Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (2 page)

In his dozen years in Congress, Ryan has managed to avoid being tied down by whatever is the issue of the day. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a member of Congress to do, especially an ambitious backbencher. But Ryan’s models when he first came to Washington as a staffer were Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett—Republican thinkers. He worked for Kemp and Bennett and later for Sen. Sam
Brownback (when I met him), thinking all the time about everything that Washington touches. Now he’s the most influential Republican thinker in Congress. His magnum opus is called A Roadmap for America’s Future. It’s a sweeping plan to reform the way Washington works.

I met McCarthy in 2004 when he was the Republican leader in the lower house of the California legislature. At a Washington dinner just before President Bush’s second inauguration, my friend Jim Brulte introduced McCarthy as the California Republican with the greatest future. Brulte, then Republican leader in the state Senate, was right. Besides being Cantor’s top deputy, McCarthy is an expert on how to win House races. He dropped by my office several months after the Republican debacle in 2006. He’d just been elected to his first term. He was already working on a strategy for political recovery. In 2010, he led the effort to recruit electable Republican House candidates. McCarthy’s favorites? Candidates fresh to politics and bursting with enthusiasm about reforming Washington.

The future of Young Guns and its three honchos is unquestionably bright. I’m convinced Eric Cantor will be speaker or majority leader the next time Republicans control the House. When that happens, Paul Ryan will be chairman of the House Budget Committee and will be in line to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The first order of business as chairman of House Ways and Means will be fundamental tax and entitlement reform. The second order of business will be more reform.
As for McCarthy, he’ll be right behind Cantor in the leadership, either as majority leader or whip—and someday, if Cantor steps aside, even House Speaker. All the while, he’ll be fixated on how to win more elections, more often. In short, Young Guns is not only here to stay, but to succeed.

Fred Barnes
April, 2010

 
 
MEET THE YOUNG GUNS:
A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

On March 11, 2010, House Republicans agreed to a one-year moratorium on earmarks—or, as they are referred to informally—sweetheart deals. A few hours later, Congressmen Eric Cantor of Virginia, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and Kevin McCarthy of California gathered around Diet Cokes and bottled water to discuss this milestone and how it fits into their vision of change in Washington.

PR:
We’ve been like Sisyphus on this thing. We’ve been pulling this earmark moratorium rock up the hill only to be rolled over with it by the people who like earmarks. We’ve been working on this thing for five years.

EC:
I think enough members finally realized that the level of frustration among the public is at such a fever pitch right now that we had no choice. We had to say enough is enough.

PR:
Yeah, this was culture change for our conference [the House Republicans]. And it just shows that our conference is beginning to acknowledge reality, acknowledge where the people are.

KM:
Part of this stems from the town hall meetings. They’ve changed people’s minds. If you’ve been out there lately, you know that the public is screaming for this. And there’s also the fact that we’re coming off a month in which we hit $200 billion, just for this month, in the deficit.

EC:
I think being in the extreme minority is what it took for us to have the dose of contrition necessary to do this. But I also think you’re seeing now an administration and a congressional leadership in Nancy Pelosi that is so extreme in ignoring the public. We see it and feel it when we go home. People are so upset. Earmarks are such a symbol of the problem in Washington. We know the moratorium doesn’t fix the problem but it certainly is the beginning. It’s a recognition that we need to change the culture.

KM:
On the flight in this week, it just happened that sitting next to me was Gary Hart. We were having a kind of generational talk about Washington. And one of the things he pointed out that was wrong with Washington was earmarks. He said Republicans and Democrats had both been poisoned by earmarks.

PR:
The way I see what happened with this earmark moratorium is we have finally begun to cleanse ourselves of the corruption that occurred when Republicans were in the majority. I was a staffer here during the mid-1990s after the Contract with America. That was an incredible Congress of people from a cross section of America. Doctors, small businesspeople, insurance brokers, farmers—people from all across America. We had people who really believed in ideas and principles. And then slowly but surely as the conference matured, they started to recruit career politicians as opposed to citizen legislators. They brought in more machine-like people. And I think our leadership changed and adopted the position that, well, we beat the Democrats’ machine, now it’s time to create a Republican machine to keep us in the majority. And out of that came this earmark culture.

KM:
Our recruits this time are like 1994. We’ve got new blood coming in here. New recruits and reinforcements to get us back to our roots as a party, back to reclaiming the American idea and stopping the careerism.

EC:
We really are beginning to feel like we’re on offense now. We lost our way when we were in the majority. We stopped playing offense. We lost our sense of what we were here for. It was almost as if the institution overcame us and became the priority. Now, being in the deep minority we’ve gained a better sense of where we need to take this country and where we need to lead. It starts with recognizing that the people expect a certain level of conduct and behavior and the people expect a certain level of humility out of their government, in contrast to the arrogance they see coming out of the majority today.

PR:
And we also have to declare our principles. They are the nation’s founding principles. And then we have to show how we are going to apply them to the problems of the day. And show how we will use these principles to guide our actions in a very transparent and clear way. I think what happened to the Republicans before was we had a majority of people who came here to do something and we atrophied into a majority of people who came here to be something.

KM:
And we lost our ideas along the way.

PR:
Yeah, we lost ideas and we lost our core. Now we’re back to being doers again because we’re seeing what the Democrats are offering. We’re seeing how they want to transform this country into a cradle-to-grave European social welfare state and change the idea of America forever.

KM:
There was a group of us at a dinner on the night of the inaugural. We got together because we weren’t invited to anything else [laughter]. But instead of drowning our sorrows, we talked about how to rebuild and how to come back to our principles. That was a turning point.

EC:
And at the same time, Democrats were assuming that they had this mandate. They assumed that there had been an ideological shift in this country toward big government and that they had a license to change this country. But this country is not about transformational change because it is firmly rooted in the first principles of our nation. Nobody wants to mess with these founding principles. But Democrats somehow convinced themselves that now was the time for America to enter the new world order; now was the time for us to become more European. And they launched an effort that has become very frightening for the American people.

PR:
They shocked the American people. They shocked us. They certainly shocked me. I wasn’t sure what kind of president Obama was going to be. I thought, maybe this guy is going to be a centrist—his rhetoric was centrist. His upbringing and his history didn’t suggest he was centrist but his rhetoric did. So I was thinking, well, we’ll see. And then—bam!—out of the gates, these people had a hardcore-left agenda. We, along with the American people, were spectators while they took this government very far left, very fast. But what became so unnerving to us and the American people is that they used
our
rhetoric. They used the rhetoric of freedom and choice and opportunity to sell an inherently statist agenda; to sell an agenda that was completely the opposite of its rhetoric. And people started to realize that they were trying to transform the country using the rhetoric of the Right to push through the substance of the Left.

KM:
It was the stimulus bill that woke us up. Remember, the president was still at 70 percent approval. He comes into our caucus and says he’s going to work with us on a bill. Then we walk out and Speaker Pelosi introduces a bill without our input.

EC:
It became a very defining moment for this conference, that stimulus bill.

PR:
Very much so.

KM:
Remember the hours we spent sitting in Eric’s conference room drafting the alternative to the stimulus? We drafted an alternative that was better, that created twice the jobs for half the money. I think that’s when we got our mojo back.

PR:
And then as the year went on, if you listened to the new majority it was actually pretty clear what their intentions were. I remember being up until midnight one night debating the health-care bill in early November [2009]. Emotions were running very high. Everyone was coming to the floor and really speaking their mind. And I sat there and watched liberal dinosaur after liberal dinosaur—people who have been in Congress longer than I’ve been living or since I was in the first or second grade—and they all basically said the same thing, which really opened my eyes. They said, “This is finally our opportunity to bring about the completion of the progressive agenda.” One of them said this was the “third wave of progressivism. There was the New Deal, the Great Society, and now we are completing the vision of transforming America into what it needs to be.” And what that means is turning the Constitution on its head, forgetting about the idea of equal opportunity.

EC:
It became about them. It became about their sense of why they were here and their desire to win.

PR:
And it became about the destiny they had charted for themselves, which, I think, helped us reach our own sense of destiny.

EC:
And it was so anathema to what the American people were thinking at the time or wanted for this country. That’s what the country saw. They saw that the powers in charge here are ignorant of what the people want and frankly arrogant about it. And it became more about their need to win. Look at the health-care debate. It’s tough for them to get their minds around the fact that the people don’t want this country transformed the way they want it. They just believe that, number one, the means justify the ends. And number two, that this country needs to become more like a social democracy.