Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (49 page)

Unfortunately, a new obstacle arose. Entirely legitimately, the administration, with the ardent support of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, had another “must” on the lame-duck Senate agenda—ratification of its nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Substantively these two goals did not conflict in any way. But to my great disappointment, Senator Lindsey Graham hinted that he and a few other Republicans might reverse their support for the treaty if the Democrats did not abandon the DADT effort. Graham has intermittently sought to moderate his party’s shift to the right. I had no expectation that he would vote for LGBT military service, but I was appalled that he would devote such extraordinary energy to defeating us. Threatening to put anti-LGBT prejudice ahead of a treaty he believed to be in the national security interest hardly became a would-be leader of the responsible Republican faction.

We did have a very powerful force on our side. In contrast to 1993, the LGBT community and our allies mobilized very effectively on the issue. The leading prorepeal organization, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, spearheaded a vigorous, sophisticated campaign. They made it clear to the president and congressional leadership that failing to win this fight would severely curtail the enthusiasm of LGBT voters. As a result, we had the political muscle to persuade supporters of the nuclear pact to reject Graham’s proposed trade-off. Rather than try to defend his legislative extortion, Graham backed off in the most decisive way: He denied that he had ever said what he said.

On December 9, after the Senate failed to invoke cloture, Collins and Lieberman proposed removing repeal from the defense bill and passing it as a stand-alone measure. This gambit, they hoped, would break the political deadlock. Republicans had made opposition to Reid’s handling of the defense bill a party issue, complaining that they had not been given a fair chance to amend it. With the exception of Collins, they did not feel that they could back down and give the Democrats cloture without some concession. This dynamic may be hard for people outside the institution to comprehend, but it was very strong inside the Senate. Putting a “clean”—that is, repeal-free—defense bill on the floor would allow the Republicans to claim a procedural victory. Prorepeal Senate Republicans would then be free to vote for both bills.

But one serious problem remained. Adjournment fever had reached the virulent stage. There was by now one week left for Senate business, and repeal was competing for time and political support with two other major administration-Democratic priorities—the nuclear treaty and the DREAM Act to protect immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children without legal status. Republican votes were needed for both of these as well, and it was far from clear that there were enough Republicans willing to break with their party on all three measures. (There weren’t. The DREAM Act was defeated by a filibuster.)

The days that followed became a grueling legislative duel. If we moved first, could we count on the Senate’s cooperation?

In order to realize the Collins-Lieberman plan for a separate repeal bill, the Senate expected us to put aside the defense authorization we had passed and instead pass two new bills—a stand-alone repeal and a “clean” repeal-free defense bill—and send them both on to the Senate.

I learned this on Monday of the session’s last week, while recuperating from a cataract operation. Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, had called me while I was in the outpatient center, just as my anesthesia was wearing off. Jim was with me for the operation and took the call. He was shielding me for the day from most business, but he knew how important this was, and I called Hoyer later that day from home. I told him I was still a little groggy and would get back to him the next morning—Tuesday—so we could decide on our strategic response.

A call from Pelosi soon woke me completely. She pointed out that if we sent the Senate both bills, it was entirely possible that they would pass the by now noncontroversial defense bill, try to obtain cloture on repealing the military ban, and if that failed for the third time in a year, call it a day and move on to the other two major legislative items—the nuclear treaty and the DREAM Act. If that happened, Democrats would be able to claim—accurately—that they strongly supported ending the ban and blame the Republicans for its survival.

In some circumstances, settling for such an outcome might have been a sound political approach. But we were determined to do better. Together, Pelosi and I devised a strategy to make sure that the Senate would act. We would send a repeal bill to the Senate immediately, using a procedural maneuver that made instant action possible. We would then wait for the Senate to pass the repeal, and only once they did would we send them the clean defense bill.

This was very high-stakes gamesmanship. House Democrats would be holding the bill that established America’s defense posture for the year hostage to the “gay agenda.” Our gambit also posed a problem for Hoyer. He had been doing great work on behalf of repeal, and the Senate’s offer to break the logjam by separating the two bills represented a major success. The hostage-taking strategy Pelosi and I devised might undercut him. It didn’t help that Pelosi and Hoyer had a recent history of tension. They had run against each other for House minority whip in 2002, and after angrily debating Democratic differences over the Iraq War, she had supported a candidate against him for the majority leader’s position in 2007. To their great credit, they put all that behind them and worked smoothly as a team during our four years in the majority, with a very constructive division of labor. While there were no significant policy differences between them, Hoyer was the one who worked more closely with the moderate and conservative Democrats.

And now it was conservative Democrats who would complain that their defense bill was in jeopardy. Dissatisfaction would be exacerbated by the perception that Hoyer, their champion in the leadership, was being disrespected—especially, to acknowledge an unpleasant fact, by a woman. Old wounds could quickly reopen.

Even worse, our plan could have undermined the tentative agreement with the Senate. Intercameral relations are inherently fragile. Cokie Roberts often recalled that her father, Majority Leader Hale Boggs, liked to repeat an old Capitol Hill line: “House Republicans are not our enemy. They are our opposition. The Senate is our enemy.” (The rise of the Tea Party has rendered this line moot, even as a joke.) Our allies in the Senate, who had pressed reluctant colleagues to accept the two-bill approach, wouldn’t be happy to be told that they hadn’t done enough. In the hypertense atmosphere of a lame-duck session’s last week, that could be fatal.

Given all this, Hoyer was in a tight spot. But as Pelosi pointed out, there was a solution: I should be the heavy.

On Tuesday morning, I got back to Hoyer as promised and outlined the legislative dance that I described above. I told him I could not support sending the Senate a clean defense bill until they passed repeal. He fully supported our approach. Once again I cannot tell the whole story without sacrificing any pretense of modesty. I was ideally situated to be the lead hostage taker. Given the importance of the personal factor in legislating, the fact that I was gay gave me more license to push hard on the issue than any straight leader would have. Hoyer and Pelosi could not demand that the House Democratic leadership pass the defense bill over my vehement, public dissent.

There was expected resistance to our plan from the more conservative Democrats. On the Wednesday before adjournment, this came to a head in a confrontation I had with Congressman Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, as Hoyer played the moderator. (It was one of the many conversations that occur on the House floor, apart from formal proceedings, audible only to the direct participants.) The main business of the House that day, according to our plan, was the DADT repeal bill, which had just passed with Democrats voting 235 to 15 in favor, and the Republicans now opposing it 160 to 15. Skelton was deeply disappointed that we were not also voting to send the defense bill along to the Senate simultaneously. As the leadership’s designated spokesman, I upheld our refusal to do so.

This was painful for me. I liked Skelton very much personally and admired him professionally. He was a man of great integrity. He had accommodated us on both the DADT repeal and the hate crimes bill, despite being one of the more conservative Democrats and coming from an even more conservative district—so conservative that he had been defeated that fall. I told him that I’d appreciated his efforts against LGBT prejudice and was saddened by his defeat, though I don’t think those words softened the blow. He was very eager to see his crowning achievement—the defense bill—become law. For his sake, so was I. But not at the expense of repeal. As we jousted, Hoyer told Skelton as gently as he could that the leadership’s new plan was not going to change. We genuinely believed that the Senate would pass both bills and do right by all of us.

And just in time it did. As Pelosi related to me, with only two days left in the session, Senate majority leader Harry Reid called her to ask that the House adopt the repeal-free defense bill. In response, she reiterated that we would do that in the House just as soon as the Senate passed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal.

According to Pelosi, Reid asked her to wait and then put her on hold briefly. When he returned to the phone, he told her that he had just filed a cloture petition—the first step toward ending a filibuster—and that the petition would be up for a vote on Saturday (the technical language is that it would “ripen at that time”).

This was less than we had insisted on, but Pelosi found Reid’s plan sufficient and decided to go ahead and pass the general defense bill. Reid’s commitment to hold a public vote on Saturday clearly meant that he and others interested in passing a defense bill would do all they could to win the necessary votes for our cause. Pelosi also knew that had we killed the defense bill after Reid’s honest effort to break the filibuster, serious intra-Democratic conflict would have resulted. Her instincts, which are among the best in American politics, were correct, and I concurred with her decision.

On Friday, I had the pleasure of taking the House floor to urge my fellow liberals once again to deviate from our usual pattern and vote yes on the defense bill. I explicitly noted that in doing so, they would be participating in a deal that would end one of the last explicitly anti-LGBT laws on America’s books.

On Saturday, the last day on which controversial action could be considered in the very eventful Congress of 2009–2010, five Senate Republicans voted with Collins for cloture, and DADT was DEAD.

*

The repeal of DADT was an exhilarating conclusion to an extraordinarily productive two years. Working to pass financial reform and DADT repeal in the same Congress had left me mentally and physically exhausted. When the term was over, Jim and I left for a restorative trip to St. John in the Virgin Islands. We had become close to another congressional couple, my colleague Chellie Pingree and her companion (and now husband), Donald Sussman. She had been elected in 2008 to represent the area of Maine where Jim lived and where I was spending much of what little leisure time I had. We saw her at events in her district, I sought her out from time to time on the House floor when I wanted a respite from my colleagues’ entreaties regarding the reform bill, and we were frequent traveling companions on the plane home. But what really cemented our friendship was the strong bond that formed between Donald and Jim as members of the male spouse caucus. They were both amused by the congressional wives’ club’s sometimes awkward transition toward becoming more gender integrated.

For the second Christmastime in a row, we were their grateful guests at Donald’s home on St. John. Over the 2010 holiday break, however, I found myself agonizing over a difficult decision: Should my next term in Congress be my last?

The previous spring, when it became clear the financial reform bill was going to pass, I was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. And so I had resolved that I would not run again after my race that fall. Following my victory, I did not fear losing in 2012—any Democrat who survived the rout of 2010 was highly likely to do even better in a presidential year, when the pro-Democratic turnout is much higher. But my subpar management of my reelection effort undermined my self-confidence. I had also seen too many talented legislators end their careers in a physically and intellectually diminished state. I had long ago decided that I would leave office when I hit seventy-five, and leaving office in January 2013 would cut only two years off that target date.

But as I vacationed on St. John, I had good reasons to reconsider. With the Republicans in control of the House, I did not want it to look as if I was running away from a tough fight. I had fought Newt Gingrich’s aggressive Republican majority in 1995, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was too afraid of the Tea Party to do it again. Indeed, to some extent I looked forward to it. It is easier to criticize the excesses of the other side than it is to pass complex legislation.

Fortunately for my self-image as a mature adult, there was also a more substantive reason for staying on. I could defend our financial reform bill against the alliance of fundamentalist free-market Republicans and unrepentant financial industry leaders who were eager to undermine it.

*

Even on holiday, Jim was an invaluable interlocutor as I talked out the pros and cons of leaving office. His full support for putting off retirement until 2015 was vital to me. So I went back to Washington in January as the ranking minority member of the Financial Services Committee, committed to stay—for two more years.

In the first Congress under the influence of the Tea Party, the Republican majority accomplished nothing of any significance. Sherlock Holmes’s nonbarking dog became the inescapably appropriate metaphor for the work of the Financial Services Committee. Little important legislation made it to the Senate, because the committee sent few bills to the floor, and the House passed even fewer. The split between mainstream conservative Republicans and the ideological crusaders on their right was too strong for the committee to function well.