• Politics

It’s Only Going to Get Worse in Washington

14 minute read
Michael Scherer; Alex Altman

In the 11th hour of any crisis, let alone one that shuts down the world’s most powerful government, things are bound to get a little weird. So it was no surprise when members of Congress began showing up for votes in late September reeking of booze. Mickey Hart, a former drummer for the Grateful Dead, appeared mysteriously in a first-floor hallway of the Capitol, uttering a psychedelic koan: “It’s the rhythm, stupid.” Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, compared members of his own party to “lemmings with suicide vests,” since jumping off a cliff is no longer enough in Washington. “It’s very hard from a distance to figure out who has lost their minds,” observed Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat.

Or what else has been lost. For a generation, at the expense of billions of dollars and armies of brilliant minds, America’s political parties have cunningly divided most of the country into ideological preserves. It serves their purposes: after multiple rounds of ornate gerrymandering, of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, fewer than 1 in 5 is truly competitive on Election Day. Republicans speak to Republicans, Democrats to Democrats, the hard right and hard left comfortably cushioned from any obligation to reach out to anyone–leaving the rest of the country with no one to speak to them, or for them.

So when the embattled Speaker of the House John Boehner took to the floor with the clock ticking toward zero and pitched a doomed offer to delay the government shutdown by a few more weeks, his simple mantra drilled to the heart of the problem. “Let’s listen to our constituents,” Boehner thundered, as though a great chorus of voters had demanded that Obamacare be blocked, no matter the cost to the country.

Let’s listen to our constituents. Those words could be etched in the Capitol marble, but perhaps never before in the nation’s history have they contained so much complexity. Polls have been clear for weeks that the majority of Americans have no interest in flirting with financial disaster. Depending on how the question was asked, 60% to 70% have opposed shutting down government operations in a vague attempt to dismantle the machinery of Obamacare. Even among Republicans, support for the tactic has hovered around 50%.

But Boehner wasn’t speaking for the popular will, at least not in a broad sense. He spoke the battle cry of an angry minority, still steaming from the bank bailouts and still appalled by the massive new health care entitlement about to take effect. Though he might be a pragmatic pol at heart, as party leader Boehner serves 231 other Republican members of Congress, who won a majority of House seats in 2012 despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than their Democratic peers. Overwhelmingly, these Republicans live in districts drawn to exclude the voices of liberals and independents in favor of the Republican base.

Of Boehner’s 231 allies, 205–that’s 89%–are no more likely to see a serious Democratic challenge next year than see their paychecks disappear in a government shutdown. They exist in a one-party world. Their greatest fear is a primary campaign challenge from a candidate to the right. Sidling further and further toward the far flank, they eventually stake their flag on zealotry. As New Mexico Republican Congressman Steve Pearce told the New York Times near zero hour, “At times, you must act on principle and not ask what cost, what are the chances of success.” He may just not care that President Obama won New Mexico by 10 percentage points; in Pearce’s district, Obama lost by a landslide.

With constituencies so divided and incentives so misaligned, the country has been set up, quite literally, to fail. And the President–who is elected by the entire country–seemed content to be a bystander to the game. At the White House, Obama’s aides studied the polls and saw in Boehner’s brinkmanship an exercise in self-harm. The GOP quest to reverse Obamacare was front and center in 2012 and failed. If the opposition wanted to die again in the same trench, Obama was content to let it. Hours after the Washington zoo locked its gates and national parks closed across the country, Obama’s top opinion tracker, David Simas, gleefully tweeted out the latest results. “Two new polls. Same findings. Independents sour on GOP,” he crowed.

For some Republican strategists, this was the nightmare foreshadowed by the exit polls of 2012: a party marching resolutely away from the center of public opinion. “The alarm bells are starting to go off for me,” says Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, who recently co-authored a report for the Republican National Committee recommending a swift turn to the middle. “If you want to appeal to the base in 2014”–a midterm election when turnout will probably be light–“I get it,” he says. “But if you want to appeal to the base in a presidential year,” the hard-line position “is going to lead to doom and failure going into 2016.”

Even as the shutdown begins to take its toll, the next battle is looming. By Oct. 17, Congress must pass a bill to lift the federal debt limit or risk economic calamity. Failure to do so would put the government on the brink of default, an event long considered so unthinkable that economists say they can’t predict the consequences. One optimistic scenario is that Boehner’s decision to hold the line on a shutdown will release the pent-up frustrations among members of his fractious conference, paving the way for a big compromise. But it could also embolden them. Some figures in the Republican Party are making a case that not raising the debt ceiling would not be catastrophic. Both parties are bracing for an even higher-stakes brawl at a time when it is not clear anyone has the ability to lead the country. “It’s like the car crashed,” one GOP lobbyist said as the weirdness unfolded, “but no one knew it until they went to use the car.”

The Republican Rebellion

Maybe the only surprise was how ill prepared the Republican leadership was for this safe-seat insurrection. For a few fleeting moments after Obama’s re-election, there were signs that the GOP might turn to the center, as Obama had predicted during the 2012 campaign. A decisive re-election would break the feverish stalemate in Washington, he said. Two days after Obama’s victory, Boehner was asked whether Republicans would continue to pursue a repeal of health care reform. “I think the election changes that,” he said. “Obamacare is the law of the land.” He flatly rejected the idea of tying funding for the bill to the larger fiscal battle. “Trying to put Obamacare on [a budget resolution] risks shutting down the government,” Boehner warned in March, the last time the government faced a funding decision.

A blue-ribbon panel of Republican elites urged the party to change along with the evolving electorate by becoming more pro-immigration and gay-friendly. Jeb Bush, the most bona fide conservative member of his family’s Republican dynasty, floated a long-anticipated trial balloon as a 2016 candidate. Burnishing his proven appeal among Hispanic voters, the former Florida governor tried to seize the moment by publishing a manifesto to solve the problem of illegal immigration. But the appetite for change was an illusion; the moment had already passed. Bush’s ideas were snuffed by a grassroots reaction that refused to acknowledge defeat. And while immigration reform would clear the Senate, it was already dead on arrival in the House.

The GOP base wanted candidates who would resist, not compromise. That same week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul fluttered their hearts with his 13-hour filibuster to protest the Obama Administration’s drone policy. The issue, troubling and arcane, united antigovernment conservatives with liberals who fear a surveillance state. Foreign policy fissures in both parties made drone politics complicated, but Paul’s defiance of the President set the tone for the months that followed.

Meanwhile, the budget process was still a mess. For the first time since 2009, both Senate and House managed to pass budget bills–but hard-liners sabotaged a committee to reconcile the two spending plans. Few noticed at the time, because higher tax rates and a slightly stronger economy boosted tax revenue and masked the emergency. But by May, the impasse was obvious and an autumn crisis loomed like the third-reel showdown in a spaghetti western.

That’s when the GOP’s nervous bankers drew down the shades on their establishments. During Mitt Romney’s 2012 run for President, a few dozen superrich donors dispensed huge sums, while party bigwigs like strategist Karl Rove and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus spread the cash around as needed. When Romney lost and the strategy proved an expensive bust, the checkbooks closed and the party’s power structure shifted.

Now more doctrinaire groups began raising money with the explicit goal of pushing Republican policy to the right. Conservative outfits like the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and Heritage Action for America weren’t interested in cutting deals to soothe financial markets. They wanted to energize the despondent core of true believers. Working out of drab, fluorescent-lit offices a few blocks and a world away from the gilded suites of the Capitol, Heritage stoked the primal fear of primary challenges in most members of Congress. It pushed hot-button issues, published rankings to praise the orthodox, and used their clout to punish signs of squishiness. Ideology, not party strategy, was their passion. “We’re not good Republicans,” Heritage Foundation executive Phillip Truluck boasts. “We’re conservatives.”

Heritage Action and the others paved the way for the ambitious junior Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, a slick and silver-tongued rookie who appears to have noticed that Obama once had those same credentials. In late July, Heritage began promoting a plan backed by Cruz to turn the approaching budget crisis into a roadblock for Obamacare. Party elites scoffed, then grew worried–for they could see that what was good politics for Cruz might be bad for the greater GOP. “Every smart Republican,” recalls a House Republican leadership aide, “saw there was no good end to this.”

But the machinery was engaged, and it seemed to have no reverse gear. At home during the August recess, though the headlines screamed Syria, conservative House Republicans heard little from their constituents except opposition to Obamacare. When they returned to Washington, the GOP lawmakers convened a closed-door meeting in the bowels of the Capitol. One by one, members of the rank-and-file took the microphone to report that their voters were demanding a fight against what Representative John Fleming of Louisiana has called “the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed.”

They scoffed at warnings that this was a bad idea. “When your approval rating is at 9% as an institution, we don’t have much further to go down,” says Tim Huelskamp, a second-term House Republican from Kansas. When a reporter noted that Obama won re-election while boasting of his health care reforms, South Carolina Representative Jeff Duncan, a sophomore Tea Partyer, shot back, “I was re-elected in 2012 too.”

Speaker Boehner and his top lieutenant, Eric Cantor of Virginia, preferred to sidestep a shutdown, fearful that it would boomerang on the GOP. They believed that a better chance at confrontation would come along later in the year, when Obama would be forced to seek authority to add more federal debt. But within a few days of reconvening, Boehner’s vote-counting whips revealed that the membership did not want to wait. “It wasn’t his thing,” admits Congressman Pat Tiberi, an ally from Boehner’s home state of Ohio. “Leadership clearly would have preferred to have this fight over the debt ceiling.”

The insistent backbenchers dragged the Speaker into battle, setting in motion a fight that culminated the night of Sept. 30. By then, Boehner had settled on a strategy of forcing Democratic Senators to take a sequence of tough votes, with no real attempt to avert a shutdown. The House passed a series of budget resolutions, each one aimed at sapping Obamacare, knowing that the Senate would swiftly volley them back.

Boehner had enough votes from moderate Republicans to keep the government open, if he was willing to concede defeat and join those votes with House Democrats’. But “there would be a major revolt. He’s trying to avoid that,” says New York Republican Peter King, the would-be leader of the moderate insurrection. In effect, Boehner allowed the hardcores to shoot the party in the foot rather than provoking them into setting it on fire. “The question is, When does enough become enough?” King muses. “When does he decide to basically pull the nuclear trigger and start a civil war within the Republican Party?”

Doom and Gloom

The sad news is that the shutdown may be just another marker on the road from bad to worse, where the power of minority rule, refined by the politics of safe seats, paralyzes the body politic indefinitely. If the past few years have shown anything, it’s that Congress can always find a way to fall further before it reaches its nadir. “No one I have talked to on either side of the aisle knows what the endgame is,” explains Representative Dan Lipinski, a Democrat from Illinois. There are always more hostages to take, more ways to threaten broader harm if specific ideological goals are not embraced.

The tactic is gaining favor because it works in the narrowest sense. The 2011 standoff over the debt ceiling–which rattled markets, shaved economic growth and directly cost taxpayers billions in higher interest costs–birthed the so-called sequester, a 5% forced reduction in most discretionary spending. In January, Obama made it clear that he was willing to let all middle-class tax rates rise if Republicans did not agree to a targeted tax increase on the wealthiest Americans. More recently, Senate majority leader Harry Reid threatened to blow up Senate rules if Republicans did not allow the confirmation of a gaggle of presidential appointees. The Republicans blinked.

Even the rosiest proposed scenario for a solution to the current impasse would fund the government only through mid-November, setting the stage for another Götterdämmerung, with the prospect of yet another crisis when the government will face shutdown or the debt ceiling must inevitably be raised again. In the absence of a functional appropriations process–let alone a framework for compromise over long-term fiscal reforms–funding the government a few weeks or months at a time may become “the new normal,” warns Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Party leaders on both sides, from the President to the Speaker, have come to terms over the past few years with the limits of their powers. Boehner has agreed to do the bidding of his most conservative members for now. The specter of a 2014 primary fight has sidelined Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, one of Washington’s most seasoned dealmakers. His Democratic counterpart, Reid has egged on the GOP infighting and eschewed any negotiations. And Obama, the leader of the free world, has been wary of inserting himself too deeply in the whole sordid spectacle, though he shows up occasionally to lecture the legislators about responsibility.

In the meantime, each faction busies itself with the daily messaging war, an unending skirmish of e-mail blasts, tweets, viral videos and cable-news sound bites, making the eternal case that someone else is to blame. The nation has been carved up into echo chambers; increasingly, we hear only the sound of our own passions and fears reverberating. While Obama clearly had the initial advantage from the shutdown, according to polls, he is unlikely to escape all harm. The public has given up on waiting for the era of good feeling that he promised in his first campaign, and Obama’s approval rating is now mired in the low 40s.

Voters will have to wait another year to decide at the voting booth who wins this unseemly and destructive combat. Republican pollster Whit Ayres is not alone in his fear that the stiff-necked purity of the safe-seat conservatives will cost the party its House majority. “It’s frustrating not being able to have much effect on Obamacare,” he warns. “It would be even more frustrating to watch Nancy Pelosi wield the Speaker’s gavel again.”

Which she could certainly do in 2015 should her health and ambition hold up, because her own re-election is a foregone conclusion. She has a safe seat in San Francisco, where she frequently wins 80% of the vote no matter what befalls the rest of the country.

–With reporting by Zeke Miller/Washington And Alex Rogers/Washington

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