Still, it seemed conceivable that with the immediate crisis past, McConnell may have reassessed his accommodating position toward the DeMint wing. Their recklessness had come close to exacerbating the biggest global financial emergency in decades. McConnell had survived his reelection and wouldn’t face voters again for another six years. And his party had just suffered its second consecutive thumping at the polls, leaving it without control of either the White House or Congress and underscoring the need for a period of rebuilding and self-examination.
A sign that he might be inclined to embrace such sobriety came with his Christmastime request to Richard Lugar, his veteran colleague from Indiana, now considered among the more moderate members of the caucus. He hoped Lugar would officially renominate him as caucus leader. “I got the call out in Indianapolis. He anticipated a challenge, and he was hopeful I would give a rousing speech nominating him for the new caucus—which I was delighted to do,” Lugar recalls. “He sensed that those forces were closing in on him, not to mention the rest of the party . . . and he thought I had the respect of the colleagues, that if I really took the thing in hand . . . that I was going to settle it.” And indeed, while there were “murmurs of some potential difficulties,” Lugar says, “after I spoke and someone called for a vote, he was unanimously elected.”
The retention of his leadership post, helped by one of the party’s old guard, might have led to a broader resolve on McConnell’s part to take on those “forces closing in” on his party.
Quite the opposite.
* * *
Jeff Merkley had known Congress when it functioned. He had been a Senate intern in the 1970s and worked as a congressional aide and a staffer for the Congressional Budget Office in the 1980s, which had left him with a “love for institution, a respect for it.” “I knew that senators may have carried different party labels, but they generally liked each other and generally wanted to work together. They realized that for twenty percent [of the issues], that’s what campaigns were about, but they could get a lot done addressing the other issues. What was particularly different was that there wasn’t an effort to just immobilize the Senate.”
Now, in early 2009, as a newly elected Democratic senator from Oregon, Merkley often had the rookie’s inglorious task of serving as the presiding officer who must watch over the chamber for hours on end while senators hold forth to a chamber empty but for tourists and pages refilling water glasses. And for much of that time in 2009, it seemed, the person whom Merkley found himself listening to was Mitch McConnell. Day after day, “he would just reel off the most partisan talking points possible, with no indication of advocacy or working together to solve the most pressing problems of the country,” Merkley said. Listening to McConnell, he says, “crystallized” what had gone wrong in the Senate since he’d been there as a young man. “It’s just a tremendous problem for America to have a perpetual partisan campaign, the inability to say, ‘The elections are over, let’s work together to solve some of these big issues.’ ”
That was not the path McConnell had chosen. In the midwinter of 2009, as Barack Obama assumed the presidency and the country was losing six hundred thousand jobs per month, McConnell assembled his caucus for a retreat in West Virginia and laid out a strategy that focused a whole lot more on undermining the former than addressing the latter. As Bennett recalls, “Mitch said, ‘We have a new president with an approval rating in the seventy percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that. And we wait for the time where the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on. We recognize the American people—even those who do not approve of him—want him to have success, are hopeful.’ ” In other words: wait out Americans’ hopefulness in a dire moment for the country until it curdles to disillusionment.
This strategy meant discouraging the sort of cross-partisan goodwill that Obama had held out as one of the central promises of his presidency, and that seemed within reach amid the celebratory feelings around his historic inauguration. So when New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, who had served as a sort of untitled consigliere to McConnell, informed him that he was considering Obama’s invitation to become his secretary of commerce, McConnell did not congratulate him. “I went and told him and he understood I was going to do it, but he clearly thought it was a bad idea,” Gregg says. “It was obvious from his body language that he thought it was a bad idea.” Shortly afterward, Gregg withdrew his nomination, citing “irresolvable conflicts” with Obama.
The strategy meant seeking leverage, at a time when diminished Republican ranks would seem to offer little of it, by bogging down the machinery of government on even the most mundane matters. In the first weeks of 2009, a big omnibus bill to expand wilderness protection that had been cobbled together for months, with provisions to please just about every senator and state, was held up for days as Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma protested the measure. A few weeks later, Coburn was at the center of the attempted delay of another measure with broad support, a bill to reform the credit card industry—he managed to attach an unrelated amendment lifting the ban on loaded firearms in national parks, forcing Democrats to choose between accepting a pet issue of the National Rifle Association and postponement of reforms of an industry that had figured in the nation’s consumer debt crisis. Most vulnerable to delays were the administration’s nominations—Republicans mounted filibusters against obscure figures such as a deputy secretary for the Interior Department and counsel to the Commerce Department. By year’s end, seventy-five nominees were still hung up in the Senate.
The strategy meant seizing on the first signs of weakness—“issues where we can win,” as McConnell had put it—which is what Republicans did after Obama ordered, on his first day in office, the closure within one year of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Fomenting controversy around that issue was McConnell’s brainchild, says his friend Bob Bennett. “He came to us and said, ‘I’ve found the issue where he’s going to lose: Guantanamo. We’re going to oppose the closing of Guantanamo. There’s a majority out there that do not want Guantanamo closed. We can talk about taking terrorists and putting them on American soil and terrorists causing prison riots and things of that kind.’ ” Senate Republicans spent a lot of time talking about that, and by the time the administration proposed in late 2009 moving some detainees to a federal prison in Illinois, the public was primed for a backlash. Guantanamo remained open and became a glaring emblem of Obama’s unfulfilled promise. “It was the beginning of, ‘Maybe this guy doesn’t walk on water,’ ” says Bennett.
Above all, though, the strategy meant holding the Republican caucus together to deny Obama Republican votes on his highest-priority initiatives. The Republicans would not follow the lead of the Democrats who, in the early years of George W. Bush’s administration, had voted for his two rounds of tax cuts and the Iraq war resolution. Instead, they would form a cohesive opposition force, regardless of the inducements thrown their way. Achieving such unity was, on one level, not difficult to achieve—life in the minority lends itself to solidarity. “In the minority it’s easier to maintain control of your caucus,” says Lula Davis, the former chief aide to Harry Reid. “If you don’t stay together, you don’t have a chance in hell of getting anything done.” Still, it was hard to imagine someone better suited to keeping members in line than Mitch McConnell. He had his fund-raising largesse. He had a top-notch staff to keep on top of things. And he had the political astuteness gained from years in the Senate—and years prior studying it—to know what he needed to do to keep members from straying when it mattered. “He’s a good listener and can read his members very well,” says Davis. “It was fascinating, watching him shepherd them and keep them together all the time. . . . He understands every issue to the nth degree.”
There were, of course, weapons at a leader’s disposal—committee assignments, ca
mpaign cash, and the like—but rarely did McConnell apply them in the blunt fashion of Lyndon Johnson. The pressure was more modulated than that, says Bennett. “He very, very seldom lowers the leadership hammer, very seldom said, ‘I’m the leader and I want your support in this, you’ve got to be with me.’ But when he does, he’s very, very firm, and makes it extremely difficult for you to say no, because he doesn’t do it in a routine fashion, so that when he does do it, you know this is really serious and important and if I disappoint Mitch this time, he’s going to remember.”
At times, Bennett says, he’d gone to McConnell and said, “Look, I can’t be with you because of stuff at home, or this is a really dumb idea and my conscience won’t let me,” to which McConnell would respond, “That’s okay, Bob.” But that allowance comes with a cost: “He lets you off the hook enough times so that when he comes to you and says, ‘I need you,’ you have to,” says Bennett. “He’ll say, ‘Bob, you’re my best friend in the caucus and everyone knows it—if you don’t come with me on this one . . . ’ How do you say no?” So implicit was the pressure that its traces often weren’t immediately discernible after the fact, Bennett says. “I have never seen him say, ‘If you do this, I’ll see to that.’ But some people will say, ‘How did [this or that senator] get on [the Finance Committee]? Why did Mitch do this or that? I can’t understand,’ . . . and I’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, look back at this [vote], and this, and this,’ and they’ll say, ‘Ah, okay.’ ”
On the first big Senate vote of Obama’s presidency, the unit held—almost. The White House and congressional Democrats had filled the economic recovery package with $288 billion in tax cuts, more than they wanted and more than many economists thought useful for effective stimulus, in an effort to win Republican backing. The inducements managed to win zero House Republicans and only three in the Senate—far short of the consensus Obama wanted for his big measure to address the economic collapse, but just enough to get the bill passed and enough to allow Democrats to claim, in a bit of a stretch, that the bill was “bipartisan.”
Mitch McConnell would make sure that did not happen again.
* * *
Max Baucus, the senior senator from Montana and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had a list. From the start of the Obama administration, Baucus had taken it upon himself to lay the groundwork for one of the new president’s top priorities, achieving near universal health coverage in a country where some 50 million lacked insurance. Baucus developed a white paper sketching out a legislative framework, and a long list of Republican senators who he thought might support the bill.
Why bother with the list? After all, by the time Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter switched parties in late April from Republican to Democrat, the Democrats had enough votes in the Senate to break a filibuster. But Baucus knew how much Obama spoke about transcending partisan divides—and he knew how important it was to get bipartisan backing for major changes in social policy. Implementation and national acceptance would be hard without some measure of consensus. After all, Social Security and Medicare had both gotten more than a dozen Republican votes in the Senate. Even in the more polarized twenty-first century, the Medicare drug benefit had passed in 2003 with a dozen Democratic votes—including Baucus’s.
Baucus had reason to believe he might get some Republican support. After all, the framework he was drawing up was modeled on proposals that had been offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation and by Republicans seeking an alternative to Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan in 1993. Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, had signed similar legislation into law in Massachusetts. Baucus’s approach did not seek to replace private insurers with government-run, “single-payer” insurance like Medicare, but rather sought to cover the uninsured via private insurance, with subsidies and a mandate requiring individuals to get coverage to make the system work.
And at first, Baucus was getting encouraging responses. No small number of Republicans told him they might just be able to sign on to his plan, particularly if he left out the “public option,” a government-run insurance plan to be offered alongside private plans.
As the spring of 2009 wore on and as the debate began in earnest on Baucus’s committee and several others in both chambers, the Republicans who’d earlier expressed interest started falling away. By summer, Baucus was left communicating with three Republicans—Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Enzi was the most conservative of the three and Snowe the most moderate, but Grassley, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, was the one Baucus was most counting on to bring a substantial minority of Republicans onto the bill. The debonair Baucus and the ornery Grassley had, even in these partisan times, worked together on major legislation that came through their committee—including on the Medicare drug benefit and George W. Bush’s tax cuts, all of which Baucus had supported, to the dismay of many of his Democratic colleagues. And Baucus had filled his draft with items he knew Grassley favored, such as a requirement that drug and device makers disclose financial relationships with doctors and hospitals, and rewards to hospitals that provide high-quality care under Medicare.
But if Grassley was tempted by these inducements and any feeling of obligation to Baucus for the Democrat’s support of Bush’s big initiatives, he was also getting persuasive warnings to resist them—not from DeMint or other archconservatives in the caucus, but from its leader. McConnell, Grassley says, made it clear that he found the legislation misguided, whatever its ideological origins. “Mitch had his mind well made up that this sort of approach that could lead to the nationalization of health care wasn’t right and wasn’t good for the country and might happen as a result of those meetings” with Baucus, says Grassley.
McConnell did not outright order Grassley and the two other Republicans against participating in the discussions. Rather, Grassley says, he told them, “I just think you ought to be cautious.” As effective was the persistent message the three Republicans were getting at caucus meetings held every Wednesday at 4 P.M. at a big square table in the Mansfield Room in the Capitol to discuss the health-care legislation. Grassley would update his fellow Republicans on what was going on in the talks with Baucus and the two other Democrats in the “Gang of Six” (Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Kent Conrad of North Dakota). The reaction he encountered every week made it clear that it was going to be very difficult to bring a critical mass of Republicans around. “Those regular meetings led people around to the point [of thinking] that this isn’t something as good as when we first started talking about it,” says Grassley. “I’m not sure if [McConnell] led them there but he put in place a process that brought around the consensus that Obamacare wasn’t good.”
Others at the meetings say it was plain that Grassley’s heart wasn’t in going up against McConnell and the prevailing sentiment, so grudging were his attempts to sell the Gang of Six’s work to the caucus. “Grassley never committed to anything” with Baucus, says Bob Bennett. “It was ‘I’ll take that back and see if that would fly’ and it never would—all of the stuff he brought back to us, including some of the stuff he felt might work, he never came back and advocated for it.” And once Grassley started hearing from his Iowa constituents attacking the legislation at town hall meetings in August, he turned critical of the legislation, telling three hundred Iowans at one event that they had “every right to fear” that the bill’s provision of Medicare coverage for end-of-life-counseling—a provision he had recently championed—could turn into a “government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.” For the Democrats in the Gang of Six, this distancing was confounding, because there was no concrete point of disagreement to negotiate over. “I didn’t identify any specific policy issue where if we’d agreed to make a change in that aspect of the bill,” agreement would be reached, says Bingaman. “I didn’t detect that. They just became less and less willing to sign on to the bill as we got further and further into the discussions.”
Grassley’s turn against his former positions and Baucus prompted speculation on the Hill about what McConnell might have offered or threatened to effect the switch—say, the loss of Grassley’s top spot on the Finance Committee. Grassley dismisses the committee rumor, but in doing so lends some credence to another version of the speculation, that McConnell had made clear to him that if he went along with Baucus, he’d face a primary challenge from the right in 2012—and would not get help from his party in fending it off. “There was no threat [over committee rank], never a discussion like that,” Grassley says. “Probably more of a concern would’ve been in the state of Iowa, whether I would have had Tea Party opposition.”
Snowe was facing a similar prospect—if anything, more so than Grassley. Every few days, it seemed, another busload of conservative activists would come down from Maine to confront her. And just as often, a member of the Senate Republican leadership of their staff would demand to know: was she switching parties? Senate Republicans deny that she was coming under collegial censure for her negotiations with Baucus—“You never knew where Olympia was going to end up on something like this,” says Judd Gregg. “No one tried to influence Olympia.” Still, she, like Grassley, had reason to fear she could not depend on McConnell and the rest of the party to back her up if she broke from them on the legislation and faced a primary challenge as a result. Snowe voted for the legislation in the Finance Committee, but when it reached the Senate floor two months later, she joined every other Republican in voting against it. Her vote against the bill was so conflicted to the end that, as one observer of the roll call noted, she could barely get out her “no”—it sounded more like “nyeo.”
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