When Gowdy rose to speak, he said succinctly, “No on cap and trade, no on carbon tax.”
“I’ve been a prosecutor for sixteen years,” Gowdy continued. “I’m used to having things proven to me and proving it to other people. Global warming has not been proven to the satisfaction of the constituents that I seek to serve.”
Gowdy was interrupted by loud applause. The crowd kept applauding and hooting while Gowdy took his seat.
Bob Inglis knew he was losing the campaign. What he didn’t know was that he wasn’t alone. Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity were replicating the strategy in congressional districts across the country. In Washington, sitting Republican lawmakers started talking nervously about being “primaried” by Koch-funded candidates. One wrong step could expose them to fierce competition. As Winn might have predicted, everyone started behaving much better.
* * *
As it pressured Republican lawmakers from the outside, the Koch network built a hard wall of “no” votes around the Waxman-Markey bill in the Senate to contain its support.
Since at least 2008, Americans for Prosperity asked politicians to sign a pledge that they would “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.” It was phrased in a way to look like an antitax measure rather than a promise to kill any effort to control greenhouse gas emissions. But it achieved the same goal. Putting a price on carbon—through a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax—was seen as the most realistic way to control carbon emissions. Only the federal government had the authority to impose that price, so Koch’s pledge killed the effort in its tracks.
The “carbon pledge,” as it was called, was signed by 223 state and federal politicians in 2009. One of them was the Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. Pence, who had called climate change a “myth,” was the only member of the Indiana delegation to sign the pledge. In this sense, Pence was a trailblazer. By September of 2010, four members of Indiana’s delegation had signed the pledge and a total of 627 state and federal lawmakers and candidates had done so.
As Koch Industries encircled the Waxman-Markey bill with its carbon pledge, the Democrats put their energy into passing Obamacare, which was approved in the Senate on Christmas Eve 2009 and signed into law in the spring of 2010. Then the Democrats put their energy into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which imposed new regulations on Wall Street banks. It passed the Senate in May of 2010 and was signed into law in July.
The cap-and-trade bill languished during these months in the Senate, as the group of senators led by John Kerry tried fruitlessly to find some sort of bargain that could make the bill palatable to sixty senators. All through the spring and summer of 2010, the political atmosphere grew hotter, stoked by AFP and other conservative groups, and the issue of carbon regulation became more toxic.
This was the period when Bob Inglis was fighting in a primary election against Trey Gowdy, set for June of 2010. Inglis refused to abandon his campaign slogan “America’s sun is still rising.” Looking back, Bob Inglis said that there was one moment when he should have realized he was going to lose. It happened to be the one moment in his political career when he was most worried about being assassinated. It happened during a town hall meeting in a public school near Inglis’s home in Travelers Rest. Because the event was so close to his house, he brought his wife and children. When they arrived, the crowd was so large that the local fire marshal was turning people away. Even before Inglis started speaking, a crowd outside was getting furious.
The atmosphere inside was even worse. The auditorium was stuffy and crowded and full of raw anger. Inglis knew that many of his neighbors around Travelers Rest carried guns on their person. He was certain there were many guns in the room that night. When he took the stage, he began to give his stump speech. Under normal circumstances, he would have pointed out his wife and children in the audience, which was a standard gesture for a congressional candidate. That night, he didn’t do it.
“I didn’t introduce my wife and kids because I was concerned about their safety. You could just tell, in the pulsating anger in the place, that it wouldn’t be good to introduce your wife and kids,” Inglis said. “If I was going to get shot, it probably was going to happen there. At that town hall meeting.”
At the end of the night, a woman close to the stage yelled at Inglis: “We don’t trust you anymore!”
If a congressman lost the trust of his voters, there was no recovering from it. When the primary vote was held on June 22, Inglis attended a watch party with his campaign staff in downtown Greenville. The event turned out to be a chance for Bob Inglis’s close friends and family to witness the most public and humiliating defeat of his political life. He lost the race with 29 percent of the vote to Gowdy’s 70 percent.
Inglis worried about what this might mean for future politicians. “I was really quite sad about the rise of this populist fire that can only burn things down. It can’t build anything up. I continued to be saddened that this fire, which I thought would burn out, has only gotten hotter.”
* * *
It is difficult to identify the exact moment when the cap-and-trade bill died. There was no vote to declare its final defeat. The measure simply lost momentum and then died quietly. In late April of 2010, Lindsey Graham dropped out of the gang of senators who were pushing the bill. No Republicans were willing to step in and replace him. Harry Reid announced that the Senate would work first to pass comprehensive immigration reform before addressing climate change.
Jonathan Phillips and the other staffers who’d written the bill knew that Reid’s decision was a death sentence. The moment of opportunity to pass meaningful greenhouse gas regulations had passed.
Americans for Prosperity emerged from the summer of 2010 in its strongest position ever. Steve Lonegan, in New Jersey, had a hard time keeping up with the organization’s growth. There were more people and more resources pouring in than ever before. When Lonegan joined AFP, it was a political upstart, a group of outsiders like a pirate crew, fighting to change government policy from outside the system. This culture was rapidly disappearing, replaced by a streamlined, corporate model.
“In the early days, we were rambunctious. There were less controls,” Lonegan recalled. “But as things got bigger and bigger, they had to put in more, like, lawyers and bureaucracy. Though it was still effective, it did become somewhat more bureaucratic. But I think that was out of necessity.”
As AFP solidified its position, it also began to entangle itself tightly with the Republican Party and change it from within. AFP went on a hiring spree and poached young and aspiring talent from the Republican Party. Two-thirds of all AFP directors were drawn from it. Perhaps more importantly, roughly one-third of all the AFP state directors who left AFP went directly from that job to positions in Republican Party politics, taking with them their contacts and education from Koch’s political operation.
The deep ties between AFP and the Republican Party were only discovered years later, when two Harvard political scientists, Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, conducted one of the only rigorous independent studies of the newly expanded Americans for Prosperity network. “These data show that the AFP federation has been able to penetrate GOP career ladders,” Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez wrote. The employees who went back and forth tended to be “young men in their thirties or forties” who would presumably have long careers in politics ahead of them.