The Deep State (28 page)

Tea Party Versus GOP Establishment: A Phony Conflict

Since Obama won his second term, one of the dominant media narratives has been the supposed war between the Tea Party and the GOP establishment. While a factional struggle to nominate candidates has led to considerable internecine brawling, we should not make too much of it. In almost every case where there has been a contest between a self-described Tea Party contestant and an establishment candidate, the issue was not over policy but over the personal presentability of the candidate. The only significant result of this intraparty struggle, over which Democrats take such gloating satisfaction, has been to drive the Republican Party even further to the right, which, by a law of political physics, drives the Democratic Party, conscious of its donor base, to the center-right. The Tea Party–establishment conflict is a mortal struggle mainly in the minds of Tea Party followers themselves, who thrive on conflict and a sense of their own victimization.

A
Washington Post
piece recounts a meeting of Tea Party candidates, elected officials, and operatives in Tysons Corner, Virginia, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which is not normally a venue for peasant uprisings. There the Ritz revolutionaries drew up their manifesto, which the
Post
describes
as follows: “In the 10-page pamphlet finalized Thursday, they called on party leaders to champion lower taxes, a well-funded military, and the idea that ‘married moms and dads are best at raising kids.' The document warns Republicans against signing on to an immigration overhaul unless the U.S. border is ‘fully secure,' and it argues that support for school prayer, a balanced-budget amendment and antiabortion legislation should remain priorities.”
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While the
Post
presents this meeting as an effort by the conservative wing of the GOP to regain control of the party's agenda, there is hardly a single Republican candidate or officeholder throughout the country who could not have enthusiastically endorsed every single one of those agenda items. Moreover, with the exception of immigration legislation (corporate America wants changes in immigration law to ensure a large reservoir of foreign workers whose presence will keep wages down and render unionization more difficult), most business interests would endorse the Tea Party's stated agenda. Tax cuts and a flush military budget are the gravy that makes up for the Tea Party's immigration stance, and social issues like school prayer are just rube bait that doesn't affect corporate America's bottom line at all. The manifesto is less the symptom of a split within the GOP than a device to pump up a feeling of group solidarity and inch the party as a whole further to the right.

Is Gridlock Inconveniencing the Deep State?

If the business elite has no real problem with most of the ideological program of the Tea Party—after all, it was born of a financial reporter's rant at a commodities exchange—the dogmatic and heedless consequentiality with which the movement's devotees have pursued their apocalyptic vision has been unsettling to them. For if there is anything the Deep State requires, it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: mud wrestling over cultural issues may in fact usefully distract voters from its own agenda.

But recent antics over sequestration, the government shutdown, and the threat of default over the debt ceiling have disrupted that equilibrium. And an extreme gridlock has developed between the two parties such that continuing some level of budget cuts, including defense cuts, may be politically the least bad option for both parties. As much as Republicans may wish to give budgetary relief to the organs of national security, they cannot fully reverse agreed-to cuts without giving in to Democrats' demand for revenue increases. And Democrats wishing to spend more on domestic discretionary programs cannot eliminate reductions of domestic discretionary spending programs without Republicans insisting on entitlement cuts.

For the foreseeable future, the Deep State must restrain, if ever so slightly, its enormous appetite for taxpayer dollars going to the Pentagon: limited deals have softened the effect of sequestration, but it is unlikely that agency requests will be fully funded. Even Wall Street's rentier operations have been affected: after helping finance the Tea Party to advance their own interests, at least some of America's big-money players are now regretting the monster they have created. Like children playing with dynamite, the Tea Party's compulsion to drive the nation into credit default alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of capital, some of whom are now telling the politicians they thought they had hired to knock it off. In late 2013, as the possibility of another debt limit apocalypse approached, a senior political strategist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced, “We are going to get engaged. The need is now more than ever to elect people who understand the free market and not silliness.”
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The House vote to defund the NSA's illegal surveillance programs in July 2013 was equally illustrative of the disruptive nature of the Tea Party insurgency. Civil liberties Democrats alone would never have come so close to victory. Tea Party stalwart Justin Amash (R-MI), who has also upset the business community in his Michigan district as a result of his debt-limit fundamentalism, was the lead Republican sponsor of the NSA amendment, and most of the Republicans who voted with him were aligned with the Tea Party. Whether their vote was a sincere reaction to
abuses of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures or whether it was a partisan response to a program of which Obama happens to be the temporary steward would make interesting speculation, but the objective result was a challenge to the authority of the Deep State. The amendment lost narrowly, but in my experience, it has been very rare for an amendment promoted by junior members of the House and opposed by the leadership to come that close to passage on the first try.

Less than a year later, the House passed by an overwhelming margin of 293 to 123 a bill to restrict the NSA's collection of electronic records generated by Americans. While the final House bill came in for significant criticism from some civil liberties groups because the House leadership watered down several provisions just before it was called up for debate, it was still noteworthy as a sign of how much the congressional mood has changed since the days of the PATRIOT Act. This change of tenor was in part due to the militant attitude of the Tea Party congressmen—who for once did something constructive.

The Tea Party and Congress's Power of the Purse

The 112th Congress of 2011 to 2013 and the 113th Congress of 2013 to 2015 were the two least productive congresses since records started being compiled in 1948.
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But the Tea Party has also profoundly shaken up the system in ways that the national media have barely noticed. Since the days of the Founders, Congress has used its power of the purse under Article I of the Constitution to set spending levels and priorities. This practice inevitably led to congressmen who would specify, or earmark, projects that would benefit their district or state. Over time, granting earmarks became standard strategy to get members of both parties to support appropriation bills.

By the 1980s and 1990s the practice had become so ingrained, and public perception of it as wasteful “pork barrel spending” had become so widespread, that organizations like Citizens Against Government Waste
sprang up to denounce it and publicize egregious examples. Politicians like John McCain made a cottage industry of inveighing against earmarks.

It got worse. Disgraced Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert set up an anonymous trust to buy land, and then inserted earmarks in legislation directing the building of highways in the area to increase the value of his property. As Bret, a good friend who worked on the Hill at the time as a specialist on transportation issues, recalled: “One of the first things Hastert did as Speaker—I mean within a day or two [of his 1998 election as Speaker]—was to have hundreds of millions of transportation funds shifted to projects benefiting Illinois and his district—or more specifically to projects which would enhance the value of land he owned. When I pointed that out, I was called in by a senior Hastert aide who told me to ‘shut the f*ck up.'”
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Outrageous cases like the late Senator Ted Stevens's $398 million “bridge to nowhere” in 2005 finally ignited a strong backlash against earmarks. By the time the Tea Party freshmen took their seats in January 2011, the move to drastically curtail such spending was in full swing. Now earmarks of the traditional kind are virtually extinct.
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Does that mean Congress has finally banned pork barrel spending?

The first problem is a fundamental institutional one: if Congress is not competent to set its own spending priorities (and unfortunately there are rogues in the institution who will grab for their district anything that isn't nailed down), who is? The only alternative is the executive branch, which actually spends the funds Congress appropriates. But are self-interested bureaucracies the best judge of the wise expenditure of taxpayer dollars? Executive agencies, and particularly the Office of Management and Budget,
which writes the president's annual budget request, certainly believe they are: they want their recommendations, which now total almost $4 trillion annually, to be passed by Congress unamended. Executive branch budget requests, however, are no more sacrosanct than congressional earmarks.

Take the new F-35 fighter aircraft, panned by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon's own Office of Operational Test and Evaluation. But the Department of Defense insists it is its top priority, and has proposed scrapping proven, effective (and much cheaper) aircraft such as the A-10 and the F-16 in order both to make room in the budget for the F-35 and to burn its bridges by eliminating any alternatives. The total cost to buy the F-35 is now estimated at $399 billion—almost exactly a thousandfold greater than the most egregious congressional earmark in memory. In addition, the operation and support costs over the projected life span of the aircraft fleet exceed $1 trillion!

The F-35 does, however, possess one crucial advantage: it supports the policy objectives and cash-flow requirements of the Deep State far better than any number of freeway on-ramps, bridges, or irrigation projects that are typical examples of congressional earmarking. In order to garner more congressional votes for the F-35, the Air Force and Lockheed Martin have politically engineered the project's subcontracting to firms in every state except Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska, and Wyoming.
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Industrially, that is inefficient and drives up costs, but politically it is enormously effective. How is that any better than congressional earmarking?

There is no direct causal relationship between the decline of congressional earmarks and limits on government spending. Earmarks are carve-outs from an already agreed-upon budget. One can argue that earmarked projects are often inefficient spending, but they do not increase the deficit: Congress had already decided on the overall spending level in an annual budget resolution, and it was only a question of whose priorities, the legislative's or the executive's, would be funded. Earmarks also served an underrated purpose: while not a large percentage of appropriated funding—they were generally less than 1 percent—they acted as a lubricant for the legislative wheels and helped ensure a bipartisan buy-in so
that bills would be passed by majorities of both parties. In today's highly partisan and ideological Congress, cooperation is the exception rather than the rule. This ideological approach has begun to have an impact on the smooth operation of the Deep State.

How the Tea Party Rattles the Lobbyists

When I asked a former colleague who had staffed the House Armed Services Committee and is now a lobbyist whether the new members of the House who are either explicit Tea Party candidates or sympathizers are really sincere about their principles, he told me the following: “About half of them go native and suck up the lobbyist contributions just like any other member. They understand the quid pro quo, and you don't have to explain the benefits of your proposal to them as long as your check clears the bank. About half, though, do not. They actually seem to believe what they're saying.” A former Senate colleague, now employed by a major defense contractor, concurred, telling me that some Tea Party incumbents would not shift their positions about spending on military projects even when told there were jobs in their district or state dependent on the continued flow of money. Campaign contributions had little or no impact on their actions. Why?

Tea Party politicians' peculiar ideological orientation renders them relatively immune to the blandishments of lobbying so long as the electoral base that has sent them to Washington is happy. Thanks to the scientific gerrymandering of House districts and the voluntary “social sorting” of people with similar political beliefs into the same zip codes, incumbents are roughly 96 percent safe in general elections. So it is highly unlikely that a Tea Party Republican will ever be defeated by a Democratic candidate in the general election.
The Economist
has pointed out that House members, both Democratic and Republican, are safer in their districts than the crowned heads of the European monarchies, who have had a higher rate of turnover through death or abdication.
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The only threat to an incumbent Republican is a primary challenger
who stands even further to the right. Thus has ideology replaced money, by no means in all races, but in the contests for a crucial fifty or sixty seats in the House of Representatives. This new reality has disrupted the business model of many K Street lobbyists who have specialized in obtaining earmarks for their clients. Van Scoyoc Associates, whose clients included public universities and municipalities, has seen its revenue fall 25 percent since 2010.
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Lobbyists, as the middlemen between wealthy interests and Congress or the executive branch, have long reinforced antidemocratic and unrepresentative tendencies in American governance; their current distress over the no-earmarks rule is one more indication that the Tea Party already is upsetting, if only so far to a minor degree, the smooth functioning of the Deep State.