Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (17 page)

It flabbergasted Blake Farenthold how little common sense existed here. Moving into his office, for example: because of the recount, Farenthold hadn’t been around for the office lottery and therefore had inherited the Rayburn office of the Democrat he had defeated, Solomon Ortiz. When Farenthold and his staff moved in, he found that all of the office supplies were gone. No stapler, no pen, nothing. What was that about? Staplers were indestructible! Why should he have to go buy a new one? Did this town have any respect whatsoever for the value of the dollar?

A month into his congressional career, Blake Farenthold still hadn’t put up his own House website. The issue was personal to him, because he had been in the Web design business for over a decade. In Congress, you were given eight companies who were authorized to work on official House websites. Eight businesses competing for more than four hundred customers—and so naturally they were charging twenty grand to build his website. Farenthold’s former company could’ve done the job for half that. It was maddening, and it stymied him.

So for now he was just using the temporary website that the House Administration Committee was providing him for free. He’d written some of the copy for it himself. Being as how he was Web-savvier than his staffers, Farenthold was half-tempted to remain the in-house content provider.

But he had too many other preoccupations—starting with the visitors who materialized in his Washington office, from a fruit juice lobbyist (apparently there were a lot of grape growers in the 27th District) to the ambassador from Singapore (whose country also had business interests there). Farenthold had also decided to buy a place in Washington, figuring it would be a good investment. He’d looked at a condo
in Georgetown. But it had been unclear whether the board of directors would allow him to rebuild the bathroom shower—which, at two and a half feet wide, wasn’t going to suffice for a 250-pound man. Ultimately he settled on a place in Chinatown. His twenty-one-year-old daughter, Morgan, had decided to move to Washington and would be sharing it with him. Farenthold’s bedroom furniture consisted of a mattress on the floor and a computer box for his nightstand.

Small wonder, then, that the deadline for submitting an amendment to the CR had passed in a flash. And now, for four days running, the House was in session well past midnight, publicly debating hundreds of ways to rein in government spending. Between votes, Farenthold watched the action on C-SPAN from his office couch. Admittedly, he’d drifted off now and again.

Farenthold had developed a new line for when he spoke to industry groups back home in south Texas. “You know how you have that anxiety dream where you go to school and you’ve forgotten to get dressed?” he would tell them. “I have this anxiety that there’s going to be some important bill that I miss, or that I vote wrong on. Your job is to remind me to put my clothes on. You’ve got to have my back.”

He would take information anywhere he could get it—constituents, lobbyists, the RSC, the daily briefing from McCarthy’s whip office, the
Drudge Report
. He’d been thinking of buying a subscription to Inter-Prep, a pop culture news service Farenthold had used back in his radio days. Part of connecting with people, he knew, involved using the day’s vernacular. How the hell could he find the time to absorb pop culture while drinking out of this legislative fire hydrant?

It would be two months into his job before Blake Farenthold could spend a Sunday at the movies. His choice was a film about a plastic surgeon, played by Adam Sandler, who pretended to be in an awful marriage so that he could win sympathy from beautiful women. Farenthold enjoyed it for the diversion. There were no parallels to his life. The Sandler character kept lying and digging himself a deeper hole. Farenthold was always going to be plain-spoken and truthful.

Yet the Sandler character managed to end up with Jennifer Aniston, while Farenthold was just hoping to make it through the day with his clothes still on.

“
I go to bed
at ten o’clock,” then–Minority Leader John Boehner had once complained during a late vote in June 2007. “I don’t think good work happens after ten o’clock at night.”

But here Boehner’s House was, amending and debating and voting until 1:12
A.M.
on Tuesday the fifteenth and until 3:41
A.M.
on Wednesday the sixteenth. The deadline of Thursday at 3
P.M.
that he and Cantor had previously scheduled had been wishful thinking. Thursday afternoon stretched into evening, until the gavel was banged at 1:08
A.M.
and the lawmakers prepared for one final day of legislating, beginning at 9:12 Friday morning and concluding at just after four o’clock the following morning. The Continuing Resolution known as H.R.1 would wind up passing on a largely party-line vote of 235 to 189 (and ten days later would be rejected in the Democratic-controlled Senate, also on a largely party-line vote). The House adjourned, and its exhausted members would then head for the airport, after which they would disperse to their respective slivers of America and spend the next week among their constituents, trying to explain what had just occurred and how it accrued to America’s benefit.

Amid the bloodshot panorama, eighty-four-year-old John Dingell maintained his customary position near the front of the House chamber—wooden cane at his side, his young aide Chris seated to his right, his eighty-one-year-old longtime Michigan colleague Dale Kildee to his left. Dingell’s expression throughout conveyed weary yet active disapproval. He had refused to join what he would call “
this outlandish massacre
of federal programs” by offering any amendments. His one contribution to the CR debate occurred midway, when he took to the floor to express his disgust after Speaker Boehner had publicly responded to the prospect of federal workers being laid off with a clipped, “So be it.”

“Well,
Mr. Speaker
, it will be so—in fact the Economic Policy Institute estimates eight hundred thousand jobs will be lost,” said Dingell from the well. He enumerated several other harmful repercussions to the spending cut bill, which he derided as “a political stunt.”

If anything, he was holding back his true feelings. It was one thing
to be skilled liars, as Dingell long believed Republicans to be. But the deep anger and bitterness that underlay the ever-coarsening public discourse was now agitated further by a roiling ignorance that truly surprised Dingell, who had figured he couldn’t be surprised anymore. He had served with Reagan, whom the freshmen so revered. Well, Reagan was certainly a charming fellow—but Lord was he senile! Dingell had seen it firsthand, during the very first year of Reagan’s presidency, when each House committee chairman was ushered into the White House. Dingell and his staff had prepared a damned good report. He’d distilled it all down to a fifteen-minute presentation, including time for questions from the president.

Well, Reagan had no questions. He sat there glassy-eyed, mute as a paperweight. After seven minutes, the Energy and Commerce chairman said, “Mr. President, I’ve told you everything I can, and I believe that indicates where I can be useful.”

“Well, John, I think that’s right,” responded Reagan with a crinkly-eyed grin. Dingell took his leave.

Later in 1981, during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Dingell was present when the Gipper began to read a speech from a set of three-by-five index cards he was holding in his hands—a speech that had nothing at all to do with the purpose of the gathering. The president carried on cheerfully while the participants sat and tried not to look alarmed. Eventually an aide came into the room, furtively replaced the cards in Reagan’s hands with a different set, and without missing a beat the president continued with a new and more appropriate speech.

Of course, the freshmen wouldn’t have known any of this. But they should have known—it wasn’t ancient history but rather had occurred even in
their
lifetimes—that their hero Reagan had raised taxes eleven times in the course of his presidency, had tripled the debt and grown the federal government, and had granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. Practically a socialist in their eyes! This crowd would have found Reagan as useful (as Dingell liked to say) as feathers on a fish.

Dingell tried to summon clemency. It had been his luck to have met FDR and Truman, to have served during the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Most of all, he had apprenticed under John Dingell Sr. Fifty-five years ago, on January 22, 1956, the younger
Dingell had sat in a seat near where he sat now, and for close to an hour he had listened to one congressman after another eulogize his father, their colleague from Detroit, who had been dead not even four months.

And then it came time for the freshman Dingell’s maiden speech. He faced his new colleagues for the first time—this erect and earnest twenty-eight-year-old man who the
Washington Post
had said “
looks and talks
like a youthful Will Rogers”—and he choked back a sob while managing to say, “If I can be half the man my father was, I shall feel I am a great success . . .”

A sweet little moment that was soon forgotten, as freshman Dingell straightaway endeavored to become a pain in the ass to Speaker Rayburn. Haranguing the Rules Committee to bring the Civil Rights Act to the floor . . . introducing legislation to repeal the 20 percent federal cabaret tax . . . seeking to kill the Taft-Hartley provision that allowed state right-to-work laws . . . demanding better food policing by the Food and Drug Administration . . . oh, to be young and obnoxious again!

But he had never been ignorant—not like these crazy tea-baggers.

CHAPTER TEN

Moment of Silence

Each day the House is in session begins with a period known as “morning hour debate.” The phrase is not to be taken literally, since the period sometimes begins at noon, sometimes lasts less than an hour, and rarely involves actual debate. It has evolved, in any event, into a peculiarly postmodern custom of the lower body. Morning hour entails a procession of House members standing in the well of the chamber and for five minutes passionately orating to an audience of virtually zero (though really to a C-SPAN television audience, which might number just slightly more than zero at that hour) on topics of almost absurd boundlessness.

The majority of the House’s 435 members do not bother with morning hour. They contend that there are far better ways to spend the first hours of an already overscheduled day than futilely exercising one’s lungs. But there are others who simply cannot turn down a chance to speak to a (likely sparse) national audience, uninterrupted and unedited, for five full minutes.

The 112th Congress featured masters of the morning hour tradition. Among the hardy perennials was Ted Poe of Texas, a former judge, whose speeches often decried the havoc on America’s southern border (despite the fact that Poe’s district abutted not Mexico but Louisiana) and reliably concluded with the solemn intonation, “And that’s just the way it is.” No morning hour would be complete without a surrogate of Minority Leader Pelosi—among the rotating cast, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Frederica Wilson, and Keith Ellison—conveying the Democratic message that “we’ve now entered the XXth day when the Republican majority has been in control of the House, and they’ve yet to introduce a single bill to create a single job for anyone anywhere.”

By and large, however, morning hour would maintain its historical charm as a rhetorical grab bag of parochialism and esoterica. Members offered five-minute send-ups to National Engineers Week, the Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers, and the Arizona State High School Division 4A-1 basketball champion Nogales Apaches. They gave florid tribute to an obscure war hero from Nevada, the economic resurgence of Chattanooga, the hundredth anniversary of the Army Dental Corps, and the hundredth anniversary of the Thomaston, Georgia, chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution. They agonized publicly over the loss of high-speed rail in Florida and the rickety state of California’s salmon industry. Then they handed over their texts to the House clerk and shuffled out of the chamber as another five-minute speech began.

Occasionally, however, a morning hour speaker would stand in the well and exhibit the solemnity befitting a nation traumatized by a decade of war. At about 10:30 in the morning on March 1, 2011, the House floor was completely empty and no more than eight high school students sat in the public galleries when a Republican congressman named Walter Jones walked to the well to give the seventh of sixteen morning hour speeches that day. He was a slightly built, gray-haired, sixty-eight-year-old man with the gentle bearing of a Sunday school teacher, and he spoke in the elastic twang that was typical of the eastern flank of North Carolina, where he had in fact spent his entire life, in the town of Farmville. For the past sixteen years, Jones had represented the state’s 3rd District, a largely coastal region that also included the Marine Corps base of Camp Lejeune. To hold that seat is to be unerringly pro-military. But in recent years, Walter Jones had developed a surprising interpretation of what this meant.