Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (3 page)

America had been at a loss 220 years before, in the spring of 1789, when sixty-five men arrived by ship and stagecoach to the reeking, war-ravaged streets of New York City to convene the
First Federal Congress
. Taking up business on the lower floor of Federal Hall, the House of Representatives threw open its doors to the public on April 9 (unlike the Senate upstairs, which tended to its affairs privately for another six years), thereupon securing its reputation as the People’s Institution.

The commoners and journalists packing the public gallery of Federal Hall noisily munched on peanuts while bearing witness to America’s unsteady embrace of republican democracy. Among the House’s stars in 1789 were James Madison of Virginia, the primary author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and, somewhat less famously, thirty-year-old Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, the House’s first great orator, who crafted the final language of the First Amendment. But, as Ames wrote of his colleagues in 1789,
“There are few shining geniuses.”
It was instead, Ames noted, a body of “sober, solid, old-charter folks”—parochial, at times shortsighted and short-tempered, prone to grandstanding and with one eye cocked to the next election. Ames would himself later confess to becoming
“crazed with the chase”
of political adrenaline, but he was not the only ambitious soul among the class of 1789: nine of the first congressmen would later ascend to the Senate, while Madison would serve as the nation’s fourth president and Elbridge Gerry as his vice president.

And yet, with ample reason to put their own interests before those of a nation in its infancy, the sixty-five men of the First Federal Congress—northerners and southerners, Federalists and Anti-Federalists—found it within themselves to cohere as a body of statesmen and thereby give America its structural and social coherency. During the spring and summer of 1789, the House of Representatives would lay the foundations for a federal government. After first standing up an executive branch and inaugurating George Washington as America’s first president, they established a Treasury Department and a federal bank. They tended to the nation’s war debt by levying taxes. They instituted a federal judiciary. They accepted Vermont and Kentucky into the union. And, to round off the House of Representatives’ maiden legislative session, they passed the Bill of Rights.

This was the story of the House, back in the day when elected leaders elected to lead.

Two hundred and twenty-two years later, a very different kind of story of the People’s Institution would unfold from the deliberations of the men gathered that evening in the Caucus Room. The story of this House, the 112th Congress, the People’s Institution in its super-evolved state, may be seen as a parable of how democracy works in a nation beset by postmodern paradoxes—at times purposeful, at other times as boisterously inconsequential as an episode of
Seinfeld,
and at nearly all times infuriating even to its members . . . a tale of many things, but not necessarily one of statesmanship.

The protagonists of this story are a few of the 435 American men and women on both sides of the aisle who love their country and who showed up to the Capitol with every intention of leading, or at least serving, the people who voted them into office. What in fact transpired was an outcome the men in the Caucus Room—also patriots, many of them widely admired public servants—only partly anticipated. Their schemings helped to produce a House that appeared to spring directly from the impulses of an outraged public; a House of passionately iconoclastic newcomers, some of them proudly oblivious to political fallout and others so hyperreactive to their constituents that they followed their Twitter feeds on their iPads while sitting in the House chamber during votes; a House that made an elaborate show of openness and of speedily fulfilling its campaign pledges; a House that, for the first time ever, scheduled half of its workdays away from insular Washington, so that its members would be maximally hot-wired to feedback from the home folks; a House unabashedly grasping for the throwback luster of James Madison and Fisher Ames, to the point of spending much of its first full day reciting aloud the entire U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights on the House floor. This was a House of clearly spelled out principles, and of considerable clout. Fulfilling the wildest hopes of the men in the Caucus Room, the Republican-controlled House passed hundreds of bills, threw the Obama White House squarely on the ropes, and dominated a jillion news cycles. In Beltway parlance, the House controlled the narrative.

For all of these exertions, the 112th Congress was awarded by its
fellow Americans an
approval rating of 9 percent
, a depth of loathing for that institution never before seen in the history of public opinion polling—a contempt eclipsing that for car salesmen, revenue collectors, the news media, and the president. This public disgust, principally aimed at the majority party but in no way acquitting the Democrats (especially the Democratic-controlled Senate), plainly bespoke a yearning for the lost art of governance. It was as if Americans, having long forgotten what political leadership looks like, saw in today’s House of Representatives an unambiguous portrait of what leadership precisely is not.

Yet something deeper is being expressed when a democracy reserves its greatest hostility toward the elected representatives who most acutely reflect the public mood. Perhaps Americans can no longer decide what it is that they want. Or perhaps—after being bombarded by the Internet, agitated by cable news and talk radio, bifurcated by redistricting maps, and dispirited by homegrown preoccupations—the outcry is in fact simple and plaintive: a plea for one America again.

Instead:
You will remember this day. You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.

When Newt Gingrich spoke those departing words at the Caucus Room, the others traded looks of doubt. On January 20, 2009, hope was in the air, but the fifteen Republicans were not yet feeling it. They stepped out into the cold. It was nearly midnight, and the other side was still out dancing.

They needed reinforcements.

PART ONE

REINFORCEMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Tea Party Freshman

“Mr. Duncan from South Carolina . . .”

A few of his new buddies in the Republican conference of the U.S. House of Representatives hollered out “Yeah!” at the sound of his name. Duncan stood up. He was forty-four, big-shouldered with thinning hair, and his round face radiated a kind of pastoral bashfulness. With the rolling gait of an ex-football player, he walked down the aisle toward the lottery box. One hand was behind his back, fingers crossed. With the other hand he pointed ceiling-ward, lifting his gaze as well so as to petition the Good Lord who had brought him this far. Directly in front of him, engraved on the wall of the House Administration Committee room in the Rayburn House Office Building, was a scripture from Proverbs:
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
His meaty hand dove into the box. He retrieved a slip of paper and handed it over to committee chairman Dan Lungren.

“Mr. Duncan drew . . . number twenty-one.”

He lifted his arms in triumph and his jowls reddened as his freshman pals cheered. The twenty-first pick among eighty-seven freshmen! Guaranteed one of the better soon-to-be-vacated House offices! Already Duncan was breaking out of the pack.

Two days earlier, on November 17, 2010,
Congressman-elect Jeff Duncan
sat in the Capitol with the entire House Republican conference for the first time. Before the election fifteen days prior, there had been 198 of them. Now there were—or would be, after all the recounts were completed—242. They were the majority. They were the one sector of the federal government that the Republicans controlled outright, making the House their spear point against the Obama White House. That day Duncan and his new colleagues voted to select John Boehner
as the new Speaker-designate.
All those in favor say . . . AYE!
Duncan had nearly fallen out of his chair. In the South Carolina state legislature, where he had previously served, there were seventy-four in the GOP caucus. Reacting to that sonic boom of affirmation, which of course included his own voice, Duncan thought:
What a true majority we have.

He did not yet think:
How the hell will
my
voice ever be heard?

Boehner had hosted a dinner for the freshmen in the National Statuary Hall of the Capitol. The members of the Republican leadership were profuse in their gratitude that the freshmen had restored the GOP to the majority. “We’ve been holding down the fort, like the guys in
Saving Private Ryan,
” one of the leaders declared. “We’ve been the guys shooting at the tank—and now all of a sudden, the plane comes flying in. We’ve finally got help.”

Duncan had arrived at Statuary Hall early. It was a Sunday evening; a ghostly quiet enveloped the marble corridor. Walking by the statues of his fellow South Carolinians John Calhoun and Wade Hampton—both of them nineteenth-century statesmen and slaveholders—he paused instead to study the newest figure in the Rotunda: the bronze, five-hundred-pound likeness of his hero, Ronald Reagan. Then he stopped. Two other freshmen were with Duncan. They all stared up at the dome together. No one said a word. Duncan could feel his knees go weak. He was part of all this now. This was his pantheon.

Not knowing what else to do, he pulled a camera out of his pocket and took a picture that would never come out and would never be of interest to anyone—just the heavenly roof of democracy hovering 180 feet above Jeffrey David Duncan.

Along the campaign trail, Duncan the candidate had always carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket.
I believe in the Constitution,
his campaign website declared—adding for clarity’s sake,
I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in States Rights.
And then a twenty-first-century conservative’s elucidation:
I believe illegal immigration is a national security problem . . . I believe we should reject amnesty . . . I believe in limited government . . . I believe that the economy prospers when we lower tax rates. I believe in a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. And I believe in term limits for all politicians.

But at the very top of his
“I Believe”
list, the candidate had stated unambiguously:
I believe in God. Our nation was founded on Christian values and principles. I believe that life begins at conception. I believe traditional marriage is the foundation for society. And I believe that Washington will never be the solution to man’s problems, therefore we must reject the political correctness that has driven God from the public square.

Jeff Duncan was a Tea Party freshman. That’s what he called himself. The origins of the “TEA” (Taxed Enough Already) party movement were revenue-centric, but before long the rallying cries ranged from a deep distrust of the sitting president to a (seemingly corresponding) outrage over the federal government’s spending habits and overall godlessness—the latter two of which were Jeff Duncan’s animating principles. There were eighty-seven freshmen in all, and some had benefited from the Tea Party wave, while others had won in spite of it, and others still had embraced the movement but would be edging away from it as soon as no one was looking. Not Duncan.
As a Christian, Husband, Father and Small Business Owner, I know what I believe in.

He’d spent the previous day, November 18, roaming the halls of
the three House office buildings
, each named after former Speakers: Rayburn, the newest and closest to the Capitol across the street, with the most spacious offices and the House gymnasium in the basement; Longworth, a neoclassical building and thus more stylish than Rayburn, with the biggest cafeteria; and Cannon, the oldest and smallest of the three, a Beaux-Arts creation completed in 1908, and which had the added benefit of being a few feet from both a Metro subway station and the Republican Party’s national headquarters. Each building contained from 85 to 251 offices, many quite different in size, shape, and view. As in the corporate world, office space on Capitol Hill conveyed its occupant’s station in the political food chain. Representatives with the greatest seniority clung tenaciously to their sprawling real estate. Those of middling tenure traded up whenever one of the old warhorses departed by retirement, defeat, or death. The offices abandoned by them, and by the recently defeated, constituted the pool from which Duncan and the other incoming freshmen chose their new habitats.