Third in a series of three excerpts Our leadership responded to my challenge of the appropriators with an organized effort to defeat these reforms and to humiliate me for challenging their power.
It worked! I didn’t get more than five votes on any of my proposals and the disdain for my efforts was so thick in the air you could have cut it with a knife.
Members and staff at a caucus meeting leaked the story to the press. Roll Call reported, “DeMint’s ideas reignited long-standing tensions with the GOP Conference and his fellow senators, who often have tried to quiet his flame-throwing ways.”
My chief of staff, who is one of the most senior and respected chiefs on the Hill, was told by several of his colleagues he should resign.
There was a silver lining to my humiliation. My Republican colleagues saw I wasn’t easily intimidated and wasn’t going to back down. And the experience forced me to finally accept a truth that had been obvious for years: My colleagues were not going to change.
The only way to change the Republican Conference and the Washington Establishment was to change the people in the Congress. A quote from former Republican President Reagan kept swirling around in my head, “If you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.” It was time to raise the temperature.
I began taking this message to stop spending, borrowing, debt, and government takeovers directly to the media instead of trying to convince my colleagues to support me. Most members of Congress are risk averse and will not take a stand until the polls tell them which positions the public supports.
But when Republicans wait to find out what the public believes before delivering our message, the Democrats have an uncontested platform to shape public opinion. Republicans must know what we believe and lead the public in the right direction. …
Taking our message directly to the American people also allowed a few of us to draw attention to the wasteful “The Bridge to Nowhere” earmark and to increase public pressure against the culture of earmarking.
Additionally, the conservative press helped us create public outrage against the bailouts, the failed “stimulus” bill, the moratorium on offshore energy exploration, and to delay the government takeover of our health care system.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to go it alone. While I was beginning my one-man kamikaze mission within the Senate, millions of Americans were coming to the same conclusion I had: Our country was moving with increasing speed toward a financial cliff and we had to act decisively to save it.
The Wall Street bailout during the last days of the Bush administration was a loud wake-up call for many Americans. President George W. Bush said he was suspending free-market principles to save the free-market system. I didn’t buy it. Americans didn’t buy it.
After the public outrage over the Wall Street bailout, Republicans in the House held together against President Obama’s trillion-dollar government spending bill he called “the stimulus.”
But it passed the House with almost unanimous Democratic support. Republicans in the Senate could have stopped it. Instead a few Republican moderates, including Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, sold us out.
The bill passed.
