Takeover (29 page)

Joe Barton and Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner were rumored not to get along, which made a waiver of the Republican term limits rule unlikely. Three other conservatives who might have made a claim on the chairmanship were Florida’s Cliff Stearns, Illinois congressman John Shimkus, and Pennsylvania’s right-to-life hero Joe Pitts. Sterns, an outspoken advocate of repealing Obamacare and expanding domestic energy production, seemed to have the most support from conservatives; Shimkus was a dogged supporter of ethanol mandates and subsidies, which were precisely the sort of Big Government corporate welfare programs that Republicans should be using their new power to dismantle. But none of the three
ever mounted a serious challenge to Upton.

Despite a strong campaign to influence members of the Republican Steering Committee and John Boehner, including editorials from conservative publications detailing why Fred Upton was “wholly unsuited for the job,” Upton was elevated to one of the most visible and powerful chairmanships in the House.
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The election of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee was even more disheartening for conservatives and Tea Partiers.

The candidates for chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, arguably the most powerful committee in the House, were California representative Jerry Lewis, the current ranking member, who was supposedly term limited but chose to ask for an exception to the term limits rule; Georgia congressman Jack Kingston, who, despite his otherwise conservative voting record, had been blasted by Citizens Against Government Waste for earmarks that doubled the Pentagon’s request for passenger jets in the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act; and “the Prince of Pork,” Kentucky’s Congressman Hal Rogers.
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Rogers, in the previous year alone, had sponsored or cosponsored fifty earmarks totaling $93.4 million, ranking him tenth out of the 435 representatives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
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Not one genuine fiscal conservative was even in the running for chairman of the committee that is the first line of defense against the continuation of the massive growth of spending, deficit, and debt that are driving America toward national bankruptcy.

Rogers eventually prevailed and became chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and while he talked a good game by publicly repudiating earmarks, he has since been a regular and strident advocate of more, not less spending.

Roger’s tenure as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee has been a far cry from the fiscal conservative spending discipline Tea Partiers thought they would get when they restored Republicans to the House majority in the 2010 midterm election.

The last time the Republicans were in charge, they became the
party of Big Spending, Big Government, and Big Business. They abandoned the philosophy of Ronald Reagan and cozied up to lobbyists and special interests.

If the selection of Fred Upton and Hal Rogers as chairmen of two of the most powerful committees in the House was any indication, the Republican establishment hadn’t gotten the message that they were on probation and the voters that handed them back the majority expected a change—or else.

The good news was, so far, the Tea Party showed no appetite for the diet of corporate welfare, Keynesian economic policies, and big business rent-seeking that characterized the Republican Party under the suzerainty of George W. Bush.

Indeed, the Tea Party began to be criticized because it stood for conservative principles, especially on taxes and spending. The Washington establishment soon began to lament that Congress “can’t get anything done.” What that really means is that they can’t grow government if Tea Party–backed members of Congress stand in the way.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein perhaps best captured this attitude in an article they penned for the
Washington Post.
They claimed that the Tea Party–inspired Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Let me translate what Mann and Ornstein are saying. Conservative Republicans are making it more difficult for Democrats to reduce your liberty, freedom, and rights and grow the power of the federal government.

It is completely dishonest for the Left and progressive Republicans to use words like
obstructionist
and
gridlock
as opposed to recognizing that there is a real ideological difference between conservatives and progressives. The real problem is not that conservatives are “obstructionist” but that for the first time in one hundred years, the Left and progressive Republicans have some serious opposition,
and they don’t like it.

Conservatives are standing and fighting because there is a clash of two diametrically opposed worldviews colliding—progressives and the Left believing in the dominance of government, and a powerful government controlling people’s lives; conservatives stand for freedom, and the rule of law limiting government. This isn’t “obstructionism,” but exactly the kind of checks and balance the Framers of the Constitution envisioned. When Tea Partiers began to organize opposition to Big Government, regardless of which Party was behind it, that was exactly what Madison had in mind when he wrote in Federalist no. 44, “In a last resort a remedy must be obtained from the people, who can by the elections of more faithful representatives, annul the acts of the usurpers.”

The bad news is that Republican headquarters is still inside the Beltway and, as Senator Jim DeMint observed after the 2010 election, “The establishment is much more likely to try to buy off your votes than to buy into your limited-government philosophy.”

The point at which the Republican establishment leadership gave the Tea Party the back of the hand and made it clear they really weren’t welcome at the Mitch McConnell–John Boehner–Reince Preibus table was the 2011 battle to raise the federal debt ceiling.

In 2010, most, if not all, Tea Party–backed candidates campaigned against the out-of-control spending, deficits, and debt of the Bush and Obama years.

Many made a solemn promise to their constituents not to vote for a debt ceiling increase, or at least not to increase it without real spending reform.

As the vote to raise the debt ceiling loomed, the newly elected Tea Party–aligned congressmen and women began to see that the challenge lay not with Nancy Pelosi’s plaintive demands for a seat at the budget negotiation table. It was in their own leadership ranks, where the willingness to sell out the taxpayer to corporate welfare seeking was unabated among establishment Republicans.

The vote to eliminate funding for a second engine for the F-35
Joint Strike Fighter was an instructive example of this fault line in the Republican Party. This wasteful pork for the military-industrial complex was eliminated only through the support of a strong core of Tea Party–backed freshmen, despite the opposition of top House Republicans who supported General Electric and Rolls Royce over hard-pressed American taxpayers.

In the view of many grassroots Tea Partiers and limited-government constitutional conservatives, this willingness to subsidize favored interests with the taxpayers’ money and pick winners and losers by legislative fiat rendered establishment Republicans indistinguishable from Democrats.

The newly elected Tea Party–backed members of Congress were also being educated on just how Washington’s insiders worked, and just how divergent the interests of Main Street America and inside the Beltway Washington had become.

As the House was debating under what conditions Congress should raise the debt ceiling, US Chamber of Commerce chief Tom Donohue peremptorily warned Tea Party–aligned members of Congress that if they voted against raising the debt ceiling, “We’ll get rid of you.”
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Missing from that threat was any acknowledgment that congressional spending always chases the funds available to be spent. Nor was Donohue prepared to acknowledge that corporate welfare, bailouts, and subsidies that benefited chamber members, such as General Electric, had anything to do with the fiscal crisis that is destroying this nation.

Tea Party and conservative activists understood that Congress must act to cut spending to solve our nation’s spending, debt, and deficit crisis—that’s where the Taxed Enough Already acronym came from!

Establishment Republicans were facing a choice that would determine whether or not the party remained a relevant force in American politics. If Republicans caved in and followed the establishment line to raise the debt ceiling, while claiming they would
address the spending crisis sometime in the future, they would render the GOP irrelevant to solving the greatest political problem of our times.

As the vote to raise the debt ceiling loomed, and with the newly elected Tea Party–aligned members of Congress making up a substantial part of the Republican majority, holding the line on the debt ceiling and making real cuts in the size of government should have been a no-brainer.

One might think that corporate interests would oppose raising the debt ceiling because they would never run their businesses the way the federal government is run. But Donohue’s comments were a stark reminder of the major fault line in the Republican Party.

Donohue and establishment Republicans understood all too well that solving the federal budget and debt crisis means derailing the federal gravy train and ending the Wall Street bailouts, corporate welfare, and pork-barrel spending that got us into the spending, deficit, and debt cycle in the first place. Clearly, that would be bad for a lot of US Chamber members who had become addicted to profiting from the axis between Wall Street, Washington, and Silicon Valley.

“Raise the debt ceiling or we will get rid of you”?

What Donohue and the Republican establishment didn’t seem to understand was that every time Republicans in Congress voted for the corporate interests over the national interest, they widened the fault line in the party and made more Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries.

As the vote to raise the debt ceiling approached, the pressure from establishment interests intensified.

On one side were conservatives who backed a plan originated by principled limited-government constitutional conservative senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, calling for an increase in the debt ceiling as part of a plan to “Cut, Cap, and Balance” the budget.

On the other side were those, such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who were prepared to do pretty much anything to avoid a fight over the debt ceiling. They were prepared to even give
Obama and the Democrats an extension beyond the 2012 election—and of course the Democrats just wanted more money without any conditions, a so-called clean increase in the debt ceiling.

Conservative leaders were holding regular meetings and conference calls to coordinate support for Cut, Cap, and Balance, much as we New Right leaders had done in the late 1970s and early 1980s to rally support and coordinate action on our agenda—and it seemed to be working. Thousands of calls, e-mails, and letters poured into Congress, and getting the federal budget under control was the dominant issue on talk radio, the evening news, and the top opinion-leading websites.

In what was to become a hallmark of his Speakership, Boehner held a vote on a House version of Cut, Cap, and Balance. The House passed the bill 234 to 190 (112th Congress, first session, roll call vote 606) to much brave talk from the Speaker about the president abandoning his veto threat and Senate Democrats quickly passing the bill.

House Republicans are the only ones to put forward and pass a real plan that will create a better environment for private-sector job growth by stopping Washington from spending money it doesn’t have and preventing tax hikes on families and small businesses. The White House hasn’t said what it will cut. And Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget in more than two years. The President should abandon his veto threat, and urge Senate Democrats to quickly pass the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan to help get our economy back to creating jobs.
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And just as quickly as the House passed the bill, Boehner began to backtrack and back down.

As soon as the Senate Democrats, under the iron fist of Majority Leader Harry Reid, voted down Cut, Cap, and Balance, Boehner put up another bill that, as FreedomWorks said in its analysis, “not only violates the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, it doesn’t even reflect the ‘spirit’ of Cut, Cap and Balance, as House leaders claim, because it neither cuts nor caps nor balances federal spending. And it creates
an opening for Washington to raise taxes next year.”
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Many conservatives, including me, couldn’t understand why Boehner was backing down. It seemed clear to us that conservatives were winning when we stood on principle and our opponents offered nothing but threats.

What’s more, all of the self-appointed financial arbiters who were issuing the threats had one thing in common: they had all benefited from the trillions of dollars the American taxpayers had shoveled into the maw of Big Government over the past four decades. For example, Tom Donohue of the US Chamber and managing director of the International Monetary Fund demanded the United States raise the debt ceiling or face some ill-defined consequences. Similarly, Moody’s Investors Service (the same outfit that missed the causes of the meltdown of 2008) raised the pressure on US lawmakers to increase the debt limit by placing the nation’s credit rating “under review” for a downgrade.

The threats confirmed what I’d been saying for two years—the Tea Party could succeed in changing Washington; all that was required was for the members of Congress who were backed by the Tea Party movement to hold fast to their principles.

And if Republicans couldn’t or wouldn’t fight to the bitter end for Cut, Cap, and Balance, it seemed to me that the next best solution to our spending, debt, and deficit crisis might be found in a bill to make immediate spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling for six to nine months.