ON NOVEMBER 22, sometime around 5 A.M., President Bush called Rep. Steve Chabot to talk about drugs. About two hours earlier, Chabot, a conservative Republican from Cincinnati, had cast his vote against the 681-page Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003, under which Medicare, the government’s health care program for the elderly, would subsidize prescription drug coverage for seniors. The bill, the largest overhaul of Medicare since its inception in 1965, was one of the president’s top political priorities. Bush wanted Chabot to change his vote. “I told him that I appreciated his call,” Chabot said last week. “But there were several concerns I had with the bill, and I had made up my mind to vote no.” Others had also made up their minds. Tom Feeney, a freshman Republican from Florida, voted “no” on the legislation shortly after 3 A.M. Saturday. He, too, got a call from the president. “Mr. President,” Feeney told Bush, “I did not come to Washington to expand government.”
Whereupon Bush brusquely replied, “Neither did I . . . Pal.” (Feeney kept his vote “no.”)
Bush’s calls were part of a last-ditch effort by the administration and the House GOP leadership to win the support of recalcitrant conservative legislators. Bush may have failed to persuade Chabot, Feeney, and others, but in the end the Medicare legislation passed the House 220 to 215, and the president won a major political victory.
It wasn’t easy. For 2 hours and 36 minutes of the 2 hour and 51 minute vote, the Medicare bill was losing, 216 to 218. And, if you listen to members of the House leadership, it was a small group of House conservatives who were behind those 2 hours and 50 minutes of imminent defeat. When the last vote was tallied at 5:51 A.M., almost 3 hours after voting began, some 25 GOP congressmen had voted against the prescription drug benefit. (Last week, the Senate approved the Medicare bill 54 to 44, with 9 GOP senators voting “no.”)
But the vote wasn’t easy for the GOP dissenters, either. “The norm has been long established and clear,” wrote congressional scholar NormanOrnstein in the Washington Post: “Fifteen minutes is the voting time.” The House Republican leadership has extended the 15-minute limit on over a dozen occasions since 1994, but, Ornstein argues, the Medicare roll call vote was a first: Over the course of the almost three-hour long vote–the longest vote in the history of the House–dissenting conservative Republicans were subject to arm-twisting, brow-beating, and outright threats.
Those who stuck around, that is. Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, voted “no,” and then left for the gym. But soon after Moran and a few others escaped, the Republican leadership made sure the House chamber’s exits were blocked. The rebel conservatives hung around in a group towards the back of the chamber, seeking strength in numbers. Says one of them, Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, “If the leadership ever got you alone, you were in trouble.”
Nick Smith, for example. Smith, a six-term Michigan Republican who plans to retire next year, sat alone on the floor after casting his “no” vote. He says he stayed on the floor out of duty. “I had the feeling that, since I voted against the leadership, I would sit there and take the punishment,” he says. “But I won’t sit out there again.” Smith’s punishment was being told his “no” vote meant his son Chris wouldn’t have the party’s support when he tries to take over Smith’s district in 2004.
Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona, who came to Congress as part of the 1994 Gingrich revolution, was another loner. He cast his “no” vote, and then kept to himself, save for a series of conversations with Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, who had come to the Capitol to spend the vote lobbying members on the floor, despite a tradition of keeping the House floor off limits to outsiders. (“Another shameful first, “wrote Ornstein.) “Thompson listened thoughtfully to my criticisms,” Shadegg told me. “We shook hands several times on the House floor. He clearly thought this was a good bill.” Shadegg didn’t.
House conservatives felt pressure to vote for the bill in other ways. Rep. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican who is running for Fritz Hollings’s Senate seat next year, got calls from campaign donors on Saturday morning urging him to vote for prescription drug coverage. DeMint still voted “no.” On November 20, a few days before the House vote, the National Right to Life Committee announced that it would score the Medicare vote as a pro-life issue. There was “uniform outrage” at the announcement among congressional conservatives, says one House aide.
The slyest instance of politicking was also the most shameless, and the most successful. As the vote stretched on and on into the morning hours, a rumor began circulating among House Republicans that, if the compromise Medicare reform package failed, Democrats, under the legislative procedure known as a “discharge petition,” would urge a vote on their own, more expensive, bill.
Said rumor quickly reached the ears of Idaho’s C.L. “Butch” Otter and Arizona’s Trent Franks, the squishiest of the House Republican rebels. Both of whom, upon hearing the rumor, switched their votes to “yes,” ensuring victory for the House leadership and President Bush. Whether or not there was a serious plan among Democrats to use a discharge petition hasn’t been determined, but after the vote, a senior House GOP aide told the Washington Post that the threat was “concocted” by the House leadership to “pry loose” stubborn conservatives. It worked.
Last week, the dissenting congressmen spent a lot of time talking about their frustrations with the Republican governing majority. “I didn’t come to Congress to be an obstructionist,” says Tancredo. He muses that “just once” he’d like to vote “yes” on an HR 1 bill (the first bill introduced during a House term and normally a leadership priority): “The last HR1 was No Child Left Behind. That was big government in education. Now it’s big government in health care.”
“I am gravely concerned about [the Medicare vote],” says Shadegg. “It has serious implications for conservatives. It’s going to be very hard and ugly: Under what set of circumstances can conservatives challenge their leaders?”
One such circumstance was the bankruptcy reform bill, which the House passed in July 2002. Shadegg points out that House conservatives were able to eliminate pro-choice provisions in the bill, inserted by New York senator Charles Schumer–provisions that the House leadership was willing to live with. The difference between the bankruptcy bill and prescription drugs, of course, is that the president has made a prescription drug benefit a central part of his reelection campaign.
Some are less sanguine about the ability of House conservatives to influence the leadership. “We’re just going to have to fight for our principles,” sighs Steve Chabot. “We’re going to win some, we’re going to lose some.” He pauses. “Hopefully, we’ll win more than we lose.”
Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
