Just after midnight on the last Thursday in July, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) drew a hand across his throat, signaling to Rep. Ray LaHood, the Illinois Republican presiding that night, to gavel the vote to a close.

The sharp rap was followed by a cascade of applause from the Republican side of the chamber as deflated Democrats looked on.

The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) had passed, 217-215, the culmination of an intense partisan showdown that had been raging for months.

It was a big win for President Bush and an even bigger win for Blunt, who put his credibility with the White House on the line. During the applause, Blunt and his team exchanged hugs and handshakes around their desk on the House floor.

Celebrations after close victories in the House are usually more about relief than elation because the party in the majority is expected to triumph. Still, Republicans and Democrats knew that CAFTA could have gone either way, and no one was more relieved that summer night than Blunt.

The Hill spent three months interviewing lawmakers, administration officials, lobbyists and staffers in Blunt's whip operation, with the agreement that their behind-the-scenes efforts would not be reported until after the CAFTA vote. The following is an account of the public wrangling and private dealings as policymakers inched CAFTA to the House floor, where the whip organization delivered on the final step: making sure the bill had enough votes to pass.

A sour mood Blunt faced an uphill task. Trade deals are notoriously difficult to pass. Members are disinclined to upset local industries or cast a vote that could be portrayed as a jobs killer during their reelection campaigns.

On CAFTA, Blunt and the White House realized early that they would not receive much support from the other side of the aisle because congressional Democrats had signaled their opposition during the debate on previous trade bills. Democratic resistance also meant wavering Republicans had more leverage to negotiate with their leadership.

As support for CAFTA fluctuated, Blunt remained characteristically confident. Blunt's floor director, Amy Steinmann, usually balanced his optimism with a healthy dose of skepticism, but those roles were occasionally reversed.

Steinmann, a cheery and focused Floridian, had the crucial task of building and maintaining the highly secret whip list, a directory of member concerns that allowed Blunt and his team to chart support for CAFTA. She and Blunt reviewed the list every night after the last vote.

In the second week of July, with CAFTA hanging in the balance, the normally upbeat Blunt was in particularly sour spirits. He was roughly 20 to 25 votes short and was running out of time. Unless CAFTA passed before the August congressional recess, the bill was probably doomed.

To bolster his flagging spirits, Steinmann printed out the initial whip list from the earlier, bitterly contentious 2003 vote on the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. As bad as CAFTA looked one week before the vote, the early whip count on Medicare was worse and was illustrative of how far they had come. "We've been in tougher spots," Blunt conceded.

Republicans had won the drug-bill vote, but the victory was tainted by an unprecedented three-hour roll call and an embarrassing ethics investigation.

'We've got to move'

Blunt had won many times on the floor, but the fate of CAFTA would shape his career as whip, one way or another.

Since taking over for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) as majority whip in 2003, Blunt has worked to make a name for himself as the top vote counter. Following DeLay - who has been called by some conservatives as the greatest whip ever - was not an easy task.

CAFTA, a relatively small trade bill, was so controversial that Republicans last year opted to delay a vote until after the November elections. The White House then tabled CAFTA in the first months of this year to focus on Social Security.

Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick had signed CAFTA on May 28, 2004, after almost a year and a half of negotiations with the five original member nations: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. The Dominican Republic joined the deal three months later.

As the trade deal languished, Blunt and House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) took up the CAFTA cause while other Republican leaders considered putting off the bill in favor of another, less contentious trade agreement.

"There did appear to be times when everybody else was ready to move on and not do this," Blunt said. "It seemed to me that if we couldn't do this we were better off to figure out that we couldn't do this and move on with it behind us one way or another, win or lose."

Blunt said he believed that ignoring CAFTA would undermine the administration's ability to negotiate future trade deals because the president could no longer promise other countries that Congress would ratify the agreements. He made that case to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove during one of their regular breakfasts in the late winter, according to a person familiar with the encounter. Blunt told Rove, "We've got to move on this."

As the president and his Cabinet secretaries toured the country in support of Social Security reform and the House was engulfed by ethics allegations surrounding DeLay, a small handful of CAFTA supporters kept rallying support for the bill in the late winter and early spring.

CAFTA was a top priority for the business community, whose support was essential to the White House agenda. Blunt and his chief deputy whip, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), harnessed that support to build momentum despite the administration's emphasis on Social Security.

Blunt tapped Republican lobbyist Kirsten Chadwick, of Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock, at the end of February to organize the business community to help sell the bill to uncertain members. Chadwick had previously led the administration effort to pass trade-promotion authority, which gave the president more power to negotiate trade deals, in her role as a legislative liaison under Nick Calio during the first two years of Bush's presidency.

As Blunt and others in the GOP leadership scrambled for votes, there were also rank-and-file figures in Congress and within the administration who played major roles in the passage of CAFTA. During the bill's darkest days, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) maintained a steady drumbeat of support among his congressional colleagues. Meanwhile, Matt Niemeyer and Chris Padilla in the U. S. Trade Representative's (USTR) Office and Brian Conklin in the White House pushed the bill relentlessly.

Conklin coordinated all the communication between Blunt's staff and each of the administration offices involved, including the White House, the USTR, the national security adviser and the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and State. Conklin and Steinmann spoke daily as the vote approached. Because trust was so essential in planning the buildup to this vote, Blunt and Cantor also organized a 15-member task force to meet weekly and manage member outreach.

The final - and missing - piece of the CAFTA puzzle was former Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who was sworn in as the U.S. trade representative at the end of April, two months after Zoellick vacated the position to become deputy secretary of state.

As a member of leadership, Portman had been aggressively courting his Republican and Democratic colleagues on CAFTA even before he was confirmed. Once approved by the Senate, he regularly held impromptu meetings in the elevators and hallways of the Capitol on his way to other scheduled events.

Staff tensions flared between Blunt's office and the USTR when negotiations stalled on a key textile deal that Portman was ironing out with six Southern Republicans, but Portman and Blunt remained friendly throughout. During that crucial negotiation, Portman brought his wife, Jane, to the Capitol on the night of their anniversary so that he could work out the final details of the agreement.

While Republicans condemned Democratic leaders for politicizing a relatively small trade bill, Democrats, in turn, argued that the labor and environmental provisions in the bill were too weak, setting a dangerous precedent heading into negotiations on future trade deals. And wavering members on both sides were concerned that the bill would put more Americans out of work.

Labor unions and the influential sugar lobby fed those fears with a massive public-relations campaign that included thousands of phone calls to the district offices of undecided members.

The White House and whip team countered that opposition by arguing CAFTA would stabilize the economies of the six member countries and was therefore essential to national security.

In the second week in May, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley briefed 20 or so reluctant House Republicans about the political instability of each member country. The briefing was so successful that Conklin then scheduled similar briefings with Hadley through Blunt's office for Republicans and Democrats alike.

A surprise leak

This was the longest whip effort of Blunt's tenure. His task force completed its first preliminary whip count on the second Tuesday in June. That Friday, almost six weeks before the vote, Blunt joked to Steinmann, "Your life is nothing but CAFTA."

At that point, the vote was tentatively scheduled for the last Friday in June, before members left for the weeklong Fourth of July recess. Over the weekend, though, members on the Ways and Means Committee - the panel with jurisdiction over CAFTA - surprised leadership by leaking details of a Social Security bill that committee Republicans were planning to introduce the following week.

Discussion of the unexpected rollout dominated leadership meetings the following Tuesday and became the focus of member curiosity during the Wednesday-morning conference meeting. That forced leadership to postpone CAFTA until after recess.

The following Thursday, two days before Congress broke for its weeklong recess, the Senate passed CAFTA, 54-45. Three sugar-state senators - Bill Nelson (D) and Mel Martinez (R) of Florida and Norm Coleman (R) of Minnesota - voted yes, a good sign for leadership and a bad sign for the influential sugar lobby, which had thrown its entire political might into defeating the trade bill.

But the House remained a sizable hurdle, and Senate passage meant Blunt was on the clock to push it through.

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