I thought to myself, We don’t have to accept things as they are. We can change things—we just need to be creative. We might be losing the inside game of vote counts in Congress, but we can still win the outside game of the country’s wishes as a whole—and the outside game is bigger and more important. Most legislators do the best they can inside their own legislative chamber, and that’s often the extent of their actions. But if they see a new reality outside—that is, masses of people demanding something different—they might think again about what to do. They might realize that for every voter who makes the effort to come to the capital, there are probably a hundred or a thousand voters back home holding the same opinions. The battle is ultimately the larger battle, I realized—the battle for the heart and soul of America. And that’s the battle we must all join.
So here was my idea. If Washington wouldn’t listen to America, I would invite America to come to Washington—and speak even more loudly, forcing Washington to listen. And if enough noisy Americans came to Capitol Hill, perhaps we could stop this lumbering monster before it trampled our health and our liberty. That way, Republicans wouldn’t just be voting no on the bill and losing; they would be voting no and winning the hearts and minds of voters outside the Beltway.
Fortunately, I had allies. When you stand true for something, you always have allies—and good allies at that. We immediately started planning: phone calls, e-mails, talk radio. And, of course, television.
On Friday, October 30, 2009, I went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. He was in New York, and I was in Minnesota. Sean is that rare combination: a passionate public advocate for conservative principles and a perfectly nice and pleasant fellow in private. For the show Sean had done his job as a journalist; he had dug through the bill, which sat in a pile next to him, and told his audience that of the two thousand pages of legislative folderol, only five pages truly mattered. And then he held up those five pages, hitting the key points that every American needed to know: Yes, the bill funded abortions. Yes, it was a government takeover of the health-insurance market. Yes, it meant higher taxes. Yes, it cut $500 billion from Medicare. And yes, it included “death panels.”
That day, we had gotten our “final copy” of the health-care bill, and I also kept a copy of the bill on my lap—all twenty pounds of it. In the hectic days to come, I would be lugging that heap of legislative language around to many different places. Meanwhile, I agreed with every one of Sean’s points, adding that the bill was not only “the crown jewel of socialism” but also unconstitutional.
Then I launched my pitch. I said to Sean and his audience, “We need to pay a ‘House’ call on Nancy Pelosi.” I was asking the American people, in other words, to come to D.C. by the carload. Meet me at high noon next Thursday, I said, right in front of the Capitol. We’d have a press conference and then the people could walk through the halls of the House—the Cannon, Longworth, and Rayburn buildings, plus the Capitol itself, seeking out members of Congress. When they saw them, they could look into the whites of their members’ eyes and say, politely but firmly, “Don’t take away my health care.” Thinking then of the Great One, talk radio giant Mark Levin, author of the bestselling book Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, I added to Sean and his audience, “This is a ‘liberty and tyranny’ moment.” As indeed it was.
Now I had crossed the political Rubicon. All that weekend and into the next week, I worked with more leaders—conservative, libertarian, Tea Party, and just plain not-going-to-take-it-anymore people—to pull a press conference together. Mark Levin was key, as was Erick Erickson of Redstate.com. And so was Jon Voight, the Academy Award–winning actor, and John Ratzenberger, the immortal Cliff Clavin from the sitcom Cheers; both came out to join us. We joked that we were holding the “Super Bowl of Freedom,” and that name stuck.
Our big press conference was held the following Thursday, on November 5, 2009. We welcomed what turned out to be tens of thousands of Tea Partiers: “You came to your House, you came for an emergency house call! Are they going to listen? Oh yeah, they’re going to listen!” I continued, “Thomas Jefferson said a revolution every now and then is a good thing.” That’s a peaceful revolution, of course, just as we are launching here and now. Then I recalled the question that Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, one of our great founders and our second president. After all that we’ve done, Abigail wondered, will generations unborn know what was done for them? The answer was yes, of course. And now people will remember this day as well. We, in our time, are a privileged generation, because we have been summoned by destiny to do something great—to reclaim freedom.
I could see the reporters’ heads spinning: All those ordinary Americans with non–politically correct views? Daring to defy the great Obama? So the mainstream media attacked, of course, using its favorite weapons, snark and ridicule. The Washington Post ran a bizarre headline: “NO ONE SAID FREEDOM WAS PRETTY.” I thought, Whoa, that’s a low view of freedom-loving Americans. To me, and to the vast majority of Americans, freedom is indeed pretty—it’s beautiful, in fact. Period. Needless to say, the Huffington Post chimed in too, headlining: “A DAY AT THE FREAK SHOW.” You get the idea.
Yet the power of the Main Stream Media was not what it once was. The American people now had other sources of information—as well as, of course, their own common sense. And so despite MSM cheerleading, opposition to Obamacare ballooned, from just 28 percent in April 2009, according to an AP-GfK poll, up to 46 percent by the time of the “Super Bowl of Freedom.” All other polls showed a similar upward movement; by 2010 opposition to Obamacare was clearly the majority position—in reality, the big-majority position.
Yet the liberal Democrats formed an ungallant light brigade and charged onward. On November 7, 2009, Speaker Pelosi forced her House Democrats to cast their votes for the bill. Or rather, most of her House Democrats; some had been spooked by the rising opposition. In the end she won the assent of only 219 Democrats; 38 others voted “no”—some out of a sense of principle, some out of a sense of survival. The Republican ranks were more solid: 177 of us in opposition, with just one going over to the other side. The final vote: 220–215.
Yet by now, in late 2009, the Democrats were starting to worry. In the home state of the original 1773 Tea Party, Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown won a historic U.S. Senate election, breaking the Kennedy family’s six-decade grip on the seat. But for the Democrats, there was no turning back; they were now sailing forward blindly on the political equivalent of the Titanic. Captain Obama stood serenely at the wheel, telling his Democratic passengers to ignore reports of icebergs in the next election. So Obamacare passed the Senate on December 24, 2009; months later, in late March 2010, after a second confirming House vote, Democrats finally pushed the deadweight of Obamacare across the finish line.
Obamacare was a victory for left-wing ideologues, and it was also a victory for governmental gangsters. As soon as the bill was enacted, the administration started issuing waivers for the provisions of the bill; that is, it began opening up loopholes that would, for example, allow an insurance plan to spend more on administrative overhead than the new law allowed. In other words, the Obama administration was admitting what critics had been saying all along—that the bill was unworkable and unaffordable. And yet it was making this admission only to a select few. So who got these waivers? Well, it helped if you were a well-connected labor union or a well-heeled donor or the client of a wired-in lobbyist. Within a year of Obamacare’s passage, the number of waivers granted had risen to over a thousand; it was becoming embarrassing to Democrats. So the administration announced that it would no longer be granting waivers; the dubious process was making Obamacare look bad. Yet conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who had been tracking the story since the beginning, wasn’t buying that new spin. She wrote in June 2011, “Expect a resurrection of the waivers in some other name or form. . . . I guarantee you: Unions, Democrat lobbying g
roups, and liberal execs will find a way to get their exemptions—and the White House will find a way to distribute their crony waivers by another name.” Is Malkin a cynic? No, she is prescient. She is simply onto the reality of gangster government.
If Washington, D.C., was hopelessly in the grip of liberal gangsters, I could see that there was only one recourse—to win the next election. Indeed, the 2010 midterm elections were coming, and so the battle lines had to be drawn. In that year, I crisscrossed the country, speaking up for like-minded candidates. I would sum up the Tea Party movement as “TEA.” That is, Taxed Enough Already.
Yet in fact there was much more to talk about. We Republicans, reinforced by the Tea Party and everyone else who could see that Obama-style liberalism was a disaster, spoke strongly on many crucial matters. We were against Obamacare and the bureaucratic takeover of our health-care system. We were against bailing out Wall Street. (Not every Republican but, by now, most.) We were against the “stimulus”—which actually, of course, was a destimulus. We were against the government running the auto industry. We were against cap-and-trade’s strange mix of repression and profiteering. We were against green energy fantasies.
That’s a lot of “against.” So what were we for? What constituted our positive, twenty-first-century conservative vision of limited government? We were for lower taxes. We were for individuals making their own health-care decisions. We were for the freedom to reduce unemployment by not taxing investment money away from job-creating businesspeople. We were for a constitutional vision of personal liberty. We were for a strong America, confident in its essential values. We were for standing up for our treasured allies. In other words, we needed GOP—Government Of the People. The American people are always the solution.
On July 15, 2010, I filed the paperwork to establish the Tea Party Caucus as a formal component of Congress. As I said at the time:
The American people are speaking out loud and clear. They have had enough of the spending, the bureaucracy, and the government knows best mentality running rampant today throughout the halls of Congress. This caucus will espouse the timeless principles of our founding, principles that all Members of Congress have sworn to uphold. The American people are doing their part and making their voices heard and this caucus will prove that there are some here in Washington willing to listen.
The Democrats and their media allies mocked Republicans and Tea Partiers. They painted us as toothless hillbillies coming down from the hills, wearing red-white-and-blue bib overalls. But I could see that despite these attacks—and maybe, in fact, because of these attacks—we were winning. Why? Because the more Obama and the Main Stream Media attacked us, the more ordinary voters could see that we were really something different, that we were boldly proclaiming an important new message. If we had been just the same business-as-usual, go-along-get-along Republicans, liberals would have left us alone, maybe even thrown us some crumbs off the table. But because we were fresh and different, bringing vital new energy to the political scene, we were a genuine threat.
And at the same time, what were the Democrats offering? Here’s a partial list of policies that needed to be unmasked: Unbridled spending. Unsustainable debt. Undermined currency. Unfundable liabilities. Unfathomable taxation. Unrestrained regulation. Underwater mortgages. Unleashed energy inflation. Unguarded borders. Unsettled families. Unending unemployment and underemployment. And unknown, unprecedented, and seemingly unstoppable stealth appropriations. Taken together, all those “uns” added up to the undoing of the Democrats’ grip on the country.
Of course, not everything in 2009–2010 was Obamacare and Tea Party. As the proud servant of the people of the 6th congressional district of Minnesota, I had a duty to help constituents. Much of the work of a member of Congress might be considered routine, but it is still important. When people lose their passport just before a foreign trip or can’t get a Social Security check or can’t get an answer to a crucial question—our office was there to help. It would be nice, of course, if the federal bureaucracy could respond in a timely manner, but if a phone call from me or my staff could nudge things along, we were glad to do it.
One such example was the case of Ronald Kane of Woodbury, Minnesota. Ron served in the army during the Vietnam War, and yet he never received proper honor for his extraordinary heroism. Back on July 11, 1969, he and his unit were patrolling in the A Shau Valley when they were ambushed by the enemy; Ron, showing no fear for his own safety, rallied his men to repulse the attack, then led them to safety. At the time, he was told he would receive a medal for his heroism, and he believed it would all be taken care of. Like so many returning veterans, he had a civilian life to pick up again; he assumed that his medal would eventually be sent to him. Well, the decades piled up, and finally, in 2002, he realized that his medal had never arrived. So he contacted the Pentagon and waited. And waited. At one point, Ron even drove to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis to see if he could track down his military records—all, once again, to no avail. He also contacted other federal officials and received no help. Finally, in 2007, he contacted my office, and we were able to help him receive what he had earned nearly four decades earlier—a Silver Star. I felt privileged to speak at an award ceremony for Ron on Memorial Day 2010, as he finally received his due, forty years later, from a grateful nation. His whole family was with him, as well as admiring neighbors, but Ron remained modest about his heroism: “I just did it to save my men.” True heroes are always like that—modest, even as their heroism is recalled. They simply did what they needed to do. As for the rest of us, it’s our duty to honor them appropriately.
Also in 2010, I faced my own biennial election. I had plenty of friends but also foes. Given my relatively close call in 2008, the national Democrats thought that this time maybe they could defeat me. My opponent was a community activist, Democratic Party official, and state senator; I knew she would have plenty of money. So I did what I have always done: I worked hard. I raised more money than any member of Congress in the history of the institution—although I might note that my average donation was just forty-five dollars; I will never be the candidate of the limousines, in either party. In the end, I won the election by thirteen points.
On election night 2010, I appeared again on MSNBC’s Hardball. Once again Matthews was in Washington, while I was in Minnesota—only this time I wasn’t in a studio, but amid an election-night party of friends and supporters at the Sheraton Hotel in Bloomington, which served as the Republican Party headquarters that victorious night. But some things never change: Matthews once again had an agenda. Noting that Republicans had taken back the majority in the House, as well as the new investigative authority that comes with it, Matthews led off by asking, “Will you use the subpoena power to investigate the Democratic members of Congress for un-American activities?” So I answered—struggling to hear his questions over an ecstatic crowd—that my goal was to make sure that taxes didn’t go up. Matthews asked the “anti-American” question again, and in my response I reminded Matthews that the Bush tax cuts were scheduled to expire less than two months in the future, on December 31, 2010; such an expiration, I warned, would mean a “dramatic increase in taxes,” just what the economy did not need. That was my agenda, and so, as always, I was declaring it firmly and staying true to it.
So then Matthews said, “Congresswoman Bachmann, are you hypnotized tonight? Has someone hypnotized you? Because no matter what I ask you, you give the same answer. Are you hypnotized? Has someone put you under a trance tonight? That you give me the same answer no matter what question I put to you?” Actually, people in that Bloomington ballroom—as well as TV viewers—may well have thought to themselves, it’s Matthews who seemed to be hypnotized, because when he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he repeated the same question. But, of course, Matthews was playing to his crowd, including those in the studio with him; I could hear his cohosts chortling. I said, “I think the American p
eople are the ones that are finally speaking tonight. We’re coming out of our trance.” And I added, “I think people are thrilled tonight. I imagine that thrill is probably maybe quite not so tingly on your leg anymore.”
On November 2, 2010, the American people began taking their country back. Republicans won control of the House, winning a total of sixty-three seats, the greatest gain for a party in a midterm election in more than seven decades.
I was at the tip of the spear in the 2010 elections. I might not be an insider’s insider—I never wanted to be—but I tried to get things done on the larger national stage. I am a fighter because I believe I was sent to Washington to actively uphold the Constitution. I listen to people and communicate with them. That’s how you build a movement, and then establish a governing coalition, and then change the country. Do what you promised people you would do.
One sad note: David Meyer, the husband of my lifelong friend Barbara, passed away on December 2, 2010. Married for thirty-two years, Mr. and Mrs. Meyer had enjoyed a great life together in northern California, raising two wonderful children. But then David was stricken with pancreatic cancer; he was a brave battler for two and a half years, but doctors could not save him. We visited several times during his struggle, and Barbara and I talked on the phone even more often than usual during that period, exchanging prayers and other words of encouragement.
When Barbara called me to say that David had only a few more hours to live, I left my office on Capitol Hill just as we were voting and jumped on an airplane and flew to San Francisco, to the airport nearest to where they lived. Agonizingly, my plane was late; when I finally landed at 11:00 P.M., I called Barbara, who told me the sad news that David had passed away while I was in the air. David died at home, surrounded by family, true and faithful and good spirited to the end. Barbara suggested that I find a hotel room near the airport and get at least part of a night’s sleep, but I wanted to be with her and her kids in their time of need. She would have done the exact same thing for me. So I drove the three and a half hours to be with Barbara, Christy, and Daniel, and to pray with them. I thought of Paul’s epistle to the Thessalonians: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.” And then Paul instructs us: “Comfort one another with these words.”
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