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Notorious conservative pundit (Plame gate) Robert Novak scorches the
current GOP House leadership and charges that that its addiction to K Street
and earmarking have made the GOP ‘the stupid party.” Robert Novak writes
in GOP Unchanged that the spirit of Tom DeLay still haunts
the GOP: “The depleted House GOP caucus, a
minority in the next Congress, convenes in the Capitol at 8 a.m. Friday on the
brink of committing
an act of supreme irrationality. The House members blame their leadership for their
tasting the bitter dregs of defeat. Yet the consensus so far is that, in secret
ballot, they will reelect some or all of those leaders. In
private conversation, Republican members of Congress blame Majority Leader John
Boehner and Majority Whip Roy Blunt in no small part for their midterm election debacle. Yet
either Boehner, Blunt or both are expected to be returned to their leadership
posts Friday. For good reason, the GOP often is called "the stupid
party." While an unpopular Iraq war and an
unpopular George W. Bush were primary causes of last Tuesday's GOP rout,
massive public disapproval of the Republican-controlled Congress significantly
contributed. While abandoning conservative principles, the spendthrift House
had become chained to special corporate interests represented by K Street
lobbyists. This malaise is
embodied in the avuncular speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, whose consistent response to accusations of failed
leadership has been 20-minute lectures to closed-door party conferences
pleading for Republican unity. As expected, Hastert is leaving the leadership
now that the party is in the minority. But his departure leaves the other
leaders in place, with their colleagues reluctant to turn them out. That reluctance is
typified by Rep. Eric Cantor, a 43-year-old third-term congressman from Richmond who
has been his party's chief deputy whip for four years since being appointed by
Blunt after only 2 years in the House. His voting record is solidly
conservative, and he belongs to the conservative Republican Study Committee
(RSC). At the same time, Cantor is well regarded in all sectors of the party,
and members see him as the principled kind of rising politician that
Republicans desperately need. But Cantor is not
seizing this post-election moment to seek an elected leadership position. On
the contrary, he has been supporting Blunt for reelection as whip out of
loyalty to his mentor and patron. Bright and able though he is, Cantor has drunk the Kool-Aid in viewing the
Republican Party as a private club where personal loyalties must transcend all
else. Blunt, like
Hastert, was handpicked for leadership by Tom DeLay, the dominant Republican in Congress until his politically
inspired indictment in Texas last year. When DeLay resigned as majority leader,
the party's lobbyist-connected establishment decision was to promote Blunt from
whip to leader and make Cantor the whip. But with the feeling that some change
was needed, Boehner defeated Blunt for the top job, and Blunt kept the
second-ranking post. In fact, Boehner's ties to K Street are even stronger than Blunt's, and he seemed to lose interest in
reform once he became majority leader. Rep. Mike Pence, the chairman of the RSC and a leader of reform, is an
underdog candidate opposing Boehner. Rep. John Shadegg, Pence's predecessor at the RSC, who finished third in the
race for leader in February, is running uphill against Blunt for whip on a
reform platform. The conventional wisdom on the Hill is that, at best, only one
of them can win, because the Republicans would not dare elect two conservatives
to the two top House leadership positions. In fact, the voting
records of Boehner and Blunt are nearly identical to those of Pence and
Shadegg. The difference between them was demonstrated Thursday when Blunt went
to the Heritage Foundation to campaign for his retention as whip. He delivered
a defense of earmarking, echoing the House appropriators' claim that the
elimination of earmarks would do "nothing but shift funding decisions from
one side of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other." That is the view
that led Republicans to earmark a "Bridge to Nowhere" and hundreds of
other projects in competitive districts, hoping it would save them on Election
Day. The
House has been a place where Rep. Don Young (a notorious Alaska porker) was
setting national transportation policy, where the "cardinals" on the
Appropriations Committee established earmarking records, where the
pharmaceutical industry had a pipeline to party policy and where even Speaker
Hastert was making personal profits on an earmark. Maybe that's what Republicans
want to retain, even in the minority. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/12/AR2006111200941_pf.html |
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