“What you’re witnessing right now is the resurrection of the Republican Party.”
On December 24, 2009, Obamacare passed the Senate in a 60–39 vote. Every Democrat voted for the bill, and every Republican voted against it. (Jim Bunning, who retired the next year, missed the vote, but it would not have changed the outcome.) If you’d been given no background information about the fight we’d been through over the year, and had walked into the Senate Chamber at the time of the vote, you would think, by the pride we clearly exuded for having stayed together on this, that the Republicans had just won a big victory and the Democrats had lost. Of course, we were all appalled by the vote, but we’d given this fight everything we had. We were completely unified as a conference but also completely divided as a government.
It merits repeating: Obamacare is the worst bill in modern history, and I still can’t fathom why any Democrat found it enticing enough to vote for. When it was all said and done, not only was the rollout of the plan a complete mess, but it didn’t do what Obama had counted on: further endear him to the public. By the end of the year, his approval rating was below 50 percent.
The problem with the bill wasn’t simply the substance, but the arrogance with which it had been enacted. I was reminded of an experience I’d recently had, a chance encounter with LBJ’s daughter, Luci Baines Johnson, in the Capitol Rotunda, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of LBJ’s birth. I had never met her, but I approached her that day.
“Luci, I was there the day your dad signed the Voting Rights Act.”
“I was there too,” she said. “I remember it so well. Daddy told me to come with him. He said it was an important day. On the way to the Capitol, he told me that Senator Everett Dirksen was joining him at the signing. I asked him why he was having a Republican there with him. ‘He had a lot to do with this getting passed,’ Daddy said. ‘And I think the country is going to be a lot more likely to accept this by knowing it was done in a broad bipartisan way.’” The lesson was clear: Americans believe that on issues of great importance, one party shouldn’t be allowed to force its will on everyone else. Yet that’s exactly what the Democrats did, and for his part in it, Obama squandered a great deal of political capital.
I was not surprised to see the public sour on the president and his plan. It was tremendously shortsighted. Our forefathers came here looking not for security, but for opportunity, and Obama’s blatant attempt to Europeanize the country flies in the face of what America is all about. By pushing this far-left agenda, all the Democrats had done was to explode the government, bringing along a coinciding mountain of debt. The deficit for this year alone was bigger than the last four years of the Bush administration combined. Combined. It reminded me of what Margaret Thatcher once said: The problem with socialism is pretty soon you run out of other people’s money. Policies like this could not be sustained in the long term and all we were doing was leaving a whole lot of problems our children would have to deal with. So were people angry? Yes. And for good reason.
Anyone doubting the political temperature of the country in the wake of Obamacare had only one place to look: to the special election playing out for Ted Kennedy’s seat in the bluest state of our union, Massachusetts. When I was an intern for Gene Snyder and John Sherman Cooper in the early 1960s, Ted Kennedy was already a well-known senator. He served in the Senate for forty-seven years, under ten different presidents. His gregariousness was legendary and his passion and intensity as a lawmaker reached near-mythic proportions. Even though he and I were on opposite sides of issue after issue, I always admired the focus and fight Ted brought to every debate. In 2006, Ted came to the McConnell Center to speak, and he was one of our most popular guests. In a very thoughtful gesture, he brought me a framed photograph of his brother John F. Kennedy with John Sherman Cooper. On it he wrote, “I know how much President Kennedy admired John Sherman Cooper in the Senate, and so did I. Mitch McConnell is part of that great Kentucky tradition of public service, and it’s a privilege to serve with him today (not that we always agree on the issues).” When I heard on August 25, 2009, that he’d passed away, I had a hard time imagining the Senate without Ted thundering on the floor.
A special election was held to fill his seat, and it was almost certain to go to the Democrat, Attorney General Martha Coakley. No Republican had been elected to the US Senate from Massachusetts since Edward Brooke in 1972, thirty-eight years earlier. The Republican candidate was Scott Brown, a state legislator, and his entire strategy was to run as the man who would take away the Democratic supermajority and enable us to defeat Obamacare. With the entire nation paying close attention, Scott Brown shocked everybody and won. By 110,000 votes. The Massachusetts election was a referendum on Obamacare, and I sure hoped it was just the first sign of things to come.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
You Can’t Make Policy If You Don’t Win the Election
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” I told a reporter from the National Journal on October 23, 2010. I then went on to explain that if Obama did what Clinton had done—decide after the elections that he was willing to move toward the political center and meet Republicans halfway on some of the biggest issues facing our nation—we’d do business with him. “I don’t want him to fail,” I said. “I want him to change.”
During the course of the interview, the reporter and I had been speaking about the number of presidents who lost part or all of Congress during their first term in office. As any student of history knows, it’s not uncommon for voters to choose divided government—it’s happened more often than not since World War II. It’s a trend, I believe, that reflects Americans’ skepticism about giving one side too much power, and when a president is elected with his party controlling both houses, the voters often show their remorse come election night two years later. I was there when that remorse was expressed under Clinton in 1994, and I was looking forward to see it happening again in 2010 under Barack Obama.
But, once again taking the long view, history has also shown that winning midterm elections doesn’t mean the fight is over. In the last hundred years, three presidents suffered significant defeats in their first term but went on to win reelection: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton. With Obama’s race for reelection just two years away, I’d been reading up on these matters, hoping to learn some useful lessons. I mentioned this to the reporter, saying that the 2010 elections were just the first step in giving Congress back to the Republicans, and then it would be up to us to keep working, to finish the job. What was that job? the reporter asked me—and I had answered.
Well, I’ve been taken out of context in the past, but never more relentlessly than with regard to this comment. Over the next few months it seemed that every Democrat was handed the same talking point: remind people Mitch McConnell said his greatest legislative goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term president. People falsely claimed I’d made the statement immediately after Obama was first elected—framing my statement as proof that before anything else, I was out to obstruct the president and cause him to fail—when the truth was that I made it after he had jammed through the health-care bill and the stimulus. Even Obama would exploit this comment, using it as one of the main riffs in his presidential campaign two years later. But to me, this reaction was nothing more than false outrage and political grandstanding. Name a Republican who didn’t want another Republican answering the phone in the Oval Office come January 2013.
The real scandal was not Republicans who wanted Obama voted out of office, but Republicans who talked about fighting for conservative principles while obstructing the only constitutional channels available for protecting those principles as best we could. Passing good legislation while dealing with these political forces in addition to an arrogant and uncooperative president posed a challenge that might prove impossible.
To my great delight, it seemed as if we were movi
ng in the direction of holding Obama to one term: the 2010 midterm elections went as I had expected. After two years of Obama’s far-left policies, Republicans gained six seats in the Senate and regained control of the House. We had the president himself—and his role in inspiring a grassroots movement of energetic, conservative voters—to thank, especially for the Republican revolution in the House. Resentment over Obamacare and his trillion-dollar stimulus package, the national punch line that had done little more than reward liberal constituencies and add a Mount Everest of debt to the national balance sheet, had planted the seeds for the Tea Party to emerge. The goals of those aligning themselves with this movement was to repeal Obamacare, take control of the out-of-control spending by the administration, and generally advance conservative ideals, all of which sounded good to me. More than thirty Tea Party candidates were elected in the House. In the Senate, Rand Paul, an eye surgeon from Bowling Green—the son of libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, and one of the earliest proponents of the Tea Party agenda, who later became a friend and ally—rose from relative obscurity to win in Kentucky.
The growth of the Tea Party was great for base enthusiasm, and was widely believed to have generated more votes for Republicans in the House elections. But much to my irritation, this movement was being hijacked by a few groups for their own mercenary purposes. The worst of the worst was the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), which had been founded in 2008 by Jim DeMint, the senator from South Carolina. For a self-proclaimed conservative organization, it had a particularly interesting way of handling itself. It raised the vast majority of its money from well-intentioned conservatives who sent in small contributions when informed by mail or e-mail that their dollars would ensure a conservative agenda. The pitch was essentially that if only the leaders of SCF had a few more dollars, a “true conservative” Senate would implement their agenda (without the president of the United States evidently). What was left unsaid is that the hard-earned dollars these donors sent to SCF were used exclusively to attack Republicans, to the great delight of liberals across the country.
As more dollars from patriotic Americans rolled in, SCF staff would direct those resources exclusively toward campaigning against the most electable Republicans from the comfort of their townhome on Capitol Hill. For the first four years of his presidency, if Barack Obama didn’t have these guys working on his behalf, he would’ve had to invent them because they would go on to elect more Democrats than the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. While SCF was outfitting its town-house offices with luxurious amenities like a hot tub and a wine cellar, it cost us at least two Senate seats in the elections of 2010, in Delaware and Colorado, and possibly a third in Nevada. In Delaware and Colorado, unelectable candidates backed by SCF unseated established Republicans in primary elections, but they lacked both experience and a message, and were promptly trounced in the general elections by liberal Democrats. In Nevada, where Majority Leader Harry Reid was vulnerable enough to be unseated by a viable candidate, he was able to portray his opponent, Sharron Angle, as too extreme. This was maddening on so many levels. Not only because SCF was misleading Americans, but it was also hurting the conservative movement because, as I frequently say, unless you win the election, you can’t make policy.
With the House back in control of the Republicans under newly elected Speaker John Boehner, a top-notch guy, every Republican in Congress was looking forward to finally doing more than playing defense to Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. If government spending was the answer to an economic slowdown, we’d have been in a boom. Instead, our debt had skyrocketed 35 percent and our annual deficit was three times greater than the highest deficit the previous administration ever ran. Despite massive spending increases by Democrats, one in ten Americans was still looking for work. It was time that Democrats were forced to make the same kind of tough choices about Washington’s budget that most American families had been forced to make about their own.
At the top of our agenda was tackling the most pressing issue we faced: the need to cut taxes and reduce spending. Getting any bipartisan measures passed during Obama’s first two years on these measures had been all but impossible. Since being elected, his idea of compromise was: you capitulate and do what I want to do. As we went into 2011, this much was clear: if Obama and the Democrats wouldn’t agree to tackle these issues on their own, it was our job to try to force them to the political center and see if we could find some areas of agreement.
At the beginning of the year, we began to look for areas where we might have some leverage with the president to address government spending and the debt crisis, and we found it in the president’s upcoming request to authorize an increase in the debt ceiling, or the amount of money the US Treasury may borrow. Periodically, in what is typically little more than a formality, Congress approves the president’s request to raise the debt ceiling. But after two years of historic spending, leading to equally historic debt, it was irresponsible to raise the debt limit without trying to do something about spending. It was our moment to force our pro-spending president to the table.
In June, I sat down with President Obama at that table to explain our position. We wanted discretionary spending reductions, both now and in the future, and a long-term entitlement fix to prevent Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security from tanking. Obama quickly came to recognize how serious we were, but his solution to reducing the debt was, unsurprisingly, to raise taxes. That was not something we would agree to.
Nothing came out of that meeting or the many subsequent meetings between the White House and members of Congress. Why? Because they went exactly like most meetings with Barack Obama go. Almost without exception, President Obama begins serious policy discussions by explaining why everyone else is wrong. After he assigns straw men to your views, he enthusiastically attempts to knock them down with a theatrically earnest re-litigation of what you’ve missed about his brilliance. The topic at hand rarely matters—what to do on the debt limit or what to get for lunch. I’ve never felt the need to lecture a colleague about the merits of his or her opinion during a negotiation. If they’ve been given the power to make a deal, they’re entrusted with deeply held convictions that must be respected, if not appreciated. Re-litigating the failures of liberalism during budget negotiations has never struck me as a particularly productive approach, as much as I’d love to explore that topic with some of my colleagues. In addition to being a little disrespectful, it just wastes time. However, this is not a theory shared by our forty-fourth president.
Never was this more evident than during these tumultuous weeks of trying to tackle the debit limit. Our discussions over the phone went something like this:
President Obama: Mitch?
Me: Yes, Mr. President.
And then I’d listen. The conversation would last as long as it took the president to feel satisfied that his soliloquy had outlined the issue well enough for me to understand. Speaker Boehner famously put the phone on his desk and carried on a separate conversation during one of these exchanges with the president. I never put the phone down, but on one occasion I did watch at least an inning of baseball.
As summer wore on, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that no grand bargain was going to occur. The hundreds of billions in tax increases the Democrats were proposing under the auspice of “reform” wouldn’t have solved the problem. On August 2, 2011, the government’s borrowing authority would be exhausted, and as the deadline approached, and talks were stalled, the situation became more tense. Christine Lagarde, the new head of the International Monetary Fund, issued a warning: If the United States failed to act before the August 2 deadline and defaulted on its loans, the impact would be felt not just in the US economy, but globally.
John Boehner and I began negotiations with Harry Reid, which lasted several days, and seemed promising. Throughout the negotiations, I wanted to be perfectly clear that Obama was going to sign the deal we were coming close to finalizing. “
Don’t let me waste my time, Harry. We have to know Obama’s gonna sign this.” The deal we were discussing would enact discretionary spending caps, increase the debt limit by about $1 trillion, and create a so-called supercommittee to identify an additional $1 trillion in cuts. If the committee was successful in identifying those cuts, the debt limit would automatically increase another trillion dollars. But if not, we’d be back at the table when it came to authorizing another debt limit increase.
“The president’s been clear that he doesn’t want to deal with another request to increase the debt limit before the next election, Harry,” I said. “This deal makes that a possibility. I don’t want us spending all of our time working this out if he won’t sign it.”
“He will, he will,” Reid said. “I’m keeping him in the loop. He knows what we’re doing and he’s fine with it. I can deliver his signature.”
We finally came to an agreement less than two weeks before the deadline. I felt good about where we stood, and was relieved that we’d gotten this done and averted a financial disaster. But a few hours after we’d finalized the negotiation, Stef appeared and told me that Harry was waiting to speak to me in my conference room.
“He won’t sign it,” Reid said. “The president won’t sign this deal.”
The Long Game Page 21