On
September 15, 2005, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf
Coast, President Bush delivered a live television address from Jackson Square
in New Orleans. As the power generators’ eerie light washed over his patch of
an otherwise darkened section of the city, Bush pledged to add billions of
dollars to an already bloated federal budget—to rebuild the region and, though
he didn’t mention it, to deflect the political embarrassment of the
government’s inept response to the storm.
Six days later, as dead
bodies were still being pulled from the flooded city’s stagnant waters, members
of the Republican Study Committee (RSC),
a collection of House Republicans who push for lower government spending,
announced Operation Offset, a 25-page proposal outlining $800 billion in budget
cuts over a 10-year period. The RSC
argued that any spending to help Katrina’s victims should be balanced by cuts
elsewhere in the budget.
To some, the timing
seemed particularly cold-hearted. House Leader Dennis Hastert, already accused
of reacting insensitively to the devastation, rejected the proposal. When asked
if Congress had any room for the RSC’s
proposed budget cutting, then–House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told Fox
News Sunday, “after 11 years of Republican majority, we’ve pared it down
pretty good.”
The result of that
paring: a Republican majority that celebrates this year’s $296 billion budget
deficit because it is 30 percent less than originally forecast. It’s smaller
than the 2005 deficit of $316 billion, but only because people are paying more
taxes, not because anyone has reduced spending.
A brutal year for the GOP finds the Democrats
poised for a possible takeover of Congress. Last winter Republican leaders
promised to cut spending and end corruption, but as spring turned into summer
those same leaders opted instead for crass efforts to write bans on gay
marriage and flag burning into the U.S. Constitution. The bulk of the RSC’s fiscally conservative
agenda isn’t likely to see the light of day, even with a GOP-controlled Congress,
unless one of its deficit hawks takes a place in the Republican leadership. As
it stands, party leaders are happy to use the committee when the group’s
activities advance their agenda and quick to ignore it, or worse, when pursuing
costly legislation.
Here’s
the strange thing: The RSC has more than 100 members, making it the largest
coalition within the House Republican Conference. It has an ambitious and
respected leader in Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.). And when Republicans recently
selected a new majority leader to replace Tom DeLay, RSC stalwart John Shadegg made it a
competitive three-way race, with his strongest support coming from the Internet
activist community. So how does a group holding a majority of the majority, a
group claiming to stand for restrained spending, coexist with record-breaking
deficits and a 45 percent increase in federal spending since 2001?
Part of the answer lies
in the Republican leadership, for whom federal spending has become a central
political tactic. Part lies in the Republican base, where social conservatives
have more pull than supporters of fiscal restraint. But part lies within the RSC itself. The committee’s
charismatic leaders talk a good game, but at the end of the day even the
group’s own members support pork projects and block reform. The RSC includes some genuine
believers in fiscal restraint, but they are regularly outmaneuvered when they
try to eliminate other members’ pork. It’s like joining a book club dedicated
to reading the classics, then spending all your time sipping mojitos and
watching Entourage.
Not Afraid to Make Enemies
The
original RSC was
founded in 1973 by Rep. Philip Crane (R-Ill.), with organizational support from
Paul Weyrich, the founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation. For the next
24 years, it existed as a small watchdog funded by the Republican caucus as a
legislative service organization—that is, a group supported by money collected
from individual Republican congressmen. The group was originally created to
counter the Democratic Study Group, which had pushed the House Democratic
caucus to the left. It has consistently endorsed lower taxes and lower
spending.
Shortly after Newt
Gingrich became speaker of the House in early 1995, he disbanded the RSC. On the surface, his
decision reflected an effort to curb the occasionally profligate system of
legislative service organizations, though many insiders argue it was really
about personality and ambition conflicts between Gingrich and DeLay, who was
then running the RSC.
Either way, the RSC
returned the very next year to help organize the party’s fiscal reform agenda.
It had a new name (the Conservative Action Team) and fewer members (just 40 as
recently as 2000), but it struggled on as a small but dedicated group. In 2000
then-chairman John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) restored the committee’s original name.
And then Mike Pence was elected to Congress.
Pence,
who describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in
that order,” had a fairly substantive history in state politics before coming
to Washington. He hosted the Indiana-based Mike Pence Show, which he
describes as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” through most of the 1990s, and he ran a
conservative state think tank, the Indiana Policy Review, from 1990 to 1994.
After two losses running for Congress in the late ’80s, his radio and think
tank experience helped him gain his party’s nomination again in 2000; he won 51
percent of the vote in a three-way race, with a 20 percent Libertarian showing.
Pence is generally a strong supporter of free market economic policies, but his
libertarian sympathies are weaker in the social sphere: He opposes abortion and
gay marriage, and he calls for stronger controls on illegal immigration.
Although Pence came to
Washington at the same time as President Bush, he sees himself at heart as a
soldier in the 1994 Republican Revolution. “I’m like the minuteman,” he told U.S.
News last year, “who showed up 10 years late for the Revolution.” He has
made up for lost time. In addition to his bitter fights with the White House
and House Republican leaders over the No Child Left Behind Act and the massive
Medicare expansion bill, he has led the campaign to eradicate budget earmarks,
which anonymously tack federal spending for pet projects onto larger bills.
Pence has also gone after the secretive practice of stuffing the budget with
pork projects under the pretense of “emergency spending,” most recently put to
use in bills funding the Iraq war.
Do You Have to Spend and Spend to Elect and
Elect?
Almost
nobody actually likes taxes, which makes it relatively easy to cut them. But
cutting spending, congressmen fear, risks the wrath of special interest groups.
“It’s like the story of the ‘secret word’ that defeated the dragon,” says
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Members believe that
spending saves them.” That belief drives the apparently contradictory behavior
of congressmen who join the RSC
and then vote for spending increases.
“I’ve heard the
arguments that you have to spend to win elections,” says Pence. “People told me
that when I voted against No Child Left Behind. I heard it again when I voted
against Medicare expansion. Both times voters brought me back to Washington with
a higher margin.” He was re-elected in 2002 with 64 percent of the vote and in
2004 with 67 percent.
While
Pence’s anti-spending stance places him in a very small club of lawmakers,
there is some evidence to support his belief that it does not hurt his
electability. Fellow RSC member Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) was also elected to
Congress in 2000. Like Pence, Flake voted against No Child Left Behind and
Medicare expansion. He also opposed creating the Department of Homeland
Security and wants to eliminate the Department of Education. In May he started
what supporters call the “Flake Hour”: At the end of spending debates, Flake
challenges earmark sponsors to take to the House floor and justify their
anonymous expenditures.
Unlike Pence, Flake has
libertarian tendencies that extend beyond the realm of taxing and spending.
Although he voted for the PATRIOT
Act and initially supported the war in Iraq, he now opposes both. He favors
increased immigration and wants to end the Cuban trade embargo. Rather than
hurting Flake, his numerous “no” votes have only increased his popularity. In
2000 he was elected with 54 percent of the vote. When a more conventional
Republican challenged him in their party’s 2004 primary, Flake walked away with
59 percent of the vote. That same year, he received 79 percent in the general
election.
Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.)
is another rising star in the RSC.
Feeney started his political career as a flack for the Bush dynasty: In 1994 he
ran as Jeb Bush’s running mate in his unsuccessful first gubernatorial bid, and
in 2000, while serving as state House leader, he helped lead the efforts to
block the Florida presidential vote recount. But since coming to Congress in
2002, he has developed an independent streak. Not only did he vote against the
Medicare expansion, but President Bush reportedly hung up the phone on him
after Feeney declared he had come to Washington to oppose entitlements, not to
expand them. He voted against spending 88 percent of the time the following
year and was re-elected without opposition.
Then there’s Rep. Ron
Paul (R-Texas), who isn’t a member of the RSC
but outdoes almost all of them when it comes to fiscal restraint. In the last
decade, Paul, the Libertarian Party’s 1988 presidential nominee, has not just
voted against Medicare and No Child Left Behind but has opposed funding the
Iraq war. When he re-entered Republican politics in 1996, Paul was barely
elected, with 51 percent of the vote. Yet his vote totals have continued to
climb despite his potentially controversial votes.
There’s more than just
these anecdotes to support the idea that congressmen don’t have to be big
spenders to get re-elected. The political scientist James Payne’s informative
but uninfluential 1991 book The Culture of Spending made a compelling
case that spending and re-election are not inevitably linked.
Payne argued that a
sophisticated consideration of “rational ignorance”—things you don’t know
because it doesn’t pay to know them—shows that voters don’t know enough about
how their congressmen vote to punish them for failing to bring home the bacon,
and that representatives don’t know enough about why voters support them to
pursue a spending path that ensures re-election. Payne also analyzed data from
a mid-’80s election to show that “voting more in favor of spending has no
positive effect on a congressman’s electoral margin,” and that electorally
secure congressmen “are just as much in favor of spending as other
congressmen.” Payne maintained that it was being in Congress, which entails
listening almost constantly to lobbyists’ arguments for more government
spending, that persuaded congressmen to spend, not a calculated attempt to buy
off votes.
Of course, there are
plenty of districts where lust for pork is topmost on the voters’ minds.
If every American wanted the government to spend less, there wouldn’t be heated
debates about deficits in the first place. Nonetheless, examples like Pence,
Flake, Feeney, and Paul show there can be a healthy counterbalance to the
incentive to spend freely, but it usually takes a lawmaker willing to sacrifice
spending on principle.
RSC leader Pence agrees
that politicians can be tighter with the public purse without harming their
electoral prospects, particularly in districts where voters are philosophically
predisposed to fiscal conservatism. “Voters are drawn to men and women of
principle,” he says. As long as you stick by those principles, he argues,
“Voters give you the benefit of the doubt.”
If there are walking
examples that being profligate with public money isn’t necessary to win, why
aren’t there more fiscal conservatives in Congress? One answer is that many
Republicans just aren’t opposed to spending. Another is that their party has
ascended to power and doesn’t want to give it up, and thus doesn’t want to take
even the slightest risk. The insurance industry has acknowledged that there is
little evidence installing a car alarm will deter auto theft. Yet car owners
continue to buy and install them, fearful of what might happen. For all their
political differences, Washington Democrats and Republicans share the calcified
belief that staying in power requires ever-rising spending.
“After the 1996
elections there was a backlash to reining in government spending,” says Brian
Riedl, the lead budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. “Because
congressional Republicans lost a few seats, they assumed it wasn’t safe to cut
spending anymore.”
A case in point: The
same night he was ushering through legislation that would cripple the current
process for earmarking spending, Pence told me, “We need a Contract With
America Renewed.” He and other House conservatives liked the idea so much they
proposed a bill by that name. It largely mirrored the original Contract With
America’s spending proposals, including a promise to balance the federal
budget, elimination of about 150 “useless” federal programs, entitlement
reform, and a reduction in foreign aid. Even taking into account increases in
military spending, the RSC
estimates its budget proposals would reduce the deficit by nearly $400 billion
in 2007 alone.
In 1994 just one
Republican congressman opposed the Contract With America. This time, 134 of
them said no.
Republicans vs. Conservatives
What
has changed since 1994? Why were Republicans able to win big with what looked
like a radical government-shrinking platform, then spend record amounts?
Republican leaders and
activists offer strikingly similar explanations for the failure. “We have a
Republican majority, not a conservative majority,” says Norquist. Rep. Jack
Kingston (R-Ga.), an RSC
member whom National Journal named the most conservative member of
Congress in 2004, echoes Norquist’s assessment: “It’s a numerical majority, not
a philosophical majority. Even within the RSC,
there are moderates who are holding out for more money.” Pence himself says,
“We don’t have a conservative majority in Congress. There are 30 to 40 members
that have a different philosophy.”
But the real power
battles have almost always been with the leaders of the Republican caucus, who
could push for more restraint on appropriations if they really wanted to.
Kingston acknowledges, “The tension comes when one side isn’t perceived as
doing what they said they were going to do.”
Two particular points of
contention stand out in the ongoing conflict between the RSC and the House
leadership: Medicare and Katrina. The Medicare expansion bill of 2003 was
eventually passed with the support of most House Republicans. But Pence and 24
other Republicans refused to support the bill even after nearly unprecedented
political pressure from within their own party. Pence acknowledges that he and
other RSC members were “taken to
the woodshed” by the House leadership after their “no” votes.
Tensions flared again
when, just two weeks after Katrina, Hurricane Rita was landing on the Gulf
Coast. At the time, many speculated the federal tab for responding to the two
hurricanes would top $200 billion. The RSC
did not object to the federal government’s role in disaster relief but stood
fast in its belief that any extra unexpected spending on that relief should be
offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.
Asked about the RSC’s Operation Offset
proposals, DeLay replies: “Cutting from essential programs is not the answer.
We need to continue to focus on growing the economy. Those who are advocating a
rollback of the Medicare bill are the same ones who opposed it in the first
place.” The friction between the RSC
and House leadership was clear. Some question whether Pence’s influence has
made those tensions worse. He once served on DeLay’s whip team, but as the
Republican leadership became more comfortable with large spending bills, their
personal relationship seemed to deteriorate quickly.
Although he has failed
thus far to accomplish his anti-spending agenda, Pence has become a figure of
some importance in D.C. circles. Even the White House has taken notice. The
same day Josh Bolten was picked to be the president’s new chief of staff, Pence
says, “He called me and said he wanted to continue our dynamic relationship.”
There have been some grassroots calls for Pence to run for president, and he
has hinted that if the GOP
loses the House this year, it probably needs new leadership. You don’t have to
be an insider to understand that “new leadership” is code for “Pence’s
leadership.”
Measuring Progress
It’s possible Pence may
not be leading the RSC after this fall’s elections, whether he runs
for a leadership post or not. His term as chairman will be ending, and he says
he hasn’t decided whether to seek another term. Speaking privately, some RSC members have started
calling for “new blood.”
That
new blood might be needed if the committee is actually to achieve its aims. The
RSC
outlined 10 goals for the 2006 legislative session, including passing a
balanced budget amendment, matching all emergency spending supplemental bills
with spending reductions, eliminating a federal program for each new one
created, making the Bush tax cuts permanent, budgeting a “rainy day fund,”
instituting a constitutional line-item veto, making budget resolutions legally
binding, and one item that doesn’t have anything to do with limited government
or fiscal restraint: passing a constitutional ban on gay marriage. It’s hard to
imagine Congress passing all or even most of these proposals in just one
session. As RSC
Executive Director Sheila Cole dryly notes, “There is no real constituency for
lobbying and earmark reform. Those who have been affected by it are the ones
who have been stung, investigated, or indicted.”
This session the RSC did win approval of a
House budget proposal that included earmark reforms and removed emergency
spending bills funding the Iraq war. But even those apparent victories are far
from complete. “We still have appropriations bills moving through the House that
contain earmarks with no names attached to them,” Cole says. “There are things
like an unsigned earmark for a science museum in Virginia with an exhibit on
jelly beans.” She also notes that while the total number of earmarks in 2006 is
lower than in 2005, the total dollar amount spent via earmarks has risen. And
now that even the Democrats have given up this year’s “culture of corruption”
campaign theme, nobody expects a bill with real teeth to emerge from conference
committee. Meanwhile, Cole acknowledges that “there’s not going to be any more
big fiscal legislation” coming from the group for the rest of the year, as its
members deal with other House business and disperse across the country to focus
on their re-election campaigns.
Being in the RSC is sort of like wearing
a varsity jacket signifying that a congressman is an athletic budget cutter.
There’s not much evidence the RSC
as a whole is serious about fiscal issues. Although there are some principled
people at its core who are taking a firm stand against pork, they haven’t been
able to move their colleagues toward their side of the argument.
If even the
self-selected tightwads of the RSC
aren’t strong enough to close ranks, it’s unlikely that a true fiscal
conservative will ascend to a leadership post anytime soon. And that means
Congress’ spending problem isn’t likely to disappear soon either, no matter
which party is in power.
Eric Pfeiffer is a national reporter for The Washington Times and the editor of the America’s Future Foundation webzine Brainwash.