Poison vote looms for tea party freshmen: Raise the national debt limit?
Even though a vote to raise the national debt limit – now just under $14.3 trillion – is months away, House Republican leaders are already preparing their caucus for what could be the toughest vote for a bumper freshman class. |
About half of the 85-member Republican House freshman class ran with backing from tea party groups – all of them on a platform to curb or cap government spending. Many of these candidates slammed Democrats they defeated for previous votes to increase the debt limit – votes, they said, that enabled big government spending. |
Now, they face the other side of the issue: A vote against raising the debt limit means the government could run out of money. Will fiscal responsibility look so appealing if the government essentially shuts down? Read more at www.csmonitor.com |
GOP taps 2 tea partiers for transition to power
| House Republicans have tapped two newly elected congressmen who drew tea party backing in their campaigns to help lead the party’s transition to power. |
Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Tim Scott of South Carolina, who won endorsements by Sarah Palin and support from tea party activists, are part of a newly named 22-member team charged with crafting new rules and smoothing the GOP’s shift from minority to majority. |
The team, led by Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon and headquartered in the basement of the Capitol, is to meet Monday night and Tuesday. It includes several seasoned veterans and influential members like 15-term Rep. David Dreier of California, in line for his second stint as head of the powerful Rules Committee, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, in line to head the Budget Committee, and Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, the GOP campaign committee chief. |
Walden said he didn’t choose the team based on whether they had tea party backing, telling reporters last week that he wasn’t sure whether those he was recruiting were supported by the conservative-libertarian movement. “It’s a nice cross-section of our Republican conference,” he said of the group. Read more at www.msnbc.msn.com |
Will The House GOP Break Apart the GOP-Tea Party Coalition
It is undisputed that the Tea Party Movement helped drive the renewed Republican momentum this past year. But for that energy, the Republicans would not have seen the gains they saw. The exit polls reflect that data. |
So now the House Republicans have some crucial decisions to make. They, unlike the Senate GOP, which appears to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from their 2006 defeat, are going to embrace an earmarks moratorium. Incoming Speaker Boehner, man I love the sound of that, announced the House will definitely have an earmarks moratorium. Mitch McConnell says no way in the Senate. |
But an earmarks moratorium is only one sign that the GOP gets it in the House. It is time for some fresh faces. Read more at www.redstate.com |
Tea Party’s First Victim: Earmarks
| A fiscally responsible thing happened on the way to the November 2 election: Rep. Eric Cantor (R.-Va.) announced on behalf of the House Republican Leadership an internal party rule mandating that Republicans will not earmark in the next Congress. This is excellent news for the Tea Party movement and it fills in a missing element of the “Pledge to America.” |
| Late in the summer, House Republicans fumbled the ball on the issue of earmarks. On August 23, House Republican Whip Cantor was quoted in Politico saying that earmarks might return in the next Congress based on “merit, not muscle.” |
| If this weren’t enough, because of intraparty disagreements, the House Republicans did not write anything in the Pledge expressing a promise to rid the budgeting process of the corrupting, wasteful earmarking process. Last week, though, Cantor picked that ball off the turf and ran with it. It looks like GOP leaders will now take it into the end zone in the House and Senate Steering Committee Chairman Jim DeMint (R.-S.C.) will make that same run in the Senate. |
Cantor published an op-ed in Politico last week in which he declared: “The next Republican Conference should immediately move to eliminate earmarks. Should Republicans be elected the majority party, I believe that we should extend the moratorium to the entire House, to Democrats and Republicans alike.” This announcement is the first evidence of the downfall of earmarks in 2011.
Read more at www.humanevents.com |
