Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (29 page)

On November 20, the Democrats convened in the caucus room on the third floor of the Cannon Office Building. The thirty-two Democratic freshmen got their first look at the incumbent chairman. Three weeks
after his surgery, Dingell was pale, cadaverously thin, and wheelchair-bound. Waxman had already dined with nearly all of the freshmen and had cut ten-thousand-dollar checks to their campaigns. His staff had also helpfully placed on each caucus chair a copy of
a recent op-ed
by
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman about the Detroit auto executives who had flown to Washington in their private jets to testify as to their industry’s need for a bailout. Friedman had assailed Dingell as being “more responsible for protecting Detroit to death than any single legislator.”

Dingell’s side lost the coin toss and therefore gave their speeches first. Dingell had wanted to be the closing speaker on his behalf. But his staff and his chairman campaign whips, Bart Stupak and Mike Doyle, had prevailed on him to deliver first. They knew that he did not look good and wanted him out of the way.

Stupak wheeled Dingell up to the front of the caucus room. The chairman spoke only briefly about his past accomplishments. He instead emphasized his desire to work with President-elect Obama on finally getting a health care bill passed. It was not Dingell’s best speech, but under the circumstances he had done adequately.

The last to speak was John Lewis. The civil rights hero spoke generally about the value of maintaining the seniority system, which in recent years had been the means by which black members had at last been elevated to power. Then Lewis said, “Think about what you’re doing to this man, after all he’s done for this institution. After all he’s done for
you.
”

None of the speakers had said a negative word about Henry Waxman. When Waxman’s turn came, his fourth speaker, an Iowa first-term congressman and former trial lawyer named Bruce Braley, took off the gloves. Dingell, said Braley, had obstructed the work of environmentalists. He had failed to get a health care bill passed out of the committee in 1994. He had been weak on consumer protection. Weak on climate change. It was a devastatingly effective and, thought Dingell’s supporters in the room, profoundly disrespectful speech.

Waxman went last. When he was finished, Nancy Pelosi—officially neutral throughout the race—was the first one out of her chair clapping. The signal was not altogether subliminal.

Dingell was standing outside the Cannon caucus room, leaning on his cane, during the fifteen-minute tallying of the votes. He remained
convinced that victory was his—until a Democratic staffer stepped outside and gave a sad nod to Dingell’s chief of staff, Michael Robbins. Dingell turned away, even as Pelosi on the other side of the door was asking unanimous consent that John Dingell be named the committee’s “chairman emeritus,” a request that was greeted with hearty applause. He began walking down the hall with his cane. A staffer brought him his wheelchair. Dingell sat down in it and told the staffer that he had something he would like to do now.

The ex-chairman wanted to get his new member ID photo taken for the 111th Congress. And so off they went.

The image captured was that of a man in his eighties wearing a big, defiantly beatific smile.

“Consuela? Madam Overseer?” John Dingell used to beckon Consuela Washington, his longtime securities advisor. “Come in and tell me how we’re going to hurt the white people today.”

Dingell’s epic pugnacity did not dissolve into embitterment following his defeat at the hands of Henry Waxman. Having garnered a half century’s worth of triumphs and disappointments, the dean of the House chose to view his dethronement as another page in an episodic career that, God and the voters willing, was not yet over. He moved on.

Like before, Dingell would begin the morning with a call from home to his Rayburn office—unfailingly greeting the answerer with “Hello there! This is John Dingell.” Later that morning, he would enter with his cane, offering up an arid spray of “How ya be?” and “Blessings on you” before settling in and inquiring, “What to tell me? . . . What else? . . . What else?” A staffer who had screwed up would be condemned with the greeting: “Dear friend . . .” Or, if he or she had screwed up royally: “Beloved friend . . .”

He would insist on directness: “Do not be difficult to agree with.” And on practicality: “Kill the closest snake first.” But also on satisfaction: “Be comfortable. Are you comfortable?” He would remind them of his seniority (“I’ve been doing this since you were an itch in your daddy’s crotch”), counsel patience (“You have to shoot the bear before you can skin it”), express his distaste for the Senate (“that no-good congregation of shit-hooks”), and invoke the hard realities of Beltway politics
(“There is no substitute for a public hanging”). When nature called, he would excuse himself so that he could “salute the president.”

The list of
Dingellisms
was long and faithfully remembered by his staffers, who tended to stay in his employ from one to three decades at a stretch and periodically threw reunions so that they could luxuriate together in memories of blackguards and lickspittles and the time the boss was madder than a boiled owl or uncomfortable as a frog in a skillet or doubled up like a monkey fucking a jug. Sometimes Dingell himself showed up to share a glass—staying and pretending not to bask in their love of him until “the lovely creature,” aka “the sawed-off-blonde,” aka “the blonde whirlwind,” aka the Lovely Deborah came to whisk him away in their American-made automobile.

Soon after losing to Waxman, Dingell called the latter and told the new Energy and Commerce chairman that he wished success for him and would assist however he could. Waxman in turn let the chairman emeritus retain two Energy and Commerce staffers. Dingell threw his energies into the health care bill. During an Energy and Commerce meeting, one of the progressives on the committee complained loudly that the Blue Dogs had made the legislation far too middle-of-the-road for him to support.

“No one here is more progressive on health care reform than I am,” Dingell interjected sternly. “I’ve always supported a single-payer system. My father introduced the first universal health care bill. Long before you were here, I was doing the same. You can support this.” That was the end of the subject.

In the spring of 2010, Chris Van Hollen introduced legislation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s
Citizens United
ruling, which permitted unlimited campaign advertising and contributing by outside political groups. Van Hollen’s bill would ban campaign participation by foreign-owned corporations and require that outside groups disclose the extent of their financial participation. Almost immediately, Heath Shuler protested that the DISCLOSE Act would land himself and other Blue Dogs in hot water with the NRA, which had been accustomed to spreading around its vast resources with impunity.

Van Hollen knew whom to call. John Dingell brought the NRA to the table, garnered their support for a carve-out exemption tailor-made
for the gun group (exempting any organization with five hundred thousand members or more), and the DISCLOSE Act narrowly passed the House with substantial Blue Dog support. (In the Senate, however, its newest member, Republican Scott Brown, cast the deciding vote against the DISCLOSE Act. The bill failed to become law.)

After Dingell beat back his Tea Party opponent in the 2010 general election, he relished the Democrats’ final legislative triumph before power changed hands: the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, a monumental overhaul of FDA inspections aimed at preventing food contamination, of which John Dingell was architect. After it had spent fully eighteen months in “the cave of winds”—a Dingellism for the Senate—President Obama signed the legislation on January 4, 2011. Sixteen days after that, Dingell announced that he intended to stick around for another term.

The new Energy and Commerce chairman after Dingell and Waxman was Republican Fred Upton. Dingell was quite fond of Upton and watched with philosophical bemusement as his fellow Michigander underwent a radical transformation so as to secure the chair. Dingell knew Upton as an old-school moderate. His coauthorship of a 2007 bill with Democrat Jane Harman to phase out incandescent lightbulbs incited Tea Party outrage and the denunciation by Rush Limbaugh of “
nannyism
, stateism.” (In the 112th Congress, Michele Bachmann would introduce a bill repealing the Upton-Harman initiative, luminously titled the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.) In 2010, Upton prevailed in a fierce primary contest against a Tea Party candidate, but his troubles were far from over. The conservative activist group FreedomWorks had put up a website,
www.DownWithUpton.com
, and was showing up to Republican Study Committee meetings urging members to reject his bid for the chairmanship.

Upton’s staffers deluged RSC officials with memos, briefs, and assorted assurances that in fact their boss had always been a true conservative—and that in any event, Upton got the message and would do better. Upton himself sent out an email to fellow Republican members: “The voters have spoken. The failed job-killing policies of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have been soundly rejected
. . . My Pledge to You: I will protect the sanctity of human life . . . I will reveal, repeal and replace ObamaCare . . . I will exert tireless oversight of the EPA . . .”

It was the kind of naked belly-crawl that Dingell had refused to do for Nancy Pelosi, and it had cost him his chairmanship. Regardless, Dingell believed he could work with Upton—though on what, in this Congress, remained unclear.

Still, he had a couple of small but dear projects of his own. The trick was getting the money for them. Fortunately, there were some kinds of tricks that only an old man would know.

Jeff Duncan and the other three South Carolina freshmen were in a fix.

There was nothing more important to their state’s economy than
the port at Charleston harbor
. That fact was true even in Duncan’s upland district. The BMW plant was there because of the port. Michelin received its rubber and shipped out its tires through the port. The economic value of the port was obvious to the freshman. But he was also its booster because the port made sense. It was America’s closest port to an open ocean. The Charleston port’s history was, for better and for worse, bound up in the very formation of the great state Jeff Duncan now represented. He, Tim Scott, Trey Gowdy, Mick Mulvaney, Joe Wilson, Jim Clyburn, and Senators Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham were in lockstep on this one issue: funding for the port to be deepened, so that supermax tankers and other big boats could dock there, was essential to South Carolina’s economic vitality.

And the matter would have been resolved in 2010, via a $400,000 earmark request by Senator Graham. The problem was that Senator DeMint opposed it and all other earmarks. As a result, the Senate Appropriations Committee did not include the Charleston port in its funding request. And now the Four Horsemen, all of whom had run for office supporting the ban on earmarks that was now in effect, had their work cut out for them.

Duncan and his other three colleagues sat down with Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman John Mica at least a half-dozen times. They did what they could to educate him about the Charleston port’s value to South Carolina—that without it, companies
like Boeing wouldn’t be there. As Trey Gowdy would later say, “We went to Chairman Mica on bended knee, saying, ‘Please. Do not punish South Carolina.’ ” But Mica offered them nothing.

They went as well to Chairman Hal Rogers of the House Appropriations Committee and pressed for him to insert it into a funding bill. With a straight face—but, it was believed, with barely disguised glee—the wily lawmaker once known as the Prince of Pork lamented that, alas, their request appeared to be an earmark, and alas, earmarks were banned.

On the House floor, Gowdy said to Rogers, “I don’t know who you’re trying to punish—if you want my seat, I’ll go back to being a DA!”

It seemed abundantly clear that the old bulls were making the young turks pay for the beliefs they shared with their political godfather DeMint. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham was staging press conferences, drafting legislation, and threatening to hold up all White House appointments. All to no avail—until he reached across the aisle to the lone South Carolina Democrat, seventy-year-old, nine-term congressman Jim Clyburn.

Clyburn called the White House Office of Management and Budget. An OMB official contacted the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. The money was procured. It was not an earmark. Rather, the telephone request was direct and paperless, a so-called phone-mark—the way most such funding requests historically took place, so long as you knew someone to call, and as long as that someone would take your calls, perhaps because they owed you a favor or knew that they could count on you for a favor down the line.

It was how business got done in Washington. The freshmen stood on the sidelines—compliant but, as another Dingellism would have it, “as useless as side pockets on a cow.”

Dingell, of course, knew how to do such things.