Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11

15. Black Saturday

129 chapter FiFteen Black Saturday With the prospects for a compromise slipping, less than twenty-four hours before the House would come into session, the White House deployed reinforcements. Palmer’s longtime friend and President Bush’s legislative affairs chief, David Hobbs, a product of the House as a former longtime aide to Majority Leader Dick Armey, personally knew the committee chairmen whose support Palmer needed. Now Palmer was out on a limb and had had it. Neither Sensenbrenner nor Hunter would budge. Passing through some reporters near the Rotunda of the Capitol, Hobbs arrived in the suite of ornate rooms surrounding the Speaker’s office, where about twenty congressional staffers loaded down with binders were hoping to negotiate and hammer out the final legislative text of the bill. Other aides moved swiftly to and from an interior room where Sensenbrenner cursed the Senate. After hours of fruitless shuttle diplomacy, Palmer grabbed his keys and walked out. He made it as far as Statuary Hall when Hobbs caught up with him and pulled him back. After coaxing Palmer onto the Speaker’s Balcony, overlooking the National Mall, they discussed how far they had come to be in a place of such grandeur. Soon they returned to the problem at hand and discussed an almost unthinkable maneuver: steamroll over the opposition of two committee barons and bring a bill to the floor they did not support. If the gamble failed, Hastert could lose his job. Calling a vote on the compromise would effectively be a vote of confidence; the Speaker would be exhorting his Republican colleagues to trust and follow him, despite the misgivings of his lieutenants. If the gambit failed, it could betray weakness that might persuade his troops to select a new leader when they met 130 Black Saturday in coming weeks to organize for the new Congress. He would be standing before his colleagues and putting his credibility on the line against two powerful allies, effectively daring them to oppose him. Legislative histories are replete with examples of powerful congressional leaders strong-arming their colleagues for votes, such as Lyndon Johnson leaning into and jawboning a tentative senator into his corner, but Speaker Hastert would be in an especially precarious position. Hastert would be asking the rank-and-file members of the House Republican caucus to look past the concerns of two respected chairmen in favor of two institutions they regarded with eye-rolling disdain: the United States Senate and the 9/11 PDP. This was a terrible option. They had to try again. Hobbs needed to keep Sensenbrenner at the table and cajole him into a compromise.But they had to get him something on immigration. His negotiations with the Senate negotiators were deteriorating into shouting matches, and Sensenbrenner was threatening to walk out. Could the president bail Palmer and Hobbs out? The problem was Bush was en route to Latin America for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. But desperate to forestall a Sensenbrenner walkout,Hobbs escaped from the room and dialed the White House “signal, ”the Situation Room’s operator,who could track down the president, the vice president,the cabinet,and the White House staff in minutes.Hobbs reached the president’s chief of staff in a motorcade in Chile. Hobbs and Card agreed that President Bush should call Sensenbrenner. Within minutes, the president, now aboard Air Force One, was calling. Hobbs called Sensenbrenner into the Speaker’s conference room and handed him the phone,and then he stepped to the other side of the room and hoped for the best.The president expressed sympathy for what Sensenbrenner was trying to do with immigration generally, but he asked him to be flexible and narrow his demands. The president stressed the importance of getting a deal because of the ambitious legislative agenda for next year.1 “Out of respect”2 for the president, Sensenbrenner dropped his insistence on the driver’s license provisions (though he had a price which he would soon demand of the Senate).3 It was an efficient deployment of presidential power. “Sorry to have to do that to you,Jim, ”said Hobbs.Surprisingly,the irascible Sensenbrenner was not annoyed that Hobbs had called in a presidential air strike, a favorite tactic of last resort for a legislative affairs staffer who could no longer make progress with a member of Congress. Black Saturday 131 After the phone call...