CQ WEEKLY
– IN FOCUS
Feb. 17, 2009 – 9:26 p.m.
New Team Repackages The Right’s Thinking
By Alan K. Ota, CQ Staff
In the past, Eric Cantor and Mike Pence have made it their business to advance the cause of conservative orthodoxy at the Capitol. Pence chaired the Republican Study Committee, the caucus of the most rightward thinking members of the House, for two years in the middle of the decade. And for the past six years, part of Cantor’s job as the appointed chief deputy whip was to placate the RSC, to which he also belongs.
This year, however, each assumed a top elected House GOP leadership position: Virginia’s Cantor has the No. 2 post, minority whip, and Indiana’s Pence is in the No. 3 job, chairman of the Republican Conference, or caucus. That has put both former members of the conservative bloc — neither of whom used to shy away from criticizing the more pragmatic GOP centrists — in a politically complicated position. On the one hand, they are being called upon to make the case for reviving their party’s political fortunes through selective accommodation to popular Democratic domestic initiatives. On the other hand, they are advocating positions hard on the right on such issues as taxes and spending discipline with the aim of keeping the party’s base engaged.
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Both lawmakers came into leadership as change candidates and were able to secure their elections with ease when Missouri’s Roy Blunt stepped down as whip and Florida’s Adam H. Putnam gave up the conference chairmanship. And in framing a new party platform for the Obama age, both men are crafting messages that curiously echo the popular new Democratic president’s appeals to pragmatism and bipartisanship.
“The country right now is not interested in conventions of conservative vs. liberal, East Coast vs. West Coast, Democrat vs. Republican,” Cantor said in an interview. “They want leadership in Washington, not partisanship.” Pence vows to press for compromise — and to showcase each member’s “unique brand of Republicanism” rather than pursue a ready-made, hard-right agenda.
Still, the generous bipartisan rhetoric also comes with risks — especially from the ideological home base of both lawmakers, the RSC, which has a reputation for trying to mete out tough discipline for leaders who get too comfortable in stoking bipartisan accords. It was a group of junior RSC members, most famously, who were instrumental in the failed coup against GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia in 1997.
So far, both Pence and Cantor have taken a cautious approach to building consensus — not around the RSC’s agenda, but on approaches to issues that have broader GOP support, including the economy, health care and immigration.
In the coming weeks, each will probably be signaling moves toward a new, “vital center” conservative approach in the House GOP. What’s more, Pence and Cantor both have ambitions that will require them to broaden their bases of personal political support: Cantor wants to succeed Ohio’s John A. Boehner as GOP floor leader, while Pence would like to move to the Senate if fellow Republican Richard G. Lugar decides to retire in 2012, when he’ll be 80. With these longer-term ambitions clearly in view, both House leaders will probably choose their battles shrewdly in Congress.
Before this month’s vote on expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, for example, Cantor and Boehner got 100 House Republicans to sign a letter to Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California pledging support for revamping the program “in a manner that puts poor children first, which was the original intent of the program.” The language signaled both general support for a popular bill and conservative alarm over benefits going to undocumented workers. (In the end, the GOP caucus split: 40 in favor, 137 opposed to the bill.)
But when Cantor and Pence need to make common cause with the RSC on such core GOP issues as lower taxes — the conservatives are pushing hard for an indefinite extension of the Bush tax cuts, which are on course to lapse next year — they will probably sound off unambiguously on the need to curtail government spending and shun broad political intervention in economic affairs.
Much the same rhetoric, indeed, attended this year’s first major test of the House GOP leadership: its approach to the economic stimulus package that was the first legislative priority of the Obama administration.
While the president pressed for quick action on the plan last week, Pence and Cantor fired up their base in opposition. “The way forward is to find compromise but not compromise on what you believe in,” Pence said after a town hall meeting in his hometown of Columbus, Ind., as the president stumped 230 miles to the north in Elkhart, Ind.
Delicate Unity
That blend of tough talk and appeals to principle has so far proven to be a unifying message. No Republican voted for the economic recovery legislation — neither the initial version the House passed last month nor the final, compromise version with the Senate that was cleared last week.
But the united front emerged only after a series of behind-the-scenes efforts by Cantor and Pence to bridge divisions between the 178-member caucus as a whole and the 100 or so within the caucus who belong to the RSC — while also keeping some RSC initiatives at arm’s length.
In one maneuver, Cantor, who headed Boehner’s working group on the stimulus legislation, had assembled a GOP substitute plan that included rate cuts for middle- and lower-income taxpayers. When it was unveiled in a bipartisan leadership meeting at the White House three days after the inauguration, Obama offered muted praise but stressed that he had won the election and insisted that his rebates and infrastructure spending would remain in the bill instead of Cantor’s version.
Still, Cantor’s package was more than just a pawn in that partisan standoff. In fact it had pointedly omitted items from the RSC playbook, such as an across-the-board tax-rate cut and reductions in the capital gains tax.
“We didn’t want to include things that Obama would stereotypically expect us to present,” said a senior Republican familiar with the consensus-building strategy pursued by Cantor and Pence. “We wanted things that he might accept.”
When the bill came to the floor, the two leaders stepped away from hard-core conservatives in still more maneuvering over another GOP alternative plan. On a procedural motion that would have added about $60 billion in infrastructure funding but reduced the bill’s overall price tag by about $100 billion, Pence initially voted “no” and took the side of 32 small-government conservatives, including Tom Price of Georgia, this year’s RSC chairman. But as Democrats flocked to defeat the motion, Pence switched to “yes” — joining most Republicans who had, by then, decided to seek some cover for opposing the Democrats’ plan for popular tax cuts and infrastructure cash.
The 2010 Challenge
Such early efforts are the prelude to the big task for Cantor, Pence and other GOP leaders: defining a pragmatic agenda that could help to reposition the GOP caucus, dominated by a growing conservative faction, in the wake of the party’s losses last fall.
Both leaders continue to attack Democrats for heavy-handed legislative tactics, but they also say they would like to find “tilting points,” or middle-ground compromises, acceptable to rank-and-file Republicans. “The journey to the middle starts with one step from both ends of the spectrum,” Pence said.
The GOP’s tilting point on spending could emerge when it offers its alternative to Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget blueprint, due out sometime in early spring. On immigration, Pence, an Irish immigrant’s son, is urging the GOP to move away from its strict opposition to granting eventual legal status to undocumented workers. “I broke from House conservatives to promote a compromise bill on immigration,” he said. “I still hope we can find middle ground.”
Pence argues that the GOP must likewise develop alternatives on other items at the top of Obama’s agenda, including measures aimed at providing health coverage to uninsured families. “Republicans have to be for something,” Pence said.
The party also has to be cultivating political growth strategies, meaning that it can ill afford the kind of rancor that would accompany a major internal rift. That’s why Cantor and Pence have so far put a premium on reaching consensus between the party’s social-conservative and business wings — a strategy that necessarily pushes questions of ideological purity onto the back burner.
Cantor led the credit-crisis working group for Boehner last year; he helped engineer a deal in last fall’s financial-industry bailout legislation to include a GOP proposal for insurance for some of the volatile mortgage-backed securities held by banks. But since backing the law’s enactment, he has joined conservatives who attacked the program for inadequate safeguards and opposed full funding for the plan. Pence opposed the bailout bill from its inception.
Now, the pair is out to align the business community’s K Street allies and their party’s conservative wing in time for the 2010 midterm campaign. Both say they will not be driving a hard-right agenda for the RSC at the leadership table. “Despite the fact people on the outside may view the RSC as fairly homogenous, it is not,” Pence said. “We won’t be working to fit members into any particular view of mine or of leadership.”
FOR FURTHER READING: Economic stimulus (
Comments
The American Right authored the ideas and policies that have broken the instruments of American power in optional wars, debased the dollar and run the economy into the ground. Pence and Cantor are unwilling to understand that and continue utopian ideas that will maintain the purity of the message. Fortunately, the American people have had enough of the "moral clarity" of the GOP and will reject their message. The GOP would do better in the future if it too rejected the fanaticism of Pence and Cantor and reoriented itself along the constructive conservative lines laid out by GOP leaders like Governors Rell and Crist.
"The country right now is not interested in conventions of conservative vs. liberal, East Coast vs. West Coast, Democrat vs. Republican," Cantor said in an interview. "They want leadership in Washington, not partisanship." Pence vows to press for compromise -- and to showcase each member's "unique brand of Republicanism" rather than pursue a ready-made, hard-right agenda. Oh, I get it - Can'tor is playing the do as I say, not as I do game! Heaven help the republican party, they're a disaster.
The problem with all the talk about a more centrist Republican Party is that it results in an ever-more-leftward Democrat Party setting an ever-more-leftward agenda. And the problem with the solutions of the left is they don't work. It wasn't Republicans who gave Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac free reign to "roll the dice one more time" (thank you, Barney Frank), it was Democrats trying to placate their constituencies. Folks like Jilli and Robert may think they can tax and spend the country to prosperity, but it that has been tried in the past and it doesn't work. As bad as things are here, they are much worse in Europe (double-digit unemployment, banks crashing as fast or faster than ours) and Japan (economy contracting at a double-digit rate - depression - not recession - anyone?). Republicans of "moral clarity" objected to the profligate spending of the Republican Congress and were appalled at Bush's failure to veto anything. The Democrats were only too happy to go along. The house of cards that is government taking care of everyone is about to go bust. Conservative Republicans will be there to put the pieces back together when that happens.
Oh, good... if the (so-silent for so many Bush years) conservative Republicans will be there to put the pieces back together when the Govt house of cards goes bust, then we'll have a long & pleasant wait until we have to deal with them again because it's the govt that will be taking care of everybody by cleaning up the conservative Republicans' free market mess for - sadly - a long, long time.
Jonathan - if I wanted to hear regurgitated GOP talking points, I'd watch Fox News. If you still think Barney Frank caused this crisis by not restraining Fannie and Freddie when he had the chance, you're totally incorrect. There are a lot of reason that this crisis happened, not least of which was the repeal of Glass-Stegall that allowed all this no-doc loan business, credit default swaps, and unsecured mortgage debt. Fannie and Freddie were one tiny, tiny part of the problem - certainly you don't think Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and AIG all went under because Fannie allowed a few sub-prime mortgages, do you? The problem with solutions from the Right is that we've been using them for the past eight years and they've CREATED this problem. I'm not happy about a trillion dollars of debt to try to fix the economy, but it's a far cry better than the 5 trillion dollars in debt that caused it.
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