already the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was ridiculing the Republicans for backpedaling on their much-publicized campaign document. Conservative groups like Heritage and FreedomWorks were outraged. Jordan’s group concurred unanimously that they should push leadership to stick with the original $100 billion. The RSC leader asked the seven of them if they would call all of the other freshmen over the weekend and find out where they stood. They did. Everyone they spoke with wanted to stick with the unqualified $100 billion figure.

And so they went to conference.

The conference room known as HC-5 lies at the end of a serpentine corridor in the basement of the Capitol. Until 2011, both Republicans and Democrats held their member meetings there. (The minority party later claimed meeting space in the Capitol Visitor Center and named it in honor of Gabe Zimmerman, the aide to Gabrielle Giffords who was killed in the Tucson shooting.) The room is drab and painfully overlit, its only hint of significance being the Capitol police who stand outside guarding its closed doors while a few reporters slouch in the hallways, waiting to pounce on any member who leaves early. Unlike their genteel counterparts in the Senate, who work out their intraparty differences over crab cakes and salad in the Capitol’s chandeliered Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, the House conferees in HC-5 line up before one of two microphone stands, much as their constituents do at town halls, and in one minute or less say to the leadership team whatever is on their minds. During 2009 and 2010, as the Democrats struggled to pass a health care bill, their caucuses in HC-5 at times resembled a reality show hair-tugging match between progressives and Blue Dogs. Meanwhile, the Republican minority’s conferences were largely rancor-free—a short, straight line to a collective “No.” The roles would reverse in 2011.

As a rule, Republican conferences, like Democratic caucuses, were numbingly predictable and thus frequently avoided by the more senior members. Those who lined up to speak tended to be “frequent fliers” like Steve King, Louie Gohmert, and Michele Bachmann who also gravitated to the House floor and the cable TV cameras. Among the GOP leadership, Pete Sessions—the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman and frustrated football coach—could be counted on to spew out a few motivational homilies (or “Pete-speak”), like “Winners do things losers don’t do” and “Let’s make the big deal
the big deal
!”

The freshmen had not yet been assertive in conference. Boehner knew how to count: they constituted more than one-third of the Republican membership. He was well aware that the force that had blown them into Washington still gusted in the near distance. He had originally awarded the new arrivals one seat at the leadership table and two on the Steering Committee (which doles out assignments to other committees). When the freshmen asked for an additional seat at each
post, Boehner relented the same day. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy also advised Boehner to hold weekly meetings with the freshmen in the Speaker’s office. Boehner agreed to that as well. After all that, he resumed his position as laissez-faire CEO of the lower body, while the class of 2010 spent its initial month on Capitol Hill preoccupied with parliamentary procedures, committee briefing books, staff training, and a locust storm of lobbyists.

By the time Boehner and the rest of his leadership team had arrived in HC-5 on the morning of Thursday, February 10, 2011, they had already been hearing plenty from Jim Jordan of the RSC and from conservative watchdog groups. The issue at hand was the Continuing Resolution, or CR, that Congress was now obliged to pass to keep the government funded through fiscal 2011, since last year’s politically skittish Democratic majority had chosen not to bring a budget to the floor. The GOP majority had until March 4 to pass a CR before the government ran out of money. The CR that the study committee had in mind entailed the aforementioned $100 billion in nondefense cuts. Now leadership was going to hear what the caucus thought about the $32 billion alternative.

Raul Labrador rushed to the open microphone. Labrador had won in November with significant help from local Tea Party groups and none whatsoever from Washington Republicans.
“This new number
is not going to go over well with the people who elected me,” Labrador told the Republican leaders. “To me, $100 billion isn’t the ceiling. It’s the
floor.
And $33 billion . . .” He shook his head. “That’s under the floor.”

The funeral home operator Steve Southerland was the last of the members to speak. “I want you to know,” the big, bald man said slowly, “there is a limit to how far I will follow. I may lose in 2012—but I will not lose
me
.”

The freshman stared directly at the House Speaker and said, “I will hold you accountable to the promises that you made to the American people.”

Within twenty-four hours, the Appropriations Committee had drummed up a CR containing $100 billion in cuts. The freshmen had won.

Later that week, the freshmen met to discuss what and how to cut. Everything, they agreed, should be on the table. No sacred cows.

Then Jeff Duncan spoke up.
“Look,”
he said, “as we’re going through these possibilities, I think it’s imperative that the United States stands with Israel, and we exclude them from any cuts.”

All but one freshman concurred. They moved on.

A number of freshmen who had formerly been state legislators argued that the best way to go about budget-cutting was an across-the-board rather than targeted approach. Better to share the pain, not pick winners and losers—it was a lot easier to explain back home than to justify each and every reduction.

It was then that Lieutenant Colonel Allen West spoke up for the first time. “That’s the coward’s way out,” he snapped. “The people sent us here to make tough decisions.”

That was the last word on the matter. A number of people in the room left the meeting believing that West—the Tea Party favorite son who had joined the CBC and always walked around with his papers in a helmet bag and military pendants on his jacket lapel—should perhaps be taken seriously.

The second week of February was shaping up to be a terrible one for
Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy
. It had begun with a vote to extend the Patriot Act, which had first been enacted as a domestic counterterrorism tool in the wake of 9/11 but had engendered some criticism for sanctioning potentially invasive surveillance techniques. Republican members were notified over the weekend that the bill would be brought to the floor right when they got back on Tuesday the eighth. McCarthy’s whip office had disseminated almost no information on what extending the Patriot Act would mean. He had also assumed that the senior members who had voted for the original bill back in October 2001 would do so again a decade later. He was wrong. The bill was defeated on the floor.

The next day, another bill (though a minor one) failed to pass, and a trade bill was withdrawn when some conservatives threatened to vote against it. Now it was Thursday the tenth, and Boehner was hearing directly from the freshmen what McCarthy had already been telling the
Speaker: they didn’t have the votes in their own conference to pass the CR with $32 billion in spending cuts.

McCarthy knew the freshmen better than any other Republican on the Hill did. Some of them he had personally recruited, like a folksy but canny farmer and gospel singer named Stephen Fincher from Frog Jump, Tennessee. Others he coached actively throughout the election cycle. One such protégé was Sean Duffy, the Wisconsin county prosecutor and former star in MTV’s proto-reality show,
The Real World.
Another was Kristi Noem, the South Dakota state legislator and rancher, who was running on an anti-Washington theme while receiving ongoing messaging advice from McCarthy back in the Beltway. Still another was Rick Berg, a respected North Dakota state representative who had been planning to retire from politics, until McCarthy begged him to run for Congress, saying, “I’ll come to Fargo in January—that’s how passionate I am about you.”

They were giant-killers in the making. Noem would be going up against Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars and the head of the Blue Dogs. Berg’s Democratic opponent, Earl Pomeroy, had held North Dakota’s at-large seat for nine terms. Fincher’s adversary, John Tanner, was the eleven-term cofounder of the Blue Dogs. Duffy’s particularly quixotic goal was to beat David Obey, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and representative of Wisconsin’s 7th District since 1969.

With McCarthy’s active support, the energetic campaigns waged by Duffy and Fincher helped spur the retirements of Obey and Tanner, respectively. All four Republican neophytes won—as did Scott DesJarlais, a Tennessee physician who was bald and wore a goatee, until McCarthy advised the candidate to shave it.

“Do you think that’s important?” DesJarlais asked doubtfully.

“Michael Phelps shaves his entire body to get one-tenth of one second faster,” McCarthy replied, referring to the Olympic swimming champion. “I think that goatee is costing you five percent of the vote. Do
you
think it’s worth it?”

The next time McCarthy saw Scott DesJarlais, he had shaved off his goatee, and McCarthy decided that he was serious.

Now that the eighty-seven freshmen had arrived in Washington, McCarthy offered himself up as their resident big brother. He regularly
took them out for dinner on his political action committee’s dime. He played a weekly game of basketball with Jeff Duncan, Steve Fincher, and a few other freshmen. Nineteen of them slept in their offices, both as a symbolic commitment not to become Beltway fixtures and as a means of saving money. McCarthy also slept on his office couch, and in the morning he would go cycling or work out in the House gym with Paul Ryan and a few of the newbies. He gave them tips on running their offices. He organized get-togethers between them and the older members. And his Capitol office suite, H-107, became the freshman class’s unofficial flophouse, where they would go to filch a granola bar, have an evening glass of wine, or duck away momentarily from the demands of their own offices across the street.

The freshmen found it easy to connect with McCarthy. That he had spent the past year nurturing their political growth only partly explained the bond. The whip was informal (no one, including his junior staffers, called him anything other than Kevin), almost absurdly sunny, and far more proactively attentive than the ever-calculating Cantor or the amiable but oft-sequestered Boehner.

He was practically one of them. McCarthy had himself served only two terms thus far, and he liked to emphasize his entrepreneurial past—that of a Bakersfield fireman’s son who at the age of twelve was making money sorting bottles at the neighborhood convenience store, using the proceeds to pay for a vacation to Lake Tahoe for his entire family. (He tended to omit from his narrative that he had been born with a speech defect—that for the first ten or so years of his life, he could not pronounce the first letter of the party he now helped lead. McCarthy’s brother Mark had been born with glaucoma, necessitating two dozen eye surgeries before he was two years old. McCarthy’s father had quit a higher-paying job to become a fireman so as to be eligible for public-employee health insurance to pay for his children’s difficulties—something else McCarthy did not volunteer.)

Just after graduating from high school, young McCarthy had walked into a store, purchased a lottery ticket for the very first time, and won five thousand dollars. With the proceeds he opened a sandwich shop, Kevin O’s, where his high school sweetheart and eventual wife, Judy, also worked. Tired of wading through onerous regulations on his small business, he sold out after about a year and pronounced himself
a Republican. It was 1984, and another Californian, President Ronald Reagan, was incanting about morning in America. McCarthy got his undergraduate and MBA degrees at California State University Bakersfield, became the national chairman of Young Republicans, and went to work for his local congressman, the notoriously crusty Ways and Means chairman Bill Thomas. After a decade apprenticing under Thomas and serving two terms in the California State Assembly, when his boss decided to retire in 2006 Kevin McCarthy took the path that had been cleared for him.

McCarthy hit the ground in Washington at warp speed. His own race had not been strenuous, so he had spent the summer and fall of 2006 raising money for other incoming freshmen, who in turn showed their gratitude by voting McCarthy to be the designated freshman on the influential Steering Committee. Boehner had encouraged their vote. He had met McCarthy through Bill Thomas years earlier and knew a racehorse when he saw one. The freshman was put on the whip team. What contacts he’d brought with him he now supplemented by requesting lunches with influential Beltway Republicans like columnist Fred Barnes and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. The latter emerged from their meeting and declared to a confidant, “Watch this guy. He’s
the
star.”

Boehner put McCarthy in charge of the Republican Party’s platform for the 2008 GOP convention. The following year, he became Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s chief deputy. The year after that, following his critical role as chief recruiter in the November 2010 election, McCarthy’s colleagues unanimously elected him to be majority whip—which came with a large office suite, Capitol security, and the distinction of being the third-ranking House Republican. He had leapfrogged other leadership aspirants with far greater seniority, most notably National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Pete Sessions and Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan. More senior members did not altogether trust the unctuous, upwardly mobile whip. McCarthy worked hard to ingratiate himself with them. He played paddleball with old bulls like Alaska’s fourteen-term congressman Don Young, and continued to raise money and give speeches in the districts of lifers like Hal Rogers, now the House Appropriations chairman.