Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (2 page)

Chapter 12: Radicalization

Chapter 13: Woman of a Certain Rage

Chapter 14: “You Hard Head”

PART THREE

“YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M COMING FROM!”

Chapter 15: Draft Horse

Chapter 16: The Winning Message

Chapter 17: Side Pockets on a Cow

Chapter 18: “Here Is Your Shield”

Chapter 19: “Dropping Out of Things Is What I Do”

Chapter 20: “You Are
Wrong
!”

PART FOUR

RASCALITY

Chapter 21: Coffee with Your Congressman

Chapter 22: The Hostage

Chapter 23: Lower, Ever Lower

Epilogue: Evening, January 24, 2012

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

CAST OF CHARACTERS

(in order of appearance)

KEVIN M
C
CARTHY: Three-term Republican, California, 22nd District, House Majority Whip

PAUL RYAN: Seven-term Republican, Wisconsin, 1st District, chairman of the House Budget Committee, leading GOP voice on economic policy

JEFF DUNCAN: Freshman Republican, South Carolina, 3rd District, former state legislator and real estate auctioneer, rated most conservative House member in 2011 by Heritage Action for America

JOHN DINGELL: Twenty-nine-term Democrat, Michigan, 15th District, dean of the House, former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee

ALLEN WEST: Freshman Republican, Florida, 22nd District, retired lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus

BLAKE FARENTHOLD: Freshman Republican, Texas, 27th District, former radio talk show cohost

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS: Three-term Democrat, Arizona, 8th District, member of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition

JOHN BOEHNER: Eleven-term Republican, Ohio, 8th District, Speaker of the House

ANTHONY WEINER: Seven-term Democrat, New York, 9th District, New York City mayoral aspirant

NANCY PELOSI: Thirteen-term Democrat, California, 8th District, House Minority Leader, former Speaker

JO ANN EMERSON: Nine-term Republican, Missouri, 8th District, member of the moderate Tuesday Group coalition and “Cardinal” of the House Appropriations Committee

WALTER JONES: Nine-term Republican, North Carolina, 3rd District, opponent of the war in Afghanistan

SHEILA JACKSON LEE: Nine-term Democrat, Texas, 18th District, liberal member of the Congressional Black Caucus

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Five-term Democrat, Maryland, 8th District, ranking member of the House Budget Committee, member of the Democrat leadership team

RENEE ELLMERS: Freshman Republican, North Carolina, 2nd District, former intensive care nurse

RAUL LABRADOR: Freshman Republican, Idaho, 1st District, former state legislator and immigration lawyer

PROLOGUE

Evening, January 20, 2009

You could fit the number of Republicans who were out on the town the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration around a single dining room table.

There were about fifteen of them, all white males, plus a few spouses.
The venue was the Caucus Room
, an expense-account steakhouse halfway between the White House and the Capitol. A seething winter chill was the least of their discomforts that evening. Nearly a half-million people had begun to congregate on the National Mall on Sunday, January 18, 2009—two days
before
the inauguration. By the time Obama was sworn in on Tuesday, the number had reached 1.8 million. The nation’s capital had never hosted a crowd that large, not for any reason. Definitely not for the previous president, George W. Bush, who had been jeered that afternoon as a helicopter whisked him off to Texas. Now the occupant of the White House was a Democrat. The House and Senate were controlled by Democrats. Barricades still lined the streets outside, as if at any moment the ruling party might engulf the Caucus Room and finish off what was left of the Republicans.

On such a night, it was a comfort to suffer among friends. Most of them—Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, and Dan Lungren—were members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Five served in the Senate: Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign, and Bob Corker. The other three invitees were conservative journalist Fred Barnes of the
Weekly Standard,
former House Speaker (and future presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, and communications specialist Frank Luntz. Most of them had attended the inauguration. That astounding vista of humanity on the Mall would haunt them more than last November’s electoral
margins. McCarthy, a California congressman who had thus far served only a single term in the House, had made a game effort of viewing the event for the historic moment it was. He’d procured Obama’s autograph and even that of Obama’s sister. As the unworldly progeny of the Bakersfield working class, Kevin McCarthy had been dazzled to be included in such a tableau. As a Republican, he and the others in the room were devastated.

Luntz had organized the dinner—telling the invitees, “You’ll have nothing to do that night, and right now we don’t matter anyway, so let’s all be irrelevant together.” He had selected these men because they were among the Republican Party’s most energetic thinkers—and because they all got along with Luntz, who could be difficult. Three times during the 2008 election cycle, Sean Hannity had thrown him off the set at Fox Studios. The top Republican in the House, Minority Leader John Boehner, had nurtured a dislike of Luntz for more than a decade. No one had to ask why Boehner wasn’t at the Caucus Room that evening.

The dinner tables were set up in a square, at Luntz’s request, so that everyone could see each other and talk freely. He asked that Gingrich speak first. It was Newt, after all, who had pulled the Republicans out of a far deeper hole fourteen years ago, leading the GOP to a takeover of the House for the first time since 1955.

Gingrich was happy to oblige. Obama’s inaugural speech was impressive, the former Speaker said. The evocations of constitutional principles, pragmatism, and risk-taking—“those could have been our words.” Someone ought to laminate Obama’s speech and disseminate it, the better to hold the president accountable to his pledges.

Being competitors, however, they did not dwell on Obama’s seeming invincibility. They’d been thrashed, it was roundly agreed, because they had it coming. They ended up chucking their own principles and standing for nothing. They’d spent the last eight years defending policies they never should have signed on to in the first place. They’d lost their way.

“We got obsessed with governing,” Ensign said—adding with distaste, “making sure the trains run on time. Well, what if the train is heading towards the cliff?”

They picked at their salads and drank their wine and tried not to think about the thousands now dancing at the ten inaugural balls that
the new president and his wife would be attending before the night was through.

Luntz was secretly overjoyed. When had Republicans in a group setting
ever
acknowledged how badly they had blown it? When had they
ever
recognized that they had become part of the problem rather than the solution?
Maybe they don’t see how big this is,
he thought.

“So we’re in the depths,” said Pete Hoekstra, who as a freshman in January 1993 had attended Bill Clinton’s swearing-in and had seen the GOP survive that particular downer. “The discussion we’re having tonight about President Obama, and where our party is, is no different than the discussion I came into as a freshman—except that it was even worse.”

Laughing, Hoekstra reminded them, “We’d been a minority party for forty years! And two short years later”—Hoekstra gestured to Gingrich, the field general of the 1994 revolution—“it’s a whole new world.”

How to regain that whole new world—that was now the question.

The men in the room were, behaviorally speaking, Washingtonians. Unlike ordinary Americans, they lived by a biennial calendar, the rhythms of their lives propelled by the electoral cycle as insistently as the migratory and mating habits of winged creatures. What their party had done from 1994 to 2000, and what the Democrats had then done from 2006 to 2008, the Republicans would once again do. They would take back the House in November 2010. They would use the House as the Republicans’ spear point to mortally wound President Obama in 2011. Then they would retake the White House and the Senate in 2012.

They would do all this, but only if the American voter blessed them to do so.

It made no sense, they all agreed, to attack Obama personally. The man was too popular.

“It’s got to be about ideas,” said Eric Cantor, the House minority whip, in his honeyed Virginia drawl. The Democrats now controlled everything and were already, with a monstrously priced economic stimulus package, showing their true colors. Give them time—they would screw things up, just as the GOP had.

“But everyone’s got to stick together,” said Paul Ryan, a thirty-eight-year-old Wisconsin congressman and numbers fetishist whose shiny
earnestness recalled an
Ozzie and Harriet
America. Ryan hated squabbling amongst conservatives—the paleos versus the neos, the socials against the moderates, on and on for as long as he’d been on the Hill, which was all of his adult life. Ryan had long sought to be the GOP’s glue, pleading for adherence to the principles and the data. At times he looked like the underfed, hollow-eyed child of alcoholic parents.

“The only way we’ll succeed is if we’re united,” Ryan told the others. “If we tear ourselves apart, we’re finished.” But, he added, he liked what he was hearing now. Everyone at the table sounded like a genuine conservative. It was a place to start.

“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” said Kevin McCarthy. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”

Luntz viewed McCarthy as one of the Republican Party’s emerging stars: an easygoing, unthreatening guy who understood that language and appearance mattered at least as much as substance. Nonetheless, the pollster and media guru interjected a cautionary note. “One of the worst political performances I’ve ever seen,” he said, “was when the Democrats took over the House in 2007 and Nancy Pelosi shut out the Republicans. And everybody whined about it. If any of you behave that way, I’ll go on TV and hold you accountable! If you’re whiners, you’re losers!”

Luntz tended to get carried away, but everyone knew he had a point.

Senator Jon Kyl began to focus on immediate tactics. He pointed out that Tim Geithner, Obama’s nominee to be secretary of the Treasury, had failed to pay his Social Security and Medicare taxes during his three-year employment at the International Monetary Fund. Kyl sat on the Senate Finance Committee, which would be conducting Geithner’s confirmation hearings the next morning. The Arizona senator intended to go after the nominee. “I’d like to hear your thoughts on the approach I should take,” he said to the others.

There was a pattern here, Gingrich pointed out. Charlie Rangel, the new House Ways and Means chairman, hadn’t paid taxes on his rental property income in more than two decades. Rangel and Geithner would be wielding more power over how taxpayer dollars would be spent than anyone else in America—and yet these guys couldn’t even be trusted to pay their own taxes?

“And there’s a web,” chimed in McCarthy. “There are freshmen who accepted campaign money from Rangel. They’re caught in the web.” McCarthy suggested that they waste no time smacking the new Democrats with attack ads.

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:

Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: “Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it—please?”)

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

“You will remember this day,” Newt Gingrich proclaimed to the others as they said goodbye. “You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.”

Forgotten, or at least not discussed that night in the Caucus Room, was what had been sown in America by January 20, 2009.

On that evening, while the ruling party celebrated in tuxedos and the minority party retrenched over steaks and red wine,
the U.S. unemployment rate
climbed to 7.6 percent, the highest such indicator of national misery in eighteen years. Things would get much worse. Joblessness in America would exceed 8 percent the following month. By May 2009, the number would climb to 9.4 percent, and by October to 10.2 percent. The avalanche of the financial markets during the summer of 2008, and the global recession it triggered, had dealt America a battering that the Bureau of Labor Statistics would be at pains to capture in its bloodless data. Coming seven years after the existential blow of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the American condition of 2009 could not be adequately characterized as “the worst recession since the Great Depression.” In a much deeper, more encompassing sense, the country was at a loss.