Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (10 page)

Boehner wasn’t ever going to encourage a personality cult in his workplace. Nor was he ever going to inhabit the cutting edge like the third-ranking Republican, Kevin McCarthy, himself not lacking in ambition. McCarthy was from Bakersfield, California, and often flew to
Silicon Valley so that he could trade ideas with high-tech CEOs. During the doldrums of early 2009, McCarthy used GOP funds to start a graphically jazzy website, AmericaSpeakingOut.com, where anyone could register their disgruntlement over the Obama agenda and propose agendas of their own.

Boehner often communicated with other members via highly abbreviated text messages. But that was about as sophisticated as he got. During one Republican conference, the Speaker gamely exhorted the members to use their Twitter accounts to convey the House GOP’s themes of the week. “And,” he added, “uh, don’t forget to, when you’re, uh, tweeting, to, uh, type in a, uh . . .”

The next words seemed to come out of his mouth sideways, like a Czech adjective: “. . . er . . .
hash . . . tag!
”

McCarthy had brought Boehner along to a Bakersfield Tea Party rally on tax day, April 15, 2009. Boehner had never seen anything like it—an outcry of anti-Washington vitriol bordering on the elemental—and immediately recognized that he could either board this train or be flattened by it. He deputized McCarthy to oversee the drafting of a Pledge to America, a riff on Gingrich’s Contract with America, which Boehner’s staff had commandeered sixteen years prior. As a sop to Cantor, they unveiled the Pledge in the latter’s district in September 2010. The promises contained in the forty-eight-page Pledge—repeal Obamacare, halt all tax increases, cut federal spending by at least $100 billion in the first year—were an unmistakable paean to the Tea Party movement. (Only a passing wink was given to social conservatives in the Pledge’s introduction: “We pledge to honor families, traditional marriage, life and . . . faith based organizations . . .”)

Meanwhile, Boehner heated up his own denunciations of the president and the Democratic Speaker. For this task it was clear that he was not the ideal messenger—this pronouncedly retro, Naugahyde-skinned Beltway lifer suddenly spouting maverick claims about how the White House was “out of touch” and that “Washington’s not listening” to the average American.

He had greater worries, however. By October 2010 it had become increasingly evident that the Republicans would retake the House. But would Boehner be their leader? It was hardly guaranteed. He had
appointed McCarthy his chief candidate recruiter for the election cycle. The Californian had built intimate bonds with the new candidates. Boehner hadn’t. One of the highest-profile candidates McCarthy was advising, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, had told her local paper that she wasn’t ready to commit to Boehner. Another Tea Party recruit, Missouri auctioneer Billy Long, would loudly drawl to a couple of lobbyists at a reception that “John Boehner and Roy Blunt are what’s wrong with Washington.”

Though McCarthy was unlikely to take a run at the Speakership, he was tight with Cantor, whose ambitions were undisguised. In 2008, it had been leaked that the Virginia congressman was on the short list to be John McCain’s vice presidential candidate. This amused McCain’s senior staffers, who had each been asked to contribute their recommendations and who therefore knew that Cantor had not been recommended by
any
of them. No doubt the leak had come from Cantor’s inner circle, which was every bit as loyal as Boehner’s.

Boehner had vowed in the fall of 2010 to “
end earmarks
as we know them”—employing that measured construction because there were many in the GOP caucus who supported earmarks. Two weeks later, Cantor, who himself had requested a $7 million flood control earmark in the past, had managed to get to the right of Boehner on his signature issue by declaring in an op-ed that “the next Republican conference should immediately move to eliminate earmarks.” Cantor played offense, and his lieutenants rivaled Nancy Pelosi’s as the most aggressive on the Hill. The mutual distrust between Boehner’s and Cantor’s staffs was at times toxic.

Still, Cantor had been the Republican whip. He knew how to count votes. Boehner had more of them—for now.

And so it was John Boehner who rapped the monstrous gavel on January 5, 2011; Boehner who received a unanimous vote from his Republican colleagues that same afternoon; Boehner who led the reading of the Constitution the next day; Boehner who spent his first weekend as Speaker talking with FBI Director Robert Mueller and House Sergeant at Arms Bill Livingood about the security of Gabby Giffords’s 434 colleagues. It was John Boehner who treated his conference early
and often to the Boehneresque mantra, “Let the body work its will.” He would not dictate in the manner of Gingrich or Pelosi.

Instead, he would at times lead—as another former House and Senate leader, Trent Lott, would say—“
by being led
.” A ferocious wind had blown him into power. The wind was still out there. He was going to hold on. He was going to relax. Things were going to be fine.

CHAPTER SEVEN

State of the Weiner

At the House Democrats’ annual retreat in Cambridge, Maryland, on January 22, 2011, a Texas communications specialist and longtime friend of the Clintons with ruddy cheeks and a bouffant of sandy-blond hair named Roy Spence stood before his audience and challenged them to rethink their purpose for being congressmen.

“The American people have left the building,” Spence told the Democrats. “They can see it. You’re in the reelection business. You’re not in the make-a-difference business. They know it, and so do you. The test for the American people is, are you in it for us—or for
you
? You passed all these laws, but you didn’t pass the test.”

Pacing while he glared defiantly at his audience, Spence continued, “We’re not in a recession. We’re in a winter. The last winter was World War II. Before that, the Civil War. Before that, the American Revolution. The difference is that in the previous winters, we knew what we were fighting for. The American people have left the building because they don’t know what we’re fighting for. And in a democracy, if you don’t know what you’re fighting for, you fight each other. That’s what’s happening now.”

The audience was absolutely quiet. Roy Spence had them spellbound—all except for one congressman, who got up out of his seat and, with a haughty glare, stalked out of the conference room. It was the representative from Brooklyn, Anthony Weiner.

What was unusual about this was not the show of attitude—Weiner’s colleagues widely viewed him as insouciant in the extreme—but rather that he had expressed his disapproval for once without actually moving his mouth. In a chamber replete with self-regarded descendants of
Demosthenes, Anthony Weiner was straight-outta-Brooklyn mouthy, orating with all the gentility of a human threshing machine.

January was shaping up to be a busy month for him. After spending the 112th Congress’s first full day reading from the Constitution and later lapsing into somber tribute to their wounded colleague, Gabrielle Giffords, the House Republicans were now proceeding full tilt with their legislative agenda. Speaker Boehner’s House promised to be a paragon of openness and frugality. Mainly, however, it would be the GOP’s spear point against Obama. Anthony Weiner could not wait to gird for battle.

Two days after Boehner rapped the 112th Congress into session, Weiner gleefully charged that the Republicans had already violated one of their new rules by failing to post a minor piece of legislation online three days before considering it on the House floor. When the Speaker pro tempore ruled that the rule applied only to bills and joint resolutions, not this simple resolution, Weiner howled,
“Am I to understand
that under the rules that were just passed . . . that the new rule requiring three days is
already being waived
?”

Ten days later, as the Republicans set to work repealing the Obama health care bill, Weiner stepped up his lacerating game. “And just a word on this whole government takeover thing,” he said in his nasal near-shout. “I mean, I love you guys, and I know you are caught up in the rhetoric of the campaign . . . Now, what’s your solution? Well, they don’t have a solution. We know what they are against. They are against health reform. We don’t know what they are for. Welcome to the Republican majority.”

After listing several Republican misrepresentations of the Obama health care plan, Weiner said from the House floor, “You know, I want to just advise people watching at home playing that now-popular drinking game of you take a shot whenever the Republicans say something that’s not true: please assign a designated driver. This is going to be a long afternoon.”

He stuck out in the House chamber like an extended middle finger. During floor debate, Weiner would saunter in, his face already wrenched in irritation, and flop down into one of the seats near the back, far from the other Democrats. He would check his BlackBerry, then yawn and stretch his arms extravagantly in the manner of a spoiled
prince. When it came his turn to speak, he would invariably bypass the microphone at the committee table where Democrats frequently gave their floor statements, instead proceeding to the well, so that he could face the full panorama of onlookers—Democrats, Republicans, visitors in the upper gallery—and they in turn could see him.

His jeering, sneering, and frequently hilarious rants were delivered off the cuff, without benefit of any notes—though now and again he brought with him a poster from the House graphics department, or on one occasion a book he had acquired from the House gift shop (
House Mouse, Senate Mouse
, to showcase the House Republicans’ seeming refusal to recognize the legislative role of the Senate).

But his work was hardly done upon leaving the House floor. Oh no: the cable TV cameras beckoned, and Weiner was more than obliging. As recently as early 2009, the congressman would enter his office in the Rayburn Building screaming at the top of his lungs,
“Why the fuck am I not on MSNBC?!”
When the health care debate kicked in, Anthony Weiner became the one-man standard-bearer for the single-payer system. He was now on MSNBC every week, sometimes every day—to the point where he was carrying his own makeup kit. (Or rather, his press guy was.) But because he believed that a fighter should also go into the enemy camp, he was also the designated liberal brawler on Fox. He rather enjoyed his screaming matches with Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly. It burned bile, he liked to say.

Neither Pelosi nor anyone else deputized him to speak for his party. But as the ultimate freelancer in a body of 435 legislative entrepreneurs, Anthony Weiner had discovered that if you go on TV often enough and say something catchy, two things happen. First, your point of view, through repetition across each network, can actually become the conventional wisdom. During the health care debate in August 2009, Weiner
had predicted on CNBC
that a health care bill without a public option would lose the support of one hundred Democrats. That number had just popped into his head. He’d uttered it without any reason to believe it was accurate. And yet it soon became a widely quoted number.

Second, by speaking for the party, you are a de facto party spokesman. But not just perceptually: as if to fulfill the prophecy, Pelosi and Steny Hoyer were now actually turning to him to issue points of order on the House floor! They’d seen he was quicker on his feet than most of
his other colleagues, not to mention an obliging slasher. And of course he loved the performance art of it, going back to his days in the mid-1980s as a young aide to then-Representative Chuck Schumer. Weiner had learned from the master how to vault one’s self into prominence without asking anyone’s permission. Freighted with pop culture references and leavened by the self-awareness that this was, on a certain level, pure shtick, the high-wire act of Anthony Weiner offered a postmodern road map of how 1 out of 435 could become first among equals.

Fellow Democrats weren’t always amused. On January 24, 2011, he told a
Politico
reporter that Obama was not going to gain any points with the new Republican majority by being conciliatory: “I don’t think he should have this tone that if he rolls on his back the new Congress is going to rub his belly.” The following morning, Weiner got an angry email from White House political director Patrick Gaspard, saying words to the effect of,
Don’t compare the president of the United States to a puppy.

Okay, so he’d been a little inartful. Still, the White House senior staff’s enthralled view of their boss’s superiority ate at him. He thought Obama should have done a lengthy rollout of the health care bill, touring the country to explain its contents and objectives to American audiences. In September 2009, after spending a day with Obama in New York to promote a financial reform bill, Weiner hitched a ride back to Washington on the president’s private plane—and, being Weiner, couldn’t resist giving the leader of the free world some advice on how to achieve health reform.

“Mr. President, I think you’re looking at this entirely the wrong way,” he said. “You need to simplify it. Just say that what we’re doing is gradually expanding Medicare.”

Weiner was advocating a single-payer system. “We don’t have the votes for that,” said Obama.

“Mr. President,” said Weiner, “you only have votes for something when you go out and fight for them.”

At least Obama had a sense of humor. “Well,” he’d said with a grin after their conversation was done, “enjoy your last ride on Air Force One.”

Needless to say, the president had ignored his advice. He and his colleagues in the House weren’t always on the same page, either.
During Boehner’s opening statement as new House Speaker, he announced that as one of the Republicans’ first acts of frugality, they would be putting their money where their mouth was by reducing every congressman’s office budget by 5 percent. Every Republican stood and clapped. So did Weiner—and no other Democrat. He’d turned around:
Uh, guys?