American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  “The demands were fine in theory, but put into practice, it just didn’t work,” he says. “Conservatism was always about trying to effect some progress toward limiting the reach of government. It wasn’t being a revolutionary to light it on fire and burn it down to rebuild it. But somehow, that’s what the definition of ‘conservative’ became.”

  AS CONGRESS HURTLED TOWARD AN AUGUST DEADLINE TO RAISE THE debt ceiling, a borrowing limit that directs the Treasury Department’s payment of costs already incurred, fratricide was beginning to consume the House GOP. It owed to a self-inflicted strategic wound: Republicans had, upon taking the majority, waived the “Gephardt Rule” that had long allowed the debt ceiling to be raised in pro forma fashion. At the time, Boehner’s team had encouraged the rank and file to view the debt ceiling vote as a leverage point in dealing with Obama. This advice proved costly.

  Boehner started the debt-ceiling talks by publicly demanding one dollar in spending cuts for every new dollar in borrowing authority. Emboldened by the Speaker’s objective, Jordan convinced the House conservatives to stake out a position even farther to the right, rallying around a plan called “Cut, Cap and Balance.” It would require any debt ceiling hike to accompany a cut in federal spending, a cap on future spending, and a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance its budget.

  The proposal, which Boehner derided as “Snap, Crackle and Pop,” passed the House in mid-July but was rejected out of hand by Obama and the Reid-run Senate. Jordan lobbied Boehner to make a national referendum out of the issue; the Speaker wanted to move on, eyeing August’s deadline and hoping to win some concessions beforehand. The tension boiled over in late July, when it was discovered that Jordan’s staff had been conspiring with outside conservative groups to pressure RSC members—Jordan’s members—to vote against Boehner’s proposed debt deal. Jordan apologized to the conference, but members shouted, “Fire him!” in reference to the rogue staffer who had undermined the Speaker.

  Ultimately, Boehner failed to collect enough Republican votes to present Obama with a unified offer that might have nudged the negotiations rightward. The consequence was twofold. In the short term, it forced the parties to settle on a deal that nobody was happy with, the Budget Control Act, which raised the debt ceiling but introduced automatic “sequestration” cuts to spending if a future agreement were not reached. In the long-term, it stripped Boehner of any negotiating power with Obama. The White House had begun to suspect that Republicans were internally fractured; the debt ceiling implosion confirmed to them that Boehner could not control his members and thus could not be trusted to speak for them.

  “He could practically never deliver his votes,” says Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.

  Boehner shakes his head. “It’s hard to negotiate when you’re standing there naked,” he says. “It’s hard to negotiate with no dick.”

  The underlying problem bedeviling the GOP was a lack of congruity; that, in turn, could be chalked up to its whiplash-inducing return to power in 2010. Time in the minority can be enormously beneficial for a political party—time to reflect, study, question, strategize, change. Storming back into the House majority just two years removed from George W. Bush’s departure, Republicans, it was clear, were not yet prepared to be a majority party.

  Of course, history might have reflected something quite different—for Boehner and Obama, for Republicans and Democrats, for the country—had the “Gang of Six” not gotten in the way.

  On July 19, as the debt-ceiling drama was intensifying, a bipartisan group of three Republican senators and three Democratic senators had unveiled the framework of a sweeping fiscal compromise they had been working toward. What they didn’t know—what almost no one in Washington knew—was that Obama and Boehner had secretly been working on their own deal. It was nicknamed “the Grand Bargain,” and just forty-eight hours earlier, the janitor and the community organizer had shaken hands to seal an agreement that might have altered the arc of American history.

  Their work had begun a month earlier—on the golf course, in fact—with Boehner’s suggestion that the debt ceiling predicament gave them an opportunity to address America’s longer-term crisis: the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation and the strain it placed on the country’s finances. The Speaker told the president that Republicans could agree to increased revenue via eliminating tax deductions and loopholes (violating conservative orthodoxy) if Democrats could agree to spending cuts and entitlement reforms (violating liberal orthodoxy). Obama signaled his openness to the idea, and for the next five weeks their teams worked in secret to hammer out a compromise, knowing that fury awaited in their respective party bases.

  On Sunday, July 17, Obama returned from church to meet Boehner and Cantor at the White House. Some fine-tuning remained, but their deal was basically done. It included reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending; and $800 billion in new revenue. Boehner, wary that Cantor would try to scuttle the deal, had initially kept him out of the negotiations; when Cantor was finally clued in, he warned the Speaker that he shouldn’t trust Obama. Now, as they shook hands in the Oval Office, Boehner felt vindicated. “I was one happy son of a bitch,” he says.

  But two days later, blind to these private dealings, the Gang of Six rolled out its own proposal. The problem was that it included significantly more revenue than Boehner and Obama had agreed to. Watching as several conservative senators endorsed this plan, the president knew there was no way he could sell the Grand Bargain to congressional Democrats.

  When the White House reached out to the Speaker’s staff, seeking a higher revenue number for their plan, Boehner was aghast. “Are you shitting me?” he shrieked to several of his staffers, a tenor of wrath they had never before heard. “We shook hands!”

  The Speaker quickly convened a meeting with Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, apprising them of the circumstances and gauging their opinions about increased revenue. Cantor shook his head in disgust; now he was feeling vindicated. The others had largely been in the dark about the deal, but warned Boehner that most Republicans weren’t going to go for $800 billion in revenue, much less more. Boehner knew they were right. And he was crestfallen.

  As the dazed Speaker walked out to his balcony for a smoke, his chief of staff, Barry Jackson, whispered nervously to friends that a coup was soon to unfold. Not a year had passed since Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy published a book together, Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, that conspicuously excluded Boehner. Now, with word spreading through the conference of the Speaker’s shadowy dealings with Obama, he appeared most vulnerable.

  Obama phoned Boehner, eager for an update, but the Speaker refused to answer or call back. The Grand Bargain was off.

  The two sides would peddle competing versions of what went down. Boehner’s team said Obama moved the goal posts; the White House said the Speaker couldn’t sell his own members on the deal. Both versions contain truth. Obama did renege on their handshake agreement; and Boehner did face an uprising among his members. For the Speaker, passing the Grand Bargain through the House would have required leaning on Democratic votes and steamrolling the conservatives—and, in all likelihood, kissing his speakership good-bye.

  Looking back, with the nation pushing toward $23 trillion in debt and no mandatory spending reforms on the horizon, Boehner says it would have been worth it. “If I could have pulled this deal off, they could have thrown me out the next day,” the former Speaker says. “I would have been the happiest guy in the world.”

  AS THEIR FIRST YEAR IN THE MAJORITY DREW TO A CLOSE, REPUBLICANS were forced to reckon with a side effect of their return to power: the rise of the professional right.

  Believing they had enabled the GOP’s decline by giving George W. Bush’s party a free ride, conservative activists were determined to hold the new Republicans accountable. Yet this impulse, however well intentioned, resulted in overreach destructive to their own e
nds. If politics is the art of the possible, then the influence of outside groups on lawmakers—especially the newest, most susceptible lawmakers—made governing impossible. By going to DEFCON 1 on a weekly basis, threatening reprisals against anyone supporting the leadership on a given legislative issue, the activist warlords locked Boehner into a constant state of lose-lose: If he gave conservatives what they wanted, he would suffer defections from the center-right members and stand no chance of passing a bill; if the conservatives spurned him and he turned to Democrats to make up the margin, he would be accused of selling out the right.

  As this dynamic took hold, Republican elected officials began viewing the operational base of the party with suspicion. Conservative political shops in DC were suddenly booming. The email lists and demographic data assembled by consultants and vendors was invaluable; advocacy groups that sprang up with seed money from major conservative donors, most notably the Koch brothers, would use the contact information to build grassroots armies, then issue sky-is-falling warnings of imminent treachery in Congress and ask for money to combat it. That money, in turn, made the groups all the more intimidating to lawmakers. For many Republicans, their “scorecard,” a voting record summary graded by Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, or the Club for Growth, became as precious as their pocket-size copies of the Constitution.

  People of sincere political conviction are plentiful, both inside the Beltway and beyond. But this purity-for-profit model introduced a new degree of capriciousness to the Republican civil war.

  “The grassroots version of the Tea Party [was] earnest, concerned citizens who want limited government and economic liberty,” Ryan says. “I think what ended up happening was the conservative industrial complex sort of stood itself up, and you quickly learned you could make money off this stuff. . . . And politicians realized, I don’t have to work my way up the committee process. I don’t have to pass a bunch of bills and prove my worth. I can just go on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and be a hero on the Drudge Report.”

  At that same moment, an ideological insurgency was taking root on the left. It shared with the activist right a fundamental loathing of centralization and a distrust of entrenched institutions. But whereas the Tea Party combated big government and the erosion of traditional culture, the disciples of “Occupy Wall Street” aimed to expose big business and its bottom-line-fueled assault on workers and families.

  Over a period of several months in the fall of 2011, tens of thousands of people descended on Manhattan’s Financial District to protest the hoarding of wealth by the nation’s elite. Some were slackers and hippies with nothing better to do. Others were neo-anarchists inspired by the internet hacking group Anonymous. But many of those who joined the demonstrations were common citizens, laborers justifiably vexed at the rottenness of their fruits while the orchard owners picked the trees clean for themselves.

  In a May essay published in Vanity Fair, former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote that 40 percent of America’s wealth was controlled by the top 1 percent, and that as a result, “the top 1% have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99% live.”12

  Adopting the identity of “99 percenters,” the zealots of Occupy Wall Street were moving the Overton window as it related to prosperity and equity, profits and communities, employers and the employed.

  Indeed, for all the cartooning of stoners sleeping inside tents in Zuccotti Park (of which there were many), the Occupy Wall Street movement was peeling back layers of societal self-doubt. The economic recession, coupled with the transformation from an industrial to a tech-based economy, on top of recurring tax cuts for top earners and mounting debt for college graduates, all against the backdrop of trillions spent nation-building abroad, was proving highly combustible. And in the age of social media, organized activism had never been easier.

  This revolutionary fervor on the left was just beginning to spark; with a Democratic president in office, it would be years until it breathed the oxygen necessary to grow into a political brush fire. The insurgency on the right, however, had already permeated the governing class.

  That said, its aims were proving somewhat abstract. While the Tea Party rose on the strength of its economic argument—that America was spending and borrowing its way to becoming a socialist state—those lawmakers under its banner seemed only selectively animated by fiscal responsibility. Indeed, years later, the right’s silence when Trump and his unified Republican government passed massive, deficit-ballooning pieces of legislation suggested that something else had been stirring the party’s base.

  “I was banging my head against a wall because I just wasn’t getting the response from a member that made any sense,” Cantor says. “And I think it was because people were in search of something on this menu of fiscally conservative policy positions that didn’t quite match with their cultural conservative motivations. That’s what’s so odd: It was all about the economics at one level, but it didn’t quite mesh with this cultural thing that was lighting the house on fire.”

  Before joining Cantor’s team on Capitol Hill, Rory Cooper ran the Heritage Foundation’s communications office. He recalls convening a meeting in late 2011 with some of his writers. The reason: A blog post, “Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax,” had gone viral.13

  Once the intellectual engine of the right, Heritage was now trafficking in scandal over a fifteen-cent tax imposed by the Agriculture Department on fresh-cut firs.14

  “I felt uncomfortable,” Cooper says. “But that’s what people wanted: cultural clash. A lot of conservatives weren’t fighting on policy anymore.”

  Chapter Five

  January 2012

  “It was like a graduate economics class.”

  NEWT GINGRICH WAS JUST ABOUT OUT OF IDEAS. THE FORMER HOUSE Speaker, having long since established himself as a visionary at a time when the post-Reagan Republican Party was woefully short on innovative thinking, had come out of retirement to run for president. But he was doing nothing to distinguish himself from the competition and was desperate for a way to break through the stuffy covenants of campaigning.

  The primary field was unimposing. Mitt Romney, the front-runner, had expected the stiffest competition to be his old rival Mike Huckabee. But the evangelical-populist favorite of the 2008 campaign had since inked a multimillion-dollar contract with Fox News and was building a mansion in Florida. Prominent conservatives pleaded with Huckabee to run, but he could not be persuaded to give up the comforts of his new life. He ended the suspense by announcing on his Fox News show, following a sublime joint performance of “Cat Scratch Fever” with rocker Ted Nugent (“I make the pussy purr with the stroke of my hand”), that he would stay out of the 2012 race. The show ended with a video message from Donald Trump wishing Huckabee well.

  Romney could exhale. Four years removed from being the conservative darling, he was the establishment preference—and given the newfound furor over his health care apostasy in Massachusetts, the right aimed to rally around a viable challenger. Huckabee had been their best bet. The former Arkansas governor’s policy record was hardly pristine; conservatives had savaged him over the years on spending and immigration. But campaigns, especially primary campaigns, are an exercise in contrasts, and Huckabee was everything Romney wasn’t: authentic, approachable, funny, human. With him out of the way, the road to the Republican nomination looked a whole lot smoother.

  There were other obstacles, of course. Michele Bachmann had leveraged her Tea Party stature to raise impressive money. Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor who had served more recently as Obama’s ambassador to China, had presidential looks and royal family resources. Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor, had an understated blue-collar appeal, as did former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, had a niche following as the field’s o
nly black candidate. And Rick Perry, the Texas governor, had a lush record of job creation amid a barren national economic landscape.

  Romney could take no chances: Conservatives were desperate for an alternative to him, and Perry’s story—the “Texas miracle” of his state creating nearly half of all new jobs in the United States since 20091—was deeply compelling. So intimidating was Perry’s late entry into the race that Romney and the other Republicans ganged up to kneecap him on immigration, specifically the governor’s granting of in-state tuition to illegal immigrant students. For Romney, immigration was the only card to play, and he played it ruthlessly, just as he had in 2008.

  “Sometimes you have to light a prairie fire to win,” recalls Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital guru. “But sometimes it comes back and burns your house down.”

  In one particularly tense debate, after Perry’s rivals took turns lacerating him over offering the in-state tuition to undocumented minors, he told them, “I don’t think you have a heart.” The audience booed him, then cheered Santorum for calling Perry “soft” on immigration. It was the second-most surreal moment in the primary season, topped only by the time every candidate onstage affirmed that he or she would reject a deficit-reduction deal that proposed ten dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in additional tax revenues, an absurdly absolutist stance given that such an agreement would balance the budget at warp speed without raising taxes on any non-multimillionaires.

  One by one, Perry and the others were voted off the island. By the time the Republican primary moved past Iowa and New Hampshire, to the third nominating contest in South Carolina, just four candidates remained: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Ron Paul.