Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (19 page)

The freshman was communicating his
desire to be a player in the CBC’s
activities. Cleaver tended to keep his feelings to himself—he was different from West in that regard—and so he simply said “Sure” and walked away. West thought he looked surprised.

Two months later, at a CBC dinner, the third-ranking House Democrat, James Clyburn, told the members, “We’re going to need Allen
West over on the other side fighting for some of the issues that we’re pushing for.” West sat at his table, emphatically nodding yes.

The opportunity for West to contribute arrived at the end of March, when the CBC celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Among the festivities was a reception in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall that Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer both attended. During the reception, a seven-minute video was played that honored the CBC’s history. Chairman Cleaver learned shortly after the fact that such performances were against Capitol rules. He dispatched CBC member Lacy Clay of Missouri—whose father had been one of the caucus’s founding members in 1971—to ask West if he in turn would get a retroactive waiver from Speaker Boehner. The lone Republican CBC member went to Boehner, who had a good laugh about the matter and then granted the waiver.

West’s relations with his black Democratic colleagues remained testy, however. Just before a CBC meeting with White House chief of staff Bill Daley was to begin, previous CBC president Barbara Lee fixed the freshman with an inhospitable glare and said, “So, are you planning to tweet during this?”

At least Lee had spoken to him. One afternoon in March, West stepped into a Capitol elevator that already had an occupant: Jesse Jackson Jr. The Illinois congressman immediately looked down at his BlackBerry and did not say a word.

It would be May before the two men finally conversed. On that day, West and Jackson again found themselves in a Capitol elevator, both heading to the House floor to cast votes while the rest of the CBC was at the White House meeting with the president.

“Why aren’t you at the White House?” Jackson asked.

“Why aren’t
you
at the White House?” West replied.

“Because I take my voting responsibility very seriously,” said Jackson.

“Well, so do I,” said West. “Plus, I have a hearing.”

“Oh,” said Jackson, adding with mock reverence: “A
hearing
!”

“Yeah,” said West. “A hearing.” Thus concluded their pleasantries.

That Allen West was a Republican was not the main reason for all the frostiness. In late January, he had appeared on a Zionist television program called
The Shalom Show
and had taken an unprovoked swipe at Keith Ellison, a fellow CBC member who happened to be of Islamic faith. West spoke of Ellison as being among those who
“represent the antithesis of the principles upon which this country was established.” Unsurprisingly, Ellison was upset by West’s comments.

Emanuel Cleaver paid a visit to West’s office in the Longworth Building. “Keith feels you owe him an apology,” the CBC chairman said.

West refused. “I don’t have anything personal against him,” he said. “But he’s going around and speaking at fund-raisers for a group that is not in concert with the principles of this country. And I have some issues with that.”

West was referring to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. According to the FBI, CAIR was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. West viewed the Brotherhood as fanatical. He was surprised that Cleaver did not seem to know much at all about CAIR’s nefarious ties.

“Look, I’m happy to meet with Keith Ellison and give him my point of view,” West offered.

Emanuel responded that Ellison’s feelings were a bit raw. Absent an apology on West’s part, it might be better to wait awhile.

As the CBC chairman got up to leave, the freshman said to him, “I just want to remind you: I’m black. I’ve got some opinions that differ from you guys. But I’m not what you might think I am.”

Cleaver nodded and left. The next time the chairman returned to West’s office, it was in April—and this time it was Cleaver apologizing. The CBC chairman had issued a press release condemning the Republican budget plan. Its lone Republican member had fired back with a press release of his own, saying, “The CBC should be a bipartisan body politic and not the place for emotional rhetoric, nor the platform for the Democratic party.”

“You’ve got a good point,” Cleaver conceded to West. “Henceforth, we’ll make sure that on positions that we send out, we’ll have some kind of asterisk that suggests that this is not reflective of all the members of the caucus.”

With some bemusement, West accepted his status as asterisk.

“You recently told a Marine that the terrorists that attacked the United States, the people that attack America, are following Islam, are following the instructions of the Koran,” the south Florida director of
CAIR said to Allen West during
a town hall in Pompano Beach
. “So a very simple question: can you show me one verse in this Koran”—the questioner held up his copy of the sacred text—“where it says to attack America, attack Americans, attack innocent people?”

“Well, of course it doesn’t say America—the book was written in the eighth or ninth century, so America wasn’t even around,” West scoffed as the largely conservative audience tittered. Then, as the CAIR representative tried to talk back, the freshman proceeded to run the gutters red with Islam’s violent historical interludes:

“The truth is out there! Six twenty-two AD, the Nakhla raid—that didn’t happen?! Six twenty-eight AD, the Battle of Khaibar?! Seven thirty-two AD, the Battle of Tours?! . . .”

Competing against near-deafening applause, West hollered at the stupefied Muslim man standing in the aisle,
“Now you explain it to me: the people that flew those planes on 9/11 shouted, ‘Allah Akbar!’ Now, I’ve been on the battlefield, my friend—don’t try to blow sunshine up my butt!”

Among the jeering and cheering, a large man stood up and thrust his finger at the CAIR representative, exclaiming: “You have just been
schooled,
my man!”

“Mr. West, may I respond to you?” the Muslim man persisted. “I am ashamed to be here with all of these people when you attack Islam—”

“You attack us! You attack us! I went to Muslim countries to defend the freedom of Muslim people! Don’t come up here and try to criticize me!”

Performances such as these, while horrifying to the CBC and others, were catnip to the right wing. In mid-February, the former Army lieutenant colonel and schoolteacher found himself delivering the keynote address before an estimated crowd of ten thousand individuals at the annual American Conservative Union
CPAC convention
. Listening to the muffled roar while he sat in the greenroom before going onstage, West imagined himself a gladiator preparing for his kill-or-be-killed moment in the arena.

West killed. He lashed out at the “bureaucratic nanny state,” warned that “we can ill afford to have a twenty-first-century Sir Neville Chamberlain moment,” asserted the necessity of “reclaiming our Judeo-Christian faith heritage,” and taunted “the liberal press” by saying: “Continue your attack. Because this is what Abraham Lincoln said: ‘Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.’ ”

The outpouring of adulation that day was almost too much for him. His favorite compliment came from someone he did not know: “You said what all of us feel.”

One morning at the House gym, West ran into Anthony Weiner. West began to introduce himself, but the New York Democrat waved off the gesture as one of inappropriate modesty.

“I know who you are,” said Weiner. “You’re a rock star.”

The actor Gary Sinise thought so as well. He asked West to come visit him in Los Angeles. Alas, there wasn’t an opening in his schedule for months. Ernest Borgnine was also an admirer and had sent the freshman an autographed head shot. Upping the ante, the conservative TV host Glenn Beck had begun a movement to draft West for president—which West found both immensely flattering and asinine, as he had been an elected official for less than half a year.

For a Tea Party icon
, Allen West could be full of surprises, some of them disappointing to his base. During the Continuing Resolution debate, the freshman passed on several chances to slash federal funding. A group of mayors from his south Florida district came to Washington to lobby him against the Republican amendment that proposed to eliminate all funding for community development block grants. West looked at the data that the mayors showed him and was convinced. He voted against the amendment. Similarly, the farmers of Belle Meade, Florida, convinced West to side against an amendment that would block Environmental Protection Agency plans to clean up Florida’s waterways. And when Georgia freshman Paul Broun introduced an amendment that would defund beach replenishment projects by the Army Corps of Engineers, West buttonholed his colleague on the House floor.

“What’s wrong with you?” West demanded. “I come from a state where there’s nothing but coastline, Paul. It’s our number-one tourist destination!”

The group Heritage Action for America had slapped West with a middling conservative ranking for failing to vote for several spending cuts. But the Florida freshman had not exactly emerged from the CR debate as a Democrat sympathizer. After listening to Barney Frank of Massachusetts on the House floor late one evening mock the Republicans’ “orgy of self-congratulation” over the use of the open rule—“You will get to debate whole aspects of the government tomorrow for
ten minutes”—West ripped into the opposition with a press release. “I have never seen a greater assembly of petulance and sophomoric behavior as what I have witnessed this week on the floor of the House of Representatives.”

“Barney Frank at midnight—I couldn’t believe it,” he later spat. “The arrogance and petulance—here’s a guy who for all practical purposes should be in a pink jumpsuit for what he did.”

And yet for all his incendiary rhetoric, it was Allen West whose very first piece of legislation as a U.S. congressman—reducing the Defense Department’s printing costs by 10 percent—would gain passage by unanimous vote, 393–0. And it was West who sat during Obama’s State of the Union address listening carefully while marking up his copy of the president’s speech, with occasional notations of
Good point!
and
Key point
in the margins. (Though most of his comments were negative:
Fiscally irresponsible. Serious class warfare. Wrong premise. Heard that before!
)

West and the president had eyeballed each other for the first time at a White House reception in January. Obama had grinned pleasantly as they shook hands, but West could not help thinking:
Yeah, he knows who I am. Like when you’re in a combat zone and you see a bunch of sheikhs and there’s one that stands out and you can tell: that guy’s the bad guy.

Allen West—rock star, legislator, the anti-Obama—
flew to Atlanta
on March 21 to give the keynote address at a Georgia GOP fund-raiser. That day he took a sentimental detour down Kennesaw Avenue where he was raised. No one he’d grown up with lived there anymore. A Che Guevara flag hung from one of the windows.

He dropped by Grady High School. No one there knew that a former student was now a U.S. congressman. West left a card at the principal’s desk and headed back to the world where he was famous.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Radicalization

One afternoon in early March, Jeff Duncan was using the tiny private restroom in his Cannon office when it occurred to him:
This is the only time I’m ever alone anymore.

His committee work on Natural Resources, Foreign Affairs, and Homeland Security was demanding enough by itself. But
Duncan was now sitting through
more than a dozen meetings every week with lobbying organizations. Some, like Caterpillar and International Paper, did business in his district. Then there were others, like an outfit called American Modern Insurance, that he’d never even heard of but that had somehow gotten on his schedule. Everyone wanted to meet the freshmen—a class whose probusiness attitude was matched by legislative inexperience. The lobbyists would be only too happy to accommodate.

For days at a stretch Duncan subsisted on a diet of coffee and granola bars. His only real recreation was the weekly pickup basketball game he played in the House gym with other freshmen like Kevin Yoder, Ben Quayle, Stephen Fincher, Jon Runyan, and Tom Graves. Consoling him was the recognition that his roommate and fellow South Carolinian, Tim Scott, had it even worse: he was on the Rules Committee and also had to attend leadership meetings, both of which consumed several hours of Scott’s weekly schedule. The two almost never saw each other back at the apartment.

One of the groups that came to Duncan’s office represented several small companies in his district. Duncan asked them, “Is there any money that could be used for job creation that’s just sitting on the sidelines? Do they have cash reserves?”

“Trillions,” was the reply. But, they added, the money would stay on
the sidelines until the business climate possessed more certainty. A full repeal of Obamacare, they agreed, would be a good start.

“The way government creates jobs is to get the hell out of the way,” Duncan liked to say. It was one of his abiding principles as a small businessman. He marveled at how the Democrats failed to get it.

But even though Duncan viewed his House office as a business, not all of the transactions on behalf of his constituents related to dollars and cents. One concern in particular had been expressed to him by South Carolinians numerous times on the campaign trail: the threat of Islamic sharia law being imposed in America, thereby imperiling the Constitution.

Duncan himself did not represent many Muslims in the 3rd District and counted no Muslims as his friends.
There was a single mosque
in his district, near Clemson University, Duncan’s alma mater. “We’ve heard from others that it’s a little edgy, but I’ve never been there,” he said.