Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (21 page)

What she did not follow was the part of Jordan’s advice that entailed her doing one thing and doing it well. To the consternation of her Democratic colleagues, Sheila Jackson Lee set out to do everything, all the time—a study in ubiquity, a generalist on steroids.

The congressional aide’s eyes were pleading as she approached a staffer from the House Rules Committee. “I’m new here,” she said. “Could you please come up with three amendments for this bill?
Anything
.”

The Rules staffer did not have to ask. This had to be an assistant to Sheila Jackson Lee, the Empress of Amendments.

It was widely believed on both sides of the aisle, and even by Jackson Lee herself, that no one during her sixteen-year tenure could match her sheer volume of amending. To many, this compulsion on Jackson Lee’s part was obnoxious. It bogged down and trivialized the craft of legislating. When the Democrats held the majority, they brought bills to the floor that had been fully hashed out by the relevant committee, with no need for further tweaking. To amend it was to concede the bill’s imperfection. And now that the Democrats were in the minority and striving to cast the Republicans as extremists, to participate in Republican legislation by amending it was to confer on the bill an imprimatur of bipartisanship.

Jackson Lee took a different view. Something could always be made better. A bill of national scope might often require an added nuance here or there that would benefit her constituents. (Or, in her grandiloquent phraseology: “
I should not deny
a corner of the world the opportunity to be heard on an amendment.”) In an institution of 435 independent contractors, the Houston congresswoman had determined her own way to stay in business as the 18th District’s officeholder. Any
opportunity to speak on behalf of her constituents (75 percent of whom were black or Hispanic), on any subject, she would lunge at. Clearly they did not care whether she irritated her colleagues in the bargain: Jackson Lee’s margin of victory in each election ranged from 30 to 80 percent. She kept winning, and amending.

Indeed, after the famishing year of 2010, when Speaker Pelosi had shut down the amendments process, Sheila Jackson Lee intended to make a banquet out of H.R.1’s Continuing Resolution. She offered sixteen amendments, more than any other Democrat. Virtually all of them simply restored programs being cut by the GOP’s Continuing Resolution, without offering a cut elsewhere to offset the cost, as was required by the Republican rules. In other words, the amendments were a waste of everyone’s time. None was debated or voted on.

In part her serial-amending ways reflected a driven woman’s larger quest for exactness. She spoke with exquisite diction and expected the same of her aides. In her office, she demanded that letters be typed just so, that certain documents be printed in particular colors. To dine at a restaurant with her was to witness a legislator amending every dish:
That’s not well done like I ordered. The soup is not hot enough. I’d like some olives on my plate, too. And some chili peppers. And a chopped onion.

But her demands extended well beyond the objective of getting things right, instead suggesting a desire for omnipresence. Jackson Lee belonged to
a staggering fifty-two different
congressional caucuses and task forces, ranging from the obvious (CBC, Progressive Caucus) to the decidedly esoteric (Friends of Norway Caucus, Songwriters Caucus, Interstate 69 Caucus). She was a reliable presence on the cable TV political broadcasts, whose producers (if no one else) saw the virtue in a congresswoman who would happily speak on any conceivable subject of the day. On the morning of each State of the Union address, Jackson Lee could be counted on to grab a seat on the House floor and hold it all day long, so that she could be seen for a few seconds in the camera frame with whomever the president of the United States happened to be that year. She managed to materialize at nearly every high-profile event worth going to—from the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner to the final Space Shuttle liftoff at Cape Canaveral—though only through the wheedling of her desperate and bedraggled staffers. Her windy declamations during Democratic
caucuses were numbing affairs. One leadership staffer memorialized in his notes a caucus in which Sheila Jackson Lee strode to the microphone and, within a minute, shrunk her audience from approximately one hundred down to twenty.

And then there were the floor statements—and the jar.

The tradition of the jar
dated back to the mid-1990s, during Sheila Jackson Lee’s early days in the House. Its precise origins were long forgotten, but it began with a congressional aide who brought a jar to work and put a quarter in it once Jackson Lee made a speech on the House floor that day. The jar would then rotate the following day to an adjacent desk. If Jackson Lee spoke, the staffer was obliged to drop a quarter in the jar and move it to another staffer’s desk. On the rare day that the Houston congresswoman did not speak, the staffer who had the jar that day was rewarded with all its contents. The Jackson Lee jar concept began to spread, with multiple jars springing up in numerous offices on the Hill, both Republican and Democrat—a rare unifying ritual in a time of divided government.

The jar-passing carried over into the next decade. In John Dingell’s office, a fanciful staffer ornamented their Jackson Lee jar with felt embroidery. In Tennessee Congressman Joe Knollenberg’s office at some point in 2006, the jar’s contents became so heavy and the aides so sick of lugging it from desk to desk that they finally broke down and used all the money to pay for lunch for the entire staff. Rumors, most likely apocryphal, began to spread of hundred-dollar payouts.

It was not that her speeches were nonsensical or poorly conceived. Sheila Jackson Lee was a progressive in the mold of her iconic predecessor Jordan (and Jordan’s successor, the famed liberal Mickey Leland, who was killed in a plane crash), and she often spoke with convincing passion on behalf of her otherwise voiceless constituents. The problem was one of ubiquity. Whatever that day’s legislative consideration was—health care, energy, the wars, job creation, every single one of the bills being drafted by the twelve Appropriations subcommittees—Jackson Lee could be counted on to speak about it. If there was no legislation on the floor, she would find something else to talk about. Such as:
Michael Jackson’s funeral
. A Super Bowl ad she deemed racist. The ground-breaking of a new stadium for Houston’s soccer team. A tape loop of white-noise musings interrupted only by her final sentence—“I
yield back”—which implied that she still had time remaining on the clock when, invariably, she did not.

Early in her career, some of her Democratic friends spoke to the congresswoman about her excessive volubility.
You’re diluting your effectiveness. You’re smart as hell, but if you want to succeed here in the House, you need to pick one thing and focus on it.
Her friends reported back to the Democratic leadership that Jackson Lee thought the advice was sound. They did not know that Barbara Jordan had given her the same advice two decades prior, and that she had similarly responded with appreciation and then proceeded to ignore it.

On one very meaningful level, the criticism was unfair. Justice was her (primary) “one thing,” and the metrics for defending the defenseless were not as cut-and-dried as the acquisition of highway funds or tax loopholes or regulatory exemptions or agricultural subsidies. Whether the subject was racial profiling in a small Texas town, Arizona’s harsh immigration bill, or the spread of AIDS in Africa—a grim phenomenon she began speaking about after touring the continent with President Clinton in 1999—Jackson Lee’s energies came early and insistently, if seldom with immediate outcome. And on occasions her orating worked to satisfying effect. In the wake of 9/11, when the Transportation Security Administration had to fill 1,200 new security-screening jobs for Houston’s two major airports, Jackson Lee browbeat the agency into holding
a job fair
in the 17th District, which led to the employment of two hundred constituents. And in the early summer days of 2011, when the budget-strapped city of Houston moved to close fifteen of its pools and community centers, the congresswoman hit up two of the big oil firms in her district for $350,000 in donations. The venues stayed open throughout the summer’s record-breaking heat wave.

And as for her other “one thing’s”: The veterans at Houston’s Riverside General Hospital being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, thanks to a $1 million Defense Department grant secured by Jackson Lee, were probably not complaining. The workers at the Houston Ship Channel—a beneficiary of a $99 million federal stimulus grant she helped acquire—were probably not complaining.

At other times, however, the counterproductive nature of her compulsions was painfully apparent. In early May 2011, the congresswoman
offered up an amendment
to a Republican bill that repealed the school-based
health care clinics provided under the Obama health care law. Jackson Lee’s amendment would require that the unobligated funds accrued from the repeal be posted on the Department of Health and Human Services website so that the public could see how much money had been saved. Her Republican counterpart on the floor that day, fellow Texan Michael Burgess, applauded the amendment as “an opportunity to increase transparency” and concluded by saying, “I urge an ‘aye’ vote on the amendment.” A voice vote was called for. The ayes had it. Jackson Lee’s amendment had won.

Then, as if seized by a demon spirit, Sheila Jackson Lee said, “Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.”

The vote was postponed to the next day, during which time whatever momentum of goodwill there was toward the congresswoman and her amendment evaporated. It was defeated, 207–218, with nine apparently annoyed Blue Dog Democrats casting the decisive votes against her. The Democratic whip team stood by their table on the House floor in a Rembrandt-like tableau of stupefaction. Jackson Lee, for her part, fixed her eyes on the board with the losing tally, her oblong face as implacable as the eternal glowers in Statuary Hall.

Though Sheila Jackson Lee had become an inviting target to right-wingers (including outright sexists and racists) and, in any event, did no particular harm to the Democratic brand, there was little sympathy for her among her colleagues. She was a tireless worker who could always be counted on when partnering on legislation or to assist at fund-raisers, but her imperious style tended to grate on others.
Jackson Lee’s abusiveness
toward subordinates had been reported on since her earliest days as a congresswoman; the annual poll of Capitol Hill staffers in
Washingtonian
consistently ranked her alongside David Obey and Bill Thomas as “meanest” boss. When she flew home to her district at the end of each workweek, a staffer would await her at the gate with a motorized cart so as to ferry her to her car, though the congresswoman suffered no infirmities—unlike her predecessor Jordan, who nonetheless walked on her own power throughout her days in office. And on a congressional delegation (or CODEL) trip overseas, the other members traveled from one stop to another in a military bus . . . while alongside them, in a black Mercedes provided by the host country, rode Sheila Jackson Lee.

Small wonder, then, that after the midterms of 2010, Jackson Lee
failed in her bid
to be elected chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. She would later claim that she had “stepped aside” and permitted Emanuel Cleaver to take the post. In fact, the CBC put the matter to a vote. Midway through the balloting, when it was clear that Jackson Lee was headed toward overwhelming defeat, the congresswoman suddenly stood and proclaimed, “I move that we unanimously elect Emanuel Cleaver as our next chairman.”

Cleaver was thereby elected. Several members, however, privately voiced their dismay. They wanted the voting to continue. They wanted Sheila Jackson Lee to see the final tally.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“
You Hard Head
”

It was March 2011, and Jeff Duncan wasn’t feeling so agreeable anymore.

He and other House conservatives had gone along with Speaker Boehner, Kevin McCarthy, and the Appropriators in agreeing to pare down their Pledge to America from $100 billion in spending cuts to $61 billion. After the four-day marathon of amendments that led to passage of H.R.1 on February 19, the Democrat-controlled Senate defeated it with contemptuous swiftness. The House was back to square one.

Boehner was unworried. “We’ll just keep hitting ’em with short-term CRs,” he told his Republican colleagues. The Speaker’s strategy was to get to $61 billion in increments. With a government shutdown date of March 4 looming, Boehner got President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Reid to agree to a short-term plan that would fund the government through March 18 while cutting another $4 billion from Obama’s proposed budget. Duncan and all but six Republicans had gone along with that interim deal.

Still, the drip-drip incrementalism was maddening to Jeff Duncan. At this rate, he wondered how they would ever make a meaningful dent in Washington’s monstrous spending apparatus. One voice of dissent was particularly influential to the four South Carolina freshmen—that of Senator Jim DeMint, the state’s uberconservative, a patron saint of the Tea Party movement and political godfather to Duncan and the other Four Horsemen. DeMint had announced after the first short-term Continuing Resolution that “this is the last time” he would support such a measure.

On the evening of Friday, March 11, when the House Republicans
met for a conference in HC-5 and Boehner announced
another
short-term CR deal—this time, funding the government through April 8 and targeting another $6 billion in cuts—Duncan decided that he’d had enough of the nickel-and-diming. After the meeting broke up, the four South Carolina freshmen huddled with Joe Wilson, the delegation’s one senior member. All of them were inclined to vote no on Boehner’s deal with the Democrats. The only wavering South Carolinian was Tim Scott, Duncan’s roommate. Scott was one of the two freshmen (along with Kristi Noem of South Dakota) who served on the GOP leadership team. Voting against the Speaker’s wishes would put him in an uncomfortable spot.