by Tim Alberta
Meanwhile, one of the men charged with conspiring to photograph the senator’s sickly wife, Mark Mayfield, vice chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party, committed suicide while awaiting a grand jury trial.
Cochran may have won, but everyone in the GOP was losing.
ON THE FIRST SUNDAY IN JUNE, CRUISING THROUGH THE SOUTHERN Virginia countryside, Paul Ryan felt compelled to make a phone call.
Things were going remarkably well in the Republican primary season, and Ryan, riding back from a weekend retreat with major party donors, was relieved. He had always considered himself a movement conservative, but the purist outlook put forth by the Tea Party, crystallized in the opposition to his budget deal, had forced him to reconsider his affiliations.
Once encouraged by the anti-establishment uprising, believing the GOP needed an injection of fresh blood and daring ideas, Ryan had come to view it as a threat to conservatism. With the Tea Party having thus far failed to score a major victory in 2014, GOP leaders were feeling emboldened. Some even went so far as to suggest—as Boehner did to donors that spring, and as Ryan had done that Sunday afternoon—that immigration reform would be back on the table following the primary season.
“Hey, I’m seeing Cantor signs everywhere,” Ryan told his friend, the majority leader, over the Bluetooth speaker. “You’re going to be fine on Tuesday. And once you’re through your primary, we’re going to get to work on immigration.”
Cantor agreed that they would. His primary election was two days away, but the result seemed like a foregone conclusion. Having compiled eight figures in his campaign accounts over the past two years, Cantor faced token opposition in the form of Dave Brat, a small-school economics professor who had raised roughly $200,000 for his bid to take down the next Speaker of the House.
Boehner had made nothing public; nor had he confirmed his plans to Cantor. But it was increasingly clear that the top House Republican would retire at year’s end, and that Cantor, the undisputed heir apparent, would become the first-ever Jewish Speaker of the House, fulfilling a lifelong dream and marking a momentous feat for his community.
Caught up in his historic career arc, Cantor spent much of 2014 doing member maintenance: tending to fragile relationships, comforting aggrieved parties, soothing frail egos. All the while, Brat was portraying him as a career politician, an elitist who’d fallen out of touch with the district and was dangerously soft on immigration. At first, Cantor responded with a shrug. His consultant Ray Allen continually reassured him, “As long as you’re on the right side of two issues with the base, guns and abortion, you can’t lose.”
But the red flags were visible to anyone interested in seeing them. Cantor’s district had been redrawn to include more of the sprawling, rural, noncollege-educated areas outside Richmond. Many of the voters in these areas didn’t know him, and many of those who did know Cantor didn’t like him. Meanwhile, as the majority leader flew around the country headlining $10,000-per-plate dinners, Brat was running a dogged shoe-leather campaign in the district, canvassing neighborhoods and talking up constituents Cantor had long taken for granted.
By late April, Cantor decided that he wouldn’t take any chances. His campaign went up with a negative ad picturing Brat’s face on a cartoon body, depicting him as a “liberal college professor” who was shaky on tax increases. But it backfired: Brat, who had no money to run ads of his own, felt a sudden surge of publicity surrounding his campaign. His rallies grew in size. Local grassroots groups began volunteering on his behalf. Around that time, Cantor had a series of worrisome run-ins with the Tea Party. Activists rejected his attempt to install a longtime friend as a local GOP chairman. They blocked his slate of delegates from being seated at the district party’s convention. And at the convention itself, some of them booed Cantor in front of his family, startling the congressman and stirring a sudden disquiet within his team.
The most vexing scene played out at the State Capitol thirteen days before the primary election. As Brat held a press conference accusing Cantor of peddling “amnesty,” Luis Gutierrez, the House Democrats’ most flamboyant immigration reform advocate, held a competing press conference nearby accusing Cantor of blocking the Gang of Eight bill.
The majority leader, it appeared, was a man without a country.
Gutierrez’s visit to the district sparked suspicion in the conservative blogosphere that Cantor, who had traveled the country with the Illinois congressman talking up immigration reform, had orchestrated a bit of Kabuki theater aimed at shoring up his right flank, using Gutierrez as a foil to prove his own conservative bona fides.
This theory probably lent to Cantor’s political team far more cunning than it deserved. Yet such an effort would be consistent with the congressman’s lurch to the right in the campaign’s final six weeks. He blocked an amendment from coming to the House floor (one he had previously supported) offering citizenship to illegal immigrants who enlisted in the military. He ran advertisements that touted his harsh dealings with Obama over the comprehensive reform. He distributed flyers that credited him with thwarting a plan “to give illegal aliens amnesty.”4 After spending the past year touting his plan to provide citizenship to illegal minors, Cantor’s sudden shift in tone was whiplash-inducing.
And not terribly convincing.
The headline on Breitbart.com said it all: “DAYS FROM PRIMARY, ERIC CANTOR POSES AS ANTI-AMNESTY WARRIOR.”
Breitbart’s wall-to-wall coverage of the primary race in its final days was not coincidental. The right-wing website had pummeled the Gang of Eight proposal throughout 2013, seemingly hell-bent on dashing Marco Rubio’s future presidential prospects. Now another handmaiden of the elite had strayed into the crosshairs, and Breitbart’s executive chairman, a native Virginian named Steve Bannon, was insistent on his reporters flooding the zone with bruising coverage of Cantor during the primary’s home stretch.
Breitbart wasn’t alone in hammering Cantor. Two of conservative talk radio’s finest flamethrowers, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, used the majority leader as a political piñata throughout 2014. Ingraham was particularly harsh, even paying a visit to the district to headline a Brat rally less than a week before the primary.
“We are slowly losing our country,” she told an overflow crowd, according to one of several stories published by a Breitbart reporter on the scene. “Who do you think Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi want to win this primary? They want Eric Cantor to win because Eric Cantor is an ally in the biggest fight that will occur in the next six months in Washington . . . and that is the fight over immigration amnesty.”5
When Brat took the stage, he added, “A vote for Eric Cantor is a vote for open borders. A vote for Eric Cantor is a vote for amnesty. If your neighbor votes for Eric Cantor, they’re voting for amnesty.”
Cantor’s allies were rattled but hardly resigned. The campaign’s pollster, John McLaughlin, had conducted a survey in late May showing Cantor leading Brat by 34 points. The noise on the ground, and on conservative talk radio, and in the right-wing corners of the internet, was just that—noise. Cantor couldn’t lose. Not to Dave Brat. So confident was the majority leader’s team that on the morning of the election, rather than pounding the pavement in search of every last vote, Cantor was speaking at a fund-raiser in Washington—on behalf of a colleague.
It was symbolic of how the majority leader had prioritized his career. Staffers would later think back to a decade’s worth of postponed or canceled meetings with constituents, almost always due to fund-raisers or lobbyist receptions or member-driven events. Cantor was a master of the inside game, collecting chits and building the brand he would need to secure the most powerful office in Congress. But it came at a price. As the returns came in on June 10, it was evident that residents of Virginia’s Seventh District assigned greater importance to the title of representative than that of Speaker of the House.
For the biggest political upset modern Washington had ever seen, the results were anticlimactic. Brat won the primary by 11 poi
nts, beating Cantor even in his own home county. The victory was so lopsided that the majority leader’s complaint of Democrats crossing over to defeat him, which turnout patterns showed had contributed to his demise, fell on deaf ears. Cantor didn’t just lose; he got destroyed. And so, too, did the prospects for immigration reform.
“I don’t think the split in the Republican Party is going to be made up with new Latino voters or new black voters or new Asian voters,” Ingraham said on Fox News that night, savoring her victory lap. “In fact, I think somebody who runs on immigration reform—or amnesty or whatever you want to call it—in 2016 would probably do worse than Mitt Romney did in 2012.”
THE SPEAKER’S CELL PHONE BUZZED. HIS CHIEF OF STAFF WAS CALLING, and Boehner, midway through a meal at Trattoria Alberto, his favorite Capitol Hill ristorante, nearly didn’t answer. When he did, the news practically knocked him off his chair: Cantor had lost. “I was pissed,” Boehner says. “Because in my mind, I was done.”
In a private memo written in November 2013, titled “The End,” Boehner’s top staffers had presented him with three choices for retirement. Option one meant announcing in January 2014 his plan to leave at year’s end. Option two meant announcing that plan in August. Option three meant announcing it in November, after the midterm elections. Boehner had ruled out option one, refusing to make himself a yearlong lame duck and invite further discord inside the House GOP. But he had never decided between options two and three. And now, with his replacement sidelined, it was not clear he could choose either.
Boehner hung up and dialed Ryan. Explaining that he had long planned to retire after 2014, and that Kevin McCarthy, the third-ranking House Republican, was nowhere near ready to become Speaker, he asked Ryan to replace Cantor as majority leader, effective immediately, and slide into the speakership in 2015.
“You’ve got to do this job,” Boehner told him.
“There’s no way I’m doing this job,” Ryan replied. “You’ve got to stay.’”
Boehner dragged on a Camel Light and cursed Cantor’s name into the summer night’s air. For all the chariness between them early on, the Speaker and the majority leader had developed a solid working relationship and a level of trust that could be understood only inside the leadership’s foxhole. Boehner was well prepared for Cantor to take over, confident that he was leaving the party—and more important, the institution—in capable hands. So much for that.
Then the Speaker received a call from an old tutor, Newt Gingrich.
“Hey, Boehner, try this on for size,” Gingrich said. “What do you think happens if Cantor doesn’t spend a dime on that race, doesn’t mention his opponent’s name once, just ignores him completely and pretends there’s no primary at all?”
“I think he wins by forty points,” Boehner replied. “That was the worst campaign ever run.”
But the Speaker couldn’t afford to dwell on the disappointment of Cantor’s improbable defeat. The forces that had crushed his heir apparent threatened to swallow up Washington itself. Congress was consumed that summer by the issue of—what else?—illegal immigration, with a crisis unfolding at the southern border. In fiscal year 2014, a total of 68,541 unaccompanied children had been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, a 77 percent increase over the previous year, according to Vox.6 Conservatives accused Obama of providing a magnet for the illegal minors with his executive actions to provide amnesty; the White House blamed Republicans for railroading a bipartisan bill that would have secured the border.
If it wasn’t obvious after the summer of 2013, it was after Cantor’s loss: Immigration reform was dead. Sean Hannity had been right. It was a career killer.
A LEADERSHIP SHUFFLE IN THE REPUBLICAN RANKS THREATENED TO expose the intraparty schisms anew. Cantor announced that he would be leaving Congress early, resigning both his seat and his position below Boehner. That meant a special election to name a new majority leader and, if McCarthy succeeded in moving up, another special election to replace him.
McCarthy was a curious figure. Universally viewed as a pitiful whip, someone with neither the legislative guile nor the meat-grinder maliciousness required to steer the membership, he was also generally well liked, an easygoing Californian who was more a buddy than a boss. McCarthy also benefited from the same unspoken realization that buoyed Boehner and Cantor: The GOP leadership had been dealt an exceptionally tough hand after the 2010 election, charged with supervising a rowdy bunch of revolutionaries who refused to play by the customary rules.
One of those revolutionaries, Raúl Labrador, took exception to McCarthy’s likely promotion. “What I found most objectionable was not Kevin, but the process: You’re next in line and you get to move up without even being challenged,” Labrador says. “It was everything that’s wrong with Congress.”
For all the beefs with GOP leadership, and the conservative qualms with McCarthy, nobody was stepping forward to thwart his coronation. So, Labrador took it upon himself. He waged a sacrificial lamb campaign, arguing for sweeping structural changes that would make Congress a bottom-up institution by empowering individual members to drive a wide-open policymaking process free of meddling from the party’s leadership. His pleas fell on deaf ears. The truth was, most rank-and-file members of Congress had come to appreciate the heavy hand of leadership, recognizing the fine line between inclusivity and anarchy. Even among Labrador’s fellow 2010 classmates, many had come around to view Boehner’s iron fist as necessary—reductive, certainly, but effective in corralling an unruly conference.
Take Tom Graves, for example. Once the handpicked conservative to lead the Republican Study Committee, and a co-architect of the Defund Obamacare strategy, Graves had retreated from the front lines in 2014. He worried that the party was inflicting too much damage on itself in the name of ideological rigidity. Inside the room, as the House Republicans prepared to vote, Graves watched his former mentor Jim Jordan stand to nominate Labrador for majority leader. Then Graves, to the shock of conservatives in the crowd, rose to nominate McCarthy.
Labrador was disgusted. “I have never seen a person change so much over a period of time,” he said of Graves. “He’s totally different than he was when he first came here.”
But Labrador had changed, too. “I’m no longer mad at the leadership. It’s not their fault. It’s really the membership that has failed, not the leadership,” he says. “The membership wants leadership to exercise a strong hand because they want this game to continue. It protects them from making tough decisions. . . . It’s much easier to go along and get along with leadership, to do what the special interest groups want you to do, because they’re all going to give you money for your campaign and help you get reelected.”
McCarthy won the internal election in a rout. And to replace him as majority whip, Republicans chose Steve Scalise, who, while alienating some of the more vocal conservatives with his chairmanship of the RSC, had endeared himself to a much broader swath of the conference.
Boehner had a new leadership team but an old set of problems. Obama was threatening further unilateral action on immigration and health care. The Speaker’s members were demanding a more forceful response; Boehner obliged them in the form of a lawsuit against the president alleging abuses of executive power in implementing Obamacare, strategically filed one day after the administration expanded the DACA program to shield another four million illegal immigrants from deportation.
But the Speaker could not satiate the bloodthirst of his base. The conservative insurgency, kept at bay for much of the year, had regained its strength thanks to Cantor’s defeat and Obama’s brazen defiance of the coequal legislative branch. The time and money spent by Republican elites trouncing far-right challengers in 2014 would be an asterisk in future political science textbooks. Far from being tamed, the GOP’s fratricidal tendencies had been further emboldened.
Jon Runyan, a former all-pro tackle in the National Football League, won a congressional seat in 2010 before abruptly quitting in 2014. Days before his d
eparture, I asked him what the biggest difference was between playing in the NFL and serving in Congress as a Republican. “When you’re on the football field, you only hit the guy wearing the other jersey,” Runyan said. “Up here, the jerseys don’t matter. You have no idea who’s going to hit you.”
THE PARTY WAS AT WAR WITH ITSELF, AND SO WAS THE COUNTRY.
In the summer of 2014, a pair of high-profile killings of unarmed black men by white policemen revived the national argument around race and equality—and predictably, fractured it along tribal boundaries.
The deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just outside St. Louis, and the subsequent decisions not to indict the officers involved, set off a national furor. The fatal incidents became intertwined and practically synonymous. Politically, the proximity of timing in the Garner and Brown cases, and their conflation in the national subconscious, amounted to a choose-your-own-adventure experience for Americans already living in silos.
Liberals angered by generations of unchecked police misconduct in minority communities (enabled by systemic inequalities in the judicial system) saw white cops getting off scot-free for murdering unarmed black men.
Conservatives riled by an ethos of disrespect toward law enforcement (one perpetuated by popular culture, rap music in particular) saw black rioters ravaging their own communities in response to the killing of known criminals.
Many whites scoffed at the sight of black celebrities striking the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” pose, considering that the slogan, inspired by Brown’s killing, was rooted in an account7 that was proved false. (As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker determined, “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ did not happen in Ferguson.”8) Many blacks, meanwhile, fumed at how their appropriation of such a symbol was construed through the lens of a single incident rather than a vast body of racial injustice.