| The myth of freshman power
House Republican freshmen came to Washington heralded as fire-breathers bent on incinerating every obstacle in their path, including the GOP establishment.
But rather than burning down the House, they've made themselves at home there over the past eight months - with voting patterns that are virtually identical to the rest of the Republican caucus, according to a new POLITICO analysis of the voting trends in the chamber.
On 100 key House votes, Republican freshmen rarely stand out, bucking the party line at almost the same rate as all other House Republicans - 12.5 percent of the time for freshmen and 12.34 percent for veterans. On 77 out of 100 votes studied, there was no more than a 5 percentage point difference between the freshman vote split and the nonfreshman split - hardly the portrait of a bunch of rabble-rousers.
And the number of times that most of the freshman class broke away as a bloc and voted against the GOP majority? Only two out of 100 key votes, neither of which were game-changing roll calls.
The numbers show that the compelling narrative of a bunch of wild-eyed freshmen playing ransom politics with the nation's future is missing one essential element: evidence.
Sure, the freshmen have pushed the party to the right, but the voting patterns reflect a theme that also emerged in interviews: The freshmen aren't the troublemakers. In fact, as a group, they don't stand out at all when votes are tallied on the House's electronic scoreboard.
"While it makes an easier media narrative to lump them into one bowl, the freshman representatives come from very different backgrounds and represent many different people, and I believe that any attempt to bind them together ideologically or as a voting bloc is a flawed exercise," second-term Kansas Rep. Lynn Jenkins told POLITICO. "At the end of the day, like all of my colleagues in Congress, the freshman class, as individuals, are showing their loyalty is to the people they represent, not an ideology or group in Washington."
The House is noticeably more conservative in part because of a shift in the electorate in the 2010 midterm elections. But while there are high-profile, hard-right conservatives in the freshman class, they are the exceptions, not the rule.
There are, of course, limitations to any data analysis: While the numbers show that the freshmen vote with their party as often as their senior counterparts, they don't explain why. Behind the data lies the story of a class of newly elected legislators who barnstormed into Congress as change agents and then blended into the institution as it began to resemble them a little bit more.
Most sources say the class has, on the whole, become more amenable to compromise - gone Washington, perhaps - over the course of eight months in office.
Some say that's a sign of maturity; others call it co-option.
"They're being co-opted, just as we predicted they would be. They're buying into the lines and the lies that the leadership uses to get their way," said Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, an organizing entity for many of the loosely affiliated tea party groups.
But Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.), who won in 2010 despite getting no help from Washington Republicans, explained freshman loyalty differently in an interview in her Capitol Hill office during the height of the debt-limit debate just before the August recess. Ellmers, who says she doesn't "owe anybody anything," has nonetheless become a leading freshman spokeswoman for House Republicans on a variety of issues, including the debt-limit deal.
"The speaker has given the freshman class everything we've asked for," said Ellmers, one of a number of newcomers who gained esteem for Boehner, and a measure of loyalty to him, even as they clamored for him to take tougher stands and sometimes voted against him. "I have no reason to be indifferent."
Feeling the heady rush of an electoral mandate, freshmen wanted more and wanted it faster when they arrived, demanding seats at the leadership table and prodding GOP leaders to take a harder line on spending matters. As Ellmers noted, they got a lot of what they wanted - not just from Boehner but also on the jumbotron scoreboard of national politics, where they racked up victories over President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. Along the way, the freshmen also integrated into the fabric of the Republican Party and the House itself, proving that they aren't all the die-hards and dead-enders they are often portrayed to be.
"Everyone's reflecting one another," said Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam, the Republicans' chief deputy whip.
Behind the numbers
To study the habits of House Republicans, POLITICO picked 100 of the 691 House roll calls through August of this year, focusing on marquee political issues - such as the budget, the debt limit and repealing Obamacare - and second-tier agenda items that helped reveal the policy and political leanings of the newcomers. Bills naming post offices and procedural requests to "move the previous question" were left off the list, as were resolutions setting the rules for debate on bills and motions to adjourn, approve the House's daily journal and send bills back to committee for more work.
The analysis, which included 23,570 individual "yes" and "no" votes, covered House action on sweeping budget plans, matters of war and diplomacy, federal regulations, labor issues and hot-button social policy fights.
The data suggest, and some Republican insiders say, that the freshman class clout can be overstated. Of the 240 House Republicans, 80 - or exactly one-third - were sworn in for the first time in January of this year.
Their ability to influence the direction of the agenda was felt immediately but not because they shut the government down, forced a default or tried to eliminate a department of the administration. By those measures, they are far more mainstream than the freshman Republicans who stormed into the House majority behind Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995.
That's not to say they are afraid to push back if they face the threat of crossing their constituents by supporting the party line. It's just that they get things done early in the process, before they actually have to vote on the House floor.
For example, House Republican leaders were forced to rewrite their original plan for fiscal 2011 appropriations to include much deeper spending cuts - enough to claim that they were trying to cut $100 billion in their first year in the majority.
"The real power behind the freshman class has been the influence that we exercise before things ever hit the floor, early on in the process," Rep. Todd Young, who hails from Indiana's battleground 9th District, told POLITICO. Once the freshmen have had their say - and a bill moves in their direction - most are willing to jump on board, Young argues.
But in some Republican circles, there's a strong sense that the power of the freshman class is a myth. They don't meet to plot strategy, they don't form blocs to vote against Republican priorities, and the hard-liners among them are indistinguishable from more senior colleagues who form the heart and soul of the conservative Republican Study Committee. Only a relative handful - 15 out of 80 - have joined Rep. Michele Bachmann's Tea Party Caucus, a number that helps expose the myth of willful "tea party freshmen" driving an extremist agenda.
"There was a number in the freshman class who were the leaders and the most outspoken and took the issue by the horns and were the driving force in the freshman class who were saying we need to push as far as we can on this conservative principle," New Jersey Rep. Scott Garrett said of the months-long battle over a debt ceiling increase that threatened to plunge the nation into default. It was "certainly not the whole freshman class, and some of the freshman class were saying that was going too far."
A scramble for purity
Despite the attention they get for holding the hard line, outspoken freshmen like Joe Walsh of Illinois and Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina are exceptions in a freshman class that is evenly distributed throughout a top-to-bottom list of the Republicans most likely to vote against the party. A testament to Boehner's ability to find the sweet spot in his conference: The folks most likely to vote no are a mix of moderates and conservatives.
Overall, the class mimics longstanding factions within the Republican Party: New England moderates vs. Southern conservatives; foreign policy hawks vs. populist isolationists; libertarians vs. law-and-order types; and oilmen vs. conservationists. To the extent that their votes show tendencies, they are more likely to vote against spending-related bills and the U.S. mission in Libya.
For example, the freshmen voted 54-26 in favor of Virginia Rep. Scott Rigell's amendment to block funds for Libya operations while the rest of the Republican Conference split 76-82. It was one of the rare votes on which the freshman class defined the party's position. While the amendment failed, the overall Republican vote tally was 130 to 108.
When Obama struck a deal with John Boehner to keep the government running through Sept. 30, 17.5 percent of the freshmen voted no, compared with 9 percent of other Republicans. With strong Democratic support, the measure passed easily, 348-70.
Roskam told POLITICO that the freshmen are more interested in accomplishing their policy goals than standing out from the crowd. By the end of the legislative process, most of them want to find a way to vote yes.
"The freshmen have come to Washington to do something and not to be somebody, and there's a palpable kind of distinction," Roskam said of their integration into the conference. "It's not a surprise to me that they end up on passage on a lot of things where the conference is."
Still, others say the freshmen have provoked a scramble for purity, pushing the party to the right as lawmakers try to find ways to prove their conservative credentials in an atmosphere of one-upmanship. They're fitting in, these sources argue, because they are forcing others to adopt their line or suffer the consequences of appearing too squishy on issues that matter to grass-roots activists.
"There's some overcompensation, preening, conservative exhibitionism if you will. ... It's a process that feeds upon itself," confided one freshman who asked to remain anonymous. "Maybe it has to do with keeping up with this reputation, which is really a myth, that the freshman Republicans have infused a new type of conservatism. ... It's like there's no appetite for incremental progress toward the goals that presumably we all share. In fact, there's hostility toward it."
Process of change
The list of freshmen most likely to buck their party is a mix of conservatives and moderates. Michigan Rep. Justin Amash's record, which shows he voted against the GOP 40 percent of the time, defies ideological categorization. But upstate New York moderates Chris Gibson and Richard Hanna ranked second and third, at 30.3 percent and 26 percent, respectively. They voted against spending cuts for Amtrak, NPR, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Energy Department; backed labor on a GOP effort to repeal Davis-Bacon prevailing-wage laws; and voted repeatedly against extending certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act.
Similarly, those most likely to support the Republican line are a microcosm of the conference.
The top 10 include all three Arkansas freshmen, both Mississippi freshmen, Young of Indiana and two of Boehner's fellow Ohioans, Bob Gibbs and Bill Johnson. The Arkansas freshmen - Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin and Steve Womack - seldom stray from each other or the party line. The only time all three did,they voted for second-term Florida Rep. Tom Rooney's amendment to kill the second engine for the F-35 fighter jet. On that vote, Johnson and Gibbs went with the majority of Republicans, and with Boehner, by voting against Rooney.
"Where they diverge is that there is a group of them that believe that compromise is what's wrong with Washington," said a senior Republican aide. "Most of them, though, understand and believe that fixing the problems we have, even as big and urgent as they are, is a process, and certainly one that can't be completed when Republicans control one-half of one-third of the government."
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