Power Grab

by Jason Chaffetz

  Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was ultimately confirmed. When all was said and done, some of the truth came out. One accuser, Judi Munro-Leighton, would later recant, admitting she had made up the allegation. The progressive activist from Kentucky said, “I was angry, and I sent it out.” Likewise, Julie Swetnick walked back her allegation, claiming Avenatti “twisted” her words. Had the media vetted her claims more carefully, they would have discovered a long history of false allegations as well as a prior connection to Ford’s lawyer, Debra Katz.

  Planned Parenthood stood behind the discredited accuser, tweeting in late October, “We still believe Julie Swetnick. #BelieveSurvivors.” Nevertheless, the committee found Swetnick and Avenatti had criminally conspired to make materially false statements to the committee to obstruct the investigation. Munro-Leighton, Swetnick, and Avenatti were all referred for criminal prosecution.

  Democrats had a choice. They could have adhered to the process and procedures that have guided congressional investigations for decades. They could have thoroughly investigated the Ford allegations behind closed doors in a bipartisan manner. But they chose not to do that. They could have used transcribed interviews to keep her identity secret and protect her from a lifetime of harassment and notoriety. They could have sought for the truth as best they could find it. But they opted for the sensational. They opted for the theatrics. By choosing not to act in a bipartisan way, refusing to conduct private interviews, failing to keep the accuser’s name private, and not involving the FBI until the allegations went public, Democrats backed themselves into a corner.

  The Cost of the Kavanaugh Approach

  While Democrats realized short-term gains from their scorched-earth strategy for derailing the Kavanaugh nomination, there are long-term costs. Those costs come in credibility, damage to the Senate’s norms and institutions, and the opportunity costs of spending their political capital on partisan warfare rather than public policy achievements.

  They also imposed a cost on Ford, Kavanaugh, and their families. Despite the lack of evidence, many Americans are left believing the false caricature of Kavanaugh as a drunken frat boy who routinely assaults women. As I was looking to refresh my memory of the outcome of the investigation, I tried a basic internet search using the names of the accusers. When I looked up Swetnick, Ramirez, and others, the only stories I could find were the ones reporting the allegations. Stories reporting the results of the investigation were few and far between. I finally had to turn to the memorandum released by Senate Republicans, which contained the full record of emails, text messages, interviews, and results from their investigation. The correction to the narrative was not amplified and was reported a small fraction as much as the original allegations. That is the danger of this false narrative strategy. It spreads misinformation and leaves broken hearts and broken lives in its wake.

  In her urgent need to score political points, Senator Feinstein revved up the media machine to trample fundamental principles of due process and presumption of innocence. Unconstrained by truth, Democrats upped the stakes and lost sight of the boundaries of believability. As the plot became more and more sensational, the stalling and distraction came across as contrived, even forced. As the show wore on, our ability to suspend disbelief on so many inconsistent plot points evaporated. They unwittingly cast themselves as the antagonists. As they continued to move the goalposts, they came across as Keystone Cops who badly bungled this investigation. Dr. Ford herself came out of this all right, but the circus that surrounded her was so over-the-top it would have made P. T. Barnum blush.

  Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, who lost a close race to Republican Josh Hawley in 2018, told news outlets the “spectacle” created by the Kavanaugh hearings hurt her with voters. “I don’t think my vote [against Kavanaugh] hurt me as much as the spectacle that occurred,” McCaskill told NPR after her defeat. “There were mistakes made by my party in terms of how that was handled.”

  With Democrats now in control of the House, there are lessons to be learned from the Kavanaugh hearings—for all parties concerned. While I won’t be holding my breath for Democrats to learn them, I do think there is value for voters in seeing the show for what it is. The sooner voters are able to see through the smoke and mirrors, the sooner we can unite to reject these damaging and divisive truth-free theatrics for the power grab they are. We can start by recognizing elements that are sure to be repeated as the House majority looks to set new narratives ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

  Chapter 5

  Double Standards

  The 2018 midterms saw Democrats convert forty-one seats in the House of Representatives to take over the majority and reinstall Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. With a Republican president and a Republican Senate, Pelosi now finds herself in the role she criticized during the Obama presidency—that of the obstructionist.

  She’s no doubt hoping that it will be a short-term role, necessary to play while Democrats wait out the remainder of the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, Pelosi is positioning her House majority to pursue an agenda that should scare the living daylights out of any true American patriot.

  Resistance Is the New Obstruction

  The mirror image of today was 2010, when Republicans took the House and Democrats still maintained the presidency and the Senate majority. What the media now refers to as resistance was what they then called obstruction.

  Back in those days, obstruction was bad. Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd’s take was typical of the narratives we heard from Democrats at the time. He told Politico in late 2009, “History will judge harshly those who have chosen the simple path of obstruction over the hard work of making change. It always does.” In a 2014 weekly address, President Obama blamed obstruction for his failure to grow the economy.

  The problem is, Republicans in Congress keep blocking or voting down almost every serious idea to strengthen the middle class. We could do so much more as a country—as a strong, tight-knit family—if Republicans in Congress were less interested in stacking the deck for those at the top, and more interested in growing the economy for everybody.

  Ironically, when the tables turned and Democrats had the opportunity to vote for a tax reform plan that would help the middle class, every last Democrat in the House resisted. They characterized the tax policy as a giveaway to the wealthy. But today the middle class is reaping the dividends as the economy continues to add new jobs, payrolls increase, new workers enter the workforce, and unemployment rates among women, Hispanics, and blacks hit record lows.

  Of course, obstruction against the Trump agenda is given a very different treatment in popular media and culture than was obstruction against the Obama agenda. What was once obstruction is now resistance. What was once bad is now good. This time, by some strange coincidence, we are not being spoon-fed a steady diet of obstruction narratives by the media.

  Back then, you could search the words “House obstruction” and “party of no” and come up with hundreds of current results—as though every media outlet were coordinating on their narrative of the day. In reality, the “party of no” and obstruction messaging originally came from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the congressional campaign arm of the Democratic National Committee. But to read the reporting at the time, one would have believed there was some kind of national consensus against obstruction.

  A search of those terms today will still show some of the old stories about Republicans, who deeply resented the label at the time and worked hard to dispel it. Far from resenting the label, Democrats, including former president Obama, now embrace it. The media cheerleads it. Suddenly resistance is all the rage.

  But just because obstruction won’t be marketed as such doesn’t mean it won’t be noticed by voters tired of political brinksmanship and hypocrisy.

  I watch the obstructionists’ resistance and I see them opposing policies they supported in the past, betraying their own principles in the pursuit of power. Voters would
be right to wonder—are both parties willing to go that far? Did I?

  Speaking for myself and other members of the freshman class elected at the same time as President Obama, we genuinely wanted to find ways to work together. I particularly remember how strongly we felt about health-care reform. It was going to impact all of our districts. We knew there was a problem. We wanted to see Congress get it right. And we really believed it was possible to come up with a bill that could garner bipartisan support. All of our efforts to engage on that legislation were rebuffed.

  I look back at a January 2010 meeting of the House Republican Conference in which President Obama made an appearance. Our interaction with the president that day highlights the huge chasm between where we were at that time and where Democrats are with President Trump today.

  At the beginning of each new Congress, Democrats and Republicans go off campus and spend two or three days in planning and strategy sessions. House Republicans, rather than going to the posh comforts of West Virginia’s Greenbrier Resort, as they had in years past, elected that year to go to a Marriott hotel on the Baltimore waterfront so that President Obama could come to address us. At the time Mike Pence was our GOP conference chair, which meant that he would be conducting the meeting and calling on members to ask questions. The night before the meeting, I approached Pence and said, “I have a question for the president. If you have a list of people to ask questions, put me on that list.” I didn’t tell him my question and he didn’t ask.

  As a freshman legislator, I was surprised when Pence called on me to ask my question. I said to the president,

  I’m one of twenty-two House freshmen. We didn’t create this mess but we are here to help clean it up. . . . There are some things that have happened that I would like your perspective on. Because I could look you in the eye and tell you, we have not been obstructionists.

  The Democrats have the House, the Senate, and the presidency. When you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health-care debates on C-SPAN, you didn’t. I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed. You said you weren’t going to allow lobbyists in the seniormost positions within your administration. And yet you did. I applauded you when you said it, and [was] disappointed when you didn’t. You said you’d go line-by-line through the health-care bill. There were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said we would like to take you up on that offer. We’d like to come. We never got a letter. We never got a call. We were never involved in those discussions. And when you said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks, in fact you didn’t want to have any earmarks in any of your bills, I jumped out of my seat and applauded you, but it didn’t happen. More importantly, I’d like to talk about moving forward, but if we could address—

  He cut off my question. There went his narrative about Republican obstruction. He knew our exchange was being broadcast and it completely undercut the false narrative he had been trying to sell. Democrats wanted the public to believe that Obama was trying to work with Republicans in a bipartisan way while we were being the “party of no.” It wasn’t true. We had been trying to engage. In no uncertain terms, our efforts had been rejected. Remember, just the previous year President Obama had rebuffed Republican leadership at the White House when they tried to negotiate with him on a stimulus package. In a remark that reportedly poisoned the well with Republicans, Obama said, “Elections have consequences. And at the end of the day, I won. So I think on that one I trump you.” (It would take a few more years before Democrats would get Trumped.) I felt he needed to own that noncollaborative attitude and America needed to know it.

  President Obama really wanted the optics to show that he was coming to us, reaching out his hand, and we were reflexively rejecting anything he attempted to do. That’s not what I saw. We had stood ready to work with him—not to cave to him—but to work to find common ground on a health-care bill we believed (and time later proved) would drive up the cost of health care. That bill had too many mandates and used too much force to implement its policy prescriptions.

  The next week, President Obama’s chief of staff came to see me in my office. In retrospect, I can only guess that they needed the optics and the story that they had followed up with me because they certainly weren’t interested in making changes to their health-care bill. After that one meeting, I never heard from them again until Republicans won back the House.

  Today, we don’t really expect to hear anyone from the freshman class of Democrats listing a series of issues on which they think the president should be applauded. This freshman class wears the term “obstruction” like a badge of honor. Their resistance-obsessed base eats it up. But what about the average American, who is working hard and playing by the rules?

  With the script flipped, the hypocrisy is laid bare. Much of what they told us two years ago is suddenly heresy. Obstruction is good now. Solving real problems, such as the border crisis, is considered bad strategy. Nobody is offering to work with the president on immigration the way my freshman class begged to work with President Obama on health care.

  Meanwhile, Pelosi has implemented changes in the body intended to stifle the minority, impose a double standard, obscure transparency, and entrench her party’s hold on power. All of that works to set the stage for the kinds of reforms that will dramatically raise taxes and spending, reduce individual liberties, and appropriate vast local government and free-market powers. The strong central government her party envisions will be more socialist, less free, and completely under the unfettered control of the Democratic Party.

  Stifling the Minority

  Not sixty days into her new speakership, Nancy Pelosi was being urged by members of her caucus to remove a long-standing tool of the minority that was exposing divisions between moderates and liberal progressives in the caucus. The little-known motion to recommit (MTR) allows the minority party to force an immediate vote on an amendment to a bill.

  In the House, the majority rules. Anything can pass with just 50 percent plus one vote. Without a few tools to give the minority input, they might as well go home. The MTR is one of the times that the minority can put something forward and force a vote on it.

  Republicans masterfully used the procedure in a February 2019 vote on the barely bipartisan piece of legislation called the Bipartisan Background Checks Bill.

  While the bill itself had the support of only eight Republicans, it had broad support from the Democratic caucus. An MTR offered by Republican representative Doug Collins of Georgia forced an immediate vote on an amendment previously voted down in committee. That amendment, which would report illegal alien gun purchasers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), received twenty-six votes from moderate and swing district Democrats—enough to pass.

  With the amendment added to the background checks bill, Democrats from safe liberal districts now had a dilemma. A vote for background checks would also be a vote for reporting illegal aliens to ICE. In an interview with the Daily Caller, Republican congressman Richard Hudson of North Carolina recalled, “I thought it was pretty amazing to watch the Democrats try to decide ‘Do we want to protect illegal immigrants or do we want to confiscate guns more?’ It was kind of funny.”

  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded to the threat to do away with minority rights that date back to 1909. During a press conference, McCarthy said:

  Democrats are now thinking about changing the rule. Rather than reconcile the differences within their party that are driving this division, Democrats want to rig the rules and suppress the minority party’s speech on the House floor.

  I want to be very clear and make no mistake: changes to the MTR would be a nuclear option. And it would leave a stain on this majority.

  You all know the history. In the last twenty-four years in America, Republicans have been the majority party for twenty of them. Never once did we discuss, bring up the option, or even entertain the idea
that we would silence the minority. Never once. Not during a sit-in, not during anything that we did.

  Why didn’t the MTR threaten the Republican majority the way it now threatens Democrats? This is where we get into how the sausage is made in Washington, D.C. MTRs never posed a threat to the Republican majority because House Republicans united to treat the motion as a procedural vote, not a policy vote. If the full GOP conference was united in voting no on every motion to recommit, there was no need to justify those votes on policy grounds. The minority could access valuable floor time to express opposition, but a united majority could still ensure bills did not get derailed by a minority picking off votes from moderate members. MTRs simply weren’t treated like policy votes.

  But with Democrats winning their majority primarily from swing districts, many of their newest members felt they could not afford to vote no on an amendment reporting illegal gun buyers to ICE, for example. They treated the MTR as a policy vote. That decision made the MTR far more powerful in the hands of the minority. Democrats now face the threat of actually having to take votes on difficult issues. This is something members of Congress try to avoid at all costs. But with the caucus fractured and inconsistent, every Democrat is now expected to explain, from a policy perspective, why they voted no on a provision Republicans selected. This has made the tool far more potent with a very real chance of altering legislation.

  As of this writing, Pelosi has not opted to eliminate the MTR. Instead she has instructed her caucus to adopt the Republican strategy of voting no across the board. Unfortunately for her, that genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Her members have established that votes on minority amendments are indeed policy votes for which they must answer. When the House subsequently passed H.R. 1, Republicans offered an amendment condemning illegal alien voting. This time only six Democrats supported the amendment. But that many, combined with the previous precedent, means every Democrat will have to go home to the district and answer questions about why they voted no on condemning illegal immigrant voting. Furthermore, MTR votes now engender headlines like this one from FoxNews.com: “House Dems overwhelmingly reject motion to condemn illegal immigrant voting.”