Jim DeMint: Leading the Right’s Rebel Brigade

On Nov. 15, a band of tea party activists gathered near the Capitol, waving signs that read “Don’t Just Stand There, Undo Something” and “Stop Spending, You Are Stealing MY Future!!!” A guy in a Captain America costume hoisted, for reasons unclear, a giant Marine Corps flag. In the middle of it all stood a man whom the crowd cheered as if he were a conquering hero: South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. And in a way he was. DeMint’s early support — sometimes in defiance of the GOP establishment — helped elect several Tea Party candidates, including Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Now DeMint, 59, was hailing a new political era. “Power has been wrested out of the hands of the politicians and into the hands of the American people,” he told the crowd. “Everything has changed here in Washington!”

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Later that afternoon, DeMint notched another big win. He had been calling on his fellow Senate Republicans for months to embrace a ban on earmarks — those notorious budget items that lawmakers direct back home for projects of often dubious value. (Think Bridge to Nowhere.) To DeMint, earmarks represent an institutionalized corruption of the way Congress treats taxpayer dollars. But Senate GOP elders, who enjoy spreading money around, didn’t see it that way. GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell dismissed DeMint’s crusade as misguided.

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In a different era, a junior Senator like DeMint might have given up his fight in exchange for a better committee assignment. But now, when GOP insiders like McConnell are losing their leverage and insurgents like DeMint are riding a wave of steaming tea, different tactics apply. DeMint rounded up anti-earmark supporters, working new media (he announced new co-sponsors via Twitter and joined a conference call for bloggers to press the issue), and vowed to force an internal Republican vote on Nov. 16, the day after the rally outside the Capitol. Conservative blogs and talk-radio hosts rallied to DeMint’s side. Smelling an impending defeat, McConnell cried uncle. “Americans want change,” he conceded in a Senate-floor speech, adding that the ban would be a “small but important symbolic step” to demonstrate that Republicans are serious about spending cuts.

But DeMint and his allies believe the earmark victory is anything but symbolic. They say earmarks are the grease that makes the hidden machinery of money politics work, the bribes that get really expensive measures through Congress. “Appropriators use earmarks to buy support for bills that come in way over budget,” says Brian Darling of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Others point to suspicious coincidences between earmarks for certain industries and campaign contributions from their lobbyists. In DeMint’s typically pointed phrasing, earmarks are “the gateway drug to socialism.”

Which is DeMint’s real target. The earmarks ban is just the first step toward what he hopes will be a radical downsizing of the federal government. That means slashing taxes and spending, repealing the Obama health care law, turning education policy over to the states and gradually dismantling safety-net programs like Social Security and Medicare. All would be blows against what DeMint calls creeping socialism in the U.S. He warns that they will require some rough tactics in the new Congress. “I’m blasting rock, and it’s hard to be graceful,” he says with a chuckle. But some Republicans aren’t laughing. They worry that DeMint’s platform is not the stuff of national majorities, that he and his band of emboldened insurgents might overreach and scare off all but the most hard-core conservative voters.

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That brings us to the real question regarding DeMint and the Tea Party movement he has come to represent. Are they leading the Republican Party down the road to salvation — or to self-destruction?

Purity Can Be Painful
“I am way out of my comfort zone,” DeMint told TIME, sitting in a Senate office conference room a few hours before his Republican colleagues formally voted to accept his no-earmark rule. Earlier that day he had been mobbed by reporters inside the Capitol, something that makes him squirm a bit. “It’s not my personality at all.”

It’s true that DeMint has never been one for flash and bombast. James Warren DeMint was born in 1951 in Greenville, S.C. His parents divorced when he was 5, and DeMint’s mother managed the family “like a drill sergeant.” For income, she ran a ballroom-dancing school — the DeMint Academy of Dance and Decorum — from the house. As a boy, DeMint absorbed traditional values from television shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. (He calls Andy Griffith “my surrogate father” and even slightly resembles the actor, with the same wholesome mild manner to boot.) Not that he was always a model citizen in his youth. “I set my moral standards low … I had a fast car and a slow brain,” he has written. But that changed after he had a Christian awakening when he was in his mid-20s. He earned a graduate degree in business at Clemson and pursued a career in market research.

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It wasn’t until he was in his late 40s that DeMint jumped into politics, after helping out in a friend’s run for Congress. DeMint was incensed by what he considered a growing public reliance on government largesse for things like housing, food and income, which to him was creating dependency and stifling free enterprise. DeMint set out to shrink government and expand “freedom” — the central word in his political lexicon. In 1998 he was elected to the House of Representatives from the Greenville area, and six years later to the Senate.

After Republicans lost their congressional majorities in 2006, DeMint found himself disgusted with his party and the “clowns,” as he calls them, who had voted for earmark-stuffed budget bills and spending expansions, like an expensive new Medicare prescription-drug subsidy that passed in 2003. Those Bush-era Republicans “betrayed the trust of the American people” and deserved to lose, he says. So the Senator implored his colleagues to change their ways, and when they didn’t seem to be listening — “people were more concerned with their parochial interests” than the good of the party or the nation — he resolved to change his colleagues. His goal was to root out Republicans who complained about spending but then guzzled from the public trough.

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DeMint’s first move, in April 2009, was to tell Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania that he would be endorsing Specter’s conservative primary rival, Pat Toomey. Although Specter had often voted with Democrats, the national GOP backed him in the primary anyway. That, after all, is the custom with party incumbents. (Specter switched parties and became a Democrat the same day.) But to DeMint, such cozy customs are precisely what ails his party. So two months later he struck again, with his endorsement of Rubio — then a little-known state legislator — who went on to trounce sitting Florida governor Charlie Crist by 19 points. He was also an early supporter of Paul, who took on a local favorite of McConnell’s in Kentucky. In all, a political-action committee that DeMint formed for his candidates raised and spent nearly $7.5 million during the midterm campaign. DeMint boasts that $5.5 million of that cash was raised via his website in contributions averaging less than $50 (although some of it also came from less populist sources, including several corporations; $10,000 came from Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire conservative activists and oil moguls Charles and David Koch).

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For all the glory of seeing some chosen candidates elected, DeMint has also endured withering scorn for elevating a few dark horses who went on to blow winnable Senate races. In Colorado, DeMint supported Ken Buck over a party-backed primary rival, only to see Buck go down. More notoriously, DeMint endorsed Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell just before her shocking primary upset over moderate Republican Mike Castle; O’Donnell’s Democratic opponent beat her by 16 points. DeMint also enthusiastically supported three other Tea Party heroes immediately after they’d taken down GOP incumbents, to the dismay of the party machine: Mike Lee of Utah, who toppled three-term Senator Robert Bennett in a state-party convention vote (and who calls DeMint “a mentor”); Joe Miller of Alaska, who beat Senator Lisa Murkowski in a primary but lost to her general-election write-in effort; and Nevada’s Sharron Angle, who beat another Establishment primary pick but couldn’t take down Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

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“Extremists cost the Republicans three seats,” says Specter, citing Colorado, Nevada and Delaware. DeMint shrugs off such criticisms by insisting that sending a wake-up call to the party is worth losing a few seats in the short term. “I’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 60 Arlen Specters,” DeMint told a conservative audience earlier this year. And he adds of his earmark victory, “If we’d had Specter, Crist [and defeated Kentucky Republican Senate primary contender] Trey Grayson, it wouldn’t have passed.” Still, the Senator concedes that his quest for party purity has its drawbacks. “It’s been painful,” he says. “A lot of friendships that are very important to me with fellow Republicans are very strained right now.”

The Next Battles
The earmark victory fresh behind him, DeMint is sharpening his sword for new confrontations. When Congress votes early next year to raise the national debt limit so the U.S. can keep borrowing, DeMint says he will insist on adding a balanced-budget provision and vote no otherwise. “I’ve been fighting spending since I’ve been in Congress, so I don’t feel a responsibility to vote for an increase in the debt limit,” he says. “These clowns who have been voting for more spending … they’re going to have to step up to the plate and vote for it.” And if Obama won’t accept a budget-balancing amendment? “I think we’re going to have to force a showdown with the President,” he says. Given that the possibility of a default of the national debt is on the line, such brinkmanship makes some in the GOP nervous.

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Looking further ahead, DeMint is hoping for a debate about everything government does, including discussion of possible overhauls of Social Security and Medicare from government-run systems into programs based on vouchers and individual choice. Even as he calls for smaller deficits, he wants a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts for all earners. (And while he has recently downplayed social issues, DeMint is as conservative as they come in that regard. Witness his view that gay people or sexually active single women should be barred from teaching in public schools.)

Such ambitious goals may delight hard-core Republicans and many Tea Party activists. But even voters who fret about spending and debt tend to make exceptions for education, Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself can say that Medicare spending must be restrained and then in the same interview bash health care reform for reducing the program’s growth by $500 billion. (He says he reconciles this apparent contradiction by opposing any cuts for today’s seniors but supporting longer-term changes.)

With Obama in the White House and Democrats in control of the Senate, DeMint won’t see his vision put into effect anytime soon. But he’s sure to keep his GOP colleagues off balance, especially as another election approaches. “This is just the beginning!” he told the crowd gathered outside the Capitol, adding that “2012 is going to make what just happened look small if we continue what we started.” After his remarks, DeMint was grabbed by an adoring May Ann Haas, a homemaker, 61, who got up at 6:30 in Scranton, Pa., in order to hear him speak. “We’ve got your back,” Haas told him.

Jim DeMint knows that. And the Republican Party establishment now knows it too.

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