California Rep. Dan Lungren will challenge Minority Leader John A. Boehner next week in a bid to dethrone the top Republican in the House, according to a letter distributed by Lungren’s office on Friday.
Lungren, who opens the note complimenting the Republican leader as “a good man” “of honor and intergrity,” casts his long-shot campaign against Boehner as a move to shake up the GOP “because I think our party is in trouble.
“If we don’t admit our difficulties and address them aggressively, we not only run the risk of becoming a permanent congressional minority but we will do a disservice to our nation,” Lungren says in the letter. “If we choose by inaction to ignore the real challenges we face, then paraphrazing President Reagan, we deserve to be relegated to the trash heap of history.”
Lungren parrots the complaints of the party’s activist base in the aftermath of last week’s election, asking, “‘Do the Republicans in Congress really understand the magnitude of what has happened?’”
I do wonder if the Congressional GOP really understands what happened - I worry they are thinking they can coast to victory in 2010 on an anti-Obama wave. While that might happen, we should work with the assumption that Obama will be a huge success and thus we’ll have to beat the Democrats with ideas and candidates. Only if the Congressional GOP maps out its program based upon the need for ideas and solutions with a mind towards re-convincing the American people we are worthy of their trust will we have a chance of winning. And I mean really winning - not just falling into power like the Democrats did on an anti-GOP wave.
Top to bottom, we need to reform the way we do business to get our party to be the party of responsibility, moral standards, solutions and core American ideals.
What the Congressional supporters of this bill fail to comprehend is that this bill bails out Wall Street AND Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the fiscally irresponsible unpopular President.
Tell me again why the House GOP should support this bill? And I write this as someone who supports its passage. If it’s that obvious to me, how freaking blind are Congressional leaders?
Do-Nothing Democrats Vote to Adjourn House of Representatives Without Taking Action to Lower Gas Prices
Putnam: “It’s Time Democrats Put Their Boarding Passes Back in Their Pockets”
WASHINGTON – Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL), Chairman of the House Republican Conference, issued the following statement shortly after the House of Representatives voted 213-212 – with no Republicans voting in the affirmative – to adjourn for five weeks in August and September without taking action to lower gas prices and break our dependence on foreign oil:
“The Democratic Congress should be held in contempt for voting to skip town without dealing with America’s energy crisis.
“Democrats are out of touch, out of excuses, out of support and out of time. Americans are hurting. Independent polls show they overwhelmingly support House Republicans’ all-of-the-above energy solutions.
“It’s time Democrats put their boarding passes back in their pockets and get to work by voting on the American Energy Act.”
As NRO points out, this is a Godsend to the GOP - its the perfect “kitchen table” issue and the GOP is entirely on the side of Joe and Jane Average on this issue. As with the Obama campaign, the only thing I can figure is that Pelosi and Co figure they’ve got their House majority sewn up and there’s no worry about what might happen in November. Of course, just as with the Obama campaign, we have to rate the Democrats as having the advantage in keeping their majority in November’s election…but there’s nothing for sure, and the GOP only needs a net of 19 to take an absolute majority…but even a GOP gain of 10 would give the GOP de-facto control over the House (with the remaining conservative and centrist Democrats scared to death of crossing the GOP). Meanwhile, if there was ever a year for Democrats to expand a majority, 2008 is it…so even a one seat gain by the GOP would be a crushing loss for the Democrats, given the political circumstances at the dawn of Campaign ‘08.
I’ve been observing politics for a long time now, and I’ve never seen a party so sure of themselves as the Democrats are. We’ll find out in November if its well-founded, or whether hubris and arrogance turned likely victory into defeat.
Boehner Says House GOP Must Draw Line On Earmarks Or Prepare For Permanent Minority.
House Minority Leader John Boehner used the first House GOP Conference meeting of 2008 to draw a very hard line on congressional earmarks. Boehner, who is one of the few Members of Congress who does not earmark, told his colleagues that if they cannot break out of that habit, they will not regain the majority. According to a knowledgeable source, Boehner told the Conference this morning, “Washington is broken. We need to show the American people we’re ready to fix it,” adding, “We aren’t going to earn the majority back until we do something serious about earmarks. If we don’t get serious about it, and get serious soon, we’re going nowhere.” The source said Boehner concluded by saying, “I have no interest in being minority leader just to be minority leader. I took this job to lead an effort to earn back our majority — this year. Not next year or the year after that. This year.”
These are the exact right words - now we’ll have to see if they are matched by deeds, and if a majority of the GOP caucus will show the necessary backbone to go along.
There were lots of reasons we lost our Congressional majority in 2006 but not least among these reasons is that we ceased to be the GOP, and started being Democrat-lite. This didn’t so much turn people towards the Democrats, but it did turn GOPers away from the GOP. We GOPers have to give people a reason for returning us to the majority - and that means we have to show that we are in deadly ernest in changing the way DC does business. Earmarks are not the only thing wrong in DC, but they are the perfect symbol of that confluence of money and influence-peddling which turns the stomach of all honest citizens. The Democrats will not - and cannot - clean up DC as their power is based largely upon appropriating government swag for favored groups, but we GOPers are supposed to be better than that. And we’ll have to be better than that, if we ever want to have our majority back.
David Freddoso notes how the House GOP seems to have hit its stride on a return to conservative, Republican principles:
House Republicans have been fighting and winning the few little battles they can, considering they are in the minority in a body where the minority has few rights. But tonight they won big on a motion to recommit the Intelligence Authorization Act to committee, with instructions to remove all earmarks from the bill.
This is one of many such little wins the House GOP has enjoyed, peeling off moderate and marginal-seat Democrats as they do so. The committee is not obligated to follow the instructions, but they can only ignore them if Democratic leaders are willing to ram the earmarks through, over a clear majority vote of the House.
It may just be a symbolic vote, but it demonstrates just how powerful the Democrats think the earmark issue is — 62 Democrats voted with a unanimous Republican caucus, including many of the most vulnerable: Boyda (Kan.), McNerney (Calif.), Lampson (Tex.) and Chris Murphy (Conn.), to name a few.
If Republicans have any chance of winning back the majority next year, the earmark issue holds forth more hope for them than any other issue right now. It resonates with taxpayers when you tell them they will be funding hippie museums and fake jobs programs for corrupt, power-hungry members of Congress.
The Democrats talk of ending earmarks in 2006 - just as their talk of ending corruption - was just that: talk. Earmarks and corruption were endemic to the Democratic majority prior to their 1994 defeat, and they waited in massive impatience for their chance to return to the trough big time as a majority party. Now that they are back in, they simply want to forget 1995-2007 and act as if nothing happened…but, they forgot that the House GOP once upon a time was the party of clean politics and spending restraint…and now that the GOP has received a well-deserved lesson, it is now time to start hammering the Democrats for being, well, Democrats…corrupt and spendthrift.
With Iraq becoming an ever clearer success, with the economy still doing quite well, with corruption now becoming a stain on the Democrats, with immigration/border security as an issue - add to this an old-fashioned GOP campaign against wasteful spending and tax hikes, and the GOP has a winning set of issues for 2008. All that is needed for victory is an effective campaign to bring this before the American people.
