Name: Jeff Billman
Hometown: Sacramento, California
Position: Deputy chief of staff, Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill.
Age: 28
Alma mater: University of Dallas
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Washington Examiner: You’ve recently gone through a lot of life changes, right?
Billman: I got engaged in November. I popped the question on the Speaker’s Balcony, the day after Trump and Paul Ryan went there.
Washington Examiner: And she said yes.
Billman: Shockingly. I’m really excited to get married, and looking forward to it.
Washington Examiner: And you got promoted right after that?
Billman: I got promoted after. That was just recent.
Washington Examiner: Congrats on both. You have a role that is unique for House offices, can you describe what you do?
Billman: I started out as body man when Congressman Roskam was chief deputy whip, and he lost a tough whip race in 2014. He was unfairly, in my opinion, cast as “less conservative” just because he is from a blue state.
When we moved from leadership back to rank-and-file, my mandate was to highlight Congressman Roskam’s conservative credentials, how conservative Peter is. I know he’s a very conservative guy.
So, I just started knocking doors. Kind of like in “The Wire,” when you need to get to the boss of something, you meet with the underlings, and then ask “who else should I meet?” that kind of thing.
Conservative groups are great, because no matter how much resources a congressional office has, the conservative groups are the most plugged in to the grassroots. They know the electorate beyond our constituencies much better than we do.
Congressman Roskam was then installed as the Ways and Means Oversight Committee subcommittee chair. What does that have jurisdiction over? The IRS, so Roskam became probably the foremost critic of the IRS last Congress, highlighting their political targeting, and misuse of resources, and other practices. A couple of examples that come to mind: They say that they don’t have any money for taxpayer services, but they’re spending millions on like forcibly unionizing their workers or spending $12 million on an email system they couldn’t use.
It’s just an insidious and dysfunctional organization, and Roskam was able to really not only shine a light on that, but enact meaningful reforms. Where conservative groups come in: They know their members would be outraged by some of the things that the IRS did. So my job is, first and foremost, communication with the groups. The relationship needs to be built on trust and communication.
Washington Examiner: And why are you the person to do that?
Billman: Both of my parents are in sales. My best attribute is talking to people about things. There’s two different extremes that congressional offices have that are both bad in regards to the groups.
One extreme is to do whatever they say just to get good “grades” on the report cards. The other side, that’s just as bad, is they just ignore the conservative groups, and have an adversarial relationship with them, and disdain them.
My role is to figure out in what ways our goals can be parallel, in what ways I can show what my boss is doing, take their opinions, listen to them — and they appreciate that — and then say, well, we may not agree 100 percent, but we both share the same strategic goals. Congressman Roskam and your group strategically agree. And these are the things that we can work together on.
I don’t have a degree in conservatism. I don’t have any children named Barry Goldwater Billman … yet [laughs]. Yet. That’s going to be after Cincinnatus Billman.
Where my background will come into play is my father takes pride in being the first guy in his family to be a Republican, vote for Reagan. Then I went to the University of Dallas, which values academic freedom, is a conservative institution, and isn’t infected by the virus of progressivism.
Washington Examiner: What’s your favorite political movie or book?
Billman: My favorite book … I’m not going to say Conscience of a Conservative, because I already cited Barry Goldwater.
My favorite book is Crisis of the House Divided, by Harry Jaffa. It’s about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It’s not a book you’re going to read for fun on a plane. It’s how Lincoln and Douglas’ visions clashed and was the watershed moment for America. Lincoln had this idea that the vision that the pro-slavery forces — and Douglas wasn’t necessarily pro-slavery, but we don’t have to get into that — but the criticism was that the founders wanted slavery. And Lincoln’s argument was truly conservative. It’s: No, they wanted to restrict slavery, you guys are the ones bastardizing the Founding. Harry Jaffa just stopped teaching. He wrote this book in the ’50s.
Washington Examiner: What about your least favorite political movie or show?
Billman: I gotta go with “House of Cards.” I mean, the Hill is like House of Cards, there’s just more sex and murders [laughs].
No, my problem is there’s some inaccuracies that really bother me. Like in the first season, when the whip, when they’re watching the bill go down on the floor, it would be better if it was real life. The whip would be on the floor. He would see these guys go against him. But they don’t present it like that.
Also, the West Wing — any Aaron Sorkin thing is preachy liberalism. My least favorite political show is John Oliver.
Washington Examiner: There’s a lot of new staffers coming in this month. What’s a lesson about the Hill that you’ve learned the hard way that you can help them with?
Billman: Don’t overpromise somebody something. Don’t tell a group or different office that you’re going to do something that you have no power to do.
Make sure to — to take a Rosk-ism (phrase from my boss) — live the happy life of low expectations. Just be honest, say: I can’t make it rain here. But I can take these steps.
Washington Examiner: Where do you live and what do you like about your neighborhood?
Billman: I now live in Navy Yard, and what I like is I can walk to work in under 10 minutes.
But the whole culture of liking neighborhoods in D.C. — this isn’t San Francisco, OK, I don’t need to hear a 10-minute lecture on where you live.
