Here is a Thanksgiving treat for you guys as Rush and Pence sit down one on one to discuss the future of the conservative movement. Please enjoy! Happy Thanksgiving and may God bless you and your family. An assignment: I want you to thoroughly absorb this important information from the Indiana congressman who is Chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), with 110 members the largest group of conservatives in Congress. Led by Rep. Pence, the RSC has recommended more than $500 billion in “offsets,” or cuts, over 10 years to compensate for Hurricane Katrina outlays. Rush: Congressman Pence. How are you?
Pence: I’m well and terribly honored to have the opportunity to speak to you. First-time caller, long-time listener.
Rush: [Laughs] I appreciate your making time. I know you’ve got to be swamped. But I wanted to talk to you because you’re part of the leadership in the House effort to get a handle on the out-of-control spending. Let me ask you, when did you first get your desire to go to Congress and why?
Pence: I grew up in a small town in southern Indiana. My grandfather immigrated from Ireland, so you can imagine, being a small-town boy in a big Irish Catholic family, that John F. Kennedy was an inspiration to my youth. Very early in my life, his example and his idealism lit a fire that led to a desire to be in politics. I was the youth Democratic Party coordinator in my little county in southern Indiana back in 1975. But when I heard the voice of Ronald Reagan, I knew that the Republican Party was where the ideals of my grandfather, my father, and the ideals of this nation, the ideals that I believed in, really reposed.
Rush: You’ve been in Congress how long now?
Pence: I’m in my fifth year in Congress. I was elected in 2000, but it took me 12 years to get there. I was a candidate back when Ronald Reagan was still in the White House in 1988, ran again in 1990, and then for ten years did my best impersonation of Rush Limbaugh every day; on about 20 little radio stations across Indiana.
Rush: I’ve heard about that.
Pence: I’m honored. Like millions of other conservatives, you greatly inspired me in my career. I had the opportunity to work in radio in Indiana three hours a day, six days a week, for about six years. From that career I re-entered politics in 1999, and then fulfilled my lifelong dream of being elected to Congress in the fall of 2000.
Rush: Thanks very much, but the correct way to say this is that you’re now inspiring others. I’m sure you’re familiar with what happened with the Contract with America, and the successful effort to balance the budget a few short years after that. But when you got there, I imagine you found less discipline on the spending side than what you expected to find?
Pence: Sometimes I felt a little like a Minute Man who showed up ten years late for the Republican Revolution.
Rush: I know how you feel.
Pence: Back in 1988, we were talking about ending Jimmy Carter’s federal Department of Education. We were talking about devolving entitlements back to the states. And I ran on the themes of Ronald Reagan’s years in the White House, and on the early Newt Gingrich’s vision for a Republican majority. Then I was out of politics for ten years. When I was elected in 2000, I felt a little bit like the frozen man. I’d been frozen before the Revolution, and thawed out after it was over. You can imagine my surprise when, in 2001, the No. 1 priority of the new Republican Congress was the largest expansion of the federal Department of Education in its history, and mandatory testing in the 4th and 8th grades. Then when I was re-elected in 2002, the No. 1 priority was the creation of the first new entitlement in 40 years-the Medicare prescription drug bill. In January 2004 I had an opportunity to give the keynote address at the CPAC convention. That’s where I first began to assert that I felt the shift of Republican governance in Washington was off course, that we were steering ever so subtly into the dangerous and uncharted waters of Big-Government Republicanism. I believe that still.
Rush: Interesting date, 2001. That happens to coincide with the inauguration of President Bush. I think people reading this interview will be fascinated to know the perspective of House Republicans who interact with the President. Clearly, the President was in favor of the education expansion- and in fact, wanted Ted Kennedy to participate. President Bush came to Washington pledging a new tone. He wanted to try to unify people. Then the Medicare entitlement came along-and there were other examples. You were probably a little disappointed. What was the House leadership doing at this point, and how did you interact with them? And what could the House leadership do, since the President was elected by the people of the country rather than by individuals and districts, as you were?
Pence: It’s an important question. In defense of President Bush, he came to Capitol Hill with a pledge to introduce national testing so we could identify failing schools and give students educational choice vouchers. When Teddy Kennedy was done with it, gone was any educational choice; all that remained was national testing and a 52 percent increase in the Department of Education. So, too, on the Medicare bill. In his 2000 campaign, George Bush called for an expansion of the Helping Hand program the state level in Medicaid to Americans who qualified, up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level. That would have addressed the one in four American seniors who lacked prescription drug coverage because they couldn’t afford it. But instead of giving the President the very focused program he requested, Congress created the one-size-fits-all massive new entitlement that we passed two years ago. So in some respects, while the President did bring these issues up, I can’t help but feel that the majority in the House and Senate were too willing to go along with the demands of the Democrat minorities on those bills.
Rush: I have to tell you, Congressman, that’s great to hear. Growing Republican majorities felt the need to accommodate the demands of the minority Democrats. Why?
Pence: This is where I flip the tables back a little bit, Rush. I think some of that was due to the strong pressure from the White House to get something done. Once Teddy Kennedy and the Democrats figured out that the President wanted an education bill from Congress during his first two years in office, they made that first Democratic vote very expensive. We had to put vouchers on the chopping block; we had to see a huge increase in the federal education bureaucracy. In fairness to our leadership, the President made it very clear that he wanted a Medicare prescription drug bill to pass. Democrats are very good at Big Government; they’ve got a lot of practice. They know how to count votes. To the extent that the President was not willing on either bill to truly walk away from the sale, to get out the veto pen if the final legislation did not reflect his vision, the House leaders were left with what they were left with: To get a bill done, you have to work with Democrats. We ultimately ended up with mainly Democrat policies in both education and Medicare.
Rush: That’s everybody’s perception. Some members of the freshman Class of 1994, who arrived very idealistic and enthuse, have since left dispirited. They’ve told me it was too big: government is a monster that had planted roots too deep for too long to actually do anything about. You’ve hung in. Why?
Pence: I’m speaking to an honorary member of the Class of 1994.
Rush: Still proud to be. I have not cut and run.
Pence: I know. The good news is, an awful lot of other members of the Class of 1994 have hung in as well. People like John Shadegg of Arizona and others who have stayed, who have fought, who have learned-as the late Russell Kirk wrote famously- that politics is the art of the possible. They’ve stayed true to their core principles and they’re staying in the fight. That’s the reason we’ve seen the positive progress in the wake of Operation Offset. It was the residual effect of conservatives not only being the majority of the majority, but also that the Class of 1994 have all risen to very significant positions in the Congress. So when push came to shove on whether we’d find budget cuts to pay for the cost of Katrina, those 1994 revolutionaries, now turned leaders in the “Congress, made their importance felt.
Rush: Good. So there’s a chance this is actually going to survive?
Pence: I think it is. In fact, I think in large measure due to your voice and many voices in the conservative movement around the country, we started a bit of a brushfire for fiscal discipline and limited government by our modest efforts here on Capitol Hill. The enthusiasm we’ve sensed in the last several weeks-which members of Congress have expressed to me, having gone home to local Republican dinners or been confronted walking out of church or synagogue- for renewing our commitment to limited government, renewing our Party’s commitment to fiscal discipline, is very real. It’s humbling for me to be a small part of that.
Rush: Thank you. I appreciate that. But we’re only words out here; you have to buck up under all the pressures there. I’m sure you get pressure from the White House. And Democrats obviously don’t like nay of this-they want more spending at every opportunity. This would be a good time to mention a quote of yours from last June. You said, “The conservative movement is at a crossroads. As the Republican Party did 40 years ago, as actor Ronald Reagan said 40 years ago, we’ve come to another time for choosing: Whether we’re committed to the ideals of limited government, fiscal discipline, and traditional moral values, or whether we will continue to sacrifice those principles on the altar of preserving our governing majority.” You said the movement went astray when it started using the federal purse to buy votes, that too many conservatives started to believe that ”big government is good government if it’s our government.”
Now, one of the reasons I think you have all this support out there is that the base has never changed on this. The base that elected the freshman Class of 1994, and elected George W. Bush, has remained steadfast-and they’re still waiting for deliverance on this. And frankly, during the last five years a lot of people have held their noses and supported Republicans as a Party because of the war, or because of the opportunity on judges. But now things have come to a head, and the voices of the base are being heard by you and, obviously, the leadership. I saw that your efforts seemed to force a reversal of sorts by the Speaker, Mr. Hastert, who I like and admire, by the way. I know that he’s got a lot of pressures himself. But when you say “too many conservatives started to believe that big government is good government if it’s our government,” those are fighting words. Any recriminations come your way because of your continuing to be the pioneer on this?
Pence: Sure. In NASCAR they have a saying, Rush: “Rubbin’ is racin’”-you can bang fenders with your teammates and still get across the finish line. You can do it on Capitol Hill, too. But when I first used that phrase at CPAC in 2004, it was expressed from the heart. But while Washington is a city of great pretensions, and commentators and political leaders love to talk about how the Republican Party has changed and can now be described as Big Government and conservative, the truth is that the Republican Party as defined by millions of men and women who have labored over the decades to elect conservatives to every branch of government at every level, that Republican Party has not changed. I still believe that the overwhelming majority of people who vote Republican across this country do so in the hopes that the ideals of our Founders, the ideals of Ronald Reagan, will be made real in Washington in the policies of the land.
Rush: There’s no question they do, and that’s why you’re attracting a lot of attention. And I know people get elected and discover that Washington’s a different culture, a social and political and media culture that is still pretty much dominated by the left. Everybody wants to be liked, and everybody wants to get along with their neighbors. What kind of pressure is brought on people like you who are considered to be off the reservation of the D.C. culture to, as they say, “grow”-that is, to get with the program that Washington is really all about, which is spending money?
Pence: There are pressures in Washington, D.C., sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle. It was once said to me that being in Congress is like everybody’s second chance at high school. You have your little cliques, you have your popular groups, you have your shop class guys, you have your cheerleaders. Everyone wants to be accepted. For my part, since it took me 41 years of living and 12 years of trying to get here, I try not to pay a lot of attention to those currents. I always tell members of our 110-member caucus that my only ambition in Congress is to let my “yes” be “yes” and my “no” be “no,” to try and do every day what I told people on the radio and told friends and my community and neighbors I would do if I ever got here. If you come to this city and you know who you are and you know what you believe and you know who you serve, the pressures can be more than overcome by any man or woman willing to come here and make a difference.
Rush: I wish it were true for a majority there, but it seems so many get caught up in it. It’s a lot of power that members of Congress have. In the Senate you could say that each one of those people have one-hundredth of the spending power of the federal budget; you can divide it 435 ways in the House. It is a considerable amount of power. And we know how it works: you’ve got to do what the leadership wants in order to climb the ladder. Every career in business has its own ladder of success. In an article title, “Deep Pockets, Small Government, and the Man in the Middle” in the Sept. 27 Washington Post- and I’m asking you this precisely because I am automatically suspicious of the Washington Post-Dana Milbank reported that you were basically taken to the woodshed behind closed doors by the Speaker and the leadership, and that you’ve since toned down your, as they call it, “hard-charging rhetoric.” Did that happen?
Pence: I say this with great respect, but I’ve made a practice of never commenting on private meetings between my colleagues, including the leaders in the Congress. But as I said in a letter to the editor about a week later, that particular article was completely inaccurate-as anyone would conclude who read “Another Time for Choosing,” my speech to Young America’s Foundation, or looked at the subsequent events where I and dozens of other House conservative have continued to go to the Floor, on the nation’s airwaves, and vigorously and unapologetically advocate finding budget cuts to offset Hurricane Katrina. The Washington Post report was inaccurate; the rumors of my political surrender were greatly exaggerated.
Rush: I assumed that, since there has been no political surrender.
Pence: No. There hasn’t.
Rush: Do you believe you’re on the way to prevailing?
Pence: I don’t know that we are, and that’s where I need your help, and frankly, the help of hundreds of thousands of your readers and millions of your adherents, Rush. When Speaker Hastert unveiled a bold plan to increase savings on entitlement spending by $50 billion, the White House for the first time in this Administration offered a recision package of budget cuts, and even eliminating up to 100 programs-for the first time since 1977 recommending reopening the budget act in the middle of Congress. But all that will only happen if millions of Americans pick up the phone and call their members of the House and Senate and say, “We want budget cuts to offset the cost of Katrina.”
Rush: Does that really work? Phone calls to members of Congress?
Pence: Nothing works more effectively than an average American from the area that a member of the House or Senate serves, picking up the phone or preferably typing an email or a letter and sending it to their Congressman on that particular issue. I literally read all my mail. I know you could never possibly do that, but I read all my mail, including all my email. Every member of Congress has staff who read and evaluate the input they’re getting. And what a difference since we announced Operation Offset! Frankly, its’ no secret, Operation Offset created some friction within the Republican majority in Congress, and I heard a little bit of that.
Rush: See, we don’t understand this. That’s conservatism; that’s who the voters think they sent there. And the voters get upset that when these people who are all conservative-sounding get to Washington, they seem to be in trepidation about acting on the very things they were elected to do. They seemed frightened of the Democrats, of the press, or what-have-you. It’s simply amazing to hear you say that something as sensible as finding budget cuts to pay for Katrina relief would be met with opposition by Republicans. We could expect that from Democrats.
Pence: Well, I’d need somebody as smart as you to explain that to me. But it did create some friction. Some of it may have simply been that many members of Congress were still stinging from criticism of the national government’s response to Katrina and thought the primary objective was simply to get money to the recovery efforts and leave the small matter of the bill for future generations. I think that underestimated the ability of the American people to deal with a national tragedy in a fiscally responsible way. The American people were ready to do that and the response we got affirmed that.
Rush: Not only that, but we no know the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, as many of us suspected, as fabricated by the press. There weren’t rapes and murders. There weren’t mass numbers of people killed or not rescued. There wasn’t poisonous, toxic water. All of this was rumor, amplified by the press, that turned out not to be true. One of the reasons the Republicans are a majority is because most of the voters in this country distrust, and in some cases, detest the media. So in the aftermath of Katrina, with the behavior of the press confirming that distrust, it frustrates a lot of voters that Republicans would still fear the media.
Pence: I understand that frustration. Present company excepted, they have plenty of reason to be afraid of the media and the treatment they received. But I really think that both the White House and our leadership underestimated the American people and their versatility and their ability to deal with those tragic circumstances but also make the tough choices. Back in Indiana when a tree falls on your house, first you tend to the wounded, then you start the cleanup, then you sit down as a family and figure out how you’re going to pay for it. Congress did a pretty good job on the first two things, spending over $60 billion in six days. But until House conservatives stepped into the fore and you turned your extraordinary megaphone loose across the United States on behalf of Operation Offset, we hadn’t yet sat down to figure out how we’re going to pay for it. But this debate is not over with the unveiling of Speaker Hastert’s plan to offset Katrina costs, or with the President’s endorsement of offsets to free up money for reconstruction. This debate has really just begun. And it is my fondest hope and literally my prayer that the American people will engage their elected representatives to give those officials the courage to make the though choices. If the American people engage on this, we will prevent this catastrophe of nature from becoming another catastrophe for our children and grandchildren.
Rush: I don’t think you should worry about support coming in. It’s reverberating in a big way. People understand that the federal budget of $2.6 trillion is never cut, despite the Washington lingo for “cuts.” People in Congress may think that the average American doesn’t know how much $2.6 trillion is, but it would take you 31,000 years to count from one to one trillion if you count, “one, two, three…” one number every second. It’s in many ways incalculable. The Democrats say, “We don’t have enough money,” yet we know the food stamp program is advertising for applicants because they’re not spending what they’re allotted. I have reports from many of the markets that my show is on, that during my program the Agriculture Department is running ads seeking food stamp applicants. And this has been going on for quite a while. There’s all kinds of fat, waste, and fraud in the federal budget – “my answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I’ll be glad to do it. But nobody has been able to come up with any yet” – my first reaction to that was he was being sarcastic. But I may have been wrong. Is he serious that as much paring of the budget as possible has been done?
Pence: I’m not sure your first reaction wasn’t right, Rush. When Tom DeLay was serving as Majority Leader, a role all of us prayerfully hope he’ll be able to return to soon, he knew how to throw down the gauntlet. I have to tell you, that was the moment Operation Offset was born. When I read that the Majority Leader said, “Bring me the offsets, no one has brought me offsets,” I went back and sat down in front of our 110 members and said, “our leadership has thrown a challenge on the table for us to bring offsets. We want all of you to go back and work with your staffs - we want to have an event next week where we unveil dozens of ideas where to cut the federal budget.” Remember, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, when asked about budget cuts to pay for Katrina, basically said, “I don’t even want to talk about cuts.”
Rush: Right
Pence: And despite lobbying by Sen. Tom Coburn (R, OK) and Sen. John McCain (R, AZ), and myself and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R, TX), the President included not a single reference to fiscal discipline or budget cuts in his address from New Orleans. At the time we were bringing Operation Offset to the fore, the whole debate as about increasing the national debt or raising taxes. We took what the majority Leader said as a challenge to add spending cuts to that debate. While it created some friction within the Republican majority, I think the progress that we’ve made now with the White House and our own leadership leading the charge to apply Republican principles of fiscal discipline to deal with this natural disaster, is evidence that we back-bench conservatives may have had some effect.
Rush: I’m glad to hear that. I’m happy that my first instinctive take on that was accurate. It sounds like something he would sarcastically say. By the way, my personal opinion is that the indictment against DeLay has been engineered, since he can’t be defeated in the arena of ideas, to try to criminalize what he believes- but most importantly, take him out of the leadership position with hopes of derailing the Republican effort on a number of things, specifically this. Has that happened?
Pence: It has not happened, Rush. There’s no question that throughout his public career, Tom DeLay has been an effective legislator and a leading voice for conservative values in Washington, D.C. But while we’ve lost an all-star player on the field, the coach is still on the sidelines with the headset on and holding the clipboard, and his name is Speaker Dennis Hastert. Speaker Hastert has made it clear that on everything from budget cuts, to Katrina, to moving some sensible legislation on immigration reform to making the President’s tax cuts permanent, that we are going to move this Republican Congress and a positive agenda forward. I have every confidence that Speaker Hastert, who’s spent more time as a coach than he has as a Speaker of the House, will continue to coach the team to a very successful 109th Congress.
Rush: One of the biggest proposed offsets was the idea to just postpone the implementation of the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan for one year. The White House rejected that. You said, “With all due respect the White House and their intentions, House conservatives will vigorously pursue the one-year delay in the Medicare prescription drug entitlement.” You expect to fight on that right away?
Pence: We do. While that issue may be settled in the corridors of Washington, D.C., it is far from settled in the hearts and minds of the American people. When we passed the prescription drug entitlement, the first new entitlement in 40 years, three out of four seniors already had prescription drug coverage. And 25 of us dug in on the House Floor for what became the longest vote in the history of the House of Representatives, about two hours and 45 minutes, before the bill finally passed by a single vote into law - adding trillions in unfunded obligations to future generations. I think the least we could do, as we continue to absorb the extraordinary cost of Katrina, is either pare down or delay or, as Sen. McCain has argued, outright reconsider the creation of this massive new entitlement. If there’s a sliver lining to Hurricane Katrina, it may be that it has laid bare, not only much of the landscape of the Gulf Coast, but also an errant fiscal course of Republican governance in Washington, D.C. We can harness that energy, harness those new priorities, and we should certainly apply that to the Medicare entitlement.
Rush: According to a recent story in the The Washington Post, the liberals are in a funk because their desire to use Katrina as a mechanism to expand their welfare-state thinking is not working because everybody can see the results of 60 years of unchecked liberalism in Louisiana. They’re in a funk. Really, I think that’s because of you, and because of these ongoing efforts to cut spending and to say, “We’ve got to pay for it.” Plus, I think the American people are more informed and educated than they’ve ever been, and they can see this for themselves. Which gets back to my point that there’s no reason for Republicans to be fearful. The leadership in the House and the Senate ought to be on offense, it ought to be aggressive and confident. Because after all, we won the majority of votes in all of these elections.
Pence: I think that’s exactly right. The American people are more informed than they were 15 years ago when I first ran for Congress. You’re a big reason for that, Rush, and a lot of us behind microphones as Rush Limbaugh pretenders are the follow-on to that as well. People are more informed. The most encouraging thing to me in the wake of Operation Offset has been that while some of our colleagues are, frankly, horrified at us bringing up the idea of paying for Katrina with budget cuts, after they had spent a four-or five-day weekend at home, many of those same members returned to Capitol Hill and said, “I was home and people were listening to talk radio and they heard about what you’re doing-why don’t you tell me a little bit more about that?” It was very encouraging to know that the strength, character, and resilience of the American people were on display-as one member after another in the Republican majority walked up to me on the Floor and said, “Let me know how I can help. People back home think you’re on the right track.”
Rush: That is encouraging. But it’s also a little bit frustrating that they don’t instinctively know this. They know who the people are who elected them, and they know that these people are conservative, and they know the definitions of the conservative core principles.
Pence: Again, there is nothing more compelling than a handwritten letter from a constituent, from the area code that you serve, who writes in a heartfelt way that they expect the member of Congress to live up to the ideals of the Republican Party-limited government, fiscal discipline- and they’re prepared to back them, even if it affects a program they directly benefit from. There is enormous power when one letter after another, one phone message after another, is received at their office.
A genuine outpouring of support for tough choices during tough times will have-and always has had-an effect on the Congress of the United States.
Rush: People are going to be overjoyed to read that. This has been very uplifting. I’m glad that I’ve had a chance to talk to you about this. Many people are going to assume you’re doing the Lord’s work and therefore they’re going to be praying for you out there. Be on the lookout for a whole bunch of phone calls and letters after people read this.
Pence: I’ll tell you, it means a lot to me that you take time and include us in the newsletter. I think I’ve actually been a very small part of this. I really do believe, with all my heart, that our honest efforts here on Capitol Hill cannot be compared to your courage and the clarity of your voice for our values over the last 15 years. So just please accept my sincerest thanks for your ongoing work for the movement.
Rush: Well, I do. I appreciate it very much. I’ll say the same thing back to you. It’s all a combined effort, and that’s why I think people like you need to be affirmed and supported and singled out when you are swimming against the tide, with you are-though it still befuddles people who think they sent a whole House of Representatives of people like you on the Republican side up there. So keep it up-and let us know anything else that we can do down the road.
Pence: We will, Rush. Really and truly, as a guy who’s been following in your shadow for a long time, keep up the great work and we’ll keep you in our prayers.
Mr. Pence, a 46-year-old Republican, is getting attention as an advocate of a leaner federal government who also has good credentials as a cultural conservative. He has an instinctive grasp of the news cycle from years of talk-radio show hosting in his home state. He is gaining mention as a possible future speaker of the House, with Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) likely to step down in 2008.
Mr. Pence, a 46-year-old Republican, is getting attention as an advocate of a leaner federal government who also has good credentials as a cultural conservative. He has an instinctive grasp of the news cycle from years of talk-radio show hosting in his home state. He is gaining mention as a possible future speaker of the House, with Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) likely to step down in 2008.
