Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (24 page)

Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, he told those gathered, would “save Medicare” by providing those under the age of fifty-four with a subsidy known as “premium support”—he assiduously avoided the politically toxic term
voucher
—to help purchase a coverage option from a private insurer. It would also “repair a broken Medicaid system” by shifting the federal burden over to the states and compensating them with block grants.

The freshmen showed up to the listening sessions eager to slash spending. To Ryan’s delight, they pushed for additional austerity measures: reducing farm subsidies, creating an attrition policy to downsize the federal workforce, squeezing corporate welfare. But most important, they required very little persuasion when the topic turned to Medicare and Medicaid. Ryan and McCarthy found themselves whispering to each other during the sessions, “Wow. We can go further on entitlements. If we don’t, these guys probably won’t even support the bill.”

McCarthy knew that it wasn’t enough to sell the Republican conference on what Ryan was up to. He had seen how conservative think tanks like Heritage Action for America had given low grades to a number of the freshmen for not siding with every single cost-cutting amendment during the H.R.1 debate. So as to foreclose another gruesome public spectacle of conservatives eating their own, the whip office conducted sidebar listening sessions with every right-of-center opinion-maker of significance.

The result was
a Greek chorus of affirmation. From Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform came the proclamation, “Paul Ryan’s Budget Is What a REAL Conservative Budget Looks Like!” The Cato Institute labeled the budget “a huge opportunity to improve health care.” And Ryan’s seventy-three-page budget plan concluded with a seal of approval from the Heritage Foundation: the Path to Prosperity, the think tank decreed, “would significantly strengthen economic performance throughout the economy and dramatically improve federal fiscal results.”

There was one disquieting contrarian: Charles Krauthammer, the
highly influential
Washington Post
columnist and preeminent conservative thinker. Krauthammer termed Ryan’s budget “recklessly bold” and tantamount to a “suicide note.” The columnist clearly viewed the Budget Committee chairman as naïve for believing that Obama would actually engage in an honest, high-minded debate about America’s fiscal future rather than launch a scare campaign about how Ryan and the GOP were seeking to end Medicare. His view was shared by many of the House Republicans’ more senior members. When one of them learned that Ryan’s budget would overhaul Medicare, he told chief deputy whip Roskam, “It’s been great serving with you—I’m about to become a former member of Congress.”

At least one senior member’s major concern was addressed. Said NRCC chairman Pete Sessions during a conference, “Please—take on Medicare or take on Social Security. But not both.” And so despite Paul Ryan’s urgent cry in 2005 that by 2017 America would “no longer have enough money coming in to pay off all the benefits” for Social Security, the Path to Prosperity left the latter matter largely unaddressed.

The dramatic overhauls of Medicare and Medicaid remained unsettling to many. Boehner’s friend and fellow Ohioan Steve LaTourette vigorously argued in conferences that the risks Ryan was taking were entirely unnecessary. “You could write a budget on a single piece of paper,” LaTourette said. Since almost any Republican budget would almost certainly be defeated in the Senate, why put details out there that the opposition could demagogue?

LaTourette was a member of the minority-within-the-majority Tuesday Group, like Jo Ann Emerson and about forty other Republican moderates. Emerson had approached both Ryan and McCarthy with an idea. “Look, I know you’ve got groups like Heritage that say the budget is wonderful, but everyone’s going to say they’re biased,” Emerson said. “Before you introduce it, why don’t you take it to someone like [the accounting firm] DeLoitte so that they can verify that your budget does what you say it does?”

Both the whip and the Budget Committee chairman responded enthusiastically to Jo Ann Emerson’s suggestion. But if any such independent vetting ever took place, the results of it were never announced to McCarthy and Ryan’s fellow Republicans.

•   •   •

McCarthy and Ryan
often worked out together in the House gym in the basement of the Rayburn Building. The Budgeteer conducted a morning exercise regimen with a few of his Republican colleagues called P90X, which involved outsmarting one’s muscles by varying the workouts so that one’s body would not adapt to a routine—seemingly an exercise that only a brainiac could love, except that McCarthy had lost twenty-eight pounds participating in P90X.

After a workout on the morning of Wednesday, April 13, Ryan told McCarthy that he had been invited, along with House GOP conference chairman Jeb Hensarling and Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp—all of them members of the so-called Bowles-Simpson Commission, appointed by Obama to address fiscal reform—to attend an address on the budget by the president at George Washington University.

“You want my advice?” the whip asked. “Why go down there? We invited him to the conference last year, and he just attacked you!”

McCarthy’s view of what had taken place at the GOP conference was more than a little bit exaggerated. But he felt protective toward Ryan, whom he regarded as almost above reproach. “If there’s ever been a person put at the right place at the right time, it’s Paul,” he would later say. His colleague was all about policy: a thinker, an economist who burned the midnight oil digesting data, an honest seeker of solutions, not a crass politician like Obama (or himself). Every time Ryan opened his mouth, the whip learned a new fact. In Kevin McCarthy parlance, it was a continuing education to hang out with the guy.

Ryan shrugged. “If the president invites you and you can go, you go.” It was about the institution, not the man occupying it, in the view of the Budget Committee chairman. Besides, the White House staff and other Democrats had told Ryan,
You’re going to really like what he has to say about Social Security.
Ryan assumed that, after the tax cuts during the December 2010 lame-duck session and the Continuing Resolution agreement a few days ago, the president’s speech would amount to a third installment of engagement with Republicans. He was led to believe that Obama really wanted him to be there.

A senior White House official would later claim that the president and his speechwriters had been unaware that Ryan had been invited to the event. Obama’s speech that afternoon amounted to a stern
rebuke of the Path to Prosperity. “
It’s a vision
that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors . . . Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it . . . Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid . . . Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome . . . These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves . . .”

Ryan sat and tried not to explode. The attack felt both gratuitous and personal to him. As he would later say, “ ‘Autism,’ ‘kids with Down’s syndrome,’ ‘maybe your grandparents’—that’s demagoguery. That’s rank demagoguery, and it’s beneath the office.”

McCarthy didn’t want to say “I told you so . . .” He wasn’t the least bit surprised that the president had smacked down Ryan. It seemed to the whip that Obama was incapable of showing leadership.
He sits back and lets everything come to him—and then he decides on what political posture to take.

Obama had made a strategic mistake, McCarthy thought, picking a fight with Paul Ryan. “
I think Ryan
’s in his head,” he would say. “Think about it. Ryan’s a young guy. Ryan’s risen fast. Ryan’s got a great family. Ryan’s got a lot of comparisons to the rise of where the president is. It’s not so smart to raise him up by picking him as an enemy.”

Predicted the whip: “If he picks a budget fight with Paul, Paul will beat him.”

McCarthy was starting to feel sorry for Chris Van Hollen. Good guy, smart guy, wrong party.

“
You’re never going
to be in play to win the majority as long as you keep your old leadership,” the whip told the Maryland Democrat on the floor one day. “I’m not worried about you guys till the day I see one of you start a Young Guns program. Whoever does that is gonna be the next leader of your party. But someone has to hold the flag and charge the hill. And he’ll need someone behind him so in case he gets shot, the other guy can grab the flag.”

Van Hollen smiled and said nothing. McCarthy wondered if the nonresponse meant that in addition to being a good and smart guy, Van Hollen viewed himself as more of a Senate guy.

Chris Van Hollen had a number of options available. After he had
served only two terms, a new leadership post, Assistant to the Speaker, was created for him in 2006. He had been chairman of the House Democrats’ political arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), in 2008, and at Pelosi’s insistence he remained at that post so as to minimize the damage during the disastrous 2010 cycle. The Democratic leader loved Van Hollen. He was progressive in his politics but moderate in tone—a gentlemanly and unflappable though tenacious debater. It was widely assumed that the fifty-two-year-old Marylander could write his own ticket: senator, governor, or perhaps one day Speaker. Or perhaps something even bigger.

At the moment, however, Van Hollen was the Democrats’ ranking member on the Budget Committee—Paul Ryan’s sparring partner. The Democrats saw the Ryan budget, with its “voucherization” of Medicare, as a breathtaking overreach by the Republicans and a glorious political opportunity for the minority. Many in the Democratic caucus argued that when Majority Leader Cantor brought the budget to the floor, their energy should be devoted entirely to condemning it. Van Hollen could sympathize with that viewpoint. He, too, found it galling that so many editorial writers lauded Ryan’s “courage” in producing a budget that cut Medicaid for the most powerless people in society by $700 billion while reducing the corporate income tax and refusing to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay additional taxes to help bring down the deficit. And he was amazed by the disingenuousness of Ryan claiming that his Medicare “premium support” plan mirrored Congress’s own health care plan. In fact, the way the Ryan budget saved money was in part
because
the government’s contribution would remain flat for seniors, unlike the 28 cents on every dollar of coverage that congressmen were guaranteed. In other words, the Ryan budget got its money by
not
supporting the premiums as they got higher.

Still, Van Hollen argued in caucuses, the Democrats needed to show that they, too, were serious about deficit reduction—that they, too, had a plan. And not just Obama’s plan, which was really only, to put it charitably, a “framework” that the Congressional Budget Office couldn’t score because it lacked any meaningful details. No, the House Democrats needed to do the same thing that Paul Ryan’s Republicans did when they were in the minority. They needed to put out an alternative budget.

Many in the caucus thought that the strategy was too risky—inviting
attacks from the opposition when all the focus should be on the Ryan plan’s shortcomings. But Chris Van Hollen’s argument prevailed with Nancy Pelosi. For the first time in two years, the Democrats would be bringing a budget to the House floor.

Friday afternoon
, April 15, 2011—the one hundredth day of the 112th Congress—found the People’s House at its most pungent. For once, the visitors’ gallery contained nearly a hundred onlookers. Kevin McCarthy strolled into the chamber, waving and slapping backs as if entering a favorite watering hole. McCarthy in fact drank very little—his grandfather had been an alcoholic and he believed himself to have an addictive personality—and so the House floor was the closest thing to his neighborhood bar, where he could quench his thirst for human contact.

The whip stood beside his committee on the floor and surveyed the House’s tacit seating chart. Near the back of the right side sat the Texas delegation—and close to them, Raul Labrador, Justin Amash, Steve Southerland, and other hard-right freshmen. He could find at a glance the Tuesday Group moderates, or a clutch of freshmen women like Renee Ellmers and Ann Marie Buerkle, or the South Carolinians, or (as if there were even a point in reaching out to them) the twin contrarians Ron Paul and Walter Jones. And off to the far right, often by himself, sat Allen West, content to be alone. Just on the other side of the aisle in the back, the remaining tatters of the Blue Dogs—now, with the absence of Gabby Giffords and the resignation of Jane Harman, an all-male coalition except for Loretta Sanchez. Near the very front, the two ancient Michiganders, John Dingell and Dale Kildee, saying nothing and wearing identically neutral countenances.

McCarthy’s almost hypnotically untroubled expression betrayed no hint of the morning’s difficulties. Unbeknownst to him, one of his staffers in the whip’s office had sent out an email to other Republican aides the previous morning, before the final vote on the Continuing Resolution. The email instructed the staffers to tell their bosses not to be “traitors” to the party when casting their vote. A photograph of actress Jane Fonda in her war-protesting “Hanoi Jane” mode was attached to the email. Some of the recipients were amused. Many were not.

At that morning’s conference
, McCarthy apologized for the email.
“That came out of my office, and I take responsibility for it,” the whip said. (Later he fired the offending staffer.)

Feelings among the Republicans had been raw for weeks leading up to the conference. Many who had dutifully supported leadership by voting for the CRs were angry at Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Louie Gohmert, and Indiana conservative Mike Pence for leaving conferences midway and immediately giving interviews to reporters about the lousy deals Boehner was getting from the White House. At this morning’s conference, Arkansas freshman Tim Griffin stood up and said, “Just because a colleague votes the other way doesn’t mean he has to then go stick a thumb in my eye.” Griffin spoke admiringly of the South Carolinians. “They vote their way, but you don’t ever see them criticizing the rest of us.”