Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (35 page)

Farenthold smiled, looked at his feet, shrugged. “Bring me a solution,” he said.

The city manager said that he would endeavor to do so, smiled bravely, and sat down.

The radio talk show atmosphere quickly resumed as audience members decried the big spenders in Washington. “As much as I hate to say it,” Blake Farenthold lamented, “what I’m coming to realize is that all we’re really able to do is put the brakes on. Imagine going real fast in a Flintstones car, and my heel is out there. I went to Washington to change the world, and all I can do is put my heel out.”

Pacing, the cherubic congressman awkwardly waved an arm and said, “You’ve got the Michele Bachmanns and that group out there saying, ‘Cut, cut, cut.’ And another group out there saying, ‘We can’t do that, or we’ll never get elected.’ ”

“But you
will
get elected!” someone in the audience protested.

“That’s the tension in the Republican Party right now,” Farenthold said helplessly. “The government was built on compromising. And it’s frustrating as hell.”

“But you didn’t get elected to compromise!”

“But you have to, if you want to get things done,” Farenthold mumbled. He sighed. “It’s a delicate tightrope.”

“The only time anyone compromises is when the Democrats want something!”

Farenthold nodded vigorously. “I said this during the campaign, and I’ll stand by it today,” he declared. “One of the problems the Republican Party has had is that we’re too fast to compromise. You can compromise on the little stuff, but you can’t compromise on your core principles.”

Almost to himself, he murmured, “I worry about it every hour of every day.”

“We’ve got an idiot in the White House with no experience who creates czars,” growled a man who introduced himself as Old Weird Pete and happened to be the city’s mayor.

“What part of ‘illegal’ do they not understand?” demanded a retiree. “Illegal aliens are taking a lot out of our budget, and we can’t afford it. They need to get ’em out of here!”

“If you want to get rid of some of the waste and fraud and abuse, get rid of foreign aid!” the mayor chipped in.

An elderly woman said in a slow, grave voice, “I hope y’all are keeping a list of what that man Obama does every day to harm our country and to take away our freedoms, so that when we
do
get control of our government, hopefully everything that this man has done will be undone.”

Farenthold nodded compliantly and gestured to another questioner. But the woman was not finished. “Also, I’m concerned about our national security,” she said, “and these rockets that are coming over. Someone is practicing.”

She turned to the others for validation. “Now, we saw the one from
California. But there have been others—my pastor and some other gentlemen saw something heading real low over Rockport. And San Antonio and Austin—what if it wipes out that population? Can you please find out what’s going on?”

Farenthold licked his lips. Choosing his words carefully, he replied, “I’m just gonna tell you the sense that I get. And this isn’t the result of any classified briefing that I get. I think our enemies are sensing weakness at the highest level of our government and are flexing their muscles right now. ”

He speculated that with all the current unrest in the Middle East, “the Muslim Brotherhood or some other organization that doesn’t like us sees this as an opportunity to do something when we’re unwilling to respond.”

Looking at his watch, Blake Farenthold added, “We’ve only got five minutes left”—referring to the Q&A, not America as a whole.

Jim Gray lingered for a few minutes after the event broke up and Farenthold departed to another “Coffee with Your Congressman” event elsewhere in the district. The Ingleside city manager acknowledged that he was a steadfast Republican, and that he and the town’s eight thousand voters “may have swung Blake’s election.” At the same time, Gray admitted that the freshman’s predecessor Ortiz—a fourteen-term incumbent with considerable seniority on both the Armed Services and Transportation and Infrastructure committees—had been quite helpful to Ingleside in securing millions of dollars in road construction and economic development grants.

“Ortiz was a ranking member of Congress,” Gray observed. “If he goes to deal with a government agency, something happens.”

Sighing, he added, “When Blake goes . . . well, I’m sorry, but . . .”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Hostage

After a first legislative session more productive than any that would follow it,
the spring 1790 session
of the
First Federal Congress
became mired in the singular topic of how to secure the nation’s financial credit. At the time, the national debt amounted to $54.1 million. In addition, the individual states owed a combined $25 million to their creditors. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton brought to Congress a detailed plan for how to reorganize the debts. Some elements, such as paying back foreign creditors in full, attracted no controversy. More worrisome to several legislators was Hamilton’s stipulation that America commit to paying interest on its debts. But the secretary’s provision that the federal government would assume all of the debts incurred by the individual states immediately provoked outrage, particularly from southerners who rebelled against the very concepts of a national bank, indebtedness to a centralized government, and commingling of state and federal monies.

As the Hamilton report prepared to hit the House floor for debate on January 28, 1790, Fisher Ames of Massachusetts immediately moved for a postponement, so that members could have more time to absorb its contents. For Ames himself, the matter was simple. An assumption of state debts would buttress the young federal government—and, frankly, the 1st District of Massachusetts needed the bailout from its $5 million in debts incurred during the Revolutionary War. Many of his constituents did not side with him. They feared high land taxes, and investors doubted the favorability of the repayment terms. Others—and perhaps Ames was among them—were hopeful that after all accounts were set to balance, the state of Massachusetts might wind up in the position of creditor. Regardless, as Ames wrote a friend,
“In any country, a public debt absolutely afloat will produce agitation. How necessary then for us to act firmly and justly!”

The devil was not just in the details, however. The thunderous Georgia congressman James Jackson predicted that a permanent national debt would “settle upon our posterity a burden which they can neither bear nor relieve themselves from.” Jackson’s sentiments had the effect of causing members to revisit the largeness of the debt itself. But Ames, a staunch advocate of property rights, argued that if such debts were not viewed and thereby honored as public contracts, then neither were the people’s other social compacts guaranteed.

James Madison then weighed in with a proposal that would discriminate in financial terms favorable to America’s original creditors. Ames and Madison, both Federalists, had now become foes, the former arguing that the latter’s plan would “rob on the highway to exercise charity.” Ames’s side prevailed, but the greater debate would be over assumption of state debts. Ames pointed out that the ammunition used at the Battle of Bunker Hill had been paid for by the state of Massachusetts but was, by any reasonable standard, a federal expenditure. Madison countered that it was unwise for the United States to assume an additional $25 million in state debts that it might not have the means to repay. Madison also feared that under assumption, his state of Virginia would pay more than it received.

From January through May, the matter of the national debt consumed all legislative oxygen. (The exception involved brief consideration of a Quaker antislavery petition, which touched off new salvos from states’ rights advocates and had the effect of further dividing the North and South on the debt issue.) Ames and Madison became opposing legislative gladiators. The former fell back on the patriotic call to pay off war debts. The latter took refuge in the Anti-Federalist suspicion that certain states were likely to be treated unjustly. The public grew restless and creditors even more so, yet the impasse carried on into June with no resolution in sight.

Then a new wrinkle developed. The Pennsylvania delegation, a swing bloc, declared their wishes that the federal government’s temporary residence be placed in Philadelphia. In return, the Pennsylvanians would vote to defeat assumption of state debts. Secretary Hamilton caught wind of the gambit and offered the Pennsylvanians the
permanent
residence in exchange for assumption votes. When the New York delegation refused to accept Philadelphia as the new seat of government and threatened to pull
their
support for assumption, Alexander Hamilton then turned to Virginia to determine the delegation’s price.

Their price was the permanent residence for the federal government, on the banks of the Potomac River.

The Pennsylvanians agreed to go along, in return for hosting the temporary residence in Philadelphia.

Ames relented, and the Massachusetts congressman got assumption of state debts out of the bargain. Still, he wrote to a friend after the deal was struck, “I despise politics, when I think of this office.”

Kevin McCarthy began each week in the late spring and early summer of 2011 by leading a group of his Republican colleagues on a field trip.

They would pile into a Capitol police van and drive a couple of miles west of the Capitol, to an unmarked ten-story glass building next door to a Five Guys Burgers & Fries restaurant. Since 1999, the building had been under lease by the Department of the Treasury’s U.S. Mint, though in 2002 an inspector general’s report had concluded that the space was excessive for the mint’s needs. At present the building housed the
Bureau of the Public Debt
—which is why McCarthy liked to tell people that the building was located in Chinatown, though technically the office was a few blocks north of that neighborhood.

The congressmen would pile out of the van, enter the lobby, and take an elevator up to a boardroom where they would sit through a PowerPoint presentation explaining how the bureau manages the public debt. Then they would stand behind a window and observe the sterile, emotionless spectacle of federal traders auctioning off America’s debt by selling Treasury bills and U.S. savings bonds to foreign countries. As the bidding began, the multidigit numbers would crawl across the monitors, marking billions of new debt. The congressmen would be rendered speechless, as if bearing witness to a state-sponsored execution.

“So which countries is America invested in?” McCarthy asked at one point.

“None,” was the answer. “We don’t invest anymore.”

The whip could see the impression that these field trips had,
particularly on the freshmen. The sensorial enhancement of actually seeing America sell itself to China, Japan, and other countries made the subject of the debt less of an abstraction to them. They could now go back to their town halls and declare,
I care so much about this issue that I actually went to the building where we sell off our debt to the Chinese—and get this, folks: it’s in Chinatown
. . . And after these field trips, they began to ask more questions.

And this was a good and necessary thing, since Kevin McCarthy knew something that many of these freshmen apparently did not—which was that Congress would ultimately need to raise the debt ceiling by August 2, so that the country could pay its bills and maintain its AAA credit rating. By the late spring of 2011, most of the eighty-seven freshmen and many of the more senior conservative House members were not of a mind to raise the ceiling, regardless of the consequences. McCarthy was working to change this.

During orientation last November, pollster Frank Luntz was doing a presentation in front of an audience of nearly all the freshmen. “How many of you are going to vote to raise the debt ceiling?” Luntz asked.

Four hands went up. “How many of you are going to vote against it?” he asked.

All of the others raised their hands. Luntz, whose expertise lay in messaging rather than policy, replied, “Good for you, because your base is going to kill you if you vote to raise the debt ceiling.”

When Luntz said this, he noticed McCarthy making an unpleasant face. Luntz didn’t understand why at the time. The pollster knew how the game was played. It was the president’s job to raise the debt ceiling, and the opposition party’s job to condemn him for doing so.

Eric Cantor took Luntz aside after the presentation. “You’ve caused us a problem here,” the new majority leader said.

Luntz was aghast. No one told him that the Republicans were going to
help
Obama raise the debt ceiling.

Boehner was strangely unworried. In his view, the debt ceiling presented what he viewed as a historic opportunity to extract dramatic concessions from the White House. Specifically, he saw it as a path to enact major entitlement reform
and
have the signature of a Democratic president on it.
His office had in fact sent out a letter
to all Republican
members after the passage of the Ryan budget on April 15, asking them to list their preconditions for raising the ceiling. But it would largely fall to Kevin McCarthy to move the freshmen from a hard “no” to a “yes, if.”

The whip began holding a new round of listening sessions in his conference room, which just that spring sported a new feature: a mammoth canvas covering the entire northern wall, painted by McCarthy’s friend Steve Penley, an artist celebrated by Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and other conservatives for his patriotic themes. The canvas depicted an expressionistic take on Emanuel Leutze’s classic rendering of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas Day, 1776, to begin the Battle of Trenton. McCarthy loved the image, for among Washington’s fellow passengers there appeared to be a woman, a black male, and a Native American.
All of America in the same boat. Paddling together.
The ultimate team-building metaphor.

At the
listening sessions
, David Camp, the Ways and Means Committee chairman, led off with a brief presentation on the 220-year history of the debt ceiling and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s statement that it must be raised by August 2 in order to avoid a federal default. Though he did not volunteer this, Camp himself had voted to raise the debt ceiling in the past, as had the next two speakers, Paul Ryan and McCarthy. Ryan then discussed some basic options for the members to consider demanding of the White House, including mandatory spending caps as a percentage of gross domestic product.