At this point, Boehner ditched large-scale diplomacy and began calling small cliques of members into his office for a reality check. “Don’t do this. It’s crazy,” the Speaker told them. “The president, the vice president, Reid, Pelosi—they’re all sitting there with the biggest shit-eating grins on their faces that you’ve ever seen, because they can’t believe we’re this fucking stupid.” Not only would Democrats never abandon the president’s bill, Boehner warned them, but a shutdown would overshadow the rollout of the Obamacare exchanges October 1, which members in both parties privately expected to be a logistical nightmare.
It made an impression. But so, too, did the countervailing influences from outside Congress. When Texas congressman Pete Sessions announced his opposition to the defund plan, the Senate Conservatives Fund labeled him a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) and threatened to recruit a primary opponent. That same week, a Tea Party activist launched her campaign against Sessions and promptly received the endorsement of FreedomWorks. For the sake of context, at that time, Sessions had an 85 percent lifetime score with the Club for Growth, a 97 percent lifetime score with the American Conservative Union, a 100 percent lifetime score with National Right to Life, and an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association.
Republican in Name Only?
Aggravated by these developments, Hensarling stood up in the weekly RSC meeting and delivered a fiery rebuke to the outside groups, as Roll Call reported at the time.5 A fellow Texan and revererd archconservative, Hensarling took out his voting card, which members use on the House floor, and held it up. He reminded his colleagues that nobody else—especially not Heritage Action—controlled their voting cards.
But the conservatives were unmoved. And Boehner was beginning to understand why: Whenever the rowdy elements of his conference had pushed too far over the past couple of years, the Speaker had pulled them back, preached patience, told them, “Live to fight another day.” That day had arrived. If they didn’t go to war against Obamacare now, they never would. With renewed whispers of his weakness gusting through the GOP, and his members girding for a game of chicken with the president, Boehner jumped into the driver’s seat and throttled up.
On September 18, less than two weeks before a potential shutdown, Boehner gathered his troops in the House basement and delivered the news. Conservatives would get a vote on exactly what they wanted: a short-term continuing resolution funding the government through December 15; an extension of the lower, post-sequester spending levels; and a permanent ban on funding for the Affordable Care Act. The room erupted in applause. “I think our leadership has got it just right,” Jim Jordan said afterward. Was that the sound of conservatives cheering Boehner? “Oh, yeah,” he said, grinning. “Heck yeah.”
Thus began one of the more futile negotiating periods in congressional history.
Boehner’s version passed the House but was rejected in the Senate, where Harry Reid stripped out the anti-Obamacare language and sent a “clean” funding bill back to the lower chamber. (The Democratic leader was not moved by Cruz’s twenty-one-hour speech in opposition, during which he promoted a new hashtag, #makeDClisten, and read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham for his daughters watching at home.)
At that point, Boehner and Cantor had a decision to make. There was no use volleying an identical bill back to the Senate; the shutdown was now less than a week away, and Democrats, even those who had voiced concerns about the health care law’s readiness, were not going to defund it. After surveying their options and twisting some arms, the GOP leadership rallied its members around a new bill, this one delaying Obamacare’s implementation by one year, repealing the medical device tax, and designating pay for military members in the event of a shutdown. Conservatives on the floor celebrated when it passed just after midnight on September 29. Boehner had given a concession, but the House had held its ground. By lowering their asking price, Republicans hoped, maybe Senate Democrats would come to the table.
Then again, maybe not. “Today’s vote by House Republicans is pointless,” Reid said shortly after the House bill passed. “Republicans must decide whether to pass the Senate’s clean [bill], or force a Republican government shutdown.”6
When the Senate officially rejected that version on September 30, with hours to go before the shutdown, House Republicans made a third concession. This time they passed a bill that would delay implementation of Obamacare by a year but keep the medical device tax, offering instead a populist amendment to strip health care subsidies for federal politicians and their staffs.
Once again, Harry Reid refused to flinch. It was like watching a speeding car negotiate with a brick wall.
When the clock struck midnight on October 1, Republicans scurried around the Capitol, many of them sporting mischievous grins. Democrats marched as though they were in a funeral precession, wearing rehearsed looks of melancholy. These optics were jarring and spoke to the national divide in public opinion. The vast majority of the country was assigning blame to Republicans. But many of them didn’t care. They weren’t elected by the vast majority of the country; they were elected by their districts, most of which were safely red and rewarding of any last-ditch effort to defeat Obamacare.
Just after midnight, David Schweikert, a Tea Party congressman from Arizona who had been kicked off his top committee a year earlier for his frequent votes against the leadership, told me a story. Hours earlier, he had participated in a telephone town hall with constituents back in his district. Rubbing his hands with glee, Schweikert relayed that nearly all of them were supportive of the shutdown and blamed Senate Democrats for their unwillingness to negotiate over Obamacare. “They get it,” he said, practically squealing.
But did the Republicans get it?
The policy implications aside, the politics made sense for many in the House GOP: Their voters, by and large, weren’t going to punish them for a government shutdown under these circumstances. But it wasn’t just the shutdown Congress had to deal with. The Treasury Department had already announced that the country would run out of borrowing authority on October 17. This was the debt-ceiling deadline that House Republicans had agreed to punt back at Williamsburg when Boehner explained how a series of wins would give them momentum heading into negotiations. Instead, with a possible default looming in sixteen days, they had now backed themselves into a government shutdown with no apparent exit strategy.
“We have to get something out of this,” Marlin Stutzman, a conservative Indiana congressman, told the Washington Examiner in the wee hours of October 1. “And I don’t know what that even is.”
FIGHT. IT BECAME THE DEFINING WORD OF THE MODERN REPUBLICAN era. As feelings of desertion took root during this period of dizzying cultural and economic transition, voters came to crave one quality above all others in their elected officials: a willingness to scrap, claw, kick, and bite on their behalf, demonstrating an understanding of their frustrations and their fears.
It’s why Donald Trump, despite innumerable manifest flaws, won the presidency in 2016.
It’s why Ted Cruz, despite obvious political defects, was the Republican runner-up.
And it’s why John Boehner, despite their prior threats on his political life, won conservatives’ trust in October 2013.