Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (39 page)

Tellingly, the Speaker had called radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh that morning to sell the überconservative on the plan. Nonetheless, many archconservatives felt that the cuts and caps were not sufficiently severe. In the meantime, Democrats insisted that the plan was a legislative nonstarter and thus an irresponsible waste of precious time before the August 2 deadline.

At the dinner, McCarthy asked West what he thought. Like every other Republican, the freshman had been hearing from Tea Party groups back home about how the debt ceiling should not be raised under any circumstances. West had advised some of his weaker-kneed colleagues, “Look, you’ve gotta stand. You’ve got to be able to come up here and evaluate legislation from the experiences you’re having here. If they know they can pull your strings, then guess what—they will.”

Or, as West had told one of his staffers, “If you allow the Tea Party to become a Roman mob, they’ll dog you the rest of the time you’re here.”

Replying to the whip, West said, “The bill’s not perfect. It’s not everything I want. But you know, when you go to the National Training Center to hone your skills before going off to battle, I’ve been on the side of guys who won battles and also of the guys who lost battles. The guys who lost were the ones who sat around and tried to come up with a one hundred percent plan and cover every single thing. And we never got to rehearse it, because we ran up the time doing all this planning, and the other side would attack us and we weren’t ready.

“Then,” he went on, “I’d go out with the commanders who said, ‘We’re just going to get a seventy percent plan. And we’re going to rehearse this. But the thing is, you’ll be able to adapt quickly—this is a framework that we can flex off of.’ So I think that’s what we have here. It’s seventy percent of what we want, but you can execute it one hundred percent.”

“You’ve gotta say that in conference!” McCarthy exclaimed.

The conference was the next
morning, Tuesday, July 26, and held at National Republican Congressional Committee headquarters, since the NRCC chairman Pete Sessions would be giving House members an update on recruiting and fund-raising efforts. After the NRCC presentation, Speaker Boehner went to the microphone. He was aware that his plan was getting little traction among his colleagues.

Almost forlornly, the Republican leader said, “Look, I’ve stuck my neck out here. I can’t do this without you guys.”

A few members stood and clapped when he was done. Feeling pressure, the other members stood as well. But the show of support was less than fervent.

When it came McCarthy’s turn, the whip said to his colleagues, “This is a different fight now. This is a much bigger fight. This defines
who wins or loses. The whole nation is watching. The president is afraid of this bill. That’s because, in the end, this will
be
the bill.”

Grinning, the whip then said, “You all know that I’m not only a student of politics, but also a big movie fan.” The lights then dimmed. On the screen behind him rolled a clip from the Ben Affleck movie
The Town,
which McCarthy’s chief of staff, Tim Berry, had brought up the evening before:

Affleck: I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re going to hurt some people.

Jeremy Renner (after a brief pause): Whose car are we gonna take?

The Republican audience roared with approval. “And now I’d like to yield to Allen West, who gave a great talk last night at dinner,” McCarthy said.

West then strode to the microphone. He repeated his story about the 70 percent plan beating the 100 percent plan. Then, riffing off the movie clip, the freshman declared: “Mr. Speaker, I’ll drive that car.”

West received a round of applause as well. The soft-spoken former football player Jon Runyan also said his piece. “I’ve been in a lot of situations like this where you can cut the tension with a knife,” he told his colleagues. “But Mr. Speaker, I’m behind you. We made a lot of progress with Cut, Cap, and Balance. We got a first and ten with ‘cut.’ We got to second down with ‘cap.’ Yes, we ended up punting in the end. But there’s also something in football called field position. We gained a lot of field position in the last week. Now it’s time to win this.”

Boehner wanted to bring his plan to the House floor that day. McCarthy told him that they didn’t have the votes. At that point, they didn’t even have half of the 217 needed for passage. The Speaker acquiesced. Voting was rescheduled for the afternoon of Thursday, July 28.

The day before the vote, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 199 points as the market nervously appraised the debt impasse. Meanwhile, Boehner’s impatience with his colleagues began to show. “Get your ass in line,” he growled during a conference. One of the Speaker’s new favorite members, Greg Walden of Oregon, lit into RSC senior staffer Paul Teller for sending out emails to gin up opposition to the Boehner
plan. The Speaker also tasked Pete Sessions to lean on members by reminding them, “Remember, the NRCC gave you lots of support . . .”

The following afternoon at 1:30, Boehner, Cantor, McCarthy, and Hensarling participated in a press stakeout to declare the House Republicans’ determination to pass Boehner’s Budget Control Act a few hours later. Joining them was a freshman whom the Speaker’s office wanted onstage as an assurance to Tea Party groups: North Carolinian Renee Ellmers. The Boehner plan, she acknowledged to the TV cameras, “
is not one hundred percent
of what our very conservative colleagues want. But it is about seventy to seventy-five percent . . . This is not about who is most conservative. This is about common sense.”

Leaving no doubt as to her intended audience, Ellmers concluded by saying, “And again, I call on my colleagues who may not be there yet . . . We’re gonna get the vote, at the end of the day.”

But, as it developed, not at the end of
that
day.

Just before the vote was scheduled, Raul Labrador was summoned to the Speaker’s office.

Boehner knew that the Tea Party freshman was never one to mince words. So the Speaker cut to the chase: “Are you with me?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, I’m not,” Labrador replied. “This is not a bill I can support. I actually think this is a terrible bill.”

“Well, I need you here with me on this,” Boehner pressed.

“I understand. But I can’t vote for it.”

Labrador saw the Speaker’s strength as his weakness: he was fair and believed others would be, too. Boehner had actually told Labrador one time, “I trust Harry Reid.”

Labrador had nearly come unglued.
Are you out of your mind?
Labrador was a lawyer. By training he had learned that it was wise to assume the worst in people. He didn’t trust Reid. He thought Obama was lying to the American people about the government running out of money on August 2.

Then Labrador added, “But I’ve talked to several folks and I know how we can get out of this mess. If you can amend the bill to make it closer to Cut, Cap, and Balance, I think I can get you some votes. I’ve been talking to people all day—I think I can convince maybe ten people.”

Despite Labrador’s tough stances and his occasional obnoxious outbursts in conferences, the Republican leadership and the whip team admired his willingness to work toward a positive outcome. They saw Labrador as an eventual legislative heavyweight—assuming he could be persuaded to stick around long enough. The Idaho freshman hated being away from his young family, hated sleeping in his office; and for that matter, he was not altogether impressed with what he had seen from the House of Representatives. He had arrived in Washington thinking that term limits was a bad idea. Now, having seen how cynical and entrenched the senior members were, Raul Labrador had concluded that no one should be allowed to serve in Congress longer than six years.

Boehner brought in a legislative staffer. “Allen West would tell you, this bill
is
basically Cut, Cap, and Balance,” the aide said.

“It’s not even close,” Labrador scoffed. He acknowledged that there were political considerations. West’s district “is like sixty percent Medicare recipients.” By contrast, Labrador’s constituents were hard-core right wingers, the freshman told the Speaker. They made Labrador seem ideologically tame by comparison. The only way he and his conservative colleagues would vote for the Boehner plan was if it were amended to stipulate that the debt ceiling would be raised after a balanced budget amendment were to
pass
both the House and the Senate.

Boehner thanked Labrador, and the meeting broke up.

The entire Republican leadership team and whip staff had fanned out and were buttonholing on-the-fence members. The arm-twisters were finding that in this new era of banned earmarks and media hyperscrutiny, the tools of persuasion were limited. Louie Gohmert had emerged from Boehner’s office telling reporters that even after his session with the Speaker, he remained “
a bloodied
, beaten-down ‘no’ ”—which struck the whip team as laughable, since it was universally understood that the jut-jawed Texan did not respond well to threats.

Nor was it McCarthy’s way to browbeat. Instead, the whip persisted, wheedled, enlisted friends, appealed to a member’s sense of loyalty, evoked history, deployed cheesy
Braveheart
analogies . . .

Blake Farenthold bent and finally broke. After sending Boehner the letter in April with its fretful line, “My fear is that the debt ceiling is very possibly a hostage that we’re unwilling to shoot”—to
which the Speaker had never responded, leading the freshman to wonder if Boehner could even pick him out of a photo lineup—the friends he had from the financial markets convinced him that the debt ceiling matter was nothing to trifle with.

“
I’m gonna vote
for this,” he told chief deputy whip Peter Roskam. Then Farenthold found himself shouting:
“But you guys are killing me! You guys have got to give us some bones to throw to the Tea Party! We were brought up here to change Washington and everything you’re asking us to do is easily portrayed as going completely Washington, DC!”

Roskam assured him, “We will get you something.”

Farenthold shared the same rant with Cantor. The majority leader smiled and said, “It is our goal to make the next five months of Congress a lot more pleasant than this one.”

When Jeff Duncan learned that the six o’clock vote had been postponed, he decided to go the members-only
chapel in the Capitol
and pray on the matter.

Several reporters were staked out by the Speaker’s office when Duncan walked past. “Congressman, are you going to a meeting with the Speaker?” he was asked.

“No, I’m not,” Duncan replied. When they persisted, he said, “I’m going right here to the chapel to pray about this.”

“Are you thinking about changing your vote?” one of them asked.

“I’m not praying for
my
vote,” he said. “I’m going to lift
them
up, to pray for Speaker Boehner and President Obama and Harry Reid. And for America. So if you’d excuse me . . .”

His phone buzzed. It was Mick Mulvaney. “Duncan, where are you?”

“I’m in the members’ chapel.”

“Hold on. I’ll be right there.”

Duncan was already in the chapel when Mulvaney arrived, accompanied by Tim Scott and a reporter who had been following Scott. It was completely dark inside, except for the sunlight pouring through the dazzling stained-glass depiction of George Washington on his knees, praying in the snow at Valley Forge.

The reporter lowered her tape recorder and stared at the window. “Wow,” she said.

After she had left, the three South Carolinians prayed and talked
quietly for a few minutes. Mulvaney reached for the Bible, searching for a particular verse. Instead, he stumbled upon Proverbs 22:7:
The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave to the lender.

It was as if Solomon himself were holding forth on the debt ceiling. “I’m done,” said Duncan.

They went to the whip’s office
. There were about twenty members there—including McCarthy, Boehner, Cantor, Hensarling, Paul Ryan, and about ten “no” freshmen, among them Raul Labrador.

Boehner was three votes shy of passage. “This is what we’re going to do,” the Speaker told the group. “Raul had something to do with this. We’re going to amend the bill.” The new version would stipulate that either the House or the Senate would have to pass a balanced budget amendment before the debt ceiling could be raised.

“No,” several of them said. They insisted on passage of the bill in both “the House
and
the Senate,” not “or.”

Mulvaney spoke for the South Carolinians. At least in the collective ear of the whip team, he indicated strongly that if the language could be changed to “the House and the Senate,” the four of them would be on board.

Boehner and McCarthy left the office and went to speak with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. While the South Carolinians waited in a side conference room, a number of the freshmen invited themselves in. They implored the South Carolinians:
You’re losing credibility when it looks like you have to get permission from your senator.

A member of the leadership team shook his head and said of the South Carolinians, “They’re making themselves irrelevant.” But most of the Republican leaders were slightly more sympathetic. The problem wasn’t just Senator DeMint. It was also the far more moderate other South Carolina senator, Lindsey Graham, who had announced his opposition to the Boehner plan. More than one of the South Carolina freshmen had told McCarthy and his whip staff,
There’s no way I survive politically if I end up to the left of Lindsey Graham on this.

McCarthy returned about an hour later, looking ecstatic. “We got it in!” he exclaimed—referring to the stipulation that the balanced budget amendment be approved by both the House and the Senate before the debt ceiling could be raised. “How many of you guys are gonna support this?”

A few members raised their hands—but not Mulvaney and the other South Carolinians.