Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (31 page)

He would “absolutely” build up America’s naval forces, which had
seen a decline in war vessels from 546 in 1990 to 243 today. “All the great civilizations have had them, going back to the Phoenicians, the Athenians, the Romans.” And he would use those vessels to go after the Somali pirates—“hunting their ships on the open seas, not allowing their freedom to maneuver.” This would require a continued naval presence along the Horn of Africa. West was for it.

And he was for “beefing up our southern border”—which, as West told a questioner at his April 26 Fort Lauderdale town hall, he regarded as “a war zone.” He asserted that “Iran is in South America. Hezbollah is in South America . . . This is a Chamberlain-or-Churchill moment.”

He was for peace between Israel and Palestine. But, as he told the Heritage audience, he believed no peace was possible “until you eradicate or eliminate Hamas. And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

West, then, was for a continued troop presence in Afghanistan, a greatly augmented sea presence, a robust military presence on America’s southern border, and an all-out Hamas eradication program. Nation-building, however, was another matter. West viewed the so-called “Arab spring”—the forced departure of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen—with suspicion and even derision, mentioning it in the same breath as the bathroom soap Irish Spring. He had no reason to believe that the new leaders would be in any way better than the ones who had been thrown out. The most organized political force in Egypt was the Muslim Brotherhood. Yemen was Al Qaeda’s greatest stronghold. As for Libya, just who were these rebel groups?

“My concern is, we’re being co-opted into something in North Africa and the Middle East,” he said. “Egypt, now Libya—and in my mind this is not coincidental. We’ve contracted out the U.S. Air Force and Navy for a bunch of people we don’t even understand.”

He had spoken up in a Republican House conference for the very first time, in early June, when Speaker Boehner tried to dissuade his members from voting to cut off funds for America’s military role in forcing the ousting of Libyan dictator Gadhafi. Antiwar Democrats and many Republicans believed that Obama had violated the War Powers Act by engaging in hostilities without Congress’s authorization.

West didn’t buy Boehner’s sentiment that “we can’t let NATO down.” The freshman told the conference, “The oath we took—it’s not an oath
to NATO. If we’re not going to stand up for the Constitution and our laws, then what do we say to the men and women in the combat zone? This is a no-brainer.”

But as to what actually should be done in Libya, West himself seemed to be at war with his own conflicting instincts. He disagreed with Obama’s decision to send in aircraft to enforce a no-fly zone. Instead, West said, “I would have dropped a drone on the guy even before” Gadhafi’s troops began to kill dissenters—“because he
is
a bad guy. I wouldn’t have allowed it to get to this point.”

But would his policy be to kill every bad state actor—even if, as in Gadhafi’s case, he had done nothing to harm U.S. interests?

“No. I can’t go around and try to protect innocent civilians. I’d be all over the place.”

But he would nonetheless drop a drone on Gadhafi?

“Well, I don’t like the guy. Period.”

But weren’t there lots of guys not to like, such as Assad in Syria and Ahmadinejad in Iran?

“Well, I think the resolve you show makes a lot of these guys go to ground.”

Then what sort of resolve should the United States show?

“I think we should’ve come out with a very strong condemnation. I think we should’ve told him, ‘If you continue in twenty-four hours with this type of action, there’ll be a response from the United States of America of a kinetic nature. And I think you have to be serious. But see, once again, you have to establish a precedent, so that they know you’re serious.”

But if Gadhafi’s behavior rose to the level that required such a response, then was that also true in the case of the behavior shown by Assad and Ahmadinejad?

“If that’s the new litmus test.”

But what was
his
litmus test?

“Mine is one that threatens the interests of the U.S., the open sea-lanes of commerce, threatens our allies. Those are my litmus tests.”

And so the situation with Libya did
not
in fact rise to that level?

“It hasn’t risen to that level.”

Even in Allen West’s indecision, he showed certitude. Grinning, he
said, “I heard you say that I’m kinda all over the place. I think that’s a strength. You can’t nail me down and say, ‘This guy is gonna go this way—he’s absolutely predictable.’ When you go into a football game and you’ve got the quarterback who can pass or run—absolutely. You don’t know where I’m coming from.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Dropping Out of Things Is What I Do”

On the afternoon
of Wednesday, June 1, 2011, the newest member of the New York delegation was sworn into office. Just a few hours beforehand, Kathy Hochul had gotten her first glimpse of the workplace on the seventh floor of the Longworth Building that Christopher Lee had vacated months ago. “Is this it?” Hochul asked no one in particular, grinning nervously as she stepped inside, as if crossing into some wondrous new dimension.

Now she stood in the well of the House floor, surrounded by her fellow New York congresspersons, who engulfed her with greetings the moment Speaker Boehner executed the swearing-in. One of those New Yorkers who shook her hand was Anthony Weiner. He had no way of knowing this at the time, but in fifteen days he would be resigning from the very body into which Kathy Hochul had just been sworn.

Weiner had walked into the chamber a few minutes beforehand, carrying on an animated discussion with one of his friends, fellow New Yorker Joe Crowley. He then sat on the front row with Steny Hoyer. For several minutes Weiner gave a rundown of what was fresh on his mind, having just now completed a succession of interviews in his office with several TV reporters about an incident last Friday in which a college student claimed she had been sent a photograph of a male’s underwear-clad crotch via the congressman’s Twitter account. Over and over he had told the reporters that he did not know this young woman and that the transmission of the photo must have been someone’s idea of a prank. But when asked whether the photo was of Weiner’s crotch, he refused to say “definitively” or “with certitude” that it was not.

Hoyer listened, his face knotted with concern. When Weiner was finished talking, the minority whip said, “You need to put everything on the table and get all the facts out there and do it as fast as you possibly can. That’s the most important thing.”

Weiner agreed with Hoyer—or rather, he said that he agreed with him. Then, for the next five days, Anthony Weiner continued to lie about what had happened.

The possibility that Anthony Weiner might be tweeting photographs of himself to women across America seemed unfathomable to his staff. Not because he was happily married to Huma Abedin, which he was; but rather, because he was so insanely driven, to the point of making life miserable for everyone who worked for him, that it was impossible to believe he would risk throwing it all away over some random Internet hookup.

If anything, Weiner was overly cautious when it came to women. If he and a female staffer were the last two remaining in his office at night, Weiner would invariably leave. Rather than flirt with his female employees, he treated them with precisely the same level of disdain that he did the men.

Weiner wanted a lean, efficient office. He wanted a breaking-news statement issued daily. He wanted his legislative staff to be focused on creating events and messages rather than on bills that were coming out of committees. He wanted a visual aid from the House graphics department to accompany his floor statements. And at the same time, he did not want to know a thing about his staffers’ personal lives. He did not want to mentor them or retain them forever as outside counsel. He did not want to think about them, ever.

He wanted only one thing, really: to be the mayor of New York City. He obsessed over creating a Rockaway-Brooklyn-Manhattan ferry service, imagined applying the Defense Department’s performance management model to city government, and lunged at every legislative opportunity to ingratiate himself with the Big Apple’s law enforcement community. Though he had lost the mayoral race in 2005, Weiner evidenced something almost resembling serenity during that run. He could be himself, not imprisoned by an institution of 435. He could be the Park Slope middle-class son of lawyer Mort and schoolteacher
Fran; he could be the guy who once sold bagels at an outer-borough shopping strip; he could sit on stoops and shoot the bull at diners.

But he could not beat Michael Bloomberg, not with the latter’s bottomless resources. And so Weiner sat out the 2009 mayoral race, instead setting his sights on 2013.

In the meantime, nothing that did not contribute to that end seemed to animate him. Though he shared living space with Mike Capuano of Massachusetts and occasionally caroused with a few other male colleagues, Weiner remained a lone wolf in the Democratic caucus. He invited only three House members—fellow New Yorkers Crowley, Steve Israel, and Nita Lowey—to his wedding in 2010. He showed no interest in paying his annual DCCC dues or raising campaign money for his colleagues—since, after all, a day on the road at some fund-raiser was a day not spent in his district. He showed up for Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee votes only when he absolutely had to. Once, after stepping into a subcommittee hearing just long enough to give a rather grandstanding speech, a fellow member thanked him for his contribution and was shocked by the flip arrogance of Weiner’s reply: “Anytime you need me to help save you guys, just let me know—I’m right down the hall.”

Hoyer had been sufficiently impressed with Weiner’s floor acumen that he convinced Pelosi to give the New Yorker a seat at the messaging table. Even then, Weiner expressed no appreciation for being bestowed such an honor and participated only when it was convenient for him; and when Hoyer suggested a title along the lines of Parliamentary Whip, Weiner balked, because something like that would be off-putting to his constituents in the outer boroughs.

It was striking to contrast his behavior with that of the other floor strategist deployed by Hoyer and Pelosi, Rob Andrews of New Jersey. Earlier in his twenty-year congressional career, Andrews had shared Weiner’s knack for rubbing his colleagues the wrong way. Though never as caustic as Weiner, the former lawyer struck other members as being deeply impressed with his own intelligence. In 1994, he cosponsored with Republican Bill Zeliff the
“A to Z Spending Cut Plan,”
infuriating his party leaders by calling for a special session devoted solely to cutting discretionary spending through his and Zeliff’s bill rather than through the Appropriations process. Andrews was fixated on the New Jersey
governorship during the first half of his career, but after losing in 1997 and briefly mulling over running again in 2005, his ambitions turned to the Senate. He became an overnight pariah in the New Jersey delegation in 2008 when he decided to run against Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg—and he further annoyed his colleagues by having his wife, Camille, simultaneously run for his House seat, only to move her aside when Lautenberg beat him in the Senate primary.

What resuscitated Rob Andrews’s political career was the health care bill. In 2009 he happened to be chairing the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee and thereby became one of the authors of the sprawling legislation. Along the way, he came to understand its intricacies better than anyone else in the caucus—and more importantly, he knew how to articulate it in a way that made sense to nonexperts. “Here’s how I explained it in my town hall,” he would tell the Democrats, and then proceed with a substantive but concise distillation.

“I’d really like to talk to you,” said then–Majority Whip Jim Clyburn after hearing one of Andrews’s health care elucidations. The New Jersey congressman thereafter became Clyburn’s advisor on a wide range of issues. All of a sudden, Andrews was more valuable than annoying to his colleagues. And at the same time, he ceased looking for exit strategies from the House. He began having periodic get-togethers in the House
dining room with John Dingell
. Andrews would ask questions about the institution—its history, but also procedural matters, how to run a subcommittee hearing, how to build relationships—and then he would let the dean of the House do the talking. Andrews had not listened when Dingell advised him not to run for the Senate. He was listening now.

Meanwhile, Andrews began dropping by the Rules Committee office and seeing if the Democratic staffers had any suggestion for a floor tactic he could employ on the floor for the party’s benefit. He volunteered parliamentary maneuvers so frequently that Pelosi and Hoyer decided that they might as well include him in their message meetings as well. By the start of the 112th Congress, Rob Andrews had not only rehabilitated his image within the caucus but was now a favorite among the Democratic leadership. He had become the anti-Weiner.

Andrews was unfailingly courteous to his employees, which also set
him apart from Weiner—who was not content simply to tell his subordinates that they were wrong, but to describe, at very high volume, the many ways in which they were
fucking idiots.
One day Huma showed up at the office and, while standing in the reception area, heard the congressman viciously chewing out a subordinate. She stepped into his office and with a horrified look exclaimed, “What is going on here?”

It became clear to his staffers that there were some things about Anthony Weiner that his wife did not know.

“
Friday dump
Scotus style? I’m hearing disclosures released today. #ConflictsAbound”

“Lets review: for more than a decade #ConflictedClarenceThomas forgot nearly $800K on his filings.”