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CHAPTER 1
THE CENTRAL PROBLEM
âTHE CHAIRMAN TELLS US THIS EVENT HAS TO BE MOVED.â
So decreed the chief clerk of the Senate Rules Committee, Lynden Armstrong, as he and his colleagues proceeded to expel about 250 citizen activists from the Russell Senate Office Buildingâs Kennedy Caucus Room. It was November 17, 2011, and the room was already packed with regular folks who had traveled from across the country at the invitation of Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah. Months earlier Lee had offered to host a meeting of a grassroots group, the âTea Party Debt Commission,â in the Russell Building and had gotten Senate Ethics Committee approval to do so. Together, we wanted to offer a budget-balancing alternative to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (aka the âsupercommitteeâ), and provide a hearing where the people would speak and members of Congress could listen.
The grandiose, century-old room (officially known as SR-325) with its thirty-five-foot ceilings was filling not only with senators and congressmen to listen, but also reporters and TV cameras from C-SPAN, Fox News, and other network outlets. The room seemed like an oddly discordant place for We the People to congregate, and a far cry from the street-corner protests Tea Partiers had started organizing in February 2009. As the U.S. Senate website describes it:
The interior decoration of the room is classically grand yet refined, much in the tradition of Versailles. Twelve Corinthian columns along the longitudinal walls flank three French windows and support an architrave and frieze. Above the frieze are classically derived motifs of dentils, egg and dart molding, and brackets. A Greek key forms a ribbon at the top of the Corinthian pilasters. . . . A large keystone crowns each window arch, and over the main doorway is a triangular pediment as found in ancient Greek temples.1
Most who were gathered in the Kennedy Caucus Room that Thursday in November had made extraordinary sacrificesâtraveling many miles away from job commitments and familiesâto petition their elected representatives with the commonsense proposition that our government cannot keep spending money it does not have. We were not in town to protest. Despite a certain let-them-eat-cake air about the Rules Committee staff, this was no modern-day Womenâs March on Versailles. We had come peacefully and respectfully to the seat of federal power to offer budget solutions.
The Tea Party Debt Commission (TPDC) plan stood in perfect contrast to the way Washington typically conducts business. The process was completely open and transparent. Everyone was welcome to participate. A series of field hearings across the country asked local residents to take the microphone to offer to the TPDC commissionersâtwelve community leaders who volunteered their time to oversee the processâtheir ideas to balance the budget. The TPDC crowd-sourced (i.e., surveyed) one million answers to budget priorities online, receiving input from more than 50,000 citizens.
This is hardly the way things work in Washington. The very idea of the supercommittee was founded on the proposition that an elite group of insiders knows better than the public what the people want and need. Of course, when you get twelve members of Congress together in one roomâeach beholden to interests other than the interests of the people, each of the opinion that his or her âexpertiseâ trumps the will of the peopleâthen you end up with what the country got: nothing. (Some would argue this was the goal all along.)
Contrast the Washington way with the peopleâs way: our work would quickly balance the budget using the Congressional Budget Officeâs own scoring.
No matter: âThe chairman tells us this event has to be moved.â Our ideas were unwelcome. So were we, apparently.
As remarkable as it seemed, we were getting kicked out. Who could possibly be so threatened by a mob of citizens armed with . . . notebooks, spreadsheet printouts, and a budget plan? Who would go to such extraordinary lengths to shut down a conversation (a particularly risky public relations move, given the reporters and cameras, and the way and speed with which information spreads these days)?
âWho told you to do it?â Senator Lee asked the chief clerk as Senate staffers collected our name placards and attempted to break down our conference tables. Who was kicking us out of a building financed by our tax dollars?
âUh, Schumer,â the Senate staffer responded condescendingly, referring to his boss, Senator Charles Schumer, the hyperpartisan Democrat from New York and chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.
âDoes the First Amendment have no application here?â asked an incredulous Lee.
âSIMULATING A HEARINGâ
IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT HUMAN HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS. But that was before YouTube. That was before the democratization of information and knowledge online.
Julie Borowski, a young economist from FreedomWorks, had the foresight to capture the terse exchange between Senator Lee and the Rules Committee enforcers on her handheld camera just as they were evicting us, and she quickly posted the video on YouTube. This turned out to be the essential record of what actually happened, because as soon as we had left the hearing room the Rules staffers went into full spin mode to cover up what had just gone down.2
Sony Bloggie HD Pocket Camcorder with 4GB memory and 360-degree lens: $79.97. The truth: Priceless.
Initially the Schumer staffers argued that Lee was violating Senate rules by âsimulating a hearing,â despite the fact that senators make a regular practice of holding mock hearings on Senate property. âFunny thing is,â blogger Michelle Malkin later reported, âmembers of Congress have been able to convene politicized âhearingsâ in government buildings for years. On the House side, Democrat Rep. John Conyersâ âbasement hearingsâ on everything from impeachment to illegal immigration are legend. On the Senate side, such non-official, non-hearing âhearingsâ are plentiful.â3 One such pretend hearing Malkin identified was in 2009 on climate change, presided over by then-senator Robert Bennett, Republican from Utah, and Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee. Another involved none other than Senator Schumer: the 2005 show trial on the Valerie Plame affair, which was referred to as a âforum on national security implications of disclosing the identity of a covert intelligence officerâcommittee hearing.â4
So which was it? A âforumâ or a âcommittee hearingâ? Any rule of conduct ought to be applied consistently across the board; otherwise it canât possibly maintain legitimacy. This seems so obvious and simple that even a senator can get it. Remarkably, one of Senator Schumerâs staffers, having been inundated by angry phone calls from disenfranchised Tea Partiers, actually argued that Senate rules donât apply to Senate Rules Committee members. Surely that frazzled staffer misspoke. Surely Senate rules apply equally to all senators, even those writing the rules. Yet one canât help but wonder what type of office culture would enable a young phone attendant to so casually channel Hugo ChĂĄvez or Vladimir Putin. Maybe this is where the problem starts?
And then there was also the odd coincidence that Shaun Parkin, the other ânon-partisanâ Rules staffer caught on video evicting the group, had long worked for the aforementioned Senator Robert Bennett, whom Lee, the Utah Tea Party, and FreedomWorks PAC had ousted in the 2010 elections. He now works as deputy staff director for the aforementioned Senator Lamar Alexander, the ranking minority member (i.e., Republican) on the Rules Committee. Presumably, the minority staff is present to protect the legitimate rights of minority members from arbitrary dictates from the majority, right? Is it possible that freshman Republicans, particularly members of the Tea Party class like Lee, were effectively treated like second-class legislators within the Republican caucusâs pecking order?
Even odder was the ex post facto decision by the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) to demand, and receive, a correction to a New York Times online report that had originally described the ousting pretty much as it had happened.5 In e-mails to reporters who covered the story, the chief information officer for the Capitol police wrote the following:
Re: the story you wrote here that you said you sourced from Freedom Works, hereâs what really happened. . . . The USCP responded to room SR-326 in the Russell Senate Office Building for the report of a suspicious package. As a security and life safety measure, the USCP evacuated the immediate area until we could determine that nothing hazardous was found in SR-326. Obviously, SR-325 [the Kennedy Caucus Room] which is adjacent was affected by this suspicious package. Iâll look for the update soon & thanks in advance for making the correction.6
Now it was âsecurityâ concerns and a mysterious package down the hall that forced the evacuation of all of us from the Kennedy Caucus Room that afternoon. Thereâs just one problem with this account. Itâs not true. In addition to Borowskiâs video, Ben Howe at RedState quickly posted a meticulous accounting of the facts, times, and e-mails of what actually happened. E-mails from Schumerâs staff belie the USCPâs claim that âa suspicious packageâ made them do it. An hour before the event was scheduled to begin, the aforementioned Rules staffer Lynden Armstrong sent an e-mail to a Lee staffer, time-stamped 1:03 p.m.: âPlease call me ASAP or meet down at SR-325 about the Tea Party Budget Hearing that is scheduled at 2:00pm. There are two problems with this and that is they are simulating a hearing which isnât allowed and the Rules Committee has determined events of this nature are political and not allowed.â7
Two minutes later, the Lee staffer responded by e-mail: âThis was an event to get input from some Utahns and others about the Debt.â8 Five minutes after that, Leeâs staff replies, âLynden I will be there in 10 minutes.â9 Armstrong doesnât wait, but instead responds, âOk. At this point, we have to pull the plug on the event.â10
During the next twenty minutes, Senator Lee confronts the two Rules Committee staffers in the corridor outside the Kennedy Caucus room (as shown in the Borowski video). Then, in an e-mail time-stamped at 1:31 p.m., the Capitol police broadcast the following message to all Senate staff:
The U.S. Capitol Police are responding to a suspicious package in Room 326 of the Russell Senate Office Building. All staff and other personnel are directed to avoid this area until further notice.11
At this point, frustrated, but graciously concerned about his hundreds of guests, Senator Lee decided to relocate the meeting rather than make a stink. His staff began searching for an off-campus meeting place. At 2:08 p.m. a follow-up e-mail from the Capitol police declared that the âinvestigation of the suspicious package in Room 326â has concluded and that âall tests are negative and the area is now open.â12
Was the âsuspicious packageâ just a bizarre coincidence? Perhaps. But the USCP account is clearly not accurate. The e-mail evidence alone makes clear when the decision to âpull the plugâ on the Tea Party meeting was made and why. We werenât evacuated for safety reasons by the Capitol police; we were evicted for political reasons by the thought police. Why, then, did the Capitol police feel a need to make sure an inaccurate version of events got into the New York Times? What motivated them to âcorrectâ the story soon after it had appeared online? At whose behest? Such palace intrigue raises serious questions. Is it the regular practice of congressional staffers and other government employees to manipulate media stories and misrepresent the facts?
One thing is for certain. If Julie Borowski had not captured the bouncers from the Senate Rules Committee red-handed in the act of evicting Senator Lee and his guests, the âhistoryâ of what happened that day would have been rewritten forever. If Michelle Malkin and Ben Howe had not reported on events in real time, digging up the facts and doing the type of investigative journalism that gets all the sources out in the openâreportedâthe version of the âtruthâ that came out would have conveniently protected Senator Schumer and his staff from the light of day. As it turns out, we are no longer dependent on one authoritative source for news. We are wholly independent of the old information monopolies, in fact.
WHOSE RULES?
IS IT PARANOIA IF THEY REALLY ARE OUT TO GET YOU? IT WAS CLEAR TO those present that the powers-that-be conspired to block outside voices from disrupting business as usual inside the marble walls of the Russell Senate Office Building. But our experience that Thursday was no watershed. They didnât stop us. We simply relocated down the street, beyond the purview of Senate authority, at Hillsdale Collegeâs Kirby Centerâa move that Senator Lee, in a nice turn of phrase, dubbed the âwalk of freedom.â But the experience is emblematic of the extent to which those in power will go to protect their station. It seems obvious that the Beltway establishment views any citizen seeking fiscal responsibility and an adult approach to making unlimited budgetary demands fit within scarce means as a hostile threat to be ignored, derided, demonized, and, when necessary, expelled from the building.
This is a pattern that can be documented over ...
