Could I do this? Did I have it in me? I was fighting the toughest race of my career. This was, according to everyone on cable news, the most important election of 2014. The pressure was enormous. I could allow it to paralyze me.
Or I could be proud of it, relish it even.
They were coming after me because of the position I now held. They were coming after me because they thought I was effective. They were coming after me not because of my failings, but because of what I had achieved.
I decided to get some fresh air, and on my way out the front door, I passed the framed photograph of my parents on their wedding day that hangs on my wall. My mom was just twenty-one at the time, my dad twenty-two. As they stood there that day, my mom in her short fur jacket, the only nice thing she owned, my dad in his well-pressed suit, they were young and hopeful. They couldn’t have known the challenges they were about to face. Within four years, they’d have a baby struck with polio, and a world war my dad felt compelled to fight. My dad had volunteered to go even though he didn’t have to, and once there, he never retreated. Rather, he gave it everything he had, even, courageously, serving as a scout, going first before the others, checking for danger so that the guys behind him might find victory. And my mom. I’m sure many days she would have preferred to rest, to read, to do anything other than kneel beside me, leading me through hours of aching exercises that, as far as she knew, were futile.
Both my parents had taught me, in both their words and their actions, that the only way to fail in America was to quit or die. I pulled shut the front door and stepped outside. As I walked toward the Capitol, I was struck by a memory from when I was a young boy, and we were living in Athens, Alabama: the day I followed my dad’s advice and mustered the courage to march across the street and fight Dicky McGrew. How I had swung long and hard enough to bend his glasses, and to teach him, under no uncertain terms, that I wasn’t going to allow him to bully me anymore. I knew my dad was proud of me that day, and I knew that if he were still alive, I’d want him to be equally proud of me now.
When I returned home later, Elaine was there. She seemed to notice something in the look on my face.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m ready,” I said. “For this fight. It’s time to tell them: Come and get me. It’s time we settle this.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Making a Point or a Difference?”
In July of 2013, a forty-six-year-old investment manager and Tea Party–backed candidate named Matt Bevin announced he was running against me in the Republican primary. He had no political experience, no familiarity with running for office, and no idea what he was walking into.
I tried to warn him he was making a mistake. When he’d begun to make some noise about challenging me, one of my aides met with one of his to show him how well prepared we were. Bevin didn’t listen, obviously, and the day he announced, we were on the air with an ad defining him as Bailout Bevin. He’d received a government loan to help rebuild his family’s bell factory in Connecticut, which had been destroyed by a fire, and had written to his clients that he had supported TARP. After he criticized me for my role in passing TARP—a role I was proud of given the cost of not acting—I couldn’t allow the hypocrisy. He’d later help us out by making more than a few bad choices, like speaking at a pro-cockfighting rally.
With Josh Holmes overseeing things, and a strong staff in Kentucky, I was feeling pretty calm, optimistic even, and I remained that way through the fall. I was feeling so good, in fact, that I set a clear goal—not only were we going to win, we were going to win big. We were going to take every one of Kentucky’s 120 counties. I pressed my campaign staff to remain focused on the work ahead, not to get distracted by anything that could get in our way of meeting that goal. I planned to follow that advice myself.
And then, in October of 2013, a few rogue Republicans decided to shut down the government.
Every Congress is required by the US Constitution to pass a federal budget for the next fiscal year. In the summer of 2013, a small but vocal coalition of House members had begun to strategize about attaching a provision to the upcoming federal budget that eliminated funding for the implementation of Obamacare. After initially failing to block Obamacare from becoming law, and then several failed attempts by Republicans to repeal it, and then the 2012 Supreme Court case that upheld its constitutionality, they saw it as the last chance to keep Obamacare from being implemented.
It was a strategy that couldn’t possibly succeed.
All this plan was going to do was to keep us from passing a budget by midnight of September 30, which would then, in turn, accomplish just one thing: shutting down the US government. As we say in Kentucky, “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” That lesson was lost here because the first kick had come in 1995 when Republicans, under Newt Gingrich, shut down the government for twenty-seven days over federal spending levels. And all that had achieved was injuring our economy, inconveniencing Americans, and hurting our party.
But, apparently, that was a risk some believed worth taking, because in politics, there are two kinds of people: those who want to make a point, and those who want to make a difference. From time to time, we all want to make a point, but at the end of the day, most of us want to make a difference. Not in this case. In late September, a budget bill was sent from the House to the Senate that included an amendment requiring that Obamacare be defunded. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the Democratic-led Senate stripped out the defunding measure, and sent it back to the House. The House then responded by sending back a bill with another amendment to delay the implementation of Obamacare for a year. On September 30, the Senate Democratic majority removed this amendment. I was doing whatever I could to avoid a shutdown. On Friday, I made a stop in London, Kentucky, for less than three hours to attend the World Chicken Festival Parade and was back at my desk in Washington by early Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, I was on the phone all day with my staff, the leadership team, Boehner, and anyone else I thought might be interested in responding with some sense about the situation. But ultimately, Boehner refused to bring the revised bill to a vote on September 30. As I left for the day, knowing that we were at an impasse with only one possible conclusion—shutting down the government at midnight that night—I stopped by Stef’s desk on my way out the door. “Stef, you don’t remember this, since you were only twelve the last time we did this. But this is going to be bad. For everyone.” The next day, approximately 800,000 federal employees were ordered to stay home with no idea when they’d next get paid. National parks and monuments were closed. Federal loans to small businesses and homeowners were put on hold, as was government-sponsored scientific research. Tax refunds were delayed. The list went on.
Every American, other than those in Congress who had spearheaded the move, thought that shutting down the government as a means to block Obamacare was a terrible idea. And they were right. We all agreed on the central issue: we wanted to get rid of Obamacare, and if we’d had the votes to do it, we’d have done it in a heartbeat. But as conservative columnist George Will put it, shutting down the government to get one’s way could best be described as “the politics of futile gesture.” We had a disability—it was called fifty-five of them and forty-five of us. While I might not be the best person in the room at math, even I knew fifty-five Democrats was more than forty-five Republicans and it was utterly irresponsible for anyone to call themselves a true conservative while misleading people into believing we could get an outcome we couldn’t possibly get—to think that a Democratic president and Democratic-led Senate were going to abandon their signature legislation.
I don’t like the politics of futile gesture—we were not elected to make a point, but a difference—and I also didn’t like that some members of Congress were going along with it. Many Americans were being told that if we just stuck it to Barack Obama, he would cave. They were being told by outside groups and te
levision and talk-radio hosts that the reason we couldn’t get better outcomes than we’d gotten was not because Democrats were in control of the White House and Senate, but because Republicans had been insufficiently feisty. That simply wasn’t true. Shutting down the government just showed that these groups, while professing to believe in the Constitution, ignored the fact that James Madison, its creator, also created the presidency, giving the president the right to veto legislation. And it was downright disgraceful that many of the groups advocating a government shutdown were not only misleading people, but were making a living off it. Critics called this practice “purity for profit.”
The only salve was that soon attention was drawn away from the government shutdown mess to the disastrous Obamacare rollout. Americans had already learned about the impact it was going to have on individuals and families—higher premiums, higher co-payments, higher deductibles, lost jobs—and now it was time to learn what life under government-run health care was like. On the same day the government shut down, the health-care marketplaces opened, and the rollout was a complete and utter mess. The website for people to begin shopping for health insurance crashed, making a visit to HealthCare.gov even less pleasant than a trip to the DMV.
My staff agreed to continue to work through the shutdown, unsure if they would get paid for their time. We’ve had forty McConnell scholars at the University of Louisville since the program launched, and nearly every year, a group comes to Washington, DC, to spend a few days seeing firsthand how government works. Well, several of them came this week to find the US Capitol closed to visitors. On day three of the shutdown, a woman was fatally shot by DC police after a car chase that began at the gates of the White House and ended at the Capitol. Everyone inside the Capitol was put on lockdown. We were asking law enforcement in our capital to protect us, when we were doing little to protect them.
And I had had enough.
On October 21, 2013, Elaine came to me with a copy of an article she’d printed from that day’s The Fix, the Washington Post’s political blog. “You have to read this,” she said, handing me the paper. “This is the most on-point article I’ve read about you in a long time.”
I took it and read aloud. “‘Mitch McConnell isn’t charismatic. He’s not dashing. He’s not an amazing orator.’” I put the paper down and looked at Elaine. “Honey, if you’re trying to tell me something, there’s probably a better way.”
“Keep reading.”
“‘He is, however, the most powerful Republican in Kentucky—and in the US Senate. There’s one reason for that: He is his party’s best strategic mind.’”
This article appeared four days after the government had reopened, after sixteen long days, through a deal I helped broker. On October 12, with nobody in DC able to fix the mess we’d made, I approached Harry Reid and told him it was time to find a way to get this done. At the time, I felt as if I had been handed the ball on my own two-yard line, with a shaky offensive line. A week into it, not only were we getting nowhere on talks to reopen the government, but once again, we were on our way to default on our debts. As soon as the shutdown went into effect, I had begun to bring together the members of my conference. We’d meet in the Strom Thurmond Room at the Capitol—a small, ornate room that looks down over the lawn of the mall, off a hallway off-limits to reporters—and, elbow-to-elbow, we discussed how we were going to stand firm in our goal to reopen the government.
My argument was clear: Shutting down the government did absolutely nothing to impact Obamacare. While hundreds of thousands of employees stayed home without pay, while families were locked out of national parks and monuments, while people waited in longer lines at the airports, Obamacare was up and running. We were not effectuating anything. And it seemed the only point we were making was that we were willing to watch our numbers tank, a year before many of us faced reelection.
“We have lost the point, and we are now losing the politics,” I said. While building unity among my conference, I also worked with Reid to negotiate a deal: a debt-limit increase until February 7, an extension of federal funding through January 15, and no binding strings attached. The Senate and House voted in favor of the measure on October 16, and the next day, after President Obama signed the bill into law, thousands of federal employees returned to work.
I had hardly made it back to my office after casting my vote when the Senate Conservatives Fund denounced me for “negotiating surrender,” and they would later announce their endorsement of Matt Bevin. During the course of my talks to reopen the government, this group had finally frayed my last nerve. Brian, who’d been keeping a close eye on my right flank, came into my office and told me about the latest issue that had been building that day. “They’re accusing you of sneaking a so-called kickback for a troubled dam project in Kentucky into the budget bill,” he said. Not only was it absurd—nobody could “sneak” anything into this bill, as it was reviewed by too many in Congress—but it was patently untrue. The funding for the project had been requested by Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, Lamar Alexander, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
“They’re calling it the Kentucky Kickback,” Brian said. “I think we should take it out.”
“This is a pretty worthwhile project, isn’t it?” I asked. “We’re not talking about a museum to Lawrence Welk in North Dakota.”
“That’s true. But the politics don’t look good. I know we had nothing to do with it,” Brian said. “But it’s gonna be toxic by three in the afternoon. Maybe we should try to get it out of there.”
Too many people were recasting themselves to satisfy these guys. Were we going to follow suit? Enough was enough. I looked at Brian. “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Are we afraid of these guys?”
“No,” he said. “We’re not.”
“Well, then—” Let’s just say, I used an expression I rarely use, and never in front of staff, but it made my point. “We’re keeping it in.”
“I’m on board with that,” Brian said, and by the end of the day, my staff was on board. As Josh Holmes later put it: “SCF has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into. The difference this cycle is that if they stroll into Mitch McConnell’s bar, he’s not going to throw you out. He’s going to lock the door.”
When the second year of the 113th Congress convened on January 3, 2014, I had a feeling that some of my colleagues were thinking, as I was, back to a vote that occurred fifteen years earlier, almost to the day. Just two months after securing a congressional majority for the first time in forty years, Republicans strode into the Senate Chamber on January 5, 1995, to cast the first vote of the 104th Congress—a vote to limit their own power.
At the time, Democratic senator Tom Harkin had proposed changing Senate rules so that it would take only fifty-one votes to shut down debate instead of the traditional sixty. Though it was clearly in the Republican majority’s short-term interest to support the measure, every one of us voted against it, as did then-senator Joe Biden, and senior members of the current Democratic leadership in the Senate, including Harry Reid.
What every Republican senator, and many Democratic senators, realized at the time was that any attempt by a sitting majority to grasp at power would come back to haunt us. Even worse, any rule change aimed at making it easier for one party to force legislation through the Senate with only a slim partisan majority would undermine the Senate’s unique role as a moderating influence and put a permanent end to bipartisanship.
All of this was relevant in January of 2014 because a few weeks earlier, Harry Reid went nuclear. In November, Reid implemented a parliamentary move, commonly referred to as the nuclear option. What is that? He broke the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate. What he achieved from it was a change to the rules to allow federal judicial nominees and executive office appointments to be confirmed by a simple majority rather than the sixty-vote
supermajority that had been the rule for nearly forty years. He’d threatened to do this before, and for months I had spent a lot of time trying to get Harry’s trigger finger away from the nuclear option.
The similarities between the Democrats’ decision to go nuclear on nominations and the Obamacare debate were inescapable. They muscled through Obamacare on a party-line vote and didn’t take into account the views of the minority. Since Reid took over as majority leader, Democrats employed every gimmick they could exploit to pursue their most prized legislative goals while attempting to minimize the number of uncomfortable votes they’d had to make. Dick Durbin, the assistant Democratic leader from Illinois, liked to say that if you don’t want to fight fires, don’t become a fireman, and that if you don’t like taking tough votes, don’t become a US senator. He has always been right about that. Taking a tough vote from time to time has always been the cost of being a senator. We are, supposedly, grown-ups, and we can take it.
As the Democratic quarterback, Reid set records for the number of times he blocked Republicans from having any input on bills, or cut off our right to debate. The committee process had become a shadow of what it had been. Major legislation was now routinely drafted not in committee but in the majority leader’s conference room and then dropped on the floor with little or no opportunity for members to participate in the amendment process, virtually guaranteeing a fight. This partisan approach was one of the main reasons Republicans had stuck together over the past few years. In the best traditions of the Senate, we insisted that the views of those we represent not be ignored. The key thing about the US Senate is that more than any other institution in any democracy, its rules are designed to safeguard the rights of the minority party. This has been a key to America’s success because it’s helped create laws that are durable, leading to stability over time. Changing a law requires at least some buy-in from the minority, which makes laws much harder to undo, and prevents us from having laws that change every few years. Invoking the nuclear option created a precedent that allows a simple majority that gets impatient to change the rules at any time to achieve a totally partisan agenda.
The Long Game Page 24