American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Processing the gut-wrenching loss in November 2012, Ryan committed himself to reinvention. He would be wiser, more amenable, less reactionary. He stopped saying “makers and takers” and apologized to people back home he might have offended. He also undertook a quiet journey to better grasp the country’s problems. Channeling the ghost of Kemp, Ryan took a special interest in poverty. Contacting Bob Woodson, a longtime civil rights advocate and leader in the black community, Ryan asked for a tour of facilities around the country that helped the poor and addicted. It struck Woodson as a publicity stunt, but Ryan said he wanted no media present. Woodson was still skeptical. “And then every month, for about the next four years, we went to a different city, we met different groups, and he deepened his understanding of these people,” Woodson recalls. “I witnessed a transformation in him. He’s traveled to more low-income black neighborhoods than any member of the Black Caucus that I know of.”

  The most outward sign of Ryan’s change could be seen in Congress. He supported raising the debt ceiling. He voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. He refused to sign Meadows’s letter demanding that Obamacare be defunded, warning colleagues that Cruz’s approach amounted to “a suicide mission.” Ryan’s actions prompted whispers in the conservative movement and puzzled looks from longtime comrades. They worried that the presidential campaign had broken him, that he had lost his nerve.

  The tipping point was Ryan’s deal with Patty Murray.

  When Congress voted on October 17 to reopen the government on a short-term basis, the condition was the convening of a bicameral budget panel to address the country’s long-term fiscal challenges. This was thought to be an empty gesture, given that neither party had shown any real willingness to cede ground on the issues of spending and taxation.

  To the extent that conservatives worried about the budget talks, it was because some Republicans had advocated getting rid of the sequester cuts—the first spending reductions the GOP had achieved in years. When Ryan was appointed the chief Republican negotiator, those concerns melted away. He wasn’t just their fiscal Goliath; he had brokered the Williamsburg Accord, which stated that the sequester cuts could be traded only in exchange for dramatic entitlement reforms. Conservatives needn’t fear that Ryan would break that promise, and certainly not in a negotiation with Murray, a liberal senator from Washington State.

  But Ryan himself had a different view. With the automatic spending cuts growing more severe, and another government shutdown looming because of Washington’s inability to govern on annual budgets, the Wisconsin congressman approached the negotiations with a dealmaker’s mentality. He would be willing to give away some of the automatic cuts if Murray were willing to make specific, offsetting cuts elsewhere that would reduce the deficit—without any new tax revenue.

  This seemed preposterously unlikely. It wasn’t exactly Washington’s golden age of bipartisanship: On November 21, as Ryan and Murray hammered away in negotiations that proved surprisingly leak-proof, Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option” in the Senate, changing the body’s rules to prevent the minority party from filibustering presidential nominees (Supreme Court justices not included). The vote, which passed mostly along party lines, with 3 Democrats joining the GOP in opposition, represented rock bottom for the Senate. Once a fraternity-like society that thrived on relationships and decorum, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” had devolved into a bad-faith blood feud between parties catering to pugnacious bases. Reid was goaded into the convention-shattering decision by McConnell’s policy of blocking a historic number of Obama’s judicial appointees, but whatever short-term gain awaited the Democrats was offset by questions of damage to the institution—and fear of unintended consequences. “You may regret it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor, “a lot sooner than you think.”8

  Official Washington was dumbfounded, then, when Ryan and Murray announced a budget deal on December 10. The toplines were straightforward: Their plan would fund the government for two full years at new, slightly higher spending levels, but would reduce the deficit and save $28 billion over a decade—all without raising taxes.

  Ryan was thrilled with the deal. Yes, he had broken the terms of the Williamsburg arrangement, but there was no question that the budget compromise moved the country in a fiscally conservative direction. “I deal with the way things are, not necessarily the way I want things to be,” Ryan said after the agreement was unveiled. “I have passed three budgets in a row that reflect my priorities and my principles and everything I want to accomplish. We’re in divided government. I realize I’m not going to get all of that.”

  The budget deal revealed a new schism on the right—between some, like Ryan, who had come around to the concept of incrementalism, and others who rejected the notion of half a loaf. Tom Price, Ryan’s friend and vice chairman of the Budget Committee, attempted to rally conservatives around the plan. “It is increasingly obvious that success, particularly in divided government, has to be measured in positive steps, not leaps and bounds,” Price said.

  But that sentiment was drowned out by loud opposition. The Club for Growth blasted the deal as “budgetary smoke and mirrors.”9 Talk radio host Mark Levin told Ryan the agreement was “Mickey Mouse.”10 And Heritage Action, which also key-voted in opposition, called Ryan’s work “a step backward” for conservatism.11

  Boehner had always ignored such external criticisms, but he could no longer bite his tongue. Ryan had volunteered on behalf of Boehner’s congressional campaign as a college kid, and the Speaker felt a fatherly bond with the Wisconsin congressman. He could not stomach watching these professional purists eviscerate his young budget chairman.

  “I think they’re misleading their followers. I think they’re pushing our members in places where they don’t want to be,” Boehner said of the critics. “And frankly, I just think that they’ve lost all credibility.”

  Boehner’s battering of the outside groups was an assault on the conservative movement itself. And it wasn’t happening in isolation. On December 11, in another Mafioso-style move, RSC chairman Steve Scalise fired the group’s longtime executive director, Paul Teller, an integral player in Washington’s conservative scene, for leaking member-level conversations to the outside groups in the hope that they could turn on-the-fence members against bad legislation.

  “We are saddened and outraged that an organization that purports to represent conservatives in Congress would dismiss a staff member for advancing conservatism and working with conservatives outside Congress,” the leaders of Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, and other activist outfits said in a statement responding to Teller’s firing. “Given this action . . . it is clear that the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill.”12

  In the middle of all this stood Ryan, once the golden child of conservatism, who seemed more bemused than beleaguered by the right’s turning against him. “It’s a strange new normal, isn’t it?” he said.

  Ryan always knew the compromise would draw opposition from Tea Party lawmakers. But the toughest disagreement was with his fellow Jedi Council member, Jim Jordan. “Eleven months ago, our conference made a decision . . . that we will not get rid of the sequester unless and until we get the kind of big savings in mandatory programs that put our nation on a path to balance in ten years,” Jordan explained. He called Ryan’s deal with Murray a “marked departure” from their Williamsburg agreement and mobilized his allies to defeat it.

  Other conservatives piled on—Mulvaney said it wasn’t “hard-core” enough, and Labrador called it “really a terrible plan”—but Jordan’s dissent was the most consequential. He and Ryan had shared breakfasts together for years, bonding over talk of sports, families, a common philosophy. Jordan had defended Ryan earlier in the year against accusations that his friend had gone soft. But he could no longer ignore the evidence of his own eyes. Ryan’s breach of the Williamsburg arrangement wasn’t just a disagreement; it was an act of duplicity. And Jordan would never let it
go.

  Thirteen days before Christmas, the House passed Ryan and Murray’s bill, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, in lopsided fashion: The tally was 332–94, with 169 Republicans supporting the legislation and only 62 opposed. It then passed the Senate and was signed into law by Obama.

  The deal’s success marked Ryan’s promotion to an essential player in Washington—no longer an ideologue, but a seasoned and accomplished policymaker who had secured real progress in a divided government and had faced down his own base to sell it.

  Ryan’s triumph was just as meaningful for Boehner. The Speaker had rung in the New Year amid swirling rumors that a mob of conservative malcontents was orchestrating a coup d’état aimed at overthrowing him in humiliating fashion. He had not only survived but thrived, uniting the conference around a plan, sidestepping the land mine of immigration, and earning newfound respect by giving his trigger-happy hard-liners the shutdown shootout they craved. Topping it all off, Boehner had outmaneuvered his enemies by putting Ryan in charge of budget negotiations, baiting the right into criticisms of a bill that passed with enormous support. After three years of the Tea Party dictating terms to the GOP, its influence was on the decline.

  As Boehner walked off the House floor, shaking hands and patting backs and looking forward to the bottle of cabernet waiting inside the Speaker’s suite, he knew this Christmas would be merrier than the last.

  Chapter Eight

  April 2014

  “We called them ‘the Caveman Caucus,’ and we needed to crush them.”

  JOHN BOEHNER SIPPED HIS BLACK COFFEE WHILE STARING INTO THE soul of Roger Ailes.

  It was a sunny Monday morning in New York, and the renewing sights of springtime felt fitting to the Speaker of the House. Ever since the government shutdown of the previous fall, the worm had turned inside the Republican Party. The civil war raged on. But it was the rebels who were now on the run—and the establishment was striking back. Having exposed the strategic clumsiness of the Tea Party delegation, and triumphed over the right with Ryan’s budget compromise, congressional leaders and their establishment allies looked ahead to the 2014 elections as a chance to seize back control of the GOP.

  This depended in large part on neutralizing the conservative news media—or at least, defusing its explosive predispositions.

  The proliferation of right-wing reporting and punditry in the late 1990s had once been a blessing for the GOP. The impeachment of Bill Clinton, the election of George W. Bush, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wherever there was controversy, conservatives had been able to depend on friendly voices covering it.

  But the disruption of recent years—the implosion of Bush, the election of Obama, the arrival of the Tea Party—had upended that business model. Politics was no longer symmetrical. To channel the populist fury of its audience, conservative media began targeting the GOP elites with the same mendacity that it displayed in attacking Democrats. The irony was inescapable: Republicans had spurned legacy journalism outlets for their perceived bias and dishonesty only to receive heaping portions of both from the likes of Fox News, talk radio, and the ever-expanding constellation of conservative blogs, websites, and social media feeds.

  “When we won the majority in 1994, we barely had talk radio. The only people using the Internet were a couple geeks in Palo Alto. There was no Facebook, Twitter. There was no Breitbart.com. And there was no Fox News,” Boehner says. “It’s hard to calculate how much more information people have about their government than they did back then. A hundred times? A thousand times? They’ve been buried under all this information, and much of is either untrue or misleading, and it has pushed people farther and farther away from the middle and into their echo chambers.”

  Boehner had given up on getting fair treatment from talk radio. Once upon a time he spoke regularly with Sean Hannity, and he would play golf with Rush Limbaugh during frequent trips to Palm Beach. But those relationships had frayed since his becoming Speaker. Nuance and pragmatism don’t play well on the airwaves; there was little audience to be gained by realistically assessing the expectations for Republicans in a divided government under a Democratic president. In Boehner’s view, it was the sudden popularity of fanatical radio host Mark Levin in the years after 9/11 that influenced the others. “Levin went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged Hannity to the dark side; he dragged Rush to the dark side,” Boehner said. “I used to talk to them all the time, and suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.”

  But there was still hope for Ailes. Boehner had known the Fox News chairman and CEO since the early 1990s, when he was a rookie congressman and Ailes was a powerful media consultant to then-President George H. W. Bush. Their friendship grew over the years, and even when Fox News was bludgeoning his speakership, Boehner would always find himself breaking bread with Ailes during swings through Manhattan.

  This meeting would have a different tone. Boehner was at his wit’s end with cable news and its insatiable appetite for conflict-driven coverage. Ailes was giving a platform to people who had no reasonable claim to one; his network was incentivizing lawmakers to do more wrecking than building, more gossiping than governing. This wasn’t merely a question of ideology. There was a difference, to Boehner, between Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert: Both congressmen made life miserable for their party’s leadership, but only one could offer a lucid rationale for why.

  Boehner could deal with fringe characters in his conference: Gohmert, Steve King, Michele Bachmann. What he couldn’t deal with anymore was seeing them on national television, broadcasting their batshittiness to tens of millions of people in prime time.

  The Speaker had come to ask Ailes a favor: Stop putting these people on your network.

  Ailes was not inclined to agree to this. His on-air talent, and the guests they booked, were part of a well-oiled ratings machine. Dictating a blacklist to Hannity at the behest of the Speaker would not go over well. But Ailes was not unsympathetic to Boehner’s plight. He, too, had observed that the GOP was becoming anarchic; Ailes had even agreed to give the Gang of Eight some breathing room at the outset of their immigration push. (It didn’t last.) Moreover, his boss, News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch, was a known moderate on certain issues and had voiced discomfort with the GOP’s absolutist wing and its allied hosts on his channel.

  “What happened to immigration reform? Why not pass that bill?” Murdoch had asked Eric Cantor during a dinner in the fall of 2013.

  “Rupert,” Cantor replied, “Have you watched your network?”

  Now Ailes was giving Boehner the same answer that Murdoch had given Cantor months earlier. “Don’t worry about them,” Ailes said, referring to his resident provocateurs. “They’re just getting ratings.”

  But the Speaker wouldn’t be dismissed that easily. He had come equipped with a sweetener for his request, something that the Fox boss could sink his teeth into. Ailes owned a special loathing for the Clinton family and particularly for its matriarch, whom he found manipulative and unfit for office. Boehner knew this. And although he did not share the right’s loathing of Hillary, the Speaker was actively building an in-house opposition research firm to damage her presidential prospects in 2016. Unbeknownst to the public, Boehner was about to launch a select committee in Congress to investigate her handling of the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans while she was secretary of state. He had come to give Ailes a heads-up, hoping it would persuade the cable kingpin to pull the “crazies” off his airwaves.

  Boehner’s plan backfired. Rather than rejoice at the Speaker’s news, the word Benghazi tripped a switch. Suddenly high-strung and wary of his surroundings, Ailes proceeded to unpack for Boehner the outlines of an elaborate, interconnected plot to take him down. It started with Ailes’s belief that Obama really was a Muslim who really had been born outside the United States. He described how the White House was monitoring him around the clock because of these views. He concluded by assuring Boehner that his house had been fort
ified with combat-trained security personnel and “safe rooms” where he couldn’t be observed.

  “It was the most bizarre meeting I’d ever had in my life. He had black helicopters flying all around his head that morning,” Boehner recalls. “It was every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard, and I’m throwing cold water on all this bullshit. Ratings were ratings to Murdoch, but I began to realize that Ailes believed in all this crazy stuff.”

  The Speaker had come with hopes of quieting the furor on Fox News. He left more concerned than ever about the threat it posed to the country.

  REGROUPING AT THE DAWN OF 2014, THE REBELS LICKED THEIR WOUNDS and pondered two principal lessons learned from the past year.

  First, they recognized, their problem was less with any one person—even Boehner—and more with the top-down processes of the House, where legislative influence is derived from seniority, fund-raising ability, and proximity to power. The incentive structures of Congress were beginning to shift; many Republicans now feared the ire of their base more than a rebuke from their party’s leadership. But this transformation wasn’t happening quickly enough for the insurgents in the House GOP. Only by reforming the process, and breaking into the inner sanctum of power, could they transform Congress.

  Second, they agreed, no one outside their small circle could be trusted anymore. Cantor had undermined them by offering citizenship to illegal minors. Steve Scalise had fired the RSC’s popular executive director and booted the Heritage Foundation from its weekly meetings. Even Paul Ryan had sold them out, trading away the sequester cuts and basking in the afterglow of a bipartisan compromise they had vigorously opposed.