The Price of Politics (51 page)

“Well there’s your answer,” said Graham. “If you don’t stick this up our ass, you all need to fire yourselves.”

• • •

The meltdown on Saturday’s Republican conference call wasn’t yet widely known on Sunday morning, December 18, when Boehner made an appearance on
Meet the Press.

“Well, it’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill—it’s only for two months,” the speaker said.
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“How can you do tax policy for two months?”

• • •

That Sunday afternoon, the president called Reid at his apartment in the Ritz-Carlton on the edge of Georgetown. Reid was angry and tired. Landra, his wife, was going for chemotherapy treatment the next day.

“What are you going to do?” the president asked about the deal.

“We are done,” Reid said. “No force of nature, nothing you say, nothing you can do, we are done.” He was sticking with the two-month extension the Senate had already passed.

Shouldn’t they think a little bit more on some of this?

“Barack, we are done,” Reid said. “We are done.”

Reid and Krone, his chief of staff, agreed they were going silent with Boehner. A total lockout. Reid would not talk to Boehner, and Krone would not talk to Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff. But they were nervous. These were high stakes. “The ultimate stare-down,” Krone said.

• • •

The mood in the White House was now giddy. The speaker of the House had just gone on the record essentially opposing a tax cut, even if for only two months. Obama, however, was worried that taxes would go up on January 1, and Sperling again noted the potentially large negative economic impact.

Obama’s family had already left for their traditional Christmas vacation in his home state of Hawaii, and the president was two days late in joining them. “I’ve told Michelle and the girls I might not be coming,” Obama told his economic team. “You should be telling your families the same thing. This is for real. We’re not going.”

• • •

As Christmas approached, Boehner was taking fire from the old-line Republican establishment.

“I think we need to recognize reality,” said John McCain in an interview with CNN December 20.
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“And that is we are not going to see that payroll tax cut expire on the first of January, and we have to accommodate to that reality.”

The fight needed to end, McCain said. “It is harming the Republican Party. It is harming the view, if it’s possible anymore, of the American people about Congress.”

On Wednesday, December 21,
The Wall Street Journal
joined the fray with an editorial headlined “The GOP’s Payroll Tax Fiasco.”
²⁶⁴
Republicans, the paper’s editorial board said, had “thoroughly botched” the politics of the payroll tax cut. “The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass.”

For Republican leaders, it is never a good day if
The Wall Street Journal
is calling you idiots.

Boehner reached the president.

Since Harry isn’t speaking to me, Boehner said, why don’t you send up your guys to sit down with mine to negotiate an agreement?

No, the president said. We’re done. Two months. You’ve got the bill in front of you. You can pass it.

Boehner then summoned the House Republicans for another conference call.

“Speaker’s decision,” Jeb Hensarling announced.

We lost, Boehner told them. He had struck a deal to approve the two-month extension with the understanding that the full-year extension would be negotiated after the holidays. This time, democracy was suspended—the members were not offered a chance to speak. No one could punch in on the call to complain or disagree.

• • •

Because the Senate would not reconsider, Boehner’s only option was to pass the two-month extension and get out of town for the holidays.

On December 23, in a speedy House session presided over by Boehner himself, the two-month extension passed by unanimous consent with no individual votes recorded.
²⁶⁵
Despite the procedural camouflage, they could not hide. The two-month extension was now an albatross around the necks of Republicans of the Senate and the House.

Nabors was surprised they had to bring the Republicans kicking and screaming to approve a tax cut. Obviously it was because it had been an Obama proposal. They would injure themselves, even contradict their own anti-tax arguments, in hopes of inflicting greater injury on the president. The Boehner-McConnell agenda was singularly designed to defeat Obama at any cost.

At 1:25, the president delivered a statement in the White House Press Room, congratulating Congress on “ending the stalemate” and passing the payroll tax extension.
²⁶⁶
“This is some good news,” the president said. “Just in the nick of time for the holidays.” Minutes later, Obama took off for Honolulu.

Media coverage acknowledged the deal was a win for Obama, but the real focus was on the failings of congressional Republicans. “The Humbling of the House GOP,” said a headline on Politico.com;
²⁶⁷
“Hate-Filled GOP Suffering from Self-Inflicted Wounds,” said
The New York Daily News
;
²⁶⁸
“House GOP Surrenders on Payroll Tax Cut,” headlined
The Washington Post
.
²⁶⁹

But there was more to the story. Not only was there a disastrous lack of coordination between Boehner and McConnell, but the internal politics of the House had become much deeper and more complex. There were now, more than ever, two distinct power centers: one led by Boehner and the other by Cantor.

• • •

In early February 2012, the Republicans agreed to extend the payroll tax cut for the full year. The package would add at least $143 billion to the deficit. Six days later, on February 17, the House passed the one-year extension 293–132, and the Senate approved it 60–36.
²⁷⁰

Obama celebrated the bill’s passage on February 21 in the White House’s South Court Auditorium. Surrounded by individuals who would benefit from the payroll tax cut, but no members of Congress, he was the champion of tax cuts. “You’ll remember,” he said, “I called on Congress to pass this middle-class tax cut back in September as part of my broader jobs plan.”
²⁷¹

Democrats were given no credit but were lumped together with Republicans. The president decried legislative gridlock, and, indicating the taxpayers on the podium, said, “With or without Congress, every day I’m going to be continuing to fight for them.”

I
n an interview about the debt ceiling negotiations in the summer of 2011, Boehner passed severe judgment on most of the Obama team, except the treasury secretary.
²⁷²

“Geithner was an asset to me in this whole thing. Geithner, Geithner!” Boehner said, as if he had been the lifesaver. “God bless him, but he was the guy running around yelling, Fire! And every day with the president he’s screaming, Fire! And you know if it weren’t for Geithner, I don’t know if the president would have gotten engaged like he did. That’s the first thing.

“Second thing is, and I thought about this this morning while I was going over this, and this is probably—hindsight is 20/20—but Bill Daley and I have had a long relationship. We like each other, we trust each other, almost like brothers. I mean we really understand each other. And when he came in as chief of staff I was very hopeful and optimistic. But he wasn’t in charge.”

Daley at first said he was flattered by Boehner’s remark, but that he looked on the speaker as “not quite a brother.”
²⁷³
He said he would not address the question of who was in charge in the Obama White House.

Who was in charge?

“I have no idea,” Boehner said. “Nobody who was in the room was.
²⁷⁴
And I’ve got Jack Lew and Daley and Rob Nabors and Geithner. But there wasn’t anybody in charge. And you know, I look back on this whole thing. The president was trying to get there. But there was nobody steering the ship underneath him.”

Had he ever said that to the president?

“No, no,” Boehner said. “I don’t know that I recognized it until later. Much later. Months.

“Again hindsight. They never had their act together. The president, I think, was ill-served by his team. Nobody in charge, no process. I just don’t know how the place works. To this day, I can’t tell you how the place works. There’s no process for making a decision in this White House. There’s nobody in charge.”

Isn’t the president in charge?

“Yeah, but any good manager, any good leader, has a team around him and a structure around him for making things work and making things happen. I never got the slightest clue that there was a structure there. It’s not that they’re bad people. But there’s no structure.”

Yes, Boehner said, the president would talk about a big deal but then send a proposal calling for Medicare cuts of merely $15 billion. However, the conversations between the two of them were good. “He and I never had a disagreement,” he said, overlooking or forgetting the heated conversations they had had, especially over the phone.

“I don’t think it was clear to me until months later because you know as I reflected on this—and I reflected on it a lot because I’ve got to tell you, in the year and a half I’ve been speaker it’s the biggest disappointment I’ve had, not being able to come to an agreement. Especially when we had one. It was right there. It was significant and it would have worked. And the country would be better off today as a result of it.”

Many in the White House, I said to him, felt it was hard to get to a deal because Boehner had to prove to his members that he had humiliated the president. That was all that would sell to the Tea Partiers. Compromise was a crime, so a deal that left both sides satisfied was
unacceptable. Obama needed to be destroyed. Crushed. A kind of triumphalism was necessary.

“No,” Boehner said. “It’s all about cutting spending. I don’t have an evil bone in my body. I’m not capable of it. It’s not who I am. You can ask anybody in this whole place,” he added, sweeping his hand and his cigarette around the speaker’s second-floor office in the Capitol. “My staff think I ought to be tougher. My friends. But I don’t have an evil bone in my body. It was all about cutting spending. And they just weren’t willing to cut spending. It’s as simple as that.”

Do you think Obama is willing to cut spending? I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Every time you get there, he’s got 50 reasons why he can’t do that, can’t do this, can’t do that. Maybe it’s the difference between the president and his staff. I don’t know.”

In the White House, you’re seen as a Main Street Republican and Eric Cantor as a Wall Street Republican, I said.

“They are judging style as opposed to substance,” Boehner said. “My voting record and Eric’s, I wouldn’t think there’s a dime’s worth of difference between them, our voting records historically. I am a conservative Republican. I have the eighth most conservative voting record in Congress. But I don’t wear it on my sleeve. I don’t shove it in people’s face.”
*

Boehner also had another complaint about the White House. “There was no outreach when we were in the minority. There is no outreach in a majority. You look at both Bush administrations, Clinton’s administration, they had a congressional affairs team that was plugged in keeping people up to date. No outreach. Go talk to the Democrats. Because they get treated the same way. There’s no outreach. The place [White House] is dysfunctional.

“I don’t know whether it’s him or it’s him versus his staff or whoever’s calling the shots,” Boehner added at one point.
²⁷⁶

“You’ve got a bunch of people down there, well-meaning people, who have never done anything. Never run anything. Organizational
structure. When you don’t know what you don’t know, it gets you in big trouble.”

• • •

Within the White House, Jack Lew, David Plouffe, Rob Nabors, Gene Sperling and Dan Pfeiffer found Boehner’s criticism laughable and untrue. In the president’s and their view, Boehner did not come close to steering his own ship. Instead of being a visionary trying to make a grand bargain, Boehner had, almost all alone, crawled out on a limb and watched as Eric Cantor and the Tea Party sawed it off.

The question they asked in the White House was simply, who was in charge in the House of Representatives? And the answer was: Not Boehner.

“I think John wanted to get a deal,” the president said to me in an interview.
²⁷⁷
“And I think that, had he had more control of his caucus, we could have gotten a deal done a month earlier.

“John was in a tough spot. He couldn’t get it done. I’m sympathetic to that. I think that him trying to spin it is understandable. But ultimately the test of leadership has to be, when the stakes are highest, being willing to set politics aside to do what’s best for the American people. And I felt that that was not done in this situation. And I think a big opportunity was missed.”