“Let me tell you why. He’s trading on fear. I think that when you trade on fear . . . you’re not leading. You’re following fearful people,” Inglis said. Brady remembered that moment because that’s when her friends started throwing their pink slips at Inglis.
Inglis was not a stupid man or an inept politician. He knew how to work a room. The reason he failed repeatedly to win over the crowds at these town hall meetings was that he would not say what they wanted him to say. His campaign slogan for 2010 was “America’s sun is still rising.” This was a horrible slogan, and Inglis knew it. Nobody felt like the sun was still rising. He knew that he needed to say, “Okay, I hate Obama as much as you do. Even more than you do.” He knew that needed to be seen as “trying to bring back the good old days before the black man went into the White House,” as he phrased it. “I just didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to be the person who was saying that ‘Yeah, this is about the future of fuels. And I know we’re in the midst of the Great Recession, but we’re Americans and we can overcome this.’ ”
Inglis kept his slogan and stayed the course.
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Koch Industries’ activities in South Carolina were just one piece of a broader strategy, and a central focus of this effort was to defeat the Waxman-Markey bill before it could be passed by the US Senate. Steve Lonegan, AFP’s director in New Jersey, came to understand the broader strategy during conference calls and meetings with Koch’s political operatives. Koch Industries would ramp up its operations outside the Senate to turn up the heat on the politicians who worked there. The effort would employ all of Koch’s political assets, from its campaign donations to its lobbyists and even its think tanks.
One immediate target would be the Republican lawmakers who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill in June. They would be made an example of, just like Inglis. There were eight of these Republicans in all, and three of them were from New Jersey: Congressmen Chris Smith, Leonard Lance, and Frank LoBiondo. Lonegan immediately set about making their political lives a living hell.
LoBiondo’s office was flooded with phone calls criticizing him for his vote on Waxman-Markey, forcing one of his aides to fax between 100 and 150 summaries of the calls to LoBiondo each day. Many of the calls came from out of state. It was exasperating and exhausting to keep up with. Lonegan’s tactics went beyond those typically associated with political campaigns. He and his growing team taught the newly energized Tea Party activists how to inflict the maximum amount of pressure on the “Three Taxateers,” as he dubbed the congressmen.
“You do a rally in his backyard. You get lots of people to call his office and say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ E-mails, phone calls. You have them confronting him when he goes out to the diner. Again, this is where teaching people how to be good activists comes in. Most people don’t know what to do,” Lonegan said. “So, I would teach people.”
The purpose of Lonegan’s effort was not necessarily to drive the Three Taxateers out of office. All three of them kept their seats. The goal was to send a message to the US senators. AFP targeted conservative Democrats such as Senator Max Baucus, who had a significant fossil fuel industry presence in their states. It also targeted wavering Republican senators. By tormenting the New Jersey congressmen, AFP showed that there was a steep price for supporting climate change regulations.
When the bill moved into the Senate, it needed to first pass through one of the powerful Senate committees. This presented a moment when the entire effort to regulate carbon emissions might be killed in the crib. Senate committee hearings did not draw much public attention. The committee hearings were slow and boring and filled with technical arcana. This delay in the process offered Koch the best chance to kill cap and trade. Koch Industries seized it.
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The Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, was a master of manipulating the political process. It was telling that he assigned the Waxman-Markey bill to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The committee was chaired by Barbara Boxer, a friend of environmental protections from California, and a true believer in the cap-and-trade system. The Democrats did not just control the committee, they held an overwhelming majority of its seats, with twelve Democratic votes to the Republicans’ seven. Republicans didn’t have much of a chance to stop the bill from being passed and sent to the entire Senate for a vote.
Still, the leading Republican on the Environment Committee, James Inhofe, from Oklahoma, was not deterred. He had one advantage. The Senate was built in a way that maximized the power of the word no. The House of Representatives operated under the rules of a simple majority rule. The Senate was designed to thwart the idea of majority rule and prize consensus between the parties. It took sixty votes in the Senate to end debate on a topic. Bipartisanship wasn’t a virtue in this arena, it was a necessity.
On the morning of the first Senate hearing, just after the Fourth of July recess, Inhofe took his seat at the center of the horseshoe-shaped committee dais, just next to Boxer. She began the hearing by preemptively criticizing Inhofe as an obstructionist. He didn’t hesitate to respond.
“You have stated that we’re the party of ‘no.’ Well—that’s true. We say ‘no’ to higher energy costs. ‘No’ to subsidizing the East and West Coasts at the expense of the heartland. ‘No’ to more bureaucracy and red tape. ‘No’ to the largest tax increase in American history and ‘no’ to sending our manufacturing jobs to China and India,” Inhofe said.
Inhofe’s embrace of the word no telegraphed to the Senate that Democrats were on their own. The Democratic Party held a supermajority of votes in early 2009, but the supermajority was fragile. Max Baucus, for example, had voted against a cap-and-trade bill in the past. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said in 2009 that she would vote against the measure. In this environment, getting to sixty votes would be difficult.
During July and August, Inhofe and Americans for Prosperity cleared the playing field of any Republican participants. By the fall, all the Republicans on Barbara Boxer’s committee were boycotting the proceedings. One afternoon hearing, Boxer sat alone at the center of the dais. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a conservative Republican on the committee who’d switched his affiliation to the Democratic party in April, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the boycott was an act of “really excessive partisanship,” which surpassed what he had seen before in the Senate. “I have been a party to some very heated disagreements, but they have been disagreements on the merits, on the substance. . . . But you can’t disagree with an empty chair,” he said.
The chairs remained empty. Barbara Boxer initially said that her committee would pass a bill and put it before the entire Senate for a vote by September 8. Then, in late August, that date was extended to late September. And then it was delayed into October.
The bill fell under the shadow of larger, more visible legislative fights. The Senate was simultaneously debating the Affordable Care Act, which drew Tea Party protestors out in crowds to town hall meetings and parades. Americans for Prosperity fed these efforts, arranging for bus rides and compiling e-mail lists to inform its members of the time and location of the public meetings they could attend. The fight over Obamacare drained the time, attention, and resources of Harry Reid, the Obama administration, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. Everyone knew that there was only so much momentum, so much political energy to be spent in Washington. This was the key advantage that was given to Koch Industries. In the Senate, the advantage always went to the opponent who wanted to stop something rather than build something.