Boehner, Blunt or Shadegg?
Conservatives now have a chance to take back the House.
BY STEPHEN MOORE
Monday, January 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
"We're going to find out whether Republicans have an appetite for a substantial reform agenda against pork spending, out-of-control budgets and deal-making politics as usual in this town." Those were the words that conservative Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona used when he announced his 11th-hour candidacy for the House Republican leader's slot vacated by Tom DeLay. Mr. Shadegg's entry means that conservatives and disgruntled moderates will have a horse in the leadership race after all. Said one House conservative, "John's like Burt Reynolds in 'The Longest Yard.' He's throwing caution into the wind, buckling his football helmet chin strap, and rushing on to the field in the fourth quarter to try to save the GOP team from an ugly defeat in the elections this November."
To be sure, Mr. Shadegg has the look of a decided underdog. He will take on party heavyweights John Boehner of Ohio and the acting leader, Roy Blunt of Missouri. But for many of the new-generation, reform-minded House Republicans, Mr. Blunt is seen as too shackled to the K Street/DeLay money machine to clean up the abuses of power that taint the party. He's an unapologetic supporter of earmarks (at least he's honest!) and was the whip who strong-armed a handful of conservatives to vote for the Medicare prescription drug bill with its multitrillion-dollar price tag. Mr. Blunt has sprinted into the early lead with a pitch that is pure horse-trading power politics--of the kind that Republicans once denounced and that, thankfully, still repels some in the caucus. If he wins, the leadership team will be composed of the DeLay machine, minus only Mr. DeLay. Where the policy vision and voice for political reform will come from is anyone's guess. The Pelosi Democrats certainly won't complain.
Mr. Boehner, who has Sinatra good looks and style, is regarded as right-of-center on the ideological spectrum, but has never been active in the conservative movement. To his credit, he's pledged to dredge the algae-filled swamp of federal spending. In an interview last week, he derided the pork that keeps getting buried in appropriations bills. "We've become addicted to earmarks as if it were opium," he complained. Mr. Boehner will also resist the xenophobic anti-immigrant streak that has invaded the party, which is the surest course for the GOP to alienate Asian and Hispanic voters, slow down the economy, and land the party back in the minority.
Still, it is Mr. Shadegg who is unquestionably the primary change agent in this field. He wants the party, in effect, to make a declaration of independence from pork spending and the government-for-sale corruption that has become its abiding image. "The American people are with us on our substantive policy agenda and our Reaganite values, but are becoming repulsed by our behavior," he told me. With a truthful message like that, don't expect him to corral any votes from the Old Bull Republicans or the College of Cardinals appropriators who have turned pork into haute cuisine of late.
Win or lose, Mr. Shadegg's candidacy will be a measuring rod of just how much trouble congressional Republicans really think they're in. It will also serve as a leading indicator of whether House conservatives will devote the next nine months of this term to slamming the brakes on a domestic legislative policy that has careened off course. The era when Republicans promised to make government smaller and smarter by abolishing hundreds of obsolete federal agencies seems a distant memory now in this era of Bridges to Nowhere. In the last five years, Republicans have enacted the largest increase in entitlement spending in three decades, doubled the education budget, nearly tripled the number of earmarked spending projects, and turned a blind eye toward the corrosive culture of corruption on Capitol Hill that seems so eerily reminiscent of the final days of Democratic rule in the House.
One wonders whether the young-gun conservatives in the House fully appreciate what's at stake here. Few current House members even remember that the first shots in the Republican Revolution of 1994 were fired in 1989, when upstart Newt Gingrich rallied the conservative troops in the House and shockingly defeated by one vote the Bob Michel machine candidate for minority whip (the No. 2 leadership perch). The conservatives for the first time in a generation had a foothold of power. Shortly thereafter, the power structure shifted again when free-marketer Dick Armey of Texas, a longtime backbencher in the House, evicted another old bull Republican from the leadership team, Jerry Lewis of California. (It's a sign of the party's lost bearings that Mr. Lewis, the epitome of so much of what's wrong with the congressional Republicans, has been made Appropriations Committee chairman and has been even talked about as belonging back in the leadership.)
The Armey-Gingrich political coups were instigated by a gang of rebellious House conservatives and triggered a domino effect of momentous political changes. For years, Republican House leaders had suffered from Stockholm syndrome, becoming subservient to their captors, the Democratic majority. That gave way to Messrs. Gingrich and Armey devising a D-Day-type battle plan for the hostile takeover of the House in the '94 midterms. Its Republicans ran on Reaganite economics and a reform agenda of bringing squeaky clean ethics to Capitol Hill in the wake of House Democratic banking and post office scandals. Delusional Democrats thought they could merely cover the reek of scandals with disinfectants and then move on--a catastrophic blunder that Republicans may now be in danger of repeating.
House conservatives in alliance with ethics-minded GOP moderates intent on cleaning up the party's stained image are undoubtedly the force to prevent that from happening. But will they? The right-leaning Republican Study Committee has a decisive voting bloc to elevate one of their own to majority leader. Or they can cut separate deals to advance their own short-term political ambitions. Mike Pence, head of the House Republican Study Committee notes: "The political reality is that conservatives are the majority of the majority party in the House." Mr. Shadegg may not win this race, but if the conservatives don't embrace his message of reform and renewal, voters might demote them to majority of the minority.
Mr. Moore is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
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