Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (15 page)

“You can’t have too many friends,” was one of the peppy McCarthy’s two favorite sayings. The other: “Continuing education!”

He was getting an education now, on the fly.

The term
whip
is British, referring to the foxhunting aide tasked with keeping the hounds in the pack. It implies coercion and in recent years has called to mind the chest-to-chest backroom persuasions of Republican whip Tom “the Hammer” DeLay. The former Sugar Land, Texas, pest exterminator thoroughly enjoyed his reputation as a bone-breaker, but in truth he relied more on deal-cutting. DeLay termed his whipping strategy “growing the vote”: finding out what it would take to gain a member’s aye, then adding that component—say, a special exemption or subsidy—to the overall package until he had his 218 votes. Relentlessly partisan though he was, DeLay was not above earmarking for a new hospital or a new research center in a Democrat’s district in exchange for the latter’s vote.

McCarthy wasn’t going to be like DeLay. Not that he was a political puritan. Like any other highly successful politician, the whip had done his share of kissing up, had given his blessing to rank attack ads against Democrats, and had happily fudged facts for the sake of a winning narrative. But he distrusted the effectiveness of deal-cutting. What worked for the Hammer might not work for him. First, DeLay had spent fully a decade forging relationships as a congressman before he became whip in 1995. McCarthy was still new on the Hill, his alliances still frail. Second, the earmark ban had removed a crucial inducement from the whip’s tool kit.

But the most important distinction between the two whips was this: Tom DeLay’s seventy-three freshmen were thoroughly beholden to Newt Gingrich—their Speaker, but also their guru. Kevin McCarthy’s eighty-seven freshmen had no particular allegiance to John Boehner, or even to the Republican Party. He had no leverage over them.

A few hours after the freshmen demanded that the CR include $100 billion in spending cuts, Kevin McCarthy was summoned to
a meeting with the Cardinals
.

The House Appropriations Committee is divided into twelve
subcommittees that control funds for federal agencies and cabinet departments. Each subcommittee is its own fiefdom, with billions of dollars under its control. Together the twelve chairmen and the full Appropriations Committee’s chairman, Hal Rogers, are known as the Cardinals. McCarthy came to their office in the Capitol that morning. They sat around him in a glowering semicircle.

This is the biggest rescission of a budget in the recent history of the House,
the Cardinals told the whip.
The biggest since disarmament after World War II. Thirty-two billion dollars is a lot of money.

“It won’t pass,” McCarthy replied.

How do you know it won’t? Have you done a whip check?

A whip check was a basic count of where every member currently stood, before any actual persuading, or whipping, had taken place.

“No,” said McCarthy.

The Cardinals were stunned.
How do you expect us to craft a bill if you don’t know the level at which it’ll be acceptable to the members?

“They all campaigned on the Pledge,” McCarthy said. “They told their voters they would cut $100 billion. That’s where they are.”

The meeting lasted over an hour. Even the Cardinals who personally liked Kevin McCarthy could see that he didn’t know much about the appropriations process. He didn’t understand how allocations were set. He didn’t seem to know the difference between “obligations” (funds allocated) and “outlays” (funds spent). And as a result, he was in no position to educate the freshmen—who, in the view of the Cardinals, had absolutely no clue what they were asking the Appropriators to do . . . had no clue at all, really, what they were doing, other than pulling a huge round number out of the sky and vowing that this was how much they would cut.

But what McCarthy did know, they could see, was where the freshmen stood.

The Cardinals offered up a counterproposal: $54 billion in spending reductions. McCarthy took it back to the conference.

He returned to the Cardinals that afternoon. “It’s not enough,” he informed them.

The Appropriators finally got the figure up to $61 billion—which, when prorated, amounted to $100 billion over the entire fiscal year. McCarthy’s shuttle diplomacy led him back to the freshmen.
“This is $29 billion more that we got for the American people in a single day’s work,” the whip told them. “This is a huge concession on Hal Rogers’s part.”

The freshmen were disappointed. But they also knew enough to trust Kevin McCarthy that it was the best deal they could get.

They agreed on the number offered by the Appropriations Cardinals, and House Resolution 1, the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act for 2011, was introduced as legislation the very next day, on February 11. The House would begin debating it four days later.

Within the Appropriations Committee where H.R.1 was being crafted, the veteran Appropriators struggled to adjust to the cut-first, ask-questions-later Tea Party ethos.

Boehner’s Steering Committee had awarded five spots on the all-powerful committee to freshmen—and an additional seat to Jeff Flake, the Arizona anti-earmarks crusader. The new committee members did not disguise their hostility toward appropriating. One freshman, Alan Nunnelee of Mississippi, had quizzed a Department of Agriculture undersecretary about food stamps recipients during an early subcommittee hearing. Nunnelee wondered if there was a way that they might be gaming the system. “
Do we just
ask people, ‘Is this your income?’ Or do we ask them to bring in their income tax statements, their paychecks? . . . What about people that work for cash—that does not show up on IRS or paycheck?”

Connecticut liberal Rosa DeLauro couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Their average net monthly income is $329,” DeLauro had snapped when it was her turn to speak. “We want them to bring their W-2 forms? I submit to you that we [should] ask GE to bring in
its
forms and tell us how they have managed to pay
zero
in taxes to the United States of America! And they ship their jobs overseas, and they take their technology and take it overseas! And we do not hold them accountable for anything! But let us make sure that anyone who gets $134 [in food stamps], that they may be buying the right thing or the wrong thing for their families!
Who are we? Who are we in this great nation?
”

The progressives wondered what world the freshmen inhabited. The freshmen wondered the same about the liberals. Kansas freshman
Kevin Yoder’s first Appropriations subcommittee hearing took place on February 11, with testimony from the U.S. Postal Service inspector general. One of the other members present was California Democrat Barbara Lee, the past chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. It astonished Yoder to hear Lee say that she deliberately paid extra to buy postal stamps at regular price because “
I am trying to support
the Post Office,” and that when she visited grocery stores, Lee refused to use computerized checkouts “because I know that is a job or two or three that is gone.”

Yoder was dizzy with disbelief. Never before had he heard someone say, in effect, “I try to create jobs by promoting inefficiency.” When Yoder was a kid, his mother always told him, “Clean up after yourself. Otherwise someone else is going to have to do it.” Barbara Lee had stood his mother’s admonition on its ear:
Leave a mess, so that someone has a job.
That was practically Soviet!

The chairwoman of that particular Financial Services subcommittee hearing was Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri, who inhabited a world somewhere in between the freshman Republicans and the liberal Democrats. Emerson was a Tuesday Group—meaning moderate—Republican and an Appropriations Cardinal who chaired the Financial Services subcommittee. Her southeastern Missouri district was almost entirely rural and was the state’s poorest, as well as the most dependent on Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ programs. During the spring of 2011, rising waters from the Mississippi River would submerge vast swaths of four rural counties in the 8th District. Emerson had never harbored qualms about the role of the federal government in assisting disaster-stricken locales. Soon she would watch as freshmen representing districts along the flood-swollen Mississippi like Billy Long of Joplin, Missouri, and Scott DesJarlais of South Pittsburg, Tennessee—two political novices who had campaigned on the bloatedness of the federal government—began to take a different view as well. Such freshmen were now begging for federal disaster relief.

The congresswoman was not a passenger on her colleague Jeff Flake’s anti-earmarking bandwagon. Rural districts like hers lacked the ability to write competitive grant proposals. A member-directed funding request leveled the playing field. Flake had gone after her in 2007, labeling her request for $50,000 to control feral hogs in her district This
Week’s Egregious Earmark on his congressional website. (“
This is a rather literal
interpretation of ‘bringing home the bacon,’ ” Flake yuck-yucked.) The reality was that an uncontrolled population of thousands of hogs had destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of crops in Emerson’s district.

It was hard for her to relate to saber-rattlers like Flake or the freshmen. She hadn’t ever considered a role in politics—until some time after June 22, 1996, when her husband, Missouri Congressman Bill Emerson, died of inoperable lung cancer. The same afternoon that he was laid to rest in Cape Girardeau, Bill Emerson’s staffers confronted the widow. “We have to talk to you,” they said. Her husband had left instructions:
Talk Jo Ann into taking my place.

Up until that time, she had been content as a forty-six-year-old politician’s wife, mother of two daughters, and lobbyist for the American Insurance Organization. But the calls kept coming—from Gingrich, from Boehner.

Three weeks after the funeral, Jo Ann Emerson was on the campaign trail. The policy stuff wasn’t difficult for her. Giving speeches, on the other hand—she had never been particularly adept at expressing her feelings publicly, and now, after Bill’s death . . . During one campaign stop in Steelville, Missouri, she faced a huge audience and decided for the first time to pitch her notes and just talk. It was like suddenly comprehending a foreign language. The audience responded. She stopped using notes after that.

In her new workplace, the Capitol, Jo Ann Emerson found a lovely way to grieve. Her new colleagues, Bill Emerson’s old buddies, didn’t try to dance around her loss. They were grieving, too. They actually
wanted
to talk to her about her husband. They
wanted
to share stories about fishing trips and late-night carousing. Bill Emerson was still present here. Two years later, she flew out to California and campaigned for another congressional widow, Sonny Bono’s wife, Mary. That same year, 1998, she also welcomed to the House a Democrat named Lois Capps, whose husband, Walter, had died of a heart attack during his first year in office. She and Capps would soon become close friends and form a bipartisan lecture series named for their late husbands.

Gingrich put Jo Ann Emerson on Appropriations because he wanted a pro-life woman on the committee. (She did, however, favor exceptions
in cases of rape, incest, or risk of death. Bill Emerson had disapproved of such exceptions but knew not to discuss it at a dinner table with three females.) She became a reliable conservative—which was not always the same thing as a reliable vote for the Republican agenda. Early in her career, Emerson traveled with a rice farmer from her district to Cuba. It struck her how the nineteenth largest rice market in the world, less than a thousand miles by air from her district, was not permitted to buy her farmers’ rice. She decided to challenge America’s long-standing trade sanctions against Cuba. Her problem was not Fidel Castro. Rather, it was Tom DeLay—who, as a child living with a father who did business in South America, had a searing memory of a pit stop at the Havana airport and being surrounded by heavily armed, foul-smelling Cuban soldiers. DeLay had concluded that this experience was a fitting snapshot of communist Cuba and vowed to withhold any trade from that country so long as he and Castro remained in office. The Bush administration was similarly determined not to do business with the Cuban dictator.

Emerson decided that her farmers were more important than the preferences of her party leaders. In 2002, she flew to Cuba and had a six-hour dinner with Castro. She came back to Washington confident that Cuba’s leader wished to do business with American farmers. A Washington state congressman, George Nethercutt, wanted his district’s pea farmers to have a cut. Together they slid a proviso easing trade with Cuba into an appropriations bill one late evening. DeLay arrived too late to prevent it from passing.

These were the kinds of maneuvers a veteran Appropriator routinely undertook to help her constituents. Could a congresswoman cut a similar deal with a communist dictator in 2011? Jo Ann Emerson had reason to be doubtful.

Boehner had vowed that his would be an open House. And so H.R.1 was brought to the floor under an “open rule”—meaning any member, Republican or Democrat, could offer amendments to it, so long as the cost of whatever was being proposed was offset by a corresponding cost reduction. Each amendment would be debated on the House floor for ten minutes and subsequently put to a vote.