Boehner started the debt-ceiling talks by publicly demanding one dollar in spending cuts for every new dollar in borrowing authority. Emboldened by the Speaker’s objective, Jordan convinced the House conservatives to stake out a position even farther to the right, rallying around a plan called “Cut, Cap and Balance.” It would require any debt ceiling hike to accompany a cut in federal spending, a cap on future spending, and a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance its budget.
The proposal, which Boehner derided as “Snap, Crackle and Pop,” passed the House in mid-July but was rejected out of hand by Obama and the Reid-run Senate. Jordan lobbied Boehner to make a national referendum out of the issue; the Speaker wanted to move on, eyeing August’s deadline and hoping to win some concessions beforehand. The tension boiled over in late July, when it was discovered that Jordan’s staff had been conspiring with outside conservative groups to pressure RSC members—Jordan’s members—to vote against Boehner’s proposed debt deal. Jordan apologized to the conference, but members shouted, “Fire him!” in reference to the rogue staffer who had undermined the Speaker.
Ultimately, Boehner failed to collect enough Republican votes to present Obama with a unified offer that might have nudged the negotiations rightward. The consequence was twofold. In the short term, it forced the parties to settle on a deal that nobody was happy with, the Budget Control Act, which raised the debt ceiling but introduced automatic “sequestration” cuts to spending if a future agreement were not reached. In the long-term, it stripped Boehner of any negotiating power with Obama. The White House had begun to suspect that Republicans were internally fractured; the debt ceiling implosion confirmed to them that Boehner could not control his members and thus could not be trusted to speak for them.
“He could practically never deliver his votes,” says Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.
Boehner shakes his head. “It’s hard to negotiate when you’re standing there naked,” he says. “It’s hard to negotiate with no dick.”
The underlying problem bedeviling the GOP was a lack of congruity; that, in turn, could be chalked up to its whiplash-inducing return to power in 2010. Time in the minority can be enormously beneficial for a political party—time to reflect, study, question, strategize, change. Storming back into the House majority just two years removed from George W. Bush’s departure, Republicans, it was clear, were not yet prepared to be a majority party.
Of course, history might have reflected something quite different—for Boehner and Obama, for Republicans and Democrats, for the country—had the “Gang of Six” not gotten in the way.
On July 19, as the debt-ceiling drama was intensifying, a bipartisan group of three Republican senators and three Democratic senators had unveiled the framework of a sweeping fiscal compromise they had been working toward. What they didn’t know—what almost no one in Washington knew—was that Obama and Boehner had secretly been working on their own deal. It was nicknamed “the Grand Bargain,” and just forty-eight hours earlier, the janitor and the community organizer had shaken hands to seal an agreement that might have altered the arc of American history.
Their work had begun a month earlier—on the golf course, in fact—with Boehner’s suggestion that the debt ceiling predicament gave them an opportunity to address America’s longer-term crisis: the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation and the strain it placed on the country’s finances. The Speaker told the president that Republicans could agree to increased revenue via eliminating tax deductions and loopholes (violating conservative orthodoxy) if Democrats could agree to spending cuts and entitlement reforms (violating liberal orthodoxy). Obama signaled his openness to the idea, and for the next five weeks their teams worked in secret to hammer out a compromise, knowing that fury awaited in their respective party bases.
On Sunday, July 17, Obama returned from church to meet Boehner and Cantor at the White House. Some fine-tuning remained, but their deal was basically done. It included reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending; and $800 billion in new revenue. Boehner, wary that Cantor would try to scuttle the deal, had initially kept him out of the negotiations; when Cantor was finally clued in, he warned the Speaker that he shouldn’t trust Obama. Now, as they shook hands in the Oval Office, Boehner felt vindicated. “I was one happy son of a bitch,” he says.
But two days later, blind to these private dealings, the Gang of Six rolled out its own proposal. The problem was that it included significantly more revenue than Boehner and Obama had agreed to. Watching as several conservative senators endorsed this plan, the president knew there was no way he could sell the Grand Bargain to congressional Democrats.
When the White House reached out to the Speaker’s staff, seeking a higher revenue number for their plan, Boehner was aghast. “Are you shitting me?” he shrieked to several of his staffers, a tenor of wrath they had never before heard. “We shook hands!”
The Speaker quickly convened a meeting with Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, apprising them of the circumstances and gauging their opinions about increased revenue. Cantor shook his head in disgust; now he was feeling vindicated. The others had largely been in the dark about the deal, but warned Boehner that most Republicans weren’t going to go for $800 billion in revenue, much less more. Boehner knew they were right. And he was crestfallen.
As the dazed Speaker walked out to his balcony for a smoke, his chief of staff, Barry Jackson, whispered nervously to friends that a coup was soon to unfold. Not a year had passed since Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy published a book together, Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, that conspicuously excluded Boehner. Now, with word spreading through the conference of the Speaker’s shadowy dealings with Obama, he appeared most vulnerable.
Obama phoned Boehner, eager for an update, but the Speaker refused to answer or call back. The Grand Bargain was off.
The two sides would peddle competing versions of what went down. Boehner’s team said Obama moved the goal posts; the White House said the Speaker couldn’t sell his own members on the deal. Both versions contain truth. Obama did renege on their handshake agreement; and Boehner did face an uprising among his members. For the Speaker, passing the Grand Bargain through the House would have required leaning on Democratic votes and steamrolling the conservatives—and, in all likelihood, kissing his speakership good-bye.
Looking back, with the nation pushing toward $23 trillion in debt and no mandatory spending reforms on the horizon, Boehner says it would have been worth it. “If I could have pulled this deal off, they could have thrown me out the next day,” the former Speaker says. “I would have been the happiest guy in the world.”
AS THEIR FIRST YEAR IN THE MAJORITY DREW TO A CLOSE, REPUBLICANS were forced to reckon with a side effect of their return to power: the rise of the professional right.
Believing they had enabled the GOP’s decline by giving George W. Bush’s party a free ride, conservative activists were determined to hold the new Republicans accountable. Yet this impulse, however well intentioned, resulted in overreach destructive to their own ends. If politics is the art of the possible, then the influence of outside groups on lawmakers—especially the newest, most susceptible lawmakers—made governing impossible. By going to DEFCON 1 on a weekly basis, threatening reprisals against anyone supporting the leadership on a given legislative issue, the activist warlords locked Boehner into a constant state of lose-lose: If he gave conservatives what they wanted, he would suffer defections from the center-right members and stand no chance of passing a bill; if the conservatives spurned him and he turned to Democrats to make up the margin, he would be accused of selling out the right.