Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives

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Authors: Robert Draper
Tags: History, Azizex666, Non-Fiction, Politics
Transportation, Appropriations, Armed Services—and made it their fiefdom. John Dingell had done precisely that with Energy and Commerce.
    Now he fell into the third category—he was a district congressman, his energies largely consigned to Michigan’s 15th District. Now he was 1 of 435, just another voice in the cacophony.
    Except that this voice was John Dingell’s. Even as the 111th Congress marked the undoing of the Democratic majority, the old man enjoyed one of the most productive legislative sessions of his career. He established America’s newest national park, in his own district. He authored a rare bipartisan food safety bill that the president signed into law. He beat back the Tea Party candidate.
    And for an encore, John Dingell intended to begin the 112th Congress in January 2011 by announcing his intention to run for an unprecedented thirtieth term.
    Hah!

CHAPTER THREE
    Bayonets
    The 112th Congress was due to begin its work at noon on January 5, 2011. That morning, a swearing-in ceremony for the members of the Congressional Black Caucus took place in the Capitol Visitor Center. Accompanied by the swelling fanfare of horns and strings, the forty-three African-American representatives filed onstage in order of seniority—beginning with John Conyers, a CBC cofounder in 1971 and the original House proponent of the Martin Luther King federal holiday. Then another cofounder, Charles Rangel, war hero and legendary Harlem congressman, whose failure to pay taxes had led six weeks ago to his being censured on the House floor by a vote of 333 to 79—though with only a single CBC member, departing Alabama Congressman Artur Davis, voting against him. Then Edolphus Towns of Brooklyn. The civil rights icon John Lewis . James Clyburn , the House’s third-ranking Democrat. And slowly cascading into relative youth as six black freshmen joined their seniors on the auditorium stage.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” concluded the announcer, “the representatives of the Hundred-and-Twelfth Congress of the Congressional Black Caucus!”
    And as the crowd applauded, one of the members seated in the back row onstage responded with a crisp salute. His graying hair was cut in the style of a flattop, and he wore wire-rimmed spectacles almost identical to those of Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary and thus his former civilian commander, whom he happened to despise. His name was Allen Bernard West . He was a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, a month shy of fifty, and, had fate turned against him a few years earlier, he might very well be winding down an eight-yearprison term rather than beginning his first day as a United States congressman serving the 22nd District of Florida.
    While Jesse Jackson Jr., a congressman and CBC member for the past fifteen years, fiddled with his BlackBerry, West the freshman sat at ramrod attention throughout. Among the forty-three CBC members, he was its only Republican. When Steny Hoyer—still the House majority leader until noon—stepped up to the podium, he described those seated onstage as “critical members of the Democratic caucus.” Typical, thought the freshman. And when Hoyer applauded the black members for being such a positive force “in a country that . . . enslaved some citizens because of the color of their skin,” West thought, I never been nobody’s slave. But his expression remained stolid, unfazed.
    Only when the new CBC chairman, a Missouri congressman and former Methodist pastor named Emanuel Cleaver II, spoke did Allen West’s heart begin to quicken. “Well, my friends,” the chairman declared in preacherly cadence, “the wall of protection for the unemployed is down. The wall of summer job security for young people is down. The wall of Middle East peace is down. The wall of civil discourse is down . . . But good news—we’ve got forty-three wall builders, standing ready! And we’re gonna rebuild the wall!”
    That was Lieutenant Colonel

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