Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (42 page)

“We live within our means,” said the freshman. “Am I perfect? No. I have debt, but we have a plan to pay back that debt. The future of
our children and our grandchildren is at stake. America knows. America got engaged in this, they got engaged in the last election cycle, and they know that Washington cannot keep spending more than it has.”

Said Jeff Duncan, “Let’s get our house in order, and let’s create a way to start paying back that enormous debt. We can do that with a balanced budget amendment.”

He walked down the aisle to where his son sat grinning. Parker kissed him on the cheek.

On the way out the door, a House clerk hustled up to them. “Excuse me,” the clerk said to the congressman. “I don’t think you mentioned your son’s name. Why don’t you give it to me? I’ll make sure it goes in the
Congressional Record.
”

Jeff and Parker Duncan walked out into the evening. The son would have his name enshrined in the American historical record alongside that of his father, who himself doubted he would ever forget that his boy had been there with him, during such a time as this.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Lower, Ever Lower

The next day, August 2, 2011,
the Dow Jones
responded to Congress and the White House’s performance on the debt ceiling by dropping 266 points. All of the gains made that entire year on Wall Street were wiped out in a single day.

Three days later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating from AAA to AA+ for the first time in history.

Later that month, Republican pollster Bill McInturff spelled out the link between America’s political leaders and its economic woes in the starkest of terms. “The perception of how Washington handled the debt ceiling negotiation,” McInturff wrote in a widely circulated report, “led to an immediate collapse of confidence in government and all the major players, including President Obama and Republicans in Congress. The collapse of confidence in government has substantially eroded already weak consumer confidence. Today’s consumer confidence rating is the fourth lowest since 1952. Make no mistake: this collapse of economic confidence . . . is the direct consequence of the lack of confidence in our political system and its leaders.”

The pollster’s stern warnings were validated by the latest public opinion surveys that greeted federal officeholders when they returned in September to Washington from summer recess. President Obama’s approval rating had dropped to 44 percent; Congress’s, to 11 percent—and then, a month later, to 9 percent, a historic low. Seven out of ten who were surveyed believed that the House Republicans favored the rich and had no clear jobs plan.

Beneath the screeching
, the posturing, and the stalemates, there had in fact been scores of congressmen quietly working with the other side in an effort to achieve results. Archconservatives Jason Chaffetz
and Raul Labrador were huddling with archprogressive Luis Gutierrez over a comprehensive immigration reform package. Fellow Missourians Jo Ann Emerson and Emanuel Cleaver would, by December, succeed in directing funds to aid communities bedeviled by persistent poverty. Democrat Rosa DeLauro and Republican Don Manzullo had coauthored legislation that would incentivize manufacturers to dedicate monies to a community bank. Blue Dog Jim Matheson and GOP deputy whip Kevin Brady had teamed on a bill that would lower tax barriers to encourage American businesses to reinvest overseas earnings back home. Against the raging currents, Democrats and Republicans continued to paddle together, now and again. But these were renegade efforts, ones that the House leaders from both parties did not openly advertise and did nothing to encourage.

To no surprise, then, the “people’s House” had become a leper colony.

Renee Ellmers
volunteered to stay behind in Washington for a few days after the debt ceiling vote and face the media. The Republican leadership needed somebody to explain to the many skeptical Fox and talk radio hosts that the deal was a good one for conservatives—that a trillion dollars in spending had been cut, no taxes had been increased, and a pathway to a balanced budget constitutional amendment had been forged—and the telegenic Tea Party favorite was an obvious choice. It was when Ellmers finally returned home to Dunn, North Carolina, that she came to realize that she was stuck in the middle between two equally intense strains of discontent.

On the one hand, many of the conservative activists in her district were outraged that the debt ceiling had been raised at all. They didn’t seem to understand that it was about paying America’s outstanding bills, not about allowing future spending. Several of these hard-liners were of the belief that the best way for America to save money would be to simply shut the government down. Ellmers struggled to convince them that even if one could turn off all federal spigots, the cost of doing so would far outweigh the gains.

“Just stay away from Boehner,” they would tell Ellmers, as if the Speaker’s willingness to find practical solutions was symptomatic of an infectious disease.

Yet at least as many of her constituents were disgusted by what they
perceived as the House Republicans’ intransigence. “You guys need to be working together,” they would lecture Ellmers. Here, too, the freshman detected strains of ignorance. Many of these folks literally did not understand that Congress consisted of two legislative bodies, both of which had to agree on each piece of legislation for it to pass—and that the upper body, the Senate, was controlled by a different party, one whose leader, Harry Reid, had decided on the strategy of doing little other than voting down everything that came out of the House.

But Ellmers was also caught between opposing forces in her own Republican conference. The other freshmen knew that she was close to Kevin McCarthy and the GOP leadership. Whenever she defended their decisions, a colleague was bound to pipe up, “Oh, you’re just saying that because you’re their favorite.”

Boehner’s doing a good job—they’re all working hard,
she would insist. It irked her that so many of her fellow freshmen behaved as if “every vote we’ve taken is the be-all-end-all, that history’s going to judge us each time.” As a former intensive care nurse, Ellmers was comfortable working as a team and trusting the surgeon to make the right decisions. Many of her freshman colleagues didn’t share that tendency. Ellmers had stopped going to the weekly freshmen meetings with the Speaker because it distressed her to listen to her classmates criticize Boehner so harshly to his face.

“You’ve created a monster,” she told McCarthy, adding that the leadership should end the freshmen meetings altogether. (McCarthy, for his part, imagined that the weekly get-togethers probably would be discontinued, though for a different reason: attendance had dwindled greatly, perhaps because the attendees saw little good coming out of them.)

Raul Labrador frequently voiced his disagreement at the meetings with Boehner. “
I didn’t come
to Washington to be part of a team,” the Idaho freshman would say. Like Renee Ellmers, Labrador had spent the month of August explaining his votes to angry constituents, the majority of whom were of the far right, shut-’er-down persuasion. They seemed to admire his independent streak even if Ellmers didn’t. He returned to Washington confident that some of the other congressmen might have a 9 percent approval rating, but not Raul Labrador.

At a meeting with other Republicans one autumn morning in 2011, someone brought up a new messaging gambit conceived by the
leadership to prove to the angry public that the House majority was doing everything in its power to put Americans back to work. It was a laminated card given to each House Republican, listing fifteen pieces of legislation that had passed the House, only to die in the Senate—“the Forgotten 15.” Labrador stood up and criticized the list. It was a stretch, he said, to be claiming that legislating regulatory restraint over Internet providers, pesticide use, water quality, and the cement sector were tantamount to jobs bills.

“You’re going to be against whatever leadership does,” Renee Ellmers said dismissively.

“And you’re just going to support
everything
they do!” Labrador replied.

In truth, Labrador didn’t blame Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy per se. It was more that he saw them as protectors of an institution that the Idaho freshman believed needed a thorough delousing. The friction between the entrenched Republican members and the upstarts had intensified. Labrador was hearing whispered threats that the dissenters on major votes would be punished. If that happened, Labrador could easily foresee a coup against Boehner. He could easily imagine a new Speaker being voted in, charged with tossing out all the committee chairmen and replacing them with Raul Labrador–style revolutionaries.

It only took about a dozen members to nearly unseat Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s,
Labrador thought.
You could find thirty members, easily.

Yet Labrador was a practical enough legislator to believe that not every hill he climbed was worth dying on. In mid-September, the Republican House leadership brought to the floor yet another short-term Continuing Resolution to fund the government’s activities, since the Senate had squashed the Ryan budget plan back in April. Labrador voted for the CR. Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats promised to do the same. Then they reneged.

The House Democrats had spent the summer stewing over Obama’s giveaway to the Republicans in the debt ceiling negotiations. Their spirits were improved considerably on September 8, when the president delivered a fiery speech before a joint session of Congress. Offering up a $447 billion initiative called the American Jobs Bill, Obama exclaimed numerous times throughout the course of his speech,
“
Pass this jobs bill
!” The fact that it would be paid for by eliminating the Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans ensured that House Republicans would not pass it (despite the fact that even a majority of Republican voters believed the same tax cuts should expire).

But to Democrats, that was the point. There was no pleasing these Republicans anyway. So why compromise when the opposition had no intention of doing so? Especially galling to the minority party was the recognition that McCarthy, the majority whip, had consistently required a sizable bloc of Democratic votes to pass the toughest bills—and yet the Democrats had nothing to show for their complicity.

Let’s educate them that they need us,
became the Democrats’ abiding sentiment.

The CR included $1 billion in emergency relief in response to the year’s many wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters. But a rare stipulation was added by the Republicans to entice its conservative members: the emergency funds would be offset by cutting a Department of Energy program that encouraged the development of high-mileage vehicles. Though the ranking Democratic member of the Appropriations Committee, Norm Dicks, recommended to Pelosi that they go along with the measure, the rank and file loudly refused to do so. Just as Boehner had done so many times that year, Pelosi for once deferred to her caucus.

Sure enough, forty-eight Republicans voted against the CR, even with the enticement of tying disaster relief to spending cuts. McCarthy needed Democrat votes. He didn’t get them. Boehner’s first big bill after the summer recess was defeated, 195–230.

Minority Whip Steny Hoyer found Kevin McCarthy on the floor right after the vote. “You’re going to call us
now,
aren’t you,” the Democrat gloated.

“Oh, we’ll be okay, don’t worry,” McCarthy shot back.

The whip had warned Boehner that they didn’t have enough Republican votes to pass the CR. The Speaker, however, was emphatic. “I want to go to the floor,” he had said. “Let the body work its will.”

That didn’t mean that Boehner was happy about the defeat. At the next Republican conference, he stood before the members, folded his arms across his chest, and with a flat stare said gruffly, “Now what?”

Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy had endeavored to find an upside to
Congress’s deepening unpopularity. Perhaps, they hoped, the freshmen would get an earful back home and return to Washington in September with a newfound eagerness to compromise. But it wasn’t quite shaping up that way. The district maps that had been redrawn this year by predominantly GOP-controlled state legislatures as a result of the 2010 census meant that many Republicans now represented much more conservative territory—or, in some cases, much more Democratic, forcing them to migrate to a new district and run against a fellow Republican and in the process compelling them to prove their superior conservative bona fides. Right-wing advocates such as Heritage Action and Erick Erickson of RedState.com continued to rate members on their votes and agitated for primary challenges against less conservative members like freshman Martha Roby and the Missouri moderate Jo Ann Emerson. (“Wow, what did you do to piss off Erick Erickson?” Texas freshman Bill Flores asked Emerson one afternoon on the House floor. She had never heard of the conservative blogger whose October 21 post began with the headline, “
Paging the Missouri Tea Party
: Here’s One to Primary.”)

In short, whatever pressures to govern the freshmen faced were drowned out by pressures from the right. On top of that, their reelection fortunes depended on money from conservative donors. Blake Farenthold had raised a meager $102,000 during the third quarter of 2011. Farenthold couldn’t stand asking people for money and was troubled by a system that dictated raising and spending a million dollars every two years so as to keep one’s seat. The big checks seemed to go to Tea Party stars like Allen West. “
Part of it is
, you’ve got to be willing to set your hair on fire in front of the TV camera, and I’m not a set-your-hair-on-fire kind of guy,” he would say.

For the moment, he had no primary opponent—but that was only because he had no district: the Texas legislature’s redistricting map had been thrown out and replaced by a panel of federal judges with a far less GOP-friendly map . . . which in turn had been thrown out by the Supreme Court. Until new maps were drawn, Blake Farenthold did not know where he would be campaigning, or against whom. It seemed that the accidental congressman whose 2010 race concluded twenty days late was destined to remain behind the curve.