Read Online Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives by Robert Draper - Free Book Online

at the podium for the first time and, with his own pocket Constitution in hand, read in a noticeably quavering voice from Article I, Section 8, relating to Congress’s enumerated powers: “To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; to raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.”
    A few minutes later, a congresswoman—a Democrat from Arizona named Gabrielle Giffords—read the immortal words of Fisher Ames: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

CHAPTER SIX
    The Institutionalist
    Boehner had been at his home in West Chester, Ohio, that Saturday afternoon when he picked up the phone and heard from his chief of staff, Barry Jackson, that Gabrielle Giffords and three of her staffers had been shot and possibly killed.
    He called his Democratic counterpart, Nancy Pelosi, who had been taking down her Christmas tree at home in San Francisco when she got the news. Then the Speaker released a short statement. “I am horrified,” it read, “by the senseless attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and members of her staff. An attack on one who serves was an attack on all who serve . . . This is a sad day for our country.”
    That evening, Boehner’s staffers back in Washington urged him to hold a press conference. People needed to see the House leader, not just hear him , they said. You can deliver it in West Chester. You’re the Speaker. The cameras will come to you.
    Boehner had been at his job only three days. He of course understood the Speaker’s traditional duties: controlling the House’s legislative calendar, overseeing the majority party’s committee assignments, and standing second in the line of succession to the presidency. Still, he was not yet accustomed to the full power it conferred on him. Sure enough, a phalanx of reporters awaited him on Sunday morning at the West Chester township office, where Boehner had begun his political career as a township trustee nearly three decades ago. He took no questions and read from a prepared statement that again included the sentiment that “an attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.” That same morning, Boehner’s staff wrangled the entire House membership for a conference call. Boehner led off with remarks—whichwere again written down and included the same verbiage as his other two statements—before passing the call off to Pelosi.
    This was Boehner. Like his immediate predecessor, Pelosi, he did his best work behind the scenes. But this, too, was Boehner: he ordered the flags flown at half-mast on the House side of the Capitol in honor of Giffords’s staffer Gabe Zimmerman, who had died on the scene. He and Majority Leader Eric Cantor agreed to postpone next week’s business in the House, which would have included efforts to repeal Obama’s health care act (which Republicans had heretofore described as “job-killing”).
    “And frankly,” he told his House colleagues on the conference call, “we need to rally around each other. This is a time for the House to lock arms . . . We must rise to the occasion for our nation and show Congress at its best.”
    Two days later, on the House floor, Boehner gave a more poignant speech in honor of the Arizona congresswoman who was now fighting for her life in a Tucson intensive care unit. He choked up and tears ran down his face. This, unmistakably, was John Boehner.
    The body closest to the people, and to their passions, was ever susceptible to unruliness and thus to violence. At times the congressmen themselves were the instigators. In 1808 , New York Representative Barent Gardenier denounced President Jefferson’s sweeping trade