The latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek devotes six pages to a profile of former South Carolina senator and current Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, emphasizing his fights against both Obamacare and business-as-usual congressional Republicans.
DeMint views the impulse to avoid confrontation as the root of Republican woes: Only by engineering grand clashes and then standing resolutely on the side of small government can Republicans win this existential struggle.
“If I were speaker, I’d tell the president, ‘Mr. President, we funded the government, but we’re not going to fund your bill,’?” says DeMint, who likes to make his point by acting out imagined confrontations. “?‘We are not going to give in—one month, two months, three months. We are never going to give in. It’s just that important.’ And if the president wants to put the country through that to save a law that isn’t ready to go, well, then that’s a battle we have to have.”
When DeMint quit the Senate mid-term, it came as something of a shock in Washington, because a high-profile senator is presumed to have more power than a think tank president. There was plenty of snickering that he was cashing in: Heritage paid his predecessor more than $1 million last year. (The group won’t comment on DeMint’s salary.)
DeMint says he was just fed up. When he was first elected to Congress in 1998, insurrection wasn’t his goal. “I came to Washington as a businessman,” he says, “served six years in the House as a team player. Didn’t cause trouble. I was a policy nerd, introduced Social Security reform, tax reforms, all kinds of health-care reforms.” In 2005 he moved up to the Senate, where he began to lose patience with what he viewed as his party’s lack of commitment to first principles. “We had a lot of people who were great pretenders, talked real big about being conservatives,” he says. “But behind closed doors, they were driving the ball in the opposite direction.”
For a while he thought he could change this by attracting a stauncher breed of Republican to the Capitol. In 2010 he formed a political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to elect like-minded Republicans. He violated Senate protocol by backing challengers to establishment candidates, as when he endorsed Rand Paul for Kentucky’s open Senate seat in 2010 over Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked choice. DeMint helped to elect many of the most influential rising conservatives, including Cruz and Marco Rubio of Florida. “I wouldn’t be in the Senate without Jim DeMint,” Cruz says.
Yet he also championed fringe Tea Party figures such as Sharron Angle, who tried to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell, whose defeats cost the party seats—and possibly control of the Senate. DeMint didn’t care. He enraged many in his party when he said he’d rather have 30 Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters, a slap at the moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania who later switched to the Democrats. DeMint became McConnell’s tormenter and the leading voice of dissent among Senate Republicans.
