GOP freshmen tilt right but keep their balance

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 3, 1997 | by John Berlau

Like many House Republican candidates in 1994, Kenny Hulshof came to Washington during his campaign to sign the GOP's "Contract With America" on the Capitol steps. Unlike most of the GOP candidates who ran that Year, Hulshof lost. To top it off, he had to defend his signing of the contract when he ran again in 1996 against incumbent Missouri Democratic Rep. Harold Volkmer. Bucking conventional wisdom, Hulshof reaffirmed his support of its objectives and won. He now is president of the new House Republican freshman class.

"On every occasion, Harold Volkmer invoked Newt Gingrich, the 104th Congress and the Contract With America,"Hulshof tells Insight. "So I began to remind people what the contract really stood for -- a balanced-budget amendment, making the federal government live within its means, using the line-item veto, enacting welfare reform, tort reform, restoring funding for national security, term limits [and] rolling back the tax on senior citizens." Hulshof says he succeeded by "reminding people that the agenda of the 104th Congress was very much their agenda, a people's agenda."

Hulshof is not the only Republican freshman who had to contend in the campaign with the legacy of the 104th Congress. Never having served in that session was no bar to being attacked for what its members did. "I'm a freshman and I readily admit that, but there are times I felt like I should be a sophomore because in my campaign I defended the 104th Congress," John Shimkus of Illinois tells Insight. "I kept being attacked as part of the institution I was was to join."

South Dakota's new at-large congressman, Rep. John Thune, recounted similar experiences. "I felt like I was running as an incumbent, because I was constantly on the defensive and answering those questions as if I had been here." Thune, the freshman-class liaison to the House Republican leadership, believes the unusually strong Democratic attacks already have shaped much of the character of the GOP freshman class. "I think there's a certain bond that forms when you come in together and you have a lot of similar experiences, have a lot of the same scars, a lot of the same bruises that we all did."

In some ways, the new GOP freshman class stands in contrast to that of the 104th. With 32 members, it is less than half the size of the class that the Republican tidal wave swept in two years ago. A large majority of the new Republicans previously have held public office. And because of their difficult campaigns, observers think these freshmen will be more careful than their predecessors in dealing with the GOP leadership and congressional Democrats. But ideologically they appear to be similar to their brethren in the 104th. "A lot of these guys who got elected, particularly some of the Republicans from the South, are just as conservative as a lot of the Republican members who are already in Congress," says Elizabeth Wilner, managing editor of the Cook Political Report. "But they know that the attitude needs to be different now than it was before."

Damon Ansell, the state-projects manager at Americans for Tax Reform, notes that 85 percent of the House GOP freshmen signed his group's Taxpayer Protection Pledge to oppose tax increases. On the hot-button issues of abortion and gun control, Thune says that "almost to a person" the freshman class shares his antiabortion and anti-gun-control positions. And longtime conservative observer Paul Weyrich points out that 20 of the 32 freshmen are more conservative overall than the Democratic or Republican congressmen they are replacing. Nevertheless, Weyrich says he is worried that despite their conservative leanings the freshmen are "scared puppies" who "don't really want to push an agenda."

But many freshmen say that although they will use a different approach than their predecessors in the 104th, being required to defend the actions of that Congress actually has emboldened them. "It gives us more confidence that we're right, the agenda was right," Shimkus says. "We won despite gazillions of dollars against us by our opponents and the interest groups. We ran the anti-Newt Gingrich gauntlet and survived."

Areas in which the freshmen seem to be most confident are balancing the budget and lowering taxes. On his first day in Congress in early January, New Jersey Republican Rep. Mike Pappas introduced a bill to phase out the capital-gains tax and raise the exemption on the estate tax, which he tells Insight would "help family-owned farms and businesses." Hulshof also is a strong supporter of tax relief, having used the concept aS a major campaign issue when his opponent blurted in a radio interview that Missourians are not overtaxed.

But though the GOP freshmen tend strongly to support the agenda of the 104th Congress, many of them deplore what they regard as the strident tactics that were used. Thune says a "defining characteristic" of the current freshman class is that it is "very conservative ideologically" but has "a lot of political savvy as well."