Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (44 page)

“But it’s wrong to let them off the hook,” said Rogers. “No punishment, no ramifications at all for doing the wrong thing . . .”

“We’d prefer to reward members for doing the right thing than punish members for doing the wrong thing,” Boehner said.

The Cardinals objected.
They
were the ones who had been doing the right thing—cutting spending two years in a row for the first time since World War II, working their butts off to accommodate everyone—and all they were getting was grief. To add insult to injury, the Cardinals were required to raise more money for the National Republican Congressional Committee than other members were. As Interior subcommittee chairman Mike Simpson put it to the leaders, “We’re having to raise extra money to reelect people who vote against our bills!”

“You need to strip them of their committee assignments,” one of them said.

“Or take them off the CODEL [congressional delegation overseas trip] list,” said another.

“That’s not going to make this crowd more accountable,” McCarthy warned.

“It’ll just make martyrs out of them,” Boehner agreed. The Speaker was mindful of the reality they lived in—one of unprecedented transparency, in which the slightest retribution would instantly be tweeted or become a banner headline on the
Drudge Report.
Every morning after waking up, Boehner would look at Facebook on his iPad to see if the fact that he’d had a margarita in a Mexican restaurant in Rosslyn, Virginia, had been announced to the public at large. It was a good thing, he reminded the Cardinals. It kept everyone honest.

“But then you’re destroying our capability of coming up with anything significant on our big bill,” said Rogers, referring to the “mega-bus” package of the remaining nine Appropriations bills that would be brought to the House floor in mid-December. The chairman recounted a warning he had been given by Steny Hoyer and ranking Democrat Norm Dicks on the House floor after the 101 Republicans had voted against the “minibus.” The two Democrats told Rogers that the “mega-bus” had better be devoid of any sops to conservatives, such as riders that cut EPA funds. “Get the riders out,” they instructed him.

“You’ve taken away our bargaining power,” Rogers said. “So don’t expect a hell of a lot.”

Boehner had nothing to say to this. Cantor, the Cardinals noted, had been mute throughout the meeting. The majority leader’s risk-averse nature had been exacerbated by the public outrage over the debt ceiling fiasco. His attack-dog press operation was now churning out fawning statements assuring voters that “we can’t wait” to find areas of agreement with President Obama. When Cantor learned that protesters would be attending his speech at the University of Pennsylvania in late October, he canceled on the day of the appearance. Having now become the left’s designated whipping boy, Cantor was now seeking to soften his image by accentuating his Jewish family history in speeches and offering to let a
60 Minutes
crew film him at home over Thanksgiving weekend. In the meantime, he was not looking to make any enemies among the Appropriators.

One of the more vocal Cardinals at the meeting, Agriculture chairman Jack Kingston of Georgia, had served in the House since 1993. He could not help thinking that his old friend Tom “the Hammer” DeLay would never have been so supine as today’s Republican leaders. Nor would Nancy Pelosi. Nor would any Speaker in any of the state legislatures.
They’d say, “You’re damn right I punished him for not voting my way.” That’s the rules of the game in any legislative body.

Another veteran Appropriator left the room recalling conversations he’d had with some of the freshmen. “You’re not in the minority,” he had explained to them. “You’re in charge! You don’t throw hand grenades at your own people! You help them govern!”

Small wonder that the Appropriator’s words had fallen on deaf ears.
The freshmen were allowed to carry on with impunity. “They’re throwing hand grenades at the very place they own,” he would later reflect. “It’s a strange thing. They seem to revel in their rascality.”

Rascality
happened to be a John Dingell word—one that he had come to use with increasing frequency to describe the connivances of the Republican majority.

On the afternoon of December 13, 2011, Dingell sat in his Capitol hideaway—the sunny office space accorded the dean of the House—and reflected on the words he had used at the freshman orientation reception thirteen months ago to describe the House:
the most humanly perfect institution.
“
The institution is still
humanly perfect,” he maintained. “The problem is, the inmates in it are not. There’s all manner of rascality and bad behavior going on here. I’m more frustrated than I’ve ever been in my career.”

Dingell shook his head as he considered that the House was supposed to be adjourning for the Christmas break in three days. But the Republican leadership had yet to bring to the floor its nine Appropriations bills, yet another Continuing Resolution to avert a government shutdown, and a measure backed by Obama (and thus viewed with disfavor by most Republicans) to extend a payroll tax cut to millions of Americans. Dingell personally viewed the payroll tax holiday as bad policy (for robbing revenues from Social Security) but clever politics, and he marveled at how obligingly the Republicans were allowing themselves to be portrayed by Obama as the party willing to raise taxes on the middle class. It would be another ten days before Speaker Boehner at last ignored the conservatives in his conference, capitulated to the White House, and brought the payroll tax cut bill to the floor under unanimous consent after all the House members had gone home for the Christmas holidays, so as to avoid one last rebellion among his ranks. Yet another thoroughly unnecessary eleventh-hour melodrama. Never in Dingell’s career—never, he believed, in the history of the House—had it been so slow to tend to the nation’s urgent business.

At least the institution still worked for him. During the summer recess, Dingell convinced EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to visit his beloved Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. Jackson was sufficiently sold on the refuge that she agreed to procure a million dollars
in EPA funds to help clean up a portion of the site that Dingell had recently convinced Chrysler to sell to the federal government—which, through Dingell’s persuasions, then gave the land to the county. After the tract got cleaned up, he would then figure out how to transfer it over to Fish & Wildlife so as to officially make the land a part of the refuge. Dingell had the experience and the relationships—and, God willing, the time—to make it happen.

And just the night before, during a week choked with partisan rancor over the payroll tax issue, yet another piece of Dingell legislation had made it through the House. It was an oil pipeline safety bill that he had been laboring to pass for more than thirty years. After the devastating spill of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010, Energy and Commerce Committee chairman and fellow Michigander Fred Upton agreed with Dingell that the bill was needed and became its cosponsor. As always, the legislation was imperfect, as environmentalists were quick to point out. Still, that any bill adding new regulations to the oil and gas industry could prevail in a Republican-controlled House was a small miracle. Then again, the legislation was labeled the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act, when of course the bill’s purpose had nothing whatsoever to do with creating jobs. And for that matter, it was hurried to passage through a voice vote, for fear that a roll call would give conservatives time to organize against it.

Nonetheless, on January 3, 2012, President Obama signed the Dingell-Upton collaboration into law. It would be only the ninetieth piece of legislation from the 112th Congress to reach the president’s desk for signature—a woeful output of historic proportions, especially considering that sixteen of those ninety bills pertained to renaming post offices and courthouses.

Perhaps, Dingell thought, the tea-baggers would be thrown out in 2012. Pelosi, for all her faults, was a peerless fund-raiser. A poll of swing-district voters conducted the previous week by Rosa DeLauro’s husband Stan Greenberg found support for Republican incumbents fast eroding—leading Greenberg to conclude that “the House is surely in play in 2012.” Certainly Nancy Pelosi was gung-ho about the prospects. She had hired Roy Spence, the Texas consultant, to interview the House Democrats and discern from their musings a common theme that could become their twenty-first-century answer to
Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Pelosi was already dropping the resulting slogan, “Reigniting the American Dream,” into her speeches, though the average listener might be forgiven for wondering exactly what the buzz phrase meant and how it applied uniquely to Democrats.

Dingell had no particular reason to believe that the climate would improve if his party returned to power. He believed the “most humanly perfect institution” was imperiled by super-PACS that the Supreme Court had permitted to spend unlimited dollars in total anonymity; by redistricting, which threatened to wipe out moderate dealmakers and replace them with crowd-pleasers from the left or the right; by talk show screamers and lie-dispensing bloggers; and most of all, by its near-total lack of credibility in the eyes of the public. He tried to think if there was anyone living or dead who had polled as low as 9 percent.

“I think pedophiles would do better,” he concluded.

In three hours Dingell would be back on the House floor to consider the payroll tax cut bill—albeit one that had been spiked with enough conservative catnip (spending cuts, the fast-tracking of an oil pipeline, curtailment of unemployment insurance) to guarantee that Harry Reid would pronounce it dead on arrival in the Senate the moment it passed the House. Impasse again.

“I’ll bet you a new hat we’re going to be here next week,” John Dingell said. In truth, he did not seem to mind all that much. If tonight was like most nights, he would linger on the floor after all the votes—just sitting in his chair, his gaze pleasantly befogged while luxuriating in a half century’s worth of triumphs and rascalities, more at home in the House than anyone had ever been. Then he would call his wife, the Lovely Deborah, and once home he might crack open a Stouffer’s frozen dinner accompanied by a cranberry and mango smoothie, and then set the TV on to the Military Channel, until the marching soldiers and the cannon blasts would send him off to sleep.

And then, God willing, another day spent in that most humanly perfect institution, where he could still manage to get things done.

EPILOGUE

Evening, January 24, 2012

There were six of them, all Republican freshmen,
seated around a dining room table
two hours before Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

The venue was the Italian restaurant Landini Brothers, in Alexandria, Virginia. Ordinarily the group gathered at the Capitol Hill row house rented by Steve Southerland and ate the gumbo of Louisianan Jeff Landry—which was why they often referred to themselves as the Cajun Caucus. As the president’s speech that evening left no time for Landry to cook, the Cajun Caucus instead drove to Old Town, pushing their way through the crowded Tuscan restaurant and upstairs to their secluded table, where they sat over pasta and iced tea and contemplated aloud what had transpired in the past year since they’d arrived as reinforcements for the beleaguered Republican leaders who had gathered in a different restaurant on the other side of the Potomac River three years earlier almost to the day.

All six men—Southerland, Landry, Jeff Duncan, Raul Labrador, Tim Huelskamp, and Tom Graves—were Tea Party conservatives. The brand of “reinforcement” they had brought to Washington had dealt their Republican leadership no end of aggravation. Public approval of the dysfunctional House Republicans now languished at 19 percent. Yet these six men were doing just fine with the voters back home in their blood-red districts. The only one among them with a primary challenge was Landry, and only because Louisiana’s dwindling population in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina had caused a fellow Republican, Charles Boustany Jr., to lose his 7th District and therefore to take a run at Landry’s seat.

“Anything you need from us, Jeff,” the others told their fellow
freshman that night. “We’ll come to your district. We’ll raise money. Anything.”

Landry and Graves had missed the annual House Republican conference the previous weekend, and so the other four men filled them in on the highlights. The affair had been pronouncedly less buoyant than the new majority’s cocksure we-want-the-world-and-we-want-it-now conference in January 2011. Fresh off of the humiliating payroll tax cut debate, in which Speaker Boehner had finally turned a deaf ear to his Republican colleagues and meekly capitulated to the White House’s demand for a two-month extension, Boehner’s new mantra was, “Let’s put the last year behind us. I want to push the reset button.”

What did that mean? The men of the Cajun Caucus hoped it meant, “Start behaving like Republicans.” But in the wake of the House majority’s dismal approval ratings, perhaps John Boehner was saying, “Start finding ways to work together with the Democrats.” In truth, they had no idea what was going on in their leader’s head.

The best part of the conference, they told Landry and Graves, had been the PowerPoint presentation by Republican pollster Frank Luntz—the man who had organized the dinner at the Caucus Room three years ago. Luntz had told them, “You’ve been talking like conservatives, but acting like moderates. You’ve got to stop that. The American people would rather you talk like moderates and act like conservatives.” Meaning: sound reasonable, but stick to your principles. That was music to the Cajun Caucus’s ears.

While they ate, the White House released a few excerpts of Obama’s upcoming address. Duncan was the first to reach for his buzzing BlackBerry. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he scoffed. Then he read aloud the offending excerpt:
Think about the America within our reach:
A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world.