Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (30 page)

In October 2010, America’s 393rd and newest national park, the River Raisin Battlefield, was officially inaugurated. It was the site of the bloodiest battle during the War of 1812, where nearly a thousand U.S. soldiers were slaughtered by British troops and Native Americans. Its location was Monroe, Michigan, which happened to be in John Dingell’s district.

Like many Michiganders, Dingell had regarded the battlefield as a sacred site. But it had for many years been the property of a paper mill, which went out of business in the late 1990s. Dingell convened a meeting with Monroe County authorities in 2005. He proposed turning the battlefield into a national park. Dingell saw that the authorizing legislation would move slowly in the House and therefore persuaded his friend, Michigan Senator Carl Levin, to sponsor the bill in the upper body. Still, to accomplish what he had in mind required money. Dingell knew where to find it.

For years he had been sitting on about $5 million that he had once obtained to move railroad tracks out of Monroe County. The railroad companies had been slow to negotiate, and it appeared that the rail consolidation project was going nowhere. Dingell told his people, “I want to transfer that money. Figure out how to do it.” The opportunity arose in 2008, when a transportation “technical corrections bill”—an interim measure between five-year transportation authorization bills—was sent over to the Senate from the House. Dingell’s staffers inserted an earmark that split up the $5 million into various projects—among which $1.2 million would go to purchasing the River Raisin Battlefield.

Dingell had already figured out how to use some of the rest of the money. As a boy, he and his father used to go hunting for waterfowl along the Detroit River. Its shorelines were now despoiled with abandoned industrial brownfields, including a former forty-acre Nike plant—and yet bald eagles, osprey, lake sturgeon, and other wildlife had begun to thrive as the economy declined. In 2000, he solicited the advice of conservationists on both the Michigan and Ontario sides of the river. From those discussions, Dingell decided to establish the first
international wildlife refuge
in North America.

The dream was realized slowly, parcel by parcel. In 2003 he procured an Appropriations earmark for $3.1 million. The next year, he secured $1 million from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. From the leftover railroad fund Dingell took $1.8 million for the refuge. From the Migratory Bird Commission—an obscure group of which Dingell was one of six members, and which spent money to acquire land from the proceeds of duck-hunting stamps—Dingell acquired another million dollars. The former bankruptcy lawyer swooped down on every financially troubled landowner he could find. He also kissed a lot of ass.
Half of the land came from wealthy donors like the Ford Motor Company. Some of it was previously owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and became Dingell’s through a Department of Defense authorization, with an additional $150,000 stipulated for the department to clean up its site—to which Senator John McCain objected, seeing it (not unreasonably) as an improper earmark . . . but Dingell himself headed over to the Pentagon and said to the proper authorities, “Come on, fellas. I could really use your help here.” The decision was made not to say no to John Dingell. As the coup de grâce, one of Dingell’s people managed to convince the Seabees to do the cleanup as part of their diving training exercise.

Dingell had one unfinished piece of business, however. He wanted fully funded visitor centers for both the River Raisin Battlefield National Park and the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. And so in June 2011, he brought Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to see Michigan’s two new crown jewels of nature.

Salazar had a gift basket from Dingell’s staff waiting for him at his hotel on the night of his arrival. Unfortunately, late that same night, the House Appropriations Committee posted its new proposed budget for the Interior Department. Wetlands conservation had been cut by more than half. The Land and Water Conservation Fund had been slashed by 90 percent. Interior had been gutted. It was the worst time imaginable to be asking Ken Salazar for money.

But it was not just anybody asking. As the secretary would say later that day at a lunch reception overlooking the Detroit River, “I cannot think of a greater conservation hero than John Dingell.” Dingell was a friend to the cause—an originator of the cause, even. It was Dingell’s father, in fact, who crafted one of the first direct appropriations to the Interior Department, via the Dingell-Johnson Act of 1950, which taxed fishing gear to pay for federal land acquisition.

And so on a sunny day in June 2011, the secretary toured the River Raisin Battlefield with the congressman to celebrate an acquisition of property that very day (thanks to Dingell’s connivances) that would quadruple the size of the national park. That afternoon, they visited the Humbug Marsh tract that had just been added to the refuge (again due to Dingell’s efforts). Both men gave speeches and interviews and saluted the two splendid additions to America’s conservationist heritage.
At the end of the day, as the secretary was saying his goodbyes, John Dingell saw the moment and seized it. He asked Salazar to sit inside his American-made SUV for a moment.

They talked for only three or four minutes. Then the interior secretary stepped out of the SUV, was swept up into his security detail, and whizzed off to the airport.

Dingell did the same. He had made his case. He had shot the bear before skinning it. He had made himself not difficult to agree with. And now he was comfortable.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Here Is Your Shield”

One late evening at the end of June 2011, Allen West walked into
Ben’s Chili Bowl
wearing a navy suit and red tie and carrying his helmet bag festooned with labels from his various tours of duty. He squinted at the sign behind the counter of the famed U Street institution that had been spared from arson and looting during the 1968 riots:
People who eat for free at Ben’s: Bill Cosby. Barack Obama. No one else.

The freshman smirked. Something else for him to aspire to. He ordered a smoker and sat down.

A few people recognized him and shook his hand. This was not surprising, since by now West was a regular on Fox and continually named in Tea Party circles as a desired presidential candidate for 2012. Not all the attention was flattering. The left could not resist mocking the Florida freshman. A couple of weeks earlier, he and a few combat veterans had decided to go scuba diving and were renting equipment when the shop owner suggested that West take an American flag down to the bottom and be photographed with it. West thought it was a great idea. But of course the photo found its way onto the Internet, along with the suggestion that the congressman was guilty of violating Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8, subsection B of the United States Code, in which allowing the flag to touch water is forbidden by law.

Sitting at a table at Ben’s with his sandwich in both hands, West dismissed the left-wing accusers as “loons” and “crackheads” and wondered aloud, “Maybe I should’ve just burned the flag—y’all would’ve been happy then.” It just made them look like idiots, questioning Allen West’s patriotism. But fair or not, the more lasting element of the whole
saga was the actual image—somewhat extraterrestrial, more than a little ridiculous—of a wide-eyed, begoggled public official encased in a wet suit, planting a flag on the ocean floor of Deerfield Beach.

West had also drawn snickers from liberal bloggers for remarks he had made in April at a Boca Raton gathering of Christian conservative women called Women Impacting the Nation. After fretting that today’s liberal women were “neutering men,” West reminded his audience that the Spartan warriors had learned toughness from the women of Sparta: “And when the Spartan mother gave that young Spartan warrior a shield, she gave him this basic commandment: ‘Spartan, here is your shield. Come back bearing this shield or being borne upon it!’ ”

Critics from the left observed that Spartan women had no political rights, and thus that West’s comments were further proof of his misogyny. West found this assertion every bit as foolish as the slight on his patriotism. He had two daughters and a wife with a PhD!

And anyway, he made no apologies for his admiration of the Spartans. West was reminded of the movie
Patton,
and of the great American war commander’s belief that he was meant for another time. A student of history himself, West wondered aloud: “A guy like Alexander, twenty-six years of age, could you have done what he did? Never had odds better than one to three. And he still was so brilliant. Like a Julius Caesar, I don’t want to have the same demise, but . . . a Hannibal. ‘We will invade Rome from the north.’ It’s just magnificent.”

Though, he added with a laugh, “I’d have to have been a white guy. Otherwise it wouldn’t have worked out so good.”

Whatever else tea partiers, liberals, the media, and his fellow House Republicans saw when they beheld the 112th Congress’s most famous freshman, Allen West continued to regard himself as a warrior. And from the warrior’s perspective, America was imperiled. Though most attention thus far in the 112th Congress had properly been focused on the nation’s predominant concern—the sagging economy—events overseas also commanded attention. In the early months of 2011, dictators in Tunisia and Egypt were overthrown, with Yemen’s despot soon to follow. In late March, NATO troops with U.S. backing enforced a no-fly zone over Libya to protect rebels seeking to depose the tyrant Muammar Gadhafi. On May 1, President Obama announced that after
nearly a decade on the lam, Al Qaeda’s ringleader Osama bin Laden had been located in a Pakistan compound and killed by a squadron of Navy SEALs.

The other twelve freshmen on the Armed Services Committee looked up to West. It amazed him how some of his fellow Republicans remained clueless when it came to the basics of foreign policy—including Afghanistan, where America had spent the past decade at war. He had winced when he heard presidential candidate Mitt Romney referring to “the Afghanis.” Afghanis were the country’s currency! “Hugely embarrassing,” West said. (Months later, when GOP presidential contender Herman Cain dismissed his own ignorance of the country he referred to as “Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” a disgusted West muttered, “Not funny at all.”)

Of course, West took a far dimmer view of the Democrats. Some of the ones on Armed Services seemed bent on turning the U.S. military into a social experiment. Allowing gays to openly serve in the military—demanding that the military change its behavior, rather than gays changing theirs—was only the beginning, he feared. “I’m just waiting on the next big-hurdle thing,” he said, shaking his head. “Women in combat units. I can see it coming.”

Earlier that month, West had visited Afghanistan. Everybody in uniform seemed to know him there. His first commander was now General David Petraeus’s liaison to the State Department and a two-star. The deputy commander for Afghanistan’s tumultuous Regional Command East had served with West as captains. Several of the Marine staff down in Helmand Province he’d known back at Camp Lejeune.

“You guys tell me the real truth,” he exhorted them. What they told him in return was:
We want to win and we’re making progress. But it can all slide back in a hurry.
They showed him the ammonium nitrate coming over from Pakistan to fashion deadly new improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. A young female captain asked him about Obama’s recent nationally televised address announcing the beginning of a troop drawdown in Afghanistan. “Why did the president give that speech the other night?” she wanted to know. “What was he trying to say?”

“It’s all political,” West told her. The president was appeasing his antiwar base. It was hard for West to understand how a substantive individual could be drawn to Obama.

His fear was that as Obama began pulling troops out of Afghanistan, the ones left there would become increasingly vulnerable to attacks by the Taliban. As West said on Sean Hannity’s Fox show just before his CODEL, “You still have a vicious, very determined enemy that is still on the battlefield . . . Having spent two and a half years in that part of the world, they only understand strength and they only respect strength.”

One of West’s two colleagues on the trip was a Democrat, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. McGovern, West believed, “went over with a preconceived notion, and nothing was really going to change it—that we just need to quit, and go home. He doesn’t care about success.” West did. He believed that the United States needed at minimum to maintain its troop strength in Afghanistan. He also believed that victory in that country was impossible unless America also dealt with Pakistan. He believed that the United States should cut off aid to the Pakistani government, and then see if it responded more as a true ally should.

It had flabbergasted West that, in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the Republicans had brought a bill to the floor defunding school-based health centers. “Why aren’t we talking about defunding Pakistan right now?” he asked Kevin McCarthy and chief deputy whip Peter Roskam. “That’s $3 billion right now, instead of $100 million over ten years! I mean, nobody’s been speaking out against Obamacare more than I have—but why
this
provision? We’re just setting ourselves up for the other side to beat us down. It doesn’t seem like you’re really in tune with what’s happening.”

The whip and his deputy couldn’t explain their logic to West’s satisfaction. “This great thing has happened, and all these second- and third-order effects . . . and you’re talking about school-based health care,” he recalled with disgust. “Show that you have the ability to adjust fire! Shift your target!”

As West had first told the RSC and would later say at a thoroughly candid Heritage Foundation speech on May 31, he believed the United States needed to develop a national security road map, just as Paul Ryan had crafted his Road Map to Prosperity. West, of course, had a few ideas as to what some of the road map’s highlights should be.