American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  It made an impression. But so, too, did the countervailing influences from outside Congress. When Texas congressman Pete Sessions announced his opposition to the defund plan, the Senate Conservatives Fund labeled him a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) and threatened to recruit a primary opponent. That same week, a Tea Party activist launched her campaign against Sessions and promptly received the endorsement of FreedomWorks. For the sake of context, at that time, Sessions had an 85 percent lifetime score with the Club for Growth, a 97 percent lifetime score with the American Conservative Union, a 100 percent lifetime score with National Right to Life, and an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association.

  Republican in Name Only?

  Aggravated by these developments, Hensarling stood up in the weekly RSC meeting and delivered a fiery rebuke to the outside groups, as Roll Call reported at the time.5 A fellow Texan and revererd archconservative, Hensarling took out his voting card, which members use on the House floor, and held it up. He reminded his colleagues that nobody else—especially not Heritage Action—controlled their voting cards.

  But the conservatives were unmoved. And Boehner was beginning to understand why: Whenever the rowdy elements of his conference had pushed too far over the past couple of years, the Speaker had pulled them back, preached patience, told them, “Live to fight another day.” That day had arrived. If they didn’t go to war against Obamacare now, they never would. With renewed whispers of his weakness gusting through the GOP, and his members girding for a game of chicken with the president, Boehner jumped into the driver’s seat and throttled up.

  On September 18, less than two weeks before a potential shutdown, Boehner gathered his troops in the House basement and delivered the news. Conservatives would get a vote on exactly what they wanted: a short-term continuing resolution funding the government through December 15; an extension of the lower, post-sequester spending levels; and a permanent ban on funding for the Affordable Care Act. The room erupted in applause. “I think our leadership has got it just right,” Jim Jordan said afterward. Was that the sound of conservatives cheering Boehner? “Oh, yeah,” he said, grinning. “Heck yeah.”

  Thus began one of the more futile negotiating periods in congressional history.

  Boehner’s version passed the House but was rejected in the Senate, where Harry Reid stripped out the anti-Obamacare language and sent a “clean” funding bill back to the lower chamber. (The Democratic leader was not moved by Cruz’s twenty-one-hour speech in opposition, during which he promoted a new hashtag, #makeDClisten, and read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham for his daughters watching at home.)

  At that point, Boehner and Cantor had a decision to make. There was no use volleying an identical bill back to the Senate; the shutdown was now less than a week away, and Democrats, even those who had voiced concerns about the health care law’s readiness, were not going to defund it. After surveying their options and twisting some arms, the GOP leadership rallied its members around a new bill, this one delaying Obamacare’s implementation by one year, repealing the medical device tax, and designating pay for military members in the event of a shutdown. Conservatives on the floor celebrated when it passed just after midnight on September 29. Boehner had given a concession, but the House had held its ground. By lowering their asking price, Republicans hoped, maybe Senate Democrats would come to the table.

  Then again, maybe not. “Today’s vote by House Republicans is pointless,” Reid said shortly after the House bill passed. “Republicans must decide whether to pass the Senate’s clean [bill], or force a Republican government shutdown.”6

  When the Senate officially rejected that version on September 30, with hours to go before the shutdown, House Republicans made a third concession. This time they passed a bill that would delay implementation of Obamacare by a year but keep the medical device tax, offering instead a populist amendment to strip health care subsidies for federal politicians and their staffs.

  Once again, Harry Reid refused to flinch. It was like watching a speeding car negotiate with a brick wall.

  When the clock struck midnight on October 1, Republicans scurried around the Capitol, many of them sporting mischievous grins. Democrats marched as though they were in a funeral precession, wearing rehearsed looks of melancholy. These optics were jarring and spoke to the national divide in public opinion. The vast majority of the country was assigning blame to Republicans. But many of them didn’t care. They weren’t elected by the vast majority of the country; they were elected by their districts, most of which were safely red and rewarding of any last-ditch effort to defeat Obamacare.

  Just after midnight, David Schweikert, a Tea Party congressman from Arizona who had been kicked off his top committee a year earlier for his frequent votes against the leadership, told me a story. Hours earlier, he had participated in a telephone town hall with constituents back in his district. Rubbing his hands with glee, Schweikert relayed that nearly all of them were supportive of the shutdown and blamed Senate Democrats for their unwillingness to negotiate over Obamacare. “They get it,” he said, practically squealing.

  But did the Republicans get it?

  The policy implications aside, the politics made sense for many in the House GOP: Their voters, by and large, weren’t going to punish them for a government shutdown under these circumstances. But it wasn’t just the shutdown Congress had to deal with. The Treasury Department had already announced that the country would run out of borrowing authority on October 17. This was the debt-ceiling deadline that House Republicans had agreed to punt back at Williamsburg when Boehner explained how a series of wins would give them momentum heading into negotiations. Instead, with a possible default looming in sixteen days, they had now backed themselves into a government shutdown with no apparent exit strategy.

  “We have to get something out of this,” Marlin Stutzman, a conservative Indiana congressman, told the Washington Examiner in the wee hours of October 1. “And I don’t know what that even is.”

  FIGHT. IT BECAME THE DEFINING WORD OF THE MODERN REPUBLICAN era. As feelings of desertion took root during this period of dizzying cultural and economic transition, voters came to crave one quality above all others in their elected officials: a willingness to scrap, claw, kick, and bite on their behalf, demonstrating an understanding of their frustrations and their fears.

  It’s why Donald Trump, despite innumerable manifest flaws, won the presidency in 2016.

  It’s why Ted Cruz, despite obvious political defects, was the Republican runner-up.

  And it’s why John Boehner, despite their prior threats on his political life, won conservatives’ trust in October 2013.

  The Speaker had not ordered his troops into combat and watched their slaughter from horseback far removed from the front lines. Instead, Boehner had gone into the trenches, displaying an uncommon defiance of political convention at the outset of the shutdown and demonstrating to the world that he stood shoulder to shoulder with his Tea Party platoon. When an anonymous White House official said that Obama was “winning” the shutdown, Boehner responded by whacking a newspaper against the lectern at his press conference. “This isn’t some damn game,” he scolded.7

  But it was a game. And Boehner’s indignation was a charade. He privately believed the shutdown was idiotic, accomplishing nothing but to steal the public’s attention away from the ugly rollout of the Obamacare exchanges—as he’d predicted. And yet, as with the immigration dilemma months earlier, the Speaker knew there was no way to exert his will without alienating much of the conference. Once again, Boehner chose to protect his right flank by feeding the party’s most self-destructive appetites. And this time, it made him a hero on the right.

  “It’s easier to follow somebody who you know is willing to fight,” Labrador, who orchestrated the coup against Boehner nine months earlier, said three days into the shutdown. With his bold subversion of Obamacare, Labrador said, Boehner was suddenly revealing himself as “the leader we always wanted him to be.”r />
  “He’s leading,” added Ted Yoho, the Florida freshman who had been part of the anti-Boehner mutiny. “He listened to membership, and he’s put himself out there, and he’s standing strong. We’re all so proud of him right now.”

  But all of Boehner’s leading—all his fighting—wasn’t getting the Republican Party anywhere.

  The purpose of the shutdown had been to highlight a bloody last stand over Obamacare, demonstrating to the Republican base how its leaders were willing to go down swinging. Several days into October, talk of health care had largely dissipated. The exchanges had opened. Democrats had not given an inch. And Republicans were no longer asking them to. Instead, lawmakers in both parties had turned their focus to the October 17 deadline for a debt limit increase.

  Whatever internal GOP schisms had existed prior to the shutdown were swelling by the minute. Roughly a third of the House Republicans wanted to reopen the government immediately, with or without concessions from the Democrats. Another third was similarly eager to end the crisis but wanted to save face, needing something to show for their efforts. The final third seemed not to have a care in the world. They faced little blowback in their deep-red districts; moreover, many of them believed they were beginning to wear down the White House. Obama hadn’t budged on his health care law, they told each other, but he wouldn’t allow the country to default on its debt, giving them more leverage the nearer they got to October 17.

  “As it starts getting closer to the debt ceiling date, the president feels more and more pressure,” Labrador said at the time. “I think there’s a good chance we can both get things we want, because he understands that we’ve never gone past that debt line.”

  Specifically, House conservatives believed they could hold out for entitlement reforms. If Obama wanted any lengthy extension of the debt limit, they argued to their leadership, Republicans should get proportional tweaks to either Medicare or Social Security in return.

  Boehner was mystified by this but decided to play along. Why not? His conference had felt like a pressure cooker for the past two and a half years, and the shutdown was letting out steam. There was no way Obama would reward their tactics with changes to entitlements. But now that he had assumed the fighting position, it wouldn’t hurt to hold it just a few days longer—allowing more steam to escape in the process.

  On the Senate side, Cruz’s Republican colleagues were less sanguine.

  Nearly all the GOP senators, even those who initially vouched for Cruz’s plan, had turned against him. Only Lee, the Utah conservative who had co-led the defund strategy, remained in the Texas freshman’s corner. This angered many of the influencers in the conservative movement; they felt a special disdain for Jeff Flake. The Arizona senator had been a conservative stalwart in the House, regularly making life miserable for the GOP leadership. He promised to continue those ways when seeking a promotion to the Senate in 2012. Yet his first year in the upper chamber had been defined by membership in the Gang of Eight—and now by a refusal to follow Cruz and Lee into battle during the shutdown.

  “It wasn’t a gradual change with him,” says Erick Erickson, a prominent activist and blogger who endorsed Flake in his Senate race. “It was a radical shift from where he was in the House, within one year, to where he was in the Senate.”

  “I didn’t want anything to do with it,” Flake says, looking back on the shutdown fight. “I said when I came to the Senate, I wasn’t going to force somebody else to carry my water like I had on the TARP vote. . . . This notion that you could defund Obamacare on an appropriations bill—you really couldn’t. And it wasn’t responsible governing.”

  Cruz proved masterful at weaponizing such critiques. Whether it was the “Beltway insiders” or the “Republican establishment” or the “elite media” or the “Washington cartel,” the senator found ways to cast himself as a lonely light flickering in defiance of the darkness. Republicans could win the shutdown, Cruz argued, if they didn’t surrender; if they united to filibuster the Senate’s clean funding bill and forced Obama to the negotiating table.

  Some of his conservative allies outside Congress bought this idea, as did the Tea Party congressmen who huddled with him frequently in the early days of October. But Cruz’s colleagues, who probed him behind closed doors for an explanation of his endgame, did not.

  “He was making it up as he went along. He led us into box canyon,” says Bob Corker, the Republican senator from Tennessee. “It was clear as a bell what was happening. He had no plan, but a base of people actually believed that Ted Cruz was doing the Lord’s work.”

  Predictably, Boehner’s effort to seek concessions from the White House went nowhere. America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, and Obama wasn’t going to negotiate entitlement reforms with Republicans who had shut down the government over an entirely separate issue. As this became clear, a small clutch of hard-liners in the House retreated to a most unexpected position: that the Treasury Department’s debt limit deadline was toothless.

  “Nobody thinks we’re going to default on October seventeenth,” Tim Huelskamp, the Kansan, said.

  “There’s always revenue coming into the Treasury, certainly enough revenue to pay interest,” said Justin Amash of Michigan.

  “We’re not going to default. There is no default,” said Mick Mulvaney, the South Carolina congressman and future director of the Office of Management and Budget. “There’s an OMB directive from the 1980s—the last time we got fairly close to not raising the debt ceiling—that clearly lays out the process by which the treasury secretary prioritizes interest payments.”

  The October 15 announcement from Fitch, one of the big three credit rating agencies, that it was reviewing the country’s AAA credit rating for a possible downgrade, did nothing to change these assessments.

  “I remember that day, sitting there with Ted Yoho,” Cantor recalls, “and I said to him, ‘Are you ready? If we default, are you ready to accept whatever consequences there are? You can’t tell me what they’re going to be because I can’t tell you, either. We’ve never been there.’”

  The Florida congressman’s response: “Absolutely.”

  House Republicans had started their morning conference meeting by singing “Amazing Grace.” But a day that began with hymns of resurrection ended with bagpipes of burial. With Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell close to a deal that would raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government, Boehner had thrown out a last-ditch plan to extract some small concessions from the White House. But his conservatives, and Heritage Action, rejected it as insufficient. After sixteen days of incremental retreat with nothing to show for it, Boehner told his team that the House would follow the Senate’s lead and end the crisis.

  When Boehner shared this news, telling his House Republican colleagues, “We fought the good fight, but now the fight’s over,” they responded with a standing ovation. The Speaker was slack-jawed. A month earlier, in this very room, the conservatives had booed him for proposing a short-term funding bill and a temporary extension of the debt limit. Now, after getting their teeth kicked in for sixteen days, they were going to pass exactly that language. And the room was cheering.

  “I’m thinking to myself,” Boehner recalls, “this place is irrational.”

  PAUL RYAN WAS NEARLY UNRECOGNIZABLE WHEN HE RETURNED TO Congress after the 2012 election.

  Once upbeat and outgoing, he was now irritable and introverted. Convinced that Mitt Romney would be president, Ryan had prepared himself for the role of the vice presidency, working closely with the transition team to craft a plan for the new administration’s first two hundred days. Instead, the Wisconsin congressman found himself back on Capitol Hill.

  He didn’t want to be there. Ryan had told his wife, Janna, that he might retire, and it took a long phone conversation with Boehner to persuade him to stay. But he had no patience for the pep talks, the funny looks, the constant inquiries from his colleagues. In a meeting one day, after being asked for the umpteenth time what he’d learned
while running for vice president, Ryan snapped, “The Electoral College matters. That’s what I learned.”

  In fact, he had learned a whole lot more. Raised comfortably as a fifth-generation resident of Janesville, Wisconsin, a town where the extended Ryan clan is royalty, the congressman had lived much of his life in a bubble. While studying economics and political science at Miami University in Ohio, he interned on Capitol Hill and caught the bug, moving to Washington full time after college and working his way up the Republican food chain. His formative experience was apprenticing at a think tank led by the former New York congressman Jack Kemp, a proponent of inclusive, sympathetic conservatism. Ryan was more philosophically doctrinaire, an Ayn Rand devotee who ate free markets and breathed rugged individualism. Even as Ryan matured politically, winning his House seat at age twenty-eight and becoming a specialist in budgetary matters, the ideological blinders never came off: He believed wholeheartedly in the concept of “makers and takers,” a line he deployed to cite the divide between America’s productive, hardworking citizens and those who snacked indolently on the fruits of that labor.

  The 2012 election changed him. Traveling the country, exposing himself to new audiences and different ideas and worlds that resembled neither Washington, DC, nor Janesville, Wisconsin, Ryan grew ashamed of his insularity. A summit with civic leaders, learning of their rehabilitation programs, hit Ryan particularly hard. His mentor, Kemp, had made poverty and social mobility the causes of his career. Yet Ryan, for all Kemp’s tutelage, was too focused on budget line items to appreciate what they represented. Accentuating the realization of his own failure was that of Romney’s campaign. Ryan had choked back his criticisms as Romney ignored nontraditional Republican voters—and as the GOP itself alienated women, minorities, and young people with its policies and rhetoric.