Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (16 page)

“
Transparency and openness
is a wonderful process,” Minority Whip Steny Hoyer wryly commented to a group of reporters after Boehner’s intentions for H.R.1 were announced. Nancy Pelosi and the previous Appropriations chairman, David Obey, had tried the open-rule approach shortly after taking power in 2007. Then the Republicans employed a series of parliamentary delay tactics on a Homeland Security appropriations bill, dragging what should have been a six-hour debate into four rancorous days. The Speaker and the chairman concluded from that experience that the Republicans had proved themselves unworthy of the privilege and thereupon shut down the amendment process. Even fellow Democrats who disapproved of the opposition party’s obfuscations found Pelosi and Obey’s remedy to be repressive. It meant, among other things, that the thirty-two Democratic freshmen from the class of 2008 had thus far been denied the fundamental legislative experience of offering an amendment.

They were going to get that opportunity now.

House staffers celebrated Valentine’s Day 2011 by spending the evening conjuring up spending amendments for their bosses to add to the Continuing Resolution, putting the ideas into legalese and marching them over to the House clerk’s office in the Capitol. By the end of the night, 403 of them had already been filed. There would be 583 amendments in all—228 of them authored by House Democrats.

Anthony Weiner had submitted seven amendments. Some of his colleagues had argued that the Democrats shouldn’t participate in the whole process. At best, they said, it was a sham, since the House Republicans’ proposed Continuing Resolution—with its draconian cuts in beloved programs like Head Start—would be dead on arrival in the Senate. At worst, the entire exercise was immoral. “Why buy into their construct?” Rosa DeLauro asked her colleagues. “Why put us in a situation where we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, where we’re having to cut from an education program to pay for a health program?”

Weiner was amazed that some Democrats didn’t get it.
You engage in the process precisely
because
none of this is gonna become law! You get to score points for free! Why can’t progressives own some of the waste-cutting turf, too?

Other Democrats seemed to be in denial altogether, preferring to believe that this whole program-slashing Republican orgy was
Boehner’s way of indulging the freshmen until the grown-ups declared an end to playtime and tucked them into bed. Norm Dicks, who was now the Democrats’ ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, had told Weiner, “Let’s just get to the end of this, and when we get into conference we’ll work all of this out.” Weiner thought:
What part of Wonderland are you living in? You’ve got the same blind spot the Obama people do! These people really do want to slash all this stuff we care about!

One of Weiner’s amendments would restore $300 million to the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program that the CR had cut; it would accomplish this by reducing NASA’s budget by the same amount. The aspiring mayor of New York saw this as a twofer. He could ingratiate himself with the law enforcement community while daring Republicans to vote against funding the police.

One of the Democrats’ best strategic thinkers, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, warned Weiner that the opposite could occur. “You’re giving Republicans a chance to clean up their record,” Van Hollen said. “They can vote for your amendment and then say, ‘See? We’re not cutting programs for cops.’ ”

Pelosi was also concerned. She had been discouraging any amendments that might muddy the waters of the Democrats’ message—which, in her view, was:
The American people want us to be talking about jobs. And instead, the Republicans are throwing firemen and policemen out of work!
The minority leader wanted every speaker to hammer home that argument—or at the very least, to not dilute it.

Weiner decided to file the amendment anyway. It went to the floor at 10:25 in the evening on Tuesday, February 15. He couldn’t resist a jab at the Republicans as he introduced the amendment. “
What are we doing
here?” he said. “We’re figuring out which diminished amount we’re going to take to restore another diminished amount. This bill [H.R.1] isn’t going to become law! The president today said that he is going to veto this bill—as he should. It slashes funding on so many important things to our communities. I bet you most of the authors of the bill are praying that he vetoes this bill.

“But the fact is, we’re in this game,” Weiner said. And after extolling the COPS program, he concluded by saying, “In a way, I’m playing the game too . . . So I hope you support the Weiner amendment by taking
from Mars and putting it in the streets of your district. I think it’s late. Let’s fold up the rest of the bill. Let’s go back. Let’s have some bipartisan discussion, and let’s try to figure out how to do this in a way that the President won’t veto it.”

Minority leader Nancy
Pelosi was watching the tally board
as the members voted. Only when Weiner’s amendment crossed the 218 threshold and its victory was assured did she vote for it as well.

Another one of Weiner’s amendments sought to strip federal funds from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a think tank that was set up to resolve international conflict. Whenever he drove to the morose-looking State Department building to pick up his wife, Huma, from work, he would gaze at USIP’s gleaming headquarters across the street and wonder where the hell they got their money. It turned out that the late, great earmarking stalwart, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, had created the institute with a $100 million earmark. Weiner found two Republican cosponsors—one of them Chip Cravaack, a Minnesota Tea Party freshman who had beaten eighteen-term Democrat James Oberstar—and rigorously defended the amendment on the House floor against the protestations of fellow Democrats.

When the vote was over and Weiner had won again, Rosa DeLauro threw up her hands in disgust and snapped, “Give me a break, Anthony!”

Jeff Duncan also wanted
a piece of the action. He sent his legislative director, Joshua Gross, on a mission to find some program to cut so that he could introduce an amendment. Gross came up with a target that for years had been in the sights of the Heritage Foundation, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and the Christian Coalition: the Legal Services Corporation, which provides free legal services to the poor at a cost of $324 million to the American taxpayer.

The legislative director described the LSC’s function to his boss, as well as the long-standing conservative claim that the organization was a front for left-wing causes. “That’s low-hanging fruit as far as I’m concerned,” Duncan said.

Gross wrote a draft of the amendment and sent it over to the legislative counsel to obtain the proper wording. At around nine in the evening on Tuesday the fifteenth, Duncan was back at his apartment, wearing
his pajamas and writing on his iPad, when an email from Kevin McCarthy’s whip office came over alerting him to the fact that they would be getting to his amendment later that evening. He put on his clothes and hustled over to the Capitol.

There were about ten amendments ahead of his. Duncan took a seat on what in recent years had become the customary Republican side of the floor. For nearly two hours, he sat and listened to the debate. Weiner’s COPS amendment was pretty sly, he had to admit. Otherwise, it amazed Duncan how much whining was going on from the other side of the chamber.
They don’t want to cut anything,
he thought.

His turn came up at 11:27
P.M.
Duncan began his speech, but the Republican floor manager, Tom Price, cut him off. “Say, ‘I have an amendment at the desk,’ ” he murmured discreetly.

“Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk,” the freshman began again. He went on, “Folks, let me remind you that we have a trillion-and-a-half-dollar deficit spending and we have $14 trillion in debt,” he said. “We can’t afford to keep paying for liberal trial lawyer bailouts like the LSC.” He quoted from a half-dozen conservative sources as to the program’s dubious worth, declared this proposed spending cut “an easy one for us to deal with,” and then sat down.

Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, stood in opposition to Duncan’s amendment. “I don’t think people who go to Legal Services because they can’t afford an attorney and desperately want to stay in their home feel like they are giving some sort of bailout to trial lawyers,” Schiff shot back. He added, “I don’t think it is a left-wing cause when you have veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan who need mental health services and need the help of counsel to get services they are entitled to.”

Three other members—one of them Republican Frank Wolf—spoke out against Duncan’s amendment. He half-listened to them, thinking:
Any time they don’t want to cut spending, they try to justify what the program does.

Another freshman, Paul Broun of Georgia, leaned over to Duncan. “Do you want to rebut them on anything?” he asked hopefully.

“They’re not affecting the vote anyway,” Duncan demurred. “Besides, I’m about out of time.”

Broun kept pushing. “What we could do,” he said, “is I can stand up and ask to change one word in the amendment. Then the chair would give me time to talk, and I could yield that time to you.”

Duncan pondered it for a bit.

“I’ve said what I needed to say,” he told his colleague.

Because the hour was late and there were still eight more amendments to consider that evening, the roll call vote on Jeff Duncan’s amendment to the Continuing Resolution was postponed until the next day. The House adjourned just after one in the morning. Before going to bed, Josh Gross sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to every House member from both parties urging them to vote for Duncan’s LSC-defunding amendment.

The next day Duncan felt punchy from lack of sleep but otherwise optimistic. Colleagues—including a Democrat, Corrine Brown from Florida—were contacting him and voicing their support. He began to feel less sanguine after the first roll call votes. Four of the eight spending-reduction amendments before his went down in defeat. Duncan was surprised. Why were Republicans not seizing every opportunity to cut federal spending?

The clerk then called out the Duncan amendment. He put his voting card in the slot. Then he looked up at the board to see how the others would vote.

Two of the other South Carolinians, Trey Gowdy and Mick Mulvaney, sidled up to him. “Hey, I’m not sure they wrote your bill right,” one of them said to Duncan. Apparently the legislative counsel had failed to include the boilerplate line at the end of his amendment that the amount cut from the LSC would be transferred to the spending reduction account. Duncan winced.

The letter
N
appeared on the board next to Hal Rogers. That did it. Duncan had heard that upwards of thirty Republicans tended to vote as the Appropriations chairman did. Supposedly the LSC did a lot of business in Rogers’s Kentucky district.

Jeff Duncan’s amendment was defeated, 171–259, with 68 Republicans siding against him. Duncan still felt good about joining the government-slashing fray. The dissenters could feel free to justify their no vote. He knew why
he
was here.

Blake Farenthold had been
one of the sixty-eight Republicans who voted against Duncan’s amendment. As a former lawyer, he knew that the LSC could be very antibusiness. But Farenthold represented a very poor district. People there needed legal services.

This constituted his fundamental dilemma. On the one hand, his constituents in Texas’s 27th District—many of whom had stayed home for the 2010 midterms but might well vote during the presidential election year of 2012—would be upset if he voted to cut this sort of stuff. And in fact protesters had gathered outside his district office in the border town of Brownsville after learning that H.R.1 would cut two hundred thousand low-income children from the rolls of the Head Start educational program.

On the other hand, the less he cut, the more wrath he would incur from the Tea Party groups who had come out for him in force the previous November. Two Corpus Christi Tea Party activists were already savaging him on his Facebook page. As he saw it, “I could morph into Michele Bachmann and I wouldn’t make them happy.”

There was no solution in sight—at least not until the Republican-dominated Texas state legislature redrew the map of his district.

Farenthold had actually voted against several spending cuts. Some of these programs—well, he knew nothing in the least about them. Didn’t they deserve a fair hearing? The Appropriators who had come up with the Continuing Resolution at least knew about the programs they were cutting. Could the members regurgitating all these amendments say the same thing? You needed at least a half hour on each of these 583 amendments just to hear the pros and cons. Like Weiner’s Institute of Peace defunding amendment: some military people had come by Farenthold’s office and lobbied him on behalf of that one. It turned out that the outfit wasn’t a tree-huggers club, but instead an organization that supported the U.S. military mission in the Middle East. Apparently a number of the Republicans hadn’t been made aware of that. Instead, it seemed to Farenthold that a mentality had developed on the floor among his colleagues:
Fuck ’em! Let’s cut it!

He’d meant to offer an amendment. Defunding something or other . . . But he had no one in his office to jump on the matter. Farenthold didn’t have a legislative director—it had sounded to him like
a middle management job. Nor did he see himself needing a full-time press person. He’d been an attorney and a radio talk show host, after all. No one had to coach him on how to communicate. So he figured he would save the taxpayer some money—though it was a bit crazy-making in mid-January, when the Republicans repealed Obamacare on the House floor and more than one thousand callers besieged the office phone lines to protest Farenthold’s vote. Because of the streamlined staff, the phones rang incessantly, and suddenly the Corpus Christi Republican was living out his anxiety dream from several months ago.