Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (18 page)

Gesturing to a large placard he had placed on a stand beside him, Jones said, “I bring a photograph of a flag-draped coffin—it’s called a transfer case—being escorted off a plane at Dover Air Force Base.

“
Mr. Speaker
, it is time to bring our troops home. They have been in Afghanistan for over ten years. I would also say it is time that this Congress met its constitutional responsibility to debate war and whether we should be there or bring our troops home . . .

“How many more young men and women must lose their legs, their lives, for a corrupt government that history has proven will never be
changed? Why should they be dying and losing their legs for Karzai, who doesn’t even know that we’re his friends? It makes no sense.”

He read from a letter sent to him by a retired military general, who maintained that the war in Afghanistan “can’t be won.” He read from another letter, this one by a recently retired Marine lieutenant colonel who viewed the war as having “gone on for too long.” He spoke of a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to stand beside the bed of a twenty-two-year-old Army private whose body below the waist had all been blown away.

And then he concluded with a kind of prayer, with eyes closed: “God bless the House and Senate that we will do what is right in Your eyes for today’s generation and tomorrow’s generation. I ask God to give wisdom, strength and courage to President Obama that he will do what is right in the eyes of God.

“And three times I will ask: God, please, God, please, God, please continue to bless America.”

Walter Jones walked away from the microphone. The next speaker happened to be Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer. He grabbed the Republican’s hand and spoke in his ear for a moment.

Then, when the Democrats’ second-ranking leader turned to the microphone, his first words were not from his prepared text. “First I want to congratulate the gentleman from North Carolina,” Hoyer said with a stricken expression. “He is a Republican and I am a Democrat, but I will tell you this: We are friends, and we work together. And he is one of the most conscientious members of this House, who follows his conscience and his moral values in making decisions. He gave a very moving and important speech on the floor today. I thank the gentleman, Mr. Jones, from North Carolina.”

Jones nodded his appreciation and walked out of the chamber. Hoyer then proceeded into his daily harangue of the Republicans, and a Republican followed to harangue the Democrats, and whatever subtle and plaintive magic had transpired during Walter Jones’s five minutes of the morning hour evaporated altogether.

Every Saturday morning at about 9:30, Walter Jones showed up to his otherwise empty district office in Greenville, North Carolina, and followed through on a ritual he had begun a decade ago. He would
put on a pot of coffee for himself. Then he would sit at his desk and reach for the letters he had written, and that his staff had then typed and printed out, to the families of the young men and women from his district who had recently died in combat.

My heart aches as I write this letter for I realize you are suffering a great loss . . . In John 15:13 Jesus says, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends . . .”

He would sign them slowly, painstakingly, using an ink pen. The signature on each had to look just right. If the
e
in
Walter
was closed too tightly, he would print out a fresh copy and redo the signature. He would do them in groups of five, because he wanted to take his time, considering each fallen warrior, thinking about why this had happened and about everyone who had been touched by each singular devastation—and about his weakness that had led him to vote for these terrible wars that had cost so many and for so little in return.

After he had signed those five letters, Jones would slide each of them into its respective previously addressed envelope, unfolded, along with a piece of cardboard. Then he would move on to the next five letters. The Saturday after he had given the Afghanistan speech in front of Steny Hoyer and practically no one else, there had been twenty-seven letters waiting on his desk. It took over an hour. Only then, after he had completed his monastic act of penitence, would Walter Jones then permit himself to move on with his day.

Often the families replied to Jones to thank him for being so considerate. He found such letters very difficult to read. Because Jones had never served in the military, he was not strong enough to vote his conscience, which was telling him that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction and that the pretext for invading Iraq was therefore false. He felt undeserving of any kind of praise. And it was haunting to read notes like the one he received a few years back but could not forget:
Thanks for your letter. My only regret is that my son was killed looking for WMD’s that did not exist.

The liberal magazine
Mother Jones
had put Walter Jones on the cover in early 2006, a few months after he had turned hard against the Iraq War. Jones’s press secretary at the time had told him that she believed
Mother Jones
was a Catholic magazine.

Walter Jones was
a Republican. He had never been anything but
a Republican—though his father, Walter Sr., had been a Democratic congressman for the 1st District for twenty-six years. The younger Jones had been elected in 1994, as a foot soldier in the Gingrich Revolution who faithfully listened to the GOPAC messaging tapes and gratefully received the campaign support of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, at the time the nation’s foremost paleoconservative.

And Jones remained a conservative: pro-life, against big government, reverent of God and of family values. When Michele Bachmann formed the Tea Party Caucus after the 2010 midterms, Jones’s chief of staff signed up his boss. The congressman had to tell his staffer to remove his name and consult with him next time. He thought Bachmann was a nice person, but her divisive statements unsettled him.

In the view of the House GOP leaders, however, Walter Jones was no longer a reliable Republican. He did not attend the House GOP conferences. On the House floor he sat next to his close friend, libertarian Ron Paul. Together they voted against any bill that furthered the war effort, no matter what else was in it. He was working with Dennis Kucinich and other liberal Democrats to produce legislation that would accelerate the troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. When the Democrats were in power, he requested from Speaker Pelosi that the House engage in a moment of silence once a month to honor the fallen. She agreed to do so. A month into the 112th Congress, Jones sent Speaker Boehner a letter, asking that he continue the tradition.

A
Huffington Post
reporter happened to be talking to Jones, who mentioned that he had sent a letter to Boehner requesting that the House honor America’s fallen warriors with a moment of silence once a month. A week later, Boehner’s chief of staff, Barry Jackson, accosted Jones on the House floor during votes.

“I understand from the
Huffington Post
that you’ve threatened the Speaker,” Jackson said.

He was joking, sort of. But there was in fact a price to be paid for crossing his party with his antiwar posture. When the Republicans regained power after the 2010 elections, Jones was informed that despite his seniority, Speaker Boehner would not be naming him to chair a subcommittee, because he was “too independent.”

He knew it was a fair criticism. Jones was not exactly a team player. In late January, when the GOP advanced a bill that would eliminate
public campaign financing, Democrat Chris Van Hollen countered with a “motion to recommit” that would substitute the Republican bill with one that required big donors to disclose their identities. Jones had always supported campaign finance reform. He voted for Van Hollen’s motion.

Jones was sitting on the front row talking to a colleague when a Republican leadership staffer bent down and whispered to him, “We need for you to change your vote.”

“I’m not going to,” said Jones.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor then came to see Jones on the floor. He made the same request.

“Eric, I’m not going to change my vote,” Jones said. “I’ve been a campaign reformer since I started out in the North Carolina state legislature in 1980.”

“Walter,” Cantor said, “we don’t need for the freshmen to see any breaks in ranks.”

Jones did not oblige the majority leader—though he, too, was interested in what the freshmen thought. He and two other Republican war critics, Ron Paul and Tennessee Congressman Jimmy Duncan, had invited all of the GOP members to attend a meeting on February 16 to discuss U.S. policy in Afghanistan with Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, retired Major General John Batiste, and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Because that day fell during the protracted amendment debate for the Continuing Resolution, only five Republicans showed up. Two were freshmen—one of whom, Todd Rokita, also voted for the amendment Walter Jones had submitted to H.R.1 that proposed to eliminate the $400 million Afghanistan infrastructure fund. Only thirty-five Republicans had sided with his amendment, which was defeated. He could see that Boehner and the rest of the Republican leadership were reluctant to appear in any way dovish.

Nonetheless, eight of those thirty-five Republican votes were from freshmen. Jones knew that the class of 2010 had come to Washington to slash spending. He hoped that he could appeal to their wallets, if not their hearts.

On February 17, 2011, the eighty-year-old Republican congressman and former Vietnam POW
Sam Johnson was escorted
by Boehner
to the Speaker’s chair. The occasion was the thirty-eighth anniversary of Johnson’s return to America after spending nearly seven ghastly years in the so-called Hanoi Hilton. The war hero’s presence was greeted on the floor with a cacophony of soldierly
Hoo-hah
s and a standing ovation. “He’s a great American,” Boehner proclaimed amid the swelling applause.

But during Sam Johnson’s brief moment as acting Speaker, he said to the House, “The Chair would ask all present to rise for the purpose of a moment of silence . . . in remembrance of our brave men and women in uniform who have given their lives in the service of our Nation . . .”

Walter Jones had succeeded.

And he was gratified. But, he felt, it should be a monthly occurrence, until all the troops were safely home at last.

Gently, he would keep pushing.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Black Republican Out of Florida

The first African-American congressman to be elected in the Sunshine State was a Virginia native named
Josiah Walls
, believed to have escaped slavery in 1863 by enlisting as a private in the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Union Army’s Colored Troops division. Walls apparently parlayed his military standing into a successful run for the Florida state legislature in 1868. As the Reconstruction era fell upon the South, the white grandees saw the writing on the wall and gave in to Negro pressure, greasing the path for Josiah Walls to run for Florida’s only seat in Congress.

In the 1870 general election he narrowly defeated a former slave owner. The House that Walls joined would soon include black members from Louisiana, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. But the climate in the lower body was not altogether welcoming to the black new arrivals. “Sir, the Negro is a clinging parasite,” declared William Robbins, a Democratic freshman from North Carolina, during Walls’s first full term in 1873. Robbins added, “Even here on this floor—and I mean no disrespect to any fellow member by this remark—he does nothing, he says nothing except as he is prompted by his managers; even here he obeys the bidding of the new white masters, who move him like a puppet on the chess board . . .”

The lot of freed African-Americans was hardly Congress’s preoccupation during the Reconstruction era. As a freshman, Walls took to the House floor to demand a federal education system so that former slaves could find a foothold in society—and in recognition of the unlikelihood that “their former enslavers would take an impartial interest in their educational affairs.” Yet the only bills passed during his tenure would sanction states’ rights rather than civil rights.

During his first full term, the hyperactive Josiah Walls managed to divide his time between the House, a budding law practice, the cultivation of a sizable cotton plantation, and a newspaper in Gainesville he had acquired for the purposes of promoting “the wants and interests of the people of color.” Apparently all of this was not enough, for during his first term in the House he also served a short stint as mayor of Gainesville. Between his burgeoning workload and his Radical Republican politics, Walls was guaranteed a tough reelection battle in 1874. Again he won by a hair. The results were contested and he was forced to vacate his office.

He ran for the House again in 1884, to no avail—by which time the number of blacks in Congress had dwindled to two, both being of such ill repute that a Negro paper pronounced them demagogues and said that white representatives would have been a better choice. When Josiah Walls died, no newspaper in Florida thought him worthy of an obituary. The “experiment” of blacks in Congress had been deemed a failure. In August 1900, the last of them, George Henry White of North Carolina, announced that he would be stepping down and leaving the state, explaining, “I cannot live in North Carolina and be treated as a man.” He advised other blacks in the state to move westward, where they could “go on a farm and own their own homes.” Another twenty-nine years would pass before Oscar De Priest from Chicago would take his place among the all-Caucasian body and five years later stage a brave and futile crusade against the segregated House dining room. De Priest lost his reelection campaign that same year, in 1934.

And with that, the House faded to white once more.

“You’ve gotta put me in, coach,” Allen West said to Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver back in January on the House floor. “I’m not here just to be window dressing. This isn’t just a symbolic thing for me.”