The New New Deal (28 page)

Eventually, Rahm stopped bathing his guests in four-letter words long enough to get to the point: Were Republicans going to support this or what?

Probably a few, they mumbled.

Anyone here?

Uh … no.

Rahm figured it was still early in the game. These guys could vote no on the initial House bill, then switch to yes on the final bill after it was worked out with the Senate. But so far, the scoreboard didn’t look the way he had hoped.

C
antor’s whip team wasn’t sure it could persuade the entire conference to march in lockstep. “You had a popular president, a financial melt-down, people talking about whether there was going to be a Republican Party,” recalls Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, another deputy whip. “I thought half the Republicans might vote for the stimulus.” But
the whip count cleaned up quickly, with only five problem children the day before the vote. Louisiana’s Anh Cao was the only “Lean Yes.”

What brought the Republicans together were the Democrats. Obama’s “I won” and Pelosi’s “we wrote the bill” helped rally the troops. Some Republicans thought their best whip was Obey, whose smarter-than-thou bombast helped persuade members to be against anything he was for. The actual content of the bill was a unifying force, too. The whip team portrayed it as Democratic overreach and an undemocratic outrage, the kind of hodgepodge no Republican could support.

“It was larded up with every Democratic policy wish since they lost the House in 1994,” McHenry says. “It was so big and atrocious, we couldn’t be for it.”

For example, many Republicans were willing to extend unemployment benefits. But the Recovery Act seemed to plus up every antipoverty program under the sun: food stamps, food banks, Head Start, Early Head Start, public housing, plus a new “emergency fund” for families on welfare. Not to mention $87 billion to help states keep people on Medicaid. It sounded like a Liberals Greatest Hits album.

“What Republican was going to vote for all that?” Tom Cole asks. “It’s not virtue if you’re not tempted.”

The Democrats had beaten most of the Republicans who might have been tempted. And Cantor included LaTourette and several other moderates on his working group, keeping them inside the partisan tent. But the whip team was still worried about centrists like John McHugh of New York, who later became Obama’s army secretary; Peter King of New York, who had carried water for public employee unions pushing for state aid; and Fred Upton of Michigan, who had delighted environmentalists by leading the fight to phase out incandescent light bulbs. The whips applied pressure, but mostly they supplied information, sending out memos reminding the conference that the NEA recently spent $190,000 on “various artistic endeavors in San Francisco,” that the STD prevention program had once advertised HIV testing at a transgender beauty contest in, yes, San Francisco.
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Castle was planning to run for Biden’s Senate seat in blue-state Delaware, and he found his party’s
knee-jerk opposition to Obama unnerving; he had said the stimulus should be about $800 billion. But he never came close to voting yes.

“It felt like an ordinary appropriations bill,” he told me. “I mean, school construction, I couldn’t vote for that in a stimulus. And handing states all that money, it seemed like a government takeover kind of thing.”

Castle has intellectual-looking glasses and a quiet decency that make him seem thoughtful, but he couldn’t explain why repairing schools wouldn’t create jobs, or how preventing layoffs of state workers would produce a government takeover of anything. In fact, he complained that the aid to states only saved time-limited jobs, as if he would have preferred a more permanent expansion of government. When I tried to explore these contradictions, he backtracked: “I don’t know. It was just too much to swallow.” He simply had a bad feeling about the stimulus, solidified by Republican groupthink and Democratic high-handedness.

“The dogs just didn’t like the food,” Cole says. “And once you get down to just a few dogs still sniffing around the food, they start thinking: ‘How come none of the other dogs are eating the food? Maybe it’s poisoned.’”

Cao was sniffing the hardest. Obama had vacuumed up 75 percent of the vote in his district, and Cao didn’t think much of his constituents’ ability to judge his positions on the merits. “I was in a very difficult position,” he said later. “I represent an African American district; all of them wanted to support a black president. Obviously, they wouldn’t know whether or not these bills are good for them.” But Cao didn’t want to alienate his new Republican colleagues by breaking ranks, either; Boehner had written a memo titled “The Future Is Cao.” Cantor and his whip team called Cao constantly, while arranging additional lobbying calls from McCain (who had a fund-raiser in common with Cao) and Newt Gingrich (who had, bizarrely, offered to help Cao with African American outreach after his victory). Cao, who had joined the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, became convinced the bill was too heavy on social services and too light on public works.

“Traditionally, when you look at federal programs that create jobs, it’s road construction, infrastructure rebuilding,” Cao says. “The bulk
of the stimulus went into Medicaid, unemployment benefits. It was essentially a massive spending bill.”

In fact, state aid and unemployment benefits were solid stimulus, too. But quite a few Republicans wanted more infrastructure spending, especially the thirty Republicans on Transportation and Infrastructure. They saw nothing partisan about filling potholes, cutting ribbons, and posing with oversized cardboard checks. “You know the one thing that brings Democrats and Republicans together?” Rahm says. “Concrete!”

As the House vote approached, that created a dilemma for Republican leaders.

C
antor and Mike Pence were both part of the conservative Republican Study Committee as well as the leadership team. But as one aide put it, Pence rolled out of bed thinking about being a conservative, while Cantor woke up thinking about being a leader. Infrastructure reflected the difference. In leadership meetings, Cantor argued that the Republican stimulus alternative should go big on public works, so Cao, LaTourette, and other GOP concrete lovers would feel comfortable voting against the Democratic bill. His aides were afraid that if Democrats added a lot of extra infrastructure, dozens of Republicans might support the stimulus. Pence pushed back: Aren’t we supposed to be against government spending?

“You can’t say spending does nothing for economic growth and then on the other hand, let’s put it all in highways,” one conservative leadership aide recalls.

Why not? Many Republicans liked highways, and John Mica of Florida, the ranking Republican on the transportation committee, kept complaining that only 8 percent of the House bill went to infrastructure. He wasn’t counting cyber infrastructure like broadband, health IT, and the smart grid, or even veterans hospitals, park roads, and other traditional infrastructure that didn’t flow through his committee. But Mica wanted more. He claimed that every $1 billion invested in infrastructure “creates or sustains” thirty thousand jobs, the kind of Keynesian argument the GOP ridiculed when Democrats made it.

Cantor wasn’t making Keynesian arguments. He just didn’t think the centrists would join the crusade against the stimulus unless they could vote for something that moved dirt. “I have no memory of hearing principled arguments,” says one conservative House aide. “It was all just retail politics. ‘Well, this is a state we could win in the future.’ Not the kind of arguments that sat well with ideology-based thinkers.” Pence, the most ardent ideology-based thinker in the leadership, kept insisting the GOP should not try to out–New Deal the Democrats.

Ultimately, the leaders decided to fall off both sides of the horse. The official $478 billion Republican alternative consisted entirely of tax cuts and an extension of unemployment benefits.
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But the GOP also crafted a second $715 billion substitute that included far more traditional infrastructure than the supposedly lavish Democratic bill.
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That way, moderates like Cao and Castle who couldn’t back the right-wing alternative could vote yes on something other than the actual bill.

Republicans never bothered to explain how $715 billion could be good public policy while $815 billion was freedom-crushing socialism. In the minority, they didn’t have to.

“I
am tempted to ask the chair: What year is this?” It was 2009—January 28, to be exact—and Obey was on the House floor, fending off a Republican effort to slash spending before the final stimulus vote. “Yeah, I didn’t think it was 1933,” Obey said. “You know, they don’t look like Herbert Hoover, but there are an awful lot of people in this chamber who think like Herbert Hoover.”

Grumpy and weary, his voice hoarse from weeks of stimulus defense, Obey ranted about the Republican “mosquitoes” who had turned a historic debate into a trivial spat over sod and condoms that weren’t even in the bill. Yes, the arts money was still there, but Obey, who played harmonica in a bluegrass band, was not about to apologize for saving arts jobs; the Baltimore Opera Company had just gone bankrupt,
and Florida was slashing its cultural funding in half. His larger point was that the economy was losing over 100,000 jobs a week. The blizzard of rhetoric about imaginary earmarks for polar bear exhibits couldn’t obscure the need for a government rescue.

“The rubber band has finally snapped,” Obey said. “The markets are in chaos, people are panicked, and we’ve got to do something to stabilize the situation. Sooner or later, we have to recognize this is not Herbert Hoover time.”

Most of the Republicans who spoke on the floor agreed something needed to be done—just not this. They quoted Summers about poorly designed stimulus, Orszag about the slow pace of public works, Romer about the power of tax cuts. They called state aid an “unfunded mandate”—when most of it was unmandated funds. They warned that the Recovery Act could siphon money to the left-wing community activists at ACORN, the latest Fox News bugaboo. They claimed that the “emergency fund” for the down-and-out would reverse welfare reform, even though Ron Haskins, the former Republican congressional aide who wrote the 1996 welfare reform bill, says it did no such thing. “I was extremely worried that Democrats would try to undermine welfare reform, but they didn’t,” Haskins says.

No matter. The Republicans attacked the stimulus as “one of the worst abuses of power in the history of Congress,” “the most colossal mistake in the history of Congress,” “a steamroll of socialism being forced down the throats of the American people,” a blob of climate change research and digital TV converters.

Republicans then introduced their tax cut alternative, claiming it would create twice as many jobs at half the cost of the House bill.
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Democrats noted that the Republican record of economic forecasting and fiscal stewardship did not inspire confidence in that claim. And Obey noted that after all the Republican rhetoric about infrastructure, the alternative had not one dime for transportation: “Those jobs go blooey.” Ditto for the grid, broadband, and health IT: “Those jobs go blooey.”

Predictably, the House rejected the $478 billion alternative, with only two Blue Dog Democrats voting yes and nine moderate Republicans
voting no.
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Without skipping a beat, the Republicans introduced their $715 billion substitute, which doubled Democratic spending on highways and quintupled spending on the water projects of the scandal-plagued Army Corps of Engineers. It failed, too, with thirteen Blue Dogs voting yes and thirty-one conservative Republicans voting no.

So more than three fourths of the GOP conference voted for a plan with no infrastructure as well as a plan with extra infrastructure. Really, the only thing the plans had in common was that they weren’t the Democratic plan. “The Republicans were never burdened by principle,” says John Dingell of Michigan, who had served in the House since 1955. “I’ve never seen it this partisan and nasty. You almost saw the country collapse, but they didn’t give a damn about anything but power.”

In the end, every single House Republican voted against the Democratic bill, along with eleven Democrats. It still passed easily, but as Cantor had hoped, the only thing bipartisan about the vote was the opposition.

“They just wanted us to do this ourselves, so they could beat the living hell out of us afterwards,” Dingell says.

Some White House aides still thought some Republicans would end up voting for the bill on final passage, to avoid accusations of doing nothing as the economy unraveled.

“It’s an old playbook,” Obey said on the floor. “It’s exactly what they did to FDR on Social Security. When they couldn’t beat it, they joined the parade. … They went along so people wouldn’t know they tried to kill it in the first place.”

Other Democrats wondered: Which part of zero didn’t Obey understand? Any Republican who voted for Porkulus would be begging for a primary challenger.

“The Republicans had a concerted strategy to oppose everything. They were betting on the failure of the economy,” says Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the head of the House Democratic campaign committee. “If that wasn’t totally obvious before the zero vote, it should have been obvious after it.”

H
ouse Republicans had voted against tax cuts for 95 percent of the country; unemployment benefits for laid-off workers; Head Start for kids and Meals on Wheels for seniors. They had rejected aid to save the jobs of teachers, cops, firefighters, janitors, and school nurses. They had marched in lockstep against special education, levees, and highways, wind and solar farms, cancer research, crime victims, border security, and high-speed Internet. They had tried to stop Democrats from sending $250 checks to senior citizens and disabled veterans.

“Washington insiders and media pundits thought it was insane to oppose so popular a president on a bill that spread so much money around,” Cantor wrote later.
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