Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (6 page)

After the hearing, West’s attorney, Neal Puckett, could barely contain his awe. “Your life’s going to be totally different.,” he said. “The nation’s going to see you as a leader who stands up for what’s right.”

Puckett added, “Allen, you should run for Congress.”

“I just don’t want to be in jail,” said West.

The “I’d go through hell with a gasoline can” quote made its way back to Washington. Republican congressmen wrote letters to the secretary of the Army asserting that West should be commended for his actions rather than disciplined. A pro-West petition collected 130,000 signatures. Enough donations poured in to more than cover his legal fees.
In the end, the military fined him five thousand dollars and permitted him to retire with full benefits. A martyr of the right was born.

West, his wife, Angela, and their two daughters relocated to south Florida in 2004. He taught history at Deerfield Beach High School but only lasted nine months. It astonished him that his students knew nothing about the Constitution or why the Civil War was fought. When one of the kids took a swing at him, West knew that there would be serious trouble if he remained. He decided that he would be better off in a war zone. For the next two and a half years he worked as a military contractor operating out of Kandahar. As it turned out, Neal Puckett was not the only one with ambitions for his former client. Some individuals in Florida contacted him after the Republicans lost the House in 2006. Would he consider running?

Allen West returned to the Fort Lauderdale area in May 2007 to begin
plotting his campaign
. But he was unknown and underfunded, running against an incumbent Democrat in the hope-and-change election cycle of 2008. The Democrat, Ron Klein, beat him by double digits. November 4 was an evening of tangled emotions for the West family. Many of his relatives had voted for Obama, with great enthusiasm. West caught some of the man’s victory speech. What he felt was not pride but skepticism. They had a term in the Army for a slick-talking media darling like the president-elect:
spotlight Ranger.

Three months after his defeat, West was knocking on doors again. A movement was beginning to brew, with CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli challenging viewers on February 19 to show up in Chicago for a “Tea Party” in July to protest the government’s ill-advised mortgage lending policies. What the crusade lacked was a warrior.

On October 21, 2009, at a Tea Party rally in Fort Lauderdale, congressional candidate Allen West stood onstage, dressed in khakis and a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm, watching two performers in colonial attire play the fife and drums. West’s assignment at the rally was to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, nothing more. Just as he was about to begin, he noticed a gentleman standing off to the side, costumed as a Revolutionary War soldier, complete with musket and bayonet. West got his cue, took the microphone, and decided that he would make the most of his moment.

He briefly sketched his life as an inner-city Atlanta boy given America’s
promise of opportunity, and how that was all he needed and all anyone should have the right to expect. Then he said, “We cannot live in a country where the government sits around and tries to engineer and design results and outcomes. Every time they try to do that—‘Everyone has a right to own a home’—how does that end up? ‘Everyone has a right to health care’—how does that end up? The Constitution says, ‘Promote the general welfare’—not ‘PROVIDE the general welfare!’ ”

After the cheers died down, West picked up steam. “We’ve got a class warfare going on. You’ve got a producing class, and you’ve got an entitlement class. If we’re not willing to take our country back”—the candidate jabbed a finger at the crowd—“then you’re complicit. It’s your fault.”

Said the lieutenant colonel, “You’d better get your butts out there and fight for this country!”

The cheering grew.

“This 2010 election is a defining moment for the United States of America . . . If you’re here to shrink away from your duties—there’s the door. Get out. But if you’re here to stand up, to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks—you are my brother and sister in this fight. You need to leave here understanding one simple word.

“That word is:
bayonets.

“And charge the enemy—for your freedom, for your liberty. Don’t go home and let your children down! You leave here today—CHARGE!”

The Democrats scoffed at Allen West. They painted him as the most off-the-beam of the extremist Tea Party candidates. They basked in the conventional wisdom that an African-American ultraconservative Christian could not possibly poach on Ron Klein’s Jewish constituent base. They did not know how to account for West’s own adoring followers or his astounding talent for fund-raising. The triumph of a man like Allen West seemed every bit as unthinkable as the viability of a ragtag movement that seemed more akin to a primal scream than anything of electoral significance.

The unthinkable occurred. He beat his opponent by 8 points.

On December 30, 2010, at six in the morning, Congressman-elect Allen West kissed his wife goodbye, hopped into the front seat of a U-Haul truck, and drove out of Plantation, Florida. The following morning, as
he passed over the Potomac River, he reflected on Caesar crossing the Rubicon to save his beloved Rome. And he thought as well about the last time he drove a U-Haul, seven years ago, when the freshly discharged lieutenant colonel and his young family headed east from Fort Hood, Texas, to begin a new life in Florida—then to teach history. And now, to make it.

He spent New Year’s Eve drinking sparkling grape juice at the Alexandria, Virginia, home of his lawyer and friend Neal Puckett. By January 1 he had already moved in to the basement apartment of an Army buddy near McPherson Square, walking distance from the White House. Congress would not be in session for another four days. None of the other freshmen had yet arrived. And that was the idea.

Because his foray into Washington was, in a sense, a paramilitary operation. Let the others stumble in on January 5 with their thousand-yard stares. West intended to get a jump on the rest. And so on New Year’s Day he was jogging on the Mall, standing before the great statue of the seated Lincoln, all pores open. Then back to his man-cave to spend the day absorbing budgetary data and parliamentary procedures. On the morning of the second, he and his chief of staff, Jonathan Blyth, visited the Capitol when no one else was around. He wandered the bowels of the Capitol basement and a couple of times got lost. Blyth had worked on the Hill before, but his boss’s instructions were to let West figure his own way out. He intended to learn every corridor, game out every shortcut. He’d drawn a low number in the office lottery, which consigned him to the seventh floor of the Longworth Building. West didn’t give a crap. He was used to living out of a tent.

On the morning of the third, when the freshmen got their office keys, West marched up to Longworth carrying a book about blacks in Congress and various other documents in his old helmet bag ornamented with the myriad postings of his twenty-two-year military career. He convened a meeting with his new staff. His instructions to them were in fact his standing orders as a battalion commander, written on a three-by-five index card that he had laminated because he carried it with him on the campaign trail:

Keep your bayonet sharp. Keep your individual weapon clean.

Be the expert in your lane, and knowledgeable in another.

Be professional.

Not on the list was:
Blindly follow commands.
The freshman had already staked out his contrary position back in October, a month before he was even elected, when
Boehner flew in
for a campaign appearance with West at the Gun Club Café in West Palm Beach and quietly advised him to go easy on the rhetoric about tax reform and the flat tax. “Try to avoid talking about that,” the Republican leader told the candidate, who ignored the counsel.

A month later, the congressman-elect appeared on NBC’s
Meet the Press
and responded to a question about potential budget cuts by saying, “Everything has to be on the table . . . We need to look at our Defense Department.” As soon as the show was over, the incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee,
Buck McKeon
, called West on his cell phone. How could West—who was vying for a seat on McKeon’s committee—say that the defense budget ought to be cut?

“You’re talking to a guy who’s been on the ground,” the freshman coolly replied. “There’s waste, and I know where the low-hanging fruit is.”

And shortly after learning of the House’s
new working calendar
, which would involve fewer days in Washington and more time back in their congressional districts, West fired off a letter to the man who designed the new schedule, incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. They should be spending
more
time in Washington, not less, the freshman wrote. How could they possibly contend with all the issues on their plate “when, among other things, we start off being in session only ten days the entire month of January?” West then circulated the letter in the form of a press release. Cantor’s spokesman responded with his own statement: “What matters is who’s in charge and the process put in place, not the number of days in session.” The majority leader himself did not contact West—which, of course, was a statement of its own.

Fine, thought West. He saw the matter as he always did, through a military prism. Any private on a rifle range can call a safety violation without the permission of the Officer in Charge. Otherwise someone could get hurt. The private is showing initiative and care. He’s thinking. He’s not a Soviet-style robot. The OIC should be grateful.

And anyway, his bayonet was sharp. Now it was January 5, 2011. Time to charge the enemy.

PART TWO

SHUT ’ER DOWN

CHAPTER FOUR

Citizens in the Devil’s City

On the morning of his swearing-in, Jeff
Duncan held a prayer breakfast
in a reception room of the Republican National Committee headquarters, across the street from the Cannon Building, where he now worked. In previous months, there had been a banner affixed to the RNC building’s façade.
FIRE PELOSI
, it had read. Now there was a new banner, hailing the politically radioactive Democrat’s commitment to stay on as their minority leader:
HIRE PELOSI
.

A hundred South Carolinians were there to join Duncan. Most of them had traveled eight hours in a bus caravan from the 3rd District, and with few exceptions they wore Carolina (or Republican) red. One of his buddies led them in prayer: “We know that the Lord installs kings, princes and leaders, and we thank him for our brother Jeff Duncan . . .”

When it was Duncan’s turn, he closed his eyes and began: “God—you are so good . . .”

The freshman choked up briefly. Taking a breath, he continued: “I thank you for this opportunity to serve my country and serve you . . . I am focused on getting back to what was inspired by you, this form of government . . . Shine your face on this nation once again. Turn it from its wicked ways . . .”

Then he led the procession over to Cannon 116—where, as promised, a ribbon barricaded the doorway. One of his young sons held the ribbon taut while Duncan applied the scissors.

“This is the grand opening of a business,” he told his constituents. “We are open for business, starting today!”

For two centuries, Washington, D.C., has sustained itself with intrigues.
“May this Territory
be the residence of virtue and happiness,”
President John Adams had declared on November 22, 1800, five days after the Sixth Congress officially relocated to America’s permanent seat of power, the Congress having been based for a year in New York, followed by a decade in yellow fever–plagued Philadelphia. Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s newly designed metropolis took a while to achieve its grandeur, if not its virtuelessness. Too squalid for family life,
Washington in its first few years
was a city of men who lived and dined together in coarse boardinghouses—the New Englanders in one, the southerners in another, the westerners in another still. Their shared workplace stood at an elevation of eighty-eight feet above the Potomac River, on land acquired from the wealthy farmer and slave owner Daniel Carroll. The Capitol’s earliest incarnation was so stifling that its inhabitants nicknamed it “the Oven.” A half-century later came its ornate dome, and then a succession of House and Senate office buildings—and not only families but whole colonies of Washington professionals, from the partisan wordsmiths who scribbled for Thomas Jefferson’s and Alexander Hamilton’s rival newspapers to the sly female “spider lobbyists” who drew the hapless congressmen into their webs by means of “pleasant parlors” and “Burgundy at blood heat.”

Now it was January 2011. Two years after a desultory cell of Republicans licked their wounds in the Caucus Room, the streets and hotels and reception rooms were exultantly theirs. Correspondingly, the K Street lobbyists and consultants and Republican job seekers were out in force. Above all, they sought out the eighty-seven new arrivals like Jeff Duncan and Allen West. That so many of the freshmen had achieved victory by denouncing John Adams’s “residence of virtue and happiness” only meant that they were due a suitable orientation to how Washington works.