Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (22 page)

As the South Carolinians were discussing the matter, fellow freshman conservative Steve Southerland walked up. He, too, was nervous about siding against leadership. “Guys, I’ve got to find a quiet place to meditate and pray on this,” Southerland muttered.

“Why not right here?” suggested Scott.

And so the five
South Carolinians and the Florida freshman sat down together in a semicircle in the Capitol basement conference room. They bowed their heads. One after the next, each Republican murmured a prayer for their country and their vote. When it came Jeff Duncan’s turn, he recited from memory a scripture from the book of Nehemiah:
He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength . . . they shall mount up with wings like eagles
. . .

“You know what?” Tim Scott said when they were done. “God has spoken through my heart. I’m a ‘no.’ ”

The following day
, Jeff Duncan was summoned to the whip’s office.

Kevin McCarthy regarded the member of his freshman whip team with mild disappointment. “I just need to get a sense of where you are, and why you’re a ‘no,’ ” he said.

“The simple answer,” replied Duncan, “is there’s a guy across the building named Jim DeMint, and he’s the barometer by which I’m judged in South Carolina.”

He added, “The ‘no’ is a reflection of how my district feels.”

In walked another South Carolinian, Trey Gowdy. He sat next to Duncan. McCarthy asked Gowdy the same question.

“Well, because Jim DeMint is a constituent of mine,” Gowdy replied.

McCarthy laughed. “You guys rehearsing your answers together?” he asked.

It was another “continuing education” moment for the whip. The South Carolina freshmen were carving out a niche as the most radical deficit hawks in the House. Good to know—except that McCarthy needed votes.

The previous night during the conference, he had given his most impassioned speech since becoming majority whip. “Look at the headlines from this week,” he told his fellow Republicans. He rattled off a few that applauded Boehner’s negotiating strategy and that indicated political troubles for various Democrats. “Now, if we don’t stay together on this vote,” he warned them, “what will the headlines be the next day?

“In baseball, you don’t just have guys who swing for the fences,” he went on. “Sometimes you bunt. You do what you can to get on base. That’s how you get more runs. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s how we win.”

McCarthy was addressing all 242 Republicans, but his message was an appeal to Duncan and the eighty-six other freshmen. Instilling in them a sense of loyalty as well as patience in the political process required frequent trips to
the whip’s vault of metaphors and homilies
:

“Reagan made that famous speech, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ But it didn’t happen right then. It happened later, because of that speech. That was Reagan’s approach: ‘I didn’t give up yardage. I always gained yardage.’ ”

“Political clout, it’s like a block of ice. If you just sit on it, all it does is melt. But if you chop it up and put it in different glasses, you reach a lot more people.”

“When you’re coming around a corner, and you see your friend in a fight, what do you do? First, you jump in and you help beat up the other guy. And then when it’s all over you can ask, ‘Hey, what was that fight about?’ ”

When all else failed, McCarthy would squeeze every drop of significance he could manage from the movie
Braveheart.

He wanted to come off as approachable to the freshmen. He wanted them to hang out in the whip’s office, where the walls were covered with black-and-white photographs of the freshmen alongside more senior
members, joining them all in a legislative Valhalla. McCarthy himself was in none of those photographs. His ambitions, whatever they were, would remain sublimated.

McCarthy loved the freshmen
. Among their largely monochromatic ranks he could discern, if not exactly a Rainbow Coalition, then at least a varied bunch of conservatives full of little surprises. He loved the forthrightness of Jeff Duncan and the other South Carolinians, even if their intransigence on deficit-cutting was becoming a pain in the ass. He loved Blake Farenthold, who had met his wife while standing in line for tickets to a Jimmy Buffett concert. He loved Sean Duffy’s relentlessly bright-eyed fighting spirit even as the Democrats were bombarding his district with attack ads in hopes of taking back Dave Obey’s seat. He loved how Duffy and Trey Gowdy, a fellow ex-prosecutor, had formed a bromance and were practically inseparable.

He loved the class act that was silver-haired former U.S. attorney Pat Meehan of Pennsylvania—definite Senate material, McCarthy predicted. He loved Diane Black of Tennessee: at sixty older than the other freshman women, and as the wife of a major Aegis Sciences stakeholder, one of the wealthiest members in the House; but Black still drove a well-worn Oldsmobile and had no interest in media attention, only in getting work done. Michael Grimm of New York, on the other hand, clearly enjoyed the spotlight, with his
GQ
wardrobe and his at times intemperate comments to the press; but McCarthy loved the former Marine and FBI undercover agent’s Staten Island scrappiness, not to mention Grimm’s reverence for his late dad’s old roofer buddies, even if it meant that the whip couldn’t count on his vote for union-busting bills. He loved the rancher’s-daughter backstory of Kristi Noem, and he appreciated the attractive South Dakotan’s determination to avoid comparisons to Sarah Palin by focusing on the needs of her district. He loved the pure businessman’s vantage point of Mike Kelly, a former Hyundai car dealer, and the jarring soft-spokenness of mammoth former offensive lineman Jon Runyan. He loved the wiliness of physician and Army reservist Joe Heck, who worked all the other docs and veterans in the freshman class and thereby secured enough of their votes to become one of three freshmen on the Steering Committee.

One of McCarthy’s two family Labradors had recently died, and when the whip bought his two kids a new puppy, he noticed how the
remaining older dog became perky around the rambunctious new household member. McCarthy saw the freshmen having the same effect on many of the senior Republicans. They were emboldened now—they had numbers behind them, but the effect was greater than simply becoming the majority: it was as if they had rediscovered why they themselves had run for Congress, however many years ago.

Of course, their newly acquired feistiness was shaping up to be a big problem for the whip. But the compulsively sunny McCarthy chose to view this reality as a virtue. The foremost regrets in his life were the risks he hadn’t taken. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, or when the brave young protesters confronted the Chinese Red Army’s tanks on Tiananmen Square, why hadn’t young Kevin McCarthy bought an airplane ticket and flown to those countries to teach democracy? And how different would his life have been if he had chosen to serve in the military?

Kevin McCarthy loved how so many of the freshmen were risk-takers. He wasn’t going to quash their spirit, even if he had the power to do so.

In McCarthy’s view, there were two types of leaders. One was a thermometer, who could accurately discern the temperature in the room. The other type of leader was a thermostat, who could actually
change
the environment. Obama was a thermometer, a reader rather than a shaper of moods—except, of course, when he, Pelosi, and Reid were aggressively ramming a liberal agenda down Americans’ throats.

Or, to dispense with the temperature-taking metaphor: McCarthy believed that humans are all products of their experience. The whip viewed himself as an entrepreneur, a creator of wealth and jobs (though in fact he had spent nearly his entire adult life in politics). On the other hand, look at Obama’s experiences. Community organizer. Lawyer. Taking money from those who have and giving it to those who have not.
He was a wealth redistributor.
The man had no experience in how America prospers. And, thought McCarthy:
He focuses too much on being liked. Not enough on solving problems.

McCarthy himself invested considerable energy in being liked. He knew he had a problem with some of the senior members. Boehner’s old friends didn’t trust the upwardly mobile Californian—above all because of his alignment with the other two members of the Young Guns troika, Eric Cantor and Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. McCarthy
worked hard to gain the Speaker’s confidence. He met with him at least once a day—maintaining his grin while thinking,
How do I always end up sitting in the direction where he’s blowing his cigarette smoke?
—and they texted even more frequently. “
Touching gloves
,” Boehner called it. And in turn, McCarthy had arranged for the entire freshman class to meet weekly with the Speaker, so that he could get a sense of what they were thinking while the new arrivals could get a dose of the House CEO’s gruff wisecracking:

“Arrghh, your tie’s too short . . . What’s up with the hair? . . . Argghh, quit kissing up.”

McCarthy also organized getting-to-know-you dinners between freshman and senior members. To break the ice, the whip liked to throw out a question like “What’s the first concert you attended?” (One elder responded: “The Beach Boys.” A freshman gave the same reply—except that the Beach Boys he had seen contained almost none of the original members. McCarthy’s first concert had been Johnny Cash at the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield.) Or, “What was the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in college?” (One congresswoman admitted that she was nearly arrested for taking a lion from a petting zoo that was going out of business.)

During another dinner, McCarthy asked everyone, “What was the first job you had?” Jim Gerlach, a five-term congressman from Chester County, Pennsylvania, said his had been at a steel mill. Then Gerlach added, “You know, this is something we should convey better. The Democrats are labeling us as defenders of big corporations. But they’re wealthier than we are—we’re small businessmen. What I think we ought to do is go back to our districts and spend a day doing the first job we ever did.”

This is a project we’ve gotta do
, the whip thought.

“
I love chaos!
” McCarthy was heard to exclaim on the House floor earlier in the session. The whip tended not to get riled up about things. And so he didn’t lose his cool when, after delivering his let’s-get-people-on-base-and-score-more-runs speech at the Republican conference, fully fifty-four Republicans voted “no” on the second short-term Continuing Resolution—which would therefore have resulted in an embarrassing defeat for Speaker Boehner had several dozen Democrats
not bailed him out by voting for the CR. Instead, McCarthy
organized another dinner
.

His guests were the two dozen or so freshmen who served as assistant whips, and Texas congressman Sam Johnson, the eighty-year-old Vietnam veteran who had led the House in a moment of silence back in February. The venue was Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Johnson’s favorite.

For three hours, they listened to the elder congressman recount his days as a fighter pilot and his years of torment with fellow POWs in the Hanoi Hilton. One of the freshman whips, Adam Kinzinger, was himself an Air Force pilot whose interrogation-resistance training had largely been based on what Sam Johnson had actually withstood.

The subject of the CRs—or anything political—never once came up. Nonetheless, McCarthy had made his point.
It’s about being part of something bigger than yourself. It’s about looking after each other. It’s about unity.

But the unity concept wasn’t entirely taking hold.

Boehner was getting frustrated. He had been through this government shutdown stalemate before—in 1995 and 1996, during the Newt Gingrich years. If the American public tended to fault Democrats for loving government a little too much, they weren’t likely to blame Obama and Reid if it shut down. In the Speaker’s view, he was coming back with billions in federal spending reductions every time he emerged from a White House meeting. Then on the House floor his fellow Republicans would dismiss it as pocket change.

“I’ve been sticking my neck out—I’m getting a little tired of being abandoned,” Boehner complained about the GOP defections during a conference.

Raul Labrador
, the Idaho Tea Party freshman, practically lunged at the microphone. “I don’t think we’re abandoning you at all,” he said. “I feel like you’re abandoning us.”

From the back of the conference came a chorus of low boos. Still, Labrador’s show of disrespect to the House leader reflected a disgruntlement over Boehner’s seeming passivity that many conservative Republicans privately shared. Jeff Duncan wasn’t among them. He blamed his colleagues, not the Speaker. They should have refused to budge on the original demand to cut $100 billion. Instead, they had given Boehner a weak hand to play.

On the House floor
, chief deputy whip Peter Roskam buttonholed Duncan. “So do you just intend to blindly follow Jim DeMint?” he asked the freshman.

“Peter, that’s not fair,” said Duncan. “On this issue, DeMint’s right.”

Fissures were emerging throughout the Republican ranks. As frustration set in over the immovable Senate, on April Fool’s Day Eric Cantor brought to the floor the
Government Shutdown Prevention Act
. Its intent, according to Cantor, was that “the Senate has to act prior to the expiration of the C.R. If it does not act, H.R.1 becomes the law of the land.” In effect, the bill was proposing that the upper body be stripped of its legislative functions.

The bill was greeted with derision, and not just by liberals.
Kevin McCarthy approached
Blake Farenthold on the House floor to explain how the legislation was not as ridiculous as it was being portrayed.

The Texas freshman brushed him off. “I’m a lawyer, okay?” he snapped. “I studied this stuff. It’s unconstitutional.”

On April 8, Boehner proposed a short-term Continuing Resolution that would keep the government running for only another week and would entail another $10 billion in domestic cuts—but would also fund the Pentagon for an entire year. The gambit would force the Democrats either to accept the painful cuts or to vote against paying America’s warriors.