Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (43 page)

Jeff Duncan, on the other hand, had the same 3rd District of South
Carolina, anticipated no serious opposition, and had been proclaimed by Heritage Action to be the House of Representatives’ most conservative member. Even in his blood-red district, Duncan had heard a few appeals for more compromise. He had his own ideas, of course, about what compromise looked like.

“
What’s it going
to take for you to vote for this?” Kevin McCarthy had asked his freshman whip on the floor during the CR vote.

“Look, Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina—we get the importance of disaster relief,” Duncan told the whip. “I can sell my constituents on $8 billion in disaster relief. Just tack it on to the $1.019 trillion spending ceiling we have in the Ryan budget.”

“The Senate’s not going to vote for that,” said McCarthy.

“To hell with the Senate. Let’s vote some conservative bills out of the House. Bills that have our identity stamped on them.”

Jeff Duncan was thinking precisely as the House Democrats now were. Since the opposition couldn’t be pleased anyway, why not stick to one’s principles?

Such was the state of governance in the House of Representatives in the fall of 2011.

Allen West happened to be sitting on the House floor next to eighty-eight-year-old Republican Ralph Hall of Texas during a tough vote when Boehner sidled up to the institution’s oldest member. West listened as the two House veterans lamented the conservative defections now taking place.

“
It’s not like
the old days, Ralph,” the Speaker noted wistfully. “Without earmarks to offer, it’s hard to herd the cats.”

West was struck by that admission. He thought,
So you don’t have anything to dangle anymore. But that’s what true leadership is about. It’s about how you take a diverse entity and get everyone focused on accomplishing a singular goal. Heck, I was commanding a company of 131 when I was twenty-eight years old. You have to provide a vision.

The Florida freshman wasn’t quite sure what vision was being articulated on November 1, when the Republican leadership brought to the floor House Concurrent Resolution 13, which reaffirmed “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States. “There are few things
Congress could do that would be more important than passing this resolution,” cosponsor Lamar Smith intoned.

West found himself scratching his head. Nearly 14 million Americans were out of work. Congress’s approval rating had hit rock bottom.
If West was making that call, that resolution would never have made it to the floor,
he thought.

But of course Allen West wasn’t being asked to help make the calls. Far from it. In early November, Eric Cantor approached him on the House floor. “The new calendar for 2012 is coming out tomorrow,” Cantor told him. The majority leader asked West to please refrain from publicly criticizing it as he had done when the previous calendar was released shortly after the 2010 midterm elections.

“Look, my point was proven,” West said—meaning:
Our constituents want us staying here and taking care of business, not hanging out in our districts.
“And,” he added, “if this calendar’s the same as the last one, my point will be proven again.”

The calendar would in fact be the same as before: a mere six Washington workdays in January, fourteen in February, fifteen in March, eight in April . . . It was in part because of this low-intensity legislating schedule that Allen West took to the House floor on December 8, stared into the C-SPAN camera, and said, “I must take the time to offer an apology to the citizens of the Twenty-Second Congressional District of Florida and to all my fellow citizens across this great nation . . . I would have hoped our exertions would have been, as a collective body, a bit greater.”

Not for nothing had West’s flattop gone grayer. In a way, life in the House was more stressful than being at war. “If I go into a combat zone,” he said, “I know I’m coming with a plan to kill the enemy. Here, you see things develop, you say, ‘Guys, come on, we can get there.’ And it just doesn’t happen.”

Not everyone was ignoring West’s advice. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, would recognize the Army veteran’s expertise in December by appointing him to a select bicameral committee that would create guidelines and funding for the Department of Defense. For the most part, however, Allen West would remain his own sovereign entity amid a constellation of 435.
The question was whether he would continue to burn bright and hold his place in the political solar system, or suffer a meteoric fate. The Tea Party star with no previous office-holding experience had grown into the role of legislator. He had authored the only spending cut bill to pass unanimously in the House. The whip team had used him to urge colleagues to accept compromise bills. West had come to realize, in his words, “As the military teaches, there are five forms of maneuver—you don’t always have to do the frontal assault.” His “yes” vote on the debt ceiling bill had even compelled a supporter back in Fort Lauderdale to say to him, “You dropped your bayonet.”

Nonetheless, two formidable Democratic opponents were vying to take back his seat. The Republican redistricting cartographers in Tallahassee had done him no favors, reconfiguring the 22nd District in a way that replaced a few Republican strongholds with neighborhoods from the district of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. If the new map withstood court challenges, the former D+1 district would be more like D+5. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee officials were crowing that Allen West would be forced to flee the 22nd District and instead challenge fellow GOP freshman Tom Rooney in the 16th.

“Soldiers don’t abandon their posts,” West would say. They also didn’t commit suicide. West moved into the redrawn 18th district—living to fight another day.

It was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s novel proposition that if 535 congressmen and senators couldn’t agree on how to solve America’s deficit problem over a period of seven months, perhaps a dozen of them could within ten weeks. The wily majority leader knew better, of course. As Reid would later confide, he came up with the idea of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, or Super Committee, fully expecting that it would fail.

The
Super Committee
held its first meeting on September 8. Signs of dysfunction were apparent from the start. Though several members at the table urged each other to “go big” by striving to find more than the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts required of the Super Committee, Republican Senator Jon Kyl warned the others that he would quit the proceedings if any of those additional reductions came from defense spending. Kyl also suggested that they begin by identifying areas that
each side would be willing to cut—but the Democrats, recalling that this was how the Biden debt ceiling talks began, refused to play ball. Instead, said Chris Van Hollen, “We need to first agree on a framework, on the ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases.” But no such ratio was ever agreed to—not on that day, and not at any other point.

The Democrat participants believed—naïvely, some of them would later admit—that the six Republican members would agree to forgo the Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans. Not a shred of evidence anywhere suggested that any among the six had ever entertained such a proposition. Still, the Democrats hoped. They hoped that Kyl, who had decided not to run for reelection, would play the statesman. They hoped that Jeb Hensarling—the Republican House’s conference chairman but largely unknown—might want to make a name for himself by producing the grand bargain that had eluded Boehner and Cantor. They hoped that House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp, who had internally resisted the Ryan budget (though more on political and jurisdictional than policy grounds), would prove to be a voice of moderation.

Halfway into the Super Committee’s ten-week tenure, no one had even offered a proposal—though in sidebar discussions, Kyl and Van Hollen mulled over a lesser revenue scheme involving a gas tax or user fee hikes on items like Medicare premiums, flood insurance, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. (Neither man could convince his colleagues to adopt this approach.) On October 26, both sides finally exchanged competing plans. The Republicans offered a package of $2.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade. The Democrats proposed $3 trillion in reductions, including $1.2 trillion in tax increases. Each side summarily rejected the other’s plan. The Republicans then floated a proposal by Senator Pat Toomey that would raise revenues by about $250 billion—but largely through closing tax loopholes, and in the process locking in the $800 billion Bush tax cuts
and
lowering the top tax rate from 35 to 28 percent. The net effect of the plan would be a disproportionate burden on middle-income taxpayers. Though even antitax guru Grover Norquist proclaimed that it was a plan the Democrats could not possibly agree to, committee member Senator John Kerry spent days toying with a way to make it more palatable, and the Republicans appeared to have gained an edge in the negotiations.

Behind the scenes, the staffs of Dave Camp and Democratic Senator Max Baucus had been working on a completely separate package—one that would include roughly $600 billion in revenues from upper-income taxpayers, plus a $50 billion adjustment in the Consumer Price Index. The $650 billion figure had in fact come from Speaker Boehner, and his policy people had participated in formulating the specifics.

On Sunday, November 13, Camp and Baucus agreed on an outline for the package: a $100 billion down payment from closing corporate tax loopholes, another $500 billion generated from tax reform, and $50 billion from adjusting the CPI and lowering the top tax rate from 35 to 34 percent. Baucus presented it to Kerry, Van Hollen, and Senator Patty Murray in Murray’s office that evening. All four Democrats were intrigued. (The other two Democrat members, Congressmen Jim Clyburn and Xavier Becerra, had been largely disengaged from all the negotiations.)

The problem lay with Camp’s Republican colleagues. Hensarling and Kyl reacted coldly to the $650 billion revenue plan. Toomey, who at one time had been president of the antitax Club for Growth, had already been taking heat for his $250 billion revenue hikes and could go no further. On Monday the fourteenth, the committee met and went back and forth on the details of the Camp-Baucus option. But nothing was agreed to. By Tuesday—eight days before the committee’s legislative deadline to submit a deficit reduction plan—the $650 billion bipartisan plan had fallen through the floorboards. The Republicans embraced the Toomey proposal. The Democrats, while proffering a $2.3 trillion reduction plan by Baucus, as a caucus began rooting for the Super Committee to fail—calculating that the better deal would be the $1.5 trillion automatic “sequestration” cuts in both defense and nonsecurity programs that would be triggered by the failure.

The Democrats got their wish, since failure is what the Super Committee ultimately produced . . . except that Republicans vowed that they would undo the sequestration trigger to protect defense programs.

At one point during the ten-week process, one committee member sighed to the others, “Failure to get an agreement—sort of sounds like a do-nothing Congress, doesn’t it, guys?”

On this, if nothing else, there was agreement.

•   •   •

While the Super Committee talks were running their ignominious course, the House and the Senate easily passed a package of three Appropriations conference bills on November 17. The “minibus” legislation passed in the House, however, only because 165 Democrats voted for it. Fully 101 Republicans did not, including two members of the leadership team: conference chairman Hensarling and policy chairman Tom Price.

Livid, the Appropriations Cardinals
demanded an audience with Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy.

The twelve subcommittee chairmen and Chairman Hal Rogers met with the leadership trio in the Speaker’s office on the morning of November 30. Rogers had particular reason to be irritated. The seventy-three-year-old, amply jowled, white-haired, cigar-smoking, silky voiced Southern gentleman had been representing Kentucky’s 5th District since Reagan was first elected president in 1980 and had been an Appropriator since his second term. To receive Speaker Boehner’s vote as chairman had required considerable pride-swallowing on Rogers’s part. When Boehner decreed that two-thirds of the Appropriations Committee’s sumptuous Capitol suite would become part of the Speaker’s ceremonial quarters, Rogers did not squawk. When it became clear, after the results of the November 2 midterm election were in, that the committee would have to be stocked with hard-line conservatives, Rogers was acquiescent. And since it was abundantly clear that the days of earmarking were over—at least for now—the Appropriator once known as the Prince of Pork vowed not only to renounce the practice but also to enforce the ban with extreme prejudice. But Hal Rogers had grown tired of being a good sport.

“We got our legs cut out from under us,” Rogers snapped. “There was no whipping of that vote. No discipline at all. Look, the electorate is going to judge all of us not by how many bills we can pass, but whether we can govern. They’ll, say, ‘We’ve given you the majority to govern. Now: can you do that?’ And we’ve just told them we can’t.”

Said Rogers, “You let us down, big-time.”

McCarthy offered a halfhearted defense. Referring to a provision in the bill that increased the limit on Federal Housing Administration loans, the whip said, “We told you that if you put the FHA in there, it would collapse the vote.”

The Cardinals were astounded. The FHA provision was a compromise with the Senate that Boehner himself had agreed to!

Sounding defensive, McCarthy nonetheless agreed that they had little control over how their members voted. Two other chairmen—Ryan of the Budget Committee and David Dreier of the Rules Committee—had recently voted against the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. He added, “The fact is, we’ve got a bunch of younger members who don’t understand that they’re operating in the long term. It’s a process, and I know it’s frustrating. But they’re beginning to see the bigger picture.”