Kochland Page 51
The pressure intensified in late May, when the Waxman-Markey bill was passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which had stifled the effort for so many years under John Dingell. Henry Waxman, the new chairman, pushed the bill through committee so quickly that it even surprised the staffers working on it. Phillips had believed that passing the bill through the committee would be harder than passing it through the entire House, because the committee was heavily staffed by conservative Democrats with deep ties to the energy industry.
“I got emotional [during the vote]. I remember looking around on the dais, and my eyes were welling up,” Phillips recalled. “That really was the day where it was like, ‘Oh, holy shit. This might happen. This is probably going to happen.’ ”
It looked like the bill would be voted on by the entire House in June. This was breathtaking speed in the world of legislation. Within a month of the bill passing committee, every member of the House would have to figure out where they stood on the cap-and-trade bill. Bob Inglis was no exception. As he tried to figure out if he would vote for Waxman-Markey, Inglis kept in close contact with his campaign donors. Like most congressmen, Inglis spent hours, every week, raising cash. He never had the luxury of focusing entirely on the job of policy making; the midterm election of 2010 was just over a year away, and Inglis needed to have plenty of money on hand.
Inglis raised cash in a small office building just a short walk from his office on Capitol Hill. The office was in a nondescript townhouse that was home to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the fund-raising arm of House Republicans. It was illegal for members like Inglis to use their own offices to raise money, so the NRCC provided them with a small call center for the task. Inglis and a staffer showed up at the NRCC and walked down the hall to a small, private office, which Inglis called a “cubby,” that had two chairs and two phones. Inglis’s staffer worked the phone until she had someone on the line, handed the phone to him so he could ask for money, and start dialing for the next donor.
Koch Industries was a reliable donor, so Inglis made sure to call them early.
Inglis called Koch’s lobbying office to see if he could count on the company’s support again. Calls like the one to Koch were the easier calls—he was maintaining a relationship rather than trying to build a new one.
The call went poorly from the beginning. The lobbyist whom Inglis usually spoke with wasn’t there. He asked if a Koch lobbyist might be able to attend a fund-raising breakfast. He was told that that would not be possible. The call ended quickly.
“I just remember it being a little bit chilly,” he recalled. He hung up and thought to himself, They’re not giving me any money this cycle.
The phone call was just the first of many messages that Koch Industries would send to Inglis.
* * *
Jonathan Phillips stood in the gallery of the chamber of the US House of Representatives, looking down on the wide-open floor area with its concentric half circles of seats for the members of Congress. It was Friday, June 26, 2009, the day that the House would vote on the Waxman-Markey bill. Phillips wasn’t at all sure that the bill was going to pass. Support was narrow, and any defections from the Democrats could sink it. It appeared that some defections were in the offing. Pelosi seemed to be working the crowd, making deals, quieting concerns. “Pelosi was doing I don’t know what sort of horse trading,” Phillips recalled. “Those are the type of tough votes where she’s making promises, you know?”
Over the next several hours, Republicans and conservative Democrats voiced their opposition to the bill based on a shared foundation. They didn’t attack the evidence about climate change or challenge the need to promote renewable sources of energy. Instead, they attacked the Waxman-Markey bill as an economic disaster; an expensive tax on everyone that would raise the prices of electricity, gasoline, and energy. The theory behind the cap-and-trade system, of course, was that market forces would help solve the price problem over time as companies invented new technologies that were carbon free and introduced them to the market.
After nearly eight hours of procedural maneuvers and debate, Ed Markey rose to speak. He didn’t seek to rebut many of the attacks one by one, but answered them with a call to take part in history. “This bill has the ambition of the moon landing, the moral imperative of the Civil Rights Act, and the scope of the Clean Air Act all wrapped up in one,” he said.
After exhausting their arguments, the Republicans prepared to make their closing statement. They reserved the privilege for a rising star in the House, a former conservative talk-radio host from Indiana who was first elected to the House in 2001, named Mike Pence.
Pence walked to the rostrum and looked down for a moment before beginning his speech. He was a striking figure, a handsome man with a square jaw and stark white hair. His training in show business was apparent the moment he started to speak. While other congressmen stumbled through their speeches, reading awkwardly from a script, Pence was at ease.
“It’s hard to know where to start,” he said, shaking his head. And then he paused, a long, dramatic pause that ate up much of his allotted speaking time but had great effect.
Everyone was listening. “This economy is hurting. American families are struggling under the weight of the worst recession in a generation,” he said, with great sadness and great compassion in his voice. “In the midst of the worst recession in a generation, this administration and this majority in Congress are prepared to pass a national energy tax that will raise the cost of energy on every American family.”
And then Pence did something that none of his colleagues seemed to have done during the course of an eight-hour day. He looked directly into the C-Span camera and talked directly to the viewers there, whoever they might be. He pointed his finger at them and exhorted them to get up and make a difference. “If you oppose the national energy tax, call your congressman right now!” he bellowed. “Alexander Hamilton said it best: ‘Here, sir, the people govern.’ We can stop this bill. We can do better. And so we must.”
It was an impassioned speech, but Pence’s rallying cry seemed oddly out of place. There didn’t seem to be some great crowd of voters in the C-Span audience ready to mount a rebellion against the Obama agenda. Pence finished his speech and stepped back in the gallery, looking like a pied piper with no one to follow him.
After several hours, the debate was finished, and the roll call vote began. Phillips and his colleagues watched as the votes were tallied, and their elation grew with every minute. The margin of victory became insurmountable. A one- or two-vote margin turned into a seven-point margin. The bill passed 219 to 212. Gene Green, the conservative Texas Democrat from oil refinery country, voted for the bill, as did Rick Boucher, from coal country. Remarkably, eight Republicans broke ranks to support the bill, more than Phillips or anyone on his committee might have expected.
When the vote was tallied, Phillips and his colleagues went to the staff office of the Energy and Commerce Committee. These were nice offices, a big space that was far removed from the basement warren where Phillips had worked for years. Bottles of champagne were popped open, glasses were passed around. Both Waxman and Markey were in the room, talking with staffers. Both men gave a speech. There was a tremendous sense of accomplishment in the room. As they drank and laughed and clapped each other on the back, everyone seemed sure that the bill would pass the Senate within months, probably by Christmas.
“We did what we set out to do,” Phillips said. “I totally felt like this is what I came to Congress for.”
* * *
Every quarter, Charles Koch held meetings in the company boardroom to evaluate the progress of each major division in his company. He peppered the business leaders with questions, probing their presentations for weak points and questioning their plans for the future. By the middle of 2009, Charles Koch was getting similar presentations from his political operatives. He sat at the large, polished wood table and listened as top operatives in his political network walke
d through the events of the past months, shared their analysis of the landscape, and laid out their plans for the future.
In the middle of 2009, the news from the political operation was unrelentingly bad. The Waxman-Markey bill had passed the House and was fast-tracked toward the Senate. To make matters worse, Obama’s stimulus bill was doling out billions of dollars to Koch’s emerging competitors in the wind, solar, and renewable-energy industries.
As with any business unit, Charles Koch absorbed this information with apparent dispassion. He asked for data and analyzed it closely. One senior political operative recalled sending Charles Koch a spreadsheet with polling data on voter attitudes. The presentation included “top line” figures, showing broad voter attitudes that were accompanied by several “cross tabs” of detailed data that broke down the results by demographic group. As the operative was presenting his findings to Charles Koch and other directors of the company, Koch interrupted to question them about the data.
Charles Koch asked about figures in the cross tables. He wanted to know why women in one geographic area felt the way they felt. The operative was shocked at the level of granular knowledge behind the question. Charles Koch was paying just as close attention to his political efforts as his corporate endeavors.
It seemed even more surprising that Charles Koch could keep all of these political operations straight in his own head. The contours of Koch’s political machine were intentionally obscured and complex. Outside analysts would spend years trying to piece together all of its various pieces. The political machine consisted of at least dozens of shell groups funded by anonymous donors, some of them staffed by current and former employees of Koch Industries. The network included the main lobbying office in Washington, DC; all of the contract lobbyists it hired; a relatively obscure activist group called Americans for Prosperity with chapters in several states; at least several private political consultancies; the Koch Industries corporate PAC; various think tanks; academic programs and fellowships; and a consortium of wealthy donors that Charles and David Koch convened twice a year to pool large donations for Koch’s chosen causes. And these elements were just the most visible pieces of the Koch political machine.
The entirety of the political apparatus could only be viewed from the top, by a handful of people with the authority to see the entire operation. These people were Charles Koch, David Koch, and their top political operative, Richard Fink. Of the three of them, Charles Koch unquestionably had the most authority. It was Charles Koch, then, who had the most influence over how this political machine would react to the surprising momentum behind the Waxman-Markey bill. His reaction might have been unsurprising to anyone who knew him well. Charles Koch had been unyielding in his years-long legal battle against his brother Bill. He had been unyielding in his battles with relatives and shareholders who wanted to take the company public. He had been unyielding in his battle against labor unions. He was unyielding now.
Koch’s political machine was deployed, in 2009, in ways that it had never been deployed before. Millions of new dollars would flow into a new political network at the state level. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of new activists would be brought on board. New attack campaigns were launched. New political candidates were chosen and supported.
In the fight that Charles Koch was about to wage, there would be no compromise. There would be no effort to amend the Waxman-Markey bill or win subsidies through the emission allotments. There would be no effort to suggest an alternative path to lower carbon emissions, such as a carbon tax. There would not even be an acknowledgment that climate change was real.
The central strategy would remain the same as the one conveyed in Koch’s lobbying office earlier in the summer. The primary target of Koch’s campaign would be Republicans who supported the Waxman-Markey bill, and any Republicans who stood against Koch on the issue of climate change.
These Republicans were the primary targets for a reason. Koch’s long-term plan was to reshape the Republican party, and these members would be made an example of. The strategy wasn’t necessarily new, but the means that Koch used to pursue it were unprecedented.
* * *
After the Waxman-Markey bill passed, Phillips and the other members of the Global Warming Committee handed off most of their work to their colleagues in the Senate. Congress was called into recess for the Fourth of July break, and members went back to their districts for the annual tradition of constituent meetings and parades.
During the holiday recess, the Global Warming Committee’s communications director, Jeff Sharp, kept working, monitoring media reports about the Waxman-Markey bill. The Senate would pick up debate of the measure in the fall, and Sharp wanted to stay on top of the story in the meantime. Over the Fourth of July holiday, Sharp started getting some disturbing phone calls and e-mails. There were protests. And the protests were remarkable. Protestors were standing along parade routes, on Independence Day, waving placards and shouting at the members of Congress as they passed by. Sharp couldn’t remember anything like it happening before.
“At each parade, there is a group of four to six people in the parade screaming and yelling: ‘No cap and trade! No cap and tax!’ Like, viscerally angry on that issue. In the parade. This is a parade, right? Most parades, as you go through the parade, at that time, people were not yelling and screaming about an issue, let alone a very specific issue like cap and trade.”
The protestors were also showing up at the congressional members’ town hall meetings, those boring civic obligations that never drew more than a half dozen people or so. The town halls were crowded now with angry constituents who hectored the congressional members with shaking anger in their voices. These protestors didn’t look like typical protestors. They were middle-aged people. Mostly white. Affluent looking. Not the kind of people that most Congress members were accustomed to seeing protest in public.
Sharp received a video from the town hall meeting held by a Delaware Republican named Mike Castle, who’d voted in favor of the Waxman-Markey bill. Protestors lined the back of his town hall. They hooted and bellowed. They repeatedly brought up the cap-and-trade plan.
“On this energy thing,” one protestor said, “CO2 emissions have nothing to do—and the greenhouse effect has nothing to do—with global warming. It’s all a hoax! Personally, for the life of me, I can’t understand how you could have been one of the eight Republican traitors.”
At the word traitors, loud applause broke out. Castle, standing at a podium, dutifully took notes as the protestors made their arguments. After the event, a woman in the crowd pigeonholed Castle and informed him that the Earth was, in fact, cooling. She asked if he knew how much the “cap-and-tax” system was going to harm the poultry industry in Delaware.
Sharp watched these videos over and over. The comments struck him as odd. Cap and trade and global warming had never elicited such visceral anger from the public. People didn’t normally show up at parades and yell about one single issue. And he kept hearing the same phrases, the same talking points, again and again. The protestors talked about “cap and tax” and a “hoax” and an “energy tax.” It was as if the protestors had been coached or handed a script. This wouldn’t have been groundbreaking—Sharp had seen such tactics used up close during his years in the PR and lobbying businesses.
When he saw these protests, Sharp saw a coordinated campaign. “I remember watching that and [thinking]: Something is Astroturf–smelling about that event,” he recalled. “It did not feel organic.”
Sharp kept watching the video of Mike Castle getting berated at the town hall. And he kept thinking about the protestor in back who called climate change “a hoax.”
“I remember watching it, and being like, Where did that guy get that from?”
* * *
I. This statement is provably untrue. NASA data shows that eighteen of the nineteen hottest years on record occurred since 2001.
II. Laurie Sahatjian married and changed her name to Laurie McCausland.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
Hotter
(2009–2010)
If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence.
—Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, 2018.
As hot as it is today, if we keep working this issue, it’s going to get even hotter for Barack Obama and Harry Reid! Because I think the American people are fed up! Don’t you?
—Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, speaking at a rally outside the US Capitol, August 7, 2010
This was unmanageable. Bob Inglis was standing in an auditorium, in front of a very large crowd, trying to make himself heard. He was hosting a town hall event and had a microphone in his hand, but his words were drowned out by heckling and shouting. He seemed dazed, like he couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing.
The first thing that didn’t make sense to Inglis was the sheer size of the crowd. There were roughly five hundred people in the room, maybe more. This was incomprehensible. Bob Inglis had been holding town hall events for years and was lucky to draw fifteen or twenty people to each event. Americans simply didn’t turn out for civic events, even if you provided free food. But one of his meetings that summer drew an estimated seven hundred people. The fire marshals arrived at that one and turned people away.
The second thing that didn’t make sense to Inglis was the rage. The crowd, all of them, were boiling with anger. At most political events, it was rare for anyone in attendance to stand up and speak into a microphone; the few people who did were the same handful of gadflies who spoke at every meeting. This crowd was different. They weren’t just ready to stand up and speak. They looked ready to charge the stage. They were shouting. Booing. Cupping their hands around their mouths and catcalling.