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

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    One of the four other staffers in the room turned the color of a fire engine.
    Then, from the old man: “Hah!”
    Followed by: “That’s disgusting.”
    Followed by: “But it’s funny, and I’m going to keep using it.”
    (He refrained from doing so on the show, which went well.)
    John Dingell first encountered the Tea Party phenomenon on August 6, 2009, when he held a town hall in Romulus , Michigan, to defend Obama’s health care legislation. He was booed and heckled from the moment he entered. A man wheeled in his son, afflicted with cerebral palsy, and stood about ten feet in front of Dingell and proceeded to assert, earsplittingly, that the new bill would end his son’s life. “Fraud! Liar!” the man hollered as Dingell calmly tried to assure the man that he was incorrect. Dingell’s answers to nearly every question were met with catcalls of “Bullshit!” and “You haven’t even read the bill!” Dingell had quite a temper but kept it in check. He held a second town hall immediately after the first one was over and then informed his staff that he would not be doing any more in the near future.
    Dingell had faced a Republican cardiologist with stout Tea Party backing in the 2010 midterm election. It was by far the toughest of his twenty-nine general election campaigns, though he still wonby 17 points. Shortly after the midterms, the entire fifteen-member Michigan congressional delegation —including Dingell and three newly elected Tea Party freshmen—convened for the first time. Speaking at the event was Daniel Akerson, a prominent Michigander who happened to be the CEO of General Motors Company. One of the freshmen, a surgeon named Dan Benishek, arrived late and promptly announced that he would be leaving in five minutes.
    “Sit down, Dan,” growled Dingell. “This is important to Michigan. You’ve got nowhere else more important to be.”
    Dingell had once been an obnoxious freshman himself—a radical liberal in the eyes of Speaker Rayburn, who had a glare that, as Dingell would say, “damn near melted your cuff links.” He had been, as Dingell liked to say of anyone new at anything, “as green as grass.”
    The difference, of course, was that Dingell had grown up in the institution. While his father, John Dingell Sr., was passing New Deal legislation on the House floor, the younger John was a House page, spending afternoons in the Capitol basement with a terrier and an air gun, shooting rats. He’d grown up in the presence of political giants. He’d seen what was humanly perfect. And therefore he could recognize that as a young freshman he was something of a jackass and had better shut up and absorb the wisdom of Mr. Sam Rayburn.
    But these damn fools? They were going to come in and immediately start running down the House. And then wonder why Americans hated the institution!
    Dingell felt sorry for Speaker Boehner, almost.
    Still, it was his own party, not the Tea Party, that had dented Big John Dingell’s armor back in 2008.
    After he had spent twenty-seven years as the Democrats’ leader on the Energy and Commerce Committee—which Dingell himself had built into one of Washington’s great fortresses of power—Nancy Pelosi and her close friend, Dingell’s nemesis, Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, had conspired to take away his chairmanship. The man responsible for the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 had been deemed insufficiently progressive to move the Democrats’ legislative agenda for 2009. Waxman became the new Energy and Commerce chairman. Dingell was pushed to the margins.
    Tom DeLay, the House Republicans’ whip, majority leader, and resident enforcer from 1995 until 2006, always said that there were three types of congressmen. There were leadership congressmen who, like DeLay, aimed to spend their careers governing the House and their colleagues. There were committee congressmen who took up residence in a particular outpost—Agriculture,