Beltway yuppies between jobs call it "funemployment." They spend their free time doing things like drinking IPAs, taking Instagram vacations, and binging on Netflix until the unemployment benefits eventually run out and they need a job. Apparently, Jim DeMint is unfamiliar with that concept.
After getting the boot from The Heritage Foundation, the closest thing the former South Carolina senator did to relaxing was to clean out his garage. After that, the conservative decided to try redrafting the Constitution. Of the United States. No big deal.
More specifically, DeMint has drawn up plans for an Article V Convention to propose new amendments.
"It's hard to explain how punishing it can be in Congress to actually vote to cut things," DeMint says over a Cobb salad and iced-tea at a Capitol Hill hotel on Monday, explaining his decision to sign on with the Convention of the States project as an adviser. "There's hardly anybody that's been here eight or nine years and is still fighting for anything. It's abusive to live that way."
Putting down his burger, former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., interrupts that what "the career politician needs right now is an excuse to do the right thing."
Both are convinced that Washington will never fix itself. And so, with three decades of congressional experience between them, the pair have decided to pursue a long-term constitutional solution rather than a temporary political fix to the federal government's challenges. Mark Meckler, co-founder of the project, explains the scheme.
While the Constitution requires two-thirds of Congress to propose amendments, it also allows two-thirds of the states to request an amending convention. And they want to call that convention to propose good-government measures like a balanced-budget amendment to return power to the states. Already 12 states have signed onto the effort, and Meckler says he recruited the two senators to help lobby the other 22 states needed.
At this point, Coburn complains about that one time he had to travel to frozen North Dakota to pitch the idea during the dead of winter. And then DeMint quips that he will only be headed somewhere warm "like Georgia or Florida."
After the laughter at the dad-jokes dies down, a more serious DeMint insists that he's not disillusioned with politics. "I don't want this to be seen in any way as me giving up," the fiery conservative says, adding that he plans on "working two fronts." In other words, while pursuing structural changes to the Constitution will achieve the most significant change, it will be a side hustle for DeMint.
During his temporary unemployment, the senator separately started laying the groundwork for a new organization. It doesn't have a name, and it won't be announced for a few more weeks, but the senator says it can do anything Heritage can do — but "quicker."
"I have the same resources available to me now," DeMint says. "I don't need 300 people because I can use research from AEI and Cato and a lot of the state policy organizations."
Old DeMint loyalists will staff the new shop. They will focus more on Hill outreach rather than "bopping you over the head if you don't vote exactly the way they want." And they won't send out fundraising letters that promise repeal of Obamacare, balanced budgets, or the moon.
In short, DeMint is designing what sounds like the antithesis of Heritage Action without mentioning Heritage Action by name. "I'm not talking about any particular group," he hedges between sips of iced tea, "don't ascribe that to me."
Caveats aside, it's clear that DeMint is hurt about the way his allies axed him from his old job.
While Heritage President Ed Feulner has recently wished him all the best , DeMint was removed from that conservative think tank in a manner reminiscent of the way United reaccommodates passengers. The board of directors turned on him suddenly, his people were purged, and he was unceremoniously thrown out the window of his corner office.
Bad as that was, DeMint sees it as rebranding opportunity. "While I might be positioned as a firebrand," he opens up, "what I've wanted to do is be a resource and a convener, and I've never liked the part of it that was just berating congressman."
And that's what the godfather of the Tea Party movement has been up to recently. More than biding his time, DeMint has been planning a wholescale political revolution by completely nonstandard political means. This is significant and shouldn't be chalked up to simple cynicism.
When DeMint said "Washington will never fix itself," he tore the curtain on the most enduring political charade of the last decade.
Republicans promised they could change things if they had a House majority in 2010, and they said the same thing about the Senate in 2014. Conservatives did the same thing, whipping up enough anti-establishment hysteria to get Trump elected.
But none of it mattered. Republicans won't fix things. And though not for a lack of effort, neither will the conservatives at the Heritage Foundation or the populist in the White House. Something new is needed, something maybe DeMint dreamed up in his month off.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
