Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (38 page)

But the next day, Boehner yielded again to the advice of McCarthy and Cantor and scrapped the balanced budget amendment legislation drawn up by Virginia Congressman Bob Goodlatte. In its place was a bill conceived the previous month that would cut the deficit in half within a year’s time; cap all future federal spending to an amount not exceeding 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product; and raise the debt ceiling contingent on passage of Goodlatte’s balanced budget amendment—which also stipulated that any revenues raised to help balance the budget would require “super-majority” approval of two-thirds of Congress.

On July 19, the House voted on a largely party-line vote, 234–190, to pass Cut, Cap, and Balance. Three days later, the bill went over to the Senate, where defeat was virtually assured.

A number of the more moderate Republicans were okay with the bill’s futility. Though time was fast running out before the August 2 deadline, they understood that Boehner had to let the freshmen and the senior conservatives—and their Tea Party constituents—feel as if they had exhausted all options, had fought the good fight.

Still, the disconnect between what Boehner himself had termed fiscal “Armageddon” and the bullheadedness of the tea partiers unnerved members like Jo Ann Emerson. She sidled up to one of the freshmen one day and said, “I need you to explain why you don’t think there’s anything wrong with us defaulting on the debt. I can’t have this conversation with my constituents because I’ll yell at them and they’ll yell at me. So you tell me.”

The freshman’s reply bewildered Emerson. “We’ve spent way too much money,” he told her. “If this is the price we pay, so be it.”

Emerson wanted to reply:
You asshole! Do you really not understand what could happen here?

When she got home that evening, Jo Ann Emerson’s greeting to her husband was “Just pour me a big glass of wine. I cannot believe that I had this conversation with somebody who was elected to Congress.”

Jeff Duncan refused to accept it. He refused to believe that Harry Reid and the Senate were so immovable, so heedless to common sense and the urgency of the moment, that they would turn a blind eye to a serious fiscal remedy just as they had batted away H.R.1 and the Ryan budget plan. He refused to accept that this was just some therapeutic, box-checking exercise on the part of House leadership to cool the hot blood of the Tea Party freshmen.

On the afternoon of Thursday, July 21, the South Carolina freshman was standing on the floor next to fellow conservative freshman Tim Huelskamp of Kansas.
“You know,”
Duncan said, “we ought to walk over there to the Senate tomorrow and look them in the eye while they’re voting.”

“That’s a great idea,” said Huelskamp. “We ought to get at least thirty of us and just be there, watching.”

Viewing the occasion as an historic one, Duncan added, “I’d just kind of like to see the vote anyway.”

Duncan’s scheduler began sending out emails while the congressman notified Senator Jim DeMint. “That’s great,” the South Carolina delegation’s political godfather said. He agreed to meet the gathering at Statuary Hall, the geographical midpoint between the two chambers.

Later that evening, during a marathon Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, Duncan passed a note to Renee Ellmers.
A bunch of us are going to go over to the Senate floor tomorrow and look them in the eye when they’re taking the vote,
it read. Ellmers nodded that she was in.

Boehner convened another conference the next morning, Friday, July 22. Amid the hand-wringing over the impending Senate vote, Ellmers stood before the microphone and said, “
Look, we’re winning
this argument! Let’s stay on message! Cut, Cap, and Balance is what we passed! We’ve done our job—it’s on the Senate and president now. And look, this is a huge deal. The president can go down in history as the
one who signed a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I mean, Mr. Speaker, you should appeal to Obama’s ego, because it’s bigger than the deficit!”

The room erupted in laughter and applause. “Who gave you that line?” McCarthy asked her after the conference.

“That’s
my
line, thank you very much,” Ellmers sniffed.

“Well,” laughed the whip, “it’s your quotable quote!”

Immediately following the conference, Jeff Duncan stood in Statuary Hall with the three other South Carolina freshmen, DeMint, Senator Rand Paul, and a half-dozen other congressmen. They formed a tight huddle as DeMint did most of the talking.

“
You’ve gotta tell Boehner
to cut the bullshit,” the senator said in a low voice. His face pursed in disgust, he continued, “When we go over to the White House like children . . .”

He then addressed the matter immediately at hand: the impending Senate vote on Cut, Cap, and Balance. “You shouldn’t go down in the well while they’re voting. But you’ve got floor privileges. You can just stand in the back, mill around, whatever. And if you see a senator and want to convince him, by all means do so. Okay?”

Jeff Duncan then said, “Senator, do you mind if we pray real quick?”

“Yeah, Jeff, let’s do that,” DeMint replied.

They bowed their heads. “Heavenly Father,” Duncan said quietly, “we ask that you lift up the Senate on this historic vote. We know you were present when the nation was created. And we ask that you be present and give these guys strength this morning in the Senate. We ask this in Christ’s name, Amen.”

Then the group of a dozen or so, joined along the way by Ellmers and Ann Marie Buerkle, marched northward down the marble corridor toward the Senate.

They stepped
inside the chamber
.

A low murmur, almost melodic, was general throughout the surprisingly small and elegantly lit room. Along the floor stood several small groups of senators, talking pleasantly among themselves and completely unaware of the new visitors who had ambled in and now stood in the back, eyeing the inhabitants with the unease of shabbily attired plebians who had barged into a country club. As each senator entered the
chamber, he or she simply made a gesture with a thumb, followed by the almost soothing feminine voice of the clerk:
Mr. Franken votes “no” . . . Mrs. Murray votes “no”
. . .

Harry Reid saw the visitors. The majority leader made his way to the back, welcomed them to the Senate, introduced himself, and then began to shake hands.

“Senator,” said Duncan, “I sure would love to see some debate. I think the American people deserve that—not just a motion to table the bill . . .”

But Reid, standing not more than three feet away, did not acknowledge the freshman’s words and continued to shake hands.

Ellmers looked for her fellow North Carolinian, Senator Kay Hagen. She and the Democrat had sat together during the State of the Union address. But this morning Hagen was nowhere in sight. Ellmers checked her watch. There were votes on Appropriations bills taking place down the hall. She left.

Duncan found West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a noteworthy moderate among Democrats. The South Carolinian made his pitch.

Looking around, Manchin said quietly, “If you could find three other votes, I’d go along.”

Duncan could not find three other votes. Cut, Cap, and Balance was tabled on a 51–46 vote. He and the other House conservatives walked out of the Senate chamber. The senators remained huddled, as in a priesthood, and paid their departure as little mind as they had their arrival.

At 5:30 that same afternoon, Speaker John Boehner informed President Obama by phone that he was pulling out of the White House negotiations. “
A deal was never
reached, and was never really close,” he said in a letter to his Republican colleagues. The letter cited two insurmountable stumbling blocks: “The president is emphatic that taxes have to be raised . . . The president is adamant that we cannot make fundamental changes to our entitlement programs.” Boehner went on to say that he would now “begin conversations with the leaders of the Senate in an effort to find a path forward.”

Curiously, Boehner did not mention in his letter the reason he and his staff would later cite for his having pulled out of the discussions—which
was that the president had “moved the goal posts” by insisting three days earlier that Boehner’s initial offer of $800 billion in revenue hikes be increased to $1.2 trillion, in keeping with a proposal that had been unveiled that same day by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Six. Less than an hour after Boehner notified Obama that he was ending their negotiations, the president convened a press conference. He did not bother to conceal his anger. While acknowledging that he had made a counterproposal on revenues, Obama added that “when you’ve got a ratio of four dollars in cuts for every dollar in revenue, that’s pretty hard to stomach.”

Said the president, “It is hard to understand why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this kind of deal.” He concluded tartly by saying, “And at some point, I think if you want to be a leader, you got to lead.”

Eleven days remained until the D-day of August 2, 2011.

Allen West was surprised
when he received an invitation to have dinner with the whip team on Monday, July 25. Not only had Kevin McCarthy never before asked him to join the group for dinner, but the Florida freshman wasn’t exactly being looked upon favorably in recent days.

The previous Tuesday, West had been on the floor to defend Cut, Cap, and Balance—though first to correct yet another Democrat, this time Peter Welch of Vermont, who had confused him with the other black Republican, Tim Scott. “
I’m not from
South Carolina—I’m from Florida, but that’s okay, I’m the guy with hair,” West had ribbed Welch, before reiterating his support for the Republican bill and concluding, “I stand in support of H.R.2560 because this is insanity, and we cannot continue to do the same thing expecting different results.”

He then left the floor. Upon arriving at his office on the seventh floor of the Longworth Building, West was told by a staffer, “Wasserman Schultz went after you!”

Immediately after West’s speech, the Florida Democrat had spoken against Cut, Cap, and Balance. “And incredulously [
sic
],” she had said, “the gentleman from Florida, who represents thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, as do I, is supportive of this plan that would increase costs for Medicare beneficiaries—unbelievable from a member from south Florida . . .”

Well, that’s not appropriate—going after me when I’m not there,
he thought, and immediately he fired off an email to his Florida counterpart, copied to several Republican leaders:

Look, Debbie, I understand that after I departed the House floor you directed your floor speech comments directly towards me. Let me make myself perfectly clear, you want a personal fight, I am happy to oblige. You are the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the US House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up.

The two Floridians had a history. Wasserman Schultz had been close to West’s Democrat predecessor, Ron Klein. When it emerged during the 2010 election cycle that West had penned op-eds for a biker magazine that also published outlandishly sexist commentary, the congresswoman had staged a protest outside the candidate’s Deerfield Beach campaign headquarters. “He thinks it’s okay to objectify and denigrate women,” she told a TV reporter.

Though she had been joined by no more than fifty other protesters, the incident got under West’s skin—and not just because his wife and two daughters did not consider him to be sexist. Instead, West seemed to view her action as a threat of sorts. When asked by a reporter in the wake of the Giffords shooting if he had ever felt in danger during his political life, West replied by saying that Wasserman Schultz had “incited a riot in front of my campaign headquarters.”

Not many Republican congressmen—outside of the women’s softball team, anyway—had nice things to say about the DNC chairwoman, who had been known to engage in hyperbole herself. Even so, West’s comments were viewed within the GOP conference as excessive and not helpful to a party that was trying to win over suburban housewives and trying to recruit more female candidates. Some of the women from the class of 2010 were offended by West’s hair-trigger reaction to a simple floor rebuttal. If he couldn’t deal with rudimentary criticism from the opposing party, then how long did Allen West expect to last in the political arena?

McCarthy had approached West on the House floor. The whip told the freshman, “Look, I’ve got your back.” But he also said, “You know,
when I get upset about something, I write a letter and just send it to my wife or my friends. Just to let the steam out.”

McCarthy viewed West as a serious man. And as someone who occasionally suffered rueful pangs for not serving in the military, McCarthy respected both West’s courage and his strategic mentality. He noticed how the freshman was always among the very first to show up at conferences and always stayed until the end, almost never speaking but instead taking meticulous notes. So when Boehner unveiled his new debt ceiling plan on the morning of Monday, July 25, the whip thought it might not be a bad idea to bring Allen West along to the
whip team dinner
and take the freshman’s temperature.

The dinner was at Art and Soul, a relatively new Capitol Hill establishment favored by Michelle Obama. As usual, McCarthy had gathered a mix of freshmen (Trey Gowdy, Tim Griffin) and more senior members (Charlie Dent, Marsha Blackburn)—and as usual, the whip threw out a couple of icebreaking questions. West divulged that his first concert was Earth, Wind & Fire, while his most embarrassing moment was at a University of Tennessee football game when a friend vomited all over him.

Talk eventually turned to the Boehner plan, which came in two stages. In the first stage, Congress would cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion and raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion, thus funding government operations through the end of 2011. It would impose spending caps that, if exceeded, would trigger across-the-board cuts. Then a bipartisan “supercommittee” composed of twelve congressmen would identify an additional $1.8 trillion in savings that both chambers would have to pass without amendments, and the president would have to sign, before the debt ceiling could be raised an additional $1.6 trillion. At the same time, both the House and the Senate would have to vote on (though not necessarily pass) a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution by the end of 2011.