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When The Tea Party Came To Town (2012)

by Robert Draper(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1451642091 (ISBN13: 9781451642100)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Free Press

review 1: The United States House of Representatives is one of those institutions that forever seems to be going downhill. Representative Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, a member of the first Federal Congress, had praised the original House for having “less party spirit, less of the acrimony of pride when disappointed of success, less personality, less intrigue, cabal, management, or cunning than I ever saw in a public assembly.” By 1796, however, Ames despaired of the growing ideological conflict in the House that had given rise to the two-party system. “Do not ask what good we do,” he wrote; “that is not a fair question, in these days of faction.” Ames’ lament provides the somewhat cumbersome title of Robert Draper’s collective portrait of the House of Representative... mores in the 2011-12 legislative session. The title, and the historical snippets that Draper weaves into the book, suggest that there’s nothing new about the ideological warfare, scandal, tragedy, and partisan gridlock that characterized the House during the 112th Congress. The People’s Institution, as the lower house of the legislative branch has been known since its earliest days, has always been a better reflection of the American people than the Senate. As any semblance of an American consensus withers, and as the citizenry becomes increasingly politically polarized and self-segregates into mutually hostile clusters of lifestyles and beliefs, we should expect the House to follow suit. Yet throughout its history the House has regarded itself as the body where most of the government’s business gets transacted. It’s the pragmatic, deal-cutting counterpart to the Senate – “the cave of the winds,” in the scornful characterization of Rep. John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who has served in the House longer than any other American. But the 112th Congress, in the view of many political observers, was the most dysfunctional and least productive Congress in history (at least until the present Congress). It passed fewer laws, was more ideologically divided, and demonstrated less bipartisan cooperation than any Congress at least since World War II. In the summer of 2011, House Republicans, pressured by the angry populism of the Tea Party movement, created an impasse over the usually routine procedure of raising the statutory debt limit ceiling, thereby threatening to create a global financial crisis and resulting in the first ever downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. Unsurprisingly, the Congress has set records for unpopularity. Dingell speculated that even pedophiles would score higher than the legislative branch’s 9 percent public approval rating. So there is something new and unpleasant about the House, and Do Not Ask What Good We Do offers some insights into what has gone wrong.Draper, a magazine reporter and author of a 2007 book about George W. Bush, approached his topic by attending House floor debates and press conferences as well as interviewing current and former House members and a number of senior staffers. Given the results of the 2010 elections, which resulted in the Republicans retaking control of the House, Draper pays more attention to the GOP than to the Democrats. Unlike Linda Killian’s The Freshmen, which focused exclusively on the Republicans who entered the House in the wake of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 triumph, Draper does not limit his cast of characters to the new members who rode into Congress on a wave of tea. He looks at the leadership of both parties as well as some more senior members, including Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri, one of the House’s few remaining moderate Republicans, and Dingell, who comes across as a genuine wise man. Gabrielle Giffords and Anthony Weiner appear largely because of the horrifying and embarrassing incidents, respectively, that befell them. The GOP freshmen are represented principally by Allen West of Florida, a cashiered Army lieutenant colonel with a telegenic talent for outrageous statements; Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, whom the Heritage Action for America group rated the most conservative House member; Blake Farenthold of Texas, a sometime radio talk show host; and Renee Elmers of North Carolina, a former intensive care nurse. Draper seems to have had the best access to West and Duncan; as he follows them around their offices and back home to their districts, the reader is privy to their scribbled notes and even some of their alleged innermost thoughts.Most embedded reporters come to like the people they bed down with, and Draper provides a largely sympathetic view of the representatives. A notable exception is Nancy Pelosi, who did to the Democrats what Newt Gingrich did to the Republicans in terms of centralizing power in the Speakership and overriding seniority rules to depose chairmen like Dingell whose ideological orthodoxy and personal fealty to Pelosi was questionable. Draper also offers an extremely unflattering characterization of Sheila Jackson Lee, the vainglorious Houston congresswoman who seems in every way an inferior version of her predecessor, Barbara Jordan. But Draper gives a three-dimensional portrait of the controversial West, whose warrior-puffery and incessant use of military metaphors (most of them monstrously inappropriate to democratic politics) are offset by his independent stance on matters such as cutting the defense budget and his skepticism about conventional politics. Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan is presented as a serious policy intellectual and an “honest seeker of solutions,” and the House Majority Whip, Kevin McCarthy of California, comes across as an effective mentor and cheerleader for the eighty-seven GOP freshmen. Duncan, despite his extreme conservatism, is depicted as a sort of Congressional everyman: hardworking, well-meaning, and understandably frustrated by the difficulty of making an impact in the House and with the broader public.Even so, some of the portraits Draper offers cast doubt on his subjects’ understanding of the American political system and even their fitness for office. Draper doesn’t provide much background on or analysis of the Tea Party movement, but he implies that those representatives who are most influenced by it constitute a different breed from past legislators. For one thing, many seem to consider the conservative movement, and its media and funding outlets, to be their primary constituency. The media dictates the priorities of conservatives nationwide – hence the otherwise inexplicable fact that Renee Ellmers won election in 2010 because the most significant hot-button issue in rural North Carolina was the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Once in office, House members seek media attention by making hyperbolic partisan pronouncements, demonstrating what Farenthold calls a willingness “to set your hair on fire in front of the TV camera.” Deviations from the conservative line are dangerous, since they might invite a primary challenge in districts that are constantly being redrawn to make them more uniformly ideological. The traditional duties of legislators – debating with the opposition, passing laws, following party leadership and the institutional norms of Congress, tending to the needs of their districts – go by the wayside.Draper gives plenty of examples of the freshmen Republicans’ willingness to disregard their party leadership and the facts in pursuit of their ideological aims, particularly in relation to the debate over raising the debt ceiling. On one occasion, several freshmen ridiculed an economist and former undersecretary of the Treasury brought in by the GOP leadership to brief them on government finances when his data contradicted their beliefs. Others claimed that the government was lying about running out of money, or that no ill effects would stem from the country defaulting on its debt, or that default was a necessary curative to excessive spending. The freshmen were oblivious to the fact that legislation must be at least minimally acceptable to Democrats to receive Senate approval, and generally seem to have shrugged off the surly bonds of reality and touched the face of pure ideology. The GOP leadership’s sporadic efforts to educate the freshmen came to naught, in Draper’s telling, because Speaker John Boehner had no leverage over them, for reasons that range from the prohibition against earmarks to the likelihood that any attempt to discipline them would provoke a coup against Boehner, abetted by the Iago-like majority leader Eric Cantor. But one wonders if Boehner wasn’t using the intransigence of the Tea Partiers during the debt ceiling negotiations with President Obama as a sort of updated version of Richard Nixon’s “madman strategy”: give the freshmen enough cuts or they’ll destroy the economy! Democrats for their part acceded to Republican demands (in 2011 if not in 2013) because they were less internally unified than the GOP and, as the party of government, had more to lose from the public perception that government doesn’t work.Draper’s narrative is unfailingly entertaining and succeeds in humanizing the House at what may appear in retrospect to have been a turning point in its history. But one wishes that he had pushed back harder against some of his subjects, particularly the GOP freshmen, rather than taking all of their pronouncements at face value. Jeff Duncan, for example, denounced the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) as “disgraceful and un-American” when he was campaigning in 2010. What if anything would he have proposed the government do to address the financial crisis? Would Duncan have voted against the auto bailout, even if that would have decimated the auto parts industries in his district? Does Duncan go along with the conservative demand to abolish the Department of Energy, even though the department’s Savannah River Site nuclear reservation is his district’s largest employer? Draper includes an amusing vignette about the inability of Duncan and the other South Carolina Republican freshmen to secure government funding for deepening the port at Charleston harbor until they were rescued by the state’s lone Democrat, James Clyburn, who used his connections to overcome the earmark ban. Did Duncan learn anything from the episode? Will the Republicans develop a more inclusive approach to governing now that the 2013 shutdown and debt ceiling hostage crisis appear to have backfired spectacularly on the GOP? Do Not Ask What Good We Do is most useful as a foretaste of worse things to come.
review 2: A weaving narrative of the players of the 2010 Congress. Follows a good mix of congressional leadership and freshmen in an attempt to explain the divide between the Tea Party congressmen and everyone else.It explains why Speaker John Boehner is as weak as he is, but IMO fails to explain the sources of Tea Party obstinance. There's a scene when the GOP caucus is addressed by a former Reagan budget director explaining what would happen if the debt limit isn't raised. He's heckled by GOP freshmen who are upset that only 'one side' is being presented. Yet it's never made clear where those freshmen get the perspective that there's another side - something I would have been very interested in. less

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