Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (28 page)

Pelosi loved his higher-ground approach. She told her caucus, “This is going to be between you all and Roy. I’m not going to give any introductory this-is-what-I-want-to-see. It’s about what you cook up together.”

Spence put his associate, Haley Rushing, on the project. Rushing was a cultural anthropologist. She knew almost nothing about any of the congressmen. Spence viewed that as an asset. Rushing would interview every one of them by phone for nearly two hours. She would hear what they had to say about what drove them, what they believed their purpose here in the House was. And then she and Spence would go over all the answers and come back to the Democratic leadership with a distillation of their findings:
Here is what you are about.
And then the Democrats would presumably use that bumper-sticker version of themselves as their slogan for 2012.

Spence told Pelosi that though he happened to be a lifelong Democrat, this wasn’t about winning to him—it was about helping out his country. “To be honest, Nancy,” he told her, “if the Republicans asked me to do this, I’d do this for them, too.”

The minority leader knew not to worry about this. For better or for worse, Republicans were unlikely to ask Roy Spence—or anyone else, for that matter—to help them explain what they stood for. It was a Nancy Pelosi kind of thing, not a John Boehner kind of thing.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Side Pockets on a Cow

“We’re celebrating
a great day—the American auto industry is coming back!”

John Dingell stood outside in the middle of a makeshift car lot in suburban Detroit, surrounded by hybrid vehicles and a small bank of TV cameras. He leaned on his cane, but through his lenses the old man’s eyes glowed with unquenchable zeal.

“These are
American
cars,” he continued lustily. “I come down with an acute rash when I go by a foreign-made car. Our workmen, our engineers, and our union members are still the best in the world. The United States is coming back!”

A local reporter asked the congressman if American consumers would be receptive to green-technology vehicles. “You betcha!” Dingell declared. “I’m no advocate for rising oil prices. But I have to say, they’ve shifted the buying tastes of the American public and probably in the long run will be necessary to break our dependence on foreign oil, which poses such a risk to the United States.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to add?” said the reporter.

Dingell faced the cameras squarely and offered a wide grin. “Tell our American people that, by golly, we still make the best right here in southeast Michigan!” he said. “Come on by and see and buy these great cars, put Americans to work, and get the best for your money!”

With that, the eighty-four-year-old congressman climbed into the backseat of his American-made SUV and sped off to his home in Dearborn.

Earlier that morning, Congress’s foremost pitchman for the domestic auto industry was celebrated at a “Green Leaders” event in downtown Detroit for his contributions to local conservation efforts. The
drive from Dearborn ferried him through the semi-evacuated rusted shell of a once-muscular city, and though Dingell was not an excessively sentimental man, he became somewhat younger as he stared out the car window and conjured up the ghosts of his childhood. He had grown up on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard in the bottom floor of a flat where his dad brewed beer in a back bedroom. He remembered John Dzieglewicz as a brilliant philosopher of a man with an eighth-grade education whose Polish last name had already been bastardized by the time the meat salesman decided to run for the newly created 15th District in 1932. He remembered how the Polack old-timers stood agape with tears running down their ruddy cheeks during the candidate’s victory speech, when John Dingell Sr. officially became one of ninety-three Democratic freshmen to join FDR in forging a New Deal. He remembered traveling from Detroit to Washington for his father’s swearing-in, and at the age of seven standing agog on the floor of the House chamber, the biggest room he had ever seen.

He remembered Detroit as a company town where for a time the men wore their union buttons under the brims of their hats or behind their coat lapels in the manner of a secret society. During pheasant season, young John Dingell would balance his .22 rifle on the handlebars of his bicycle and pedal out to the woods, along what would later be known as 8 Mile Road, the de facto line of racial demarcation, and he would shoot fowl all day. The city population was nearly a million back then; its inhabitants were Polish and Czech and Irish. No one locked their doors back then. Nowadays, no one would think not to. But John Dingell still loved this city, though it had long been carved away from the 15th District that he represented.

The Green Leaders breakfast was attended by the city’s new movers and shakers—many of them young, many of them Arab-American or African-American. Implicit throughout the morning’s award-bestowing was the broadly shared hope that the Motor City was at last emerging from the wreckage of economic malaise and beginning to turn a corner. The sixteen awards to Green Leaders were decided by the event’s sponsor, the
Detroit Free Press
—which, while saluting Dingell, noted that “the longest-serving member ever in the U.S. House has angered some by battling for Detroit automakers against tough fuel efficiency standards.”

Dingell made no mention of this in his acceptance remarks. But after the event, the dean of the House climbed back into his American-made car and vented his annoyance. The storyline that the obstinate old protector of auto industrialists and foe of environmentalists had finally come around was one he found tiresome and, frankly, bullshit. “If you look,” he said gruffly, “you’ll find that what I did was make these laws tolerant for industry. And I would tell the industry folks, ‘You’ve got to go along. I will get you a bill that you will hate, but it will be a bill that you can live with.’ ”

His efforts in other environmental matters constituted a long list that put him in the forefront of American conservationists. In 1963, Dingell drew industry’s ire by authoring a bill that would allow the federal government to establish water quality standards, and by sponsoring another bill that empowered the government to sue businesses for destroying fish and waterfowl. Three years later, Dingell demanded national standards for air quality as well. In 1969, he led a successful effort to quadruple President Nixon’s cash-strapped water pollution budget. He coauthored the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, wrote the Endangered Species Act of 1973, cosponsored an amendment in 1976 that banned PCBs, and was a driving force behind scores of other conservation initiatives.

And he played a leading hand in the shaping and passage of the Clean Air Act, both in 1970 and in its reauthorization two decades later. But that hand was not the same unflinching hand that struck fear in the hearts of water polluters. It was instead a hand that held the hand of the beleaguered American auto industry, a hand that pushed back hard against environmental activists demanding reductions in carbon monoxide that befouled whole cities and caused thousands of fatal respiratory illnesses and heart attacks each year. And it was the hand that held the levers of power at the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Most of FDR’s New Deal legislation ran through what was then called the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, chaired by Sam Rayburn. But when Mr. Sam assumed the Speakership, power in the House became centralized and Commerce ceded some of its jurisdiction.
That changed when Dingell
became its chairman in 1981. He recruited aggressive legislators to join the committee and encouraged them to develop bills that would maintain, and often broaden,
its jurisdiction. At the same time, Dingell instructed his committee staffers to review every single bill that was dropped in the House clerk’s hopper to ascertain whether any involved an Energy and Commerce matter. Turf disputes frequently erupted between him and the Judiciary and Natural Resources chairmen. Dingell invariably won. His committee now included the word
Energy,
having beaten back an attempt to create a committee solely focused on that subject. Dingell kept an aerial photograph of planet earth on the wall above his chairman’s perch. When people asked him to describe his committee’s jurisdictional territory, he turned around and pointed to the photograph.

Dingell also chaired its oversight subcommittee, from which he interrogated government officials and corporate executives with bullying efficiency. If outnumbered on a committee matter, Chairman Dingell was known to say, “You may have the votes, but I have the gavel,” and then with a bang adjourn the proceedings before a vote could be taken. A year into his new assignment, a poll of House members concluded that John Dingell was viewed by his peers as the institution’s best chairman—but also arrogant and domineering, a man who used his six-foot-three frame and his caustic verbiage to get whatever he wanted. It was likewise true that Dingell was a superb builder of coalitions, worked well with the other side of the aisle (including Gingrich and DeLay), and was universally regarded as a man of his word. But his reputation as a hard-ass, and as a congressman who fiercely protected the interests of his automaking constituency, did not bother Dingell in the slightest.

It did, however, bother him (though he would never say so) to be called Dirty Dingell and Tailpipe Johnny by the left, to have his office picketed by the Sierra Club, and to be viewed by fellow liberals as a toady for the Big Three automakers. From a smog-choked California district that included Beverly Hills came a short but no less brash congressman named Henry Waxman, who managed to get on Dingell’s committee. In Waxman’s slice of America, children and senior citizens were dying of lung and heart diseases as a result of the polluters in Dingell’s America. A decade’s worth of legislative mano a mano between the two Democrats ultimately led to the bipartisan and much-heralded Clean Air Act of 1990. But a mutual dislike now ran
deep—all the more so as an alliance developed between Waxman and another Californian, Nancy Pelosi.

Dingell had supported Pelosi’s opponent, Steny Hoyer, in the 2001 whip race. She in turn campaigned on behalf of Lynn Rivers in 2002 when redistricting threw Dingell into a primary challenge with Rivers. After the Democrats regained the majority in November 2006 and the Energy and Commerce gavel fell back into John Dingell’s hand, he reverted to the methods he had used to such great effect as chairman from 1981 to 1994. He held all of the committee members to a blood oath to protect the committee’s vast jurisdiction. He worked with both sides of the aisle and the full gamut of outside advocacy groups. He developed his committee’s legislation, as he would say, “from the center”—bringing everyone to the table, hashing out differences together, and forging strong consensus.

What he had failed to recognize was that the House—and perhaps Washington politics writ large—had, between his two tenures as chairman, ceased to function in this fashion. His own leader, Nancy Pelosi, had no intention of working this way. Her Speakership would instead be in the mold of her immediate Republican predecessors, Newt Gingrich and Denny Hastert. Power would be centralized. The legislative agenda would emanate from the top. Member fealty would be to her, not to chairmen like Dingell—and she would monitor their loyalty, rewarding it and punishing breaches of it. Those were the new rules, and they were clear to seemingly everyone except John Dingell.

Among Speaker Pelosi’s first acts in 2007 was to create a House Select Committee on Global Warming—which clearly poached on the Energy and Commerce chairman’s turf, and which Dingell thus proclaimed “
as useful as feathers
on a fish.” Henry Waxman opposed the select committee as well. As it turned out, the ongoing robustness of Energy and Commerce was something in which the Beverly Hills congressman had a vested interest.

Dingell’s friends and subordinates could smell a Waxman challenge coming. They knew as well that he had made himself vulnerable by antagonizing Speaker Pelosi. Dingell seemed thoroughly unaware of the spot he was in. During the summer of 2008, he had a conversation with
Pelosi on the House floor. The subject was his continued desire to be chairman in 2009 and beyond. The Speaker had said words to the effect of “You’re doing a good job.” Dingell told others that he took her remark to be an endorsement.

His wife, Deborah Dingell, was not so sanguine. The former General Motors executive had wide contacts in Washington and was hearing rumblings. One late summer afternoon in his Capitol hideaway office reserved for the lower body’s dean, Dingell’s wife convened a meeting with the congressman, a couple of current and former staffers, and longtime friend and Democratic operative Anita Dunn. Together they warned Dingell that his chairmanship could be in jeopardy. Dunn reminded him that since his 2008 general election campaign would be a cakewalk, his energies were better spent shoring up support among his colleagues. Dingell assured them that he had the backing of both the Democratic caucus and the Speaker.

Dingell was due to undergo reconstructive knee surgery in October. His staff had urged him to have the procedure done in August, which might make it difficult for him to campaign for reelection in the fall but would ensure that he would be at full strength by late November, when the Democratic caucus and its new members met to vote on committee chairmanships. Dingell did not take their advice. He elected to put off the surgery until early October. He then suffered a minor cut on his knee—and so as to avoid infection, the doctors put off the procedure until the very end of October.

On November 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama’s victory, Henry Waxman announced that he would challenge John Dingell’s chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The first call Dingell made when he got the news was to Nancy Pelosi. “You told me you had my back,” he said.

“That’s not what I said,” she reminded him.

Steny Hoyer wanted to avoid a bloodbath. The incoming majority leader attempted to broker a deal in which Dingell could keep his chairmanship for two more years. Waxman was not amenable. The matter would therefore be put to a vote.