John Boehner and the Tea Party Congress : The New Yorker

John Boehner’s introduction to the political force that would make him the Speaker of the House of Representatives came on a cool April afternoon in 2009, on the streets of Bakersfield, California. Boehner, the Republican House leader, had come to town for a fund-raiser for his colleague Kevin McCarthy, who represents the area. The event was scheduled for tax day, April 15th—the date targeted for a series of nationwide protest rallies organized by a loosely joined populist movement that called itself the Tea Party. One rally was to take place in Bakersfield, and Boehner and McCarthy decided to make an appearance. “They were expecting a couple of hundred people,” Boehner recalls. “A couple of thousand showed up.”

The two congressmen witnessed a scene of the sort that played in an endless loop across the country for the next eighteen months: people in funny hats waving Gadsden flags and wearing T-shirts saying “No taxation with crappy representation,” venting about bailouts, taxes, entrenched political élites, and an expanding and seemingly pampered public sector. (Noticing an open window in a nearby government office building, some in the Bakersfield crowd shouted, “Shut that window! You’re wasting my air-conditioning!”) Although Bakersfield is in one of the most conservative districts in California, the Tea Party speakers assigned fault to Republicans as well as to Democrats. The event’s organizers had been advised that Boehner and McCarthy would be there but did not invite them to speak.

For Boehner, the Bakersfield rally was a revelation. “I could see that there was this rebellion starting to grow,” he says now. “And I didn’t want our members taking a shellacking as a result.”

Back in Washington, Boehner reported what he’d seen to his Republican colleagues. While many Democrats and the mainstream media mocked the Tea Party, Boehner pressed his members to get out in front of the movement or, at least, get out of its way. “I urge you to get in touch with these efforts and connect with them,” he told a closed-door meeting of the Republican Conference. “The people participating in these protests will be the soldiers for our cause a year from now.”

Boehner seemed an unlikely clarion for an anti-establishment revolt. He had been in Congress since 1991, during the Bush-Quayle Administration—long enough to have twice climbed from the back bench to a leadership position. He was a friend of Ted Kennedy’s, and a champion of George W. Bush’s expansive No Child Left Behind legislation. After the economic collapse of 2008, he had reluctantly advocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“a crap sandwich,” he called it), the Tea Partiers’ litmus test of political villainy.

But Boehner was among the first Beltway Republicans to recognize that the rise of the Tea Party represented, for Republicans, a near-miracle of good luck. At the start of the Obama era, the G.O.P. was a battered and exhausted party, suffering not only defeat but something like an existential crisis. The Republican claim to competence had been squandered during the Bush years, along with its rationale of limited government. A brisk business arose in the writing of conservatism’s obituary, and not just on the left. Declaring Reaganism dead, influential public intellectuals on the right, like David Frum and Ross Douthat, urged a new conservatism that accommodated itself to the public’s apparent acceptance of an activist government, suggesting such policy prescriptions as a national anti-obesity campaign (featuring a “fat tax”) and the payment of subsidies to working-class single men to make them more attractive marriage prospects. Independents, spooked by the Bush-era mixture of “compassionate conservatism” and faith-based activism, seemed irretrievably lost to the G.O.P.

The emergence of the Tea Party, Boehner says, forced upon Republicans, in one cycle, a rebranding that otherwise might have taken the Party a generation to achieve. The channelling of the Tea Party transformed the House Republicans. When the 112th Congress convenes, next month, a third of the Republican members will be freshmen, bound to a mood of deep disaffection. “None of these folks are coming in saying, ‘Mommy, may I?’ ” Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House Speaker, observes.

That presents a challenge to Boehner, who has served for twenty years and certainly noticed that, during the campaign, some Republican candidates made a point of not pledging to vote for him as Speaker. But Boehner aggressively wooed the insurgents, spending much of the summer travelling, often by motor coach, to campaign events—he attended more than a hundred and sixty—and donating millions of dollars from his own campaign chest to the challengers. He adopted the overheated Tea Party rhetoric in vowing to dismantle the Obama health-care plan (“this monstrosity”), and, after the election, he announced a renewal of the Republican moratorium on budgetary earmarks and forswore domestic travel by military jet, a relished perk of his predecessors.

As the transition to the new Congress began, in mid-November, Boehner avoided potential conflicts with his freshman colleagues by promising them a seat at the leadership table and two places on the steering committee that will choose committee chairs. When the freshmen told Boehner that they still felt underrepresented, he gave them a second leadership position and a third steering-committee seat. As it turned out, the transition drama came from the Democratic side, where forty-three members voted against making Nancy Pelosi the minority leader. Boehner and his Republican leadership team won unanimous election.

“When it comes to the issues of cutting spending, creating jobs, dealing with Obamacare, reforming Congress—this unites all of our members, including all eighty-five brand-new ones,” Boehner told me as Congress left Washington for the Thanksgiving recess. “There’s no daylight between the freshmen and any of our members or the leadership.”

But Boehner doesn’t imagine that managing the Tea Party Congress will be as smooth as the transition has been. Gaps between the freshmen and the leadership may well appear when Boehner and his team decide how to proceed on health care, and there is already disagreement between Boehner and some of the newcomers, including at least one freshman member of the leadership team, about how to control the federal deficit. The matter of raising the government’s ceiling on the national debt is a particular concern. Last February, Congress raised the debt limit to $14.2 trillion; the debt is already nearing that point, and will reach it—fulfilling obligations that the government has already incurred—by the time warm weather arrives. Before then, Congress will have to decide whether or not to once again raise the debt limit. (The least of the consequences of doing otherwise would be havoc in the bond market.)

A similar fight in 1995 led to a shutdown of the government, and played disastrously for Newt Gingrich’s Republicans. Clinton’s handling of the situation was masterly, Gingrich’s clumsy. What Republicans considered a principled stand for fiscal restraint played as an act of petulance (Gingrich had publicly complained about having been forced to sit at the rear of the plane on a Presidential trip); Clinton’s approval ratings rose as Gingrich’s plummeted. Boehner and his team will have to convince Republicans that it really is in their best interest to go along with something they vowed, as candidates, to oppose. “This is going to be probably the first really big adult moment” for the new Republican majority, Boehner told me. “You can underline ‘adult.’ And for people who’ve never been in politics it’s going to be one of those growing moments. It’s going to be difficult, I’m certainly well aware of that. But we’ll have to find a way to help educate members and help people understand the serious problem that would exist if we didn’t do it.”

Boehner won’t take the Speaker’s gavel until January 5th, but his unofficial elevation came in September, when President Obama, campaigning to salvage the Democratic majority in Congress, began to frame the election as a chance to save the republic from John Boehner. In a forty-five-minute speech on the economy on September 8th, Obama called out Boehner, by name, eight times. The President seemed almost to be wishing for the gift that voters had handed Bill Clinton with the Republican sweep of 1994—a polarizing opposition figure. Clinton needed to regain the middle in order to save his Presidency, and Newt Gingrich, from the start of his Speakership, proved an obliging foil. The ’94 results were barely in when Gingrich made his first public appearance as presumptive Speaker, displaying in a morning-after press conference the qualities that made his tenure at once so exhilarating and so exhausting, to ally and foe alike. Assuming the tone of one addressing a roomful of particularly dim children, Gingrich, a former history professor, lectured the press (“You guys are so deeply committed to a negative view”), critiqued the Democratic dilemma (“The Democrats adopted a McGovernite view of foreign policy and military power, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society structure of the welfare state, and counterculture values”), and fixed the Republican victory in historical perspective (“I think you probably have to go back to at least 1946 to find an election as decisive”). He declared the new Republican majority a band of “revolutionaries” with a warrant from the American people. “Every time you’ve had an election that clear-cut, the word that has always been used to describe it is a ‘mandate,’ ” Gingrich said. “I mean, if this is not a mandate to move in a particular direction, I would like somebody to explain to me what a mandate would look like.”

Gingrich’s style, and his Speaker-as-Prime Minister approach, facilitated the famous Clinton pivot, insuring the triangulator a second term that outlasted Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker. When I asked Boehner whether he saw the Republican victory of 2010, which was at least as decisive as Gingrich’s, as a mandate, he seemed almost to recoil. “No, no, noooooo,” he said. “I have watched people in the past deal with this issue, whether it’s Speaker Gingrich, or Speaker Pelosi, or President Obama. And we made a very conscious decision that we were not going to go down that path. The tone that we set is very important. You saw it on Election Night, and you’ve seen it since.”

Boehner forbade a Republican victory party on November 2nd, and has since signalled that he means to play the “adult” card in his dealings with Obama and within his own House conference. It is the strongest play he has. Unlike Gingrich, Boehner is not a visionary; his politics were formed by his revulsion, as a small businessman in Ohio, at the size of his tax bill. Nor is he an extemporaneous rhetorician; in public appearances, he rarely strays from his script. Where Gingrich was at once the Party’s chief political theorist, strategist, and messenger, Boehner is happy to delegate those roles to the young comers around him: Eric Cantor, the next Majority Leader; Kevin McCarthy, who will be the Republican Whip; and Paul Ryan, the G.O.P.’s designated thinker on the big issues, like entitlement reform. “We have very different personalities and different styles,” Gingrich told me recently. “You have to measure Boehner against other Boehners—you can’t measure him against me. Boehner would tell you up front that he’s not attempting to be the defining figure of this moment. He’s trying to be the organizer of the team that may define the moment. Clinton was able to pivot with me because I was a large enough figure that Clinton could say to the left, ‘You really want Gingrich?’ And they’d go, ‘O.K., even though we’re really mad at you, we’re not that mad at you.’ This may be an argument for the Boehner model.”

Boehner is now the most important Republican in the country, but far from the best known, which carries some advantage. Washington is familiar with him as an amiable, somewhat prosaic conservative with an umbilical connection to business, an old-school pol who loves his golf, his wine, and his cigarettes. His physical aspect—the mahogany skin tone, the smoky baritone, the Ken-doll coif, and the impeccably dapper attire—lends itself to caricature with a throwback theme. (Dean Martin and Don Draper are two press favorites.) Lately, Boehner has taken to reciting his personal biography, perhaps partly to counter the caricature, but also as a device for framing his approach to the job as the uncomplicated application of ordinary American common sense. “Trust me—all the skills I learned growing up are the skills I need to do my job,” he says.

Boehner was reared in Reading, Ohio, a small working-class community outside Cincinnati, where everybody he knew went to Sunday Mass at one of the town’s two parish churches. (A local joke defined a “mixed marriage” as the union of a Sacred Heart girl and a boy from Sts. Peter and Paul, situated less than two miles away.) Boehner’s ancestors had come to Ohio in one of the German immigration waves of the nineteenth century. His paternal grandfather, Andrew, opened a homely little tavern—Andy’s Café, on the industrial edge of Cincinnati—which holds a central place in the Boehner story. When Boehner was growing up, his father, Earl, ran the place, rising each morning at four in order to open the bar at six for the local early-shift workers, who would stop by for a shot and a beer before punching in. Boehner spent much of his youth in the bar, doing chores and, eventually, tending bar. “You have to learn to deal with every character that walks in the door,” Boehner has said, to explain that he was prepared to handle the incoming congressional freshmen.

Earl and Mary Ann Boehner had twelve children, nine boys and three girls, whom they brought up in a single-story stone-slab box of a house that had one bathroom and, for much of John’s early life, only two bedrooms. The boys slept, barracks style, on bunks in one room, their sisters in another, and Earl and Mary Ann used a pullout sofa. (Eventually, when the oldest children were teen-agers, the family added two bedrooms onto the back of the house.) The place was on a hilltop in the part of Reading that was considered “the country”; there were no city snowplow services and water was (and is still) collected in a cistern. On school days, the children were assigned shifts for morning bathroom access. “I used to sleep over there a lot, and my one vivid memory of their house is that I’ve never, ever been there when there wasn’t diapers hanging all over,” Jerry Vanden Eynden, Boehner’s closest friend since childhood, says. “If it was the summertime, diapers were hanging outside. If it was winter, the basement was full. It was just diapers.” Bob Boehner, the eldest child, remembers coming home on leave from the Army in the early nineteen-seventies and finding his youngest brother asleep in his bed. “I told him to get out of my bed, and he didn’t know who I was,” he recalls.

The older children—John was the second-oldest—were expected to help organize and, occasionally, discipline the younger ones, and all the children worked. Most of them put in time at Andy’s, mopping the floor or stacking cases of beer. (The family no longer owns the place, but Boehner’s sister Linda still works behind the bar.) One Sunday every year, Earl would close up, and, after Mass, the family would spend the day at Andy’s, wiping down the walls and windows with ammonia, removing the layers of cigarette tar. Earl and Mary Ann were both heavy smokers, as is John (reportedly two packs a day); Mary Ann, who died of pulmonary failure in 1998, smoked until the very end. “She was on oxygen and still smoked,” Bob recalls. “She’d take the oxygen off and smoke. And we’d come in and see her and she’d put the cigarette down, and the smoke would come up. And we’d say, ‘Mom, if you’re gonna smoke, you’ve gotta go in the other room.’ She was hard-core.”

The Boehner children went to parochial grade schools, and, with tuition help from their parish, all nine boys attended Moeller High, the big new Catholic boys’ school in Cincinnati. Moeller was a football powerhouse, coached by the future Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust, and Boehner became a reliable, if unspectacular, two-position regular as a linebacker and a center, earning Faust’s respect for playing with pain after suffering a back injury. (Boehner’s high-school nickname was, inevitably, Boner.) He graduated in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when every young man’s first concern was the draft.

Boehner’s parents couldn’t afford college, and the deferment that came with it, so Boehner took what jobs he could find to earn his own way, working as a roofer, a referee, and a heavy-equipment operator. He and his crowd dreaded Vietnam but didn’t protest the war. “There wasn’t much antiwar protest in this area,” Bob Boehner says. “All our fathers fought in the Second World War, and they wouldn’t have put up with any antiwar protesters.” At one point, John and Jerry Vanden Eynden took off for Florida and bummed around for a few months. When they returned, Boehner, facing the inevitable, enlisted in the Navy. His construction experience helped him land in the Seabees, where he was dispatched to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to help residents dig out from Hurricane Camille. In Mississippi, he re-injured his back, and was honorably discharged after less than six months’ service.

Boehner worked his way through Xavier University, in Cincinnati (it took him seven years to earn his degree), starting as a night janitor at the Merrell Dow pharmaceutical plant, a five-minute drive from Andy’s Café. He was eventually promoted to the product-testing department, where he met a man named Dave Kessler, whose firm, Nucite Sales, sold plastic packaging to companies like Merrell. Kessler was looking for a hungry young associate, and took Boehner on. It was unglamorous work—Kessler’s own children weren’t interested in the business—but Boehner was a born salesman. For strivers like Boehner and Vanden Eynden, sales was the expressway of class mobility. (Vanden Eynden, who took a similar job, now heads one of the largest domestic manufacturers of decorative candles.) As Nucite prospered, Boehner took a more direct hand in the company, and eventually acquired it, on friendly terms, from Kessler’s family. To Boehner, this was the American proposition defined—relentless hours, and a feel for commerce, led to a big payday. Boehner married Debbie Gunlack, a secretary he met at Merrell Dow, and by 1978, before his thirtieth birthday, he was earning seventy-four thousand dollars a year—enough to put him in an extremely high tax bracket.

That 1978 tax bill provoked Boehner to make a political conversion, from nominal Kennedy Democrat to wholly convinced free-enterprise fundamentalist. He became a Republican, and in 1984 he won a seat in the Ohio legislature, representing the prosperous white-collar district north of Cincinnati where he and Debbie then lived. His political formation was influenced by a man named Pete Dobrozsi, the lobbyist for Armco Steel at the time, who took Boehner under his wing. Armco, the biggest employer in Boehner’s district, was feeling squeezed by foreign competition and by federal regulation, and Dobrozsi sensed in Boehner a sympathetic soul. “He was a guy who was young, energetic, and really committed to the issues,” Dobrozsi recalled recently. When I asked him to elaborate, he said, “John’s interest was ‘I’m paying too much taxes, and the government’s intruding too much on my business.’ ”

After Newt Gingrich served a few terms as a member of the Republican minority in Congress, a circumstance he detested, he devised a plan to achieve what most of his colleagues could scarcely conceive—a Republican majority in the House. Gingrich believed that the G.O.P. had been the minority party for so long—ever since the first Eisenhower Administration—that Republicans had lost the ability to imagine themselves as anything else. In 1986, he took control of GOPAC, a backwater Republican training organization, and, under his leadership, it shaped a cadre of conservative politicians who were prepared to seize the majority. One of GOPAC’s most effective tools was an audio instruction series, teaching conservatives to communicate their program in the pithy style mastered by Gingrich himself. The mail-order audiotapes included specific phrases, recorded by Gingrich, that listeners were to memorize, and repeat at every opportunity until they had internalized the message: “You favor a political revolution. You want to replace the welfare state with an opportunity society. You favor workfare over welfare. You want to lock prisoners up and you’re actually prepared to give up some political pork barrel to build as many prisons as you need.”

The main targets of this program were young politicians in the hinterland. John Boehner spent hours listening to the GOPAC tapes as he drove between Columbus and his district. By 1990, he felt emboldened to make a run for Congress. Helped by a gifted young strategist and Gingrich admirer named Barry Jackson, Boehner defeated two Republicans—the scandal-tarred Republican incumbent and a former incumbent—in the primary and won the general election.

Boehner brought Jackson with him to Washington as his chief of staff, and the two of them fell easily into the Gingrich circle. Boehner joined Gingrich’s Conservative Opportunity Society, and became part of the Gang of Seven, an insurrectionary group of young conservatives who tormented the old bulls of the House for abusing such privileges as the House bank and post office. In 1994, Jackson was made the director of the Contract with America project. When Gingrich’s promised majority was realized, Jackson became the executive director of the Republican Conference, and Boehner, in his third term, became its chairman—the fourth-highest position in the Republican leadership.

Boehner may have been a Gingrich revolutionary, but he was also known as the Congressman from K Street. This fall, a liberal group called Blue America put up a billboard along I-75 in Cincinnati, showing Boehner in golf togs at the top of his backswing, with the tagline “When was the last time you golfed 119 times in one year?” Vanden Eynden, Boehner’s old pal and frequent golf partner, says, “He’s not denying it. He probably does play that much. But to me, my opinion, whether it’s him or Joe Blow—if you want me to donate a whole bunch of money to you, you’re not going to take me to some joint down the street. And all these guys he wants money from are golfers. But that’s what he does. He goes out for the whole month of August to all these different guys, and he helps them raise money. He’s really good at that.”

Boehner was unapologetic about his friendship with lobbyists, which he saw as a natural reflection of his core political beliefs. Besides playing golf with them, he travelled in their private jets and raised money from them. In return, he listened to their concerns. “John wants good information to make good decisions,” Jim McCrery, a friend and former congressional colleague of Boehner’s, who is now a lobbyist at the boutique firm Capitol Counsel, says. “Lobbyists can give good information, or they can supply somebody, a client, who’s an officer, whether it’s Jeffrey Immelt, from G.E., or the chief financial officer for Caterpillar. You’re getting it straight from the guys—how do you think this will affect you? That’s how you make good decisions, with good information.” Pete Dobrozsi, Boehner’s old friend from Armco Steel, makes the case more bluntly. “Everybody who is a legislator is a friend of a lobbyist or a liar,” he says. “They’re representing their church, their teachers’ union, their steelworkers’ union, their carpenters’ union, the trash haulers’ union, the Chamber of Commerce, or their manufacturers’ association. Everybody is represented by at least three lobbyists in Washington and doesn’t even realize it.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Armco, now known as AK Steel, has been the largest contributor to Boehner over the years. Boehner once asked the E.P.A. to reconsider a suit against the company. (The agency refused.)

Boehner’s chumminess with lobbyists was the source of one of his most embarrassing moments in Congress. In 1995, when the House was considering whether to extend tobacco subsidies, Boehner delivered half a dozen campaign-contribution checks to colleagues on the House floor. Although the contributions were legal, it seemed a case of influence-peddling of the grossest sort. Among those most offended by the incident were the earnest young Republican freshmen who had come to Congress on a reform wave, which now seemed a fraud. Boehner, after defending his act as being technically permissible, admitted that it was a bad practice, and said he’d move to end it (he subsequently did).

Boehner’s other humbling moment came in 1998, with the collapse of the Gingrich reign. The Gingrich majority had fulfilled its Contract (a bullet-point agenda with such objectives as limiting the terms of committee chairmen), and, working with Clinton, had achieved much more (welfare reform and a balanced-budget agreement), but the cost was a chronic state of low-grade chaos. Gingrich became ensnared in an ethics-violation accusation, worsening his considerable image problems, and by the summer of 1997 some in his closest circle had wearied of his leadership.

The top members of the Gingrich leadership team—Dick Armey, the Majority Leader; Tom DeLay, the Majority Whip; Bill Paxon, the leadership chairman; and Boehner—met to discuss what one person close to the situation at the time describes as “Newt’s disconnect from the conference, and his disconnect from being Speaker.” The leadership circle, aware of gathering unrest among some of the conference’s younger members, considered whether Gingrich’s assets were enough to warrant his continuing as Speaker. This person went on, “The discussion was ‘How can we support Newt, and all the good that he has—he’s an idea machine, he’s inspirational, we love him on the stump, he raises money—but insulate ourselves from the craziness of, back in 1997, Newt talking about what 2012 would look like? The upsetting of the daily apple cart?’ ” Events resolved themselves when Armey, after meeting with the young conspirators, had second thoughts and informed Gingrich of the rebellion. Paxon resigned from his leadership position the next day. Boehner insisted that he was not an instigator of the attempted putsch, although some close to Gingrich still count him a conspirator. “It was all of them,” Frank Luntz, one of Gingrich’s most loyal admirers, and one of the shapers of the Contract with America, says. “It was DeLay, it was Boehner, it was Paxon, and it was Armey—all four of them. And the beginning of the blow-apart, the real explosion, was when that effort failed, when Newt was informed of it—then it became every man for himself.”

After the 1998 election, in which the Republicans lost five House seats, Gingrich called his leadership team and announced that he was leaving Congress. “I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” he told them. Later that week, the House Republicans chose a new leadership team, and decided that it might be useful to have J. C. Watts, of Oklahoma—the only black member of the conference—sitting at the leadership table. Boehner was voted out as conference chairman.

In a post-Gingrich Congress, Boehner established himself as a serious legislator. He became chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, historically intensely partisan, where George W. Bush’s pet cause, education reform, seemed destined to die on arrival. But Boehner worked hard with George Miller, of California, one of the most liberal Democrats in the House, to establish a coöperative approach, and, with Ted Kennedy championing the cause in the Senate, No Child Left Behind became law.

Boehner also became known as a conservative who did not allow his personal positions on social issues—he is a devout pro-life Catholic—to direct his legislative agenda. (Barney Frank, the longtime Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, remembers him then as “a Midwestern mainstream conservative.”) In 2005, when Congress intervened in the case of a Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, who had been removed from her life-support system, Boehner argued within the Republican Conference against the extraordinary measure. “I thought that it was inappropriate for Congress to involve itself in what was essentially a court case,” he says. But when the vote was called he voted for the intervention.

Boehner was reminiscing recently with Barry Jackson about the 1998 leadership defeat, and about their shared determination not to settle for the back bench or leave Congress, as some expected. “I just walked out of the room, I looked at Barry, and I said, ‘We’re just gonna put our heads down, and we’re gonna work our way back,’ ’’ he recalled. “And we did. I just knew that I was not going to take defeat as an answer.”

Boehner’s election as the House Republican leader, in 2006, was a mild surprise, and, even as Republican momentum built this year, his ultimate selection as Speaker was not considered certain. Boehner’s likeliest challenger was thought to be Eric Cantor, of Virginia, the forty-seven-year-old Republican Whip (and among those who didn’t vote for Boehner as leader when he first ran). Cantor, a canny and ambitious politician, fell in behind Boehner, but, as the new Majority Leader, and presumed Speaker-in-waiting, Cantor will be a reminder to Boehner of a pronounced generational tension within the Republican Conference.

Cantor is the co-author, along with his colleagues Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan, of “Young Guns,” published this fall, which was a sort of campaign book making the case for, as the subtitle put it, “A New Generation of Conservative Leaders.” The title came from Fred Barnes, who, in a 2007 Weekly Standard cover story, named Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy “the leader,” “the thinker,” and “the strategist” of a Republican revival. (Boehner’s name appears in the book only three times, though it was published in September, just a week before he announced what was supposed to be the defining manifesto of the Republican campaign, the glossy, forty-five-page Pledge to America. The Pledge laid out general conservative principles but, unlike Gingrich’s Contract, avoided specific to-do lists.) “Young Guns” is insistently contrite (“We lost our way when we were in the majority”), while implicitly distinguishing the authors’ generation from that of the ten-term, sixty-one-year-old Boehner: “We had a majority of people who came here to do something, and we atrophied into a majority of people who came here to be something.”

The three congressmen, who are friends as well as ideological kinsmen, can be credited with supplying a desperately needed dynamism to the Republican remnant in Congress as the Obama era began. Anticipating the Democratic stimulus package, Cantor convened a series of meetings in January, 2009, of what he called the House Republican Economic Recovery Working Group, to devise an alternative stimulus package. The plan that emerged, consisting mostly of tax cuts and a home buyers’ credit, had no chance of being adopted, even in part, but it proved to be a hugely valuable political device. Three days after Obama’s Inauguration, Cantor and Boehner went to the White House to discuss the economic emergency, and Cantor handed out copies of the Republican plan to the President and his team. At the meeting, the President told Cantor, “Elections have consequences . . . and, Eric, I won.”

That remark, leaked to the press, allowed Republicans to say that they were being steamrolled by Obama and a Democratic majority intent on passing a nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package bloated by wish-list spending items. More important, the Republicans’ alternative plan provided Cantor and his whip team with an argument that they could make to wavering Republicans tempted to vote for the stimulus (Obama had hoped to win converts among some forty reportedly wavering Republicans). On the day of the vote, January 28th, Cantor went to the Hill unsure of his members’ votes, and when the bill went to the floor half a dozen were still uncertain. The whip team worked the waverers mercilessly—a challenge in a minority, where the leadership has few plums to dispense—and the outcome was in doubt until the vote was finally taken. “Cantor and McCarthy really built that vote out,” Representative Patrick McHenry, of North Carolina, recalls. “The whip check wasn’t strong to begin with—this thing was not a fait accompli. They really had to make sure that people understood the bill, truly understood the importance of the vote and the impact it would have. And the impact of a no.”

In the end, a hundred and seventy-seven Republicans voted against the stimulus bill, and none for it. This proved to be the defining moment for the Republicans of the 111th Congress, a signpost to the “Party of No” strategy that would make Republicans the only alternative if the Democratic program disappointed voters. “That’s where we got our mojo back,” McCarthy says. “That’s where we finally realized we did have ideas. We’d stand up to the President. And we stood up to him when he was at his strongest.”

Paul Ryan, for his part, was the Republican answer to the criticism that conservatism had run out of ideas. Ryan, an intense, forty-year-old Wisconsinite who considered a career as an economist before entering politics, has made an obsession of working out a fix for the looming entitlement crash. His detailed plan, Roadmap for America’s Future, first offered as legislation in 2008, proposes to insure permanent solvency of both Social Security and Medicare through quasi-privatization; to simplify the tax code; and to eliminate the federal debt by mid-century.

Ryan’s ideas have been roundly criticized by some Democrats, and the Times columnist Paul Krugman called them “leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.” But President Obama voiced the view of many others when he called the plan “a serious proposal.” That sort of credibility means that Ryan will have a prominent say in whatever tough-medicine entitlement remedy Republicans and Democrats finally agree upon. Last month, Ryan and Alice Rivlin, the former Clinton budget director—both are members of Obama’s deficit commission—introduced a plan, based on Ryan’s Roadmap, that would fundamentally transform Medicare. Their proposal would end the government’s open-ended payment of seniors’ medical bills, instead providing beneficiaries with an annual payment, in the form of a voucher, to be used to buy private insurance. Current Medicare recipients, and people who are now fifty-five and older, would not be affected by the changes, which would begin in 2021. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Rivlin-Ryan plan would cut deficit spending by two hundred and eighty billion dollars over the first decade. Last week, when the deficit commission declined to accept the Rivlin-Ryan plan—or to address health-care costs in more than a glancing manner—Ryan declared that he would vote against the commission’s final report. “My point is, either get it done now, or it’s hard-core, Greek-like austerity later,” Ryan says. “And I think we can make the case to the public that, if we do it now, we do it on our own terms, we do it in a gradual, intelligent way.”

Kevin McCarthy has ties to both Cantor and Boehner, who put him in charge of the project that produced the Pledge to America. The morning after he and Boehner unveiled the pledge, at a Virginia lumberyard, I met McCarthy for breakfast at the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican den on First Street. McCarthy, a cheery sort, breezed in wearing jeans and shirtsleeves, and accepted greetings from his colleagues at nearby tables (“Hey, Sunshine! Read your reviews yet?”) before landing across from me with a plate of bacon and eggs. He’d just come from his morning workout, an extreme regimen called P90X, which is the fashion at the moment in the House gym. “Paul Ryan got us into it,” he said, then asked, “You get something to eat, or am I being rude?”

McCarthy, despite his laid-back manner, is a driven achiever who was running his own business, Kevin O’s Deli—started with lottery winnings—before his twenty-first birthday. He sold the business, used the proceeds to finish college and enter politics, and was elected Republican leader of the California Assembly as a freshman member, in 2003. He was elected to Congress in 2006, the year Democrats won back the House, and he arrived in Washington to join a Republican minority that, he says, was in denial. “I saw a conference that, two-thirds of them, had never served in a minority, and they were almost going through the stages of death,” he said. “They were in the denial stage. Then they were lashing out. They said, ‘Oh, we’ll come back, it’s just these two years, the public didn’t know.’ And they were blaming Bush.”

McCarthy and a group of like-minded colleagues pooled resources and began a drive to bring fresh blood into the conference, finding five candidates who managed to win House seats in the Democratic tide of 2008. This year, the Party turned the recruitment of candidates over to McCarthy. Some of the recruits were Tea Party types, some were not, but all were fully in tune with the anti-Washington mood. It is a mood that McCarthy, the son of working-class parents, takes pains to show that he shares. He lives in his office and flies home to Bakersfield every weekend. After breakfast, as we drove past the Capitol on the way to an appearance he had scheduled on MSNBC, he gestured at the city outside and said, “I don’t want to wake up and have my kids going to school here and worrying about this education, or these roads, or this air. That’s not who lends us the power.”

McCarthy is probably more familiar with the incoming freshman Republicans than any other incumbent. He describes their zeal in vivid terms: “My father was a firefighter, and there’s two different ways to fight a fire—you put water on it, and put it out, and rebuild, or you backfire, and burn it all down, you know? And I think this freshman class is like that. Sometimes you change from within, and you bring the revolution in.”

The new revolutionaries seem inclined to emulate McCarthy. More than a dozen of them plan to sleep in their offices, and the office suites most prized, according to the Wall Street Journal, are the ones closest to the House gym.

McCarthy, Ryan, and Cantor identify more assertively with the Tea Party wing than Boehner could or, perhaps, even should—as was demonstrated this fall when Boehner suggested in a television interview that he might compromise with Democrats if the middle-class tax cut was the only option. The next day, the Young Guns, promoting their book on Sean Hannity’s radio show, denounced any hint of compromise. “It’s a generational thing,” McCarthy told me. “We have our ideals, but also our principles.”

Next to the Young Guns, Boehner can sometimes seem a bit languid. One of the criticisms of him, levelled again this summer by Joe Scarborough on the air, is that Boehner cares too much about his leisure to be an effective leader. That perception is shared across the aisle, where Barney Frank, for one, sees potential problems for a relatively weak Speaker. “He has not established himself, it seems to me, as a strong personality—people don’t think of him in that way,” Frank says. That means that the “Midwestern mainstream conservative” will be pulled to the right by a more assertively ideological caucus. “Unlike with most Speakers, now there’s more power in the caucus than in the Speaker,” Frank says.

Boehner’s friend Jim McCrery says, “He enjoys playing golf. He enjoys having a drink of Merlot. He doesn’t work eighteen hours a day. But he gets a lot done during the course of a day, when he does work. And he does delegate to staff, and he gets a lot out of his fellow-members. He’s very effective. But he is not a dynamo. Like, Newt was go-go-go-go-go, banging his fist on the table and raising his voice, and very histrionic—John’s not like that at all. So some people look at the outside John Boehner and say, ‘Golly, he’s not a dynamic leader.’ Well, he’s got a different style. But he’s not lazy. He’s very effective. And he gets results.”

As the election neared, polls showed that more than forty per cent of Americans had no opinion about Boehner, making it important for him and his team to try to shape his image as something other than a dapper, golf-playing Republican. Boehner made a series of speeches, on subjects ranging from national security to the economy to legislative reform, meant to suggest his policy seriousness. He also addressed superficial issues. At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last year, President Obama joked that Boehner was “a person of color, although not a color that appears in the natural world.” This fall, Bob Boehner explained to me, “This whole thing about the tan—besides John, there’s three other brothers and a sister who are very dark-complected. Even in March and April, they look like they’ve been out in the sun all day.” Eventually, Boehner told the Wall Street Journal, “I have never been in a tanning bed or used a tanning product.” By the transition period, Boehner had either been staying off the golf courses or applying gobs of sunblock, as his skin tone had softened noticeably to a commonplace Crayola peach.

Boehner is a delegator, but he is given credit by some conservatives for taking on the Republican appropriators in the House last year on the issue of earmarks. He has shunned earmarks for his entire career in Congress, and he insisted upon the gesture of a Republican moratorium on the practice. “He stared the appropriators down, and he won,” Patrick McHenry says. “And I don’t know the last time that appropriators have been beaten.”

The Republican pollster and message strategist Frank Luntz, who is close to Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy but has feuded with Boehner, says that the Young Guns “hope that he will be a conservative activist, rather than just a conservative traffic cop. I think that their hope is that Boehner be as passionate after he becomes Speaker as he has been in becoming Speaker.”

McCrery says that Boehner, after living through the Gingrich majority and its aftermath, is particularly wary. “John’s watching the ambitions of others in the conference,” McCrery says. “And, with eighty-five new members in the conference, he’s watching his back.’’

Boehner claims not to be worried about the young strivers. “Hey, I was one myself, I know exactly how this works,” he says. “I told them, ‘My job is to get you guys ready to take my place.’ I’m very open about it. That’s what a good manager does, that’s what a good leader does. You’ve got to give them room to grow. You’ve got to give them room to be rebellious, from time to time. If you try to tighten down the pressure cooker too much, it’s gonna explode.”

Boehner knows that the Republicans won only a probationary victory in November. “What I got out of the election is not so much that we won but they lost,” he says. “Now we’ve been given a second chance. But we have to go earn it.”

The test of Boehner as Speaker will be how the Republican majority decides to interpret that tentative mandate. One reading is that voters were alarmed by a government stuck in overdrive, and elected Republicans in order to slow it down. As a Boehner adviser put it, “The country is saying to all of us, ‘Stop. Just put the gun down and walk away.’ ” Boehner leans toward that interpretation, which dictates a particular approach: an effort to achieve things that might be broadly considered sensible, doable, and practical, like the earmark moratorium. If Boehner gets his way, there would be reforms of the institution itself that, if they worked, might tend toward greater caution on spending. There would be an effort to pass elements of the Pledge to America, such as a rollback of government spending to 2008 levels, and there would be extensive use of the congressional-oversight function.

Kevin McCarthy’s revolutionaries are unlikely to embrace that approach. “They didn’t come to Washington to tinker around the edges,” McHenry, one of the conservatives who have most eagerly welcomed the newcomers, says. “They came to cut the size of government, not to trim its growth.”

The next Congress will also be a test of the Young Guns, two of whom—McCarthy and Cantor—carry rank on Boehner’s leadership team. I asked the third, Paul Ryan, what he thought of the prospect of a go-slow approach. “I could not disagree with it more,” he said. “I am so sick of playing small ball. That’s why I stepped out there with the Roadmap in the first place. The country doesn’t deserve small ball. The country deserves real answers to the enormous problems facing us. And we owe it to our employers, the people who elected us, to give them a choice of two futures. Look, we know where the left wants to go, we know the path that we are on. We owe it to the country to show them an alternative path, based upon our principles. And if, after getting a second chance, we blow that opportunity, then shame on us.”

Ryan noticed that, during the campaign, the complimentary remarks about his reform ideas from President Obama and other Democrats were replaced by criticism of his entitlement plan as a risky scheme. Republicans, too, shied from Ryan’s politically toxic pet subject, even while positioning him to amplify his arguments (he’ll be chairman of the Budget Committee). Ryan believes that the incoming Republican freshmen will ally themselves with him. “We’ve got different people coming to Congress than we have had in the last number of cycles,” he says. “We’re not getting that many career politicians and wannabes. We’re getting a bunch of cause people. And these are cause people who will be fresh out of the experience of being hit by this’’—campaign attacks over proposed entitlement reforms—“and who will have survived those hits.”

Ryan credits Boehner for giving him rein on an issue that many of their colleagues would prefer him to be less insistent about. “He’s never asked me to stop it, he’s never asked me to tone it down,” Ryan says. “He’s never asked me to jettison these things. I think he realizes the kind of class we’ve got coming in, and the kind of times that we are in.” Ryan’s first important task in the 112th Congress will be writing the 2012 budget, which will define the Republican agenda. “I will have to write a budget that can pass,” he says. “I can’t tell you what that is going to look like. I can tell you that it is not going to raise taxes, and it’s going to cut spending. And we are going to have to begin to have this conversation on entitlements.” It is likely that the Rivlin-Ryan plan, rejected by the Obama deficit commission, will find its way into Ryan’s budget next year.

“They’re trying to do the economically impossible,” Barney Frank says. “I don’t know how you reduce the deficit while raising military spending and cutting taxes for all kinds of people, including the very wealthiest, and including the estate tax. The problem is, I don’t know how they’re going to pass not just the debt limit but appropriations bills. I think the appropriations bills that they’re going to have are either going to be too low to meet the minimum needs of the government or too high to get a majority of the votes.”

Boehner had hoped to establish an even tone at the advent of his more “adult” Congress, but developments tend to dictate the tone in Washington. Last week, the lame-duck season began with Boehner, Cantor, and others meeting at the White House with President Obama. Afterward, all sides declared themselves pleased, and Obama appointed a team to negotiate with congressional Republicans on the Bush tax cuts. By Friday, Boehner and Cantor had taken on the Smithsonian Institute over an exhibit deemed an insult to Christians (the museum removed the offending work); old-bull appropriators of both parties anonymously complained to Politico that Boehner’s reform plans for spending legislation would lead to chaos; Charles Rangel was censured by the House (with Representative Maxine Waters’s ethics problems still to be addressed); and Nancy Pelosi succeeded in obtaining a House vote on an extension of middle-class tax cuts, which the White House, as Obama prepared to leave for Afghanistan, coolly dismissed as an effectively meaningless gesture. Boehner, upset that Republicans had not been allowed to offer their own measure on the tax-cut extension, came close to losing his composure. “I’m trying to catch my breath,” he told reporters after the vote was taken, “so I don’t refer to this maneuver going on today as chicken crap, all right?” That remark moved the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer to observe, on Fox News, “The Speaker-to-be has signalled us that we are not going to have rhetoric at the level of John Calhoun and Henry Clay in the coming Congress.”

Boehner faces the same dilemma that establishment Republicans faced in the primary season, when candidates considered more viable in the general election were often pushed aside by purists. He knows what the base wants—an immediate, sustained effort to undo the entire Obama agenda. But the broader public, especially independents, might be repulsed by a reign of what would almost certainly be portrayed as radical Republicanism. That is why Boehner has avoided showcasing a symbolic H.R.1—the first bill that will be passed by the next Congress. If it were a full repeal of health care, the country might see it as partisan vengeance; if it were anything else, the base would begin to grumble about the squishes running the Party.

Eventually, though, the question will come down to health care. One approach is to hold committee hearings that would expose the health-care law to a trial by oversight, so thoroughly revealing its flaws that Republicans could try for full repeal near the end of the session. Meanwhile, there would be revisions around the margins—a repeal, for example, of the much reviled requirement, tucked into the health-care bill, that businesses file 1099 forms for every contractual transaction over six hundred dollars. This is the approach that Boehner is believed to favor. The Tea Partiers want full repeal, now. Representative Michele Bachmann, of Minnesota, a stalwart of the Tea Party caucus, told the conservative news outlet CNS last week, “If they”—the Party leaders—“decide they’re going to cave, or go weak in the knees, you will see members of Congress that will stand up against our leadership, because we’re going to stand with the people on this issue.”

One possible course for Boehner is to continue his recent parroting of Tea Party rhetoric, while working to adjust the new members, over time, to the realities of their limited legislative power, and of the risk in seeming too radical. He could talk of repealing “this monstrosity,” and of having “a lot of tricks up our sleeves,” knowing that even starving the health law of funds will be difficult to achieve legislatively, since Obama will have to sign funding bills.

Paul Ryan believes that Boehner will prove equal to the challenge. “He’s been around,” Ryan says. “He’s poised with experience. And I think he, of all people, kind of understands where we are, the moment we are in. The problem with leaders, typically, is that they’re worried about their personal ambitions, and that clouds their judgment. He will have arrived, he will have fulfilled his personal ambitions. He doesn’t have any farther to rise. And people who get into that moment—not everybody, but a lot of them—end up doing more the right thing than not. And I think he realizes that he can’t stand athwart history or the direction of this new conference, anyway. If he tried, they’d throw him out.”

Boehner is aware of the heat from below, which is perhaps why, when I asked him whether he means to try the oversight route with health care or yield to the cry for full repeal, he replied, “All of the above.” ♦

via newyorker.com

Posted via email from Brian's posterous