After House Republican Leader Rep. John Boehner
suggested that he was considering shutting down the House
Republican Policy Committee and returning the committee’s budget
for next year to the taxpayers as part of a broader budget
cutting campaign in the House, the staffs of House Whip Rep.
Eric Cantor and his deputy, Rep. Kevin
McCarthy, leaked the idea to the media in an attempt to
scuttle the plan, in part, say House leadership staffers, because
the plan might have overshadowed parts of a planned PR offensive
the House whip and others had in the works.
Boehner and Cantor and their respective staffs have been
competing to launch various policy strategies and campaigns for
the 2010 election cycle. Boehner’s office is expected to put
forward a broad “Contract for America” like plan in late August,
and Cantor has a book about a GOP agenda coming out later this
summer, for which he has built an extensive, national book
tour.
Late last week, as several Capitol Hill reporters began
inquiring about Boehner’s suggestion — made during a private
leadership meeting — a Boehner aide sent an e-mail to all
leadership staff complaining about the leak. The committee could
not be shut down without support from the full House Republican
conference, say the staffers, and the broader plan had not been
fully developed.
“The idea wasn’t complicated,” says a House leadership
source. “One of the reasons Republicans lost the majority was
that we became bloated and spent taxpayers’ money like drunken
sailors during our time in [majority] leadership. We lost touch
with our base and our fiscal conservative roots. The American
people don’t trust us quite yet to be responsible and make the
tough fiscal choices, so Rep. Boehner felt there were some steps
the leadership and conference could make leading into the fall
that would illustrate how we would lead if voters were to give us
another opportunity.”
Boehner and House Policy Committee chairman, Rep.
Thaddeus McCotter, had discussed the notion of
shutting down the policy committee in late June, which would
largely have been symbolic until the next fiscal year came
around. But the broader plan would have involved identifying
additional spending cuts on the House Republican side and
challenging the Democrat leadership to find similar
savings.
“We’re talking millions of dollars that is wasted up here
by Democrats on unnecessary staff, consultants, travel, projects
and studies, at a time when our constituents are struggling to
get by, cutting their own budgets and restraining their
spending,” says another House GOP leadership aide. “We should try
to do the same.”
McCotter argued that the policy committee was a good place
to start since it had completed its work for the year — a
document that laid out a broad Republican ideological and
philosophical agenda for 2010, and which has been shared with
state and local Republican Party officials — and that it largely
was a redundant committee since so much policy development took
place in other areas of the Republican conference.
But Cantor and McCarthy apparently saw things differently.
Perhaps most telling, during the leadership meeting where Boehner
floated the idea, Cantor suggested that if the funds wouldn’t be
spent on a policy committee, then he could use the funds for
other projects. And this inclination to spend is what bothers a
number of House members about the man who would be poised to
serve as leader of House Republicans if they were to gain a
majority in 2010 and John Boehner were elevated to the Speaker’s
chair.
“If we want the opportunity to really make a difference in
this place, and bury the Democrats and their ideas for a long
time, we can’t afford to run this place like we did in 1996,”
says a veteran GOP House member. “Are there places where we need
to spend and hire staff? Yes. No one wants to hamstring a
committee from doing the work that has to be done. But we also
need to show the American people we can be accountable, that the
spending cuts and austerity start here. And with all due respect,
I don’t know that Eric really gets that.”
Cantor has shown a remarkable ability to recruit and
support Republican House candidates, and to raise money
nationally for their campaigns. His “Young Guns” program was a
highlight of the 2010 election cycle long before it appeared the
GOP might be looking at a potential “wave” election cycle. But
Cantor has also shown a weakness for poor messaging and a
fondness for the trappings of power.
Cantor sought a national platform by putting himself front
and center with the founding of the National Council for a New
America, an organization set up more than a year ago and intended
to provide the vision for Republicans in the 2010 and 2012
cycles. But Cantor chose to launch the group’s first “listening
tour” event in Arlington, Virginia, less than five miles from
Washington, D.C., an odd choice for a group that was supposedly
not going to be tied to the Beltway crowd.
Prior to that, Cantor undercut his own party during the
votes over TARP, when instead of crediting conservative
principles for the initial defeats of TARP in the House, he
claimed the victories came as a reaction to Speaker Nancy
Pelosi’s anti-Bush Administration/Republican tirade on
the House floor.
Cantor has
clashed at times with Boehner, as well as McCotter, who has
been criticized for not having the policy committee do enough in
the policy arena. Those criticisms have largely been generated by
allies of Cantor, who has over the past four years built out
policy working groups inside his office. Cantor’s efforts in
policy weren’t rogue operations. They were organized with the
approval of Boehner and the larger leadership team, but the
activities, and those of other House Republicans, limited the
areas of focus for the policy committee.
“Ironically, it’s Cantor’s insistence on running policy
that made the committee obsolete,” says a House member who has
served on two separate policy working groups organized by Cantor.
“Maybe McCotter could’ve done more, but the policy committee
today is very different from what it was ten years ago, largely
because we have members who wanted a bigger hand in policy
development.”
Cantor will be touring to promote his book on a new
Republican agenda, at the same time that Boehner and other
leaders will be putting the finishing touches on the House
Republican agenda for the fall campaign, a project that has been
run largely out of Boehner’s office. “That’s the kind of thing
we’re talking about when we complain about Eric,” says a House
leadership aide. “I’m sure the book will help. It just isn’t what
we might have done had we all been working
together.”
