by Brian Abrams
VAN JONES
The American people are pretty busy. They don’t have time to track this stuff. We tend to traffic in symbols, moments, and gestures, and this was Obama’s downfall in a lot of ways. That If you just go in, ignore the politics, and do the hard work, ultimately the country would notice and reward you. That was where the mythology of the Obama White House translated to “No Drama Obama.” In hindsight, it was foolish, but we were that way, and I had a different view the entire time but wasn’t in a powerful-enough position for my opinion to matter a lot.
RAHM EMANUEL
I was gone, but it’s not like the telephones didn’t work. There’s one chief of staff at a time, and if the chief of staff wanted your advice for the president, they called you. Not the other way around. I was gone, but obviously after the election I talked to them about what to do, how to structure. There were discussions about his agenda for the 2012 presidential [election] and also in 2010, between the old Congress and the new Congress, what you could get done.
BILL DALEY
US Secretary of Commerce (1997–2000)
White House Chief of Staff (2011–2012)
[Pete Rouse] was going to be temporary, he was only going to be [White House chief of staff] a couple of months . . . You’d just come off a terrible election. There was a sense that things had to be changed. So I think that was part of why they reached out to me and began the discussions in November/December of ’10.
MONA SUTPHEN
Before we lost control of the House, we pushed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [repeal], New START, and had immigration on the table. [We thought we could] get two of those three over the finish line. There was a big question of which of those three it would be.
TYLER MORAN
Policy Director, National Immigration Law Center (2001–2012)
Deputy Policy Director, Domestic Policy Council, White House (2012–2014)
Senior Policy Advisor, US Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (2014–2017)
Harry Reid was the one who decided to bring the DREAM Act to the [Senate] floor, even though people in the administration were telling him not to do it.88 Everyone was telling him he was crazy . . . That was after his election, where everyone thought he was a goner, and it was the Latino vote that put him over the edge and he won.
CECILIA MUÑOZ
Senator Reid, who was in a tight reelection race, announcing he was gonna bring the DREAM Act to a vote—that was controversial in the immigration world, because up until then, there had been this sense of Everybody has to link elbows and go together. People in the immigration community did not want to break any one piece of the legislation off from any of the others. Every piece of the comprehensive immigration reform is an incentive to move it forward, and if you break off the more popular pieces, the theory went, that might jeopardize the ability to get the whole thing done.
JIM MESSINA
We had lost seats in the House of Representatives. We lost [six] seats in the Senate, and we had to get New START [ratified]. Basically the Senate Republicans and Dems had come together and said they had time to do one issue. And I remember Obama saying, “Uh-uh. We’re going to get ’em both.”
GENE SPERLING
We also still faced an issue with the economy, which, while technically in recovery, was not in recovery for tens of millions of people. The long-term unemployment rate still reflected the depth of the financial crisis. We knew going into 2010 that Making Work Pay was going to expire.89 We knew that we had to extend emergency unemployment insurance for millions of families. So the question was, Were you going to do everything you could to help real lives, struggling Americans, or were you just going to stand on principle, even if it meant getting nothing done?
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
Instead of doing [comprehensive] immigration reform in the lame-duck session of 2010, I led the effort here in the House and we passed the DREAM Act.90
CECILIA MUÑOZ
So, Speaker Pelosi passed it through the House. It was the first time the DREAM Act had ever passed the House. [Because Senator Reid was going to introduce the bill] we, and the advocacy world, worked it incredibly hard in the Senate. In fact, in the administration we did so many press calls and conference calls with different members of the cabinet that it became almost a joke in the White House press corps. Like, Oh, it’s Tuesday. Which cabinet member’s gonna come out for the DREAM Act today? “We’ve got an angle for the Secretary of Defense!”
JAMES KVAAL
Still, at the time there was a lot of concern about the state of the economy. So the president had a clear sense in priorities, and that meant finding legislative common ground with people who didn’t always agree with you, and prioritizing that above ideological purity.
GENE SPERLING
Here was the reality: the only way we could get through a House that was going to have John Boehner as its Speaker and Eric Cantor as its majority leader was to allow the top [marginal tax] rate to not kick back up to 39.6 percent. Now, believe me, I was an architect in the Clinton era of taking the top rate to 39.6 percent, but if simply extending [Bush’s 35 percent tax rate] for two years was going to allow us to get unemployment insurance, which we had no chance to do without this deal, if it allowed us to extend for two more years the refundable tax credits that could help twenty million low-income families, if it could allow us to do some form of significant middle-class demand policy, like a payroll tax cut, was that trade-off worth it? Our view was that it was.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
The Making Work Pay tax credit, which effectively gave you a tax cut for payroll taxes paid, was a way to cut taxes that was quite progressive. If you did cuts to the income tax, they tended to go to high-income people. This was geared toward working people. It had been the biggest tax cut for working people probably in the history of the United States, and yet, in 2010, the polling showed that the majority of Americans believed that Obama had raised their taxes. In reality, no one’s taxes had been raised.
GENE SPERLING
President Clinton came to the White House,91 and this was a time when a lot of progressives and Democrats were split on whether to support the agreement, and if President Clinton had wanted to create division or draw supporters away, he easily could have. Instead, he came into the briefing room with President Obama and defended the agreement.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
I was thinking, What is wrong with our messaging? We could give hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts and nobody even knew it. They actually thought their taxes went up! So the fact that those tax cuts were in the stimulus—and Republicans had staked out a position that they hated everything about this stimulus—meant that they were going to let all those tax cuts expire for 98 percent of Americans. Economists certainly thought that the economy could not take a giant tax increase on 98 percent of workers. So we were pushing to extend the Making Work Pay tax credit and unemployment benefits. These were people who were literally hand-to-mouth. Whatever money they got they would go spend it, as opposed to tax cuts for the rich where, you know, one-third or more of the money, they’re just gonna put in the bank.
JAMES KVAAL
The 2010 tax deal gave tax relief to almost every household. So by putting more money in the hands of American families, you were increasing consumer spending and propping up the economy.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
It was pretty well negotiated by Obama with nothing in his hand. He ended up getting two or three times more than what he had to give up, but he had to do it in a way that, you know, rather than saying, Let’s extend the stimulus, he had to say, Fine, we’ll let all the stimulus go away, and we’ll start a new payroll tax cut, unemployment benefits, whatever. In reality it was the right decision. He was not going to be able to let the Republican tax cuts expire, though he wanted to, and made perfectly clear he wanted to. So he basically said, We’re gonna extend these for two years in exchange for getting all of these tax cuts for middle-income and working people, plus unem
ployment-insurance benefits and some other stuff, and we’ll live to fight another day.
MONA SUTPHEN
People were super-excited about the idea that we might be in the multilateral-treaty business again, so we were able to channel that enthusiasm even among people who didn’t care about New START. They were just like, If we get back into the treaty business, it means that Law of the Sea and other things that people want might come back onto the table, too.92
BARNEY FRANK
I never thought much of the nuclear treaty anyway. They committed us to spending billions. It was a waste of money . . . Nancy Pelosi and I took the lead on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell . . . There was a point when a key question was in the Senate. Lindsey Graham, to his eternal shame, with some help from McCain, threatened to sink the nuclear treaty with the Russians if we pushed for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. There were some in the administration that were kind of willing to give in to that.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, White House (2009–2011)
Senior Counsel and Special Assistant to the President, White House (2011–2014)
Deputy Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the President, White House (2014–2015)
I don’t recall the idea that we would trade one priority for another. In that lame-duck session, the thought was that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal would be part of this broader Defense Authorization bill that’s passed every year for the past fifty-some-odd years,93 and that’s how it would have gotten across the finish line. And then that bill was blocked, and after it was blocked, the White House, supporters of the bill, and leadership decided to move Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [repeal] as a stand-alone bill, and really made the time and effort to push it through. That really made the difference.
JIM MESSINA
It was one of those issues that, when it [was signed into law] literally [three] days before Christmas, I was sitting on the Senate floor and just crying like a baby. It was one of the most difficult things I’d ever worked on, but in the end, history will judge us right.
MONA SUTPHEN
We ended up getting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [repeal] and New START over the finish line and not immigration.
CECILIA MUÑOZ
The DREAM Act went down by five votes [in the Senate] . . . The teams working on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the DREAM Act all watched that vote in my office. That was right after the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell vote—like, literally right after—and, you know, there were tears. Happy and sad tears.
TYLER MORAN
I was sitting up there in the [Senate] gallery with all the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell people and all the Dreamers for the vote . . . Not all the Dems voted for it.
CECILIA MUÑOZ
Valerie’s office was in the same corner of the second floor as mine. She was my boss at the time, and she must have told the president that we were up there, because he came up and gave us a pep talk after it was over. He said, you know, “Remember that on the way to getting the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act passed, there were defeats on the way to those victories. And, for that matter, on the seventeen-year path it took to get Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repealed, there were defeats before we got to that victory. And remember, this is one of those. Because the day will come when we’re celebrating.”
* * *
75 Known as the “Underwear Bomber,” Abdulmutallab confessed to attempting to detonate plastic explosives, hidden in his underwear, on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from the Netherlands to Detroit. (He made it past airport security, but passengers on board the flight were able to subdue him.) The twenty-three-year-old Nigerian was assisted by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which claimed responsibility and stated that the thwarted attack was retaliation for the US’s role in a Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda. Abdulmutallab was convicted in federal court and was sentenced to four life terms, plus fifty years without parole, at the ADX Florence facility in Fremont County, Colorado.
76 January 28, 2010: Pelosi’s weekly address on Capitol Hill.
77 James Kvaal: “Let me try and explain that a different way. Congress had long ago adopted expedited procedures for budget bills, as a way of making it easier to reduce the deficit. It would keep the Senate from filibustering bills that would reduce the deficit, and so those types of bills only need majority support in the Senate. That’s how Bush passed his tax cuts, for example. So we were able to get the final touches put on the health-care law without getting that sixtieth vote.”
78 President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law on July 26, 1990. It was the United States’ first comprehensive antidiscrimination labor law for people with disabilities, ranging in civil-rights protections from employment opportunities to public accommodations. The bill’s first draft was introduced in Congress in 1989.
79 King v. Burwell was a 2015 Supreme Court decision that upheld key provisions of the Affordable Care Act to provide premium tax credits to qualifying individuals receiving coverage from both state-run and federally established exchanges. The challengers, led by Virginia limousine driver David King, had sued Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell—arguing that the text describing the calculation of those tax credits referred only to state-run exchanges, and therefore anyone residing in the thirty-seven states that had not set up an exchange was not eligible.
80 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
81 April 8, 2010.
82 May 21, 2010.
83 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
84 The Volcker Rule, named after former US Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, was designed to prohibit big banks from “proprietary trading and certain relationships with hedge funds and private equity funds.”
85 Democrats Ted Kaufman of Delaware and Sherrod Brown of Ohio proposed Senate Amendment 3733, which would have levied a 10 percent “cap on any bank-holding-company’s share of the United States’ total insured deposits” and other restrictions that would prohibit “financial institutions from becoming ‘too big to fail.’” The Senate voted down the amendment 61–33 on May 6, 2010. Twenty-seven Democrats, plus one independent (Joe Lieberman), voted nay.
86 “Some folks . . . think that we should return to the policies that helped to lead to this recession. Some of them made the political calculation that it’s better to obstruct than to lend a hand. They said no to tax cuts. They said no to small business loans. They said no to clean-energy projects. Now, it doesn’t stop them from being at ribbon-cuttings, but that’s okay.” —President Obama at Compact Power, Inc., July 15, 2010.
87 Senate Minority Leader McConnell, in an interview with the National Journal, October 23, 2010.
88 The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act proposed provisional and eventually permanent residency status for undocumented immigrants who entered the country before their sixteenth birthday and would fulfill a number of other requirements, including either serving two years of military service or attending college.
89 The Making Work Pay tax credit was a provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and provided a refundable tax credit of up to $400 for working individuals and up to $800 for married taxpayers filing joint returns. The credit was applied via automatic withholding changes to workers’ paychecks, as lawmakers hoped the increase in take-home pay would encourage consumer spending to help stimulate the economy. The credit was not renewed by the House for 2011, and only applied to the 2009 and 2010 tax years.
90 House Democrats passed the DREAM Act by a vote of 216–198 on December 8, 2010. The legislation would fail in the Senate ten days later by a vote of 55–41, falling short of the sixty votes needed to pass.
91 December 10, 2010.
92 In 1982, the United Nations adopted the Law of the Sea Treaty (formally the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS III), which outlined commer
cial responsibilities and environmental protections for the 140 million square miles of ocean and sea. (Prior to the treaty, the understanding was that each nation maintained sovereignties over its respective coastlines.) The US participated in the years-long negotiations for UNCLOS, but ultimately did not ratify the treaty. President Reagan believed “the underdeveloped nations who now control the General Assembly were looking for a free ride at our expense—again.”
93 The National Defense Authorization Act is annual legislation that has been passed by Congress since 1961 and specifies the budget and expenditures of the Department of Defense. In 2010, Representative Patrick Murphy (D-Florida) introduced an amendment to the 2011 Defense Authorization bill that would have repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. After several successful Republican filibusters against debate on the NDAA, Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins introduced a bill focused solely on DADT’s repeal, which passed both the House and Senate and was signed into law by President Obama on December 22, 2010.
2011
John Boehner was met with loud cheers as he took the gavel from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and held it up to his newly sworn-in 112th House of Representatives, dominated by 242 Republicans over 193 Democrats, still walking wounded from their losses two months prior. The famously quick to cry “proud son of Ohio,” as Pelosi had characterized him in her introduction, had to wipe his nose from whatever sobbing he held back while giving his remarks to the opening session. “It’s still just me,” he admitted, trying to inject a little humor and modesty into what was likely the shining moment of his quarter century in Congress. After two minutes of expressing gratitude and niceties behind the podium, Speaker Boehner dove right in to his majority’s new mission: “No longer can we kick the can down the road. The people voted to end business as usual, and today we begin to carry out their instructions.”
