The theory of his lawsuit that was the pension funds were secured creditors, and should have been given better treatment when they took a loss on their holdings as part of the bankruptcy and restructuring of Chrysler. The Chrysler bonds represented less than 1 percent of the pensions’ holdings—about $17 million—but that was the legal toehold Mourdock needed in order to intervene. He hired a New York–based law firm for about $2 million and filed a lawsuit asking that the bankruptcy be halted. The stakes were enormous: If he succeeded, the entire rescue might have been prevented, pushing the company into liquida tion. The company, its assets—and, most importantly, the jobs—would be gone forever.
On Friday, May 29, 2009, New York’s federal bankruptcy court rejected the motion. Mourdock appealed. On June 5, the appeals court also affirmed the sale, leaving Mourdock heading into the weekend with nowhere to go but all the way to the Supreme Court. He filed a request for an emergency stay on Sunday, June 7, and the next day the court granted a temporary stay while reviewing whether to intervene. To his original argument, Mourdock added a constitutional challenge, arguing that it was not legal to use funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program for this purpose. Using the TARP money this way was Bush’s work-around after the Senate refused to fund the auto bailout in late 2008; if found unconstitutional, it would push the entire matter back into the hands of a Congress incapable of doing anything unpopular.
Until the Supreme Court could decide whether to take the case, the sale was on hold. But it couldn’t wait long: the entire bailout deal had a June 15 deadline. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Howard County had soared to 20 percent. Kokomo’s mayor, Greg Goodnight, braced his employees and community for the possibility that their biggest employer might never get back on its feet. Services would have to be cut, families would have to reconsider plans to send their kids to college, and the entire population of the town would begin to drain away.
Obscure bankruptcy proceedings don’t generally get much notice outside of the business world, but over that weekend the country began to take notice. Mourdock was making the rounds of the cable shows, and in the process became a hero in what was just beginning to be known as the Tea Party for standing up to government, labor, and Obama all at once.
By now Chrysler was estimated to be losing $100 million a day. One industry expert told CNN that “if the case drags on for even a few weeks and Chrysler is unable to restart its plants by the end of the month as planned, it could spell doom for Chrysler.” Its suppliers would be next—and the simultaneous rescue of GM might fall apart, too.
In a filing on Monday the eighth, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, soon to be named to the Supreme Court herself, responded for the administration, reminding the Supreme Court and the country of what was at stake. “The liquidation of Chrysler would have very severe effects on the American and Canadian economies. . . . More than 38,000 Chrysler employees would lose their jobs; 23 manufacturing facilities and 20 parts depots will be shuttered; more than 3,000 Chrysler dealers would suffer significant and possibly fatal harm to their businesses; and billions of dollars in health and pension benefits for current and former Chrysler workers would be wiped out.”
In addition to the economic gravity of the situation, there were serious legal flaws in Mourdock’s case. The biggest was that the holdings he represented would actually be worth less under liquidation than in the proposed bailout deal. In other words, if the pensions won the lawsuit, they would actually lose money compared to the plan they were suing to stop. In general, American case law does not allow you to go to court and sue to make yourself worse off.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied the stay and declined to hear the case. The sale could go forward—as it did, the next day. The sense of relief was still tentative. It would be years before we would know that the rescue was a success, with the companies and jobs saved and the government paid back. But the Indiana communities that rely on the auto industry—and possibly the American economy as a whole—had dodged a bullet.
Mourdock himself was no worse off for his courtroom rejection. He had made a name for himself, and in his own mind he had stood on principle by defying Washington and the auto workers who had pushed so hard to save their jobs. Gripped by ideology, Mourdock simply could not accept that government getting involved could be a good thing, even if it prevented the destruction of thousands of lives. But I wonder, sometimes, whether he talked to any of the families whose livelihoods could have been wrecked by his legal adventure. Did he think about the stakes for them, or was it just numbers on a page to him?
To Mourdock, it seems, the most important issue at stake in the auto rescue was that investors on the bond market would have to take a haircut. To the rest of us, the most important issue was that families’ lives could be ruined by the same kind of economic disaster that had nearly killed my hometown half a century earlier.
To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.
RICHARD MOURDOCK WAS UP FOR REELECTION in 2010, and when I investigated who was looking to run against him from the Democratic side, the answer was no one. I was surprised. I knew down-ticket races, especially for Democrats in Indiana, were thankless, difficult, and hard to recruit for. But a candidate as extreme as Mourdock seemed beatable—at least if there were a favorable national atmosphere, a flawless campaign, and a little bit of luck. Surely someone would take him on, in the name of the people and communities who could have been devastated by his adventure. And if no one else was going to step up, why not me?
In American political culture, you are not supposed to admit you have any interest in running for office until the moment you declare. I didn’t even realize this was a particularly American quality until studying in England, where I would often meet students who made it clear they would stand for Parliament at the earliest opportunity, and then did exactly that. It’s hard to say where this norm of ours comes from; I’d like to think it has something to do with the premium we place on humility. There is something jarring about the idea that anyone thinks himself truly fit to perform the tremendously difficult and sensitive tasks of public office, and so putting yourself forward to do so seems immodest.