IN a secret meeting Wednesday of the House Republican leadership, Minority Leader John Boehner ruled that Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) will continue as the party’s ranking member of the Appropriations Committee while under federal investigation on ethics charges.
That widened the gap between Boehner and reform-minded House Republicans, including members of the leadership. Under investigation for sponsoring questionable earmarks, Lewis remains a major Republican spokesman in Congress. He led the Republican debate Wednesday on Democratic procedures for handling President Bush‘s veto of the expanded State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
GOP reformers complain that Boehner is harsher on rank-and-file members of Congress than on leaders. While Lewis keeps his leadership position on Appropriations, Rep. John Doolittle left the committee in April because he is a federal corruption target.
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WHILE 19 of 22 Republican governors once favored the Democratic bill expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), only two signed a Tuesday letter to President Bush urging him to sign the measure.
Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, a former Utah governor, helped bring around his old colleagues. Even California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a presumed supporter of the SCHIP bill, joined his fellow Republicans. The only GOP governors signing the letter were Connecticut’s Jodi Rell and Utah’s Jon Huntsman (following the lead of his state’s GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch).
With Republicans opposed, the letter to the president could not be a position of the National Governors Association – currently headed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.). The letter, signed by 26 of 28 Democratic governors, was on plain stationery,
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SEN. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who joined the most liberal senators in voting against censure of MoveOn.org, received $824,000 from the left-wing group for his 2006 re-election campaign. Only 25 senators refused to condemn MoveOn for its newspaper ad belittling Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq.
Federal Election Commission figures show Sen. Hillary Clinton, who also voted against the resolution, got only $5,700 from MoveOn. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, No. 2 after Byrd among the group’s recipients with $389,000, voted for the censure resolution.
Byrd received his MoveOn money in 2005 after delivering a fiery attack on President Bush’s Iraq war policy. It was thought then, incorrectly, that Republicans would seriously challenge Byrd’s re-election.
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REP. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), who nearly lost his upstate district in 2006, is conducting a Washington fund-raiser Oct. 15 costing as little as $50 to attend. That unusually low figure reflects generally declining prices in a deteriorating Republican financial climate.
Reynolds’s invitation asks supporters to gather “behind the bar at the bottom of the stairs” at McFadden’s Saloon in Washington to “tailgate with Tom” watching the Buffalo-Toronto hockey game.
While chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) for the 2006 election cycle, Reynolds faced an unusually strong challenge for his seat and won with 52 percent of the vote. He left the NRCC $16 million in debt after losing control of the House.