Without DeLay
BARNES, FRED
Without DeLay House Republicans are in search of a vision. BY FRED BARNES AS HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER, Tom DeLay had a crisp and clear style. He coupled an agenda with an unwillingness to compromise...
...Seventeen members of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House voted to keep the 527s unregulated...
...For them, it's a free speech issue...
...That's not enough...
...This year they are being used to target vulnerable Republican moderates...
...This raises the question whether the basic Republican tactic should shift from relying almost solely on Republican votes, as DeLay did, to trying to woo Democrats...
...Besides, sparing moderates massive TV attacks might be critical to their reelection...
...He's referring to problems for Republicans...
...Believe it or not, DeLay was usually a gentle persuader, not an arm-twister...
...Boehner's plan for 2006, after deciding on a vision, is to create a week-by-week schedule for taking up issues...
...Boehner will have difficulty getting more than half of the 232 House Republicans to vote for a bill that includes any guest-worker program or process allowing illegal immigrants here in America to earn citizenship...
...He could tie micro issues to the macro purposes of the party and the nation...
...on some substantive issues like immigration, Republicans are hopelessly divided...
...He may gain the trust of the entire Republican majority, but it won't be easy with an unpopular president and a potentially disastrous election coming in November...
...It's doubtful a significant number of Democrats would agree with Republicans in any event...
...His skills are rusty...
...DeLay is gone and Republicans, both at the White House and in Congress, are struggling just to figure out what their agenda is...
...He's giving the White House time to develop its own agenda with a new chief of staff, Josh Bolten, taking over this week...
...The conventional wisdom in Washington is that it's time for Republicans to compromise with Democrats...
...The curb on the supposedly independent groups passed narrowly, but only because seven Democrats defied House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi's orders against working with Republicans on any issue...
...But can the House again lead...
...The House would lead, and the senate would follow...
...He gets along with Democrats...
...Not for now...
...But Boehner and other House leaders aren't prepared to defer automatically to the White House...
...Boehner has one distinct advantage over DeLay...
...It shouldn't violate anyone's principles to make the 527s comply with a law intended to apply to them, they argued...
...The aim, of course, is to reach agreement on which issues to pursue...
...At the moment, his successor, John Boehn-er, is working on a mission statement—an official vision—for House Republicans...
...Their majority in the House, one of them pointed out to me, preceded the arrival of the president...
...Boehner's lieutenants argued at a Republican caucus that the 527s were circumventing the McCain-Feingold restrictions that Republicans, like it or not, have been forced to accept...
...That was the story of Bush's first term...
...More important, he doesn't yet have the trust of House conservatives, the 100-plus who are hard core...
...Times have changed...
...He wasn't The Hammer, the nickname used mostly by the press...
...A test of this was last week's vote to curb the unlimited spending of so-called 527 independent expenditure groups...
...This is a pipe dream...
...The media and even some inside the administration never recognized how talented—brilliant, even—a congressional leader DeLay was...
...President Bush would propose and the House would dispose, just as the old saying has it...
...By doing so, the House became "the engine" for enacting Bush administration policy...
...The effort didn't quite work...
...Boehner has been out of the Republican leadership for eight years...
...But Boehner can get Republicans working to help each other get reelected...
...The result: Whatever the Boehner vision turns out to be, the House won't be able to do much...
...for the president...
...The only thing that unifies them is they don't like us," Cole says...
...Boehner has to pull the team together...
...He didn't create it, and it may outlive his presidency...
...They want to pass an immigration bill and extend the tax cuts on dividends and capital gains...
...Now they blame Republicans for putting it in the bill in the first place, in hopes that it will infuriate Hispanic voters and cause them to vote Democratic this fall...
...The problem is that many conservatives take the principled position that political spending should not be regulated...
...They are a tool to evade campaign finance laws and have been used by rich liberals and Democrats to finance TV ads against Republicans at saturation level...
...Democrats will play a crucial role on that vote...
...DeLay believes the House worked best when it was "the echo chamber Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of Rebel-in-Chief (Crown Forum...
...He worked amicably and productively with them as chairman for five years of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce...
...Pass immigration legislation, extend the tax cuts, and continue to support Bush on Iraq—that's probably the best case scenario...
...So far, they're sure of only two issues...
...The comparison is not meant to belittle Boehner, but to point out where Republicans now find themselves...
...Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said DeLay could convince members to vote with him "just for Tom and the cause and the team...
...That's why 192 Democrats voted to retain the provision of the House-passed immigration bill that makes illegal aliens guilty of a felony...
...The Democrats want problems, not solutions," says Republican representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma...
...He coupled an agenda with an unwillingness to compromise and an iron resolve to produce narrow victories based entirely on Republican votes...
...Democrats are not sufficiently unified...
Vol. 11 • April 2006 • No. 29
