By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
On the home page of the National Council for a New America, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) greets visitors with the suggestion that they nominate their hometown to host one of the council’s national town hall meetings.
But the council isn’t coming to your town — the year-old group is defunct.
Cantor aides explained that the group has been “suspended” one year after its splashy launch in part because of the intense negative attention it received from the Democratic campaign committees and other groups after its introduction.
The NCNA was intended to be a traveling forum of Republican leaders who could engage the public in a broad-ranging discussion of hot-button issues.
Cantor spokesman John Murray said despite 5,000 positive news hits, the “relentless attacks from the left” became overwhelming to the whip office soon after its launch.
“I think now, we are in a suspended state,” Murray said.
Continue reading ‘Cantor’s Policy Group Has Faded Away’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
House Republicans are so determined to have Members fulfill their fundraising quotas this year that they have enlisted two of their own to act as the NRCC’s repo team.
With the blessing of National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas), Reps. Kevin Brady (Texas) and Tom Cole (Okla.) have assembled a 14-member whip team whose only mission is to collect dues from Members who have failed to meet their fundraising goals.
“It’s a brutal exercise in peer pressure,” said Cole, a former NRCC chairman. “This is a critical point for us.”
Cole said the stakes are too high to let any outstanding debts slide since, for the first time in several years, Republicans have great opportunities to pick up a host of House seats.
But with the wider field comes the greater need for cash, and there, Cole said, the GOP still has a problem. Continue reading ‘NRCC Sends Crew to Collect Dues’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
House Republicans are launching a new effort to craft an election-year mission statement that appears to be part “Contract With America” and part “American Idol.”
GOP Members said the ideas that will eventually become the basis for their initiative — the working title is the “Commitment to America” — will come largely from outside Washington and largely online, but they pledged that reforming the legislative process would be a top priority.
“Seven, eight, nine months ago if you talked process you came off like a whiner,” Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) said. “People now understand that bad process yields bad legislation and so my expectation is that process will be part of this.” Continue reading ‘GOP: New Twist on ‘Contract’’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
On any given day during House votes, Republican Reps. Don Young (Alaska) and Anh “Joseph” Cao (La.) can be seen sitting next to each other in the upper-right side of the chamber, chatting and laughing.
They are, by all accounts, an odd pair with seemingly little in common.
But Cao, a 43-year-old freshman from a Democratic district, and Young, a 76-year-old former chairman who has watched his influence fade, have forged a solid alliance as outsiders. Continue reading ‘Cao, Young Forge an Unexpected Friendship’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.) appears to have done all the right things to win him an appointed seat at the GOP leadership table: be a good team player, prove you’ve got political and policy chops, and have friends in high places.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) tapped Walden last month to serve as the chairman of the Republican leadership, a post that has been vacant since Rep. Rob Portman (Ohio) left the House in 2005 to serve in the Bush administration. At the time, questions abounded about why Boehner would pluck a relatively obscure Member from the back benches and place him in the leadership. But Walden had a somewhat hidden portfolio: He may be National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions’ (Texas) closest friend, he had become a regular counsel for leaders on top issues, and he was willing to give up a powerful committee post to make room for the Conference’s newest lawmaker.
“We wanted to put Greg in a position where he is at the leadership table every week,” said Sessions, who last year appointed Walden to serve as his deputy chairman at the committee.
But the roots between Sessions and Walden run deeper than many political allies. Continue reading ‘Walden Rises Up From Obscurity’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
Since joining the House Rules Committee last fall, Rep. Virginia Foxx (N.C.) has become a secret weapon for the Republican Party in complex legislative warfare, but she has also sometimes performed like a loose cannon.
Her higher public profile has been a blessing and a curse for House Republican leadership. They have praised Foxx for her unrelenting energy and willingness to dig into legislative details, but they have winced quietly at her mistakes.
Foxx first took center stage during the House Republican protests last August, when GOPers took over the floor to protest the Democratic decision to adjourn for the summer without a comprehensive energy bill. She attended the protest for a dozen days, more than any other member of the Republican Conference. Continue reading ‘Foxx Hunts for GOP, Sometimes Misfires’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
Republicans are split on whether the resurrection of the immigration debate could undermine the party’s Hispanic outreach effort ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.
While the issue is also problematic for some Democrats, the GOP is in a particularly challenging position: caught between an anti-immigrant base and the need to recruit new voters. Continue reading ‘Immigration Fuels Internal GOP Debate’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
House Republicans have spent two weeks touting their unity on an economic stimulus package, but a testy confrontation caused by misspoken words reveals that behind closed doors, the bond between the top two GOP leaders is fragile.
Several GOP sources say Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) and Minority Leader John Boehner’s (Ohio) relationship was put to the test after Boehner suggested at a Jan. 28 press conference that Cantor wasn’t whipping votes during the House debate on the economic stimulus measure. Sources say Boehner’s remarks, echoed at the press event by Conference Chairman Mike Pence (Ind.), angered Cantor and prompted a “heated” confrontation between the new Whip and Minority Leader at the GOP retreat at the Homestead Resort in Virginia late last month.
Continue reading ‘Boehner, Cantor Face First Dust-Up’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
A smaller-than-ever group of House Republicans on Thursday decamped to the tony Homestead Resort in Virginia, more than 200 miles away from the Capitol.
But instead of exploring what went wrong in the 2006 and 2008 elections, Republicans seemed content with who they are — insisting it wasn’t their ideas that sent them deep into the minority but simply an unfavorable political environment.
Speaker after speaker at the three-day GOP retreat declared victory in last week’s economic stimulus fight and said it was time to simply move beyond the two cycles of losses. Continue reading ‘No Identity Crisis Here’
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his chief deputy, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), are retooling the House GOP’s once-formidable legislative arm-twisting operation into one focused on helping the party bolster vulnerable incumbents and unify its message.
Aggressively collecting votes from the rank and file — the hallmark of whips such as Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and his predecessor, Tom DeLay (R-Texas) — will take a back seat for the House GOP as it attempts to dig its way out of minority status.
The first step: McCarthy and Cantor intend to raise $1 million for the whip team to ensure that the 50-plus members are less worried about re-election and can focus on helping the two young guns expand the Republican Conference. Continue reading ‘For Cantor, Message Is the Medium’