Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (7 page)

The educating went both ways, of course: the Washington establishment sought to disaggregate this great blob of newness and take its measure of them one by one. After all, this was hardly the first time that the town had seen a large freshman class. There had been a whopping 94 incoming Democrats following the referendum on the corrupt Grant administration in 1874; a class of 86 Democrats following the Panic of 1890; an unprecedented 131 Democratic freshmen riding the FDR wave in 1932; the 49 Watergate Democrats in 1974; the 52 so-called Reagan’s Robots in 1980; and the 73 Gingrichites in
1994. Each outsized freshman class rode into Washington confident that it had received an unambiguous mandate to change how business was done here. None was terribly successful at doing so.

For it was never all that hard for the Washingtonians to break down a brawny yet tender freshman class into its constituent parts. The Republican class of 2010 was not by any means monolithic. Nearly a third of them had never before held public office and were instead “citizen-politicians” from the fields of medicine, law enforcement, farming, auto sales, football, roofing, or pizza making. Others, however, were seasoned state legislators, two had been congressional senior staffers, and another was a well-known Republican opposition researcher. Occupying a category of his own was the unsinkable Charlie Bass of New Hampshire, who first was elected to Congress on the Gingrich wave of 1994, then rolled out to sea on the anti-Bush wave of 2006, only to return on the Tea Party wave four years later.

Beyond individual background, each representative, in the end, answered to his or her peculiar country-within-a-country. A dentist from Arizona named Paul Gosar now represented the state’s 1st Congressional District—sent here by the Tea Party, except that Gosar now had to figure out how to respond to the needs of the Navajos who occupied vast swaths of his constituency. County prosecutor Sean Duffy, a former lumberjack and reality TV show star, had won a Wisconsin seat that had been in Democrat hands for four decades—and now came the hard part: convincing blue-collar union workers that the Tea Party sensation was one of them. Mo Brooks of Huntsville, Alabama, ran against the evils of Obamacare but now had to find a way to protect his district’s missile defense interests. Allen West was now the duly elected defender of the Florida coastline; Jeff Duncan, the overnight guardian of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, a major nuclear facility.

Even among Republicans, America could be interpreted 435 different ways.

For these newcomers in the company town, there was an avalanche of names, customs, and vocational minutiae to reckon with. But all of them had a jump on Renee Ellmers and Blake Farenthold, who showed up to Washington like naked orphans on the doorstep of power.

Ellmers was a registered
intensive care nurse from Michigan with a teenaged son, married to a surgeon whose practice had relocated them to North Carolina in 1999 and ultimately to the small town of Dunn, forty miles south of Raleigh. Her political involvement had been marginal until October 2008, when Barack Obama had his famous exchange with Joseph “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher about the candidate’s desire to “spread the wealth around.” As Ellmers would say two years later, “I knew at that point that things were going to change for me. And either I could be a victim of it and yell at the TV every time I heard a speech or saw a story, or I could become involved.”

The ex-nurse felt that Obamacare had it all wrong—that the emphasis should be on decreasing health care costs, and that the best approach to this (she believed, as a surgeon’s wife) was to enact tort reform. She and her husband attended a town hall of local congressman Bob Etheridge, a seven-term Democrat. The crowd was rowdy, Etheridge was testy, and Renee Ellmers decided that he could be beaten.

No one in Washington thought she stood a chance. That included Kevin McCarthy, the two-term Californian who had been among the forlorn schemers in the Caucus Room on Obama’s inauguration night. As the House Republicans’ chief candidate recruiter, McCarthy had visited Etheridge’s district in search of a viable opponent during the summer of 2009, just as Ellmers was making plans to run. McCarthy decided no Republican, including Ellmers, was worth throwing his weight behind and wrote the district off. After managing to secure the nomination the following summer, she visited with National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Pete Sessions in Washington but got the distinct impression that he had better things to do.

Ellmers caught a huge break in June 2010, when two NRCC interns who were following Etheridge to a fund-raiser got under the skin of the Democrat. The videotape—“Please let go of my arm, Congressman”—went viral. Oddly, Ellmers’s consultant, Carter Wrenn, advised her not to fan the flames, which further convinced Washington Republicans that the nurse wasn’t ready for the big leagues.

Wrenn did, however, commission a poll that summer to determine hot-button issues in Ellmers’s district. The most significant—“overwhelmingly,” Ellmers would recall—concerned the desire by a Muslim organization to erect a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero
in lower Manhattan. “We were having a discussion about the poll numbers,” Ellmers would remember. “My point, and this is from a historical standpoint and my own personal knowledge, is that when Muslims would conquer areas, they would erect a mosque—I guess you could call it a Victory Mosque.”

Ellmers’s political ad termed it precisely that—followed by the narrator’s skeptical, “Where does Bob Etheridge stand? He won’t say.” The ad got her a slot on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show. When Cooper suggested that the people building the mosque “are not terrorists,” Ellmers interjected, “Do you know that, sir?”

Ellmers became ridiculed by the left and embraced by the Tea Party movement. Sarah Palin endorsed her. Ellmers pulled off an astonishing upset—though not until after a recount that lasted seventeen days, which on the congressional learning curve put Renee Ellmers well behind the other Republican freshmen . . . with one exception.

Blake Farenthold’s recount took twenty days.
Farenthold was a shy
and roly-poly forty-nine-year-old trust fund beneficiary from Corpus Christi, Texas. According to congressional analyst David Wasserman, Farenthold was a “fluke winner.” Possibly Wasserman had understated the matter. Texas’s 27th Congressional District, which included the border city of Brownsville, was 70 percent Hispanic. The incumbent, Solomon Ortiz, had represented the district for twenty-eight years. Ortiz had done no polling whatsoever and was sitting on a hefty war chest. What did he have to worry about? His Republican opponent was a conservative talk radio sidekick who didn’t speak Spanish and whose only claim to fame was that his grandmother, Sissy Farenthold, had been the state’s liberal icon three decades ago.

Ortiz clearly had not taken stock of Farenthold’s listenership on
Lago in the Morning.
They were angry that the Democratic incumbent had not hosted a health care town hall, that he used earmarks both to reward and to punish, that in a variety of ways he fulfilled the stereotype of the political fief who had overstayed his welcome. Even so, it was hard to take Blake Farenthold’s candidacy seriously. Farenthold himself was anything but self-serious—a good-natured, clever bon vivant whose grandfathers (businessman George Farenthold and attorney Hayden Head Sr.) were two of Corpus Christi’s wealthiest citizens. (Blake Farenthold’s father, Randy, was murdered when Blake
was eleven.) After working eight years as a radio disc jockey (“It was a great way to meet girls at the time”) followed by another eight years in his wealthy grandfather’s law firm, and then creating and eventually selling a Web design company, Farenthold seemed content to spend his semiretirement throwing rocks at politicians from the air-conditioned confines of a radio studio.

Then a day came when he found himself giving a five-minute pro-growth speech in front of two hundred cheering strangers. “I could do this,” he decided. On the filing date deadline, Blake Farenthold hopped on an airplane, flew to Austin, and called his wife along the way to tell her, “You’ve got ten minutes to talk me out of filing.” She thought he meant “filing for divorce.”

Farenthold enlisted $100,000 of his own money. He made it into the Republican primary runoff, where he beat an opponent whose candidacy was doomed when it was learned that his wife worked for Planned Parenthood. Seven different Tea Party groups fell in behind the Farenthold insurgent campaign. The National Republican Congressional Committee had eyeballed the candidate but showed little interest until early October, when Farenthold spent $10,000 on a respected pollster whose findings showed the Republican ahead of Ortiz by 8 points. Suddenly Blake Farenthold had an NRCC staffer flying down from Washington to assist him in debate prep and Pat Boone doing a robocall on his behalf. Meanwhile, the 27th District’s Hispanic voters stayed home on November 2. After a manual recount that finally came to an end on November 22, Blake Farenthold emerged with even fewer votes than the previous Republican whom Solomon Ortiz had
beaten
in 2008.

But in 2010, Farenthold’s tally was just enough. Having defeated Solomon Ortiz by 799 votes, he was the Tea Party David who slew the Hispanic Goliath, and was now occupying the very office formerly inhabited by the vanquished, albeit with a tiny and woefully unprepared staff. The reception buffet in his congressional office on January 5, 2011, was the only one in the Rayburn Building to include beer and wine (along with tacos and quesadillas)—as if Blake Farenthold had still not yet caught up to the fact that he was no longer just an affable big fish on the Gulf Coast but a federal officeholder whose every blurt and quiver would be thrust into the blogosphere.

In a sense, he was all too aware. Farenthold was prone to anxiety
dreams. One night he dreamed that he was a newly elected congressman, standing cluelessly alone in an office that was bare except for a telephone that would not quit ringing.

Still: Blake Farenthold and Renee Ellmers were present among the eighty-seven Republican freshmen who would soon become the great animators of the 112th Congress—which, apart from a single tragic interruption, quickly and inalterably became an ideological contest that at times would join the freshmen and their colleagues to the ageless national quarrels personified by America’s greatest statesmen . . . but which at other times would resemble nothing so much as a professional wrestling match wherein, despite spasms of epic brawling, the outcome was preordained.

At 2:03
P.M.
on January 5, 2011
, Speaker Nancy Pelosi officially relinquished power by handing over to John Boehner an almost comically oversized gavel that he had chosen for the occasion. He wiped his eyes during the applause. After both he and Pelosi spoke to the chamber, the dean of the House, John Dingell, stood in the well and administered the oath of office to the new Speaker, just as Dingell had done to Pelosi four years prior. After Boehner declared, “I do,” and the chamber erupted in cheers, the eighty-four-year-old Michigan congressman made his way up the stairs to the Speaker’s chair, assisted by a gnarled wooden cane. He offered his hand to the Republican.

“Hey!” said Boehner in apparent surprise, then shook Dingell’s hand.

Boehner swore in the new members. Clapping and handshakes were general throughout the chamber.

Only a few minutes later, the new House majority leader, Eric Cantor, called up the new rules package that would govern the House for the next two years—“a different and better way” that would include repealing the previous Congress’s most significant achievement, the Affordable Health Care Act.

The bipartisan applause ceased. For the next hour, Democrats took to the floor to blast the new majority for “hypocrisy” and “discredited old tricks.” The 112th Congress was officially under way.

The following afternoon, for the first time ever in the recorded history of the House of Representatives—and at the suggestion of veteran
Republican lawmaker Robert Goodlatte, though likely inspired by the sentiments of the Tea Party movement that had returned the GOP to power—the body’s 435 elected members stood on the House floor to
read sections of the U.S. Constitution
. Jeff Duncan had made a point of arriving early and was among the first five in line. But then the House leaders from both parties were permitted to cut in front of him, and other latecomers saw their chance and edged in as well. Before Duncan knew it, he was thirtieth.

But the freshman still felt an overwhelming thrill as he stood at the podium for the first time and, with his own pocket Constitution in hand, read in a noticeably quavering voice from Article I, Section 8, relating to Congress’s enumerated powers: “To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; to raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.”

A few minutes later, a congresswoman—a Democrat from Arizona named Gabrielle Giffords—read the immortal words of Fisher Ames: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Gabby

Two weeks after the midterm elections had wiped out more than half their membership, the fiscal conservative Democratic coalition known as the
Blue Dogs hosted
a wake at Charlie Palmer steak house. The group’s administrative cochair, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, asked each member to toast another. When it was Gabrielle Giffords’s turn, the forty-year-old Arizona congresswoman stood, smiled, and raised her glass.

“I want to toast all of the lady Blue Dogs, since there aren’t that many of us,” she said. Giffords proceeded to praise each of her fellow female moderates: Herseth Sandlin, Betsy Markey, Kathy Dahlkemper, Melissa Bean, Jane Harman, and Loretta Sanchez. She did not have to add that among this meager list, only three—herself, Harman, and Sanchez—would be coming back for the 112th Congress.