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CQ ROUNDTABLE
Are GOP Hard-Liners Endangered Species?

By Phil Duncan

With just three months to go until Election Day, GOP control of the House in 1997 may hinge on whether the most endangered Republican first-termers have the dexterity -- and the desire -- to moderate their political image to attract swing voters.

The 73-member freshman class has a reputation as staunchly conservative and confrontational toward President Clinton and congressional Democrats. Will the brash Republican revolutionaries of 1995 adopt a kinder, gentler stance in preparation for the 1996 election? Some already have; others appear resolute in their conservatism.

Steve Stockman, for instance, compiled a voting record of unblemished conservatism during his first 16 months representing Texas' 9th District, where he upset veteran Democratic Rep. Jack Brooks in 1994.

On "Contract With America" votes in early 1995, he supported a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, a GOP welfare overhaul plan and a package of bills making it more difficult for federal agencies to issue health, safety and environmental rules. He faithfully sides with abortion opponents and with defenders of the right to keep and bear arms. He voted in March 1996 to repeal the ban on certain semiautomatic assault-style weapons, and in April he was one of 46 Republican holdouts against a bill giving the federal government enhanced powers to combat terrorism.

But in May, the politically charged issue of raising the minimum wage brought Stockman into an unusual alliance with Democrats. He supported a 90-cent increase in the wage floor and was the only Texas Republican -- and one of only 43 in the entire House GOP -- who voted against a minimum wage exemption for small businesses. The 9th District has a sizable working-class constituency. As a Stockman aide explained: "While the economic case for raising the minimum wage is weak . . . the emotional case is strong."

In Ohio's 6th District, the minimum wage vote also lured freshman Rep. Frank A. Cremeans from his habitually conservative line. As in Texas' 9th, hourly wage-earners are a substantial bloc of voters in the 6th, and Cremeans is in a rematch this year with the Democratic incumbent he narrowly ousted in 1994, Ted Strickland. Although Cremeans voted to increase the minimum wage, he did support an amendment to exempt small businesses from paying the wage.

Stockman and Cremeans may have been reluctant converts, but they likely broadened their appeal with their minimum wage votes. In contrast, a number of their freshman colleagues who anchor the chamber's GOP right did not make even that exception to the conservative orthodoxy.

An analysis of key House votes cast over the course of the 104th Congress reveals that a dozen of the most politically endangered GOP freshmen have compiled records of nearly unalloyed conservatism: J.D. Hayworth (Arizona 6th), Andrea Seastrand (California 22nd), Helen Chenoweth (Idaho 1st), John Hostettler (Indiana 8th), Todd Tiahrt (Kansas 4th), Jon Christensen (Nebraska 2nd), David Funderburk (North Carolina 2nd), Fred Heineman (North Carolina 4th), Tom Coburn (Oklahoma 2nd), J.C. Watts (Oklahoma 4th), Wes Cooley (Oregon 2nd) and Richard "Doc" Hastings (Washington 4th).

These freshmen represent highly competitive districts. Ten of the 12 districts were in Democratic hands before the national GOP sweep in 1994. None of the Republican winners got more than 57 percent of the vote.

Upon taking office, these 12 freshmen knew they might well face tough re-election contests, yet throughout the past 18 months they maintained the conservative revolutionary fervor that prevailed at the convening of the 104th Congress, when Congress' new GOP majority thought it could transform the American political landscape.

Each one of the 12 voted in October 1995 for the GOP leadership's plan to reduce projected Medicare spending. Each has voted a resolutely anti-abortion line. All voted in March 1996 to repeal the assault weapons ban. Whenever an issue has arisen that pits landowners and business interests against environmental preservationists, these freshmen have sided with private enterprise.

For all of them, a paramount goal has been reducing the deficit and downsizing the federal bureaucracy. Indeed, five in the group -- Chenoweth, Hostettler, Tiahrt, Christensen and Coburn -- in June 1996 went so far as to vote against the GOP leadership's budget plan for fiscal 1997 and beyond. They were among a cadre of GOP conservatives who objected that the budget plan showed the deficit increasing in the short run before reaching balance by fiscal 2002.

By any measure, nearly everyone in the GOP Class of 1994 is a conservative. Yet, like Stockman and Cremeans, most freshmen facing re-election pressure have leavened their records to some degree. Not so for the stalwarts named above. Come November, the voters' verdict on this resolute band will be pivotal in determining whether Democrats approach the 20-seat gain they need to retake the House majority.

Copyright © 1996, Congressional Quarterly Inc. All rights reserved.

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