Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (12 page)

“Look at the person to your left, and then to your right,” Greenberg intoned. “One of them is likely to be gone after 2010.”

To many of the members, Greenberg’s numbers amounted to a
strong argument for going slow and sticking with the mainstream. But this was not the Speaker’s way. She was just getting started.

No one in the House knew how to get to 218 votes better than Nancy Pelosi. As the House Democrats’ leader and as their preeminent fund-raiser, she doled out both money and committee assignments, and she was not the least bit shy about reminding recipients of her largesse whenever she needed a vote. But she also possessed an acute understanding of the Noah’s Ark that was the House Democratic caucus.

The progressives uniformly disliked the fiscally conservative Blue Dog coalition. “I’m tired of bending over for you Blue Dogs!” John Tierney of Massachusetts had snapped at Oklahoman Dan Boren during one caucus. Another liberal, Pete Stark of California, had referred to them as
“brain dead,”
while Henry Waxman mused to a reporter that the loss of a few Blue Dogs might purify the caucus. (At Pelosi’s behest, he placed a call to an enraged Allen Boyd and assured the Florida Blue Dog that his words had been taken out of context.)

Then there was Sanford Bishop of Georgia, a Blue Dog but also a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which had brawled with the Blue Dogs over welfare reform in the mid-1990s. The CBC was thoroughly progressive, but with particular causes—such as the
Pigford
discrimination lawsuit, brought by black farmers—in which the rest of the Democratic caucus had little investment. Their insistence on standing by William Jefferson of Louisiana (after federal authorities found $90,000 in his freezer) and Charles Rangel (after the Ways and Means chairman failed to declare to the IRS some property that he owned in the Dominican Republican) gave the House Democrats, and their leader, considerable heartburn.

In short, the House Democrats were cursed by diversity. The devoutly Catholic Speaker at times sought to unify them by reminding them of Jesus Christ’s admonition to his disciples during the Last Supper: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

If necessary, Nancy Pelosi would wash her disciples’ feet—at least until she got to 218.

Never was her relentlessness more apparent than on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Pelosi viewed energy as “my signature issue.”
Her highest-end donors were ardent environmentalists; she had promised them that the Democrats would address climate change, and she aimed to deliver. Shortly after assuming the Speakership in January 2007, Pelosi paid a visit to the Bush White House to discuss a bill that would promote fuel and home energy efficiency. Bush’s aides found it telling that the Speaker had not brought Energy and Commerce chairman John Dingell with her. Eyebrows were also raised when Pelosi formed a Select Committee on Global Warming and installed liberal Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey as its chairman. Dingell and his nemesis on Energy and Commerce, Henry Waxman, didn’t agree on much, but they both saw the new committee as a threat to theirs and demanded that Pelosi strip it of legislative authority.

On the latter she acquiesced. But her thumbs-on management of energy legislation irked Dingell, who one day snapped to Pelosi, “Nancy, maybe you shouldn’t be Speaker. Maybe you should be chairman of Energy and Commerce instead.”

Pelosi did the next best thing: she allowed her friend Waxman to challenge Big John’s chairmanship. When Waxman won, she and her “signature” energy bill were off to the races.

Without consulting with anyone else on her leadership team, Speaker Pelosi announced in February that the House would proceed with the bill, which would include a provision that capped greenhouse gas emissions. Blue Dog Democrats protested that their constituents were concerned about the economy, not climate change. One of the most prominent Blue Dogs, Tennessee’s John Tanner, collared Majority Leader Hoyer on the House floor and, with a sweeping wave of his arm to encompass some of the more electorally vulnerable newcomers, said, “Steny! You are
killing
these freshmen! They’re not gonna come back after this!”

Hoyer agreed with Tanner’s sentiment but knew Pelosi’s determination from painful experience. For her part, the Speaker responded that at bottom, the bill was about “four things: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”

Obama’s then–chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was among the unconvinced. He begged Pelosi not to introduce energy legislation before health care, which would by itself be a heavy political lift.

Pelosi replied, “I’ve got the votes.”

Meaning: she would
find
the votes, eventually. After the Energy and
Commerce Committee produced a “discussion draft” of the energy legislation in late March, Democratic chief deputy whip Diana DeGette’s office tallied the bill’s supporters as a meager eighty Democrats and no Republicans. Pelosi continued to work her caucus, cutting deals that would thread the needle between the opposing concerns of the Sierra Club and more conservative Democrats. The number moved into triple digits. Pelosi kept pressing her colleagues. When the whip count exceeded two hundred, Pelosi scheduled a vote on the House floor for June 26, 2009.

The day before the vote, Obama threw a Hawaii-themed congressional picnic on the White House lawn. One by one, undecided Democrats with their leis and their cocktails were escorted to the Oval Office by White House legislative liaisons to be subjected to the president’s persuasions. But Obama was unable to turn anyone. A whip staffer approached DeGette and told her that Pelosi was going to make a final decision at ten that evening on whether to bring the energy bill to the floor.

“By my count we’ve got 208, maybe 209,” sighed the chief deputy whip. “It’s her decision, but we don’t have the votes.”

What the Speaker had not told DeGette, or apparently anyone else, was that Pelosi on her own had quietly met with a group of moderate Republicans and had procured eight of their votes. The bill went to the House floor on June 26, passing by a vote of 219 to 212.

It was a remarkable victory—but for whom? When the final tally was announced by the House clerk, several Republicans began chanting, “BTU! BTU! BTU!”—referring to the controversial 1993 bill that taxed the heat content of fuels, or BTUs, and which House Democrats had passed at the behest of President Bill Clinton. That bill had subsequently died in the Senate, serving only as a political millstone for the Democrats during the 1994 midterms. Numerous colleagues had pled with Pelosi not to “BTU” them with an easily demagogued cap-and-trade bill that stood little chance of passage in the upper body.

Pelosi had not budged. Promoting clean energy and reducing greenhouse gases were fundamental progressive values, she would remind them. This is why they were here, to do big and difficult things. If not now, then when? Perhaps their actions would spur the Senate
to action—but regardless, the House couldn’t wait around to see what their colleagues on the other side of the building would do. They had to move the agenda.

And so they did, after which Nancy Pelosi’s “signature issue” was dead on arrival in the Senate. Meanwhile, 467,000 Americans lost their jobs during the month of June 2009.
The unemployment figure
now stood at 9.5 percent.

And between the $780 billion stimulus and the “cap-and-tax bill,” the suddenly energized Republicans had arrived at a winning narrative:
The Democrats don’t care about jobs. They just want to shove a liberal, over-regulatory, Big Government agenda down your throats.

Next up: the health care bill. Or, as Republican pollster Frank Luntz helpfully renamed it after first hearing the term from a middle-aged St. Louis woman in one of his focus groups: “the government takeover of our health care system.”

On the evening of January 19, 2010, the
House Democrats caucused
at the Capitol Visitor Center. The atmosphere bordered on riotous. It had just been announced that in Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown had won the Senate seat previously held by the late Ted Kennedy—effectively ensuring that the Senate Democrats would no longer have the sixty votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. This meant, among other things, that the health care bill that the House Democrats had sent over to the Senate stood no chance of passage in the upper body. Many in the room believed that the Affordable Health Care Act, with its divisive provision of a “public option,” or government-run health insurance program that would compete with private insurance companies, was dead—or that it should be dead.

Speaker Pelosi quieted the members. “We came here to pass a health care law that will really change this country,” she said. “And we’re not blinking.” Pelosi promised them that she would fight to keep the public option in the health care bill. Then she left the caucus to meet with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Even some of the progressives in the caucus were astonished by her words. One of them was Massachusetts Congressman Mike Capuano, who represented Cambridge, but also the working-class city of Chelsea,
with a poverty rate exceeding 20 percent. Capuano kept on his office wall a large framed photograph of a meaty-handed Italian-American from his district. He had recently come off the campaign trail in a failed bid to be the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat that Scott Brown had just won. “They’re telling us, ‘Slow down,’ ” Capuano warned his colleagues that evening. “They don’t trust Washington. They don’t understand what we’re doing here. And this is a message they’ve sent us, and we’d better pay attention to it.”

Gene Taylor, a Blue Dog from Mississippi, was even more emotional. He stood before the microphone and told the House Democrats about how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Taylor and his son were touring the devastation by boat when they happened upon a man who refused to believe that his home had been destroyed. “They were telling him, ‘Your house is gone,’ ” said Taylor. “And he kept saying, ‘No, no, it’s still there, you just can’t see it from the water.’ He was in denial!

“And if the Speaker were still here,” Taylor declared sharply, “I would tell her: ‘Madam Speaker, face the facts! We haven’t listened to the people—and now our House is gone!’ ”

The moment represented an astonishing turnaround from the year before, when the House Republicans seemed paralyzed by the new president’s ability to find support from among private insurers, the American Medical Association, and doctors for a comprehensive solution to the nation’s health care problems. But by August 2009, the health care debate had ceased to be an earnest disagreement over policy. It was now an ugly snarl of fear, loathing, and cynicism blaring through a Tea Party megaphone.

Pelosi’s task was a hopeless one. The progressives wanted universal coverage. The Blue Dogs wanted lower health care costs. Rural members wanted higher Medicare reimbursement rates for rural hospitals. Bart Stupak of Michigan wanted a stipulation that none of the federal funds would be used to pay for abortion. President Obama wanted at least one Republican vote from the Senate.

And these were only the major demands. Pelosi had countless others to contend with. Her most poignant dissenter was John Tanner. The Blue Dogs’ cofounder had served with Pelosi for over two decades and was on good terms with her. During the health care debate, when Tanner and others were hosting town halls that degenerated into screaming
matches, he dropped by the Speaker’s office to share with her a theory he had been nurturing.

“There’s a lot of anger, but people don’t know what they’re angry about,” he told her. “You know, from the end of the Vietnam War all the way up to 9/11, for the most part everyone was fat, dumb, and happy. Then 9/11 happened and shattered all that. People became scared and anxious and out of control. They’d go to Wal-Mart and realize that everything they’ve been buying says ‘Made in China.’ They see the complete ineptitude of the federal government during Hurricane Katrina. They see some guy [investment advisor Bernie Madoff] within the shadow of the SEC run a $50 billion scam—and who the hell is watching out for
their
$10,000 IRA? And then the banks melt down, the auto industry is taken over, and we pass this huge stimulus. All of this builds up and they’re saying, ‘What the hell can
I
possibly do about a $14 trillion national debt?’

“But then it gets to health care,” Tanner said. “And they’re saying: ‘That’s me. That’s
mine.
’ It’s the first big issue that’s personalized. And that’s why we’re getting all this pent-up frustration and anger. Because when you explain the bill to ’em, they say, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.’ But it doesn’t matter. All their anger is focused on this, because it’s personal.

“Madam Speaker, what you need to do is break the bill down. Have a bill that covers preexisting conditions. Pass that—or make the Republicans vote against it—and then move onto another part. But you do this omnibus approach, they won’t know what the hell’s in it. And they’ll keep yelling at it.”

Pelosi had been listening politely, until now. Crisply she informed John Tanner that the health care bill would stay big—and that it would pass.