Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (27 page)

In the meantime, his near anonymity extended even into his place within the South Carolina delegation. The
New York Times
had published a story
about the four freshmen. The reporter had interviewed each of them, including Duncan, but he was the only one without a quote.

Duncan made his peace with it. God’s divine wisdom would be revealed in its own time. During his junior year in high school, his father was dispatched from Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Duncans were living, to turn around a struggling mill in South Carolina. Jeff Duncan had been a big football star on his team. Now he found himself in the no-stoplight town of Ware Shoals, playing for a 1A team, in a graduating class of ninety. He’d hated his dad because of it—until he met a small-town girl named Melody.

She became his bride. South Carolina’s 3rd District became his home.

As for the Four Horsemen, Jeff Duncan saw himself as “
the draft horse
. The one who’s gonna plod along and be steady. I’m very convicted in what I believe. That’s how I want to be seen. I don’t want them to look up at the board to see how I voted.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Winning Message

On the morning
of April 7, 1965, the chairman of the Democratic Study Group, Congressman Frank Thompson of New Jersey, sent out a memo to all members of that now-defunct coalition of liberal Democrats. It urged them to “be on the House floor during the debate on HR 6675 to prevent delaying tactics of opponents, time-consuming quorum calls, and other dilatory maneuvers so that this important part of our Democratic legislative program can be passed by an overwhelming margin.”

Thompson was referring to the Mills bill, which would later be known as the Medicare bill. The American Medical Association had bitterly opposed any form of national health insurance since such a measure was first brought to the House floor by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Back then, the elder Dingell scoffed at the claims made by the physicians’ lobbying organization. “Socialized medicine, of course, is just a bugaboo,” the Detroit congressman said on a radio program in 1945. “It is a coined phrase, it is just a lot of medical bunk peddled by the physicians’ organization organized in Chicago and fighting the battle for the reactionaries within the medical profession.”

But the AMA succeeded in defeating Dingell Sr.’s early efforts to enact a national health insurance program. Now, in 1965, it aimed for a similar outcome with this new initiative. Early in the year, the AMA launched a $3–4 million nationwide advertising campaign—with airtime on 346 TV and 722 radio stations—in an effort to squash a preliminary version of the legislation. AMA president Donovan F. Ward condemned the bill as “a cruel hoax—a lure, not a cure, for the problems of the aged.”

The massive lobbying effort had the unintended effect of driving the process underground, into the lair of Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills, the wily Arkansas Democrat who in previous years had played a key role in sinking attempts to provide federally funded health care for the elderly. Following the enormous gains made by Democrats in the 1964 election, Mills now believed that President Lyndon Johnson had the votes and therefore elected to lead the parade rather than be trampled by it. With the help of future Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and behind closed doors, Mills tied House Resolution 6675 to that year’s Social Security amendments. It used payroll taxes to finance hospital insurance for senior citizens. It also provided 50 percent federal coverage for their health insurance and assisted the elderly poor through federal and state matching funds. This so-called three-layer cake came to the House floor on April 7, 1965, under a closed rule with no opportunity to amend the bill—meaning, it would be a fully baked cake or no cake at all.

The Speaker pro tempore who banged the gavel when Medicare passed the House on April 8, 1965, was thirty-eight-year-old John Dingell. President Johnson signed it into law on July 30, declaring, “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.” Three months later, the AMA announced that it would not boycott the new legislation.

Only thirteen Republicans supported the new entitlement in 1965. Then and later, Medicare was anathema to market-based conservative orthodoxy. But it would also prove to be immensely popular among senior citizens—who, more than any other demographic, reliably express their sentiments at the ballot box.

Unsurprisingly, then, the most predictable subplot of any electoral drama would soon involve Democrats using any and all weaponry to push Republicans off of their Medicare tightrope: in 1980 against candidate Reagan, in 1996 against Speaker Gingrich, in 2000 against candidate Bush, and in 2008 by Obama against candidate John McCain. It was a strategy of artful demagoguery that the Republican House candidates would themselves employ in 2010 against Obama’s health care bill by suggesting, repeatedly and inaccurately, that the legislation had cut Medicare benefits by
$500 billion
. The 2010 GOP nationwide
Medicare ad blitz was undoubtedly fruitful. In the 2006 midterms, the two parties split the elderly vote right down the middle. In 2010, seniors went for Republicans by a 21-point margin.

It became a Washington axiom: to tamper with Medicare, if only rhetorically, was to invite a politically lethal wave of “Mediscare.” And until the passage of Paul Ryan’s budget on April 15, 2011, Republicans had not only avoided revisiting Medicare reform but, in one notorious instance, had trampled on both conservative orthodoxy and House floor traditions, all in one fevered all-night melodrama.

That night in question was Saturday, November 22, 2003, when House Speaker Denny Hastert held the vote open from 3
A.M.
until nearly 6
A.M.
—longer than any vote in the recorded history of the House—in an attempt to secure sufficient votes to pass the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003. Since subsidizing prescription drugs for senior citizens amounted to a brand-new entitlement, Republicans were loath to support President Bush’s bill. Only after Arizona freshman Trent Franks was ushered into a Capitol conference room and handed a cell phone with Bush on the other end of the line, and named his price—to have a one-on-one conversation with the president about who the next Supreme Court justice would be—did
Franks switch his vote
to “yes” and Majority Leader Tom DeLay announce that the Republicans had prevailed. Immediately following the unprecedented marathon vote, Minority Leader Pelosi remarked bitterly to the press, “We won it fair and square. So they stole it by hook and crook.”

She would remember all of this.

The 26th District of western New York, which included the city of Erie, had been represented for the previous two years by Christopher Lee—a Republican who occasionally strayed from the party line. As a freshman, Lee had been one of the eight House Republicans whom Speaker Pelosi had convinced to vote for the Democrats’ energy bill in 2009, and at the end of his first term he also voted for John Dingell’s bipartisan food safety bill. But Lee’s infamy was to come on February 9, 2011, when the news blog Gawker published a photograph Lee had taken of himself, shirtless, and posted on Craigslist as a means of soliciting contact with a transsexual. Following the disclosure, Lee’s resignation from
the House was instantaneous, and a special election was scheduled for May 24, 2011.

Nobody gave the Democratic candidate, Erie County Clerk Kathy Hochul, the slightest chance to win. The district was perhaps the state’s most Republican, she did not even live within the district’s boundaries, and polls a month before the election had her down by 15 points. But when her Republican opponent, Jane Corwin, acknowledged that she would have voted for Paul Ryan’s budget with its controversial Medicare provision, the numbers began to change. The DCCC barraged the district with attack ads saying that Corwin “
supports a budget
that essentially ends Medicare.” Nearly every sentence Kathy Hochul uttered during the last month of the campaign began and ended with the word
Medicare.

The Democrat crushed Corwin by 10 points. Within the Republican conference, blame quickly focused on Corwin’s lackluster campaign and the meager support shown by the NRCC.
They always bungle special elections,
Republican members and staffers repeated incessantly.

The Democrats weren’t buying it. Here was the first test case of how voters reacted to the House Republican agenda. DCCC chairman Steve Israel knew that most of the GOP freshmen had won on an anti-Obama/Pelosi sentiment but were largely blank slates to their own constituents. Now Israel knew how to define them. In a caucus, he showed his fellow Democrats the very ads that the NRCC and conservative outside groups had run in 2010, accusing Israel’s colleagues of having voted to slash Medicare benefits.

“If I could, without violating copyright laws, I’d run the same damn ads against them!” he told them.

Nancy Pelosi and Steve Israel were in a mind-meld. Shortly after Kathy Hochul’s upset victory, the minority leader brazenly announced her party’s three top issues for the 2012 election:

“Medicare, Medicare, and Medicare!”

“I hope you get cancer!”
a woman hollered at Renee Ellmers at the conclusion of her town hall, as the North Carolina freshman was being escorted out by local sheriffs’ deputies.

“You want to kill Grandma!” another woman yelled at New York freshman Michael Grimm during a town hall in Staten Island.

At Cavalry Chapel
in Fort Lauderdale, Allen West stood onstage wearing a suit and yellow tie. Three minutes into his town hall presentation, the heckling began.

“I want to tell you this,” he said in a calm voice. “You’re not going to intimidate me.”

The pro-West attendees who made up almost the entire audience leaped to their feet and applauded. But when the cheering died down, a bald white man stood up and began to yell in protest and was promptly escorted out by security staff.

“There are people that don’t want to face the truth,” West observed. “We all”—referring to military veterans such as himself—“sacrifice, so that you can have the freedoms of liberty.”

More applause. Another heckler stood and began to shout. He, too, was escorted out of the building.

“Run someone against me,” said West, “and let me beat them, too.”

Another standing ovation.

A middle-aged woman was seated just behind West’s wife, Angela, near the front, and was videotaping the proceedings while periodically muttering “Lies!” Angela West turned around and glared.

“Oh, so I’m not allowed to speak?” she hooted.

A security official appeared and leaned over to the woman with the video camera. “Do you want to be escorted out?” he said.

“No, I’m not doing anything!” she replied.

“Do you want to be escorted out?” he repeated.

“No,” she said, and he left.

The freshman worked through his PowerPoint presentation about the national debt, America’s insufficient sea power (“If we continue on this path, the world’s greatest naval fleet will be flying under a Chinese flag”), and the unsustainable economic path that Congress now had to address. He then took questions. But unlike his previous town halls and unlike town halls being held by the other Republican freshmen, there was no open microphone for questioners. Instead, all questions had to be submitted in advance, in writing, with no opportunity for a follow-up. West figured that he could go through more questions this way, without long-winded pontification from the audience members. He also knew that as a military strategy, it had the effect of disarming the enemy.

“There’s a huge stack of Medicare questions,” the moderator observed. “The first is from Angel: ‘Please explain who will be affected by the Ryan budget plan.’ ”

West ticked off his answers: “If you’re fifty-five, no changes. If you’re fifty-four or younger, you’ll see a different kind of system . . . We have to move away from fee-for-service in Medicare, which lends itself to a lot of waste and fraud . . . We need to put American citizens in charge of their health care decisions . . .”

The woman behind West’s wife began to holler, “That’s a lie!” West stopped talking; the woman kept shouting. A cascade of booing ensued. West stared at the woman with an expression that looked almost pitying. His staffer, built like a linebacker, strode from the side of the stage to its very edge—standing there with legs spread as if to protect the congressman from an assault. A security guard grabbed the woman by her arm and pulled her out of her seat. A second woman, pro-West, stood up and clapped. “Stupid bitch!” screamed the woman with the video camera as she was dragged out of the town hall.

“I’ve kinda been shot at, almost blown up, used to jump out of airplanes at the middle of the night,” Allen West told the crowd at the conclusion of the night. “Takes a whole heckuva lot to scare me.”

Even as Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had settled on a narrative by which to define the Republicans—as a party that refused to ask sacrifices of billionaires and big oil companies while robbing the old and the poor of their Medicare and Medicaid—they had decided to ask for help in defining themselves. So in May
Pelosi called Roy Spence
, the Texan whose fiery “making-a-difference” presentation at the Democratic retreat in January had led Anthony Weiner to stalk out but had entranced everyone else.

“We need to get clarity in our message,” the minority leader told Spence. “We’ve got to find a way to get people in my caucus to know what it is we’re saying.”

He agreed with her. Reagan had boiled the Republican worldview down to a phrase fit for a bumper sticker: “Morning in America.” The Democrats . . . well, they liked to govern. They enjoyed getting in the weeds. But what was the unifying theme between a Sheila Jackson Lee and a Heath Shuler?

Spence saw the Democrats’ diversity as a strong point, given that America’s original motto was
E pluribus unum
(“out of many, one”). But ultimately, to move the republic forward, commonality had to trump diversity. “My deal is, forget what the American people think,” Spence told Pelosi. “What do
you
believe in?”