AFP was reshaping the Republican Party and strengthening it at the same time. In 2010, the Koch network shifted its focus from fighting the Waxman-Markey bill to electing as many Republicans as possible in the midterm congressional election.
In November, a wave of votes from Republicans and Tea Party activists destroyed the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Republicans also made strong gains in the Senate, although it didn’t win control. The era of the Democratic supermajority of sixty votes was firmly buried. The filibuster would once again become a remarkably powerful tool of opposition. Now, if Harry Reid wanted to pass a bill, he would need Republicans to join a vote to end a filibuster debate. This was a possibility of vanishing likelihood.
The magnitude of this victory was immense for Koch Industries. Of the eighty-five newly elected Republicans who arrived in Washington, seventy-six had signed Americans for Prosperity’s carbon pledge, vowing they would never support a federal climate bill that added to the government’s tax revenue. Of those seventy-six members of Congress, fifty-seven of the signees had received campaign contributions from Koch Industries’ PAC, according to an analysis by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. Koch Industries had terminally stalled the Waxman-Markey bill in the Senate, and now it had salted the earth behind it, ensuring that a new climate change bill would never grow.
* * *
One of the earliest acts of the new Republican majority was to halt funding for the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The team began to box up their files and personal belongings and emptied out the basement office of the Longworth Building.
Jonathan Phillips, the young staffer who’d written sections of the bill to promote renewable energy, left Congress and took a job with the US Agency for International Development. He traveled to Africa and helped companies there build new clean energy infrastructure. Two of the legal experts on the team, Michael Goo and Joel Beauvais, moved to the EPA, where they started working on a plan to regulate carbon emissions from coal-powered utility plants. The EPA rule, called the Clean Power Plan, was the closest thing to a carbon control law that officials in the Obama administration felt they could achieve. Americans for Prosperity quickly caught wind of this and immediately began recruiting opposition to it through its website.
In the absence of regulation, greenhouse gas emissions continued to soar. In 2011, humans emitted 32.27 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, a rate that was more than 150 times what it had been before the industrial revolution. Concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere rose every year after the death of the Waxman-Markey bill. Scientists had warned that humans should strive to keep carbon dioxide levels at 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic environmental impacts. As the Waxman-Markey bill was debated, carbon levels hovered around 370 parts per million. Within five years of its failure, levels hovered at 400 parts per million, the highest ever recorded during human existence.
After he left politics, Bob Inglis formed a group that promoted free-market solutions to the problem of climate change. His view remained unpopular in Republican circles. And everywhere he went, Inglis had that nagging feeling from 2010, when he had looked at the back of a town hall meeting and seen someone with a video camera, mounted on a tripod, filming him, someone “that maybe had a little bit of help, you know what I mean?”
Someone still seemed to be helping.
Inglis attended a debate over climate change policy in Washington, DC, hosted in part by the Libertarian Reason Foundation. When he arrived, Inglis found something curious. On each empty seat had been placed a campaign-style button. The buttons read simply: “70–29.” This was the vote margin by which Inglis had lost to Trey Gowdy, 70 percent to 29 percent.
The buttons stuck in Inglis’s mind. Someone had to print them, pay for them, and disperse them over the empty seats. Things like that took money and coordination. A couple of years after he was kicked out of office, Inglis finally had a strong suspicion as to who could do that. When he held the button, one thought crossed his mind:
“It seems to me that it has Koch written all over it.”
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Charles Koch had reason to be exultant as 2010 came to a close. Koch Industries had faced an unprecedented economic threat in the form of the Waxman-Markey bill and had played a vital role in derailing it. His own political ideals had faced an unprecedented threat in the seemingly permanent Democratic majority in Washington and the popularity of the Obama agenda. He played a vital role in destroying it. Koch’s political operations were larger, more influential, and more powerful than ever.
But Charles Koch still felt threatened. He felt that the fight was still in its early stages. There was no time to waste with victory parties. On September 24, he sent a letter to wealthy political donors whom he was hoping to enlist in his cause. “Everyone benefits from the prosperity that emerges from free societies. But that prosperity is under attack by the current administration and many of our elected officials,” Charles Koch wrote. “We must stop—and reverse—this internal assault on our founding principles.”
The letter was an invitation to Charles Koch’s eighth private gathering for wealthy conservative donors and the politicians who sought their help. The conference was in January of 2011 at a resort near Palm Springs, California.
Security around the donor conference was intense. Attendees registered for the event by contacting the Koch Industries lobbying office in Washington, DC, rather than the host hotel. When attendees arrived, they were required to wear an identification badge at all times. They were also warned not to leave materials behind, or to post on social media while they were at the event. No one from the media was allowed inside.
Charles Koch had a pithy piece of wisdom that he liked to share with his political operatives. It was a saying about whales and harpoons. “The whale that comes above sea level gets harpooned,” is how one person remembered it.
The allegory was clear. It was safer to remain below the surface. It was better for Koch’s political operations to remain anonymous. This helped explain the complexity of Charles Koch’s emerging political organization, the endlessly complicated interlocking network of shell organizations and secret donations. It also explained the security and secrecy around the donor meetings that Charles Koch hosted twice a year.
The events had grown larger and more lavish since 2006, when Steve Lonegan attended one of the earliest conferences in Aspen. Since that time, the events had been attended by Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; GOP congressmen Mike Pence, Tom Price, and Paul Ryan; Republican governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour; and celebrity speakers like Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer, and John Stossel. At the summer conference of 2010, one of the keynote speakers was the Tea Party leader Glenn Beck, whose speech was entitled “Is America on the Road to Serfdom?”
But secrecy was becoming difficult to maintain. Americans for Prosperity was one of the most influential political organizations of 2010. A number of investigative reporting outlets began to dig into Charles and David Koch’s long history of political involvement, including the Center for Public Integrity and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. Both groups published deep reports that outlined the Koch brothers’ extensive political donations. Activist groups took note as well. In March of 2010, Greenpeace released its forty-three-page report entitled Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine, which detailed Koch’s extensive giving to groups like the Mercatus Center, the Cato Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.