Despite the election results, it looks like House Republicans are going to shift their leadership in a conservative direction. My friend and colleague Mike Brady, who studies Congress, put together a nice graph illustrating this point (the line represents DW-Nominate estimated ideal points on a left-right ideological dimension):
House GOP Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) are stepping down from their posts and are likely to be replaced by Reps. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.), respectively. In addition, there has been talk of a challenge to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) by either Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who ultimately withdrew his name, or Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.), who is still considering it. As you can see, the new leadership entrants are all to the right of the existing leadership and the GOP House median (represented as "minority" on the graph).
"Conservative direction" can have at least two meanings:
1. Opposed to the expansion of government
2. Favoring socially conservative policies.
My impression is that the people named by Brendan tend to be conservative in sense #1.
Posted by: David | November 16, 2008 at 09:18 AM
Conservative or right-wing?
Right now, 'conservative' is like 'libertarian was in 1990-2003; 90% of the time it was a way of supporting right-wing policies while pretending to be something else. Now, people who supported Bush up to the point where he became a loser have to have some way of disassociating themselves from him; that way seems to be to call themselves 'conservatives'.
Posted by: Barry | November 16, 2008 at 05:53 PM