Washington – Even before Rep. Tom DeLay stepped down as majority leader of the House of Representatives last week, the extraordinarily regimented House Republicans were showing signs of rebellion.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and his leadership team were scrambling to put out fires among restive conservatives and appease disgruntled moderates.
Now, with DeLay, R-Texas, officially out of the party’s top echelon, Hastert is missing his main disciplinarian just as Republicans want to cut spending and taxes aggressively, and change immigration and energy laws. His absence gives rebels an opening.
“DeLay has an experience in both leadership and moving our agenda that is just amazing. It’s a gift,” said Rep. Thomas Reynolds, a New York Republican who heads the congressional campaign arm of the GOP.
“He’s the best vote counter I’ve ever been associated with.”
Hastert still may keep DeLay within reach, as he told the Texan he would on Thursday, but DeLay has no official role now that he’s been temporarily replaced by Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. Blunt will handle DeLay’s old duties with two other GOP veterans, Eric Cantor of Virginia and David Dreier of California.
Despite the extra help, Hastert has his work cut out as he tries to keep the party’s fiscal hawks, social conservatives and moderates on the same page.
Conservatives already were fretting that Republican leaders and President Bush were doing little to contain spending. The Republican Study Committee, a group of House conservatives, had demanded sizable spending cuts, including delaying a Medicare prescription-drug program for the elderly and elimination of lawmakers’ pet highway projects.
The suggestions had not gone over well with the GOP leadership.
Meanwhile, moderates had been resisting pressure all year to buy into Bush’s plan to create individual retirement accounts for Social Security. Many also gritted their teeth through votes in favor of Bush’s tax cuts.
“Lots of members have been appalled at the kind of Gilded Age mentality of the party,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “Others felt like they had to take one for the team.”
Ornstein said Republicans had hung tight because they were pushing Bush’s agenda, but the landscape is different now that Bush no longer faces re-election and they do.
“Suddenly, the president’s fate and their fate are no longer inextricably linked,” he said.
