House GOP: winners by default

Daniel Libit Daniel Libit Tue Jul 14, 5:37 am ET

Written off six months ago as the least-powerful wing of an impotent party, House Republicans say they’re finding their footing again — and that they’re ready to challenge the idea that GOP governors provide the best hope for a Republican resurgence.

“The House is leading,” California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republicans’ chief deputy whip, told POLITICO last week.

“When you look at the cadre of those in the House — and how we have come together as a team — we don’t make headlines, but we continue to make progress.”

“Progress” might be a strong word. House Republicans still lack the numbers to get legislation passed — or even to stop the Democrats from passing bills over their objections. Nor do they have among their ranks anyone who counts as an obvious top-flight 2008 presidential contender.

But the bet they placed against Barack Obama’s economic recovery plans is looking at least marginally better than it did earlier this year; in the latest Quinnipiac University poll, 32 percent of respondents said they trust congressional Republicans more than Obama when it comes to dealing with the economy — a 6-point uptick since March.

And among the decimated ranks of the Republican Party, the House Republican Conference — once home to the likes of Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, John Doolittle and Mark Foley — is the one branch of the GOP that’s not currently tarred by personal scandal.

Among rising-star Republican governors, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal took a beating for a widely mocked State of the Union response; Alaska’s Sarah Palin prompted a lot of head-scratching when she bailed out on her job; South Carolina’s Mark Sanford laid waste to his own future when he took up with an Argentine mistress; Texas’s Rick Perry raised many eyebrows when he suggested that some in his state might start to think about seceding from the union; and Utah’s Jon Huntsman neutralized himself by signing on as Barack Obama’s ambassador to China.

Among Republican senators, John Ensign and Tom Coburn are ensnared in the scandal surrounding Ensign’s extramarital affair with a former staffer; Arlen Specter has bolted from the party; and those who remain are getting grief from the base for not doing more to fight the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Over the Fourth of July recess, Sen. John Cornyn — the head of the party’s Senate campaign committee — was booed repeatedly at a “tea party” event back home in Texas.

Maybe it’s just an intraparty war of attrition, but House Republicans think they’re winning.

And even more than their colleagues in the Senate — who this week find themselves having to carefully calibrate their opposition to Sonia Sotomayor — House Republicans seem to be relishing their role as the unrestrained agents provocateurs. Compare the dour demeanor of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — or the somber confessionals of Sanford and Ensign — with House Minority Leader John Boehner’s rollicking, laugh-a-minute attack on the Democrats’ climate change bill earlier this month.

All this has lawmakers like McCarthy embracing that old gambler’s maxim: If you play long enough, the House will eventually take over.

“If we get the House back, that is the best chance a Republican has to win the White House,” McCarthy said.

The argument would have been laughed off six months ago.

When the Republican Governors Association convened in Washington in February, GOP strategist Mike Murphy declared that congressional Republicans “don’t have a lot of power to do anything” and that “all the governing power of the GOP is there [among governors] right now.”

Sanford, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, said governors were “the last folks standing.” Huntsman was outright dismissive of his House brethren, telling The Washington Times: “I don’t even know the [Republican] congressional leadership. I have not met them. I don’t listen or read whatever it is they say, because it is inconsequential — completely.”

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour argued that since Democrats controlled Washington, state capitals were “the only place where you can really see Republican ideas implemented.”

But the economic debate in Washington has given House Republicans a prime stage for making their case, transforming what seemed to be a liability — how do you oppose a popular new president in a time of economic crisis? — into what may be an opportunity.

“The one benefit of being a governor was that you were removed from the fights of Washington,” said Brian Darling, director of Senate relations for The Heritage Foundation. “But that’s no longer the case.”

Although he’s not exactly a disinterested observer, House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence said he’s been “impressed” with “the degree to which both Republican leaders in the House and rank and file have stepped into the debate on an unprecedented level.”

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said that “it’s going to take an effort on the part of all of us, both here at the federally elected level as well as the state level, to turn reform and to demonstrate to people that we are the party they want us to be.”

On Sunday, Cantor told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that in light of recent scandals, it was important for voters to remember that the Republican Party is “not just about personalities — it is about ideas.”

But Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) — who saw the potential of the House during the so-called Republican Revolution class of 1994 — suggested that his congressional colleagues, working as a group, may have more power than governors to bring their party back to power.

“Governors are sole actors, and they can become party leaders and they can create momentum for the party, but in part it is momentum for themselves,” he said.

Of course, the governors aren’t ready to hand over the best-hope baton just yet.

“The best opportunity to rebuild the party is from the ground up,” said Nick Ayers, the Republican Governors Association’s executive director. “That’s going to be at the state level. We subscribe to a very simple theory that we won’t get the presidency, the House or the Senate back until we have 28, 29 or 30 Republican governors.”

Some House Republicans remain wary of the notion that the solution to their party’s problems will come from the Capitol.

“We know that all wisdom doesn’t come from inside the Washington Beltway,” said Boehner’s communications director, Michael Steel. Steel said that congressional Republicans have to work with their statehouse counterparts, and he noted that Boehner’s State Solutions project aims to facilitate that sort of cooperation.

Meanwhile, McCarthy said the ideas and tactics coming out of the House Republican Conference — opposition to Obama’s spending plans, last summer’s gas-price protest, a jobs-based critique of Democratic control — are starting to spread beyond the Beltway.

“We are finding this voice in the House, and it’s transferring out there,” said McCarthy. “You don’t see it in news at night, but you feel it filter out to the country.”

Alex Isenstadt and Zachary Abrahamson contributed to this story.