Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (41 page)

McCarthy knew, of course, that Obama’s complicity in the “Satan sandwich” accounted for some of Hoyer’s surly reaction. What he also knew but did not volunteer to Hoyer was that the Republicans’ own conference that morning had been far from celebratory. Boehner had assured his fellow Republicans that “we got ninety-eight percent of what I wanted from my original deal,” while Ryan had given an optimistic presentation of the details. But the cuts were far lower than what the conservatives had wanted, the caps were not permanent, and there was no mandatory balanced budget amendment.

McCarthy still thought he could get upwards of 150 Republican votes, though he had requested a cushion from Hoyer just in case. He wasn’t sweating this one quite like he had the previous week’s vote on the Boehner deal. On the other hand, there wasn’t any time for orchestrated persuasions of individual members. Today was their last shot.

Rob Andrews approached McCarthy on the floor. “We can get to one hundred,” he assured the whip. “We just have to work at it.”

“Madam Speaker,” Dennis Cardoza of California fumed when he saw Nancy Pelosi on the House floor, “the president of the United States is the worst negotiator who has ever owned that title! I mean, I didn’t know Millard Fillmore, but . . . he’s the worst. He doesn’t know how to do this.”

“Yeah,” said Pelosi, “but he doesn’t think so.”

Pelosi shared Cardoza’s disappointment. She thought the deal was a lousy one. Though she, Hoyer, and Biden had made a few calls to wavering members throughout the afternoon to tell them, “We might need you,” Pelosi had not only not told anyone how to vote, she had not told any of her colleagues how
she
would vote. Pelosi had been a team player throughout the whole saga. Recognizing that the negotiations might ultimately require including entitlement reform as a component, she had carefully modulated her language in caucuses from “no cuts to Medicare” to “no cuts to Medicare beneficiaries.” And she had resisted the temptation to say “I told you so” to Obama—who, back in December, had disagreed with the Speaker’s belief that they should raise the debt ceiling during that lame-duck session. The president’s belief had been that the Republicans would and should be equal partners in the debt ceiling discussion—implying, she thought, that he believed the Republicans would treat the matter in a reasonable fashion.

When the minority leader learned that day that McCarthy was requesting a hundred Democrats, Pelosi was beside herself. “These people come to the table, they want it all their way—then they can’t provide two hundred and eighteen?” she fumed to a colleague. “You can only play that game so long. Do it one time, and it’s the last time you do it.”

Except, as Nancy Pelosi well knew, they had done this in fact twice—the first being the Continuing Resolution vote back in April. Once again, they had gotten their way with Obama. And once again, they were demanding that the Democrats show their solidarity with the President by voting for a sugarcoated Satan sandwich.

And Pelosi knew that she would have to do so, once again.

All but holding her nose, Nancy Pelosi stood in the well of the House chamber on the late afternoon of Monday, August 1, 2011, and asked her colleagues on both sides of the aisle, “Why are we here?”

The minority leader asserted that it was because “all of us in this body care about our country, have decided that public service is a noble pursuit, and that we have come here to make the future better for future generations.” Pointing out that the Founding Fathers had created the Great Seal of the United States with the inscription
Novus Ordo Seclorum,
or “a new order for the centuries,” Pelosi went on, “So confident
were our Founders in their idea about generational responsibility, one to the next, that they were confident that our country, that what they were putting forth, would exist for the ages. For the ages. That was the challenge they gave us. That is the responsibility that we have.”

But then she asked, “Why are we here today? Why are we here today, within twenty-four hours of our nation going into default, after months of conversation about how we would address the debt ceiling? . . . [T]his has never happened before. We have never, never tied the hands of a president of the United States. We have never placed any doubt in the public markets as to whether this would happen.”

Pelosi cited a few virtues to the bill—namely, that it fulfilled America’s obligations to its creditors, protected entitlement benefits, and placed equal weight on defense and nondefense spending. And though she criticized the legislation for requiring “not one red cent from America’s wealthiest families,” the Democratic minority leader said that “I feel a responsibility” to vote for it.

She stared out to her fellow Democrats and said, with landmark equivocation: “I urge you to consider voting ‘yes,’ but I completely respect the hesitation that members have about this.” Then, in a bitter final shot at the opposition: “I hear that our Republican colleagues have said they got ninety-eight percent of what they wanted in the bill. I hope that their votes will reflect that.”

A few minutes later, at 6:27
P.M.
, Paul Ryan stood. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I move for a call of the House.”

The rest of the House members began to file in. Ryan walked toward the Democrats, looking for the opposing floor manager, Chris Van Hollen.

He shook Van Hollen’s hand and asked, “Are you voting for the bill?”

Van Hollen said, without enthusiasm, that he was.

A quorum was declared, and
a recorded vote
was demanded on the Budget Control Act of 2011. Almost immediately, Minority Leader Pelosi stuck her card in the voting slot and voted “aye”—a last dutiful waving of the pom-poms.

Kevin McCarthy stood beside the Republican whip table. He turned in one direction and then the next, intermittently looking up at the
electronic voting board. As he had expected, the Democrats were holding back their votes. The Republicans were voting in trickles, with slightly more “ayes” than “nos.”

Cantor grabbed him. “Barton’s a ‘no,’ ” the majority leader pointed out.

As the second-ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, Joe Barton was particularly influential. The whip moved briskly to the back of the chamber, where the Texans habitually congregated. He found Barton standing behind the last aisle.

“Why are you voting against it?” McCarthy asked, clearly vexed.

Barton said that the negotiators had taken out a passage that he had wanted. The whip protested that they hadn’t. They had already been through this in conference. Someone had shown Barton the passage that was still there. The Texan had ruefully acknowledged, “Dang it, now I gotta vote for it!”

But he hadn’t. McCarthy saw that he was wasting his time. He headed back to the whip table. The “ayes” were approaching 160 with 118 dissenters.

“It’s done,” McCarthy’s chief of staff, Tim Berry, said confidently. “We shouldn’t go around and break people.”

But McCarthy did not look particularly confident. His eyes darted around—to a member and then back to the board, member and board, a flicker of anxiety across that Californian composure . . . 180 to 131 . . .

From all the way across the chamber beside the eastern door there came a sudden uproar. Then a surge of applause that moved like an electromagnetic wave across the House of Representatives. McCarthy squinted.
If it’s the president,
he thought,
I doubt they’d be standing and clapping
. . .

It was Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. She had come to cast her vote.

Escorted by Pelosi, the sergeant at arms, and the House chaplain, Giffords stepped into the chamber. The congresswoman was sticklike and her long auburn hair had been cut short. But she waved vigorously and responded to the cheers with a broad smile.

McCarthy was agape. He clapped along with the rest. And with that wave of applause came a wave of “ayes” from both Democrats and Republicans.

Seemingly half of the congregation moved toward the frail figure as she held out her voting card, the one she had not used since January 7, and became the 251st House member to vote to raise the debt ceiling.

Jo Ann Emerson rushed toward the other side of the aisle to see her softball teammate. But the crowd was too dense—she worried that Gabby would be hurt. Emerson saw Diana DeGette, and the two women hugged.

She backed away, and found an empty seat next to John Dingell. Emerson kissed her old friend on the cheek.

“Isn’t it wonderful Gabby’s back?” she exclaimed, almost out of breath—while off to her left, John Boehner made his way to Giffords and with wet eyes threw his arms around her.

Dingell had celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday just three weeks earlier. As a matter of habit and prudence, he did not get too worked up about things (though he had certainly appreciated the birthday gifts from his staff: CDs of Chopin, the Red Army Chorus, the Detroit Symphony, the University of Michigan marching band, and Gilbert & Sullivan, along with Subway sandwiches and cake).

But yes, he acknowledged to his friend. He was glad to see the young lady back.

The Republican and Democrat sat together for several minutes—the one beaming unabashedly, the other gazing out into wherever it is that John Dingell gazes out into: some seam of history, perhaps, into which crises slip like dead leaves into an ever-churning river.

Jeff Duncan
walked down the front steps of the Capitol and headed on foot toward the Cannon Building. With him were fellow South Carolinians Mick Mulvaney and Trey Gowdy, along with Steve Southerland. It was getting close to eight in the evening, and the heat of the August sun had eased as the men walked languidly alongside each other toward their offices, where, all of a sudden, there was no more work to be done.

All of them had been “nos.” Duncan had not wished to be an obstructionist. He had gone over the numbers while Ryan went through the seven slides on the screen that morning in conference. Even using charitable estimations, Duncan calculated that under the new plan, America would still be running a $1.3 trillion deficit—while at the
same time ratcheting up the debt ceiling to $16.7 trillion. And in the meantime, no one could say exactly where all of these proposed spending cuts would be coming from.

Duncan had written down, underneath his calculations:
Have I reduced the size and scope of government?

He could not vote for it.

During the vote, after he had cast his “no,” Duncan approached Boehner. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “thank you for the effort. For fighting the good fight.”

They shook hands. “Duncan,” Boehner said simply as their eyes met. He did not call the South Carolinian “hard head” this time. That fact had already been established. Within weeks, the Heritage Action for America group would rank freshman Jeff Duncan as the most conservative of all 435 House members.

As he and his fellow “nos” walked to their offices, Mick Mulvaney muttered, “I wish we could have done more.”

Duncan responded that for freshmen, he thought they had done pretty well.

Now Jeff Duncan sat at his desk in Cannon 116. After tonight, Congress was in recess until September 7. Duncan’s ten-year-old son, Parker, was in town for a weeklong tourist camp for kids called the National Treasures Experience. The father figured that he might spend some of the rest of the week doing some touring himself—particularly of the Capitol, so as to gain a broader understanding of the architecture and the paintings, little facts he could pass on to visiting constituents when he showed them around the building. Just the other day he had discovered a stairway leading out of a closet door beside Steny Hoyer’s minority whip office. At such times, Duncan reminded himself that, impossible as it now seemed, he had only been in Washington for eight months.

Parker was staying at Duncan’s apartment, and the two were living like bachelor slobs off a diet of pizza and fried baloney sandwiches. They’d gone to a Washington Nationals baseball game in which the Nats beat the Mets in extra innings. They’d been to the Air and Space Museum twice. They’d gone to the National Mall and tossed the football.

But now, on this first night of August, they had one more thing to do. While sitting in his office with Parker that evening, the congressman
received an email informing him that Trent Franks of Arizona was on the floor for an hour-long special order to talk up the desirability of a balanced budget amendment. Because so many Republican members had already headed to the airport, Franks needed speakers. Would Duncan consider heading over to the Capitol?

Duncan grabbed his coat and his son and headed out the door.

He spoke for the first time on the House floor without benefit of notes. “What a great evening to talk about America living within its means,” Duncan began. He pointed out that legislation with language for a balanced budget amendment had now been sent over to the Senate. He talked about his days as a small business owner—how he set a budget every year based on projected revenue inflows, and “I couldn’t just hope that there was a money tree out in the backyard and continue spending money that I didn’t have.”

Duncan’s oratory was plain and not apt to be confused with that of Fisher Ames, or even Nancy Pelosi. The people who had elected him to represent the 3rd District of South Carolina expected no more of him than to say as he believed, that it was time “to require Washington to live within its means the way families and small businesses and large businesses have to do all across this great land.”

He closed, however, with something of a flourish, for Jeff Duncan anyway. First, he indulged in a bit of a boast—albeit a boast with cause. Referring to the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, he said, “I am proud that I stand with eighty-seven members of our freshman class that really helped, I think, leadership see that this was a vital component to this piece of legislation.” He added, “So I want to urge the American people to get behind this—to contact your senators, contact your House members.”

Then he added a personal note. “I brought my little boy, who is ten years old,” Duncan said. “He is sitting on the House floor with me today because I teach my children the value of not spending more than you can bring in. And they say: Dad, can we have that baseball? Can we have that item? I say: Son, we don’t have the money in our budget this week or this month to purchase that. But let me make plans so that we can purchase that in the future.