Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (23 page)

Allen West was appalled by the cynicism. The former Army lieutenant colonel blasted Boehner in a press release. “
I am disgusted
at the perception that the leaders in my own party who did not move a defense bill earlier and are now using the men and women in uniform, the individuals who are defending our freedom, as a way to pass yet another continuing resolution,” it said. Though West voted for the CR “for my brothers and sisters in uniform,” he conveyed his “disappointment in my own leadership.”

Boehner never said anything to West about his missive. The same day that Boehner’s short-term CR was passed by the House (and, predictably, rejected by the Senate), West walked off the House floor and approached a reporter he knew. He looked uncharacteristically stricken.

“
I thought I
’d let you know—I had a death threat,” he said. “About two hours ago.”

He went on to explain that someone had sent a package of white
powder to his Fort Lauderdale office. A letter inside the envelope made reference to anthrax. The FBI was already on the scene.

“Oh, I’m fine,” he insisted. “But my girl who opened it . . .”

West did not appear fine—though he momentarily chuckled when recalling that a few minutes ago, Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer had quoted on the House floor West’s denunciation of Boehner for using the troops as pawns . . . and had referred to West as “the representative of South Carolina”—apparently confusing him with Tim Scott.

Smirking, he said, “I know all us colored boys look alike. If a Republican had said that, they would’ve killed him.”

Then his thoughts returned to the package sent to his office. His eyes narrowed.

“I’m sick of these attacks,” West said. “They’re the ones talking about civility . . .”

Steny Hoyer received a call
from his counterpart Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday the thirteenth of April. The Democrat had hosted a lunch in his office with McCarthy shortly after the latter had been elected majority whip. Hoyer suggested that the two try to find some areas they could work on together. McCarthy responded that he had often partnered with Democrats while serving in the California State Assembly. The lunch broke up, and the two men had done no business together since then—until now.

McCarthy wanted to talk to Hoyer about a final Continuing Resolution that Boehner, Obama, and Reid had agreed to and that would fund the government until September 15. The good news for conservatives was that the CR contained a proviso that would ban federal funding of abortions in the District of Columbia. The bad news was that the final figure agreed to was $38.5 billion in spending reductions. That sum was far closer to what the Cardinals on the House Appropriations Committee had originally proposed than the $100 billion prescribed by the Pledge to America. McCarthy knew that he wasn’t going to have enough Republican votes to pass the measure. He told Hoyer that he might need as many as seventy Democrats.

“Are you guys gonna fight this thing?” McCarthy wanted to know.
“Your president agreed to this. Do you view it in that way, or in some other way? That’s what I have to know.”

Hoyer promised McCarthy that he would furnish the necessary votes. But McCarthy knew that Hoyer would make the Republicans put up all their votes first. Later that day, word leaked to the media that he had asked for help from the minority whip. McCarthy thought that was classless on Hoyer’s part.

But he had other worries. That day, an Associated Press story analyzing the CR had concluded that the bill would only cut an anemic $351
million
in 2011. The whip’s “yes” count began to plummet. Several members, already exhausted from the two-month slog, demanded to know whether Speaker Boehner had been duped by the White House.

McCarthy hastily organized a conference in one of the Capitol offices. Republican budget expert Douglas Holtz-Eakin walked the Republicans through the proposed cuts. The $38.5 billion was a legit figure, he maintained.

“Look, we all want more,” the whip told his colleagues. “But you should be proud of what you’ve done here. We’re one-half of one-third of the federal government. And what’s happened here no one thought was possible.”

Enough Republicans agreed. On the afternoon of April 14, the final Continuing Resolution passed, with the help of thirty-five Democrats—and despite the opposition of fifty-nine Republicans.

John Boehner happened to be on the House floor and walking down the aisle when he bumped into one of the Republican defectors, Jeff Duncan.

“Mr. Speaker,” the freshman said in greeting, and offered his hand.

Boehner accepted the handshake. Then he pulled Duncan toward him and looked him in the eye.

“You hard head,” the Speaker said.

Duncan decided to take it as a compliment.

The entire Continuing Resolution experience, Republican chief deputy whip Peter Roskam would later say, “
was a miserable experience
, like pushing a wet noodle.” The new majority would immediately
reward itself, however, with a more gratifying prospect—one in which the House wouldn’t be squabbling over billions in cuts, but rather, trillions.

The author of the House Republican budget was
Paul Ryan
. Until very recently, Ryan had been an energetic advocate for fiscal reform but hardly a partisan warrior. His congressional district in southern Wisconsin was strongly pro-union. Though an avowed social conservative, in 2007 Ryan parted company with most Republicans (including Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy) by voting for a Democratic bill that banned employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. He often spoke about the widening income gap between rich and poor. Having endured racist comments from friends while dating an African-American woman in college, Ryan was mindful of struggles within the black community and regularly accompanied Congressman John Lewis on the latter’s annual pilgrimages to Selma, Alabama, where in 1965 Lewis and other civil rights marchers had courageously endured beatings by state troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Ryan was an avid bow hunter who skinned his own prey and was a fan of the works of Ayn Rand—even toying with her Objectivist embrace of man’s “reason as his only absolute,” before settling on Catholicism. Offsetting his straight-arrow retro handsomeness and perky informality were his dolorous eyes, seemingly still haunted by having discovered, at the age of sixteen, the body of his father, who had died of a heart attack. He frequently referenced his Tipperary, Ireland, roots and his three young children, who lived back in Janesville with his wife, Janna, a former tax attorney whom he first asked out shortly after seeing her wearing camouflage at a congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus dinner.

Most of all, however, Ryan was a numbers geek and a Washingtonian—and only in the latter city could the former confer rock stardom. Straight out of college he became the economic advisor to Senator Bob Kasten. Later he went to work for Empower America, a nonprofit group founded by prominent cultural conservative Bill Bennett and supply-side guru Congressman Jack Kemp. The earnest young Republican supplemented his income by working at the Washington Sports Club and tending bar at a Capitol Hill restaurant called Tortilla Coast. Elected to Congress in 1998 at the age of twenty-eight, Ryan wasted little time impressing fellow House Republicans as a serious, almost monastic young fellow who stayed up nights on a rollaway bed in his Longworth
Building office leering at actuarial tables like soft porn. Following liberal Democrat Barney Frank’s advice to him to “pick two or three issues and really focus on them,” the freshman staked a claim as the Hill’s most vigorous conservative “budgeteer.”

In 2000, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore pilfered Ryan’s proposal to preserve Social Security trust funds in a “lock box.” In 2006, Ryan turned down the offer to be President Bush’s new budget director. Later that year, when the Democrats retook the House, the disheartened new minority turned the page by allowing Ryan to leapfrog over a dozen more senior Republicans and become their Budget Committee ranking member.

Despite all the accolades, Paul Ryan had functioned as little more than policy arm candy for his party. His Social Security lock box proposal had gone nowhere in the Republican-controlled House. Instead of reducing the federal deficit, as Ryan had advocated, the Bush administration opted for sizable tax cuts. Ryan had been among the few GOP House members to enthusiastically promote Bush’s Social Security semiprivatization scheme and was chagrined to see his colleagues “hit the brakes” on the president’s proposal, while Ryan described himself as “obviously a gas-pedal guy.”

As the new Budget Committee ranking member in 2007, Paul Ryan earned the right to produce the GOP’s budgetary alternative to that of the Democratic majority. Strikingly, forty Republicans—20 percent of the entire conference—found his budget too austere and sided with the Democrats in defeating it. Undaunted, the Budget Committee ranking member went at it again in 2008—this time with a budget that featured what would become, for better or for worse, Ryan’s signature planks: reconfiguring Medicare and Medicaid. Again, 20 percent of the Republicans voted against their own budget. A month later, Ryan refined and repackaged his budget, dubbing it a “Road Map for America’s Future.” By the time it went to the House floor on April 2, 2009, Ryan was calling his budget “The Path to American Prosperity.” Notwithstanding the new label, precisely the same number of Republicans voted against it as they had the previous year. Among those who took a dim view of Ryan’s entitlement-reforming budgets were Fred Upton and Joe Barton, the two top Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which held jurisdiction over most health care issues.

Even in the summer of 2010, as Tea Party bloggers and conservative columnists began to throw their support behind Ryan’s Road Map, his party’s top two leaders could muster only tepid praise. Boehner told reporters, when asked about Ryan’s proposed budget, “
There are parts
of it that are well done. Other parts I have some doubts about, in terms of how good the policy is.” When conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham asked Cantor if he would sign on to Ryan’s Road Map, the second-ranking Republican refused to give a direct answer.

Oddly, the only public official in Washington who seemed willing to publicly give Ryan his props was Barack Obama. While visiting a Republican conference in January 2010, the president waved a copy of the Road Map over his head and said, “I think Paul, for example, head of the Budget Committee, has looked at the budget and has made a serious proposal. I’ve read it. I can tell you what’s in it. And there are some ideas in there that I would agree with, but there are some ideas that we should have a healthy debate about, because I don’t agree with them.”

A month later, shortly before passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, Ryan showed his gratitude toward Obama during a health care summit by assailing the bill to the president’s face as “full of gimmicks and smoke and mirrors,” ticking off its quantitative errors and then characterizing it with the Frank Luntz–tested phrase “government takeover of health care.” Obama stared icily at the Budgeteer throughout his harangue.

By that time, however, Ryan had found the only ally he needed in Kevin McCarthy.

They complemented each other perfectly. McCarthy knew that the Republicans couldn’t take back the House if they remained “the party of no,” bereft of ideas. Ryan, for his part, had ideas but little expertise in selling them. Out of deference to Boehner and other senior members, McCarthy kept the Road Map out of the 2010 Pledge to America. And that summer, when Ryan appeared on McCarthy’s interactive website “America Speaks Out” to tell viewers about his plans to restore fiscal discipline in Washington, he did not utter a word about Medicare or Medicaid. Already GOP congressional candidates like Sean Duffy and Gabrielle Giffords’s opponent Jesse Kelly were taking heat for their earlier endorsement of the Road Map, with its controversial Medicare reform provision, and were furiously backpedaling. There was an
election to be won, and McCarthy’s tastes for risk did not run to kamikaze missions.

Even after reclaiming the House majority, McCarthy knew to proceed with caution. Budgets were historically difficult things to pass. Ryan liked to call them “moral documents.” But moral stances tended to give way to political reality.
Denny Hastert had told Ryan
that his heaviest lift as House Speaker had been the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which barely passed the House and the Senate even though Republicans dominated both. In 2010, Democratic Budget Committee chairman John Spratt had met with every Democratic caucus and articulated the selling points of Obama’s hefty $1.4 trillion budget. But the younger members in particular resisted—arguing that they hadn’t been around when some of the big-ticket items were voted on—and then–Majority Leader Steny Hoyer finally told Spratt, “It’s fruitless. We can’t win if we take it to the floor.” The Democrats elected instead to offer no budget at all that year. The Budget chairman was thereafter mocked on the campaign trail for failing to do his job and on November 2 was crushed by Jeff Duncan’s South Carolina compatriot Mick Mulvaney.

McCarthy was optimistic, however. He had seen enough of the hot-blooded class of 2010 to believe that they could be brought on board with Ryan’s budget, so long as it wasn’t rammed down their throats. And he had also witnessed the Budgeteer’s adroitness with PowerPoint presentations during freshman orientation and the Republican retreat—no one knew this stuff better than Paul Ryan. If McCarthy could create a forum where his GOP colleagues could interact with Ryan, much as he had done with his America Speaks Out project, then they would become invested in the Path to Prosperity and ultimately support it. He suggested to Ryan that they host a series of small-scale “
listening sessions
” in the whip’s office.

Throughout February, March, and early April, upwards of twenty listening sessions took place in H-107, the Office of the Majority Whip, in groups no larger than fifteen Republicans. Ryan would lead off by producing his dire charts and graphs.
Our nation is $14 trillion in debt . . . Since Obama took office, nondefense discretionary spending has jumped 24 percent—84 percent if you include the stimulus . . . The EPA’s budget has gone up 36 percent in that time frame . . . Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid consume over 40 percent of the budget and will soon crowd out everything else . . . If it stays on its current fiscal path, the United States will be unable to afford its role as an economic and military superpower
. . .