House GOP leadership, ‘Young Guns’ approach showdown on health vote

By Paul Kane,
Apr 24, 2013 09:23 PM EDT
The Washington Post


The House Republican leaders suffered a humliating legislative setback Wednesday when a large faction of of its members rebelled against a leadership proposal that had drawn the opposition of powerful outside activists.
The mutiny forced House Majority Leader Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.) to abruptly pull from the floor legislation to shore up a program that allows people with pre-existing health conditions to buy into an insurance pool for high-risk patients before they are able to transition to coverage under President Obama’s new health-care law.

The measure is part of Cantor’s effort to rebrand the GOP following embarrassing defeats in the 2012 presidential and Senate races, but it quickly found resistance among conservative activists.
The Club for Growth led a contingent of right-leaning groups that urged Republican lawmakers to oppose the bill casting it as a costly boondoggle that does nothing to dismantle the Obama health-care law.
“Fiscal conservatives should be squarely focused on repealing Obamacare, not strengthening it by supporting the parts that are politically attractive,” Andy Roth, a vice president of Club for Growth, wrote to lawmakers last week. Heritage Action, the political arm of the the conservative Heritage Foundation, joined in the opposition.
No Democrats supported the bill since it emerged from the House Energy and Commerce Committee because the $3 billion tab is paid for by revoking funds from a different piece of the health-care law. That left GOP leaders needing to wrangle almost every vote from their side of the aisle to pass the measure, provoking a failure reminiscent of past embarassing flops since seizing the majority in 2011.
Cantor pulled the bill after trying to push his rank-and-file for support during a closed-door huddle on Wednesday. He argued that “helping the sick people” was a worthy conservative cause. “This is the right thing to do,” Cantor said. “We’re trying to find solutions here.”
Conservatives rebel
On numerous occasions during the last Congress, Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has tried to muscle legislation through the House with only Republican votes, only to see a couple dozen conservatives rebel, some fearful of retribution from outside groups that specialize in financing primary challenges in safe GOP districts.
Unlike those previous battles, this fight measured the clout of Boehner’s lieutenants. Cantor, 49, and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, 48, have often been described as tea party leaders in Congress, part of the younger GOP generation that recruited the rabble-rousing class of 2010 that thrust Republicans into the majority.
Increasingly, however, conservative activists have signaled uneasy relations with the younger leaders. In January, they opposed a relief bill for communities hit by Hurricane Sandy, which Cantor had pushed, and the resulting passage of the measure was a legislative victory but a political embarrassment.
Cantor and McCarthy (R-Calif.), who wrote the “Young Guns” book together, supported the bill, but only 49 Republicans voted yes, while 179 opposed the measure. It passed because 192 Democrats backed it. Their book co-author, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), also voted no. For several months, Cantor has pushed a “Making Life Work” agenda focused less around slashing federal spending and more around kitchen-table issues. The items tend to get easy-to-grasp names, such as Wednesday’s vote on the Helping Sick Americans Now Act.
“I hear about the debt and the deficit. I hear about the fights,” McCarthy said in an interview in his Capitol office Tuesday. “And if I’m sitting at home, or if I’m trying to make within my household different things work or go forward, I think, how does it relate to me?”

While Cantor has been crafting the softer agenda, McCarthy’s job has been to secure the votes for its passage, a whip operation that has been privately mocked by fellow Republicans.

For a few dozen core conservatives cutting spending and elmininating the health-care law are such paramount goals, they tend to oppose any new spending or any health-related bill that does not repeal the 2010 law — no matter what Cantor and McCarthy say.
“You’re replacing one big government program for another big government program, and I don’t think that’s what the American people are asking us to do,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said at a Wednesday forum hosted by the Heritage Foundation.
Reconsidered in May
Some GOP lawmakers and aides said that the health measure appeared too quickly, winning committee passage last week, and there was insufficient time to build support for it. Senior advisers suggested it would be brought back up in May.
But the defeat signaled again that, only when a large bloc of Democrats are also voting with them, can Republican leaders truly guarantee a floor victory.
Without Democratic support, GOP leaders have only about 15 votes of their own to spare,. Club for Growth and Heritage Action have shown an ability to hold sway over a few dozen Republicans, those from the most GOP-leaning districts who would have the most to fear if a well-financed conservative challenger appeared in a primary.
On April 9, leadership brought a bill to the floor to allow state and local governments to purchase battlefield sites from the Revolutionary War. A few hours before the vote Heritage Action opposed the measure and announced that it would “key vote” the roll call, putting it in its rolling score card measuring how conservative a lawmaker is. The group declared it “irresponsible” for any government to be purchasing more land in such tight budgetary times.
Cantor, McCarthy, the entire leadership team and every major committee chairman supported the bill, including Ryan. It received just 101 Republicans votes, as 122 GOP lawmakers opposed it.
The measure passed only because of universal Democratic support.
Ed O’Keefe contributed to this report.

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