Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (40 page)

“Why?” McCarthy exploded. “You just said you wanted this, I go over there and fight for it, I come back, and you’re not for it? Screw it! No deal! We’re done!”

Most of the people in the room had never seen the whip go ballistic before. “Whoa, whoa—don’t leave, Kevin!” someone called.

McCarthy cooled down. It looked like they had the votes, even without the help of the South Carolinians. It was now after ten in the evening. “Let’s bring it to the floor,” he urged Boehner.

A brief discussion ensued, but Boehner was firm. “We are not doing a vote after midnight,” he said.

This was his House. He was the keeper of the institution. There was no way he was going to pull a dark-of-night gambit like the notorious Medicare prescription drug vote of 2003.

“We’re going to wait till tomorrow,” Boehner said flatly.

McCarthy was deflated. He knew they could win the vote
now.
How things might be tomorrow, he couldn’t say. But he also knew that Boehner was usually asleep at this hour. They would have to take it up on Thursday.

The following afternoon, the amended Boehner plan passed, 217–210. As Harry Reid had warned, the Senate promptly voted to table it.

The next day, Friday, July 29, the House preemptively rejected Reid’s $1.2 trillion deficit reduction plan.

The table was now bare. There was no White House plan, no Boehner plan, no Reid plan—and almost no time left before August 2.

On Sunday afternoon, July 31, McCarthy was sitting in the twelfth-floor apartment of Nebraska Congressman Adrian Smith, which he had once shared with Smith until he became whip and decided he needed to be close to the Capitol at all times. McCarthy’s cell phone rang. It was Arizona Senator Jon Kyl.

“Hey buddy,” the whip said in greeting. The two men then fell into discussion about the debt ceiling deal that Mitch McConnell had just now consummated with his former senatorial colleague Joe Biden.

“It’s gonna be tough,” McCarthy told Kyl. “But I think I can get 150 to 170 votes.”

The first of a dozen or so Republican congressmen began trickling through the apartment doorway, beginning with Sean Duffy. While Adrian Smith grilled steaks, they sat inside and drank wine and beer and caught the hour-long NBC special
Taking the Hill: Inside Congress.
They snickered when camera-craving Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer criticized the Republicans’ usage of
The Town
in their conference. And they nodded appreciatively when Kevin McCarthy declared to host Brian Williams, “The world of buying votes are [
sic
] gone.”

They clambered up to the rooftop for their steaks. A dazzling sunset blazed over them as they listened on their cell phones to Speaker Boehner explaining to the entire conference the details of the McConnell-Biden deal. The key elements were:

The debt ceiling would be raised immediately by $400 billion. The president could request an additional $500 billion, which could only be blocked by a congressional resolution of disapproval.

A trillion dollars in spending cuts would take place over the next decade by means of spending caps. If the caps were exceeded, across-the-board cuts in both nondefense and defense spending would be automatically triggered.

A Senate-House “supercommittee” would be empowered to identify another $1.5 trillion in cuts, which would enable the president to further raise the debt ceiling by the corresponding amount.

A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution would have to be voted on by the end of 2011 in both the House and Senate, though passage would not be a requirement.

Everyone on the rooftop that night was a “yes.” But though the evening was convivial, an exhausted wariness gripped one of the attendees, Blake Farenthold. He didn’t know what this vote would mean back home, but he could guess. Already his Tea Party supporters were disgruntled with him. Obama’s approval rating was bad, but it was stratospheric compared to Congress’s. Within the next week, it would dip to a record low of 13 percent.

Farenthold figured the low estimation was due to the perception that the House wasn’t even trying. And he happened to agree. He himself had given too many programs the benefit of the doubt. No more. He now intended to vote for almost every cut. Washington needed to start behaving like it was broke. “
No more
, ‘Instead of getting lobster
I’m getting steak,’ ” he would scoff. “No. You should be getting ramen noodles.”

They didn’t even cut the $2 million that the Department of the Interior had appropriated for summer concerts and fireworks! Come on! A private company would have picked up the slack! “Don’t tell me that ‘National Fireworks, brought to you by Lockheed Martin’ wouldn’t have happened! If we can’t cut freakin’ fireworks, we are in serious trouble.”

But more than just program-slashing, he thought, why not be bolder? Why not defund the EPA and start from scratch? Why not eliminate the Department of Energy? To Farenthold, it would be a marvelous thing to replace the entire Appropriations Committee with freshmen. How about that?

Farenthold had recently lost his chief of staff and fired his communications director. His wife, who was present on the rooftop that night, had become the bad cop at the office, which apparently hadn’t sat well with some of the staffers. But as Blake Farenthold thought about his restaffing, he was also contemplating what role he would like to have in the House of Representatives, going forward.

And what he had decided was this, as he would say later: “I want to be the communicator.” Farenthold’s belief: “Our conference sucks at it. We’re so dead set on telling the truth—what the Democrats can say in two emotion-packed sentences takes us ten PowerPoint slides.”

Farenthold was a “yes”—just this once more. But in the near future, the former talk radio host expected to be a voice. They could use him. How much worse could he be?

It was not like the Reverend Emanuel Cleaver to emote.

Both in his capacity as chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and in the Democratic caucus as a whole, Cleaver tended to be a quiet, steadying presence. He gave the invocations at whip meetings, counseled Democratic members on personal matters, and otherwise picked his moments to speak up. While meeting with the whip team on one occasion, he reminded his associates that Moses had parted the Red Sea with the cane he held in his hand. “Use what you have,” was the spiritual message. And during a caucus, when the discussion focused on the Democrats’ alternative to the Ryan budget, the reverend went to the
microphone and said that someone had asked him one time which of Cleaver’s children did he love the most.

“My answer was, ‘The one who
needs
it most,’ ” he told the caucus. “So on the budget, let’s be balanced. But most of all, let’s exert our efforts on behalf of those who need it most.”

It had been a trying year for Cleaver after beating Sheila Jackson Lee for the CBC chairmanship. He had done what he could to broker peace between the sole Republican member, Allen West, and his progressive colleagues. After West had offended Keith Ellison with his anti-Muslim remarks, Cleaver had discussed a possible lunch between the three but could tell from Ellison’s lingering anger that no good could come of it. It was equally evident to him that the 112th Congress had dedicated itself to eviscerating programs most beneficial to minorities. The appetite for such back-of-the-hand treatment was alarming but unsurprising to Cleaver, given how Steve King and Michele Bachmann had reacted during the previous session after the conclusion of the
Pigford v. Glickman
discrimination case, brought by African-American farmers. King and Bachmann had labeled the settlement “reparations”—leading Cleaver to think:
If you guys think this is reparations, believe me, we could do reparations a lot better than this.

But the greatest emotional challenge for Emanuel Cleaver—greater, in a sense, than the notorious incident in March 2010 when a white man protesting the impending health care vote spat on him on the steps of the Capitol, prompting Maxine Waters to holler, “Have him arrested!,” which Cleaver declined to do—involved his disappointment in the Obama administration. The CBC chairman and his colleagues had met with the president and his chief of staff, Bill Daley, more than once to protest the White House’s supine response to the Republican agenda. During the H.R.1 program-slashing debate, Cleaver told the president, “Look, I was mayor of Kansas City. The community development block grant program? Huge for me. That’s how I got infrastructure projects funded—how I did all sorts of things. If you cut that, Mr. President, the effects will be real.” And yet Obama’s own budget had proposed a $300 million reduction in the block grant program.

Of late, Cleaver, who grew up in the small Texas town of Waxahachie, had been conferring with his good friend and fellow Texan Jeb
Hensarling, along with Paul Ryan and Appropriations subcommittee chairwoman Jo Ann Emerson, about a project that would redirect federal funds in grant-making agencies to the districts that had been the most persistently impoverished. Many of these were white districts, like Emerson’s. The three Republicans were enthusiastic about working with Cleaver. Boehner seemed open to it as well. Cleaver dared to envision a historic press conference—a Republican Speaker alongside the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, announcing a bipartisan initiative to attack persistent poverty in America.

But when Cleaver brought the matter up to Barack Obama, the former CBC member was less than encouraging. Not only did Obama believe such a bill was unlikely to pass during the 112th Congress; he also preferred that Cleaver not try to do so, for fear that it would complicate his ongoing negotiations with the Republicans.

And now this eleventh-hour debt ceiling compromise. When Cleaver scanned the outline of it on Sunday evening, he could see that it was of a piece with previous Obama White House capitulations. As he would later say, “
It’s hard
to condemn the president for hope.” But this plan—with the dubious setup of a supercommittee that was destined to disagree just as the larger body had, and with the trigger of across-the-board cuts that would almost certainly be undone later by the Congress—was sure to fail: “Stevie Wonder could see it coming.”

The following morning, August 1, after opening his Twitter account, the reverend wrote: “This deal is a sugar-coated Satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see.”

The Democrats did not like what they saw.
But Vice President Joe Biden
, the co-chef of the sugarcoated Satan sandwich, came to the caucus that morning to explain it to them anyway.

“Look, I’m not gonna tell you how to vote,” Biden stated from the outset. “And I accept the fact that you might see the politics or the substance different from how I do. But I want to tell you what we’re doing here.”

For the next two hours he and White House budget director Jack Lew answered questions about the McConnell-Biden plan. Many expressed doubts about the enforceability of automatic defense spending cuts. “This is Van Hollen’s hobbyhorse,” Biden replied, explaining that
the Maryland Democrat had successfully pressed for inclusion of firewalls that would protect nondefense discretionary spending from being cut unless defense funds were being cut as well.

Van Hollen stood and predicted to his colleagues, “I think the Republicans are going to pay a very heavy price for this, because of the extreme lengths they were prepared to go. The American people saw that they were literally willing to jeopardize the creditworthiness of the United States in order to try and force upon the country their budget agenda.”

But, he acknowledged, “They won the framing. They changed the debate from investment in America to cutting.”

Disappointment was palpable throughout the room, and at one point Biden became angry over suggestions that the White House had done a feeble job negotiating on behalf of Democrats. It was at that point that John Dingell went to the microphone.

“Treat him decently,” the dean of the House told the others. “He’s right on this. It’s the best we can get.” Dingell did not volunteer that he, too, was disappointed—most of all in the president’s detached attitude, as if he were back in the classroom teaching constitutional law rather than striving to save a country from economic ruin.

The most compelling argument came from Dingell’s recent protégé, Rob Andrews of New Jersey. “These people have been going after the president, if you haven’t noticed,” Andrews said. “They’ve compared him in pictures to a monkey. There’s been a concerted effort to try to diminish his ability to lead by suggesting that he’s not
capable
of leading.

“I don’t want to be part of something like that,” Andrews told his colleagues. “I want people to understand that he is, in fact, a functioning leader who can solve problems.”

Further, Andrews observed, “It’s the Republicans that are the party of antigovernment, while Democrats are the party of government. And if we fail here, if this bill goes down, it will reinforce the public’s impression that the government doesn’t work. And I don’t care what the polls say. ‘The government doesn’t work’ is an attack on the Democratic Party.”

Immediately after the caucus, chief deputy whip Diana DeGette did an informal whip check—meaning a simple count without any attempts
to persuade the members. About a third were “aye,” another third were “no” or “lean no,” with the remainder undecided. DeGette, who had concluded from studying the bill that it would gut virtually every federal program on which her Denver constituents depended, put herself down as a “lean no.”

Meanwhile, Majority Whip McCarthy called Minority Whip Hoyer. The Republican told the Democrat that he would need one hundred of their votes.

Coming out of the dispiriting caucus, Hoyer was stupefied to hear McCarthy’s request. “We got nothing out of this bill!” he snapped angrily. The minority whip said that the Democrats could provide at most twenty-five votes.

McCarthy replied that Hoyer could then call the president and be the one to inform him that the bill was going down in defeat. “The president agreed to this deal,” he reminded Hoyer.