Every year, Republican members of the House of Representatives retreat from Washington to assess their political fortunes. This year, they gathered in mid-January, at the Kingsmill Resort, in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was too cold to play golf on the resort’s renowned course, and at nearby Colonial Williamsburg, with a steady rain falling, there wasn’t a costumed Thomas Jefferson or Benedict Arnold in sight. Aside from the bar and the spa, there was no escaping the ballrooms, where, for three days, some two hundred Republicans pondered the state of their party.
Two months earlier, Republicans had lost the Presidential election and eight seats in the House. They were immediately plunged into a messy budget fight with a newly emboldened President, which ended with an income-tax increase, the first in more than twenty years. A poll in January deemed Congress less popular than cockroaches, head lice, and colonoscopies (although it did beat out the Kardashians, North Korea, and the Ebola virus). It was time to regroup.
The event at Kingsmill was not so much a retreat as an intervention. On the eve of the getaway, Tom Cole, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told me that factional disputes over taxes and spending had created a dire situation. “It’s a very important time for the conference, and it needs to air some of these things,” he said. “It’s a little like a dysfunctional family right now, where everybody knows old Uncle Joe at the end of the table’s an alcoholic, but nobody wants to say it. And somebody needs to say it. We need to get Joe some help. Come on, he’s ruined too many Christmas parties!”
Over three days, the Republicans heard from political strategists, pollsters, conservative intellectuals, C.E.O.s, and motivational speakers. A dinnertime address by Erik Weihenmayer, a blind mountaineer who scaled Everest, was called “Using Adversity to Our Advantage by Working Together.” Panel discussions had existential titles such as “What Happened and Where Are We Now?” Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor for National Review, was asked to explain why the Republicans’ economic agenda had failed. “I said to them, ‘Don’t kid yourself that this was a close election; face the facts that this is in a lot of ways a very weak party,’ ” Ponnuru told me. He argued that too many voters believe that the Party’s economic agenda helps nobody except rich people and big business.
On the second day, after a 7 A.M. choice of Catholic Mass or Bible study, the political analyst Charlie Cook gave a sober presentation about current demographic trends, demonstrating that the Party was doomed unless it started winning over Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and younger voters. He also noted that forty per cent of the electorate is moderate—and Republicans lost that constituency by fifteen points in 2012. Thanks to congressional redistricting, Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, and Cook said that the Party could probably keep it for the foreseeable future, but he warned that the prospects of winning back the Senate, and the White House, would require dramatic change. There are only twenty Republican women in the House, and Kellyanne Conway, a G.O.P. pollster, gave the overwhelmingly white male audience some advice: stop talking about rape.
In the next few years, a new field of Republican Presidential candidates will emerge to sort out some of these issues. Until then, House Republicans, who have moved sharply to the right since January, 2011, are the face of their party. They will also determine the destiny of President Obama’s second term, which features an ambitious agenda including taxes, immigration, and gun control. The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has often shown a willingness to compromise, but for more than two years he has been stymied by a small and unruly group of right-wingers, led by his deputy, Eric Cantor.
Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political strategist. Cantor is frequently talked about as a future Speaker; he could even be a future President, some of his aides say. Since the election, as Republicans have confronted Obama in a series of budgetary battles—another will unfold this week—few have tried as hard as Cantor to reposition and redefine the defeated party.
“He’s a fantastic Majority Leader,” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a close friend, said. “Eric keeps the trains running on time very efficiently.” As Mitt Romney’s former running mate and the architect of the budget policies that some Republicans blame for their loss in 2012, Ryan is well aware of his party’s problems. “What Eric is really focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us there. That is a huge job.”
Late in the afternoon on the second day of the retreat, Cantor and his wife, Diana, who happens to be a liberal Democrat, met me for coffee at the Trellis restaurant, in Williamsburg. Cantor, who is forty-nine, is slight and speaks in a nasal Southern drawl. When cameras are around, he has a tendency to look frozen, as if he’d just been caught doing something wrong; his smile can look like a snarl. He’s more genial in person.
Born in Richmond, Cantor, who is Jewish, first entered office in 1992, as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. In 2001, he became a member of the U.S. House. In 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House, Cantor became the Majority Leader, and the highest elected Jewish official in America. Along the way, he has become one of the top fund-raisers in the House. For the past two years, he has anchored the Tea Party, as the leader of House conservatives and the creator of a strategy to oppose and obstruct the Obama agenda.
Cantor was one of the most influential political forces in Obama’s first term. In June of 2011, the President and the Speaker began working toward a Grand Bargain of major tax increases and spending cuts to address the government’s long-term budget deficits. Until late June, Boehner had managed to keep these talks secret from Cantor. On July 21st, Boehner paused in his discussions with Obama to talk to Cantor and outline the proposed deal. As Obama waited by the phone for a response from the Speaker, Cantor struck. Cantor told me that it was a “fair assessment” that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the issues of taxes and spending to the voters and “have it out” with the Democrats in the election. Why give Obama an enormous political victory, and potentially help him win reëlection, when they might be able to negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican President? Boehner told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a Grand Bargain, Cantor and the House Republicans made a grand bet.
The bet failed spectacularly. Just as Cantor had urged, Obama and Romney spent much of the campaign debating tax and spending policies that the House Republicans had foisted on the Romney-Ryan ticket. What’s more, by scuttling the 2011 Grand Bargain negotiations, Cantor, more than any other politician, helped create the series of fiscal crises that have gripped Washington since Election Day. The failure of the Grand Bargain led to a byzantine deal: if the two parties could not agree on a new deficit plan, then a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—cuts known, in budget jargon, as a “sequester”—would automatically kick in on New Year’s Day. (The sequester was postponed until March 1st.) Looming beyond this “fiscal cliff” was an even more perilous fight, over the expiration of the debt ceiling, which is the limit on how much money the government can borrow, and which Congress must regularly raise if the Treasury is to pay its bills.
At the January retreat, a halfway point in the midst of these budget battles, Cantor sounded chastened, or, at least, like a man wanting to appear chastened. “We’ve got to understand that people don’t think Republicans have their back,” he said. “Whether it’s the middle class, whether it’s the Latino or the Asian vote.” It was not “necessarily our policies” but, rather, how “we’ve been portrayed.” He added, “It goes to that axiom about how people don’t really care how much you know until they know you care. So we’ve got to take that to heart and, I think, look to be able to communicate why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Cantor had been struck by one presentation at the retreat. Patrick Doyle, the president and C.E.O. of Domino’s, had given a talk called “Turning It Around,” in which he explained that he revived the failing company after conducting extensive research that led him to conclude that Domino’s pizza was terrible. But Cantor seemed more interested in Doyle’s sales advice than in his point about his product.
“There was a discussion about features and benefits,” he said. “Marketing 101, right? If you’re selling detergent and you put a new blue dot in a detergent block, that’s a feature. But the benefit is it gets your clothes cleaned.” He paused to let the lesson sink in.
“Well, we have features that we’re for, whether it’s balanced budgets, whether it’s fiscal prudence or reforming entitlements,” he said. “Those are features—those aren’t ends in themselves. But they’re going to produce a stronger America. They’re going to save the safety-net programs for those who need them. We have to apply our principles in a way that translates to understanding that we actually are focussing and trying to help people and meet the needs that they have.”
Since the 2012 elections, the Republicans have been divided between those who believe their policies are the problem and those who believe they just need better marketing—between those who believe they need to make better pizza and those who think they just need a more attractive box. Cantor, who is known among his colleagues as someone with strategic intelligence and a knack for political positioning, argues that it’s the box.
As he gamed out G.O.P. strategy for the budgetary showdowns with Obama in January and February—including this week’s clash over the sequester—Cantor was happy to make himself available for several long interviews. He persistently struck a diplomatic note and mentioned again and again how much he looked forward to working with Obama, a position that he said he’s been articulating for a long time.
“Why isn’t that your reputation, then?” I asked.
“I have to ask you that. Maybe you can make it so!”
When a party’s base of power is centered in the House, the most populist and polarized institution in Washington, it often has trouble corralling its most obstreperous partisans. The lower chamber of Congress has frequently served as a foil for Presidential candidates trying to distance themselves from the more radical elements in their party. In 1999, George W. Bush criticized members of the House for “balancing their budget on the backs of the poor.” But the problem is trickier when you are the House Majority Leader.
There are several ways to think of the divide in the Republican conference. One is regional. The House has two hundred and thirty-two Republican members; nearly half of them—a hundred and ten—are from the South. The rest are scattered across the Midwest (fifty-eight), the mid-Atlantic (twenty-five), the mountain West (eighteen), and the Pacific (twenty-one). There are no House Republicans from New England. Nan Hayworth, a Tea Party representative from upstate New York who lost to a Democrat in November, told me about a Southern Republican who once tried to win her support for a colleague on some internal conference position. “He’s a good Christian man,” the congressman told her, assuming that was the first thing she needed to know. She responded, “Well, I’m married to a good Jewish man.”
Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who holds Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat and is seen as a leader of the most conservative House Republicans, said that, during a recent debate over taxes, “we talked past each other oftentimes as much as Republicans and Democrats talk past each other.” He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
The other divide in the House is generational. If Democrats vote as a bloc, which they often do, it takes only sixteen dissenting Republicans for the leadership to lose a vote. There is a rump group of some forty or fifty restless Republicans. At its core are two dozen younger members, most of whom have been elected since 2010 and have what generously might be called a dismissive attitude toward their leaders, whom they see as holdovers from the big-spending era of George W. Bush.
Raúl Labrador, who is forty-five, is a cheerful libertarian and the unofficial leader of the rump. Born in Puerto Rico, he moved with his family to Las Vegas when he was thirteen. His mother thought that he was hanging around with the wrong crowd, so she sent him to a Mormon youth program, and eventually they both became devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He later moved to Boise, Idaho, where his wife, whom he met at Brigham Young University, was born. In the 2010 election, he beat a conservative Democrat, and now represents one of Idaho’s two congressional districts.
Older House members “were so excited when this class came in,” Labrador told me in his office recently. “But they just wanted us to sit in the corner and be quiet. They want our numbers, but they don’t want our input, and they don’t want our opinions. They spent two years working really hard to make sure that we were co-opted—that we were just another member of Congress who did as we were told. But it’s because of this class that we have a majority.” He said that, if it weren’t for the class of 2010, “these guys wouldn’t have any chairmanships. They wouldn’t have the leadership positions.”
Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, who is sixty-three and has served for a decade in the House, recently emerged as the leader of a large faction of House Republicans who believe that the Tea Party-inspired congressmen are dooming the Party. A member of the Chickasaw Nation, Cole started in politics in 1979, when he was thirty, as a strategist and a consultant. He served in top staff positions in the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is in charge of electing Republicans to the House. He has a lifetime rating of ninety-two per cent from the American Conservative Union.
Cole is no fan of Obama. “The President is so self-righteous and so smug,” he told me. But Cole is one of the few House Republicans who have worked closely with the White House. On one of his walls, which is decorated with Native American artifacts, were framed copies of two laws that Obama signed regarding tribal issues. “He’s the best President in modern American history on Native American issues,” Cole said.
He seemed far more frustrated with the extremists in his own party. “This is a very different Republican Party than the one I got elected into,” he said. “It’s much more domestically focussed, much more fiscally responsible, much less concerned about America’s position in the world or about defending the country. It almost takes for granted the security that we have now. It’s not a group shaped by 9/11. Their 9/11 is the fiscal crisis, the long-term deficit.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of House Republicans—a hundred and fifty-eight out of two hundred and thirty-two—have arrived in Washington since the 2006 election, when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had become increasingly unpopular. A hundred and sixteen, exactly half, came after the 2010 election, and the fallout from the economic crisis has been the major issue.
“But this is also a much braver conference politically,” Cole went on. “It will do things that it knows are politically not in its interest.” He pointed out that House Republicans have twice passed Ryan’s budget, which included controversial changes in Medicare and deep cuts in Medicaid; it included large tax cuts, too, which meant that the plan wouldn’t bring down federal deficits for several decades. But Cole also said that his colleagues had some serious blind spots. “If this were football, some of these guys would know only one play, and that’s to throw deep every time,” he said. “They don’t understand winning incrementally or winning first downs. I admire the zeal, because we have to have that, but it needs to be tempered with a little bit of experience.”
Cantor’s reputation as a Tea Party leader is a recent development. In his office, he keeps a photograph of a bow-tied Thomas Bliley, the former mayor of Richmond, who represented Cantor’s suburban district for two decades, until Cantor succeeded him. Bliley, who is Catholic, and who started out as a Democrat, is now a lobbyist. “He’s a real Virginia gentleman,” Cantor, who worked as Bliley’s driver when he was a student at George Washington University, said. “He really was seen as a uniter.” As Bliley created a base in the quickly suburbanizing areas around Richmond, Cantor’s parents held meetings in their home to help build up the local Republican Party. In Virginia politics, the Bliley machine is known for its pro-business views, not for its Tea Party adherents. “I learned a lot from him,” Cantor said.
After Obama’s election in 2008, Cantor started a group called the National Council for a New America, which sought to embrace the idea that the G.O.P. needed to become more moderate. He told reporters that he was reading David Frum and Ross Douthat, two conservative writers at odds with the rightward drift of the Party. The efforts were short-lived. As the Tea Party movement took off, in 2009, Cantor worked to harness its energy. The National Council for a New America shut down a year later, and Cantor co-authored a book, “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders,” with Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, a congressman from California, who is now the third-ranking Republican in the House. They presented themselves as a new wave of small-government conservatives who would help thwart the Obama agenda.
For the first two years of Obama’s Presidency, while House Republicans were in the opposition, John Boehner shared Cantor’s approach. Things started to change after Republicans took over the chamber in January, 2011. In terms of political intrigue, the relationship between the two men is rivalled only by the complicated partnership of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. When Cantor was aligning himself with the Tea Party right, and Boehner was trying to reach a Grand Bargain with the White House, Boehner deputized Cantor to enter into budget negotiations with Vice-President Joe Biden. He thought that Cantor might be brought into the process, rather than working against the deal from afar. But the arrangement was shattered when Cantor learned that the Speaker was secretly negotiating his own deal, directly with the President. It took the men, and their fiercely competitive staffs, months to repair the rift.
The first test for Cantor in his attempt to alter the Party’s trajectory came this winter, as he navigated the maze of fiscal deadlines—the automatic tax hikes, the spending cuts of the sequester, and the debt ceiling. After Election Day, Cantor and Boehner, humbled by the Party’s losses, came to agree on strategy and moved quickly on two fronts. First, the election had made a tax increase inevitable—taxes would rise automatically if there was no deal with Obama to avert the fiscal cliff—so Cantor conceded that they would have to return to negotiating with the White House. They were trying, he said, “to straight up do what we really need to have happen, which is: we’re going to have to increase taxes, and you can’t keep digging the hole deeper, so you got to do something to control spending.”
But Boehner and Cantor needed more control over their most unruly faction. A new Congress is a time to evaluate chairmanships and review committee assignments. Controlling such perks is one of the few remaining sources of leverage that senior Republicans have over junior members. House Republican leaders decided to punish four wayward members who had defied their authority in the previous Congress. In early December, the four men—Tim Huelskamp, Justin Amash, Walter Jones, and David Schweikert—were removed from their committees. On Capitol Hill, the event became known as the Purge.
It did not have the intended effect. A few weeks after the episode, Huelskamp was still outraged. I met him in his Capitol Hill office, and he sprang out of his chair to point out some vaguely conspiratorial details that he said didn’t add up. Huelskamp, a fifth-generation farmer from Kansas who represents that state’s First Congressional District, said that he was being punished for his conservative views, an argument that had made him a minor cause célèbre on Fox News and conservative blogs.
Republicans involved in the decision insisted that the Purge wasn’t about ideology. Huelskamp and Amash were removed from the Budget Committee largely because they refused to vote for Ryan’s budget in the previous Congress. (Huelskamp also lost his assignment on the Agriculture Committee.) Walter Jones was taken off the Financial Services Committee—a coveted assignment, because members attract enormous sums of money from Wall Street—for not helping to raise money for the Party. David Schweikert had voted the wrong way on two-thirds of the key votes that his leadership tracked in the previous Congress, and, I was told, “there was a strong feeling that he had somehow been responsible for this story that broke about skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee,” a reference to a story on Politico, last August, about a member of Congress, Kevin Yoder, of Kansas, who, after a night out with other House members and their families, took off his clothes and plunged into the sacred waters upon which Christians believe Jesus once walked. (Schweikert’s office insisted that he had nothing to do with the story.)
In a previous era, when House leaders punished errant members, there was little recourse for the congressmen; party committees could withhold campaign funds. But Huelskamp said that he was immune to such pressure, since his support came not from House leaders but from grass-roots conservatives. “They will say, ‘Either vote this way or we’ll shut your money off,’ ” he said. “But nobody in Washington elected me, nobody in leadership. Outside groups came and helped me.”
He added, “I’m very upset about the lack of leadership. We came in with high hopes and high expectations—the class of 2010!—and left with a big tax increase, a big spending increase, more corporate welfare, and no entitlement reform. If the Republican leadership doesn’t look, at a minimum, like it’s actually articulated and attempted to advance some conservative principles, then I think we’ll lose the majority.”
Cantor was unapologetic about the Purge. “There was some sense within the House” that some members “were going out of their way to, let’s just say, leverage a certain position against the team as a whole,” he told me. “Again, it wasn’t their votes. It was the conduct that followed.” Still, the episode was a reminder that steering House Republican politics in 2013 could be dangerous. It was not an ideal moment to be peddling a plan to raise taxes.
By early December, Cantor’s and Boehner’s original plan, to negotiate a fiscal-cliff deal directly with the White House, had begun to trouble House conservatives. Boehner was negotiating the details of the tax hike with Obama, as he had in 2011, but this time Cantor clearly agreed with the strategy and the policy. Cantor was simultaneously trying to reposition a deeply unpopular party and preserve his credibility with the most conservative members of the House. (You never knew when Boehner might quit or be overthrown.) Five days before Christmas, the negotiations with Obama stalled. The White House wouldn’t agree to any spending cuts, and a large faction of House Republicans wouldn’t proceed without them.
Merely talking to the President had cost Boehner. News of his concessions to Obama were leaking to House conservatives, some of whom no longer trusted him. Tom Price, the Georgia Republican, recalled reading that Boehner had told Obama that he would accept higher tax rates. “That was an ‘Oh, please, no, tell me I’m reading the wrong story here’ moment,” Price said. “People recoiled.” According to Huelskamp, at one meeting of the full Republican conference a conservative rose and asked the Speaker if they could please send their own person into the negotiating room with Boehner and Obama.
The effort to reach a deal with the President was Plan A. But Obama, energized by his victory, insisted on a deal that raised taxes far more than Boehner would accept. The Speaker suspended the talks, and, with Cantor’s full support, proposed his own plan, and tried to get it through the House. They called it Plan B.
“The purpose of the Speaker’s talking with the President was to get something for the additional monies you’re asking people to pay in,” Cantor said, about the tax increase that they knew they were facing. “When that seemed as if it wasn’t going to meet with a lot of reception on the part of our members, we went to Plan B.”
In theory, passing Plan B would strengthen Republicans in their negotiations with Obama. But it still entailed passing an income-tax hike, something that Republicans hadn’t supported for twenty-two years. Republican dogma held that the 1990 tax increase signed into law by George H. W. Bush had cost him reëlection, in 1992. (The real culprit was probably the recession that year.) For almost a quarter of a century, no policy has been more sacrosanct to the Republican Party than opposition to higher income taxes.
But there was no way around it. The fiscal cliff insured that, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when the vast majority of the Bush-era tax cuts were allowed to expire, taxes would rise for ninety per cent of Americans anyway. The two sides had now agreed to preserve the Bush-era tax cuts for most taxpayers, and the negotiations had narrowed to one issue: the threshold of income at which a sliver of the wealthiest Americans would pay more. Obama’s long-standing position was that the trigger should be two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Boehner and Cantor’s Plan B set the threshold at a million dollars. At the last minute, Cantor advanced a separate bill with spending cuts that he hoped would attract his most right-wing colleagues to also vote for Plan B. Early on the day Plan B was set to pass, December 20th, Cantor told reporters, “We’re going to have the votes.”
That night, in the Speaker’s Lobby, a hive of ornate rooms, with fireplaces and leather chairs, just behind the rostrum that viewers see on C-SPAN, members of Congress and reporters milled about, trading gossip about the fate of Plan B. Nan Hayworth, the Republican from upstate New York, was sitting a few paces off the floor in an overstuffed chair, explaining how the Tea Party movement in the House had matured. Hayworth is a Princeton-educated doctor, and, like almost half of her 2010 classmates, she had no previous experience in government. Her favorite book is Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson,” a 1946 free-market treatise about the long-term economic impact of government policy.
“We came in saying we have got to move on deficit and debt,” she said as the House voted on a bill to name a government health clinic in Florida. “We have got to move on the Affordable Care Act. We are on the wrong course. If we don’t act, calamity awaits.” Instead, she said, “we experienced the process of having our aspirations and our commitments disappointed.” The Tea Party, like Obama’s most loyal voters after 2008, had been frustrated by the messy reality of the legislative process. “Our supporters looked at the lack of progress and thought, Here we elected this enormous majority in the House of Representatives. We came in with all this enthusiasm and passion, and nothing’s getting done.” Since Election Day, she believed, members were listening to the leadership, which was trying to set a smarter course for the Party.
Boehner and Cantor entered the floor and cornered potential holdouts. One early vote in the evening suggested trouble. It was on the package of deep spending cuts that Cantor had put on the floor to make the tax increase in Plan B more palatable. Twenty-one Republicans, including Huelskamp and Labrador, the core of the rump faction, voted nay, because the cuts weren’t deep enough.
Steve LaTourette, a moderate from Ohio who was retiring, characterized them as “extremists.” Hayworth also thought that they were outliers. “All along, the Speaker explained to us, in straightforward but respectful ways, ‘Look, guys, just realistically, there are some things you’re going to be able to do and some things you’re not.’ But it took a while for some of us to understand.” Hayworth was going to support Plan B. She looked at her phone to make sure she didn’t miss the vote. “You know, you can be a revolutionary, but you’re not necessarily going to be able to do the long, hard grind of governing.”
When we finished talking, Hayworth looked down at her phone again. “That’s weird,” she said. There was no mention of the vote, but she had a message summoning her to an emergency meeting of Republicans in the basement of the Capitol. She and other members filed down to the meeting room, underneath an area known as the Crypt. Along the way, they walked through the Capitol Rotunda, where the flag-draped coffin of Daniel Inouye was lying in state and two young women stood in tears, grieving.
Inside, Boehner opened the meeting with a prayer made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Then he announced that he didn’t have enough votes to pass Plan B, and sent everyone home. Moments later, Hayworth and some two hundred Republicans burst out of the meeting room. Mike Kelly, a heavyset car dealer from western Pennsylvania, shook his head. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he exclaimed. Boehner, grim-faced and flanked by security, marched out a side door. Paul Ryan, who had kept a low profile since November, tried to slip away unnoticed, but was chased down a hall by a pack of reporters shouting questions. “You’re confusing me with someone who’s commenting,” he said.
As the building emptied, I ran into David Dreier, a California Republican who was retiring from Congress after thirty-two years. “I just don’t have an easy explanation,” Dreier said. “It’s a group up here of members who have been outspoken and are ideologically very conservative. I’ve said for the past four years: I’m a Reagan Republican, which makes me left of center in my party.”
On New Year’s Day, Cantor was back in the Republican conference room underneath the Crypt, with an announcement to make. Twelve days had passed since the Plan B fiasco. Cantor’s first attempt at leadership after the election had failed, leaving Boehner hamstrung in his negotiations with Obama and the Senate. At a White House meeting eight days after Plan B’s demise, Boehner was sullen and silent. He refused to engage in the discussions, and instead repeated talking points: the House had done all it could; now the Senate needed to act. The White House and the Senate negotiated a deal to avert most of the tax hikes in the fiscal cliff; Vice-President Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, who led the final talks, agreed to set the crucial threshold for the new tax rate for upper-income individuals at four hundred thousand dollars (and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars for families). With no time left to negotiate anything more substantive, they simply delayed by two months the sequester—$1.2 trillion in spending cuts that, if not averted, could cost the economy an estimated seven hundred and fifty thousand jobs this year. Although some Democrats warned that the delay was foolish, the deadline was kicked to March 1st. The final bill, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, passed the Senate, by 89–8, shortly after 2 A.M. on New Year’s Day, after five minutes of debate.
House Republicans had to decide what to do with it. If Cantor had had his way, he would have been in Guadeloupe. “My whole family went on a cruise, and I couldn’t go,” he told me, glumly; he had to stay in Washington to deal with the fiscal-cliff crisis. His wife, Diana, said, “This was our twenty-third anniversary, and he missed my fiftieth-birthday cruise also.” Cantor called every morning to check in on her mother, who lives with them and was on the cruise. “She’s his buddy,” she said, “so he’s calling me to make sure that my mother’s happy, that I’m doing enough activities with my mother, because they do crossword puzzles together every night.”
A few hours after his daily call, Cantor walked into the meeting room with Boehner—another public show of alliance. Cantor then announced that he couldn’t vote for the Biden-McConnell compromise. If Obama was getting new revenues, Republicans had to get spending cuts. “I do not support the bill,” he told reporters as he walked out of the meeting. Once again, Cantor had abandoned Boehner at a crucial moment of the negotiations. The Senate bill seemed doomed, and the economy was headed for the cliff.
Later in the day, during a second meeting, Boehner offered his members a stark choice: alter the bill by adding spending cuts to it, and send it back to the Senate, or pass it unamended. Boehner said that he would pursue the amendment approach if two hundred and seventeen Republicans—a majority of the House—favored it. But he warned his colleagues that that would effectively blow up the deal negotiated by Biden and McConnell, and Republicans should prepare to accept the blame for it. A quick count that evening revealed that the votes weren’t there for the more radical approach.
In the end, Boehner’s bill passed, 257–167, but only eighty-five Republicans, mostly from states that Obama won in 2012, voted for it. Cantor watched the vote from the floor. It was one thing to tell his colleagues that he didn’t support the bill, as he had done that morning. But now he had to decide how to vote. When it was clear that the bill would safely pass with Democratic support, he quickly marched down the aisle, voted nay, and left the chamber. The Speaker of the House does not normally vote unless he or she wants to make a statement. But on New Year’s Day Boehner voted for the fiscal-cliff deal, which included more than six hundred billion dollars in higher tax revenue over the next decade. After almost two months of unity, the old Boehner-Cantor divisions had broken into the open. And again it was the Speaker, not Cantor, who was trying to lead the Republicans in a more responsible direction. According to a Republican who spoke with Boehner shortly after the drama of New Year’s Day, the Speaker was blindsided by Cantor’s public opposition to the bill: “He couldn’t believe it.”
Paul Ryan voted for the bill. Since his failed bid for Vice-President, Ryan has been seen as a potential rival to Cantor for the Speaker’s job in a post-Boehner House. “I was torn,” Ryan told me. “You get so tied up in these votes, so I just pulled myself out of it and said, ‘Look, this has to pass. The deal is not going to get better.’ And if I’m saying to people, ‘This has to pass,’ then I ought to vote for it, you know? It’s just not going to get better. I just thought it was important to show some unity at that moment. I understand why people voted against it.” Ryan insisted that there was no rivalry with Cantor. “This is nothing but ridiculous palace intrigue, honestly,” he said. “I’m a policymaker. If I wanted to be in leadership, I would have run for it years ago.”
During my conversation with Cantor in Williamsburg, he seemed uncomfortable talking about his vote on the Senate bill and again pointed to the lack of spending cuts in exchange for the tax increases to which Republicans had acceded. “You cannot keep telling people, ‘I’m just going to raise your taxes,’ and then not fix the problem!” he told me. He insisted that Boehner knew where he stood. “John and I were very up front with each other,” he said. “He and I had met one on one that morning.” He added, “It was my impression that we were on the same page. We both didn’t like this bill. We both did not like it and both were upset that we couldn’t have moved the needle.” (Boehner’s office said that the two men did not have a one-on-one meeting but that there was a larger leadership meeting that morning at which Cantor made it clear how he would vote.)
I told Cantor that other Republican members were baffled that their leadership was so divided on the issue. “I felt John and I had communicated with each other,” Cantor said. “And I felt, you’ve gotta do something about this problem! You can’t just kick the can! And that’s what caused me to vote like that. Is it a vote that members like to see? No.”
He motioned toward his wife, who had just been joking about her husband living with two liberal Jewish women. “Again, go back to this family, and my getting along with the Jewish women in my life,” Cantor said. “You don’t agree on everything, O.K.? But you work to find ways that you can move forward together. And I think that’s the important takeaway here. You’re not getting everything you want in life.”
The chaotic resolution of the fiscal cliff left Republicans even more battered. Rather than rejuvenating the Republican identity, Cantor seemed to be doing little more than opportunistically tacking between factions within the House.
And the extremists were invigorated. On January 3rd, the House was to elect its Speaker. Normally, this would be a pro-forma exercise, but Labrador, Huelskamp, and a small band of colleagues had another idea. They would round up enough of their dissatisfied Tea Party colleagues to vote for someone other than Boehner. That would throw the election into a second round of voting, and might produce a more conservative option—Tom Price or even, if they could convince him, Cantor.
Labrador was still irked by the Purge. “I thought it was a mistake for anybody to be punished for their votes or for their actions or for their attitudes,” he said. Worse, he added, was that Boehner had insisted on personally trying to cut a deal with Obama after the election and then agreed to raise taxes. “I agree that the President won, and I agree that the President had a mandate to propose what he wanted to propose. It doesn’t mean that my mandate is the same as his mandate. I won my election as well.” Many House Republicans said the same thing after the election. “We’re the first branch of government,” Labrador said. “We don’t have a king. We don’t have an emperor.”
The attempt to unseat Boehner was so ill-conceived that a Times reporter dubbed it the Keystone Coup. The plotters had openly discussed it at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill bar frequented by congressional staffers, some of whom overheard the details and leaked them to Bloomberg Businessweek. On the morning of the vote, Huelskamp was photographed on the House floor with his iPad; right there, open in an e-mail, was a list of congressmen whom he expected to vote against Boehner. The subject line, visible to reporters, said, “You would be fired if this goes out.”
Labrador said that the plot would have succeeded had several of the Republicans not lost their nerve. “I just decided that I was going to follow through with what I said I was going to do, even though other people decided that they were going to change their mind,” he said. In the end, twelve Republicans did not vote for Boehner—a historically high vote of no confidence. Cantor received three votes. During the roll call on the House floor, Cantor grimaced and shook his head when his name was called out as a replacement for Boehner.
I asked Cantor what he was thinking at that moment. “That we don’t need that,” he said. “That I am one hundred fifty per cent behind John Boehner as Speaker.” He insisted that the plotters were motivated by stories in the press that overhyped the idea of a split between the two leaders. “Where did they get their information to go and make their decisions?” he said, noting that two of the votes he received were from freshmen who barely knew him. “What do they know, really? I only met them a couple of times.” He added, “That’s why I was shaking my head. ‘Here we go again!’ ”
Nevertheless, Labrador said he thought that the episode sent a useful reminder to the leaders. The next big fight was already coming. The Treasury was about to hit the debt ceiling, sometime in middle to late February. Unless Congress agreed to authorize the government to borrow new money, the United States wouldn’t be able to pay its bills and would default on its loans, which could trigger a global economic crisis. Labrador wanted House leaders to be willing to hit the debt ceiling unless Obama agreed to spending cuts.
On January 15th, a few hours after I left his office, Labrador joined a hundred and seventy-eight other Republicans who voted against a fifty-billion-dollar relief package for areas in coastal New York and New Jersey that had been wracked by Hurricane Sandy. It was the second time that month that major legislation passed the House with a majority of Democratic votes. This time, Cantor voted for the bill.
So did Tom Cole. He was dumbfounded that so many of his colleagues voted against the fiscal-cliff deal. “These guys have no endgame,” he said. “I mean, they just are so desperate to do something that they don’t think past their nose. And that’s the dangerous part of this.” He added that he couldn’t understand what the opponents of the deal believed they were accomplishing: “I saw one of them on television who said, ‘Well, Obama will cave.’ Really? With all the polls running in his direction, his popularity moving up, ours in the tank? He’s not going to cave. Some of these guys will hold a political gun to their head and threaten the President: ‘Do what I want or I’ll pull the trigger!’ Like he cares?”
The divisions had to be repaired before the fight over the debt ceiling. “We have to have a unified leadership with a clear strategy,” Cole said. “We cannot afford to go through a situation again, as we did with the fiscal cliff, where four leaders vote one way and five vote the other.”
In Williamsburg, back in January, Cantor was pondering his party’s position on the debt ceiling. A vote to raise it would allow the Treasury to borrow money to pay its bills, but many conservatives, like Labrador, hated the idea of voting to increase the debt. But if the ceiling wasn’t raised a government default and economic catastrophe could follow. It wasn’t clear whether Cantor would ultimately side with Raúl Labrador or with Tom Cole.
Before he arrived at the restaurant that afternoon, Cantor, together with Boehner, had led a panel called “The Next 90 Days—Planning for the First Quarter,” which turned into a debate about the Republican strategy for dealing with the debt ceiling. The most conservative Republicans argued that, if Obama wouldn’t yield on more spending cuts, a nay vote on the debt ceiling would prove to the President, and to Tea Party constituents, that they were serious about cutting the size of the government. The Party’s consultants and its business class warned that such a path was suicidal. Cantor hinted at his inclination. “I think the way forward is that we need to be on grounds where the public understands why it is we’re doing what we’re doing,” he told me. He said he had figured a way out of the dilemma.
A few days later, he was standing in his Capitol Hill office beside a crackling fire; he was about to go and vote. Cantor and his staff occupy a sprawling space on the third floor of the Capitol (rather than in one of the far-flung House office buildings). An elevator off the main corridor of the Capitol delivers visitors directly to his suite. Cantor and his aides explained that, after a fierce debate at the retreat, he and Boehner, back in a temporary alliance, had persuaded their G.O.P. colleagues to drop their threat to use the debt ceiling to extract spending cuts from Obama. “Hoo!” he told me. “We had some robust discussion.”
They still didn’t have a solid majority. Cantor descended a narrow spiral staircase at the end of the hallway outside his office. He looked at his BlackBerry to see what bill he was about to vote on—“the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness reauthorization,” he said. In the House, there is always a stack of uncontroversial votes that the leadership can use to buy time; the votes were bait to lure Republicans to the floor so that the Party’s whips, who are in charge of vote-counting, could make sure that the debt-ceiling vote, which was scheduled for the following day, didn’t turn into another embarrassment, like Plan B. Nobody knew what the Democrats were planning. If they voted against the Cantor plan as a bloc, the Republicans would need to supply two hundred and seventeen votes. On the morning of the Plan B vote, Cantor had famously declared that it would pass. This time, as he walked through the Capitol Rotunda to the House floor, a reporter shouted a question about the prospects for the vote. Cantor ignored him.
As the whips made their rounds, Cantor retreated to another suite that he maintains, just off Statuary Hall, the old House Chamber. Obama had given his Inaugural Address the previous evening, laying out a program that included tax and immigration reform and emphasized support for gay marriage and gun control. Conservative columnists and radio hosts were condemning it. Cantor was diplomatic. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said. “I think he checked the box with some of those who are in the base on his side. If he’s interested in wanting to work with us, we’re going to be there waiting and interested to do so. We really need to be focussed on trying to accomplish something, being results-oriented, and not beating our chests.”
Cantor seems newly pained by his reputation as an ideological roadblock. In Virginia, his favorable rating is twenty-seven per cent, a fact that makes a statewide run for office in the near future a dim prospect. Cantor explained why he argued at the retreat against using the debt ceiling as political leverage. He had been hearing from donors on Wall Street and in the business community about the potential impact on the markets. “Most people would say incurring debt at this point is allowing money for bills that you already incurred,” he said. “It’s to pay the bills.” Eight days earlier, at a press conference, Obama had made the same argument.
Besides, there were better fights to come. Conceding the debt-ceiling vote was a simple way for House Republicans to prevent the U.S. government from going into default, which would be disastrous for the economy here and abroad. It also meant they could save their leverage for the coming fight over the automatic spending cuts in the sequester. “We’re not trying to sit here and just obstruct,” Cantor said. “We’re trying to solve the problem, and we’ve been put in this position, I guess, perception-wise, that all we want to do is obstruct. So this is an attempt for us to get on firmer ground.”
To win over the right, House leaders promised three things. They would demand that the Democratic-controlled Senate write a formal budget, which Senate Democrats have avoided doing for several years; if the senators didn’t pass a budget, they wouldn’t get paid. Second, they promised conservatives that the cuts in the sequester would be kept intact or replaced with something equivalent. The final promise was far more daunting: Paul Ryan would write a budget that balanced within ten years. “Big goal,” Cantor said, and he sounded relieved that it wouldn’t be his job; Ryan’s last budget, which included severe spending cuts, didn’t promise to come into balance until the late twenty-thirties. “People were concerned that it took too long to balance,” Ryan said. To make the budget balance in a decade, the level of cuts will have to be extreme. Cantor may have led his colleagues out of the debt-ceiling canyon only to get them trapped in another one.
I pointed out that, because the fiscal-cliff deal included more than six hundred billion dollars in higher taxes over the next ten years, Ryan’s job might be a little easier. Cantor flashed a mischievous grin. “Irony!” he said.
The next day, at the White House, as the House was voting on Cantor’s debt-ceiling legislation, Rob Nabors and Dan Pfeiffer sat in Nabors’s spacious office, on the second floor of the West Wing, and discussed Obama’s legislative strategy. Since 2011, Nabors had been the director of the President’s Office of Legislative Affairs, which put him in charge of figuring out how to move Obama’s agenda through the House and the Senate. Pfeiffer, who, like Nabors, previously worked on Capitol Hill, was Obama’s communications director. (A few days later, Nabors was promoted to deputy chief of staff for policy, and Pfeiffer was promoted to senior adviser, the position previously held by David Axelrod and then David Plouffe.)
Pfeiffer thought that the G.O.P.’s retreat on the debt ceiling was the first rational move the House Republican leaders had made since the election. “They knew at the end of the day that they would be forced to extend the debt ceiling,” he said. “They saw in advance that they were holding this ticking time bomb, and they gave it away.” As he finished his sentence, an aide said, “The bill just passed. Two-eighty-five to one-forty-four.” Boehner and Cantor had made some progress; only thirty-three Republicans had voted against it.
The legislation merely delayed the fight over the debt ceiling until mid-May. In its place, Cantor and the House Republicans had engineered the battle over the sequester, which would begin on March 1st. Cantor viewed the various fiscal deadlines as what his aides referred to as hot stoves. “One is particularly hot,” Steve Stombres, Cantor’s chief of staff, said. “You touch the debt limit and you go into default, and that could be irreparable damage to our economy. But we felt like we could handle the heat of the sequester. We just needed to get them sequenced correctly and use that as an opportunity. The sequester was in place, and the members don’t want to give up that money, those cuts.”
Cantor seems to have absorbed a few lessons since the November election. The first is that his own unpopularity has become an impediment to the Republican cause. During our last conversation, over breakfast at a hotel in Richmond, he repeatedly returned to his dismay over the partisan “rancor in Washington” and expressed the hope that “we could bring people together more,” because “I don’t think accentuating the differences is helping anybody.” This acknowledgment counts as a victory for the White House, which hoped that the election would “break the fever” and raise the cost of G.O.P. obstructionism.
Cantor had also come to see that when House Republicans returned to power in 2011 they were unrealistic about their expectations. “The job right now is, first of all, accepting the fact that although we’re a majority in the House, we are a minority in Washington,” he said. “It’s run by the Democrats, and so we’ve got to be smart about how we go forward.” Boehner repeatedly reminds House Republicans that they control only “one-half of one-third of Washington.” Similarly, at the retreat, Paul Ryan told reporters that Republicans “have to recognize the realities of the divided government that we have.”
Finally, Cantor reaffirmed his belief that the best way to win the winter and spring budget fights is by making short-term adjustments in public relations, not major changes in policies. As he sees it, Republicans face a marketing challenge: the problem is the box, not the pizza. In early February, before he was set to deliver a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, he invited me to join him at a luncheon in an A.E.I. conference room with some dozen people who he said would be affected by the policies that he was going to discuss from the lectern. He said that the fiscal battles with Obama over taxes and spending had left his side sounding like budget scolds, speaking an alien language of Washington jargon (“austerity,” “sequester,” “debt ceiling”). Just as those blue dots in the laundry detergent are only an abstract feature until you know that they provide the benefit of cleaner clothes, Cantor wanted to show that Republican fiscal policies “make life work” for average Americans, a group of whom he had assembled for the lunch.
Joseph Kelley, who lives in Washington, had been invited to explain the benefits of school choice, or vouchers, which had allowed him to take his four children out of a crime-ravaged public school and send them to the private Preparatory School of D.C. Erin Shucosky, who wore a neck brace, was there to highlight a tax on medical devices that passed as part of Obama’s 2010 health-care law. A twelve-year-old girl who has battled cancer, an area of federal research that Cantor has long championed, sat at the end of the table. Fiona Zhou, a Chinese graduate student in engineering at George Washington University, was the beneficiary of a visa program that Cantor wants to expand. “Majority Leader Eric Cantor interviewed me about my experience,” she said. “So I guess he’s using my case for the speech.”
Cantor entered the room and greeted everyone. “I know it’s been a lot of pain, but we appreciate you doing it,” he told Shucosky. He thanked the group for coming and explained that he wanted “to make sure that people understand that the issues that we’re trying to grapple with here in Washington have a real personal impact on real people.”
Shucosky talked about the arthritis in her neck and the costly surgery that she had had. She hoped that the government would help bring down health-care costs rather than increase them. The comment piqued the interest of Kelley. “If I heard correctly, certain other countries, they get free medical?” he asked. “Is that true?”
Cantor sighed. Free health care was not on his list of issues. “Well, it’s different in every country,” he explained. “There are a lot of people who don’t have insurance here and can’t access it, and that’s why the President’s health-care bill that passed attempts to go in and allow for everyone to have health care. And we’re grappling with the expense.”
Afterward, Cantor went upstairs to give his speech. His aides had been planning the address for weeks. That morning, they had learned that Obama would be simultaneously delivering remarks about the sequester, an issue that Cantor’s speech purposely avoided. There was something surreal about what Cantor was attempting. The looming sequester, which would slash spending across the government, was created by both parties, after the failure of the Grand Bargain, in 2011, as a purposely odious policy, in order to force the two sides to reach a more rational plan to reduce long-term deficits. Now House Republicans wanted the sequester to go into effect—and were blaming Obama for creating it. I asked Cantor about the disconnect between his speech, which highlighted real Americans who would theoretically be helped by future G.O.P. policies, and the real-world and immediate impact of the sequester. “What’s our choice, right?” he said. “There seemed to be no interest whatsoever on the part of the White House or the Senate to act. It’s up to the President to lead.”
Cantor spoke about school choice, tax reform, expanding visas. After the speech, he rode back to the Capitol and met privately with House Republicans to discuss one of the policies he had emphasized: a policy that would allow workers to convert overtime compensation into time off. “I gave a talk today about helping people and about finally focussing on legislation that has understandable benefits right away,” Cantor said. He explained that it would help parents who wanted to go on a field trip or attend a teacher conference. “What I want to see is how we can communicate this, communicate the benefit. How are we going to build a coalition and get it done?”
Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, of Florida, excused herself halfway through the session and left; the meeting seemed to have been convened mostly for the edification of the one reporter in the room. Cantor asked Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the fourth-ranking Republican leader, if the legislation was ready yet. “We’re still kind of in the exploratory stage, but we are looking at some child-care bills, and not quite ready at this point to bring them forward,” she said. “But we’re working on it.”
“O.K., I get it,” Cantor said. “There’s always . . .” His voice trailed off. “O.K., anybody else have anything?” The room went silent. “All right, thank you. Thank you very much.”
Some of the media greeted Cantor’s public speech with ridicule. Politico called it “Cantor 4.0” and noted that he has a history of championing the latest political craze. His attempts to reorient himself seemed ham-handed and overly political. But the problem extends beyond Cantor’s personal limitations. The real trouble is that the Republican Party cannot be transformed by the leadership of the House of Representatives. House Republicans as a group are farther to the right than they have ever been. The overwhelming majority still fear a primary challenge from a more conservative rival more than a general-election campaign against a Democrat. They may hope that the Party’s national brand improves enough to help win the White House in 2016, but there is little incentive for the average member of the House to moderate his image.
The House is rarely the source of renewal for a political party. In the nineteen-eighties, during a low point for the Democrats, it was Democratic governors like Bill Clinton, not the unpopular Democratic-controlled House, who pointed the way out of the wilderness for the Party. Major change almost always comes from a party’s aspiring Presidential candidates, and almost never from the House. In Richmond, before my last conversation with Cantor, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, who may run for President in 2016, spoke at an annual political breakfast hosted by Cantor. Jindal’s target was Obama, but his remarks were an implicit rebuke to House Republicans for becoming mired in a series of unnecessary fiscal crises that are of their own making, and which have kept them from dealing with other issues. “These are, in reality, sideshows in Washington that we have allowed to take center stage in our country,” Jindal said. “As conservatives, we are falling into the sideshow trap.”
Days after Cantor told me that he wanted to rise above the budget squabbling, he was back in the thick of the fight over the sequester—a policy that, whether he deems it a sideshow or not, will have a more immediate impact on real Americans than any of the issues he mentioned in his think-tank speech. Ryan’s new budget, which is scheduled to be released in March and will include dramatic cuts, will again leave the Republican Party defending fiscal policies that do not enjoy majority support. (Ryan brushed off the coming attacks. “I’m used to that,” he said. “We’re going to get demagogued no matter what we do. It’s like ‘Groundhog Day.’ ”) Unsurprisingly, when I asked Cantor if he was interested in running for President he responded with a resounding no. He seems to be settling in for a period of relatively low expectations.
“We all want to hope for winning the lottery, you know?” he told me at the end of our last meeting. “We all want to hope for going to the land of Oz. I love that. I mean, that’s what Hollywood is about. That’s what the press likes to write about—the extremes. But I think reality is you’ve got to be reasoned in your leadership, and it’s about managing expectations and about staying true to your principles.” ♦
