Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (16 page)

A SEAT AT THE TABLE

T
HIS INSURGENT GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT HAD OUTPERFORMED EXPECTATIONS
from day one, accomplishing things that few within the establishment had imagined possible. First a protest movement was predicted to fade with the passage of Obamacare. Now an organic GOTV machine was expected to disassemble, like a typical political campaign, on November 3, 2010. This latest prediction was particularly shortsighted, given that many activists had first cut their grassroots teeth fighting legislative proposals like the spending stimulus and the health care takeover.

Maybe they just wanted us to go away? But that’s not what happened.

Fighting a bad idea was one thing. Coming up with better ideas and drafting specific legislation is on a whole new level. We had a seat at the table, but the cards were still stacked against change. The right policies were defined by the Contract from America, creating an incredibly cohesive set of policy priorities for the new freshman class. But the legislative path from where we stood on November 3, 2010, to where we need to be required a continued evolution and increased sophistication in Tea Partier tactics.

How do we repeal and replace Obamacare? How do we cut spending and reform entitlements, balance the budget, and get our fiscal house in order? How do we rein in the power of politicians, government employees, corporate rent-seekers, and an army of special interests that have enriched themselves at taxpayer expense?

While it is true that Republicans only controlled, in Speaker John Boehner’s words, “one half of one third of the government,”
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it is undeniable that the Tea Party started setting the agenda and shaping the conversation even before the Class of 2010 was sworn into office. The dominant conversation in Washington, D.C., quickly became one about how best to cut deficit spending and get the burden of big government off the backs of workers and job creators. The freshman class was demanding as much because the citizenry demanded it of them.

The debate was now how much to cut; not how much more to spend. The debate wasn’t about whether we should repeal Obamacare; it was now about the best way to replace it and restore individual control over your family’s health care decisions.

Typically, freshman legislators are little heard from, assigned to backwater committees and expected to follow their leadership, particularly in the House of Representatives. But the sheer size of the freshman class, and the now indisputable power of the grassroots movement behind them, forced a rewriting of the rules of the game. The largest freshman class in seventy years was given unprecedented representation on the most important committees that affect spending, taxes, regulation, and new entitlements like Obamacare. “Most of the 22 House Republican freshmen-to-be selected to sit on much coveted, A-list committees won their races with Tea Party backing,” the
Hill
reported. “The House Republican Steering Committee last week added the incoming members to the rosters of four powerful committees: Appropriations, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce and Financial Services.”
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The House leadership also decided to include two freshmen at the leadership table, and the historic class elected Tim Scott as one who would meet weekly with the Elected Leadership Committee. “In just eight months,” Columbia’s
State
would later report, “Rep. Tim Scott has skyrocketed from state legislator to House Republican freshman class leader who stood up to his party bosses in high-profile debt talks and is heading his party’s attack on federal economic bureaucrats.”
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Tea Party politicians were not just shaping the conversation, though. They were proposing solutions that focused on increasing freedom and putting decision-making power back where it belongs, with the people. Cutting against the progressive grain in Washington, these young legislators started asking the question: How do we move power and money back home, out of Washington, D.C.?

MIND YOUR PLACE

E
VEN BEFORE THE 2010 ELECTION, AS IT BECAME CLEAR THAT THE
T
EA
Party would have a big impact on the results and many Tea Party-aligned candidates would win, some in the media shifted the conversation away from Tea Party electoral success, and instead began to question whether elected Tea Party-aligned senators and congressmen would be effective in implementing conservative policies. Mike Lee, who would soon be elected by Utahns to the U.S. Senate, faced such a critique from his hometown newspaper, the
Deseret Morning News
. The newspaper reported that while Lee was proclaiming he would bring “radical reform,” including a Balanced Budget Amendment, it was likely he would have little impact:

Political insiders say it’s unlikely [Mike Lee will] do much of significance in the Senate, at least in his first term. In the Senate, seniority governs everything: the committees you sit on, the arms you can twist to get votes, the bills you get to sponsor. “Mike will have a choice of joining with a few like-minded people to try to have more strength and power in numbers, or to work with a greater number of Republicans and Democrats on certain issues that will allow him to have a far greater influence on many more issues,” says Kirk Jowers of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. “I hope he chooses the latter.” The question, Jowers says, is whether Mike Lee wants to make a difference, or whether he simply wants to make a point.
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While many in the press doubted that the new freshman class could make a difference, the Washington establishment and lobbyist class quickly began setting off alarms, manning the castle turrets, and preparing for battle as if against an invading force. Former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott, now a lobbyist, vividly illustrated this mind-set when he told the
Washington Post
: “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”
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This was how it had always worked in D.C., of course, and there is a natural tendency for power to corrupt, as Lord Acton famously warned. But something was different this time. The quality of the freshmen was markedly higher than average, in terms of their commitment to individual freedom and limited government. More important, there was now a constituency back home that was serving as an effective counter balance to the corrupting forces inside the Beltway. While Lott’s comment reflected how out-of-touch the mainstream media and the Republican establishment were about the strength of the Tea Party movement and the conviction of Tea Party candidates like Mike Lee, it was a prediction validated by history. When Americans rose up in 1994 to throw the bums out, they promptly went back to what they were doing before, assuming that the election had fixed the problem. Lott’s comment illustrates the worst kind of cynicism—that candidates like Mike Lee were just saying what needed to be said to get elected and would be malleable and could be “co-opted” once they achieved their self-interested goals at the ballot box. That, after all, is what Trent Lott had done. He came to Washington to do good, and ended up doing really well. For himself. Such a perspective fits with other establishment Republicans who did exactly that to get elected and reelected.

But Mike Lee was a different breed of political animal. As one of the senator’s aides explained: “If it’s perceived you’re challenging authority, someone [in leadership] will put their arm around you and say, ‘Hey son, that’s not the way it works around here.’ But Mike Lee doesn’t care if that’s the way it works around here.”
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Indeed, Mike Lee would politely, respectfully, directly, and publicly challenge the authority and hierarchy of the Republican establishment in his first few weeks in office. Before he was even sworn into office, Lee, a constitutional lawyer, had started drafting a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution that would become the new gold standard of budget reforms,
both inside and outside the Washington Beltway.

AMENDING THE CONSTITUTION

A
S A YOUNG ECONOMIST AT THE
U.S. C
HAMBER OF
C
OMMERCE IN
the early 1990s, I had been in charge of federal budget policy and budget process reforms like the BBA. There was a heated debate back then about the proper structure of a BBA. Was the goal to balance at any rate of spending, even if it meant constitutionally mandated tax increases? Or was the goal to eliminate deficit spending and the unchecked growth of government, reflective of the clear intentions of the Founders? I was unambiguously in the second camp, and there was a pitched battle then between those legislators who advocated a simple BBA, which allowed a simple majority to raise taxes to balance the budget, and those of us who believed that any amendment to the Constitution had to be done right, or not done at all. We wanted “supermajority” limits on taxes, spending, and the size of government.

The simple BBA was then championed by the late Democratic senator Paul Simon of Illinois. Simon wanted to grow the size of the federal government, and he wanted the constitutional mandate to raise the taxes to finance that growth. He was an unabashed big government progressive. In his failed 1988 run for the Democratic nomination for president, Simon distinguished himself by running
to the left
of other contenders, including Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis, by saying, “I am willing to use the tools of government to work on the problems we have.”
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According to a 1987
Houston Chronicle
account of his campaign:

Simon, a traditional Democratic liberal but one who has advocated a mandatory balanced federal budget, was reminiscent of unsuccessful 1984 Democratic nominee Walter F. Mondale in bringing up the politically sensitive issue of taxes. . . . Simon said he is the only presidential candidate of either party who voted against both the federal income tax cuts enacted in 1981 and 1986. He said the tax cuts bloated the federal deficit and chiefly benefited the wealthy. . . . Simon has supported some tax increases and says more revenue increases are needed. Full employment, through a New Deal–style public works job program, is Simon’s idea of one way to stimulate the economy and raise needed revenue.

Simon said in his announcement: “I stand here as one who is not running away from the Democratic tradition of caring and dreaming. I do not want the Democratic Party to forget its heritage in order to become more acceptable to the wealthy and powerful. One Republican Party is enough.” . . . One of Simon’s pet legislative projects is a bill to create a Guaranteed Job Opportunity Program under which public works jobs would be provided to anyone who wants to work.
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Oddly enough, the simple BBA long advocated by Simon was picked up by “conservative” Republican senator Orrin Hatch in 1997. His version was almost identical to Simon’s progressive legislation in 1992 and 1994, requiring only a simple majority for a tax hike.
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On January 26, 2011, now a six-term senator from Utah and one of the most powerful and longest-serving Republicans in the Senate, Hatch introduced a new version of the Balanced Budget Amendment. This was part of a conspicuous effort to rehabilitate his conservative credentials in Utah in the wake of his colleague’s defeat at the Utah Republican Convention the previous spring. Needless to say, Hatch’s 2011 version was better than his 1997 version, requiring a two-thirds majority vote for a tax hike, but it was flawed in other sections. Hatch’s 2011 budget amendment capped spending at 20 percent of GDP, allowing Congress to exceed this percentage with a two-thirds majority. Twenty percent is just too high, and would lock into the Constitution the expansion of government taken on under the Obama (and Bush) spending sprees. It also allowed Congress to get out of implementing a balanced budget, by raising a simple majority vote based on a vaguely defined “threat to national security.” There was also no requirement of a supermajority vote to increase the debt ceiling.
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Hatch’s early list of cosponsors reads like a Who’s Who of Republican establishment politicians, including Senators John McCain (Ariz.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine).

Unknown to Hatch, Senator-elect Mike Lee had chosen not to follow the
Deseret Morning News’
suggestion that he should stay quiet as a freshman, and had already drafted his own version of the Balanced Budget Amendment. I had seen a draft of the young legislative entrepreneur’s amendment in December 2010, and it was the best version I had seen, much better even than the ones I had supported in the early 1990s. It was airtight. Once sworn into office, Lee introduced his own legislation—just a week after Hatch’s presentation, on February 3, 2011. Like Hatch’s version, Lee’s Balanced Budget Amendment included a two-thirds majority for any tax hike. But that’s the only major similarity. Lee veered away from Hatch’s version with a much more fiscally conservative approach. Lee’s version included a spending cap at 18 percent of GDP (the postwar average, prior to the Bush-Obama spending spree) and required a two-thirds majority to raise the debt ceiling.
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Mike Lee’s list of cosponsors was much shorter than Hatch’s, and included Senators Jim DeMint (S.C.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Pat Toomey (Pa.).

Why did Lee go against conventional wisdom on what the
National Journal
called Hatch’s “signature issue”?
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Lee explained that this was what he was elected to do. “I was elected in part on [pushing the BBA]. And I think it’s the most important effort of this Congress, to get something like that done.”
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On February 14, 2011, I spoke on a CPAC panel discussion of the BBA. At the last minute, Hatch had been added to the panel. Given that FreedomWorks had come out strongly in favor of the Lee approach, it was an interesting dynamic, to say the least. I reiterated my long-held view, having watched progressives like Paul Simon corrupt the concept of the BBA, that any amendment to the Constitution needs to be done the right way. After I spoke, the senior senator from Utah leaned over to speak to me. “The problem with an eighteen percent cap on spending,” he said, “is that the Democrats won’t go along with it.”