Two articles in today’s Washington Post highlight what’s really at stake in the race between Roy Blunt, John Boehner, and John Shadegg to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader.
First, Dan Balz says that the race is about more than just naming a new Majority Leader, its about the future of the Republican Party:
The leadership contest playing out this month in the House of Representatives represents more than a battle of personalities. At stake is the direction of a Republican Party that, by some lights, is facing the most serious confluence of problems in the decade since it roared to power on Capitol Hill.
(…)
“I do think we’re at a critical, pivotal moment for the Republican Party right now,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican representative from Minnesota. “The problem we’re facing today is that that hard-work effort to define a reform conservative agenda has taken a back seat to simply political, tactical efforts to retain power.”
(…)
Whatever course the new leadership takes could have a significant effect on the party. If the party’s new leaders in the House choose the wrong path, they could jeopardize their majority in the coming midterm elections. Others in the party — the 2008 presidential candidates, governors, senators — will distance themselves, as Bush did at times when he ran for president in 2000. If House leaders do the opposite, they could reassert themselves at the heart of the conservative movement just as Bush’s presidency is nearing its end.
Interesting analysis and, for the most part, Balz is correct in defining the stakes in this race. The GOP has been in the majority in Congress for ten years and, as I’ve written about repeatedly recently (see this post, and this one. and this one too) they have become entrenched and, seemingly, more concerned with retaining power than advancing any real ideas. Putting their leadership in the hands of the right person could reverse that course before its too late.
On that note, Howard Kurtz has this profile of Arizona Congressman John Shadegg, who entered the race on Friday:
He grew up around Barry Goldwater, arrived in Washington with the “Contract With America” crowd, boycotted one of President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speeches and is more conservative on some issues than President Bush.
Now John Shadegg, a six-term Republican congressman from Arizona, has jumped into the race for House majority leader, trying to position himself as the reform candidate in challenging two more established members of the GOP leadership, Missouri’s Roy Blunt and Ohio’s John A. Boehner.
The more I read, the more I think that Shadegg is the right person for this job he may not be perfect, but he is the person most likely to put the House GOP back on the course it started on in 1994. And it appears I’m not the only one making this observation:
Shadegg has drawn his strongest backing from economic conservatives. CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow said on his blog that if Shadegg were to succeed Tom DeLay in the No. 2 House post, it “would stop the misbegotten march toward big government conservatism and budget excess which has gotten the Republican Congress into so much trouble.”
Sounds good to me.
Update 1/16/06: Today’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece by Stephen Moore on the Majority Leader race. Money quote:
Win or lose, Mr. Shadegg’s candidacy will be a measuring rod of just how much trouble congressional Republicans really think they’re in. It will also serve as a leading indicator of whether House conservatives will devote the next nine months of this term to slamming the brakes on a domestic legislative policy that has careened off course. The era when Republicans promised to make government smaller and smarter by abolishing hundreds of obsolete federal agencies seems a distant memory now in this era of Bridges to Nowhere. In the last five years, Republicans have enacted the largest increase in entitlement spending in three decades, doubled the education budget, nearly tripled the number of earmarked spending projects, and turned a blind eye toward the corrosive culture of corruption on Capitol Hill that seems so eerily reminiscent of the final days of Democratic rule in the House.
The more I read, the better John Shadegg is sounding.
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