AS HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER, Tom DeLay had a crisp and clear style. He coupled an agenda with an unwillingness to compromise and an iron resolve to produce narrow victories based entirely on Republican votes. At the moment, his successor, John Boehner, is working on a mission statement–an official vision–for House Republicans. The comparison is not meant to belittle Boehner, but to point out where Republicans now find themselves.
Times have changed. DeLay is gone and Republicans, both at the White House and in Congress, are struggling just to figure out what their agenda is. So far, they’re sure of only two issues. They want to pass an immigration bill and extend the tax cuts on dividends and capital gains.
DeLay believes the House worked best when it was “the echo chamber for the president.” 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 House would lead, and the Senate would follow. That was the story of Bush’s first term.
But can the House again lead? Not for now. Boehner has been out of the Republican leadership for eight years. His skills are rusty. More important, he doesn’t yet have the trust of House conservatives, the 100-plus who are hard core. 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.
The media and even some inside the administration never recognized how talented–brilliant, even–a congressional leader DeLay was. He wasn’t The Hammer, the nickname used mostly by the press. Believe it or not, DeLay was usually a gentle persuader, not an arm-twister. He could tie micro issues to the macro purposes of the party and the nation. Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said DeLay could convince members to vote with him “just for Tom and the cause and the team.”
Boehner has to pull the team together. On some substantive issues like immigration, Republicans are hopelessly divided. 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. Democrats will play a crucial role on that vote.
But Boehner can get Republicans working to help each other get reelected. A test of this was last week’s vote to curb the unlimited spending of so-called 527 independent expenditure groups. 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. This year they are being used to target vulnerable Republican moderates.
The problem is that many conservatives take the principled position that political spending should not be regulated. For them, it’s a free speech issue. 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. It shouldn’t violate anyone’s principles to make the 527s comply with a law intended to apply to them, they argued. Besides, sparing moderates massive TV attacks might be critical to their reelection.
The effort didn’t quite work. Seventeen members of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House voted to keep the 527s unregulated. 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.
Boehner’s plan for 2006, after deciding on a vision, is to create a week-by-week schedule for taking up issues. 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 aim, of course, is to reach agreement on which issues to pursue. But Boehner and other House leaders aren’t prepared to defer automatically to the White House. Their majority in the House, one of them pointed out to me, preceded the arrival of the president. He didn’t create it, and it may outlive his presidency.
Boehner has one distinct advantage over DeLay. He gets along with Democrats. He worked amicably and productively with them as chairman for five years of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. 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. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that it’s time for Republicans to compromise with Democrats.
This is a pipe dream. “The Democrats want problems, not solutions,” says Republican representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. He’s referring to problems for Republicans. That’s why 192 Democrats voted to retain the provision of the House-passed immigration bill that makes illegal aliens guilty of a felony. 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.
It’s doubtful a significant number of Democrats would agree with Republicans in any event. Democrats are not sufficiently unified. “The only thing that unifies them is they don’t like us,” Cole says. “That’s not enough.” The result: Whatever the Boehner vision turns out to be, the House won’t be able to do much. Pass immigration legislation, extend the tax cuts, and continue to support Bush on Iraq–that’s probably the best case scenario.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and author of Rebel-in-Chief (Crown Forum).
