When the Tea Party Came to Town: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives' Most Combative, Dysfunctional, and Infuriating Term in Modern History - Softcover

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Robert Draper is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic and a correspondent to GQ. He is the author of several books, most recently the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He lives in Washington, DC.

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When the Tea Party Came to Town

PROLOGUE

Evening, January 20, 2009

You could fit the number of Republicans who were out on the town the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration around a single dining room table.

There were about fifteen of them, all white males, plus a few spouses. The venue was the Caucus Room, an expense-account steakhouse halfway between the White House and the Capitol. A seething winter chill was the least of their discomforts that evening. Nearly a half-million people had begun to congregate on the National Mall on Sunday, January 18, 2009—two days before the inauguration. By the time Obama was sworn in on Tuesday, the number had reached 1.8 million. The nation’s capital had never hosted a crowd that large, not for any reason. Definitely not for the previous president, George W. Bush, who had been jeered that afternoon as a helicopter whisked him off to Texas. Now the occupant of the White House was a Democrat. The House and Senate were controlled by Democrats. Barricades still lined the streets outside, as if at any moment the ruling party might engulf the Caucus Room and finish off what was left of the Republicans.

On such a night, it was a comfort to suffer among friends. Most of them—Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, and Dan Lungren—were members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Five served in the Senate: Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign, and Bob Corker. The other three invitees were conservative journalist Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, former House Speaker (and future presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, and communications specialist Frank Luntz. Most of them had attended the inauguration. That astounding vista of humanity on the Mall would haunt them more than last November’s electoral margins. McCarthy, a California congressman who had thus far served only a single term in the House, had made a game effort of viewing the event for the historic moment it was. He’d procured Obama’s autograph and even that of Obama’s sister. As the unworldly progeny of the Bakersfield working class, Kevin McCarthy had been dazzled to be included in such a tableau. As a Republican, he and the others in the room were devastated.

Luntz had organized the dinner—telling the invitees, “You’ll have nothing to do that night, and right now we don’t matter anyway, so let’s all be irrelevant together.” He had selected these men because they were among the Republican Party’s most energetic thinkers—and because they all got along with Luntz, who could be difficult. Three times during the 2008 election cycle, Sean Hannity had thrown him off the set at Fox Studios. The top Republican in the House, Minority Leader John Boehner, had nurtured a dislike of Luntz for more than a decade. No one had to ask why Boehner wasn’t at the Caucus Room that evening.

The dinner tables were set up in a square, at Luntz’s request, so that everyone could see each other and talk freely. He asked that Gingrich speak first. It was Newt, after all, who had pulled the Republicans out of a far deeper hole fourteen years ago, leading the GOP to a takeover of the House for the first time since 1955.

Gingrich was happy to oblige. Obama’s inaugural speech was impressive, the former Speaker said. The evocations of constitutional principles, pragmatism, and risk-taking—“those could have been our words.” Someone ought to laminate Obama’s speech and disseminate it, the better to hold the president accountable to his pledges.

Being competitors, however, they did not dwell on Obama’s seeming invincibility. They’d been thrashed, it was roundly agreed, because they had it coming. They ended up chucking their own principles and standing for nothing. They’d spent the last eight years defending policies they never should have signed on to in the first place. They’d lost their way.

“We got obsessed with governing,” Ensign said—adding with distaste, “making sure the trains run on time. Well, what if the train is heading towards the cliff?”

They picked at their salads and drank their wine and tried not to think about the thousands now dancing at the ten inaugural balls that the new president and his wife would be attending before the night was through.

Luntz was secretly overjoyed. When had Republicans in a group setting ever acknowledged how badly they had blown it? When had they ever recognized that they had become part of the problem rather than the solution? Maybe they don’t see how big this is, he thought.

“So we’re in the depths,” said Pete Hoekstra, who as a freshman in January 1993 had attended Bill Clinton’s swearing-in and had seen the GOP survive that particular downer. “The discussion we’re having tonight about President Obama, and where our party is, is no different than the discussion I came into as a freshman—except that it was even worse.”

Laughing, Hoekstra reminded them, “We’d been a minority party for forty years! And two short years later”—Hoekstra gestured to Gingrich, the field general of the 1994 revolution—“it’s a whole new world.”

How to regain that whole new world—that was now the question.

The men in the room were, behaviorally speaking, Washingtonians. Unlike ordinary Americans, they lived by a biennial calendar, the rhythms of their lives propelled by the electoral cycle as insistently as the migratory and mating habits of winged creatures. What their party had done from 1994 to 2000, and what the Democrats had then done from 2006 to 2008, the Republicans would once again do. They would take back the House in November 2010. They would use the House as the Republicans’ spear point to mortally wound President Obama in 2011. Then they would retake the White House and the Senate in 2012.

They would do all this, but only if the American voter blessed them to do so.

It made no sense, they all agreed, to attack Obama personally. The man was too popular.

“It’s got to be about ideas,” said Eric Cantor, the House minority whip, in his honeyed Virginia drawl. The Democrats now controlled everything and were already, with a monstrously priced economic stimulus package, showing their true colors. Give them time—they would screw things up, just as the GOP had.

“But everyone’s got to stick together,” said Paul Ryan, a thirty-eight-year-old Wisconsin congressman and numbers fetishist whose shiny earnestness recalled an Ozzie and Harriet America. Ryan hated squabbling amongst conservatives—the paleos versus the neos, the socials against the moderates, on and on for as long as he’d been on the Hill, which was all of his adult life. Ryan had long sought to be the GOP’s glue, pleading for adherence to the principles and the data. At times he looked like the underfed, hollow-eyed child of alcoholic parents.

“The only way we’ll succeed is if we’re united,” Ryan told the others. “If we tear ourselves apart, we’re finished.” But, he added, he liked what he was hearing now. Everyone at the table sounded like a genuine conservative. It was a place to start.

“If you act like you’re the minority,...