“We have to do something that conservatives haven’t done in a long time: We’ve got to stand up and win the argument,” Cruz declared in Dallas. “Republicans assume, with any impasse, that President Obama will never, ever, ever give up his principles—so Republicans have to give up theirs.” Building to a rhetorical crescendo, with the crowd now chanting the answers to his repeated questions, Cruz asked a final time, “How do we win this fight? Don’t blink!”
DeMint was no less dramatic. Calling the Affordable Care Act “probably the most destructive law ever imposed on the American people,” the Tea Party stalwart declared, “If you’re giving up the fight against socialized medicine, you’re almost giving up on the country.”
Most Republicans didn’t feel they were giving up, or blinking, or abandoning principle. The argument over Obamacare had been lost: The bill passed the House, passed the Senate, was signed into law, was upheld by the Supreme Court, and was validated by Obama’s reelection. Polling that showed the bill’s relative unpopularity was meaningless at this point. Unless Republicans believed that the president was willing to abolish the law bearing his name, their threats to defund it could produce only one outcome: a government shutdown.
“I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Republican senator Richard Burr, one of Boehner’s closest friends in the Congress, told reporters that summer. “Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law.”2
Burr’s remark earned him attack ads on the radio back in North Carolina, courtesy of DeMint’s former group, the Senate Conservatives Fund. Meanwhile, DeMint’s new plaything, Heritage Action, spent half a million dollars in August on localized ads urging House Republicans to sign a letter that had circulated from an obscure freshman lawmaker, Mark Meadows, urging Boehner to defund Obamacare.
Whatever their tactical preference, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, activists, and politicians seemed to sincerely believe that the Affordable Care Act represented a threat—if not to their own insurance plans, then to the relationship between the government and its citizenry. That said, the battle over the president’s signature law offered a unique window into the shadowy motives and incentives of the leading belligerents in the GOP civil war.
For DeMint, it was an opportunity to rid Heritage of its scarlet letter, the individual mandate.
For the rest of the professional conservative class, it was an opportunity to flex financial muscle while recruiting and mobilizing their armies; Charles and David Koch, through their umbrella group, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, spent more than $200 million on the anti-Obamacare effort, according to the New York Times.3
For Cruz, it was an opportunity to establish ideological supremacy among the nascent 2016 Republican field, capitalizing on Rubio’s immigration stumble. (During a meeting that summer in Mike Lee’s office, as Cruz and top conservative activists plotted the defunding plan, Rubio arrived late. “The prodigal son is here,” he said, smiling.)
And for Meadows, the little-known freshman congressman, it was an opportunity to make a name for himself.
AMERICAN POP CULTURE WAS ROCKED IN 2013 BY THE RELEASE OF THE Netflix series House of Cards, an adapted version of the British drama that follows one exceptionally cunning and ruthlessly ambitious politician’s rise to power. Kevin Spacey portrays Francis “Frank” Underwood, a Democratic congressman who lies, betrays, swindles, and murders his way to the top of American government. The show was a commercial dynamo at the height of the Republican drama inside of the real Congress. And if there was one person on Capitol Hill who looked in the mirror and saw Frank Underwood, it was Meadows.
The freshman lawmaker from North Carolina wasn’t a bad person, and he certainly wasn’t a killer—not in the literal sense, anyway. But there was something about the way he worked a room, the way he perched his glasses low over his nose for effect, the way he would feed a group of reporters one thing and then walk away texting a favored reporter something contradictory.
There was also something cryptic about his past: A self-described “fat kid” and social misfit from Florida, Meadows lost weight, married at age twenty, and, after randomly choosing the mountains of North Carolina for a honeymoon, fell in love with the area, so much that he and his wife eventually moved there.4 First opening a sandwich shop, then selling it to become a real estate broker, Meadows made enough money to loan his congressional campaign $250,000, essentially buying both the GOP nomination and the general election in his freshly gerrymandered western North Carolina district.
We first interacted over several breakfasts in the middle of 2013, consistent with my efforts in covering Congress to build relationships with new members. Meadows wasn’t like any of the others—or like any other politician I’d come across. He was disarming, with an easy smile and a sluggish southern drawl. He was engaging on policy matters. But what set him apart was the questions he asked—about the media, the coverage of Capitol Hill, how reporters’ sourcing worked, what he needed to do to get his name in the paper. It was obvious that Meadows wanted to be a player.
Cue the release of his Obamacare letter.
It took serious gumption for a freshman lawmaker eight months on the job, but Meadows clearly saw a vacuum waiting to be filled. Cruz and Lee were leading the fight on the Senate side; nobody had yet orchestrated a real pressure campaign in the House. McConnell could only do so much: Despite a primary challenge from his right in 2014 that he was monitoring obsessively, the Senate GOP leader had the cover of a Democratic majority to deflect blame for Obamacare’s implementation. Boehner had no such luxury. As House Republicans returned from the August recess emboldened by the anger on display in their districts and itching for a showdown with Obama, the Speaker knew there would be no talking them down.
There had been a cooling-off period for both parties after the president’s reelection and his second inaugural. That period was long gone. Events that summer, including CIA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks showing illegal mass surveillance and Syria killing nearly fifteen hundred of its citizens in a chemical attack on the one-year anniversary of Obama’s “red line” remark, exacerbated partisan tensions and fueled the declining trust in government.
The acceleration of cultural conflicts throughout the year—Obama’s push for gun control, his unilateral action on climate change, the Supreme Court’s rulings striking down California’s gay marriage ban and the federal Defense of Marriage Act—had pushed traditionalists to the edge. The broader societal landscape did little to soothe the sense that things were spiraling. The Oxford dictionary shortlisted twerk as the word of the year, but opted instead for selfie, newly popular among not just Hollywood celebrities but politicians as well. Miley Cyrus was Google’s most-searched person. Even in the Vatican, a redoubt of orthodox thinking, newly elected Pope Francis was sounding squishy, doing little to pull conservatives back from the brink.
Obamacare’s approaching silhouette sent them over it.
BOEHNER AND CANTOR COULD SEE IT COMING. OBSERVING THE BREWING storm over the August recess, they prepared various trial balloons to float, hoping to prevent the zero-sum warfare their members wanted.
First, on September 9, Cantor outlined the leadership’s preferred plan to the conference: They would force both the House and Senate to vote on defunding Obamacare but would not tie those votes to the rest of the government’s funding, as a way of avoiding a shutdown. Conservatives booed Boehner and Cantor out of the room.