rebels with a cause

...The Clinton-Congress budget is not historic," charged Cox...

...Gingrich, of course, created the conditions in which Cox and McIntosh have prospered—but like Dr...

...And he ingratiated himself with the future speaker by mobilizing 16 out of 18 freshmen to support Gingrich's successful campaign for whip in March 1989, then the number-two job in the House for a Republican...

...Frankenstein, he finds himself losing control of what he has made...

...I do not wish to hand them that tool...

...Having declared their opposition to the budget— and with Steve Forbes blasting the budget deal in national TV ads—Cox and McIntosh must decide how significant a break to make with Gingrich...

...Then when the president vetoed the measure as promised, the Republican leadership abandoned the riders and caved...

...Still only 44, Cox has scored some eye-opening legislative victories in the past two years...

...they meet and talk "frequently," he says, when the House is in session...

...Both passed up Senate bids next year and can expect to be in the House for some time...

...McIntosh hasn't been punished for his heretical vote on the budget...

...Says another staffer: "They have to be brought into the room, but neither one of them is seen as one of the guys...

...McIntosh is more prepared to mix things up...

...This is a guy who in 1984 started a company to publish daily English translations of Pravda to increase awareness of the Soviet propaganda machine...

...Gingrich has said privately he wants Cox to work more closely with the leadership...

...Cox is "way too calculating, he drives Newt crazy," says one, and relations between Cox and the speaker are "nonexistent...

...By 1992, a New York Times profile would pronounce, "In Washington's power stakes, Mr...

...After the budget vote and the coming MFN debate, that will be more difficult...

...Yet with a polished appearance complementing his intellectual rigor, Cox quickly earned notice as a GOP rising star...

...After graduating from Chicago and spending a few years in private practice, McIntosh went to the Reagan Justice Department, where he worked for Ed Meese, then to the White House in the waning days of the Reagan administration to work for Gary Bauer, now a prominent conservative activist...

...For his part, Mcintosh told a reporter, "The leadership's position is, 'We lost, so let's get out of town quickly.' It's another example where people lose confidence in the Republicans' ability to lead...

...Matthew Rees is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...

...In addition to procedural budget reform, he fought for cuts in committee staffs and term limits on chairmen...

...Chris doesn't do that well...

...The council became an effective tool for thwarting regulations favored not just by congressional Democrats but also by some in the Bush administration...

...He shouldn't be surprised...

...He's not much of a backslapper, either, which is why some Republicans call him "arrogant" and "aloof" and—with his law and business degrees from Harvard and his knowledge of Russian—too smart for his own good...

...It is a continuation of a pattern of unabated government growth established during uninterrupted decades of Democratic Congresses...

...Yet in looking for ways to resurrect himself, the speaker could do worse than occasionally to heed the advice of these two cerebral activists...

...There is another House Republican who fit this bill a few years ago: Newt Gingrich...

...This is especially notable because the two appear to be prototypical Gingrich Republicans...

...It was there that he first gained wider recognition...

...Cox and McIntosh's opposition to the budget has exacerbated tensions with the rest of the Gingrich inner circle...

...Cox, who had opposed the bill throughout on the grounds that it was pork-ridden, was disgusted...

...he had hardly lived in Indiana since high school...

...He sees himself as "in-between an inside critic and an outside critic" of the leadership...

...Dana Rohrabacher, a close friend from the Reagan administration, speaks for Cox as well as himself when he says, "So far this session, it's been a lovefest [between Democrats and Republicans...

...Publicly, Cox is still pro-Newt...

...Asked about his alleged negativism, Cox offers this explanation: "The leadership's job is analogous to a board of directors, and the job of each member of the leadership is to question management's decisions...

...Says a friend, "The price of admission to big-time politics is to be able to suffer fools gladly...

...Almost from his first day in Congress in 1979, Gingrich was a thorn in the side of House Republican leaders, and the pattern continued even after he joined the leadership a decade later...

...iy 7hen David Mcintosh was making his first run for office in 1994, Gingrich came to Indiana for a fund-raiser...

...While some would have him replace Dan Burton as head of the House's investigation of the Clinton scandals, those who have worked alongside him complain that in meetings Cox is a persistent critic...

...They knew each other from McIntosh's tenure as an aide to Vice President Dan Quayle, and they were kindred spirits...

...When he launched his House bid in 1994, he didn't have much of a local presence...

...That presents a dilemma for Gingrich, whose colleagues will press him to ignore them...

...McIntosh is hot," and House Democrats would vote to abolish funding for his office...

...A few months later, Gingrich asked McIntosh to work with moderate Republican Sherwood Boehlert to find a compromise on a regulatory reform bill...

...A securities lawyer at Latham & Watkins for eight years before coming to Congress, he was the lead sponsor of securities-litigation reform—the only bill enacted over Bill Clinton's veto...

...One project he initiated as a freshman—a survey of Washington's spending habits called the "Annual Report on the United States Government"— reflected his workhorse mentality...

...McIntosh is derided for saying one thing in leadership meetings, then telling the media the opposite...

...Rep...

...The chairmanship of the GOP policy committee is a perfect job for Cox, whose legislative interests range from China to the budget to the Internet...

...McIn-tosh's attitude toward closing the government was cavalier: His constituents, he said, were telling him, "Go ahead...

...Some were important symbolic achievements, such as the abolition of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the privatization of the helium reserve...

...And the two have broken over prominent issues like deploying troops to Bosnia, increasing the minimum wage, and renewing most-favored-nation status for China, all of which Cox opposed...

...Republican leaders had attached a couple of worthy but wonkish riders to an unrelated flood-relief bill (and had allowed it to get loaded down with special-interest pork...

...Republican aides mutter that Cox and McIntosh aren't team players, that they're hypercritical of every proposed initiative and a little too eager to go public...

...Coming after two stalwart years, their defection on the budget (though not on the tax package, which both support with reservations) signals brewing discontent with the House's exceedingly modest agenda...

...Yet twice in the past month, Cox and Mcintosh—alone on the speaker's 23-person team—voted against the balanced-budget resolution...

...At a key juncture he rounded up 60 House Republicans to sign a letter pledging to kill an appropriations bill if Gingrich didn't have the advocacy measure attached...

...McIntosh, now 39, hung out at a couple of conservative think tanks after Bush's defeat...

...They're ambitious, brainy, and right-wing, and both have spent most of a decade in Washington battling liberals...

...He was fresh from two years in the Reagan White House counsel's office studying matters like an overhaul of the federal budgetary process...

...In leadership meetings he is a voice for restive conservatives...

...Mcintosh's stubbornness grows out of his career in the conservative counterestablish-ment, where compromise is a dirty word...

...Cox says that as Congress labors to turn the balanced-budget resolution into reality, he intends to keep quiet: "The minority likes to use Republican internecine battles for their own purposes...

...Others drew on his personal expertise...

...Cox and McIntosh downplay these charges, saying they bear the speaker no ill will...

...The Republican favorite missed the filing deadline for the primary, and McIntosh narrowly won the nomination...

...In their law-school days, McIntosh and a few friends from other law schools (including Spencer Abraham, now Republican senator from Michigan) organized the Federalist Society, which quickly became an influential network of conservative and libertarian law students, professors, attorneys, and judges...

...Until he got married in 1992, he spent so much time working that colleagues wondered whether his office doubled as an apartment (it didn't...

...McIntosh, who had drafted the bill, didn't see the point of watering it down and opted to pull it from further consideration...

...So he brought in Robert Bork for a fund-raiser (as did Cox in his first campaign...

...But that didn't stop McIntosh from telling Gingrich that the tax-cut provisions of the Contract With America were too modest and that Republicans should have advocated repeal of Clinton's tax hikes...

...This year, McIntosh made clear his dissatisfaction with the budget agreement in leadership meetings, but neither Gingrich nor any other top Republican made a serious effort to get him on board...

...Both proposals infuriated liberals and thrust McIntosh into the spotlight...

...The line on Cox among House Republicans is that for all his brains he is unlikely to rise much higher in the hierarchy...

...And, unlike many conservative favorites, Cox and McIntosh have enough experience to be credible candidates for higher leadership roles...

...Rebels with a Cause Christopher Cox and David Mcintosh Take on the Leadership By Matthew Rees Among the many unhappy campers in the House GOP last week, two may have been the unhap-piest of all: Christopher Cox and David Mcln-tosh...

...Yet not all is well between him and Gingrich...

...While his party was in the minority, Cox pushed the congressional reforms Gingrich talked about incessantly...

...Shut it down, if that's what it takes to balance the budget...

...then he rode the Contract and Clinton's unpopularity to victory in the general election with 54 percent of the vote in a district held by Democrats since 1975...

...McIntosh left Washington briefly in 1988 to manage Cox's first House campaign, then during the Bush years, he headed Quayle's deregulation effort, the Competitiveness Council...

...Gingrich seems to be getting the message: Last year he expended precious political capital to win over Cox and McIntosh, but this time around he didn't even lobby for their votes...

...But while both Cox and Gingrich are big-picture types given to radical rhetoric about cutting government, Cox's conservatism is the less compromising...

...In an institution populated mostly by people looking to be led, McIntosh and Cox are different: They're leaders whose passions run to policymaking, and their fervor is fed by confidence in their ideas...

...Their mutiny pleases conservatives...

...It's not clear the feeling is mutual: When asked to comment on his relations with the two dissidents, the usually garrulous Gingrich declined...

...Perhaps, but Cox's demeanor doesn't go down well with his colleagues...

...For most of the '95-'96 budget showdown, Mcln-tosh supported Gingrich and used his clout with the freshmen to dissuade the speaker from caving...

...Cox would like to see Congress pass a version of the California Civil Rights Initiative (he's had CCRI prime mover Ward Connerly address the policy committee), while Gingrich says this is premature...

...But Cox and McIntosh are building a record of principled opposition to the budget deal and to the GOP's general quiescence that could serve them well when House Republicans select their next crop of leaders...

...He also points out that a Congressional Quarterly survey shows he votes with Gingrich more consistently than does even majority leader Dick Armey...

...One of Chris Cox's first acts when he came to the House from California's Orange County in 1989 was to join the Conservative Opportunity Society, the group Gingrich put together in the early '80s to generate free-market ideas and challenge the intellectual lethargy of Bob Michel's House Republicans...

...Gingrich liked McIntosh's boldness and put him on the transition team after the '94 election, then made him a subcommittee chairman—one of three who were the first freshman subcommittee chairmen since Richard Nixon in 1946...

...There are other differences as well...

...But Cox is far from content with these accomplish-ments—and, like countless Republicans inside and outside Congress, he is increasingly disillusioned with the speaker...

...And we didn't come here to have a lovefest...

...Cox and McIntosh, though themselves second-tier members of the House leadership, are increasingly willing to vote against it...

...After graduating from Yale, where he was a self-professed "liberal egalitarian," he attended the University of Chicago Law School and studied under free-market legal scholar Richard Epstein and Antonin Scalia, now a conservative justice of the Supreme Court...

...McIntosh hired an experienced Capitol Hill conservative, Mildred Webber, to run his subcommittee and used it to push pet issues like regulatory reform and restrictions on political advocacy by federally funded interest groups...

...Asked to characterize his relations with the speaker, McIntosh politely says, "There's no animosity," and, "We both listen to each other...

...Sources on Capitol Hill say he has expressed private doubts about Gingrich's commitment to conservative principles...

...He might find in their ideas the basis for a principled, and popular, agenda...

...Announcing his vote against the budget deal, Cox challenged the Gingrich view that it was progress...

...Working to improve these decisions is precisely our job...

...He stuck to this position even after Gingrich abandoned it, setting up the clash between the two in which McIntosh eventually capitulated...

...Last year, by contrast, Cox supported every major appropriations bill, and McIn-tosh voted to reopen the government, in both cases setting aside their own strongly held positions...

...But McIntosh hasn't often retreated...

...He withstood the attacks and didn't retreat, even though Gingrich wasn't sold on either idea...

...Cox fit right in...

...Shortly after the shutdowns, he told a reporter Gingrich had displayed a "crybaby attitude" for punishing a couple of Republicans who broke ranks on a key vote—a pointed jab at Gingrich's complaint about being mistreated on Air Force One...

...Their work in the conservative trenches paid off when the Republicans captured Congress and their colleagues chose Cox to chair the House GOP policy committee and McIntosh to represent the large and estless group of Republicans first elected to the House in 1994...