Roy Blunt is leaving Congress. Is his dealmaking approach to politics going with him?
It is a Monday, six days before Christmas, 13 days before the new year and 15 days until Roy Blunt is no longer a U.S. senator.
Outside his Senate office, which used to belong to another Missouri senator, President Harry Truman, some of the pictures and memorabilia that once hung on the gray walls of his staff have been taken down and bubble wrapped. Computer monitors are piled on carts. Other senators’ staff have come by to scout the office and see if they may want to move in, like hermit crabs looking for a new shell.
Inside, the current occupant doesn’t look ready to leave. His computer and phone are still up and working, his art is still on the walls and Blunt is sitting in an armchair, declining to reflect on his legacy.
“I think I’m more pragmatic than that,” he says.
Blunt has just gotten back from a trip to Missouri, where he gave a speech at a winter commencement at Missouri State University and watched Springfield-Branson National Airport name a terminal in his honor.
He has been in Missouri often over the past year, part of his pledge to visit all of Missouri’s 114 counties before he leaves office. And, after making good on the promise, Blunt is still busy. The Senate is attempting to pass a large spending bill, and he has events to attend and votes to cast.
It is easy for retirements to take on the air of funerals. People begin to use was instead of is. For the popular — and Blunt is a very popular man in the U.S. Capitol — people are eager to jump on the phone and gush. They call him a friend. They call him a partner. They call him a true leader, whip smart and salt of the earth.
He listened, they say.
But they struggle to tell stories about the moments that defined him as a politician.
“He isn’t looking for that defining moment,” said former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri. “He’s looking at how can I get up today and do the best job I can at actually making something happen.”
Blunt is one of a wave of Senate “dealmakers” retiring this year. He’s joined by Republican Sens. Richard Shelby of Alabama, who as former chairman of the Appropriations Committee helped foster deals on spending bills; Rob Portman of Ohio, who helped get the Respect for Marriage Act through the Senate; and Richard Burr of North Carolina, who supported a bipartisan bill to address gun violence.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell often says he encounters two types of politicians: those who want to make a point and those who want to make a difference.
“Once you’re here, there is a fundamental decision to make,” McConnell said. “Do you want to sort of get up every day and throw stuff, or actually get an outcome? Roy clearly wants to make a difference and has from the very beginning.”
Blunt is a lawmaker’s lawmaker. Republicans and Democrats alike are eager to share kind words about his mild-mannered approach to legislating, or about his ability to make deals, his dedication to helping make policy, how he really cared about history and Missouri.
But over the 25 years Blunt has spent in the Capitol, it seems as if his style of politics is fading. In his farewell speech to the Senate, Blunt spoke about the importance of building consensus, of finding one thing in common with another senator and making progress from there.
“The answer to the question of how good is the senator, is what do the senator’s colleagues think of them,” said former Sen. Jack Danforth said. “That’s it.”
Politics evolve. Danforth’s statesman-focused definition of success might give way to one more focused on disruption and change. The Republican Party, which has long been built on the Reagan philosophy of pro-business, less-government and hawkish foreign policy, has cultivated a base of rural, religious, working-class conservatives and a new focus on populist nationalism.
Blunt, in some ways, represents the type of politics they disdain. He’s a Washington insider — to the point where his wife and three of his children are lobbyists. He’s focused on deals, not disrupting the status quo. If Washington is a swamp, then Blunt is an alligator.
“Well, the job’s in Washington and I do work inside,” Blunt quipped. “The job here, I think, is to come and do your best to find the best possible solution with the other 99 people sent to the Senate or the other 435 people sent to the House. And if the solution doesn’t move you in the right direction, you shouldn’t be for it.”
He is being replaced by Senator-elect Eric Schmitt, who throughout his campaign promised he would go to Washington to fight. Missouri’s other Republican senator, Josh Hawley, whom Blunt helped recruit, has built his reputation on being a legislative roadblock and has called for the end of the type of Republican policy priorities Blunt has spent a career espousing.
As Blunt, 72, is set to retire, it appears his brand of politics is falling out of style.
“Let’s hope not,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat who will step down from leadership in the new Congress. “There is no doubt that the Congress and the country have become more polarized. There’s no doubt that we have, through social media, come to a place where making an impact on social media as opposed to making an impact on legislative product and working together have become more important for some members and politics generally.”
Blunt’s rise in politics
Blunt’s legacy has already been sorted and packed into boxes. The papers deemed worth keeping, like the handwritten speeches for his remarks at two presidential inaugurations, were sent to Columbia, where, for the past few weeks, Blunt staffers have pulled up in rented vans and unloaded 340 cubic feet of their boss’ papers into the headquarters of State Historical Society of Missouri, where Blunt serves on the board of trustees.
The building, which holds documents dating to 1808, is not to be confused with the James C. Kirkpatrick Information Center, a 35-minute drive down U.S. 63, which stores the state archives. As Missouri secretary of state, Blunt helped that building get built more than 30 years ago.
Blunt was elected to that statewide office in 1984, at 34 years old. In the ’80s, the state’s archives were stored in an old warehouse. When it rained, the staff used to run to Walmart to get plastic lining because the building leaked and they didn’t want the water to ruin the records. Blunt was able to work with a Democratic-controlled state House and Senate to get the funding for a new building. They moved 150 tractor trailer loads of paper over to the archives’ new home in 1991.
It was an early example of a trait that would come to define Blunt’s legacy as a lawmaker — his ability to strike deals with members of the opposite party.
When voters chose him as secretary of state, Blunt was the first Republican elected to the position in 52 years. He rose to the job after three terms as Greene County clerk in Springfield and held the office for four years before launching a failed statewide campaign for governor in 1992. Then he went back to school, becoming the president of Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar.
Blunt was elected to Congress in 1996, and it took him only one term to become the chief deputy whip for the Republican Party, a rapid ascent to a leadership position. He became the House majority whip, the person who is in charge of persuading members of their party to support or oppose a bill, in 2003.
The title comes from fox hunting. At the edge of a hunt are the whips, whose job is to make sure the hounds stay on track. If a hound strays, they crack the whip and bring it back into line.
Politicians, with their competing egos and interests and goals, don’t always respond to the crack of the whip. But, according to his colleagues, Blunt was an expert at it. He knew how to count votes and how to effectively apply pressure to get the support needed to pass a bill.
At one point, Blunt looked around the room at a leadership meeting and realized he was the only one paying attention to whether an argument could win over members of the opposing party because of his experience in general elections.
“It made a difference in the way I looked at almost everything compared to the way my colleagues looked at everything, because they were way more primary election focused and I was way more general election focused,” Blunt said last year in a speech to the State Historical Society of Missouri. “Does this still work when you’re trying to put a combination of people together who are not automatically on your side?”
A nation divided
National politics has become even more partisan over the course of Blunt’s time in Congress. As his successor to the House, Rep. Billy Long, put it, “it’s polarized on steroids.”
The majority of congressional seats are determined in primaries — only 54 House races were decided by fewer than 10 percentage points in November’s general election. In the House, which Blunt left in 2010 for the Senate, it’s rare for members to cross party lines.
Political scientists have shown that the majority of lasting legislation from Congress is bipartisan. It requires lawmakers to foster agreement. And while the Biden administration has been able to point to a series of laws that have gotten support from some Republicans over the past two years, that’s expected to be more difficult in the next Congress.
Blunt has been among the core group of Republican lawmakers who helped pass most of the major legislation this past Congress — he signed onto the infrastructure bill that pumped billions into repairing the country’s roads and bridges; an attempt at curbing gun violence by tightening existing gun purchasing loopholes and funding mental health initiatives; and a bill that would enshrine federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriage.
But Blunt is a conservative. While he worked to get the mental health provisions in the gun violence bill, he was against stricter gun restrictions like banning the sale of assault weapons. He said he supported the same-sex marriage bill because it allowed Congress to define where they stand on religious freedom protections.
In a tribute speech to Blunt, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota described walking through the halls of the Capitol and seeing the broken glass and spray paint after it had been overrun by supporters of former President Donald Trump. She said Blunt, who was instrumental in making sure the election was certified that day, had turned to her and said, “See you tomorrow.”
In the time since, they’ve worked on legislation to prevent a similar attack — passing a bill that would allow Capitol Police to directly call for support from the National Guard and legislation to make it more difficult for lawmakers to object to the certification of the presidential election.
But Blunt voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial that followed. It was the second time he voted to acquit Trump. The only other time Blunt participated in a presidential impeachment, he voted as House member to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about having sexual relations with an intern while giving testimony in a lawsuit.
“That is his call,” Klobuchar said. “I don’t agree with everything he does nor does he agree with me. But we’re very good friends.”
In his farewell speech in the Senate, Blunt talked about the importance of working with people he may not always agree with to pass legislation.
He talked about certain changes, like working with Klobuchar to update the rules of the Senate — she mentioned the fact that they worked to amend the rules to allow Sen. Tammy Duckworth to care for her newborn baby on the floor and that they updated an old dress code that was restrictive about what women could wear.
After the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers, Blunt said people were once again repeating that the country needed better mental health services. He and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, had helped create a program operating in some states he said was proven to work. So they convinced the coalition assembling a bill to address gun violence to expand funding for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics. The provision helped the bill get through the Senate.
Some of his largest accomplishments came through his ability to secure government funding. In his time as the ranking Republican on the subcommittee in charge of funding for health and human services, Blunt helped get the National Institutes of Health an additional $15.4 billion in funding over six years. He increased funding for Alzheimer’s research from $631 million to more than $3 billion, and got his name on a center for research into Alzheimer’s and related dementias.
“Most Missourians don’t really understand the breadth and the depth of his body of work when it comes to really pushing America to continue to be the leader in scientific health research,” McCaskill said. “He is not a ‘hey look at me’ kinda guy, he is a ‘hey what can we get done’ kinda guy.”
He got millions in funding for Missouri colleges and universities, helped boost funding for the Special Olympics, Children’s Advocacy Centers (which help victims of child abuse), helped increase the amount in Pell Grants, which help lower-income people attend college, secured funding for a number of infrastructure projects in the state and helped get a coin commemorating the centennial of baseball’s Negro Leagues.
In a recent spending bill, which marked the return of “earmarks” — when lawmakers can secure funding for specific projects in their state or district — Blunt’s $313 million for Missouri was the fourth highest of any lawmaker, according to The New York Times.
“I am proud that Roy Blunt was my senator,” Danforth said. “That’s something wonderful to think about somebody. You’re proud of them. Whether you agree with them or don’t, this person was my United States senator.”
Forging relationships
What some saw as Blunt’s ability to cut deals, epitomized the type of inside-the-beltway politics that’s been a frequent target of voters’ ire for at least 15 years.
Blunt’s wife and three of his four children have lobbied Congress (the fourth is slated to head to college soon). In 2002, Blunt was criticized for attempting to slip a provision that would help the tobacco industry into a bill creating the Homeland Security Department. His soon-to-be wife, Abigail, and son Andy had lobbied for Philip Morris. He was criticized for using lobbyists when whipping members’ votes.
Much of that history was used by Democrats in both of Blunt’s Senate campaigns. In 2016, as Trump was rising to power in the Republican Party as an outsider pledging to “drain the swamp,” Democrat Jason Kander used a similar argument against Blunt.
Liz Mair, a Republican consultant who worked for Blunt’s 2010 and 2016 campaigns, said even during the height of the Tea Party movement, when some conservatives were pushing the Republican Party toward less government spending and eschewing Blunt’s mold of legislating, he had a way of winning over some of the most fiscally conservative voters who may not have been philosophically in line with Blunt.
“It cannot be explained by anything apart from his personality and his ability to forge relationships with people that don’t instinctively agree with him on every single issue,” Mair said.
While Blunt may have been able to personally win over individual conservatives, they appear to be gaining larger influence in the Republican Party.
Missouri, once the symbolic bellwether state in presidential elections, has become reliably conservative. The candidates who replaced Blunt tripped over themselves to appeal to Trump and his base and denounced some of Blunt’s efforts at bipartisanship.
During negotiations on the gun violence bill, 49 members of Missouri’s General Assembly signed a letter urging Blunt to abandon the deal. When the Senate was attempting to enshrine federal protections for same-sex marriage into law, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, the son of the man who got Blunt his first job in politics, urged the senator to oppose the deal.
In both cases, he stuck with the legislation. Last month, a Missouri state representative filed a resolution condemning him for it.
“Sen. Roy Blunt was elected to office on a conservative policy platform,” said state Rep. Michael Davis, a Kansas City Republican. “He has since betrayed Missourians by legislating exactly the opposite. His betrayal of Missouri’s conservative values is shameful.”
Blunt said he understands why there are so many people frustrated with politics and the type of deal making that goes on in Washington.
“You keep hearing, ‘Here’s what we’re doing, here’s this new program, here’s this new plan, it’s gonna be really good for you’ and it turns out not to be really good for you,” Blunt said. ”And I think that’s developed most some frustration and cynicism about government. That is understandable.”
What’s next in Washington?
Missouri’s senators this coming year may speak more to the cynicism and frustration voters are feeling.
Hawley, Blunt’s seatmate, has written that the “old Republican Party is dead.” He criticized two, large bipartisan deals Blunt was part of — the infrastructure bill and the law attempting to curb gun violence — and is a leader in the wave trying to push the Republican Party in a new direction, one that looks different from the party Blunt helped build in Missouri.
Blunt’s replacement, Schmitt, has spent the past few years adopting a similar stance to Hawley’s. He built his reputation in the Attorney General’s Office by suing the Biden administration. In his campaign to win Blunt’s seat, Schmitt sold himself as a “fighter” who would take a blowtorch to Biden’s agenda. He pledged to oppose McConnell as minority leader.
Both appear to be embracing a style that’s far removed from Blunt’s advice to never say what you’ll “never do.”
“(It) seems to be the the absolute certain way to take yourself out of the political discussion,” Blunt said. “Because you’re almost certain to never get exactly what you want. You don’t get exactly what you want almost anywhere else in life either, unless there’s something wrong with you.”
Lawmakers were reluctant to say that Blunt’s departure means there won’t be as many deal makers in Congress. McConnell said he understood that was a common thought in Washington, but that he felt it was “premature.”
McConnell said it was rare for so many people to attend Blunt’s farewell address (“many times, the farewell speech, the only person there is the leader and the speaker”). There were more than 13 Democratic senators on the floor, along with many more Republicans. His current staff lined the inside of the chamber and former staff filled a number of rows in the gallery. His family looked on.
After Blunt gave his remarks, members went over to shake his hand and congratulate him. McConnell, known as a relatively cold man, embraced Blunt.
Blunt, after accepting his congratulations, sat at his desk and listened.
