Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (5 page)

Tea-baggers, he preferred to call them. Over time it became clear to his (significantly younger) staff that Mr. Dingell (as they called him) was unaware of the term’s alternate meaning. This had been a source of private hilarity, until March 2010, when Dingell was invited to be a guest on
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
to discuss the recent passage of the Democrats’ landmark health care legislation, which had been Dingell’s legislative raison d’être not only throughout his career but also throughout that of his father, John Dingell Sr., whose congressional
seat the son was elected to after the elder died in office in 1955. To say “tea-bagger” on the comedian Stewart’s much-viewed show would . . . well, no one on his staff could envision an upside to it.

Dingell was surprisingly nervous about going on the show as it was. The congressman had been studying past episodes as if preparing for a confirmation hearing—relishing the way Stewart had verbally undressed TV stock tipster Jim Cramer, yet dreading such a fate himself. Staffers took turns playing the host in mock Q&A sessions with the boss. After maybe the third or fourth mention of “tea-baggers,” Michael Robbins—Dingell’s chief of staff at the time—finally spoke up.

“Sir,” he said carefully, “do you know what that actually means?”

By the look on Mr. Dingell’s face, it was clear that he did not.

Because Mr. Dingell was hard of hearing, Robbins knew that he would have to speak loudly and enunciate.
Well, sir, I guess you could say it’s a kind of sex act, when a man places his testicles onto the face of another person
. . .

One of the four other staffers in the room turned the color of a fire engine.

Then, from the old man:
“Hah!”

Followed by: “That’s disgusting.”

Followed by: “But it’s funny, and I’m going to keep using it.”

(He refrained from doing so on the show, which went well.)

John Dingell first encountered the Tea Party phenomenon on August 6, 2009, when he held
a town hall in Romulus
, Michigan, to defend Obama’s health care legislation. He was booed and heckled from the moment he entered. A man wheeled in his son, afflicted with cerebral palsy, and stood about ten feet in front of Dingell and proceeded to assert, earsplittingly, that the new bill would end his son’s life. “Fraud! Liar!” the man hollered as Dingell calmly tried to assure the man that he was incorrect. Dingell’s answers to nearly every question were met with catcalls of “Bullshit!” and “You haven’t even read the bill!” Dingell had quite a temper but kept it in check. He held a second town hall immediately after the first one was over and then informed his staff that he would not be doing any more in the near future.

Dingell had faced
a Republican cardiologist with stout Tea Party backing in the 2010 midterm election. It was by far the toughest of his twenty-nine general election campaigns, though he still won
by 17 points. Shortly after the midterms, the entire fifteen-member
Michigan congressional delegation
—including Dingell and three newly elected Tea Party freshmen—convened for the first time. Speaking at the event was Daniel Akerson, a prominent Michigander who happened to be the CEO of General Motors Company. One of the freshmen, a surgeon named Dan Benishek, arrived late and promptly announced that he would be leaving in five minutes.

“Sit down, Dan,” growled Dingell. “This is important to Michigan. You’ve got nowhere else more important to be.”

Dingell had once been an obnoxious freshman himself—a radical liberal in the eyes of Speaker Rayburn, who had a glare that, as Dingell would say, “damn near melted your cuff links.” He had been, as Dingell liked to say of anyone new at anything, “as green as grass.”

The difference, of course, was that Dingell had grown up in the institution. While his father, John Dingell Sr., was passing New Deal legislation on the House floor, the younger John was a House page, spending afternoons in the Capitol basement with a terrier and an air gun, shooting rats. He’d grown up in the presence of political giants. He’d seen what was humanly perfect. And therefore he could recognize that as a young freshman he was something of a jackass and had better shut up and absorb the wisdom of Mr. Sam Rayburn.

But these damn fools? They were going to come in and immediately start running down the House. And then wonder why Americans hated the institution!

Dingell felt sorry for Speaker Boehner, almost.

Still, it was his own party, not the Tea Party, that had dented Big John Dingell’s armor back in 2008.

After he had spent twenty-seven years as the Democrats’ leader on the Energy and Commerce Committee—which Dingell himself had built into one of Washington’s great fortresses of power—Nancy Pelosi and her close friend, Dingell’s nemesis, Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, had conspired to take away his chairmanship. The man responsible for the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 had been deemed insufficiently progressive to move the Democrats’ legislative agenda for 2009. Waxman became the new Energy and Commerce chairman. Dingell was pushed to the margins.

Tom DeLay, the House Republicans’ whip, majority leader, and resident enforcer from 1995 until 2006, always said that there were three types of congressmen. There were leadership congressmen who, like DeLay, aimed to spend their careers governing the House and their colleagues. There were committee congressmen who took up residence in a particular outpost—Agriculture, Transportation, Appropriations, Armed Services—and made it their fiefdom. John Dingell had done precisely that with Energy and Commerce.

Now he fell into the third category—he was a district congressman, his energies largely consigned to Michigan’s 15th District. Now he was 1 of 435, just another voice in the cacophony.

Except that this voice was John Dingell’s. Even as the 111th Congress marked the undoing of the Democratic majority, the old man enjoyed one of the most productive legislative sessions of his career. He established America’s newest national park, in his own district. He authored a rare bipartisan food safety bill that the president signed into law. He beat back the Tea Party candidate.

And for an encore, John Dingell intended to begin the 112th Congress in January 2011 by announcing his intention to run for an unprecedented thirtieth term.

Hah!

CHAPTER THREE

Bayonets

The 112th Congress was due to begin its work at noon on January 5, 2011. That morning,
a swearing-in ceremony
for the members of the Congressional Black Caucus took place in the Capitol Visitor Center. Accompanied by the swelling fanfare of horns and strings, the forty-three African-American representatives filed onstage in order of seniority—beginning with John Conyers, a CBC cofounder in 1971 and the original House proponent of the Martin Luther King federal holiday. Then another cofounder, Charles Rangel, war hero and legendary Harlem congressman, whose failure to pay taxes had led six weeks ago to his being censured on the House floor by a vote of 333 to 79—though with only a single CBC member, departing Alabama Congressman Artur Davis, voting against him. Then Edolphus Towns of Brooklyn. The civil rights icon
John Lewis
.
James Clyburn
, the House’s third-ranking Democrat. And slowly cascading into relative youth as six black freshmen joined their seniors on the auditorium stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” concluded the announcer, “the representatives of the Hundred-and-Twelfth Congress of the Congressional Black Caucus!”

And as the crowd applauded, one of the members seated in the back row onstage responded with a crisp salute. His graying hair was cut in the style of a flattop, and he wore wire-rimmed spectacles almost identical to those of Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary and thus his former civilian commander, whom he happened to despise. His name was
Allen Bernard West
. He was a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, a month shy of fifty, and, had fate turned against him a few years earlier, he might very well be winding down an eight-year
prison term rather than beginning his first day as a United States congressman serving the 22nd District of Florida.

While Jesse Jackson Jr., a congressman and CBC member for the past fifteen years, fiddled with his BlackBerry, West the freshman sat at ramrod attention throughout. Among the forty-three CBC members, he was its only Republican. When Steny Hoyer—still the House majority leader until noon—stepped up to the podium, he described those seated onstage as “critical members of the Democratic caucus.”
Typical,
thought the freshman. And when Hoyer applauded the black members for being such a positive force “in a country that . . . enslaved some citizens because of the color of their skin,” West thought,
I never been nobody’s slave.
But his expression remained stolid, unfazed.

Only when the new CBC chairman, a Missouri congressman and former Methodist pastor named Emanuel Cleaver II, spoke did Allen West’s heart begin to quicken. “Well, my friends,” the chairman declared in preacherly cadence, “the wall of protection for the unemployed is down. The wall of summer job security for young people is down. The wall of Middle East peace is down. The wall of civil discourse is down . . . But good news—we’ve got forty-three wall builders, standing ready! And we’re gonna rebuild the wall!”

That was Lieutenant Colonel West—that signified his brothers in arms, he thought:
We stand on the wall, guarding this country’s foundations.

Before the 2010 elections, the House Democrats had forty-two black members. The Republicans had zero. Now there were two of the latter. The other African-American freshman, Tim Scott from the old slave market town of Charleston, South Carolina, had made it clear during the 2010 campaign that he had no interest in joining the Congressional Black Caucus with its liberal agenda. West hadn’t discussed the subject with Scott. In Scott’s view, politics was beside the point. Allen West was beside the point. West’s parents had spent most of their young lives in south Georgia, where society’s tenets were inalterably color-coded. Raised in Atlanta less than two miles from Ebenezer Baptist Church, West could still remember the primal wailings of his mother and his aunts the night Martin Luther King was shot. To honor the perseverance of his forebears, West knew what he had to do.

“My parents were Democrats,” he told Jim Clyburn when they met
and shook hands. “I think they’d be proud of the decision I made to join.”

The seventy-year-old Democrat replied, “And my parents were Republicans. Welcome.”

John Lewis welcomed him as well. “We’re looking forward to working with you,” the Georgia congressman said.

“My parents used to vote for you,” said West. “I’m from right near your district at Grady High School.”

“I get my laundry done at the dry cleaner’s right over there!” exclaimed Lewis.

Thought West:
Yeah, so don’t come down to my district anymore and campaign against me like you did last October!

“Never see your color as a crutch,” his father used to tell him. Herman West was an Army corporal who had helped liberate Rome in World War II. His older brother was wounded in Vietnam. His mother worked for the 6th Marine Corps District headquarters in Atlanta. West joined the ROTC at the age of sixteen. Instructed the father: “You make yourself so good that you can’t be denied.”

The Corps became his world. He did not fraternize or smoke or drink or do drugs—not then and not to this day. At jumpmaster school in 1984, he blew out his knee on a night jump from an aircraft and attended graduation on crutches. His first tour of duty was with an airborne battalion unit in Vicenza, Italy. At the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm in March 1991, Captain Allen West stood beside the tent in Safwan where Iraqi generals signed on to the terms of the cease-fire agreement—and he thought to himself,
We’ve left a dictator’s military intact.
He strongly suspected that he would be back in Iraq one day.

A dozen years later, Lieutenant Colonel West was commanding a 4th Infantry Division battalion in the central Iraq town of Taji when he learned of a plot to assassinate him. After a roadside bomb hit his unit, he decided to take the report seriously. On his orders, an Iraqi police officer named Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi, who supposedly had knowledge of the plot, was detained and brought back to the base for interrogation.

Hamoodi insisted, through several hours of questioning, that he knew nothing. Then West entered the room. The lieutenant colonel
sat down in front of the detainee, on a stack of MRE boxes, and placed his 9mm pistol on his lap, with the barrel facing Hamoodi. “You’re either going to tell us what we need to know,” said West, “or I’ll kill you.”

Hamoodi repeated his denials, and one of West’s soldiers punched him in the face. They dragged the Iraqi policeman over to a weapons clearing barrel and shoved his head down into it; West held his pistol against the back of Hamoodi’s head. He counted backward from five. Hamoodi still offered nothing. West then fired off a shot, purposefully missing the detainee by maybe an inch. Hamoodi promptly collapsed, invoked Allah, and proceeded to rattle off names and locations. Arrests were made. Nothing of substance was uncovered. No more ambushes occurred. West immediately reported what had taken place to his superior, who did not relay the information up the chain of command. The information got out anyway, and in October 2003 Allen West was relieved of his command and choppered to the base in Tikrit to await further discipline. At minimum, his Army career was finished. Just as likely he would be court-martialed and sentenced to prison at Fort Leavenworth.

West testified at his Article 32 hearing in November 2003. He acknowledged that his actions were in violation of Army rules. He pled that no action be taken against his subordinates, who were only following his orders. He told the court about a promise he had made to his soldiers’ families at a pre-deployment gathering: “I’m going to bring your guy back alive.” Their safety was worth his breach of regulations, he contended—adding, “I’d go through hell with a gasoline can for my men.”