Priebus had reached those same conclusions. Although he denied to Steele on multiple occasions that he was interested in running for his position, Priebus had spent the summer warning the chairman against seeking reelection. The membership was deeply unhappy, he explained, and the committee was engulfed by controversy. It would benefit everyone if Steele graciously stepped aside after his two-year term.
Steele refused to listen. “If they want me gone, they’re gonna have to throw me out,” he said.
Priebus finally decided that he had no choice. Just before the midterms, he knocked on Steele’s door at the RNC. “I think the party needs to go in another direction,” he told the chairman.
“You know what, Reince?” Steele responded. “Keep the fucking suit.”
Chapter Four
January 2011
“Shakespeare has got nothing on this shit.”
HE STOOD BEFORE THEM IMPERIALLY DRESSED, SKIN FRESHLY KISSED a bright citrus by the Florida sun, his two-pack-a-day baritone rumbling with alternating notes of caution and aggression. It was the first week of Congress, and John Boehner was the Speaker of the House. Two decades spent collecting favors, dialing donors, and hustling votes had finally paid off. Now, as he addressed the enormous new class of House Republicans—eighty-seven of them—Boehner needed to set a few things straight. He was delighted that reinforcements had arrived. And he was looking forward to fighting alongside them in presenting a muscular check on the Obama administration. But he was going to need their cooperation. And their trust.
Boehner had heard the rhetoric from Republican candidates in 2010, and he wanted to make one thing clear. “Campaigning,” he told the freshmen, “is different than governing.” Republicans now controlled the House, but Democrats were still running the Senate and the White House. If the House GOP was to accomplish anything—if they were to make gains for conservatism in a divided government—compromise and incrementalism would be necessary.
Many of the new members nodded their heads. Although they had all hugged the Tea Party, plenty of the incoming lawmakers were factory produced: noncontroversial, corporate-friendly, mechanical-mannered Republicans whose twin objectives were scoring victories for the team and winning reelection for themselves (not in that order). They listened to Boehner and heard a leader worth following; he was savvy, experienced, disciplined.
The true believers had a different reaction. If half the freshmen were standard fare Republicans who expected symmetrical partisan combat with the Democrats, the other half were Tea Party guerrillas. These lawmakers felt, with some justification, that they had been sent to Washington not to trade chess moves with Obama, but to flip over the board and send the pieces scattering. They looked at Boehner, the back-slapping, cabernet-swirling, country club connoisseur, and saw that which they had come to destroy. As these rookies stewed, watching their fellow classmates pledge allegiance to Boehner, the earliest seeds of discord were sown within the House majority.
“I thought it was a revolution. I thought we were going to completely change the way that Washington worked,” Raúl Labrador, the new Idaho congressman, recalls. “Within one week—I’m not exaggerating—I saw a large majority of my class saying, essentially, ‘Whatever you need us to do, we will do.’ And I was sick inside.”
THIS INTERNAL TENSION WENT UNDETECTED AT FIRST. AFTER ALL, THE closing months of 2010 had set the stage for Armageddon between the parties. The week before Election Day, Boehner had told Sean Hannity that it was “not a time for compromise,” promising specifically that Republicans would do everything possible to keep the Obamacare law from being implemented. “We’re going to do everything—and I mean everything—we can do to kill it, stop it, slow it down,” he said.
Perhaps eager to one-up his counterpart, Mitch McConnell told National Journal that same week, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”1 This quote would become legend, neatly encapsulating the GOP’s obstructionist outlook, even as it was blown slightly out of proportion. (Minority party leaders have always schemed to prevent the other party’s president from winning a second term; furthermore, McConnell had said in the next breath that Republicans would cooperate with Obama “if he’s willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues.”)
More consequential than any verbal jousting had been the collapse of the Bowles-Simpson commission. After nearly eight months of deliberation, the commission released its final report on December 1, 2010. It prescribed a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases that would slash the deficit by nearly $4 trillion by 2020. This would be achieved by slaughtering sacred cows left and right: raising the Social Security age, reducing spending on Medicare and military operations, eliminating a trillion dollars in tax loopholes, and capping government spending at 21 percent of GDP.
Congress would vote on the plan if a supermajority of the commission, fourteen of its eighteen members, approved it. But only eleven did. And while there was opposition from liberal members, the more conspicuous resistance came from the three House Republicans appointees who voted as a bloc: Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, and Dave Camp.
Ryan’s vote came across as particularly cynical. The Budget Committee’s senior Republican had spent years warning of America’s unsustainable fiscal course, yet when handed a concrete, bipartisan proposal to help correct it, Ryan balked, arguing that the plan would drive Obamacare’s price tag even higher while hindering economic growth with considerable new tax hikes.
This sparked a feud between Ryan and Obama that dashed whatever prospects once existed for a partnership. Months after the Bowles-Simpson vote, when Ryan had taken over as Budget Committee chairman and released a new version of his entitlement-cutting “Roadmap,” the White House invited him to a speech Obama was giving on fiscal solubility. With Ryan sitting in the front row at George Washington University and “shaking his head in disgust,” as the Wall Street Journal reported, the president savaged his proposal, saying it would leave poor people, disabled kids, and the elderly to “fend for themselves.”2
Without mentioning him by name—not that he needed to—Obama said Ryan’s plan “paints a picture of our future that is deeply pessimistic.” The congressman was blindsided. He rushed out of the auditorium after the speech, cursing out the president in conversations with his friends back on Capitol Hill. It was a gross breach of decorum by Obama. White House aides worried that he had gone too far; for his part, the president later told journalist Bob Woodward that he didn’t know Ryan would be attending, calling the entire episode “a mistake.”
The bigger mistake, in the eyes of Republicans, was Obama’s own rejection of Bowles-Simpson. It had been a unique opportunity to seize the high ground; Obama could claim that Republicans weren’t serious about deficit reduction, that he was willing to make the difficult choices necessary to improve America’s fiscal health. “I thought he was going to triangulate us, embrace Bowles-Simpson, make us look like we were right-wingers. But he didn’t,” Ryan recalls. “At every one of those inflection points in his first term, I thought the guy would go to the middle and kill us and scoop up the center of the country. But he just couldn’t help himself. He was a hard-core progressive.”