Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives by Robert Draper Read Free Book Online Page B

leaders, and we thank him for our brother Jeff Duncan . . .”
    When it was Duncan’s turn, he closed his eyes and began: “God—you are so good . . .”
    The freshman choked up briefly. Taking a breath, he continued: “I thank you for this opportunity to serve my country and serve you . . . I am focused on getting back to what was inspired by you, this form of government . . . Shine your face on this nation once again. Turn it from its wicked ways . . .”
    Then he led the procession over to Cannon 116—where, as promised, a ribbon barricaded the doorway. One of his young sons held the ribbon taut while Duncan applied the scissors.
    “This is the grand opening of a business,” he told his constituents. “We are open for business, starting today!”
    For two centuries, Washington, D.C., has sustained itself with intrigues. “May this Territory be the residence of virtue and happiness,”President John Adams had declared on November 22, 1800, five days after the Sixth Congress officially relocated to America’s permanent seat of power, the Congress having been based for a year in New York, followed by a decade in yellow fever–plagued Philadelphia. Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s newly designed metropolis took a while to achieve its grandeur, if not its virtuelessness. Too squalid for family life, Washington in its first few years was a city of men who lived and dined together in coarse boardinghouses—the New Englanders in one, the southerners in another, the westerners in another still. Their shared workplace stood at an elevation of eighty-eight feet above the Potomac River, on land acquired from the wealthy farmer and slave owner Daniel Carroll. The Capitol’s earliest incarnation was so stifling that its inhabitants nicknamed it “the Oven.” A half-century later came its ornate dome, and then a succession of House and Senate office buildings—and not only families but whole colonies of Washington professionals, from the partisan wordsmiths who scribbled for Thomas Jefferson’s and Alexander Hamilton’s rival newspapers to the sly female “spider lobbyists” who drew the hapless congressmen into their webs by means of “pleasant parlors” and “Burgundy at blood heat.”
    Now it was January 2011. Two years after a desultory cell of Republicans licked their wounds in the Caucus Room, the streets and hotels and reception rooms were exultantly theirs. Correspondingly, the K Street lobbyists and consultants and Republican job seekers were out in force. Above all, they sought out the eighty-seven new arrivals like Jeff Duncan and Allen West. That so many of the freshmen had achieved victory by denouncing John Adams’s “residence of virtue and happiness” only meant that they were due a suitable orientation to how Washington works.
    The educating went both ways, of course: the Washington establishment sought to disaggregate this great blob of newness and take its measure of them one by one. After all, this was hardly the first time that the town had seen a large freshman class. There had been a whopping 94 incoming Democrats following the referendum on the corrupt Grant administration in 1874; a class of 86 Democrats following the Panic of 1890; an unprecedented 131 Democratic freshmen riding the FDR wave in 1932; the 49 Watergate Democrats in 1974; the 52 so-called Reagan’s Robots in 1980; and the 73 Gingrichites in1994. Each outsized freshman class rode into Washington confident that it had received an unambiguous mandate to change how business was done here. None was terribly successful at doing so.
    For it was never all that hard for the Washingtonians to break down a brawny yet tender freshman class into its constituent parts. The Republican class of 2010 was not by any means monolithic. Nearly a third of them had never before held public office and were instead “citizen-politicians” from the fields of medicine, law enforcement, farming, auto sales, football, roofing, or pizza making.