Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (4 page)

Duncan surveyed
the buildings with two of his young staffers, who directed him to this or that soon-to-be-vacated space so that the congressman-elect could study his options. The least desirable of these was the fifth and uppermost floor of the Cannon Building, a forlorn former attic that later housed, among others, a California freshman
named Richard M. Nixon. Next door to Nixon’s haunt in Room 511 was Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert, a bald and hawk-eyed former judge who had just earned a fourth term representing the 1st District of Texas, and who possessed a gift for finding his way in front of TV cameras. Up until now, Gohmert had remained on the top floor for six years—and by choice, for the simple reason that he could park his barbecue grills on the ledge just outside and cook ribs for his buddies.

“The architect of the Capitol sat me down,” Gohmert explained to the visiting freshman, “and he told me about the OSHA restrictions, and we cleared through all the baloney. And that left only one fire code violation I had—which is no fire within ten feet of the wooden window frames. I’m moving to the Rayburn Building. There’s a window I’m gonna work to get open.”

He asked Duncan, “Are you thinking about the RSC?”

That was the Republican Study Committee, the GOP’s in-house conservative policy coalition. Duncan said that he had already signed on.

“And you heard about the dinner Heritage is having?” Gohmert shook his head reverently. “Just a great group.”

In another Republican congressman’s office, Duncan ducked in and noticed a Bible on the shelf. “A Christian,” he observed. “That’s good.” But for the most part Duncan’s encounters that afternoon were with soon-to-be-departed Democrats. In the office of defeated New York Democrat Michael McMahon, a couple of staffers slouched vacant-faced in their chairs, drinking Sam Adams beer. The office of Tennessee Democrat Lincoln Davis was a jumble of boxes and—on top of a lone file cabinet—a plastic statue of the R&B singer James Brown. One of Duncan’s entourage pushed a button on the statue. It responded with a miserable tape loop of “I Feel Good.” Davis’s staffers glowered and the Republicans mumbled their goodbyes.

At one office in the Cannon Building, the receptionist was crying. Amid the stacks of file folders and hollow office rooms, the main switchboard in front of her now lifeless, she seemed both overwhelmed and bereft. The woman asked Duncan if he would come back some other time. The congressman-elect said he understood.

His voice became brittle, however, once he was out in the hallway. “They had a chance to choose right and vote right on behalf of America,” he said. “And they didn’t. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but,”
he corrected himself, “I wished it on those guys, so we could get our majority and get some things done.”

Duncan was one of four freshmen to win seats from South Carolina.
The Four Horsemen
, he had helpfully mentioned to a couple of local reporters. (Thus far, the moniker hadn’t taken hold.) His rural district bordering Georgia and North Carolina was a Republican shoo-in. All he’d had to do was prove to voters in the primary of South Carolina’s 3rd District that he was the truest conservative in the field and at least as conservative as his predecessor, Gresham Barrett, who had vacated the seat to run (unsuccessfully) for governor. The other three Horsemen had stories that wrote themselves. Tim Scott from Charleston was one of only two blacks in the entire House Republican conference. Trey Gowdy was a lawyer with not a day’s worth of political experience who had mustered enough Tea Party support to demolish not-conservative-enough incumbent Bob Inglis in the Republican primary. As for Mick Mulvaney, in winning he had delivered to the GOP the prized scalp of John Spratt, a fourteen-term Democrat and chairman of the House Budget Committee.

By comparison, Duncan could seem like something of a country plodder, the kind of fellow you ran into so many times in the course of a day that he became as familiar and forgettable as wallpaper. He made no apologies for his steadiness. After emerging from the bottom of the heap to prevail in a four-man Republican primary, Duncan aimed to make a nice little career out of defying expectations. He would seek to get on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, where he could strut his oil and gas expertise. He would introduce a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. He would slash away at the federal budget like a reaper.

Most of all, he would represent his district, which was among America’s most conservative. In his pre-political life, Jeff Duncan had been a real estate auctioneer. To him, the 3rd District was now his business and its 750,000 or so constituents his customers. He intended to run things like a business. Before ever setting foot in the Capitol, Duncan had already decided that he would cut his designated budget by 10 percent. He did not know exactly what he would cut or what effect such cuts would have on his office’s overall performance. He just knew that it would set the right tone, as Jeff Duncan came to Washington to curb
its appalling spending addiction, to begin his tenure by handing over to the U.S. Treasury a check of the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. And so he instructed his new chief of staff to figure out the cuts.
Get ’er done.

And lo and behold, Speaker Boehner was now himself making noise about reducing the House’s overall administrative budget back to 2008 levels. The Republican leader was following the freshman! Already he was making a difference!

But just to show everyone how sincere he was about his small businessman’s approach to governance: on the day of his swearing-in, January 5, 2011, Jeff Duncan was going to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, right there in his new office doorway. That office would, like its inhabitants, be accessible to all his visiting customers. It would be on the first floor of the Cannon Building, less than a block from the Metro subway. Not the biggest office he could have chosen with his twenty-first pick of the lottery, nor the fanciest. But the best for his customers.

It would be Cannon 116, the office where the Democrat woman had been crying.

The woman’s boss and the office’s current occupant was a thirty-six-year-old Virginian named
Glenn Nye
, a freshman just as Jeff Duncan would be. Nye had endeavored to represent his district, which included the naval base in Norfolk. He fought to keep the nuclear aircraft carrier there and he lobbied aggressively on behalf of military families. But it didn’t matter. The economy was foundering, and the Democrats seemed preoccupied with anything but. After passing a $787 billion stimulus bill at Obama’s behest, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had devoted much of the 111th Congress to passing energy and health care legislation. Nye voted against both. He couldn’t understand why, with so many Americans out of work, the House Democrats were fixated on cap-and-trade legislation—especially when the controversial measure stood no chance of making it through the Senate.

By 2010, a volley of attack ads twinned Nye with the House Speaker, whom the Republicans had invested a fortune in demonizing.
Glenn Nye
votes with Nancy Pelosi 83 percent
of the time.
Which was true, if you counted procedural votes, like whether to adjourn for the day. But try explaining that to the voters. Nye did his best to do so. They either
didn’t listen or didn’t care. Following the precise message prescription used by Jeff Duncan and hundreds of other Republican candidates—repeal Obamacare, fire Pelosi, choke off the spending, cut the taxes—a car dealer and Republican neophyte named Scott Rigell whipped Nye the incumbent Democrat by 10 points.

A couple of days before Jeff Duncan selected Glenn Nye’s office for his own, the House Democrats
met in HC-5
, the conference room in the Capitol basement, to rehash the midterm shellacking. Pelosi, now deposed as Speaker, had recently announced that she intended to run as the House minority leader. Nye was astounded by this news. He talked to several of his colleagues who had also lost on November 2. Pelosi’s decision was crazy, he told them—they had to speak up. Some agreed to do so. Others saw little point in complaining. Who in the Democratic caucus could beat Pelosi? She had all the votes she needed: the liberals, the Californians, the women, the Congressional Black Caucus. And the Democratic members most likely to oppose Pelosi’s bid were those who had just been beaten and therefore wouldn’t have a vote. The losers could bitch about it, but what good would it do?

At the caucus, Nancy Pelosi did something unusual. She barred staff members from sitting in, because she wanted her colleagues to be able to speak frankly. “I’d like for us to hear from those who lost on November second,” the Speaker said.

A long line formed at the mike stand. Some of the defeated blamed the economy. Others cited the intransigent Senate and the detached Obama White House. Still others recognized that they may well have been done in by the health care bill that had been so extravagantly vilified by the Republicans—but that they were proud to go down for such a noble cause.

When it was Nye’s turn, he began by thanking the Speaker for leading the Democrats through difficult times. But, he went on, “You clearly became the face of the election in a way that harmed a lot of us. Fair or not, the Republicans were able to paint you with an image that dragged us down.

“It’s up to me to win my race,” said the defeated freshman. “I get that. But this is a moment where we have to be honest with ourselves. We have to accept your role in these defeats. And it’s going to be much harder for someone like me to run again if you’re the party leader.
Because instead of running a race where it’s me against the other guy, I’ll be dealing with the same ads. The same framing I can’t get away from.”

When he was finished, Nancy Pelosi nodded and said nothing. Another defeated member stood up to talk, then another. The caucus lasted nearly five hours.

Glenn Nye didn’t stay for the end of it. Instead, he went back to Cannon 116 and began packing up.

CHAPTER TWO

The Dean

At a weeknight party
for the ninety-six incoming freshmen (including nine Democrats) in the solarium of a Washington hotel, an old man materialized from the sea of fresh faces. He made his way to an open area by means of a walker—a bald and bespectacled yet not quite frail figure who with his stooped posture was still taller than most of the others in the crowd. He leaned into a microphone and in an arid voice began to talk to the guests about the House of Representatives, where they would soon be serving, the place where he had served the past fifty-five years, longer than any other United States congressman in its history.

“It is an institution that is often demeaned,” said the old man. “Usually during campaigns.”

Through his glasses, the blue eyes glared meaningfully at the much younger men and women fresh off the campaign trail.

“But it is an institution composed of people who pride themselves on being public servants,” he went on. “And I’m pleased to tell you that most of the members who come here do so to serve and look after people and do important things.”

Without benefit of notes, the old man proceeded to bless them with a quote from Daniel Webster’s famed discourse at Plymouth:
Let us rejoice that we behold this day. Let us be thankful that we have lived to see the bright and happy breaking of this auspicious morn
. . . He spoke of the great House Speaker Sam Rayburn, with whom the old man had once worked, a half century ago—how Mr. Sam had once been asked how many presidents he’d served under, prompting the reply, “Not a damn one. I served
with
presidents.”

And then the old man shared with the gathering a joke that he had
once been told “when I was a young fella.” He said, “A fellow was once very impressed with this institution he’d come to work for. And an older colleague said to him, ‘My friend, for the next six months you’re going to be wondering how the hell you got here. And then one day you’re going to come out onto the House floor, look around—and wonder how the hell all these
other
fools got here.’ ”

The old man permitted himself a tight smile and waited until the laughter died down. Then he said, “At any rate, it is a wonderful institution, one I’ve been very proud to have the privilege to serve in. Something like ten to fifteen thousand Americans, out of the two billion who’ve been part of America, have had such a privilege—to be part of the most humanly perfect . . .”

His eyes seemed to become watery as he looked out into the crowd. “Most humanly perfect,” he repeated, “institution on this planet.”

He welcomed them to the House, finished with a terse “Thanks,” and then the old man with the walker took off with surprising velocity.

Though the eighty-four-year-old man, whose name was John Dingell, had a not-undeserved reputation for being cantankerous, he got along with almost everybody. He got along with Mr. Sam and his fellow Democrats, of course, but he also got along with Ronald Reagan and counted Newt Gingrich as a friend. He got along with big business—particularly the American auto industry, which was the chief employer of his Michigan district—and equally so with labor unions. He got along with consumer groups and the National Rifle Association, with all the ethnics, with young and old, urban and rural. The only folks he’d yet encountered with whom he simply could not get along were the tea partiers—
“but then again,”
he would invariably add, “I don’t think the good Lord will get along with them, either.”