American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  But there was little for the national ticket to celebrate. Romney had held Obama to 39 percent of white voters but still lost. Pushing that number any lower would prove exceptionally difficult—and not necessarily in the party’s long-term interest, given how the requisite policy emphases would register with other demographic groups. White voters without a college degree were the fastest-shrinking portion of the electorate, whereas the groups Obama owned (Hispanics, young people, women with college degrees) were booming as a share of the overall vote. Even before Romney’s concession speech, the case was being made that Republicans would be competitive in 2016 only by appealing to a broader segment of voters in the diverse states that George W. Bush had carried in 2004: Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, and New Mexico.

  But there was a massive obstacle blocking this approach: the issue of immigration. Romney’s hard-line positions and clumsy rhetoric had alienated Hispanics, no doubt, but so, too, had five years’ worth of antagonism from Republicans dating back to Bush’s failed overhaul. The GOP’s perceived hostility toward nonwhites was repelling not just Hispanics and Asians, but also the suburbanites and business-friendly moderates who had anchored the party’s coalition for generations. Something had to be done.

  “We’ve got to get rid of the immigration issue altogether,” Sean Hannity told listeners on his radio show two days after the election.15 “It’s simple to me to fix it. I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here—you don’t say you’ve got to go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because you know what? It’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here—if some people have criminal records you can send them home—but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, it’s first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done.”

  Hell had frozen over. Not only was Hannity of all people publicly endorsing “amnesty,” the dirtiest word in the conservative lexicon, but he was placing private calls to Republican leaders, including Cantor and Ryan, urging them to move cursorily in Congress while the issue had momentum.

  They were a step ahead of him. The day after the election, Cantor gathered his team in Richmond and announced that he would support offering citizenship to children who had been brought to the United States illegally, a policy Republicans has opposed in the form of the DREAM Act. Boehner went even further. “I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue,” he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that same week. “And I’m confident that the president, myself, others, can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”

  All the while, inside the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, the chairman’s phone never stopped ringing. Donors, elected officials, activists, lobbyists, RNC members—everyone wanted the same thing: a declaration from atop the party that something would be done to prevent another such loss in the future. Priebus had been content to hang back since becoming chairman, toiling behind the scenes to improve the GOP’s infrastructure and ground game across the country. He had never believed it was the role of the national party to dictate policy from on high. Now he was prepared to do exactly that.

  Gathering five of his closest allies, Priebus instructed them to produce a sweeping report on what had gone wrong in 2012 and how it would be avoided in presidential elections to come. It would lead off with immigration, stressing the need for comprehensive reform, but would also make a host of recommendations about engaging women, minorities, and young people, as well as making smarter investments in technology and data analytics.

  Officially christened by RNC staffers as the Growth and Opportunity Project, it quickly earned a more ingenuous moniker: “the autopsy.”

  Chapter Six

  December 2012

  “There must be atonement!”

  THE TIME HAD COME AT THE END OF THE CONGRESS TO CHOOSE A NEW leader of the Republican Study Committee, and Steve Scalise, a Louisiana lawmaker first elected in 2008, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Jim Jordan had spent the past two years relishing the role of John Boehner’s personal tormenter, leading one internal charge after another to weaken the Speaker’s legislative agenda. Now Jordan was term-limited by the RSC’s two-year rotating chairmanship, and his departure was one thing Boehner didn’t cry over. The past two years had seen the RSC’s membership balloon to record numbers and its relationship with the Republican leadership disintegrate. Boehner and his deputies were desperate to see someone more reasonable take control of the conservative caucus

  There had always been tension. Founded back in 1973 alongside the Heritage Foundation by the pre-Reagan luminaries of the right, the RSC’s mission was to agitate for legislative outcomes more conservative than the leadership might otherwise permit. The group floundered for decades, counting just a few dozen members, most of whom were considered fringe characters by the party’s leadership. Meanwhile, Democrats had controlled the House since 1954, rendering the GOP’s far-right wing powerless to dictate policy. That changed in 1994, when Republicans snapped their forty-year streak in the minority and Newt Gingrich became Speaker. Moving quickly to consolidate his power, Gingrich abolished the RSC by rewriting House rules to eliminate its funding. The paranoid new Speaker, already sweating an insurrection from his right flank, thought he had neutralized a potential menace.

  It wasn’t long, however, before a small crew of House conservatives found a loophole and relaunched the group as the Conservative Action Team, or CAT. Gingrich watched with angst as David McIntosh, the Indiana congressman appointed its first chairman, handed out lapel pins featuring a roaring mountain lion. As the group grew in size, the members who had resurrected it—known as “the Founders”—established two bylaws: a rotating chairmanship and a private process for choosing each chairman. They worried that moderate Republicans would infiltrate their cabal at the behest of GOP leadership, elevating a company man to lead the group instead of a conservative. Safeguarded by these rules, the Founders restored the name to “Republican Study Committee” and employed a succession of leaders who charged ever harder toward ideological nirvana: Mike Pence, Jeb Hensarling, Tom Price, and Jim Jordan.

  The next chairman was hiding in plain sight: Tom Graves, a handsome young Georgian, had been groomed by Jordan to continue the incursion against the GOP leadership, pushing Boehner harder and farther to the right. The Founders, which had since come to include all former chairmen as well as an honorary member, Paul Ryan, were required to interview every candidate interested in the job, including Scalise. But this was a mere formality. The Founders voted unanimously to appoint Graves.

  Scalise decided to protest. Past complaints about the Founders’ dictatorial process had yielded an asterisk in the bylaws that allowed for any rejected candidate to force a groupwide vote on the chairmanship by collecting signatures from 25 percent of the RSC’s membership. Scalise did just that, much to the annoyance of the Founders—and much to the delight of GOP leadership. The Louisianan was campaigning on the promise of a more constructive partnership with party elders, and Boehner and Cantor lobbied furiously behind closed doors in support of him.

  Once upon a time, Scalise would have stood no chance. The RSC was too small, its membership too conservative, for someone preaching cease-fire to become its chieftain. But the RSC’s numbers had soared in recent years, from fewer than 70 at the turn of the century to upwards of 170 a decade later. More than a sign of the GOP’s rightward drift, this explosive growth reflected the necessity for center-right Republicans to identify as anything but. With a Tea Party purge under way, lots of lawmakers concluded that belonging to the RSC would enhance their right-wing bona fides. Once the beating heart of conservativism on Capitol Hill, the RSC had become diluted by moderate Republicans who needed street cred to survive. It was this transformation that propelled Scalise to a contentious victory over Graves—and that sparked the first conversations about a smaller, spinoff group of House conservatives.

&nb
sp; “That Graves race created a rift in our conference that brought this whole Freedom Caucus thing to bear,” Ryan says. “Jordan got really upset about it. Understandably so.”

  Weeks after the disputed RSC election, another bombshell rocked the conservative movement: Jim DeMint resigned his Senate seat just two years after being reelected to become president of the Heritage Foundation.

  The move made sense. He might have been a Moses in the eyes of the base, but to colleagues on Capitol Hill, including many of his fellow conservatives, DeMint had become a distraction. His crusade against the establishment was unceasing. His talk of purifying the party was exhausting. Unlike some of his star pupils, such as Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Pat Toomey, DeMint had earned the reputation of a show horse who did more bloviating than legislating.

  Heritage, meanwhile, was urgently in need of renewal. Once an intellectual giant of the right, crucial to designing the policy achievements of Ronald Reagan and guiding a generation of policymakers thereafter, Heritage suffered greatly from a prolonged stretch of rotten publicity thanks to the ACA’s individual mandate being litigated and relitigated. To the extent the venerable institution was still relevant, it was the guerrilla unit, Heritage Action, that raised the money and earned the headlines, not the scholarly side of the think tank. Doubling down on that militant approach, Heritage hired DeMint as its decorated new general.

  South Carolina’s young governor, Nikki Haley, was tasked with picking hes replacement. The speculation centered on two congressmen who were finishing their first terms: Mick Mulvaney and Tim Scott.

  Mulvaney had distinguished himself in the freshman class as a mouthy, whip-smart fiscal hawk whose distrust of Boehner was surpassed only by a skepticism of the right’s sincerity in avoiding fiscal ruin. (He wanted to cut the defense budget, a nonstarter for most of his colleagues.) Widely seen as a rising star in the party, Mulvaney was known to charm colleagues with an earthy joke one minute and startle them with an expletive-laden rant about corporate subsidies the next.

  And then there was Scott. He initially stood out because there were only two black Republicans in Congress and he was one of them. The other, Allen West of Florida, was also elected in 2010, and both were hailed as Tea Party heroes. But the similarities ended there. Whereas Scott was thoughtful and polished, West was impulsive and obnoxious, calling himself “a modern-day Harriet Tubman”1 while seizing any opportunity to insult Islam, women, liberals, and Obama voters, calling them “a threat to the gene pool.”2 As West became a fixture on Fox News during their first term, Scott’s chief of staff received a phone call from a nervous donor. “You guys are falling behind,” the donor said. “Allen West is the black Republican.”

  Scott had to laugh. He didn’t worry about being the black Republican; he worried about being typecast, about being used, about being treated like a prop in a party desperate for outward signs of diversity. Indeed, his first few months in Congress were awful in this regard. The Republican bosses had shoved him in front of the cameras whenever possible, blind to Scott’s discomfort at being paraded in front of the press as a rookie congressman still finding his way to the nearest washroom. “Tim was like Elvis Presley. Leadership wanted him all the time to be the party’s face on television,” says Trey Gowdy, a fellow freshman who would become Scott’s closest friend. “It was incredible pressure on someone brand new to Congress.”

  The pressure had only just begun. When Haley called Scott in December with the news of his appointment, the historical implications were staggering. He would be just the seventh African American to serve in the U.S. Senate—and the first African American ever to serve in both chambers of Congress.

  The notion of an affirmative-action hire, as grumbled about in certain quarters back home, ignored the fact that Scott had held public office for fifteen years and was easily the most qualified candidate. Still, there was no downplaying the symbolism: South Carolina’s Indian American governor, who had overcome a nasty, identity-based whisper campaign in her own election, was bulldozing a major racial barrier on behalf of Scott, a self-made black man from the lethal neighborhoods of North Charleston, just as the national party commenced a public display of hand-wringing over its homogeneity.

  “The Republican Party has always been very good at saying, ‘We include everyone,’ but they’ve never taken time to show it,” Haley said in an interview after Scott’s appointment. “When have they ever gone to a minority community and said, ‘What do you care about? We’re a better country because you’re in it.’ We can’t be this party of old, white men who just say, ‘We need diversity’ and end it there.”

  Together, Haley and Scott vowed to each other that they would fight to remake the Republican Party in the image of a diversifying America.

  They had no idea what they were in for.

  DEMINT’S EXIT IN DECEMBER 2012 WAS TIMELY FOR GOP LEADERS AS they faced their trickiest negotiation yet: the fiscal cliff.

  January 1 was circled on every congressional calendar. When the ball dropped on 2013, it would trigger a domino effect of economic woe: All the Bush-era tax cuts would expire, raising rates on every American; and the automatic spending cuts crafted during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis would take effect, ripping indiscriminately through the budget and gashing everything from military readiness to safety net programs. With the economy struggling back to its feet after the wallop of recession, going over the cliff was not an option.

  The problem, yet again, was ideological disagreement—between the two parties and within the Republican Party.

  The president had won reelection campaigning on a proposal to raise tax rates for individuals making more than $200,000 annually. But Republicans would not give an inch. Understanding full well that Obama had the leverage, they argued nonetheless that owners of small businesses would be crushed by such a hike. After weeks of haggling, the president offered a concession: $400,000. It was still unacceptable to Republicans. Most of them had signed a document the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” sponsored by an outside group, Americans for Tax Reform, that forbade any tax hike for any reason. Even though this circumstance was unique—taxes would increase on everyone if nothing were done, and Grover Norquist, the group’s president, was telling lawmakers that the pledge did not apply—many Republicans didn’t care. The nuance would be lost in attack ads from inevitable primary challengers alleging that they had voted to raise taxes. They couldn’t take that risk.

  So, Boehner made a counteroffer to Obama: $1 million. Anyone making less than that would be spared from a tax increase; anyone making more than that would see their taxes go up. Surely, Boehner thought, after the party’s nominee had been bludgeoned as an out-of-touch aristocrat, Republicans would see the value in volunteering a tax hike on millionaires only. The Speaker, having been battered in past negotiations, now thought he had the White House on the ropes. If the House GOP united behind his $1 million proposal, passing it on the floor to demonstrate their leverage, Obama’s offer would likely go higher—not all the way to $1 million, but higher, protecting more taxpayers along the way. It was quintessential Boehner: He was bluffing with a bad hand, hoping to salvage part of the pot rather than throwing down his cards and walking away from the table with nothing.

  But the conservatives didn’t see it that way. To them, certain issues were nonnegotiable: guns, abortion, taxes. It didn’t matter that Obama had the high ground. It didn’t matter that Boehner was trying to make the best of their very had situation. All that mattered was honoring a commitment, the context and the consequences be damned. “We didn’t come to Congress to raise taxes,” says Jordan, who led the effort against Boehner’s proposal.

  As Cantor and Kevin McCarthy ended their vote-whipping effort only to discover that they were well shy of the support needed to pass the $1 million plan, Boehner was devastated. The Speaker was a cool customer, but this defeat nearly broke him. How could they not see? How could they justify opposing a tax hike on millionaires when it would mean a tax hike on e
veryone making more than $400,000?

  Boehner was running out of patience. The day before, Harry Reid had blasted him from the Senate floor, accusing him of running the House like a dictator. “I don’t do angry. Nobody on my staff has ever seen me angry,” Boehner recalls. “But that little son of a bitch got under my skin.” When they arrived at the White House the next morning for a meeting, Boehner spotted Reid talking with McConnell. “I walked right up to him and said, ‘Harry, you can go fuck yourself. You ever listen to that shit that comes out of your mouth?’” Boehner imitates a flustered Reid, then adds: “I thought McConnell was going to have a heart attack.”

  Now, hours later, dejected and teary-eyed, Boehner stepped to the microphone inside a conference room in the House basement. The room was silent. Christmas was less than a week away, the fiscal cliff was looming just beyond, and nobody had a clue as to how this crisis would resolve itself. “Lord,” Boehner declared, “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  It was the Serenity Prayer used in twelve-step addiction programs. Republicans had failed to find the necessary votes, Boehner announced, and would have no counter to the president’s offer. They were free to go home for the holiday; they would be called back with forty-eight hours’ notice to vote on a Senate bill addressing the stalemate.

  On New Year’s Day, the House passed the Senate’s bill—with 85 Republicans joining 172 Democrats—that raised taxes on individuals making more than $400,000, while permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone making less. Boehner and Paul Ryan voted in favor, while Cantor and McCarthy, to the murmurs of their colleagues in the chamber, were opposed.

  Boehner made a beeline for his top two lieutenants. “Are you shitting me?” he demanded.