Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (8 page)

“Well,” said Herseth Sandlin when her friend was done, “if they’re really set on trying to figure out how to come back in 2012, you and Donnelly”—referring to Indiana Blue Dog Joe Donnelly—“are the ones that should be at the table. They need to hear how you managed to survive this.”

After raising
$4 million in contributions and outspending her Tea Party opponent three to one, Giffords had survived by 4,156 votes out of nearly 284,000 votes cast—and it wasn’t until three days after the election that her victory was made official. She was down in the polls going into the final week of the campaign. During one low moment, a dismayed Giffords told a colleague, “My constituents don’t like me anymore.”

The hard, abrupt swing against her in Arizona seemed unfathomable after so many years of mutual infatuation.
Her boomerang trajectory
could have been diagrammed by a Hollywood screenwriter: brainy, beautiful, free-spirited local gal becomes New York financial planner, only to spurn the skyscraper world and return home to rescue her family’s struggling tire business . . . and later, marry an astronaut! She drove a pickup truck and a Harley, had been restoring Vespas since she was fifteen, was fluent in Spanish, and, as the great-granddaughter of a Lithuanian rabbi, was herself a practicing Jew. In a highly transient southwestern state of asymmetric social hierarchy, Gabrielle Giffords won over her constituents by not pretending to be a square peg. After one term in the Arizona House followed by a single term in the state senate, in 2006 she ran for the 8th District seat, being vacated by a Republican. Assisted by blue-ribbon donors like Emily’s List and the Sierra Club, by helpful campaign plugs from John Dingell and then-Senator Barack Obama and by an ad campaign that promised an unyielding stance on border security, Giffords walloped her opponent by 12 points, and then won a second term by the identical margin in 2008.

What made 2010 different was a rising tide of economic distress, coupled with the growing belief that the Democrats were only making things worse. Unlike many of the other Blue Dogs, Giffords had voted for the complete unholy trinity: stimulus, cap-and-trade, and health care. The latter vote set off an ugly conflagration of attacks—the very least of which were snarky ads featuring a Pelosi double instructing a Giffords stand-in who would bleat,
“Whatever you say
, mama Nancy.” More ominously, an anonymous assailant blew out the windows on her district office. Sarah Palin’s PAC website showed a map of congressional districts with crosshairs covering twenty of them, representing Democrats who had voted for health care. Arizona’s 8th District was one of them. Giffords went on MSNBC to warn Palin that “there’s consequences to that action.” Already an attendee at one of her health care forums had dropped a loaded revolver on the ground. Now her Tea Party opponent, a twenty-eight-year-old Marine named Jesse Kelly, was posing in campaign ads brandishing an M-16 assault rifle. “Send a Warrior to Congress,” Kelly’s ad said.

Giffords herself was more of a survivor than a warrior. She navigated the fault line between her conservative voters and her party’s progressive agenda with acrobatic expertise—which did not mean that her footwork escaped notice. The Republicans in the Arizona delegation
felt that her efforts to secure her district’s porous border lagged behind her tough talk. During one breakfast with her Arizona colleagues, Giffords described a recent trip she had taken to get to know ranchers along the border and then chidingly added, “All of you were invited, too. How come you weren’t there?”

“Listen, young lady,”
growled Senator John McCain. “We know a little bit about the border, and I won’t be lectured by you about it!”

While staking out territory as a centrist, Giffords departed from other Blue Dogs by cultivating a relationship with Speaker Pelosi—believing that, for all the Speaker’s shortcomings, she was a strong advocate for women in Congress, and believing further that most of the attacks on Pelosi had their basis in sexism. Pelosi, for her part, saw star potential in the freshman and therefore awarded her choice committee assignments for her district (Armed Services and Science and Technology). A year later, Giffords became the only sophomore handpicked by Pelosi to join the twenty-member congressional delegation to the Copenhagen climate change summit. That same year, the Speaker invited her to a weekend of rubbing elbows with big donors at Pelosi’s Napa Valley cabin.

Giffords had district-specific reasons for supporting most of the Democratic agenda—especially the energy bill, which would have been a boon for Arizona’s solar power industry had it passed the Senate. But she also voiced sharp disagreements with the party, particularly during the 2010 election cycle. Along with other Blue Dogs, she emphatically told then–Budget Committee chairman John Spratt that she could not vote for Obama’s $1.4 trillion budget—and as a result of such objections, the Democrats never introduced a budget for the next fiscal year. That spring, shortly after the shooting death of a well-known rancher in her district, Giffords had lunch at the White House and spoke forcefully to Obama about the administration’s insufficient efforts on the border.

Her opponent Kelly had proclaimed himself
“absolutely the Tea Party
candidate,” leaving Giffords a wide swath of running room in the middle. “Gabrielle is not like other politicians,” her press statements unfailingly asserted. “She takes an independent view on the issues and was rated Arizona’s most moderate member of Congress by the
National Journal
. . .” Her campaign ads—at least the ones that weren’t
excoriating her opponent as “dangerous”—touted endorsements by Arizona Republicans, veterans, senior citizens, small businessmen, and local law enforcement agents. She buttressed her advocacy of seniors by introducing a resolution that would oppose an increase in the Social Security retirement age—though no such policy was under active consideration that legislative session. Above all, both on the House floor and on the campaign trail, she delivered multitudes of speeches on border security—including a tart critique of the president’s claim that the border was “more secure today than at any time in the past twenty years.”

Still, Giffords never equivocated in her support of the much-demonized stimulus, energy, and health care bills. While calmly explaining her votes during a debate with Kelly two weeks before the election, she was drowned out by boos.

The catcalls Giffords could handle. If representing her constituents in the legislative process meant shouldering some political grief, so be it. But, as she confided to some of her colleagues, Pelosi’s domineering reign had taken some of the joy out of public service. Giffords saw herself as a legislator. During her first term, seven bills and amendments that she introduced were signed into law. In four years, she had introduced fifty-nine bills and amendments.

But her contributions had, like that of most other House Democrats, slowed to a crawl in 2009, when Speaker Pelosi began to stifle amendments and limit debate so as to prevent the Republicans from throwing the Democratic agenda off course. And in the meantime, Giffords told associates, the party had been far too deferential to seniority, and discouraging its younger members from aspiring to leadership roles.

Adding to her doubts was her desire to start a family with her husband, Mark. The astronaut lived in Houston; the congresswoman, in Arizona and Washington. One night over dinner at the Democratic Club a few blocks from the Capitol, Giffords asked her friend Diana DeGette—a seven-term Colorado representative who had two teenaged children—just how a young mother could make it all work. DeGette offered encouragement. Her friend Gabby wasn’t convinced, however. The two agreed to continue discussing the subject some other time.

Tears ran down Gabrielle Giffords’s face on election night when she heard the news that nearly every one of her friends in the House had lost. On January 5, 2011, the day of her swearing-in, Giffords joined her depleted Blue Dogs in voting against Nancy Pelosi for minority leader—though
she discussed the matter with Pelosi
on the floor that morning, saying that it wasn’t personal but instead a reflection on how effective the Pelosi-bashing had been in her district. Giffords then proceeded to support not the Blue Dog candidate Heath Shuler but instead civil rights legend John Lewis. The next day, just after reading the First Amendment to the Constitution on the House floor, Giffords introduced legislation to cut the salaries of all congressional members by 5 percent—an effort she had cosponsored the previous year, but which then-Speaker Pelosi had not permitted to come to the floor. Under a Republican majority with its budget-slashing Tea Party freshmen, she figured that the bill stood a better chance.

The following day
, Friday, January 7, Gabby Giffords accosted one of the freshmen, David Schweikert, on the House floor. She took the fellow Arizonan on a tour of the Capitol. That same day, her staff announced that she would be attending her premiere “Congress on Your Corner” event of the year, on Saturday the eighth at a supermarket in northwest Tucson.

Giffords had told her staff that life in the congressional minority would mean concentrating more on district issues. She expressed the desire to get to it right away. The Safeway event would be the beginning of her up-tempo, localized focus—and would also be the 8th District’s first opportunity to embrace Gabrielle Giffords’s message, verbalized in her victory speech back in November, that
“there’s a big difference
between a crowd and a community. When you’re in a crowd, you’re pushing. You’re shoving. You’re jockeying for position. But when you’re in a community, you stop for a second, and you acknowledge one another . . . and you can disagree, without being disagreeable.”

The next morning just outside the Safeway supermarket, the congresswoman and her constituents renewed their acquaintance. They lined up and chatted amiably with her, in the civil manner of community. It did not feel like a crowd until all of a sudden someone pushed forward. A moment later came the act that defied all agreeability.

CHAPTER SIX

The Institutionalist

Boehner had been at his home
in West Chester, Ohio, that Saturday afternoon when he picked up the phone and heard from his chief of staff, Barry Jackson, that Gabrielle Giffords and three of her staffers had been shot and possibly killed.

He called his Democratic counterpart, Nancy Pelosi, who had been taking down her Christmas tree at home in San Francisco when she got the news. Then the Speaker released a short statement. “I am horrified,” it read, “by the senseless attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and members of her staff. An attack on one who serves was an attack on all who serve . . . This is a sad day for our country.”

That evening, Boehner’s staffers back in Washington urged him to hold a press conference.
People needed to see the House leader, not just hear him
, they said.
You can deliver it in West Chester. You’re the Speaker. The cameras will come to you.

Boehner had been at his job only three days. He of course understood the Speaker’s traditional duties: controlling the House’s legislative calendar, overseeing the majority party’s committee assignments, and standing second in the line of succession to the presidency. Still, he was not yet accustomed to the full power it conferred on him. Sure enough, a phalanx of reporters awaited him on Sunday morning at the West Chester township office, where Boehner had begun his political career as a township trustee nearly three decades ago. He took no questions and read from a prepared statement that again included the sentiment that “an attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.” That same morning, Boehner’s staff wrangled the entire House membership for a conference call. Boehner led off with remarks—which
were again written down and included the same verbiage as his other two statements—before passing the call off to Pelosi.

This was Boehner. Like his immediate predecessor, Pelosi, he did his best work behind the scenes. But this, too, was Boehner: he ordered the flags flown at half-mast on the House side of the Capitol in honor of Giffords’s staffer Gabe Zimmerman, who had died on the scene. He and Majority Leader Eric Cantor agreed to postpone next week’s business in the House, which would have included efforts to repeal Obama’s health care act (which Republicans had heretofore described as “job-killing”).

“And frankly,” he told his House colleagues on the conference call, “we need to rally around each other. This is a time for the House to lock arms . . . We must rise to the occasion for our nation and show Congress at its best.”

Two days later, on the House floor, Boehner gave a more poignant speech in honor of the Arizona congresswoman who was now fighting for her life in a Tucson intensive care unit. He choked up and tears ran down his face. This, unmistakably, was John Boehner.

The body closest to the people, and to their passions, was ever susceptible to unruliness and thus to violence. At times the congressmen themselves were the instigators.
In 1808
, New York Representative Barent Gardenier denounced President Jefferson’s sweeping trade embargo on the House floor with escalating obnoxiousness, to the point where House Ways and Means chairman George Washington Campbell challenged Gardenier to a duel. Campbell was the abler marksman. The gravely wounded Gardenier, it was later said, “escaped with his life; and when he returned to his seat he assailed his opponents with more violence than ever.”

On an afternoon in February 1857, as the
New York Times
breathlessly reported it, “The vulgar monotony of partisan passions and political squabbles has been terribly broken in upon to-day by an outburst of public revenge”—referring to New York Congressman Daniel E. Sickles gunning down the District of Columbia’s district attorney, who was the son of Francis Scott Key, after learning that the younger Key was enjoying liaison with Sickles’s wife. The jury ultimately found the congressman not guilty—telling a reporter later that the murdered
adulterer “deserves his doom”—and overjoyed spectators carried Sickles out into the streets.