Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (8 page)

I will let history judge whether government spending is the best way to spur job creation and economic growth, much less whether the $787 billion Democratic stimulus bill did much to help our economy. But sometimes saying “No” is what’s right for this country—and all 178 Republican members said just that to President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid’s pork-laden stimulus package. At the same time, we did so after offering our own, better alternative, which was central to creating a sense of purpose and unity among House Republicans—we were going to be the party of principled opposition.

Still, back in January 2009, we knew we were taking a gamble when we decided, as a group of House Republicans, to oppose the stimulus bill. We knew the Democrats had the votes in the House to pass the legislation without us. But if they were able to gain the support of just two or three Republican members, they would be able to put a phony “bipartisan” label on the bill and claim it was passed, not on behalf of favored Democratic special interest groups, but on behalf of the American people. And as for business groups who misguidedly supported the bill, our position
was clear cut: our obligation was, first and foremost, to the people. Our job was to be prudent guardians of the taxpayers’ money, not to line up like robots behind self-proclaimed business interests.

In the end, the stimulus bill passed the House of Representatives on January 28, 2009, without a single Republican vote. In the Senate, just three Republicans—Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and then-Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—supported the bill.

As the Republican Whip, my job was to try to convince my colleagues in the House that it was in the nation’s interest—as well as their own interest—to oppose the bill. However, the Whip Team didn’t take the old-style approach—breaking arms and cutting deals—to bring us all together. Instead, we came together by developing sound, principled, commonsense solutions and alternatives that resulted in a better way that was a credible alternative to the Democrats’ plan. This model would become the hallmark of how we would engage the Democrat majority going forward—saying no to bad policies by offering a credible alternative.

The Democratic majority hadn’t produced a stimulus bill; it had produced a spending bill. In contrast, we had worked hard to produce a serious, forward-looking, smarter, and simpler plan to create real, sustainable jobs. We gave our members what they needed to go home to their Rotary Clubs and their chambers of commerce and
neighborhood meetings and say, “Here’s the Democratic bill, it costs more than the entire Iraq War, will give us budget deficits not seen since World War II, and most of the spending won’t even reach the economy for over a year. But here’s our bill, and it’s a better way.” We gave our members what they needed to be viewed as leaders, as sensible, responsible legislators trying to address problems and fight back against this notion that if we didn’t just accept the Democratic plan than we were the party of “no.”

So in a sense, President Obama had been correct when he identified the stimulus vote as a turning point—he was just wrong about what message it sent to the American people. Far from revealing us as the party of “no,” our solidarity in the face of the majority party’s bullying tactics revealed us to be an awakening movement of responsible leaders; the adults in the room at a reckless liberal blowout on the taxpayers’ dime. The mainstream media didn’t like it one bit, of course. The snarky
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd complained that “somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor.”

Getting under the skin of certain
New York Times
columnists is a badge of honor as far as I’m concerned. But there was no cause for celebration for anyone after the stimulus vote. For one thing, the majority Democrats were determined to make us pay a price for our opposition to the bill. Chris Van Hollen, the head of the Democrat Campaign Committee, had warned us that opposition to the
stimulus bill would be the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2010 attack ads. And sure enough, once the bill passed, the Left embarked upon a very organized, sophisticated campaign attacking Republican opposition to their agenda.

One House colleague told me about going home to her district, only to wake up in the morning to see an ad on television attacking her. Then she opened the paper and went online and read the streams of vitriol financed by the Left. Getting in her car, she turned on the radio, hearing ads portraying her as someone she didn’t recognize. And when she returned home at night she got more of the same through the mail and robo calls.

But the real reason we weren’t patting ourselves on the back was that Americans were still out of work. Despite the Obama administration’s promise that unemployment wouldn’t reach over 8 percent if the stimulus passed, unemployment surged to over 10 percent as the year went on. Americans were hurting and all we had accomplished was to go $787 billion deeper in debt. Just three and a half months after it became law, the vice president bizarrely took to the microphone and announced that when it came to taxpayer’s stimulus dollars, “There are going to be mistakes made, some people are being scammed already.” And sadly that pattern hasn’t changed. This wasn’t the type of change most Americans expected—nor deserved.

House Republicans had always known that our belief in free people and free markets was the route to economic recovery. After the stimulus vote we had new confidence in
our ability—and our credibility with the American people—to translate our beliefs into solutions. We just needed the votes to get it done.

The massive stimulus bill was just the opening round in a high spending, big government agenda, that over the course of the last year and a half that has put at risk what I consider to be the essence of the American Dream: leaving my children and grandchildren a better country and the opportunity for a better life than what I inherited. As Paul will detail later, America is approaching a point of no return in which, if we don’t change our ways, each year we will pile more debt on future generations than the year before. The policies of the past year and a half didn’t create this cascading cycle of spending and debt, but they have dangerously accelerated it.

After the stimulus vote, nothing concrete had changed in Washington. The liberal lifers were still in control of Congress. President Obama was still popular. But something important had changed for my conservative colleagues and me: our ability to stand together on the stimulus vote had strengthened our resolve. We went on to stand unanimously against the president’s big spending budget. We sent a strong message that there is a better way to become
energy independent by maintaining strong opposition to the cap-and-trade bill. We had a new confidence. We were moving from playing defense to playing offense. We knew that the model we had followed with the stimulus bill—working hard to present our own commonsense solutions to contrast with the majority’s big government proposals—was the best way forward.

A good example is the housing crisis. Soon after the stimulus bill, the Obama administration rolled out a housing plan that sought to alleviate the mortgage crisis by throwing enormous sums of good taxpayer money at people who had engaged in irresponsible and even fraudulent behavior to get a mortgage, but now weren’t paying their bills.

From the outset of the housing crisis, Washington Democrats had done all they could to direct the public’s anger away from one of the prime culprits in the crisis: the liberal special interest slush funds otherwise known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Democratic lawmakers, led by Financial Services chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), gambled with the taxpayers’ money on millions of risky loans and then blamed everyone else when their house of cards fell down. Left out in the cold were the nine out of ten Americans who had behaved responsibly and were continuing to work hard, play by the rules, and pay their mortgages on time.

Again, far from being the party of no, we had a better way to keep honest, hard-working Americans in their homes and to stop the free fall in housing prices. To keep responsible homeowners who are at risk of losing their
home through no fault of their own, such as those who find themselves temporarily out of work, we offered a $5,000 refinancing tax credit.

And instead of offering incentives for more irresponsible behavior, we offered incentives for Americans to buy new homes or refinance at a lower rate. Our plan included a $15,000 tax credit for the purchase of a primary home
provided that the buyer paid 5 percent down.
It also included incentives for lenders to keep owners in their homes by refinancing mortgages and lowering monthly payments. If the homeowner agreed to share a portion of future home appreciation with the lender, the lender would be exempted from taxes on eventual profits and the borrower would not pay taxes as the result of refinancing.

Our plan was very different from the administration’s plan to have the taxpayers foot the bill for modifying mortgages. We believed that enough irresponsible financial behavior was being bailed out by Washington. It was time to stick up for the Americans who weren’t walking away; those who were sacrificing to do the right thing and pay their mortgages.

We also differed—radically—from the Democrats in charge of Washington when it came to energy and the environment. Their cap-and-trade bill has rightly been called a cap-and-tax bill. It would essentially amount to a national energy tax that would slam small businesses with higher energy bills and put more pressure on already struggling
middle-class American families. Even President Obama, during his presidential campaign, told the editorial board at the
San Francisco Chronicle
that the policy would cause electricity rates to “skyrocket.” At a time of economic uncertainty and high unemployment, it’s the last thing we need. And yet Speaker Pelosi and congressional Democrats have called it their number one priority.

All you have to do is look around you—and read a little history—to know that the best thing a nation can do for its environment is to generate wealth and prosperity. There aren’t a lot of struggling, developing nations devoting their effort and resources to protecting the environment. And, contrary to all the fans of authoritarian regimes like China in the columns of the mainstream media, it’s not the economies smothered by big government that are producing the innovations that will supply “green” energy.

There’s a better way to protect our jobs and protect our environment—it’s offering incentives to develop new energy technologies, not penalties for heating your home and operating your business. We need to protect our national security by developing
American
sources of energy like our clean natural gas and our abundant coal from shale. And we need to offer incentives for our companies to develop the alternative energy we need to make us energy independent. The last thing America’s economy, our national security, or our environment needs is more taxes to kill jobs and stifle innovation. It is important that we diversify energy sources
for both our economic and environmental security. And Republicans developed the American Energy Act, which shows that being conservative and green go hand in hand.

What is most heartbreaking for me looking back on the past year and a half is the wasted potential it represents. President Obama and the strengthened Democratic majority in Congress rode in on a wave of genuine hope for change in 2008. They could have reached across the aisle and found real solutions to our challenges. They could have helped find commonsense answers—answers that wouldn’t satisfy the radical fringes of either party but would address the needs of the American people. Instead, they mistook the voters’ disgust with Washington for a mandate for a Far-Left agenda. They decided, in the words of the White House chief of staff, to “never let a serious crisis go to waste” and attempted to exploit the country’s economic anxiety to entrench huge new government entitlements.

President Obama has implored us to get beyond ideology and he’s right. Americans don’t care about dogma, be it of the Left or of the Right. They’re not looking to belong to a club and know all the secret handshakes. They just want to live their lives and make better lives for their families.