Re-Election Prospects of Tea Party Freshmen in Congress

Illinois Primary Reveals a Weakened Tea Party
(Alex Altman, Time.com, March 22, 2012)

Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum was the heavyweight bout in Illinois on Tuesday night, but one of the undercards was much more interesting. Democratic redistricting forced Republicans into their first intra-party primary skirmish of 2012, a bout that laid bare divisions between the GOP’s past and future.

The race pitted Don Manzullo, a conservative 10-term congressman nicknamed ‘Mad Dog,’ against Adam Kinzinger, a telegenic 34-year-old freshman who swept into Congress as part of the 2010 wave. Like many in the 87-member freshman class, Kinzinger was elected with Tea Party support amid promises to return the party to the conservative principles abandoned by get-along, go-along Washington veterans. The twist is that in Tuesday night’s primary, the roles were reversed. Manzullo, the vet, was backed by a battery of conservative organizations, including the Tea Party primary battalion FreedomWorks and the Illinois Tea Party. Kinzinger, meanwhile, got a critical boost from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who bucked convention by endorsing the Air National Guard pilot while his allied super PAC dropped $50,000 on a pro-Kinzinger ad.

Cantor’s role in the internecine battle sparked much of the media interest, but the race was also a useful signpost of the party’s evolution in the Tea Party era. Last year, I wrote a dead-tree dual profile of two Illinois Republican freshman to illustrate the impending collision between pragmatism and purity. Joe Walsh was the Tea Party purist, and Kinzinger was the pragmatist, someone who believed in a role for government (his backing of unemployment insurance put him at odds with much of his party), eschewed polarizing rhetoric and spoke of the need to find common ground. He clearly had mixed feelings about the movement that put him in power. When I asked him why he hadn’t joined the Congressional Tea Party caucus, he replied: “I’m representing a big district. I’m a conservative, but at the same time I don’t want to pigeonhole myself. I think the Tea Party has some great ideas. Limiting government is a great thing, but I don’t necessarily want to be part of the caucus. But I’m definitely supported by them in comparison to who I ran against.”

Though Manzullo argued otherwise — in one ad he likened the freshman’s record to Nancy Pelosi’s — Kinzinger largely toed the party’s increasingly conservative line, backing fantasy legislation like Cut, Cap and Balance and railing against a debt-limit hike. Still, he took his lumps for not being pure enough. Early on he was cited by Heritage Action for America as one of the GOP freshmen least committed to cutting spending. “This is a guy who definitely strayed,” a FreedomWorks staffer told Politico. Last year was a scary time for Republicans to run afoul of conservative outside groups itching to primary transgressors as proof of their clout, and Kinzinger’s spokeswoman complained more than once when I suggested he was anything less than arch-conservative.

But with the economy slowly improving and the GOP bruising by the battles of the past year, the dynamic has shifted. On Tuesday night, Kinzinger beat Manzullo by double digits in a new district. You could view the victory as the Establishment fending off the Tea Party, or through the prism of youth over seniority. Tea Party-affiliated groups will likely again be a force in 2012, particularly in the smaller states where they thrived two years ago. But their power has attenuated as the movement’s popular support has waned. Of course, as Kinzinger knows, it helps to have the party’s heavy hitters on your side.

Election 'chickens' coming home to roost for farm bill debate
(Forrest Laws, Farm Press Blog, March 23, 2012)

It must have been a lot of fun to show up at meetings in the summer of 2010 and bash your sitting congressman or senator. No one knows how many video clips were shot of Tea Party members shouting down members of the U.S. House and Senate, some of whom had put their careers on the line for farmers.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak, and, for the first time in decades farmers are faced with the very real possibility of not having a new farm bill or much chance of an extension of the current legislation when the 2008 law expires later this year.

By now, most of you have seen reports of the new federal budget proposed by Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. The proposal would cut $33 billion from federal farm programs or about $10 billion more than the House and Senate Agriculture Committees proposed last fall.

Unlike previous years, this time the House of Representatives is filled with freshman members who have little or no sense of the purpose of farm programs or the stability they provide to agriculture. All most of them know is they think they have a mandate to cut federal spending.

House and Senate Democrats have tried to point this out in their statements about the Ryan budget. Rep. Colin Peterson, D-Minn., and ranking member of the House Ag Committee, said farmers could pretty much kiss any chance of a new farm bill goodbye for this year.

Sen. Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and one of the principal authors of the 2008 farm bill, said the Ryan budget poses real threats to programs such as health care and farm programs for residents of his state of North Dakota and the nation.

“The cuts to agriculture programs will especially hurt North Dakota, and would pull the rug out from under thousands of hard working farm and ranch families,” he said in a statement released by his office.

Conrad said the Ryan plan “is a mix of deep reductions in federal spending and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. It calls for cutting federal support for education and job training programs, energy and infrastructure programs, Pell grants for college students, and health care programs, including Medicare.

“The House Republican proposal also upends a bipartisan agreement on the amount of federal support for agriculture programs and will make it extremely difficult to craft a new farm bill this year.”

As Conrad notes, the Ryan budget calls for about $180 billion in cuts in the USDA budget, including $31 billion to commodity and crop insurance programs, $133.5 billion to nutrition assistance programs, and about $16 billion to conservation programs. That’s in contrast to last fall’s House and Senate agriculture committee proposal to cut $23 billion in agriculture, conservation and nutrition program funding.

"We had an agreement on what the savings would be out of agriculture and then Congressman Ryan comes along and throws that agreement out the window," Conrad said. "In order to get this farm bill done now, it's going to require House Republicans to tell Congressman Ryan that his plan goes way too far and that they're not going to go for it."