Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (20 page)

The Islamic Society of Clemson was actually not very edgy at all. The mosque had existed for a decade, attracting two hundred or so Muslims who worked and studied at the university. Some of these were citizens of Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, and Jordan. But the mosque’s cofounder was a fifty-seven-year-old African-American and lifelong Clemson resident named Darnell Oglesby, who had grown up as a black Christian in a climate of segregated bathrooms and unsolved lynchings, and whose brother had graduated from high school with Senator Lindsey Graham. Oglesby viewed sharia as a spiritual compass that “just deals with day to day life—we don’t want to make it the law of this country.” He and his fellow Clemson Muslims were baffled that their elected congressman would suspect otherwise. They hoped that Duncan would drop by the Islamic Society of Clemson sometime and see for himself.

But Duncan was heading in a different direction.

In early March
of 2011, Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King announced that he would be holding a hearing on radical Islam in America. King, who often sparred with his fellow New Yorker Anthony Weiner, had a knack for drawing media attention. The Muslim radicalization hearing would be his pièce de résistance, dominating the cable shows and garnering front-page headlines for several days.
While many Democrats charged that King’s hearing smacked of racial profiling, and hundreds protested in Times Square, Jeff Duncan saw an opportunity. He dispatched two of his legislative aides to spend three days interviewing counterterrorism specialists in conservative think tanks. They prepared a detailed brief for their boss.

Duncan was less interested in the methods of Muslim radicalization than what he believed to be the jihadists’ ultimate goal: to make sharia the law of the land in America. He had been reading a book called
Sharia: The Threat to America.
Its coauthor, Frank Gaffney, espoused alarmist views on “stealth jihad” that were distinctively scattershot—accusing conservative tax activist Grover Norquist, for example, of being a radical Islam sympathizer and the CPAC conference where Allen West gave the keynote of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Nonetheless, Duncan had heard anecdotal evidence to buttress Gaffney’s claims. There had been a lower court ruling in New Jersey that a Muslim man who had sexually assaulted his wife was exempted from punishment because sharia law held that the wife should submit to him. (The case was overturned in an appellate court.) To Duncan, the equation was simple: “Sharia butts heads with the Constitution.”

The hearing took place on March 10 and began with the testimony of Congressman John Dingell. “I represent a very polyglot and diverse congressional district in which we have all races, religions, and all parts of the world society represented,” Dingell said, glaring at the committee members instead of reading from a prepared text. “I represent a very fine community of Muslim-Americans . . . They are, almost without exception, loyal, honorable citizens.”

Dingell reminded the committee members that he once ran numerous investigations in his capacity as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. “I kept a picture of Joe McCarthy hanging on the wall,” he said, “so that I would know what it is that I did not want to look like, to do or to be.” While applauding Chairman King for the hearing’s “great potential,” he urged that “we do not blot the good name or the loyalty or raise questions about the decency of Arabs or Muslim or other Americans en masse. There will be plenty of rascals we can point at,” he concluded.

The King hearing lasted four hours. Like most congressional inquisitions, exchange of information took a backseat to speechifying and,
at times, emotional theater. Its six witnesses included the House’s first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, who sobbed bitterly as he recounted the death on 9/11 of a first responder whose Muslim faith had caused his character to be smeared. Less sympathetic to Muslims was the testimony supplied by two men whose young male relatives had turned to violent jihad, and by an Arizona Muslim named Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, who urged reformist interpretations of the Koran. As a freshman, Jeff Duncan’s turn came near the very end. He knew that he would have only five minutes and thus time for only one question. He was grateful when none of the other congressmen touched on the topic that he had intended to broach.

He began by reading from a
Newsweek
story that criticized the left for protecting Islamism and the right for “often wrongly attacking the Muslim faith.” Then Duncan declared, “I’m not aware of anyone on this side of the spectrum attacking Islam, nor of anyone wishing to limit anyone’s First Amendment rights. But rather I believe we are raising the awareness of Islamism.”

Duncan said, “I am regularly astonished and outraged . . .” He rapped his fist against the table and repeated, “Outraged! By this administration’s continued failure to single out who our enemy is!” The freshman carried on for another minute about the Obama administration’s politically correct aversion to using words like
jihad
and
Muslim Brotherhood,
showing a chart by Frank Gaffney to bolster his point.

“But what I came here today to delve into is a completely different line of thought,” Duncan then said. “It is this, an issue of particular concern to me and my constituents, and that is the threat of sharia law to the United States Constitution.”

The freshman declared his desire “to seek multiple hearings” on “the role that Islamic doctrine plays in the radicalization process.” With his time running out, the freshman finally got out his question to Dr. Jasser: “Do you feel the U.S. government has done an adequate job learning about Islam and how Islamic doctrines affect the behavior and community norms of Muslims residing in America, and how does Islamic doctrine and sharia law shape the responsiveness of local U.S. Muslim communities to law enforcement efforts that target Islamic jihad?”

It was a mouthful. “I think that’s a wonderful question,” Dr. Jasser replied, before proceeding to spend the final two minutes not answering
it—instead expanding on his earlier testimony about the antique nature of sharia and the need to reform it.

Duncan was fine with that. He had been permitted his moment on national television to register his concern with radical Islam. That evening, liberal commentator Chris Matthews would run the clip of Duncan’s “outraged—outraged!” moment on his MSNBC show
Hardball,
followed by the observation that Duncan was “a congressman reading nonsense.”

Duncan’s press release that afternoon cast it differently:
DUNCAN DEFENDS CONSTITUTION DURING RADICALIZATION HEARING.
“Freshman Congressman Jeff Duncan was a leading voice in today’s radicalization hearings . . .”

A couple of hours after the hearing had concluded, Duncan was walking down the aisle of the House floor, feeling rather buoyed by his performance. Then someone threw a shoulder into him. Turning, he noticed a short but solidly built African-American woman walking in the opposite direction. He figured it must have been a mistake.

But then as she returned up the aisle, she did it again. Bumped him hard. Duncan realized he’d recognized her from the hearing—she had gone on and on about how the proceedings were “tainted” and “an outrage,” refusing to acknowledge Chairman King’s rapping of the gavel. Duncan told a few of his colleagues about what she had done to him, and they laughed and shared some of the many stories about her.
Sheila Jackson Lee
was her name.

“She and I are gonna butt heads,” he vowed.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Woman of a Certain Rage

Sheila Jackson Lee represented Texas’s 18th Congressional District—the seat, in every meaningful way, of Barbara Jordan.

The legendary Houston
congresswoman had actually helped draw her own district map while serving as vice chair of the Texas State Senate redistricting panel in 1971—a post she had secured due to her alliances with Lyndon Johnson. The former president saw his protégé as “the epitome of the new politics in Texas, not the politics that seek to destroy and divide and mess up everything in the way.” Likewise, much of the all-white Texas political establishment regarded the heavyset young woman from Houston’s Fifth Ward with the searing intellect and regal voice as singular and predestined for this moment. Before her, no black had ever been elected to Congress from Texas. Nor had any African-American since Reconstruction served in the state senate until Jordan was elected in 1966 at the age of thirty. But the time now seemed ripe to fall in behind a black politician who was strong and principled yet also accommodating—whose abiding view was that “militancy is expressed in different ways.”

Jordan arrived in Washington in January 1973 as a freshman in a class of her own. Her first choice had been to serve on the Armed Services Committee. But LBJ persuaded her to aim for a seat on Judiciary instead—and then sealed the deal through phone conversations with influential Democrats like Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills. (John Dingell, who had taken an immediate liking to Jordan, later asked her if she could help secure
him
a seat on her committee. She demurred, laughing, “I don’t think Judiciary is ready for you, John.”) The chairman, Peter Rodino of New Jersey, curried favor with Jordan rather than the other way around, seeing her popularity as something that might help
him gain favor with his own black constituents. It was not long before Washington reporters were referring to the thirty-eight-year-old freshman as “the brightest member of the Judiciary Committee.”

On February 6, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee began its impeachment inquiry of President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal. Jordan had been a lawyer before she entered politics, but her clients were largely poor and black. Now she endeavored to become a constitutional scholar on the fly. Twice she visited the National Archives and took her place among tourists staring at the Founders’ document. By night she immersed herself in legal texts and testimony transcripts. Jordan had quickly formed the conclusion that the president was guilty of obstructing justice. But she had not decided how she would express this opinion until just a few hours before July 25, 1974, when the House Judiciary Committee would convene before a nationally televised audience to discuss articles of impeachment.

Being a freshman, Jordan’s turn to give her fifteen-minute statement came near the very end. Leaning into the microphone, she began, “Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States.
We, the People.
It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that
We, the People.
I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton must have left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in
We, the People.

“Today, I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

Late that evening, an immense crowd had gathered outside the Rayburn Office Building, where the hearings had taken place. Jordan’s administrative assistant, Bud Myers, suggested that they take another route to get to her car.

But the freshman knew that she had become part of history. There was no sense running from it. “Are you kidding?” the congresswoman snapped. “We’re going to get out there and be with the people!”

Two days later, Barbara Jordan voted to impeach the president. Nixon resigned less than two weeks after that, on August 9, 1974.

Then, in December 1977, it was Jordan’s turn to announce that she, too, would be stepping down from office. She did not say why, beyond the oblique observation that “Congress was not, I believe, intended to be a haven for life.” In fact, she had been afflicted with multiple sclerosis for some time. Her face had been swollen from medication that very day in 1974 when the strong black woman from the Fifth Ward became an inquisitor on behalf of the Constitution.

No one had noticed then, just as few would recall later, that her tenure in the House had been a scant three terms. Barbara Jordan had found her moment in history—and from those fleeting fifteen minutes she achieved a state of permanence.

It was in 1978, during Barbara Jordan’s final year representing the 18th District, that she received an office visit from a recent law school graduate named Sheila Jackson Lee.

The younger woman was thrilled to be in the famed congresswoman’s presence. But she did not behave like a starstruck postgrad. She possessed a deep, enunciating manner of speech not unlike Jordan’s, and she used it to ask a very basic question:
How do I gain a foothold in Houston the way you did?

The young woman was actually from Queens, New York. Sheila Jackson Lee’s mother was a vocational nurse and her father drew horror comics for Eerie Publications. But her husband, Elwyn Lee, had just taken a job as professor at the University of Houston, in the city of his birth, and the boomtown openness of the Bayou City was appealing to the plainly ambitious Yale and University of Virginia graduate. She lacked her role model’s ability to impress higher-ups. Yet it’s likely the congresswoman saw something of herself in this hustling, intense young woman who now sought to succeed in a southern community still dominated by white males.

“The way to become relevant,” Jordan told her visitor, “is to go meet the icons of the community. Let them tell you what needs to be done in the community. Find out what that is, and do it well.”

It was good advice that Sheila Jackson Lee took, more or less. She did in fact seek out Houston icons, beginning with Jordan’s friend,
the former Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who hired her at his law firm. And after an unsteady decade of attempting to find a toehold in local politics, Jackson Lee at last managed to parlay her seat on the Houston City Council into a primary challenge against the 18th District’s officeholder in 1994, Craig Washington, and steamrollered the incumbent Democrat. Amid the tidal wave of the Gingrich Revolution, Sheila Jackson Lee arrived in Washington in 1995 as one of the Democrats’ few success stories, much as Barbara Jordan had been twenty-two years earlier.