American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Looking back, Boehner says that not solving immigration is his second-biggest regret after the failed Grand Bargain. He blames Obama for “setting the field on fire.” But it was the inaction of the House of Representatives—not voting on the Senate bill, not bringing up any conservative alternative, not doing anything of substance to address the issue—that enabled the continued demagoguing of immigration and of immigrants. Ultimately, Boehner’s quandary boiled down to a choice between protecting his right flank and doing what he thought was best for the country. He chose the former.

  It wouldn’t be the last time.

  RIGHT AROUND THE MOMENT IMMIGRATION REFORM DIED, SO, TOO, DID one of the longest-standing alliances on Capitol Hill.

  Since their inception in 1973, the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee had worked in tandem. Heritage would supply conservative lawmakers with policy blueprints; conservative lawmakers would keynote Heritage dinners. Heritage would pay for conservative lawmakers to go on retreats; conservative lawmakers would hawk Heritage materials back home and encourage their constituents to donate. For decades, this codependent relationship revolved around the presence of Heritage staffers at the RSC’s weekly meeting in the Capitol basement.

  But with the creation of Heritage Action in 2010, that bond had begun to fray. Whatever promises of legal separation between the think tank and its lobbying arm proved insincere; the wall crumbled almost immediately and came crashing down entirely once DeMint became president. In raising large sums of money for his Senate Conservatives Fund by picking on “moderate” Republicans, many of whom had solidly conservative voting records, DeMint had created a model for the organization he now led. Heritage Action was increasingly belligerent, baiting Republicans into fights they could not win and then monetizing their failures with fund-raising emails decrying the impotence of the GOP.

  The tension boiled over after a June vote on the Farm Bill, a monster piece of annual must-pass legislation that governed both agricultural subsidies and food stamp provisions. Heritage Action argued, as did many conservative Republicans, that the policies should be split into separate bills. It was a reasonable request and a smart fight for Republicans to pick. They had leverage because of the bill’s weight; furthermore, legislating these two items together made sense only in Washington, a town that thrives on punting tough decisions and regularly resolves conflicts by larding up legislation with goodies to satisfy both parties.

  But Boehner and his team ignored the conservatives, bringing the bill up for a vote that failed in embarrassing fashion. As they scrambled to save face, Scalise promised the party leadership that splitting the farm policy and food stamps into separate bills would deliver the votes. They listened, and he was proved right: Of the 62 Republicans who voted against the first iteration, 48 came around to support the second. (“Incredibly,” the Kansas City Star reported, “Rep. Tim Huelskamp of KS-01—one of the most farm-centered districts in the United States—was one of just 12 GOP votes against the measure.”)

  The revised bill passed the House, and conservatives celebrated a major victory. There was just one problem: Heritage Action, which had issued a “key-vote” alert threatening punishment for any members supporting the first bill, had key-voted against the second bill as well. This, despite House leaders doing exactly what the group, and its congressional allies, had called for. Heritage officials explained that now their opposition owed to sugar subsidies in the farm-only bill. The goalposts had moved, and the Republican locker room went berserk.

  Mick Mulvaney, the hot-tempered South Carolinian, contacted the Wall Street Journal about placing an op-ed in the newspaper. He drafted a memo hammering Heritage Action as a bloodsucking enterprise and found a half-dozen willing co-authors. But then, Mulvaney decided to scrap the project. It turned out that his friend Scalise, the RSC chairman, had a different sort of vengeance in mind.

  One July morning, Scalise told DeMint that Heritage was no longer welcome at the RSC’s weekly meetings. Ed Feulner, the iconic Heritage Foundation president, had been a founding father to both organizations. Now his successor was responsible for an ugly divorce.

  It was a watershed moment inside Washington’s conservative movement. Since the dawn of the Tea Party, conservative organizations had pushed Republicans rightward at every turn. Some of it was justified in the pursuit of accountability, but much of it was insincere, empty rage rooted in unreasonable expectations. The revolutionary warfare had succeeded only in amplifying the narrative of a feckless party that needed to be demolished and reconstructed, the result of which was a cyclical, slow-motion collapse of the GOP as a governing entity.

  Heritage had pushed too far this time. But it was going to take more than a reprimand from Scalise to turn back the insurgency’s advance.

  Chapter Seven

  August 2013

  “He led us into box canyon.”

  THE SENATOR PROWLED THE STAGE LIKE A TELEVANGELIST, A WIRELESS microphone clipped to his crisp, white shirt, sleeves rolled up above the wrist, knifing his hands and arching his cadence to ingest the Dallas hotel ballroom.

  It was the third week of the August recess. After a long stretch of high-wire legislative drama surrounding the immigration debate, lawmakers had emptied out of Washington to spend the month back home. What they found, instead of rest and relaxation, was fury among their constituents about something else: Obamacare.

  The Affordable Care Act would soon take effect, with federal exchanges opening to the public for enrollment on October 1. House Republicans had voted to repeal it some three dozen times since 2011. But with Harry Reid and the Democrats still controlling the Senate—and the law’s eponymous, twice-elected president still in the White House—there was no stopping its implementation. This truth, rooted in the elementary realisms of government, was unacceptable to much of the conservative base. Republican politicians had promised to repeal and replace Obamacare; there had been no caveats, no speed-talking radio voice explaining the mechanical fine print. Their constituents were upset at having been misled. Republicans now faced a choice: Concede the law’s irrevocability or wave a white flag and suit up for battle one last time, armed only with the narrative that heretofore the troops had not been fighting hard enough.

  Ted Cruz knew a thing or two about narratives. Having watched with childlike fascination in 2010 as the Tea Party movement engulfed the GOP establishment, Cruz, then the solicitor general of Texas, began sketching the contours of an insurgent’s campaign for Senate in 2012. It wouldn’t be easy. Though he came from modest origins, his father a poor Cuban refugee, Cruz himself had known only success. He had worked in the George W. Bush administration and met his wife, Heidi (who’d since become a Goldman Sachs executive) on the Bush campaign. He had attended Princeton and Harvard Law School, and as Texas’s top attorney, he had argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was, in other words, a career patron of the political class.

  When Cruz pitched Bush on his anti-establishment stratagem during a private meeting in 2011, as the journalist Shane Goldmacher reported, the former president replied, “I guess you don’t want my support. Ted, what the hell do you think I am?”1

  Cruz was gifted with certain political talents—a keen intellect, linguistic dynamism—that made him instantly formidable. He had a computer-like memory and an uncanny ability for repetition, deploying not just identical phraseology but the same facial expressions and tonal inflections to accompany them. Some of this owed to training: He had spent his teenage years touring the state of Texas delivering the Constitution from memory as part of a free-market troupe and had also been involved in drama club, briefly considering a career as a thespian. (On the Bush campaign, he was known to launch into various recitations of his favorite film, The Princess Bride, capturing every line and every character’s accent with precision.)

  Less appreciated was Cruz’s knack for finding a foil. It would serve him well in the years ahead, propelling him to new heights and very nearly to the Republi
can nomination for president, had he not encountered an opponent with that skill in even greater supply. But in 2012, Cruz had a somewhat smaller target: Texas’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, who had a monopoly on the donor class, enjoyed high name identification across the state, and boasted the support of its best-known Republicans, including Governor Rick Perry. Cruz used all this to his benefit. Once polling in the low single digits, he captured the energy of the grass roots and channeled the resentment of the masses, upsetting Dewhurst in the August primary runoff.

  Cruz attracted legions of conservative supporters, from Sarah Palin to the Tea Party Patriots to talk radio host Mark Levin. But no endorsement meant more than the one from Jim DeMint. And now, in Dallas a year later, the two men were reunited, with Cruz headlining a town hall event sponsored by Heritage featuring a stage-length banner behind him: “Defund Obamacare.”

  The idea was not elaborate: Rather than repeal the health care law, conservatives argued, Congress could refuse to appropriate the funds to pay for it. Nor was it new: Tom Graves, the Georgia congressman who came to Washington in a special election shortly after the law was passed, had introduced the Defund Obamacare Act in July 2010. He reintroduced it each of the next two years, though few Republicans took the effort seriously. It wasn’t until 2013, with the specter of the exchanges opening on October 1 and the serendipity of Washington running out of money that same day (the start of the fiscal year), that the concept gained traction. By holding the rest of government funding hostage, the fantasizing went, Republicans would out-leverage Obama and compel him to dump his legacy-forging law. Cruz called Graves in July and asked to sponsor a companion bill in the Senate. A month later, as DeMint’s “Defund Obamacare” tour rolled through Texas, it was Cruz who stole the show and announced himself as the mission’s captain, daring the party’s establishment to stand in his way.

  “We have to do something that conservatives haven’t done in a long time: We’ve got to stand up and win the argument,” Cruz declared in Dallas. “Republicans assume, with any impasse, that President Obama will never, ever, ever give up his principles—so Republicans have to give up theirs.” Building to a rhetorical crescendo, with the crowd now chanting the answers to his repeated questions, Cruz asked a final time, “How do we win this fight? Don’t blink!”

  DeMint was no less dramatic. Calling the Affordable Care Act “probably the most destructive law ever imposed on the American people,” the Tea Party stalwart declared, “If you’re giving up the fight against socialized medicine, you’re almost giving up on the country.”

  Most Republicans didn’t feel they were giving up, or blinking, or abandoning principle. The argument over Obamacare had been lost: The bill passed the House, passed the Senate, was signed into law, was upheld by the Supreme Court, and was validated by Obama’s reelection. Polling that showed the bill’s relative unpopularity was meaningless at this point. Unless Republicans believed that the president was willing to abolish the law bearing his name, their threats to defund it could produce only one outcome: a government shutdown.

  “I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Republican senator Richard Burr, one of Boehner’s closest friends in the Congress, told reporters that summer. “Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law.”2

  Burr’s remark earned him attack ads on the radio back in North Carolina, courtesy of DeMint’s former group, the Senate Conservatives Fund. Meanwhile, DeMint’s new plaything, Heritage Action, spent half a million dollars in August on localized ads urging House Republicans to sign a letter that had circulated from an obscure freshman lawmaker, Mark Meadows, urging Boehner to defund Obamacare.

  Whatever their tactical preference, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, activists, and politicians seemed to sincerely believe that the Affordable Care Act represented a threat—if not to their own insurance plans, then to the relationship between the government and its citizenry. That said, the battle over the president’s signature law offered a unique window into the shadowy motives and incentives of the leading belligerents in the GOP civil war.

  For DeMint, it was an opportunity to rid Heritage of its scarlet letter, the individual mandate.

  For the rest of the professional conservative class, it was an opportunity to flex financial muscle while recruiting and mobilizing their armies; Charles and David Koch, through their umbrella group, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, spent more than $200 million on the anti-Obamacare effort, according to the New York Times.3

  For Cruz, it was an opportunity to establish ideological supremacy among the nascent 2016 Republican field, capitalizing on Rubio’s immigration stumble. (During a meeting that summer in Mike Lee’s office, as Cruz and top conservative activists plotted the defunding plan, Rubio arrived late. “The prodigal son is here,” he said, smiling.)

  And for Meadows, the little-known freshman congressman, it was an opportunity to make a name for himself.

  AMERICAN POP CULTURE WAS ROCKED IN 2013 BY THE RELEASE OF THE Netflix series House of Cards, an adapted version of the British drama that follows one exceptionally cunning and ruthlessly ambitious politician’s rise to power. Kevin Spacey portrays Francis “Frank” Underwood, a Democratic congressman who lies, betrays, swindles, and murders his way to the top of American government. The show was a commercial dynamo at the height of the Republican drama inside of the real Congress. And if there was one person on Capitol Hill who looked in the mirror and saw Frank Underwood, it was Meadows.

  The freshman lawmaker from North Carolina wasn’t a bad person, and he certainly wasn’t a killer—not in the literal sense, anyway. But there was something about the way he worked a room, the way he perched his glasses low over his nose for effect, the way he would feed a group of reporters one thing and then walk away texting a favored reporter something contradictory.

  There was also something cryptic about his past: A self-described “fat kid” and social misfit from Florida, Meadows lost weight, married at age twenty, and, after randomly choosing the mountains of North Carolina for a honeymoon, fell in love with the area, so much that he and his wife eventually moved there.4 First opening a sandwich shop, then selling it to become a real estate broker, Meadows made enough money to loan his congressional campaign $250,000, essentially buying both the GOP nomination and the general election in his freshly gerrymandered western North Carolina district.

  We first interacted over several breakfasts in the middle of 2013, consistent with my efforts in covering Congress to build relationships with new members. Meadows wasn’t like any of the others—or like any other politician I’d come across. He was disarming, with an easy smile and a sluggish southern drawl. He was engaging on policy matters. But what set him apart was the questions he asked—about the media, the coverage of Capitol Hill, how reporters’ sourcing worked, what he needed to do to get his name in the paper. It was obvious that Meadows wanted to be a player.

  Cue the release of his Obamacare letter.

  It took serious gumption for a freshman lawmaker eight months on the job, but Meadows clearly saw a vacuum waiting to be filled. Cruz and Lee were leading the fight on the Senate side; nobody had yet orchestrated a real pressure campaign in the House. McConnell could only do so much: Despite a primary challenge from his right in 2014 that he was monitoring obsessively, the Senate GOP leader had the cover of a Democratic majority to deflect blame for Obamacare’s implementation. Boehner had no such luxury. As House Republicans returned from the August recess emboldened by the anger on display in their districts and itching for a showdown with Obama, the Speaker knew there would be no talking them down.

  There had been a cooling-off period for both parties after the president’s reelection and his second inaugural. That period was long gone. Events that summer, including CIA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks showing illegal mass surveillance and Syria killing nearly fifteen hundred of its citizens in a chemical attack on the one-year anniversary o
f Obama’s “red line” remark, exacerbated partisan tensions and fueled the declining trust in government.

  The acceleration of cultural conflicts throughout the year—Obama’s push for gun control, his unilateral action on climate change, the Supreme Court’s rulings striking down California’s gay marriage ban and the federal Defense of Marriage Act—had pushed traditionalists to the edge. The broader societal landscape did little to soothe the sense that things were spiraling. The Oxford dictionary shortlisted twerk as the word of the year, but opted instead for selfie, newly popular among not just Hollywood celebrities but politicians as well. Miley Cyrus was Google’s most-searched person. Even in the Vatican, a redoubt of orthodox thinking, newly elected Pope Francis was sounding squishy, doing little to pull conservatives back from the brink.

  Obamacare’s approaching silhouette sent them over it.

  BOEHNER AND CANTOR COULD SEE IT COMING. OBSERVING THE BREWING storm over the August recess, they prepared various trial balloons to float, hoping to prevent the zero-sum warfare their members wanted.

  First, on September 9, Cantor outlined the leadership’s preferred plan to the conference: They would force both the House and Senate to vote on defunding Obamacare but would not tie those votes to the rest of the government’s funding, as a way of avoiding a shutdown. Conservatives booed Boehner and Cantor out of the room.

  At this point, Boehner ditched large-scale diplomacy and began calling small cliques of members into his office for a reality check. “Don’t do this. It’s crazy,” the Speaker told them. “The president, the vice president, Reid, Pelosi—they’re all sitting there with the biggest shit-eating grins on their faces that you’ve ever seen, because they can’t believe we’re this fucking stupid.” Not only would Democrats never abandon the president’s bill, Boehner warned them, but a shutdown would overshadow the rollout of the Obamacare exchanges October 1, which members in both parties privately expected to be a logistical nightmare.