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# Copyright

## Copyright

The Right Way? Republicans Rethink, Reload for 2014  
The Wall Street Journal  
Copyright 2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.  
Smashwords Edition 

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# For GOP, Midterm Elections Will Measure Party's Resurgence

##  For GOP, Midterm Elections Will Measure Party's Resurgence

_By Gerald F. Seib_

The morning after the 2012 election, The Wall Street Journal's front page carried this summary of the political landscape: "A campaign year that began with great hope for Republicans....instead ended Tuesday night with the GOP in a cloud of gloom."

It wasn't just that Democratic President Barack Obama had won re-election. It was that he won even though his job approval had been stuck below 50% for months, and the unemployment rate had hovered around 8% for most of the year. He won relatively easily, holding intact the coalition of young, female and minority voters that first put him in the White House. A presidential campaign that once looked very winnable for the GOP had gone awry.

Many Republicans also believed they had blown a chance to reclaim control of the Senate, and blamed tea party activists who took control of the nominating process in some states and produced candidates who were easily caricatured as extremists. The party's most-energized activists, the party establishment felt, had undermined its fortunes.

Republicans had maintained control of the House. Even there, though, they had lost the national popular vote in House races to the Democrats, 48% to 47%. Only favorable mapping of congressional districts saved House control, small solace at a time when the GOP seemed to have had a legitimate chance to win the House, Senate and White House at once.

In the election's aftermath, the party wasn't in agreement on what the problem was. Some thought that, because Republican nominee Mitt Romney had lost despite winning more white votes than any GOP candidate since the 1980s, the outcome was a sign that the party needed to broaden its coalition to include more young and minority voters. Others urged a recommitment to conservative principles that would energize the party's existing base.

Such disappointments and disagreements can set a party into a bout of soul-searching. That's exactly what happened to the Republicans, who embarked on perhaps the most public period of introspection by either party since Democrats tried to regroup after Richard Nixon destroyed George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus appointed five veteran GOP campaign operatives to form a task force, fan out across the country, and conduct thousands of interviews and focus groups with party regulars. The group returned in March 2013 with a report a Journal story called "a scathing self-analysis" of the party's problems.

"Public perception of the party is at record lows," the report said. "Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us."

The task force also found that there was no single view of what the Republican party ought to stand for --but, rather, several views, often in conflict.

The task force said the party should embrace an overhaul of the nation's immigration system to appeal to Hispanic voters, but House Republicans balked at immigration plans that provided any path to citizenship for the millions of Hispanics in the country illegally. And while many in the party's leadership--not least House Speaker John Boehner--thought the GOP's image as a party that could be trusted to govern effectively would be enhanced by negotiating a broad budget deal with President Obama, the House tea party faction repeatedly blocked that path.

The tea party caucus in the House became a kind of guerrilla force in its own right. It was personified in many ways by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a first-term congressman who, within weeks of his election, was spearheading an unsuccessful coup against Mr. Boehner. That gambit didn't work, but Mr. Massie and like-minded colleagues discovered that they had the power to stop other things the party establishment wanted, such as passage of a farm bill, an increase in the government's debt ceiling and an increase in the federal debt ceiling. These were conflicting impulses no task force could resolve, and with which the party has continued to grapple in the halls of Congress.

In many ways, however, the more interesting introspection and experimentation has been happening not in the Capitol or a task-force hearing room but in statehouse buildings around the country and in conversations Republicans launched with voters far from Washington. Those are the places The Wall Street Journal's political reporting staff visited to chronicle much of the party's attempts to find its footing, compiling many of the stories collected here.

In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback set out to create a "red-state model" he thought could be a model for the party nationally. The model was designed not to smooth off the corners of conservative views, but to sharpen them. He passed the largest income tax cut in state history, and set out to make more fundamental changes in the state's tax code. He was confident the result would be robust economic growth, but even some Republicans worried about the sales tax increase needed to fill part of the revenue hole, and the fate of the state's education system under decreased funding became a hot topic of debate.

In Ohio, another Republican governor, John Kasich, tried to blaze a different trail. He pushed tax cuts but, citing his strong Christian beliefs, argued that Republicans benefit from showing a compassionate side, cooperated with the Obama administration by undertaking an ambitious expansion of the Medicaid health program for the poor. The fact that the strategy aligned him with a health-care overhaul--Obamacare, as Republicans called it l--widely despised within his party seemed not to trouble the governor at all.

"I know this is going to upset a lot of you guys, but we have to use government to reach out to people living in the shadows," he told one conservative group.

Meanwhile, Republicans grappled with what many considered the party's biggest long-term political liability: its poor performance among the nation's burgeoning Hispanic population. Many turned to Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico for guidance and inspiration. The Journal's profile of him summed up his importance to his party succinctly, calling him "the rarest of Republican Party officeholders, a very conservative Anglo who keeps winning elections from a predominantly Latino electorate."

The Pearce prescription is simple: Engage, rather than shy away from Hispanics. "You just have to show up all the time, everywhere," he said. "Most Republicans don't bother. I do. I bother."

In South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham had a different problem. When he supported an immigration reform plan that provided a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, he found that though many party leaders agreed with his course, convincing voters back home was a harder sell. He has stuck to his position in the face of voter skepticism, working to buttress his position by stressing his conservative credentials on other issues.

The party's conflicts remain largely unresolved. Still, by the end of 2013, something interesting began happening: Things started to come easier for Republicans. Some of the tea party faction's impulses subsided, enough of them standing aside that their congressional leaders could shepherd through Congress a two-year budget plan that put to rest the politically harmful talk of a government shutdown.

The rebels, despite their disdain for government borrowing, also allowed their leaders to work out a plan to raise the nation's debt ceiling, ending the fear--especially acute in the financial and business communities--that the U.S. might default on its debt. Republicans seemed to have decided that proving they could govern smoothly and effectively was perhaps as important as showing they would stand for small government and fiscal responsibility.

As it happened, Republicans had cleared the decks of those questions just in time for President Obama to run into the buzz-saw of problems emanating from his signature domestic-policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act. The rollout of the law turned into a disaster when Americans found it nearly impossible to perform the seemingly simple task of going online to sign up for insurance coverage.

The results showed in public perceptions. Mr. Obama's job-approval rating began sliding. By March 2014 it had reached 41%, the lowest of his presidency. The share of Americans who said they wanted the 2014 mid-term elections to produce Republican control of Congress inched higher than the share who wanted Democratic control.

None of that represented a magical turnaround for Republicans, of course. Indeed, 45% of Americans said they held negative views about the party, while only about a quarter had positive feelings. If Republican fortunes were improving, that appeared to have as much to do with the problems facing the opposition as much as positive moves by Republicans.

What those mixed signals will produce in the crucial 2014 mid-terms, which in turn will determine control of Congress for the next two years and the arc of the remainder of the Obama presidency, remain very much an open question.

The situation as spring arrived in 2014 was the culmination of a long and bumpy journey Republicans began after election night in 2012. It was a journey in an attempt to find--as a series of Journal stories framed the question--the Right Way.

The stories that follow chronicle that journey.

_Gerald F. Seib is The Wall Street Journal 's Washington Bureau Chief._

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# Contents

**The GOP's Internal Debate Plays Out in Congress**

Freshmen GOP Lawmakers Revel in Maverick Power

Heritage Foundation Becomes a Handful for the GOP

Utah Senator Pays Price Back Home for Shutdown

Government Shutdown Is Defining Moment for Boehner

Boehner Plea Runs Into GOP Rebellion

Hal Rogers, a Republican Team Player, Chides His Own

House Conservatives Gird for Next Budget Battles

Cruz Vows to Keep Pressing Against Health-Care Law

**Elections Underscore a GOP Civil War**

Mitch McConnell Campaigns on Clout Despite Anti-Insider Mood

Idaho Race Shows Split in GOP Donor Base

GOP Hawks Are on the Rise

GOP, Business Recast Message

Tea Party Faces Test of Its Clout in Primaries

**Across the Country, Republicans Seek a Way Forward**

Party Eyes 'Red-State Model' to Drive Republican Revival

One GOP Lawmaker Shows How to Woo Latino Voters

Deep in the Red of Texas, Republicans Fight the Blues

As Prisons Squeeze Budgets, GOP Rethinks Crime Focus

An Ohio Prescription for GOP: Lower Taxes, More Aid for Poor

Republicans Shy Away From Their Own Health Plan

Governors, GOP Allies Clash Over Tax Cuts

Evangelical Leader Preaches a Pullback From Politics, Culture Wars

GOP Sees a New Path for Senate Through Iowa

President's Approval Rating Hits New Low

Republicans Widen Push to Pick Up Senate Seats

Ted Cruz, Invoking Reagan, Angers GOP Colleagues but Wins Fans Elsewhere

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# The GOP's Internal Debate Plays Out in Congress

## The GOP's Internal Debate Plays Out in Congress

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# Freshmen GOP Lawmakers Revel in Maverick Power

##  Freshmen GOP Lawmakers Revel in Maverick Power

_By Patrick O'Connor_

_Aug. 1, 2013_

_Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, has changed the agenda in Washington with a defiant posture. Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal_

ASHLAND, Ky.—U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie lives off the electrical grid in a solar-powered home on a 1,200-acre farm in the Appalachian foothills. The first-year congressman and engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built the house from lumber he logged and milled.

The Kentucky Republican also lives off the grid politically. Just a few weeks after his election, he helped spearhead an unsuccessful coup against House Speaker John Boehner and has since voted regularly against party priorities.

The defiant posture of Mr. Massie and a dozen or more like-minded conservatives has changed the agenda in Washington. In a capital where partisan power is nearly evenly balanced, he and a small but committed group of new House activists have discovered that they have the ability to block not just Democrats but their own party's leaders—and they are willing to use it.

"I'm going to hang in here like a hair in a biscuit," said Mr. Massie, who has twice appeared on the TV show "Junkyard Wars," as one of the competitors who build machines from scrounged objects. "I'm digging in for the long haul. This place is worse than I thought."

Republicans hold just a 17-vote majority in the House, which means such a relatively small but cohesive bloc can derail just about any measure that doesn't draw Democratic support. That already happened when Mr. Boehner was unable to bring the conservatives into line on a big farm bill, compelling unhappy Republican leaders to make wholesale changes in the legislation. Trouble also lies ahead on a proposed immigration overhaul, as well as efforts to fund the government and extend the U.S. borrowing authority this fall.

Mr. Boehner has told audiences in New York and Washington not to expect much activity from the House for the rest of the year. The speaker was forced to rely on Democrats, for example, to help pass disaster relief for superstorm Sandy, the Violence Against Women Act and an extension of Bush-era tax rates for people who make less than $400,000.

Mr. Massie, 42 years old, represents a potent strain of small-government conservatism. He and his colleagues, unlike some of their predecessors, didn't come to Washington content to trim government. Instead, they believe wide swaths of what government does need to be reconsidered from the ground up to deal with deficits and a potential explosion in entitlement spending.

These lawmakers, who now are the front line of the tea-party movement, are unwilling to fall in line with GOP colleagues. They are, however, willing to vote against what is perceived as their own political interests, as some did in opposing farm subsidies popular back home.

"There are a bunch of zombies here," Mr. Massie said in an interview, referring to lawmakers in both parties. "Most of them come here with the purest of intentions, but they just get bitten...I don't know whether to hug 'em or hit 'em with a baseball bat."

The White House has concluded that this conservative bloc is so formidable that it now is, in effect, seeking to work its agenda through the Senate instead of the House.

Mr. Massie is hard to pigeonhole, though he leans to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. He drives an $80,000 Tesla electric sedan with a license plate that says, "Friends of Kentucky Coal." He wants lower taxes and less federal spending. He has sponsored or co-sponsored 61 bills, including ones to abolish the Federal Reserve and the new health-care law, as well as a measure to make legal possession of guns in a school zone.

He and his wife, Rhonda, grew up in Lewis County, Ky., population 13,870. They left after high school to attend MIT, where Mr. Massie, with the help of scholarships and financial aid, earned degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, as well as the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, known as the Oscar for inventors.

At MIT, the couple started a company in their apartment to sell a virtual-reality computer technology Mr. Massie created, using some of the 24 patents he developed.

In 2003, after building the company to a 60-person team that raised $30 million from investors, the Massies sold their stake and moved back to Kentucky to raise their four children on the farm where Rhonda Massie grew up. Mr. Massie's father, a beer distributor, and his mother, a nurse, still live in Mr. Massie's childhood home, about 15 miles away in Vanceburg, Ky.

Mr. Massie took a one-week course to learn how to build a timber-framed house on his farm, which he bought from his in-laws. He used a bulldozer to fell the 600 trees he used and assembled the solar electricity system himself. He later acquired 50 head of grass-fed cattle.

Mr. Massie said he began reading the Lewis County Leader, a local newspaper, where he learned county officials had proposed a levy to build a government office to lure a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Mr. Massie, who estimated the levy would have cost him $100, wrote letters to the newspaper and staged a protest that drew 150 opponents. Officials later dropped the idea, and Mr. Massie was soon drawn to politics by the small-government wave that washed across the U.S. in 2010. That year he ran his first political campaign and was voted the top elected official in Lewis County.

As the county's judge-executive, Mr. Massie scoured financial records and halted services he thought the county didn't need. To save money, he installed a new water tank at the county jail himself.

When Mr. Massie ran for Congress in 2012, his maverick reputation had already reached Washington. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and other House Republicans donated more than $50,000 to Mr. Massie's top rival in the GOP primary, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Mr. Massie used the donations to reinforce his portrayal of his opponent as beholden to Washington. "Once she wore the establishment hat," he said, "it was all over."

He won over college student John Ramsey, who had given $3 million of his inheritance to build a group that backs free-market, small-government conservatives in the mold of former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul. The group, Liberty for All PAC, spent more than $640,000 on Mr. Massie's behalf, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations.

Mr. Massie won the seven-candidate GOP primary with 45% of the vote, and then beat Democrat Bill Adkins by nearly 30 percentage points.

House freshmen used to be a quiet breed. But consecutive elections have swept away older lawmakers and replaced them with newer faces, instilling younger members with a measure of power over party elders.

In Washington, Mr. Massie joined a handful of freshmen who won seats despite opposition from congressional Republicans. First-year U.S. Reps. Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma and Ted Yoho of Florida both beat incumbent Republicans.

It took Mr. Massie just a few weeks to run afoul of party leaders. In late December, Mr. Boehner was negotiating with President Barack Obama to avoid a combination of pending tax increases and spending cuts that was nicknamed the fiscal cliff. As talks fizzled, Mr. Boehner asked the House to approve extending tax rates for all but million-dollar earners.

Mr. Massie, who was sworn in early after his predecessor resigned, opposed raising tax rates and voted to block it.

Mr. McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican in the House, bounded across the House floor to scold the newcomer, Mr. Massie recalled. Mr. McCarthy then turned to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, ringleader of the revolt, and said: "Jim, he doesn't even know what he's doing. He doesn't know what you're getting him into."

After Mr. McCarthy left, other Republicans congratulated the freshman for standing his ground, Mr. Massie said. Mr. Boehner pulled the bill.

Mr. Massie's reputation was cemented weeks later when he tried to deny Mr. Boehner's re-election as speaker. Although the plot fizzled, 12 Republicans voted for someone else or abstained, the most defections by fellow party members for a speaker since 1923.

Mr. Massie and his allies are supported by a network that raises money and builds support outside the party structure. Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the Heritage Action for America use social media and direct outreach to congressional offices to fan discontent among conservative voters nationwide over legislation they oppose.

"The internal forces here in Washington, D.C., don't produce the right answer," Mr. Massie said. "We need to rally people on the outside."

In March, Mr. Massie and 15 other Republicans nearly upended legislation to fund the government. Some opposed the bill because it failed to cut funds for the health-care law. Others were annoyed that party leaders denied an amendment to prevent Mr. Obama from spending taxpayer money to play golf.

Democrats say the infighting helps them paint the GOP as out of step with voters, while tamping enthusiasm among conservative activists.

"You've got the far right worrying about the far, far right and pulling the entire party out-of-step with independents," said Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

GOP leaders tried to bring the agitators into the fold. They scored a victory in March by persuading Mr. Bridenstine to support a budget blueprint that Mr. Massie and nine other Republicans opposed.

To win his vote, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) spent more than an hour with the freshman, trying to quell Mr. Bridenstine's concerns about increased spending. During voting, House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R., Calif.) sat next to Mr. Bridenstine to prevent others from lobbying him against the bill. Mr. Bridenstine said the Ryan plan "was the best we could do" to stabilize the debt.

Republican leaders aren't likely to try a similar effort with Mr. Massie. He told his staff to give his cellphone number only to his most fiscally conservative colleagues. Of Mr. McCarthy, the GOP majority whip, Mr. Massie said, "I run around tying shoes and Kevin runs around untying them."

The rhetoric by House Republicans has cooled since party leaders put off until fall a fight over extending the U.S. borrowing limit. The controversies buffeting Mr. Obama have also galvanized Republicans, including the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service.

"The energy has dissipated some," Mr. Massie said. Party leaders "have succeeded in peeling off some members." He recently attended a session with Mr. Boehner in the speaker's Capitol office. Mr. Boehner told the group to be patient. Change, he said, takes time.

Mr. Massie used the meeting to lobby Mr. Boehner on one of his favorite causes, telling the speaker to oppose legislation that would give states the authority to collect sales tax on Internet transactions. Mr. Boehner told him the bill would never reach the floor, Mr. Massie said.

Representatives of retailers Best Buy, Home Depot, Target and others had piled into Mr. Massie's office in June to give him an earful about how online retailers now have a pricing advantage, according to participants in the talks.

The speaker recently promised his rank-and-file he wouldn't allow a vote on an immigration bill unless a majority of his caucus supported it—a nod to Mr. Massie and others.

Mr. Massie also made a concession to party leaders when he backed a revised farm bill after GOP brass, bowing to conservative pressure, stripped money for food stamps.

But the Kentucky Republican and his allies were back at it last week, nearly passing a measure to defund the National Security Agency's data-collection program.

Back in his district, Mr. Massie revels in his outsider status. He returns to Kentucky on weekends and during the week he stays in the basement of his aunt's house in Virginia.

At a town-hall meeting this spring, he told constituents about a recent flight home from Washington. His 4th congressional district, which is heavily Republican and 92% white, favored former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the 2012 election by 29%,

The congressman took his seat in the last row of the plane when a man next to him jabbed him in the ribs. "Do you realize who's on this flight," the man said, gesturing to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, all fellow Republicans.

"I was sitting there," Mr. Massie said, "hoping he doesn't ask me what I do for a living."

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# Heritage Foundation Becomes a Handful for the GOP

##  Heritage Foundation Becomes a Handful for the GOP

_By Patrick O'Connor_

_July 22, 2013_

_Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint for years waged policy battles as a Republican senator. CQ Roll Call_

For four decades, the Heritage Foundation was a stately think tank that sought to define conservative thinking for Republicans.

Now, in one of the more significant transformations in the capital's intellectual firmament, it has become an activist political operation trying to alter the course of conservative thinking. It now challenges establishment Republican leaders as much as it informs them, making waves in the process.

The think tank has long laid the framework for Republican efforts to cut spending and taxes, deregulate sectors of the economy and overhaul large parts of the federal government, including education programs, welfare, Medicare and Social Security. The group also has been vocal on social issues, such as speaking out against same-sex marriage.

But since the foundation in 2010 created Heritage Action for America, a lobbying arm designed to pressure Congress, it has clashed with Republican congressional leaders over bills to fund the government and extend Bush-era tax rates. On immigration, the foundation has steered away from its past approach of emphasizing the economic advantages of allowing more potential workers into the U.S.

The latest dust-up arose earlier this month when Heritage Action opposed a revised version of the farm bill. Some Republicans were incensed because GOP leaders had bowed to the group's demand to strip out money for food stamps and other nutritional programs.

The Heritage Foundation or its lobbying arm have pressed congressional Republicans on several major measures:

Immigration The foundation opposed the immigration overhaul that passed the Senate, with the backing of many Republicans, because it grants legal status to people in the country illegally.

Farm bill Heritage Action helped force GOP leaders to split food stamps and other nutritional programs from a broader measure to reauthorize agricultural programs, only to oppose the resulting measure.

Boehner tax plan The group helped scuttle an 11th-hour tax proposal offered late last year by Speaker John Boehner that would have rolled back Bush-era tax rates for all Americans who make more than $1 million.

"We went into battle thinking they were on our side, and we find out they're shooting at us," said Mick Mulvaney (R., S.C.), a conservative who also lobbied to split food stamps into a separate measure in hopes of enacting changes to the programs. He said Heritage Action's refusal to back the farm bill even after food-stamp funding was removed "undermines the credibility of the organization."

Behind much of the lobbying group's heft are two tectonic shifts in American politics: conservative activists' growing distrust of GOP leaders and the technological innovations that allow well-organized groups and individual politicians to connect directly with pockets of supporters and donors.

"Influence is being dispersed," said Heritage Action Chief Executive Mike Needham. "The reason we're controversial is that people don't like change."

Heritage Action says it has 61,000 donors but doesn't disclose sources of its funding. It raised $5.9 million in 2012, according to figures provided by the group, a significant uptick from 2011 but still a sliver of the $82 million its parent organization raised. A number of prominent conservatives sit on the Heritage Foundation board, including billionaires Steve Forbes and Richard Mellon Scaife.

This isn't the first time the foundation has sparred with GOP leaders. It was born in 1973 in part to counter what its founders viewed as then-President Richard Nixon's drift to the political center, and it notably clashed with Republicans during last decade's enactment of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

The establishment of Heritage Action coincided with a generational shift at the foundation after former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who had long waged policy and election battles intended to push the Republican Party to the political right, took the foundation's reins earlier this year from one of its founders.

Unlike Club for Growth, a small-government advocacy group that built its reputation by wading into GOP primaries to knock off incumbent Republicans it sees as insufficiently conservative, Heritage Action seeks primarily to influence legislation. The group has recruited 5,000 local activists, known as "sentinels," in 160 key congressional districts and claims an email list of 400,000 supporters. Hundreds of those activists dial in to weekly Monday night conference calls run from the fourth floor of the foundation's headquarters, where they are often warned about coming legislation frequently authored by House Republicans.

Aides rank each member of Congress based on his or her votes on key measures, alerting supporters about each important roll-call vote.

"I don't even look at those scores from Heritage and Club for Growth," said Rep. Ted Yoho (R., Fla.), a conservative who regularly votes against party leaders. He said the combined farm bill that Heritage Action helped kill included a large set of conservative provisions, ending the direct-payment program to farmers and cutting $20 billion over 10 years from food stamps.

"They're overlooking what we're here for," he said, of these outside conservative groups. "We're here to legislate."

Mr. Needham, however, sees his group as an extension of the Heritage Foundation's legacy of challenging orthodoxy.

"There's a huge swath of the American people who feel totally unrepresented in Washington, and you have two political parties that are equally part of the problem," Mr. Needham said. "We need to have a political party that steps up and says, 'Look, it's true, the fix is in in Washington and it might be difficult, but we're going to be the party for you.'"

House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas (R., Okla.), an author of the farm bill, accused Heritage Action of criticizing Republicans just to raise money—a complaint echoed by other GOP lawmakers. Critics contend that Heritage Action and other groups pick policy fights in order to tap a conservative donor base that remains skeptical of party leaders, and that it relishes these internecine battles.

Mr. Needham takes umbrage at that complaint. "It's offensive, the notion that in Washington, D.C., a politician is allowed to go to Charlie Palmer's steakhouse and collect $10,000 [political action committee] checks, but if 50,000 Americans around the country want to write $25 checks, something untoward has happened," he said.

Up next is the battle over immigration. Heritage Action has taken a hard line against any bill that legalizes people already in the country illegally. It also has been a leading promoter of the idea that legalizing illegal immigrants carries long-term costs to taxpayers—a position at odds with that of the Congressional Budget Office, which said the bill overall would spark economic growth and trim the deficit.

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# Utah Senator Pays Price Back Home For Shutdown

##  Utah Senator Pays Price Back Home For Shutdown

_By Neil King Jr._

_Oct. 23, 2013_

SALT LAKE CITY--Republican Sen. Ted Cruz received a standing ovation from supporters at a GOP event when he returned home to Texas after the 16-day government shutdown.

That hasn't been the case here for Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, his staunchest ally in pursuing the strategy that led to the shutdown. The state's freshman senator has found a cold shoulder since returning to one of the reddest states in the country.

Critics in the Republican Party, including former governors and sitting legislative leaders, openly blame Mr. Lee for helping chart a course they say weakened the party's standing nationally and dented a state economy reliant on tourists drawn to its national parks.

"Among the tea party, Mike Lee is a rock star," said Holly Richardson, a former Republican state lawmaker and political commentator. "Among everyone else, not so much. There's real unhappiness about what he has done to Utah and to the image of the Republican Party."

The debate over Mr. Lee's role in the shutdown is part of a broader struggle over the future of not just the Utah GOP but the national party, one that both tea-party activists and the Republican establishment expect to play out for months.

Even before the shutdown brought Mr. Lee to national prominence, some Utah party and business leaders had begun a $1 million petition drive to overturn the state's caucus system that brought him to power. That system, which gives grass roots delegates a large say in picking party nominees, toppled incumbent GOP Sen. Robert Bennett--a more conventional conservative--in 2010 amid a wave of anger over passage of the health-care law. Mr. Lee went on to win the seat that November.

Fallout from the government shutdown, which ended last week, has opened a rift between the GOP's activist flank and its more business-minded, establishment wing. Business groups say they are reconsidering which Republican candidates nationally they should support.

That divide is stark in Utah, which gave Mitt Romney his largest margin of victory in the presidential election. Former Gov. Jon Huntsman describes the sentiment among Utah Republicans toward Mr. Lee, his former general counsel, as one of "widespread discontentment over how Mike Lee has handled his priorities in the Senate."

"There is now massive, unparalleled frustration among mainstream Republicans toward the actions of a few in our party," said Kirk Jowers, who directs the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics.

Discussions with more than a dozen party leaders and lawmakers found widespread support for Mr. Lee's quest to unravel the health law, which helped to provoke the shutdown. But many fault him for a championing what they saw as a combative, unrealistic strategy that fueled dissension within the GOP, battered its image and harmed Utah.

"Our last chance to overturn Obamacare is to retake the Senate next year, and what Mike did in helping shut down the government made that a lot harder," said Dan Liljenquist, a former GOP state senator who lost a GOP challenge last year to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah).

Since returning to Utah on Friday, Mr. Lee has made no public appearances. In an interview, he said he is catching up on calls while spending time with his family at home in Alpine, 45 minutes south of Salt Lake City.

"Utahns don't like fighting in Washington, and they certainly didn't like the fighting that led to the government shutdown," Mr. Lee said, explaining the negative reaction. But he thinks he will be vindicated: "I believe that over the next year, Obamacare will become even more unpopular, so that people will see what this was all about."

Others agree. "You are going to have people angry at you whenever you take on a really tough issue," said Utah GOP chairman James Evans. "But over time, people will come around to Mike's views as he continues to articulate them."

Still, even some of Mr. Lee's backers note the contrast in the post-shutdown reception given to Mr. Cruz, who according to news accounts received an eight-minute ovation from people at a Texas GOP women's group meeting Saturday, and Mr. Lee.

"Republicans here are polarized, no question about it," said Spencer Stokes, who served for two years as Mr. Lee's Senate chief of staff. "So, Ted Cruz went home to a standing ovation, and Mike Lee has hardly wanted to go shopping for fear of being confronted."

Republican circles are now rife with talk of who might challenge Mr. Lee in 2016. So far, no one is firmly raising a hand. But the Count My Vote initiative to do away with the state's caucus system, backed by many of the state's largest GOP donors and business names, represents perhaps the best-organized effort in the country to counteract the tea-party wave in the 2010 elections.

Mr. Lee could face a tougher route to re-election in 2016 if GOP caucuses are replaced with a direct primary. That would allow a more centrist candidate to make an appeal to all Republican voters, not just the activists who dominate caucuses, political observers say.

A Brigham Young University poll taken in the midst of the shutdown battle showed the freshman senator's approval rating falling to 40%, the lowest rating for a sitting Utah senator in years. Among Republicans, Mr. Lee's favorable ratings were little different from those of Rep. Jim Matheson, the state's lone Democrat in Congress.

Neither Mr. Lee nor the state GOP are showing signs of thriving financially, as many of the big state donors look elsewhere. Despite his national prominence, the senator raised just $249,000 in the past quarter through September, about a fifth of what Mr. Cruz raised, and emerged with just $52,000 in cash on hand.

Pushing back against local criticism, some allies of Mr. Lee say anger at the senator is merely a remnant of the animosity that establishment Republicans still harbor over the defeat of Mr. Bennett. Moreover, Lee spokesman Brian Phillips notes that a large majority of the Utah legislature in March voted for a resolution calling on the Utah delegation to use "all means possible" to block the implementation of the health-care law.

In an email, Mr. Phillips said, "Mike Lee is the only one DOING the things the overwhelming majority of legislators SAY they want done."

###

# Government Shutdown Is Defining Moment for Boehner

##  Government Shutdown Is Defining Moment for Boehner

_By Patrick O 'Connor_

_Oct. 1, 2013_

WASHINGTON--House Speaker John Boehner opened a meeting of his fellow Republicans Monday by telling them: "If you really want to fight, you've got to put everything on the table."

That included shutting down the government.

Mr. Boehner, of Ohio, didn't pick the battle to strip funding from the new health overhaul, but the standoff will stand as a defining moment in his roller-coaster tenure as speaker. Mr. Boehner has survived a series of deadline-induced crises since 2011 but now finds himself helping to usher in the first government shutdown in nearly two decades.

Torn between a conservative wing adamant about dismantling the new law and Democrats unwilling to revisit a law that they already have passed, Mr. Boehner sided with his conservative rank-and-file. Repeatedly Monday night, he rejected spending bills approved by the Senate because they excluded Republican demands to eliminate or delay parts of the health law.

President Barack Obama has long said he wouldn't accept changes to his signature domestic legislative achievement. Mr. Boehner, speaking on the House floor after a phone call with the president, bridled at Mr. Obama's insistence. "I would say to the president, this is not about me," Mr. Boehner said. "It's not about Republicans. It's about fairness to the American people."

The fight now heads into an uncertain phase in which both parties will blame the other for furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal employees and shuttering nonessential government services.

The next few days could determine not only how long the government stays shut, but the reputations of the nation's leaders--and especially Mr. Boehner. The reaction of financial markets, which will see in this impasse a harbinger of what might happen in mid-October if the U.S. reaches a deadline to raise the federal borrowing limit, could play a role.

Since January, Mr. Boehner has strained to steer clear of either a shutdown or a debt-ceiling crisis for which his party might be blamed, from reshuffling the legislative calendar to scheduling more than 40 votes to repeal or rework the health law, a move designed to give his members ample opportunity to voice their displeasure with the law.

In the end, the impasse resulted as much from the internal dynamics of Mr. Boehner's GOP caucus as it did from the partisan divisions in the country as a whole and the chasm between Democrats and Republicans about basic tax-and-spending policies. After months of jockeying, Mr. Boehner heeded the calls from his most conservative colleagues by refusing to give in on requesting health-law changes.

At a closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement Monday, New York Rep. Peter King railed against his GOP colleagues for favoring a strategy that would result in a shutdown. "We have too many people who follow Ted Cruz," Mr. King said he told his caucus, referring to the Texas Republican senator who has emerged as the face of the push to defund the health law.

In the same session, other Republicans pleaded with colleagues not to advance legislation that would end federal subsidies to help members of Congress and their staffs buy health insurance, lawmakers in attendance said afterward. That was another favored option among some in the party, on the grounds that Congress should interact with the law much like regular Americans.

"What we're doing here is shooting ourselves in the head," California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said, according to lawmakers in the meeting.

Even outside conservative groups who had been prodding Mr. Boehner for months to take a hard line against the new law started to splinter as the midnight deadline approached.

Mr. Cruz and the Club for Growth endorsed the House Republicans' final volley, a measure delaying a requirement that all individuals buy insurance and an end to federal health-insurance subsidies for lawmakers, their staff and senior administration officials.

Meanwhile, Heritage Action, the campaign arm of the Heritage Foundation think tank, which spent the summer building support for an effort to defund the law, opposed the last House offer. Conservative pundit Erick Erickson posted a message on Twitter encouraging Republicans to pass a government-funding bill without conditions, saying, "They've already embarrassed themselves."

Democrats, blaming Republicans for shutting down the government, chided Mr. Boehner. "Why don't you just quicken it up and pass Sen. Cruz the gavel?" Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) said on the House floor.

Boehner allies said the speaker's shift was less about conservative pressure than it was about constituents pressing members of Congress about their concerns over the health law, which became a reality for many Americans Tuesday with the launch of health-care exchanges for buying insurance.

"There has been a change in the dynamics of what he's hearing, not just from Ted Cruz," said Ohio Rep. Pat Tiberi, a close Boehner ally. "It has ballooned way above that."

Negotiations between the House and Senate effectively concluded when House Republicans decided late Monday night to name a committee of lawmakers to negotiate a final spending resolution, a move Democrats had been requesting for months but one that came too late to hammer out a meaningful deal.

Earlier in September, conservatives forced Mr. Boehner and his leadership team to scuttle an initial attempt to pass legislation funding the government. But in the weeks following, the speaker made concessions to his conservative wing by reinserting changes to the law after Senate Democrats stripped them out.

Mr. Boehner also won a big concession over the weekend when conservatives agreed to support legislation that delayed the health law for a year, a step down from demanding a spending bill defund the law entirely. In the process, Mr. Boehner earned praise from a quarter of his caucus more inclined to criticize him.

"I do not think the speaker is making up his comments," said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R., Kan.), one of the conservatives Mr. Boehner removed from his committee slot late last year. "He really believes, as I do, as the polls do, that the people don't want the government shut down and they don't want Obamacare."

###

# Boehner Plea Runs Into GOP Rebellion

##  Boehner Plea Runs Into GOP Rebellion

_By Patrick O'Connor_

_Oct. 15, 2013_

_Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner addresses the media during last year's government shutdown. Getty Images_

Speaker John Boehner assembled his restive troops Tuesday morning to unveil possibly the last chance for House Republicans to make their mark on a bill to fund the government and stave off default.

Rep. Paul Ryan, the party's 2012 vice presidential nominee, said the plan was imperfect but likely the best of the bad options that remained, according to lawmakers in attendance. He also challenged the 30 or so conservatives who had rejected earlier proposals. "Look at where we are," he told them, according to two lawmakers in the meeting. "Your 'no' vote has consequences."

But in a replay of so many other previous showdowns, the more conservative members of the caucus rebelled—even after Mr. Boehner retooled the bill to appease the lawmakers—and party leaders abandoned plans Tuesday evening to bring the bill to the floor.

"I've got one vote and mine's a 'no,' " Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) said after emerging from a meeting with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).

As was the case with previous budget showdowns—such as the 2011 debt-ceiling debate and the 2012 "fiscal cliff"—all eyes are on House Republicans and what they might be willing to pass. By rejecting the latest proposal from GOP leaders right on the cusp of a critical deadline, the House may soon be forced to vote on a deal hatched by Senate leaders.

Months of debate within the Republican Party about how to fund the government and avoid a U.S. debt default came to a boil at the morning meeting in a Capitol Hill basement. The more conservative members of the House GOP voiced their displeasure about Mr. Boehner's proposal as well as their weakened negotiating position. Other, longer-serving lawmakers interrupted their speeches with heckles. An argument broke out about how to improve the bill.

The House budget fight has amplified a long-standing rift between conservatives willing to upend traditional ways of doing business to slow the growth of federal spending and dismantle the 2010 health law, and other, more-veteran lawmakers who see these actions as damaging to the party.

House GOP leaders have repeatedly struggled to muster the 217 votes they need to pass party-line measures without Democratic votes.

The fight has also been a personal one for Mr. Boehner, whose speakership has been repeatedly questioned by his own rank-and-file. He has also come under attack from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.). On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who served with Mr. Boehner in the House, said failure to pass the House plan would put the speaker "in a compromised situation."

At the same time, conservatives have unexpectedly praised Mr. Boehner in recent weeks for sticking his neck out for their priorities, particularly his push to include changes to the health-care law in a budget bill. "I've been quite impressed with our speaker throughout this whole ordeal," said Rep. Matt Salmon (R., Ariz.).

To kick off Tuesday's meeting, Mr. Boehner outlined his proposal. He was blunt, saying the bill was just "putting lipstick" on a separate plan being hatched by Senate leaders, according to lawmakers in attendance.

The proposal would raise the debt ceiling and open the government, while also adding a two-year delay of a tax on medical-device makers and a prohibition on health-care subsidies for the president, his cabinet and members of Congress.

Mr. Boehner reminded his colleagues that the leadership had heeded their concerns at every stage of the fight with the White House and Senate Democrats. Republicans could wait for the Senate to act, which could take days, or they could take one more crack at forcing the action by passing their own version. "We're running out of time," Mr. Boehner told his colleagues, according to multiple attendees.

Mr. Cantor echoed Mr. Boehner's appeal. Republicans had a "binary choice," he said: They could accept the House bill or swallow one crafted by Mr. Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

Rep. Steve Southerland of Florida opened the meeting by leading the group in "Amazing Grace" and offering a prayer. Yet Tuesday's two-hour session mixed bonding with quarreling. A number of Republicans argued in favor of beefing up the proposal by prohibiting staff, in addition to lawmakers and senior administration officials, from receiving health-care subsidies.

Some of the more outspoken conservatives raised complaints about the Republican offer and groused about being largely sidelined since late last week when President Barack Obama rejected an earlier Republican offer.

At points, frustration with those Republicans boiled over. A group of veteran lawmakers shouted "regular order" when the conservatives spoke too long. Others sought assurances that leaders would let their new bill fail, in which case they planned to blame their more conservative colleagues.

Mr. Southerland rose again, but not to sing or pray. This time, he asked his GOP colleagues directly whether they would support the bill outlined by Mr. Boehner, if leaders beefed up the prohibition on health-insurance subsidies. A number said they would.

After the meeting, GOP leaders bowed to conservative demands by changing the bill to extend the health-insurance prohibition to staffers and to fund the government through Dec. 15, a month earlier than the Senate plan. But in the end, that proved to be not enough.

"The government shutdown has made the House Republican negotiating position that much weaker than it was already," said Rep. Charlie Dent (R., Pa.). "Obviously, right now, things are not good. But over time, will things bounce back? We'll see."

Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas (R., Okla.) said only, "We live in challenging times."

Others weren't that gracious. "This is it," said Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). "The Star Wars convention ends today."

—Janet Hook contributed to this article.

###

# Hal Rogers, a Republican Team Player, Chides His Own

##  Hal Rogers, a Republican Team Player, Chides His Own

_By Janet Hook_

_Aug. 2, 2013_

_Rep. Hal Rogers quickly came to believe conservatives wouldn't back the transportation and housing bill. Roll Call/Getty Images_

A soft-spoken party loyalist, Rep. Hal Rogers (R., Ky.) isn't the kind to rock the boat on Capitol Hill.

But the 16-term lawmaker and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee delivered a tongue-lashing to Republican Party leaders last week and called for abandoning the budget-cutting tool known as sequestration, a lament that rang through the Capitol like a firecracker in a church sanctuary.

He stepped out after a bill that would cut spending for housing and transportation programs was abruptly pulled from the House floor for what he said was a lack of support. Reflecting on the bill's collapse in an interview Friday, Mr. Rogers said it showed that many in his party don't have the stomach for the kinds of spending cuts the GOP promised when the House in April passed the budget crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

"A good number of members who had supported the Ryan budget ideals, when it came time to implement it with specific cuts, were unwilling to support it," Mr. Rogers said, smoking a cigar in his corner office in the Capitol. "They abandoned ship."

Mr. Rogers's outburst—he called proposed budget cuts "unrealistic and ill-conceived"—was a fitting send-off as Congress left town Friday for a five-week recess, leaving behind a budget and legislative process in shambles.

The major accomplishments of this session of Congress are few. The Senate, after advancing a bipartisan immigration bill and a flurry of executive-branch nominations, relapsed into partisanship when Republicans blocked a spending bill. Nerves were so frayed this past week that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) at one point called for his noisy colleagues on the Senate floor to "sit down and shut up."

Most ominous of all, Congress hasn't approved—or come even close to enacting—any of the 12 appropriations bills needed to keep the government running after Sept. 30. It is common for Congress to leave big budget fights until the last minute, but the budgeting process now seems so adrift that even congressional veterans find it hard to see a resolution.

"I have to ask myself, why am I even doing this?" said Rep. Jim Moran (D., Va.). "We don't have any leadership in Congress, and there is no consensus among the American people."

Now, frustration is so high that even a team player like Mr. Rogers is breaking ranks.

Mr. Rogers joined the appropriations committee in 1983, a time when federal spending was increasing annually and the committee was a bastion of power. The panel could build support for legislation—and reward its members—by dispensing money for local projects known as "earmarks." Mr. Rogers, who represents a rural swath of eastern Kentucky that is one of the poorest districts in the U.S., in 2005 was dubbed by a local newspaper as the "Prince of Pork."

He became appropriations chairman after Republicans won control of the House in 2010, and by that time, the political winds were shifting. The tea party pushed to end earmarks, anti-spending fervor raged, and GOP leaders even took away the committee's prime office space, near the House floor. Programs that need annual appropriations, the part of the budget overseen by his committee, proved the easiest to cut, even though they made up only about one-third of the federal budget. That frustrated Mr. Rogers, because the fastest-growing part of the budget is in automatic spending programs such as Medicare.

This year's House budget called for making all the cuts in domestic programs and none in defense. The transportation and housing bill, which would have cut programs from $48.4 billion this year to $44 billion next year, was the toughest test yet of Republicans' budget-cutting mettle.

Mr. Rogers knew Democrats wouldn't vote for the bill. He also expected to lose support from some centrist Republicans, especially from the Northeast, who opposed cuts to Community Development Block Grants, Amtrak and other programs. But Mr. Rogers quickly came to believe he couldn't even count on conservatives, with some opposing his panel's bills because they didn't cut spending more.

GOP leaders said that the bill was pulled from the House floor because of time constraints. But Mr. Rogers said the vote count was "bleak."

After the bill was pulled, Mr. Rogers aired his frustrations in a meeting with House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) Wednesday, who listened sympathetically but offered no new budget strategy for the party. "I understand the frustration that they're dealing with," Mr. Boehner said later. But "the sequestration is going to remain in effect until the president agrees to cuts and reforms that will allow us to remove it."

After returning from recess, Congress is likely to pass a stopgap funding bill to keep the government running while it grapples with a fiscal conundrum more far reaching than Mr. Rogers recalls seeing in a career that stretches back to the Reagan administration. "I don't recollect a time like this," he said.

###

# House Conservatives Gird for Next Budget Battles

##  House Conservatives Gird for Next Budget Battles

_By Patrick O'Connor_

_Oct. 17, 2013_

_House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, center, arrives at a House Republican meeting on finding a resolution for the debt ceiling and government shutdown. Getty Images_

WASHINGTON—The mood was decidedly glum Wednesday when a handful of House conservatives gathered in a congressional office building to eat Chick-fil-A and assess what three weeks of fighting had wrought.

Across the Capitol, Senate leaders were announcing a deal to reopen the government and extend the country's borrowing authority, an agreement the House approved later in the night. But the eight Republicans were looking ahead to the next round of budget battles early next year—and they weren't optimistic.

"We have less leverage on the next [government-funding bill] and on the next debt limit than we did right now," said Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has been at odds with party leaders since arriving in Washington late last year.

Idaho Rep. Raúl Labrador looked even further ahead. "This is going to be about the 2014 election," he said. "Are we going to go out there and articulate to the American people what our vision would have been, how this would have turned out better, if we had more conservatives in the House and we had a Republican majority in the Senate?"

The House conservatives were digesting a difficult reality: the deal to fund the government and extend borrowing through early next year wouldn't make significant changes to the 2010 health-care law, a demand that kicked off the budget brawl.

After enduring weeks of barbs by Democrats and even some fellow Republicans for picking a fight with President Barack Obama over the health law, some of the assembled conservatives were eager to return fire.

Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp hinted that some Republicans who chose not to take a hard stand against the health law might face primary challenges next year. Mr. Labrador said, "It was not very helpful when you have person after person going to the media and whining about how difficult this is."

One person not on that list: House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), a frequent target of his party's conservative wing whose speakership has been repeatedly undercut by rank-and-file Republicans. Mr. Boehner surprised some by embracing demands to delay parts of the health law and to allow the government to close.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan said "there is absolutely no talk" of replacing Mr. Boehner as speaker, even in light of his decision to bring the Senate deal to the floor, despite strong resistance from the GOP caucus.

The conservatives were gathered for the October installment of "Conversations with Conservatives," a monthly confab moderated by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. None of them showed signs of retreating from their push to delay or dismantle the health law. They continued to argue that the law is unfair, and restated their goal to shield individuals who don't buy insurance from a penalty that kicks in next year, something the president has already done for certain businesses.

"We were the only group in this whole entire debate who was fighting for the individuals, families and small business, and they will ultimately be the losers of whatever passes," said South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney.

The assembled conservatives, citing the troubled rollout of the health-insurance exchanges, predicted the president may soon do what they have spent much of the year hoping to achieve.

"I'll predict it right now. Within the next few months, you watch, the president himself will delay the individual mandate," Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon said, referring to the requirement individuals buy coverage. "It's not ready for prime time, and everybody knows it."

The lawmakers were openly dismissive of Mr. Obama and said there is little chance House Republicans will ever work with him again on a legislative priority, particularly immigration reform.

The Senate deal appears to guarantee more budget battles early next year because the government is only funded through mid-January and new borrowing authority ends early the following month. Questioned on what factors will be different next time, Mr. Jordan said, "The debt will be bigger and Obamacare will be more unpopular."

Asked if conservatives had formulated a strategy for future battles, Mr. Mulvaney quipped, "I didn't know what the strategy was the first time."

###

# Cruz Vows to Keep Pressing Against Health-Care Law

##  Cruz Vows to Keep Pressing Against Health-Care Law

_By Neil King Jr._

_Jan. 9, 2014_

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stirred a larger disturbance in Congress last year than any freshman senator in recent times, helping to instigate the government shutdown and earning the label of "whacko bird" from fellow Republican Sen. John McCain.

But don't expect Mr. Cruz, back in Washington after what he calls the "whirlwind" of 2013, to flash a newfound mellowness.

In an interview, he lambasted Senate Republicans for a lack of courage, compared himself to Ronald Reagan and vowed to "fight even harder...to repeal every word of Obamacare."

Republicans must use "every leverage point available" to uproot the law, he said in a 45-minute discussion in which he mentioned Obamacare more than 40 times, calling it "a disaster" and "the No. 1 job killer in the country."

Mr. Cruz said opportunities to scale back the law will come with a spending bill to fund federal agencies, which must be approved by Jan. 15, when the government's current funding expires, and the vote to be taken before the spring on raising the federal borrowing limit.

It remains unclear whether the rest of the GOP is in a similarly feisty mood. Speaker John Boehner, the party's de facto leader, ended the year defending a compromise budget deal crafted in part by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and seen by many in the party as a turn toward pragmatism.

Even some of Mr. Cruz's staunchest allies--chief among them Sen. Mike Lee of Utah--are saying the party must be defined by a positive agenda and policy innovations, rather than by confrontation, to retake the Senate and the White House.

"This year is different, because it's an election year," Mr. Lee said, promising to focus on proving "that conservatives have solutions to the problems Americans care about." He added: "We need to win a mandate."

Sporting black ostrich-skinned cowboy boots in his Senate office and sitting beneath a huge painting of Mr. Reagan at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, Mr. Cruz disputed that he is an obstructionist at heart.

He came to Washington, he said, "to focus on jobs and economic growth" before circumstances thrust him into fights over surveillance drones, gun control, Syria policy, the Benghazi attacks and, above all, the push to repeal the 2010 health-care law.

That said, he doesn't hesitate to list "elevating the debate on Obamacare" as his top achievement last year. All harm done to the image of the Republican Party, he argues, was entirely self-inflicted after Senate GOP leaders "actively attacked House Republicans who were standing on principle and fighting to defund Obamacare."

Some other Republican lawmakers, blunt in their criticism of the Cruz-led push that led to the October shutdown, are uneasy with the notion that Mr. Cruz might pursue a similar course this year. "That was a failed strategy," said Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who is pushing measures to amend and minimize the health law. "This year, let's not have shutdown fights."

Mr. Cruz acknowledges that a full repeal of the law may not be possible under after the 2016 presidential election, but he cites signs that sentiment may be shifting enough to make that happen sooner.

One bit of evidence: "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno has taken numerous whacks at the law in his monologues. "Late-night comics are often effective barometers of where the American people are," Mr. Cruz said.

If Mr. Cruz's Senate tenure seems a tad lonely at times, he doesn't appear to mind. Last year taught him that most lawmakers in both parties are beholden to lobbyists and to the imperative of winning re-election--"a sadly bipartisan affliction," he said.

Standing to soak up the Reagan painting, Mr. Cruz drew a parallel between his push to uproot the Obama health-care law and Mr. Reagan's famous "tear down this wall" challenge to the Soviets from near the Berlin Wall in 1987.

Mr. Reagan had to fight to keep that line in the speech, Mr. Cruz said, "because he understood the power of speaking the truth."

Mr. Cruz said he feels a similar vindication now, amid the troubles in implementing the new health law.

"People have said, 'Boy, did you get lucky that Obamacare has gone so badly,' " he said. "But when you are speaking the truth, the truth will prevail."

--Kristina Peterson contributed to this article.

###

# Elections Underscore a GOP Civil War

##  Elections Underscore A GOP Civil War

###

# Mitch McConnell Campaigns on Clout Despite Anti-Insider Mood

##  Mitch McConnell Campaigns on Clout Despite Anti-Insider Mood

_By Patrick O'Connor_

_March 18, 2014_

_Sen. Mitch McConnell, above center at the U.S. Capitol with other Republican senators, will defend his seat in Kentucky's May GOP primary against a tea-party favorite, Matt Bevin. Getty Images_

HAZARD, Ky.—Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the U.S. Senate, is building his re-election campaign around a concept that hasn't been heard much recently: Vote for me—I'm powerful.

In a February swing through southeastern Kentucky, Mr. McConnell touted his central role in inserting a pilot program for hemp growers into a recent farm bill and in fighting with the Obama administration over proposed rules on coal-fired power plants.

In Kentucky, he has benefited from his grip on the state GOP, whose headquarters is named for him. Of the 68 Republicans in the Kentucky statehouse, 64 have endorsed him over his Republican-primary opponent, Matt Bevin, a Louisville businessman favored by tea-party activists.

The 72-year-old Mr. McConnell is a veteran tactician skilled in pulling the levers of power. And despite historic levels of disdain among American voters for Washington and the deal-making that is the senator's forte, he is running on his clout, in his campaign tactics and his pitch to voters.

"I'm going to try to appeal to all Kentucky voters," he said during the February tour, "about the future of the state and the significant loss of clout...if Kentuckians trade in, in effect, a potential majority leader."

All told, Mr. McConnell's 2014 re-election bid is shaping up as a test of whether a consummate insider can win by openly touting his influence at a time when outsiders seem to hold more cachet.

Most unaligned political observers are skeptical Mr. Bevin can unseat Mr. McConnell in the May primary. In the latest Bluegrass Poll of Kentucky voters, conducted by local media outlets, 55% said they favor the incumbent, versus 29% for Mr. Bevin—at a time some polls show tea-party popularity waning.

But some McConnell supporters worry that some conservatives may refuse to vote in November, likely a tight race. The Bluegrass Poll found Mr. McConnell trailing his likely Democratic opponent 42% to 46% in the general election; other polls show the race deadlocked.

Mr. McConnell warns that his defeat, and loss of his seat, would all but ensure continued Democratic control of the Senate. He has taken an increasingly hard line against the tea-party activists who helped nominate Senate candidates that lost in 2010 and 2012, denying the GOP some wins it expected. The GOP needs to net six seats to reclaim the Senate majority.

"This fall, you'll have a choice: Do you want to take my desk and move it over on the other side of the aisle with somebody who is going to make Harry Reid ...the play-caller in the Senate?" Mr. McConnell asked a lunch crowd here in coal country, referring to the Senate majority leader, a Democrat from Nevada. "Or do we want a leader of the majority from Kentucky, who believes in coal, who believes in the kind of America I think all of you and I think we ought to have?"

That message resonates for voters like Winford Cornett, 61, of Carrie, Ky., who retired after 30 years in the coal industry. "If we lose him," he said after hearing the senator in Leburn, Ky., "we lose our voice in Washington."

Mr. Bevin, happy to engage in the insider-versus-outsider debate, is stoking conservative resentment for Mr. McConnell. "The purpose of this party is not to help Republicans in this state, it's to help Mitch McConnell," said Mr. Bevin, 47, in an interview after addressing a multidenominational Christian gathering in the state capitol in Frankfort.

"This is a state where he rules by fear," he said, "but people are weary of it."

Mr. McConnell's likely Democratic opponent in November, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, 35, is similarly attacking him for his lengthy Washington tenure, telling voters he has been there too long and no longer represents Kentucky's interests.

Mr. McConnell, nearly three decades in the Senate, is minority leader, a perch that makes him a particular target for those playing on anti-insider sentiment. In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 81% of those surveyed disapproved of the job Congress is doing.

That disapproval has leached into Kentucky. In the Bluegrass Poll, 60% of the 1,070 voters surveyed disapproved of the job Mr. McConnell is doing in Washington, matching Mr. Obama's rating in the poll. In October 2008, just before the senator's last election, 41% disapproved in the Poll.

"We need a change," said Carol Miller, 67, a Kentucky bed-and-breakfast owner who previously voted for Mr. McConnell but plans to vote for Mr. Bevin. "I don't trust Mitch McConnell. I think he does what he does because he wants to be elected." She will probably vote for the incumbent if he wins the primary, but "it will be a sad day."

Many Republican and Democratic incumbents, under similar anti-insider fire as they head toward elections, are playing down their work in Washington, often positioning themselves as voices for change.

In contrast, Mr. McConnell and his allies haven't been shy about showing clout, including in campaign tactics. Since Mr. Bevin announced his candidacy last summer, McConnell allies have warned activists, some elected officials and political operatives who provide campaign services that they risk alienation by backing the senator's opponent, said people familiar with those warnings. A top consultant to Mr. Bevin said he fielded 15 to 20 calls from McConnell allies encouraging him to drop Mr. Bevin as a client.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which supports Mr. McConnell, told other Republican campaigns not to do business with a consulting firm that produced ads for the Senate Conservatives Fund, one of several groups working to fuel discontent with the senator and some other GOP incumbents.

It was strictly a business decision," said NRSC spokesman Brad Dayspring about the move, which was reported earlier by the New York Times. "We simply choose not to conduct business with firms or groups who actively support Democrat campaigns and help keep Harry Reid in power."

Josh Holmes, a senior McConnell adviser, declined to discuss those episodes. He said Mr. Bevin—who is from New Hampshire and was an investment manager—and his supporters "live in their own reality where a self-funding, East Coast moderate...is more conservative than the most conservative Senate leader in modern history."

At an event last fall, Mr. McConnell's campaign manager, Jesse Benton, appeared alongside Mr. Bevin onstage and quizzed him about the Constitution during an acrimonious back-and-forth in which the manager called Mr. Bevin "a really angry guy" and accused him of lying on his résumé. Mr. Bevin countered that Mr. McConnell has never worked in the private sector, dubbing him "the least popular senator in this nation."

Such tactics have rankled Kentucky conservatives who aren't in the McConnell camp and have been a source of tension dating to the senator's efforts to deny Rand Paul the Republican nomination in 2010.

Soon after, a group of tea-party activists started plotting Mr. McConnell's demise, interviewing would-be primary opponents before settling on Mr. Bevin. "In the past, people were afraid of him," said Scott Hofstra, spokesman for the United Kentucky Tea Party, who said he was among those involved in the plotting. "This is the best shot we're going to have to unseat him."

Mr. McConnell, who dismisses conservative complaints, said after an event in Leburn, Ky., joined by Sen. Paul: "I don't think there's any particular reason conservatives should be upset about my performance. And, of course, I'm pleased to have the support of my colleague Rand Paul. Certainly, that's a solid conservative."

The McConnell team is working to present a unified front, showing how he has the power to bring friend and former foe to his cause. During a recent campaign swing through small towns in southeastern Kentucky's coal country, Mr. McConnell traveled with an entourage of Kentucky elected officials including Mr. Paul and the top-ranking Republican in state government, Agriculture Commissioner James Comer.

Mr. Paul credits Mr. McConnell for reaching out to him after the 2010 primary to unite Kentucky Republicans ahead of the general election. Mr. Paul endorsed him last year. The tea-party favorite's campaign manager, Mr. Benton, also runs Mr. McConnell's campaign.

Mr. Comer's presence displayed Mr. McConnell's reach into the state-party network. Mr. Comer, who was 18 when he first met the senator in 1990, relied on Mr. McConnell for campaign advice, including where to run ads, during his first statewide race in 2011. Mr. Comer is now a leading contender to be Kentucky's next governor.

These surrogates say Mr. McConnell is under fire from people outside Kentucky who don't know what he has done for the state, and that Kentuckians need the senator in Washington because he can stand up to people who don't share their values.

At a stop in the Leslie County Courthouse, state Sen. Brandon Smith told constituents that Mr. McConnell's opponents outside Kentucky don't support coal production, gun rights or abortion restrictions. "They're beating on my senator because he's standing up for me," he said, "and that means he's standing up for you."

Ever since Republicans defeated then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D., S.D.) a decade ago, party leaders have been top targets for the opposition. Ms. Grimes and other Democrats paint Mr. McConnell as the face of Republican obstruction in Congress, dubbing him "Senator Gridlock."

"There is a cost to that gridlock, to that obstruction, to that extreme partisanship that we have suffered and endured under the failed leadership of Mitch McConnell," she told farmers recently in Eminence, Ky.

The senator's conservative critics take the opposite tack, assailing him for cutting deals to reopen the government and extend the country's borrowing limit.

There are some facets of influence Mr. McConnell doesn't stress. In past campaigns, he touted big federally funded projects like those to rebuild the Paducah waterfront and stabilize a bluff protecting the city of Hickman from the Mississippi River.

Money he has directed to Kentucky has repaired dams and funded research at his alma maters, the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky. But big taxpayer-funded projects, or "earmarks," have fallen out of favor in American politics.

The McConnell team highlights subtler examples of how his influence in Washington benefits Kentucky. His first big introductory ad featured a worker at the Paducah uranium-enrichment plant who testified to Mr. McConnell's efforts to help workers exposed to dangerous materials.

At the Hazard lunch, Mr. Paul credited the senior senator for demanding explanations from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about why a fish called the duskytail darter is preventing the Army Corps of Engineers from raising the water level in Lake Cumberland, a tourist destination whose traffic dropped after the Corps lowered the lake in 2006.

In Leburn, Messrs. Comer and Paul credited Mr. McConnell for including a pilot program in the farm bill that would let Kentucky farmers grow hemp for industrial use, a potential tobacco alternative.

On the stump, Mr. McConnell tells voters how he used his power to appoint farm-bill negotiators to ensure the hemp provisions were included. "There's absolutely no way this would have occurred without Sen. McConnell," Mr. Paul told the crowd of about 400 people in Leburn.

Yet later that day, in London, Ky., hundreds swarmed a McConnell event at a Harley-Davidson dealership to protest his support for the bill, showing how focusing on his influence can cut two ways when a national-policy move runs afoul of local politics.

The assembled were unhappy the bill included stiffer penalties for cockfighting. Some said they supported Mr. McConnell in past races but planned to vote for an opponent or to withhold their votes.

"I've voted for Mitch McConnell in the past," said Tommy Brown, 33, of London, who organizes cockfights, "but he's not getting my vote this year," even if he wins the primary.

Supporters continue pressing the senator's political-maneuvering prowess as a campaign message, including his work to prevent Kentucky tobacco farmers from seeing payments reduced by federal budget cuts.

In coal country, Messrs. McConnell and Paul talked repeatedly about their work fighting proposed Obama-administration regulations on coal-fired facilities such as power plants.

"They say he's lost touch. He hasn't lost touch," said James Phillips, 59, a circuit-court clerk, after a McConnell event. "He has to fight Obama and Harry Reid every day for everything we've got."

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# Idaho Race Shows Split in GOP Donor Base

##  Idaho Race Shows Split in GOP Donor Base

_By Neil King Jr._

_Nov. 29, 2013_

Something unusual happened after the conservative Club for Growth said it would try to oust Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson in next year's election: A new GOP group rose up to defend him.

Since then, more groups have jumped in to help Mr. Simpson, making the battle in his corner of Idaho a leading example of how the Republican Party's business-friendly, establishment wing plans to answer challenges from the party's tea-party wing.

After the new group, a super PAC called Defending Main Street, committed to boosting Mr. Simpson, the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry in August launched its own super PAC--a political action committee allowed to raise unlimited funds--seeking to defend the incumbent congressman. A number of national business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are also gearing up now to provide aid.

"In the past, groups like Club for Growth pretty much had the field to themselves in attacking centrist candidates, but not anymore," said Steve LaTourette, a former Ohio Republican lawmaker who helped create the Defending Main Street organization, which plans to spend as much as $1 million to help Mr. Simpson.

The PAC is affiliated with the Republican Main Street Partnership, a 19-year-old group that calls for "pragmatism" in policy-making and includes members known for sometimes working with Democrats or bucking party leaders. Members include Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and John McCain of Arizona, and Reps. Peter King of New York and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania.

The alliance now moving to defend Mr. Simpson, who is in his eighth term, is evidence of how much more aggressive the business community and other centrist and center-right forces plan to be in defending their favored candidates.

Defending Main Street plans to raise about $8 million to aid eight to 10 Republicans. The PAC's decision in July to back Mr. Simpson was its first step into the 2014 elections.

"This race represents a real turning point for us in the business community," said Greg Casey, president of the national Business Industry PAC, which also plans to back Mr. Simpson.

Business groups faced off in a similar but smaller fight earlier this month to help an establishment GOP candidate beat back a more conservative challenger in a special election in Alabama.

The Club for Growth, which has helped defeat a number of GOP incumbents in recent years, decided to target Mr. Simpson after the group's membership voted to back his challenger, trial lawyer and political newcomer Bryan Smith, in an online ballot early this summer.

The group paints the Idaho fight as a match between small-government activists and GOP "special interests." A defeat for Mr. Simpson, said the group's spokesman, Barney Keller, "will send a shiver down the spine of the political establishment."

The Club for Growth spent more than $18 million in the 2012 election cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. It backed the Senate races of conservative Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Flake of Arizona, who won, and Richard Mourdock of Indiana, who lost.

Apart from the Club for Growth, Mr. Smith is also being backed by small-government advocacy groups such as FreedomWorks and the Madison Project.

The groups are blasting Mr. Simpson, a close ally of House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), as a defender of big government and corporate welfare. They fault him for voting to end last month's government shutdown and supporting bank bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis.

First elected in 1998, Mr. Simpson has never struggled to win re-election or to beat back primary challengers in his heavily Republican district. His advisers point to support for him from the National Rifle Association and from antiabortion groups, as well as his record on the appropriations committee, where he pushed to trim funding for the Environmental Protection Agency while supporting continued farm subsidies. They also note that he has backed every move in the House to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

His opponent clearly intends to hammer on Mr. Simpson's vote to end the shutdown and to approve a temporary lifting of the federal debt ceiling. "Congressman Simpson voted to raise the debt limit without any spending cuts and gave President Obama a blank check," Mr. Smith said in an interview.

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# GOP Hawks Are on the Rise

##  GOP Hawks Are on the Rise

_By Janet Hook and Patrick O 'Connor_

_March 5, 2014_

The Ukraine crisis has given GOP foreign policy hawks a fresh opportunity to reassert themselves in a party that has seen rising isolationist sentiment.

For Republicans with presidential ambitions, the turmoil in Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela and other world hot spots has been an occasion to raise their own profiles as players in the foreign-policy debate and to attack President Barack Obama's leadership.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, is pushing for policies to isolate Russia financially and diplomatically as punishment for Russian President Vladimir Putin's use of force in Ukraine.

Most Republicans have backed a similar policy direction, providing a unified response after years of murky, often-inconsistent criticism of Mr. Obama and the rise of a libertarian wing that objected to the aggressive interventionism of former President George W. Bush.

At the same time, the Ukraine debate exposed different impulses among leading Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), another potential White House candidate, initially advocated for more "respectful" relations with Russia, reflecting his more cautious approach to intervention abroad. He later changed his tone, criticizing Mr. Putin after his military mobilized in Crimea.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) called almost immediately for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight and possibly from other world councils, such as the World Trade Organization.

But Mr. Cruz also described his own perspective as a middle ground between those in the party calling for a muscular foreign policy, such as Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), and the party's more cautious wing. "I agree with John McCain that we should be a voice for freedom, but I agree with Rand Paul that we should be exceedingly reluctant to employ U.S. military force," Mr. Cruz told Politico.

The Obama administration has taken a number of steps to provide support for Ukraine and step up economic and diplomatic pressure on Russia. The Pentagon suspended military cooperation, the U.S. and European Union have threatened to impose sanctions, Secretary of State John Kerry was dispatched to Kiev, and the White House is working with congressional leaders on a package of economic aid to Ukraine. "Above all, we believe that the Ukrainian people should be able to decide their own future," Mr. Obama said Tuesday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) defended the president's approach. "The cautious direction of the president has been very good in Ukraine. It's a difficult issue," he said Wednesday.

Republicans nearly across the board contend what they view as Mr. Obama's missteps in foreign affairs--such as his threat to bomb Syria, later withdrawn--might have emboldened hostile leaders like Mr. Putin. "After several crises, the pendulum is swinging back" to a more assertive posture, said Richard Grenell, a Bush-era spokesman at the United Nations. He described the party's stance as "diplomacy with muscle."

Since Mr. Obama took office, the GOP struggled to formulate a unified vision for America's role in the world. The long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made it harder to return to Bush-era hawkishness. The rising influence of tea-party activists also brought a strain of anti-interventionism and opposition to military spending increases.

In 2011, Mr. Paul seemed like an outlier within the GOP when he said one test of conservative purity was a willingness to cut military spending. "If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget," he told the Conservative Political Action Conference that year.

During the next three years, some Republicans in Congress moved in that direction. "A lot of Republicans would love to have the party take on the president on lack of leadership and inadequate defense spending,'' said former Rep. Vin Weber, who advised Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. "But the party is not as clearly where it was 20 years ago. There is a growing neo-isolationist strain at the grass-roots."

Republicans also were divided over Mr. Obama's proposal to launch military strikes against Syria last fall in response to the use of chemical weapons. Mr. McCain led the party's hawks in supporting the proposed attack; Mr. Rubio wanted the U.S. to intervene, but opposed the proposed strikes as too little too late. Mr. Paul was opposed, saying the situation was too remote from direct U.S. interests.

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# GOP, Business Recast Message

##  GOP, Business Recast Message

_By Neil King Jr. and Patrick O 'Connor_

_Dec. 26, 2013_

Republican leaders and their corporate allies have launched an array of efforts aimed at diminishing the clout of the party's most conservative activists and promoting legislation instead of confrontation next year.

GOP House leaders are taking steps to impose discipline on wavering committee chairmen and tea-party factions. Meanwhile, major donors and advocacy groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads, are preparing an aggressive effort to groom and support more centrist Republican candidates for Congress in 2014′s midterm elections.

At the same time, party leaders plan to push legislative proposals--including child tax credits and flextime for hourly workers--designed to build the party's appeal among working families.

The efforts, at the national and state levels, come at the end of a year of infighting and legislative brinkmanship, capped by the 16-day government shutdown in October that drove the party's image to historic lows.

One stark example of the new quest for discipline came this month, when Republican House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio publicly lashed conservative advocacy groups that had opposed a two-year budget compromise aimed at breaking the crisis-driven cycle that has governed Congress's budget-writing process.

At the same time, Mr. Boehner's deputies took steps behind the scenes to end internal dissent, including among GOP committee chairmen who had voted against the House leadership in prior fiscal battles. In the run-up to the budget vote, Mr. Boehner's deputies warned chairmen who were tempted to oppose the deal that doing so could jeopardize their committee posts, said people familiar with the discussions.

The goal was to reverse a trend in which chairmen, who typically earn their post by hewing to the party line, voted against priority legislation. Six chairmen had voted against an initial version of a farm bill earlier in the year, causing the legislation to collapse on the House floor, and 11 voted against the pact this fall to reopen the federal government and extend the country's borrowing authority into 2014.

Mr. Boehner's spokesman, Michael Steel, said that "the speaker, and the entire leadership team, urged all House Republicans to support the [budget] agreement, which lowered the deficit without raising taxes."

Party leaders face two crucial tests with their rank-and-file: in mid-January when Congress considers a bill to keep the government running, and in the spring when Republicans weigh legislation to extend the country's borrowing limit, which most conservatives oppose on principle.

The debt-ceiling debate will play out against the backdrop of a series of Republican primaries set to start in early March. With those contests likely to shape the balance of power inside the party, outside groups say they plan to ramp up efforts to defeat tea-party-inspired congressional candidates.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce early next year plans to roll out an aggressive effort--expected to cost at least $50 million--to support establishment, business-friendly candidates in primaries and the general election, with an aim of trying to win a Republican Senate majority.

"Our No. 1 focus is to make sure, when it comes to the Senate, that we have no loser candidates," said the business group's top political strategist, Scott Reed. "That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket."

GOP leaders hope a less restive Republican caucus will allow the House to pass a farm bill and push ahead on at least incremental overhauls of the immigration system. But conservatives groups, including Heritage Action, already promise to fight both initiatives.

The head of Heritage Action, which has encouraged conservative lawmakers to challenge GOP leaders on a number of fiscal measures, questioned the effectiveness of the drive by leading Republicans to impose greater discipline on conservative lawmakers and pledged to continue broadcasting the group's views to grass-roots activists.

"Lawmakers do not have a monopoly on information, and we will continue to communicate directly with their constituents on important legislation as it moves through Congress," said Michael Needham, chief executive of Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation think tank. He said that most lawmakers "will find it difficult to go back home and defend votes that increase spending, increase deficits and undermine the rule of law."

Some GOP leaders are looking for a legislative agenda to unify the party. Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia is working to rally House Republicans to support moves meant to appeal to middle-class Americans: modest proposals to lower health-care costs, make higher education more affordable and expand domestic energy production. His efforts also include a more controversial drive to revamp social-welfare programs, starting with food stamps.

"Working middle-class families are struggling to find a good-paying job, get ahead and keep more money in their pocket," Mr. Cantor said. "House Republicans will continue to offer conservative solutions that help create better conditions for them to succeed."

The other goal is to unite factions within the GOP. Focus groups conducted by YG Network, a nonprofit founded by former Cantor aides, suggest conservatives and centrists alike are drawn to many of the pocketbook issues addressed by this agenda.

Any legislation to emerge from these talks would be little more than a footnote to the Republicans' yearslong drive to dismantle the 2010 health law, but the bills represent the most concrete steps GOP lawmakers have taken to address voters' concerns since last year's election.

No Republican lawmaker in Washington has undergone a starker turnaround on this front than Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a close ally of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the fight to hamper Mr. Obama's health-care law, which sparked the October government shutdown. Mr. Lee is now calling for the GOP to embrace a positive policy agenda.

"There is a hole within the Republican Party that is exactly the size and shape of a conservative reform agenda," Mr. Lee said in an interview. He said the GOP hadn't updated its policy prescriptions since Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980.

In a speech this month to a conservative women's group, Mr. Lee said Republicans "have to avoid getting caught in the loop of perpetual 'no.' Our 'yes' button has to work."

Mr. Lee and his allies argue the GOP must move beyond its traditional economic agenda--built around spending cuts, corporate deregulation and income-tax reductions--that has failed to resonate among enough voters to win national elections.

The senator has introduced bills since October to expand the number of institutions that can grant college credits, shorten the sentences of nonviolent criminals and rewrite the tax code to shift tax benefits from the wealthy to working families with children. But even these small-bore proposals have faced resistance. House conservatives forced Mr. Cantor to shelve an early centerpiece of his "Making Life Work" agenda--a bill to expand insurance pools for high-risk individuals.

Some bills that have passed, like one to provide more-flexible work schedules for hourly workers, have yet to advance in the Senate. But in a sign of potential progress, the House passed the most recent proposal--legislation redirecting federal dollars to pediatrics research--by an overwhelming margin. All but one Republican supported it.

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# Tea Party Faces Test of Its Clout in Primaries

##  Tea Party Faces Test of Its Clout in Primaries

_By Janet Hook_

_Feb. 25, 2014_

After a series of defeats on Capitol Hill, the Republican Party's tea-party wing has shifted its attention to congressional primaries, setting up a major test of how much the movement's clout has been weakened.

Earlier this month, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders ushered a budget deal and debt-limit increase through Congress, with the goal of avoiding the kind of partisan fights that could alienate independent voters in an election year.

The decision infuriated many in the tea party, who said Republicans had given up on winning new spending cuts. In Mr. Boehner's home state of Ohio, conservative activists redoubled their efforts to challenge GOP incumbents and win state party posts. Tea-party-aligned candidates from Kentucky to Mississippi to Texas moved to capitalize on anger at party leaders. A national conservative group issued a call for deposing the entire GOP congressional leadership.

"What got everyone re-energized was the debt ceiling,'' said Ann Becker, president of the Cincinnati Tea Party, who attended a meeting in Mr. Boehner's district of more than 200 people Saturday to discuss a long-shot challenge to him for the GOP nomination.

Primary elections, which start March 4, will help determine the balance of power between the Republican Party's business-friendly, establishment wing and the tea-party activists who first roared onto the scene five years ago by opposing President Barack Obama's proposed health-care overhaul.

The outcome could help determine how much room Mr. Boehner has to maneuver in Washington and whether the tea party can sustain its influence on policy making, especially in areas such as spending and entitlements. Mr. Boehner is scheduled to meet with the president on Tuesday to discuss a range of topics, but any rapprochement on issues like immigration would risk tea-party ire.

Independent political handicappers say most incumbents are likely to fend off challengers in upcoming primaries. That would be a victory for GOP leaders who have tried this year to avoid a repeat of 2010 and 2012 Senate elections, when tea-party-aligned candidates, including Sharron Angle in Nevada and Todd Akin in Missouri, won primaries but lost general-election contests that might have given Republicans Senate control.

"We're done being the stupid party," Mr. McConnell declared at a recent fundraising event in New York, according to one Republican who attended. McConnell aides would neither confirm nor deny the report, but one said it was consistent with the senator's view that "we're done nominating candidates who can't win general elections."

This month's debt-ceiling vote has become a central symbol of the battle. After Mr. McConnell cast a key vote in a procedural test to advance the debt-limit increase, he was greeted at a Washington fundraiser with cheers and applause from donors and fellow senators who appreciated his strategy of avoiding another fiscal and political crisis. But his primary opponent in Kentucky, Matt Bevin, called the debt-limit bill a failure of Republican leadership and launched a new television ad last week that said, "Mitch McConnell betrayed conservatives to give Obama a blank check."

In Texas, Rep. Steve Stockman said his primary opponent, Sen. John Cornyn, had betrayed tea-party hero Sen. Ted Cruz's efforts to block the debt-limit increase. "Cornyn is treating Ted Cruz's back like his own personal cutlery holder," Mr. Stockman said on Twitter.

Even Sen. Thad Cochran (R., Miss.), who voted against the debt-ceiling increase, found his past votes on the issue used against him. Mr. Cochran "voted to raise the debt ceiling 20 times, putting our children trillions more in the hole," said an ad from the conservative group Club for Growth Action.

The political high-water mark for the tea-party movement came in the 2010 elections, when it helped Republicans win House control. That brought a wave of fiscal conservatism to the party and drove enactment of a 2011 budget law that locked in deep spending cuts for a decade.

But in the aftermath of the October government shutdown, which many Republicans considered a disaster for the party, GOP leaders tried avoid the take-no-prisoners tactics urged by tea-party activists and conservative groups such as Heritage Action and Club for Growth.

In the ensuing months, Mr. Boehner and other GOP leaders have orchestrated passage of a two-year budget deal, a farm bill and a $1 trillion spending bill.

Mr. Boehner lashed out at elements of the tea-party movement that he said were self-serving, money-raising machines. "I don't have any problem with the tea party. Those people have brought great energy to the political process,'' he said in a recent interview with Jay Leno. "My problem was with some Washington organizations who purport to represent the tea party. There's nothing I could do that was ever conservative enough for them."

His view appears to be taking hold in the House, where some are taking a more pragmatic approach after demanding Mr. Boehner push harder for budget cuts and other concessions.

But tea-party activists contend they still have power. Jenny Beth Martin, president of Tea Party Patriots, said the group played an important role in the House GOP shelving immigration legislation. After Mr. Boehner issued "principles" guiding his plans to advance bills on the issue, the tea-party group launched a robocall campaign that Ms. Martin says connected 41,046 protest calls to the offices of 90 members of Congress.

The most prominent test of GOP leadership will come from tea-party backed Senate primary candidates in Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas and South Carolina, as well as in Kentucky and Texas. Many nonpartisan analysts say the most intense battleground is Mississippi, where state Sen. Chris McDaniel is challenging Mr. Cochran with support from tea-party and conservative groups.

"If we're able to defeat Thad Cochran in this primary race--he's been there 41 years--do you know the shock waves it'll send through the system?'' Mr. McDaniel said recently at the University of Mississippi.

The Cochran campaign disputes the challenge. "Mississippians know Senator Cochran as a consistently strong conservative voice for them in Washington," said Jordan Russell, a Cochran campaign spokesman.

--Patrick O'Connor contributed to this article.

###

# Across the Country, Republicans Seek a Way Forward

##  Across the Country, Republicans Seek A Way Forward

###

# Party Eyes 'Red-State Model' to Drive Republican Revival

##  Party Eyes 'Red-State Model' to Drive Republican Revival

_By Neil King Jr. and Mark Peters_

_Feb. 4, 2013_

TOPEKA, Kan.—Even if he doesn't enter the race himself, this state's Republican governor, Sam Brownback, is determined to play a starring role in the next presidential election.

How? By turning Kansas into what he calls Exhibit A for how sharp cuts in taxes and government spending can generate jobs, wean residents off public aid and spur economic growth.

"My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, 'See, we've got a different way, and it works,'" Mr. Brownback said in a recent interview.

Coming off the largest tax cut in state history on Jan. 1, Kansas is now on the leading edge of a growing but still largely untested quest among conservative governors to create growth by dramatically revamping state tax codes.

The Brownback experiment is stirring both praise and anxiety among Kansas conservatives even as it helps spark similar overhaul proposals in the GOP-led states of Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Oklahoma.

The focus on fiscal innovations in the heartland comes as conservatives nationally seek ways to revive the GOP's standing in the aftermath of its stinging election losses last year. Bruised by the continuing budget battles in Washington, where divided government has led to near-gridlock, top Republicans nationally are holding up Kansas and other GOP-dominated states as examples of what the party might accomplish if left to its own devices.

Mr. Brownback recounts how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reacted when the two talked recently about the work under way in Kansas.

"Mitch said, 'This is exactly the sort of thing we want to do here, in Washington, but can't, at least for now,'" Mr. Brownback said. An aide to Mr. McConnell confirmed the conversation.

In some of the GOP-led states, governors are looking to slash income taxes while increasing state sales taxes, betting that formula will be better for the economy. Others want to turn projected surpluses from a slow but steady recovery in the national economy into tax cuts. Mr. Brownback is making a riskier wager: that sharp cuts in income-tax rates will pay for themselves by igniting growth. The supposition is that a tax cut will spark more growth, hence more revenue from all taxes, including sales taxes.

Mr. Brownback has boasted that his state is set to go head-to-head with Texas, which has neither a personal nor corporate income tax, in luring new businesses and residents. Lawmakers in other states, in turn, are worried about keeping pace with Kansas or other neighboring states.

"If we don't do this, we continue to see the prospect of falling further and further behind," said Phil Berger, the Republican president of the North Carolina Senate.

Elections in November left all but 13 states with one-party control of both the legislature and the governor's office, and half of all states with veto-proof legislative majorities.

The overhauls have reignited a long-standing debate over the efficacy of tax cuts in generating economic growth. Proponents point to a record of growth in many of the nine states, such as Texas, Tennessee and Florida, that have no state income tax. Skeptics note that the U.S. economy sputtered for much of the past decade, despite the tax cuts under President George W. Bush.

Either way, economists agree it could be years before clear conclusions can be drawn from the experiments under way in Kansas and other states.

If successful, the combined tax cuts and pared government spending could reignite slumbering state economies and draw in new residents, while positioning Mr. Brownback and governors such as Louisiana's Bobby Jindal and Indiana's Mike Pence for potential White House bids.

But if they fall short, the policies could leave Kansas and other states scrambling to fill big budget holes for education and social services, while driving investors to other states.

The tax gambles under way in the red states contrast sharply with proposals put forward by some Democratic governors. The governors of Minnesota and Massachusetts have proposed raising income taxes while cutting the sales tax. The trend promises to create unusually stark divisions between conservative and liberal states.

Elections in November left all but 13 states with one-party control of both the legislature and the governor's office, the most in decades. Fully half of all states now have veto-proof legislative majorities, making intraparty disagreements the chief potential threat to legislative agendas.

In Kansas, about a dozen centrist Republican lawmakers were targeted by conservatives and voted out of office last year, so Gov. Brownback now enjoys the backing of an overwhelmingly conservative legislature. He is savoring the moment.

"We've got a series of blue states raising taxes and a series of red states cutting taxes," he said in his sunny, cavernous office on the second floor of the Kansas capitol. "Now let's watch and see what happens."

The governor may have few Democrats to worry about—Republicans hold a four-to-one advantage in the state legislature—but his proposals have created fissures in the state's GOP, underscoring that aggressive efforts to pare government and cut taxes can be tough even in a Republican-dominated state.

Mr. Brownback, who made a brief bid for the White House in 2008 while still in the U.S. Senate, signed a steep income-tax cut last year, the first step in what he hopes will be the eventual elimination of the state's income tax, which still generates about 40% of the state's general-fund revenue. He has chopped thousands of state jobs, merged government departments and removed thousands of Kansans from the welfare rolls.

For guidance, Mr. Brownback has leaned on Reagan-era supply-sider economist Arthur Laffer, as well as on Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group funded by the Wichita-based Koch brothers. One of AFP's top consultants, who drafted mock state budgets while working for the group, is now the state's budget director.

But the governor faces an array of challenges. His income-tax cuts, which took the top rate from 6.45% to 4.9% at the start of the year and are targeted to hit 3.5% by 2017, are projected to leave a significant hole in next year's state budget, which starts in July.

The official state economic-forecasting agency predicted last fall a drop of $700 million in revenue in the next fiscal year, equivalent to about 12% of this year's budget, with the decline growing steeper after that. Mr. Brownback's budget proposal for the coming year, released in January, put the figure even higher, at $800 million, or four times what the state spends annually on all its prison facilities.

To make up for the revenue drop, the governor is pushing to preserve what was meant to be a temporary increase in the state sales tax, and to eliminate two popular deductions, including the state write-off for home-mortgage interest payments. Those moves would raise about $600 million next fiscal year. He also wants to transfer more than $100 million from a state highway fund to cover other expenses.

Estimates prepared by the state's legislative research department predict that, even with the steps Mr. Brownback proposes, Kansas is on track to be short of money. The estimates suggest that the state will need to lean on its reserves in the coming years, and lawmakers by 2017 will be forced to make $780 million in spending cuts to prevent a deficit, which isn't allowed under Kansas law. A Brownback aide said the forecasts don't take into account the beneficial impact of the tax cuts.

Still, Mr. Brownback faces stiff opposition to keeping the sales tax at its current rate of 6.3%, not only from the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and many conservative lawmakers, but also from Democrats in the Legislature. The rate is set to fall back to 5.7% in June. A trade group for real-estate agents is lobbying strongly against cutting the mortgage-interest deduction.

At the same time, a recent state-court order in a long-running dispute over state support for the schools said that Kansas was underfunding public schools by more than $400 million a year—a ruling Mr. Brownback and GOP lawmakers are now pushing to overturn.

Mr. Brownback and others believe the tax cuts will eventually pay for themselves by drawing in new businesses and stirring job growth.

The state forecasting body remains unconvinced. In a November report, the group said over the long term, "new economic growth" would likely help offset just "a portion of the revenue loss."

Mr. Brownback and his top aides acknowledge they have taken a leap based partly on faith. "Our out-year forecasts are pretty much guesses," said the governor's revenue secretary, Nick Jordan.

Mr. Brownback said he hopes some new oil exploration in the state will generate unforeseen revenues. Others in his administration point to signs of a turnaround in the aviation industry around Wichita.

Talk of eliminating the income tax altogether has drawn applause from conservatives in the statehouse, who say it will help Kansas compete with low-tax states like Texas. But the proposal has also stirred dissent from centrist ranks of the Republican Party.

Republican critics worry the state's schools and infrastructure will suffer. Others are concerned that an over reliance on the state sales tax may shift too heavy a burden onto the less affluent.

"I fear for what the Republican Party is doing to the country and to Kansas," said Jean Schodorf, who lost her seat in the state Senate last year after decades as a Republican officeholder. "All of what we have built in this state is in jeopardy."

House Speaker Ray Merrick, a veteran GOP lawmaker and Brownback ally, praises the effort to eliminate the state's income taxes as "a bold plan," but says the state has to avoid being rash. "The devil is in the details," he said in an interview. "We don't need to rush this."

Similar strains are showing in other GOP-controlled states looking to follow Kansas' lead.

In Indiana, days after Gov. Pence was sworn into office in January, he proposed reducing the individual income-tax rate to 3.06%, from 3.4%, over two years. The former congressman, who was a member of the House Tea Party caucus, is looking to make a mark for himself after eight years of tax cuts and budget cutting under former Gov. Mitch Daniels.

"Because we can afford to cut taxes for every Hoosier, I believe we should," the new governor said in his first speech to the Legislature.

But leaders in the Legislature, where Republicans have large majorities in the House and Senate, haven't been quick to back his plan. Some question whether it makes sense to cut taxes at a time when the economy still appears fragile and the federal government is passing on new costs to the states.

Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma said his priorities are more focused on ensuring fiscal stability. Nor is he convinced an income-tax cut will provide the promised boost in economic growth. He wants to restore some of the government services cut during the recession, while making investments in transportation and education.

"My encouragement to everyone is to look at long-term sustainability and not just an election cycle," Mr. Bosma said.

Over the past eight years, former Gov. Daniels cut corporate income taxes and began the phaseout of a state inheritance tax. The Legislature required any large surpluses to be split between funding state pensions and a tax rebate.

Like Gov. Pence, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin wants to turn projections of a surplus into a tax cut. On Monday, she proposed cutting the state's top income-tax rate to 5%, from 5.25%, a proposal that is smaller and simpler than one that failed a year ago despite large Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.

"This is not the last tax cut we will see from my administration," Gov. Fallin told legislators on Monday.

Other red states are considering similar proposals or even grander plans to eliminate the income tax.

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman is pushing to end the state's income taxes and offset the lost revenue by broadening the sales tax to more items, while Gov. Jindal of Louisiana is discussing an end to the state's personal and corporate income taxes. He is looking to replace the revenue by raising the sales tax and broadening it to more items.

Republicans are weighing similar proposals in North Carolina, where developments will be watched all the more closely considering the state's status as a presidential battleground state. Gov. John Kasich in Ohio, another battleground state, proposed on Monday cutting income taxes by 20% over three years.

In Kansas, Gov. Brownback compares what is happening on the tax front in his and other Republican states to the GOP-led welfare overhauls in Wisconsin and Michigan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which paved the way for a sweeping national overhaul in Congress in 1995.

"There will be no model for what we want to do nationally until we can examine how several states have done it first," he said.

###

# One GOP Lawmaker Shows How to Woo Latino Voters

##  One GOP Lawmaker Shows How to Woo Latino Voters

_By Neil King Jr._

_March 11, 2013_

_U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, center, a New Mexico Republican, visits with ranchers last month near Animas, N.M. Neil King Jr./The Wall Street Journal_

LAS CRUCES, N.M.—Rep. Steve Pearce is the rarest of Republican Party officeholders, a very conservative Anglo who keeps winning elections from a predominantly Latino electorate.

As the national GOP seeks to improve its dismal standing with Hispanic voters, the 65-year-old former oil man has some advice.

"You just have to show up, all the time, everywhere," he said, during a recent barnstorm tour of his district, which sprawls across the southern half of this border state. "Most Republicans don't bother. I do. I bother."

Mr. Pearce has watched the national GOP struggle to understand why its low-tax, pro-business, family-values message hasn't resonated with Latinos: Mitt Romney got the lowest share of the Hispanic vote of any GOP presidential candidate since 1996.

Many conservatives have since concluded that if the party can get immigration off the table, Hispanics will give the GOP a new look.

Mr. Pearce agrees, but he contends that changes in policy platforms aren't enough to reverse the party's decline among voters like those in his district. Republicans must spend time in Latino neighborhoods with the respectful attentiveness of a small-town mayor.

"We have to sell ourselves," he said. It will take hard work, he added, because the majority of Hispanics are "spring-loaded" to favor the Democrats and their more expansive view of government.

Some party leaders are taking note of Mr. Pearce. The Republican National Committee has formed a committee to lay out a new election strategy, with South Carolina committeeman Glenn McCall in charge of reaching out to minority voters.

"What Steve Pearce is doing in New Mexico is what we need to do everywhere," said Mr. McCall. "We have to learn to work for every vote."

Mr. Pearce's success among voters here, even those who disagree with him, underscores the hope and the difficulty of the task. Mr. Pearce said he logged more than 90,000 road miles in his district last year, a travel regimen that often separates him from his wife for weeks.

When describing his brand of constituent service in a district that is larger than the state of Florida, Mr. Pearce said, "I see myself as a big windshield wiper, just working my way back and forth, back and forth."

Democrats, who view Mr. Pearce as a prime target for the 2014 midterm election, are recruiting potential challengers.

"I don't know if there's been a politician in New Mexico more out of touch with the state or his district," said Javier Gonzales, chairman of the state Democratic Party.

But Mr. Pearce's opponents will need to do more than just wave the party flag. Bald and bespectacled, he has won the southern half of New Mexico five times since 2002. In November, he nabbed around 42% of the Hispanic vote, or nearly twice what Mitt Romney received nationally, and better than Republican Susana Martinez's share when she won the New Mexico governor's race in 2010, according to various polls.

No non-Hispanic House Republican represents a district with a higher percentage of Hispanics. Fewer than four in 10 residents of the district are Anglo, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by six percentage points.

The congressman counts on the support of such constituents as Rose Garcia, a Las Cruces housing activist and lifelong Democrat, who said she voted for Mr. Pearce and President Barack Obama in November.

Ms. Garcia showed up an hour after sunrise on a Saturday morning to discuss immigration with Mr. Pearce and local leaders at Roberto's restaurant, which claims to be the home of the world's largest enchilada.

If the U.S.-Mexico border can be secured, a formidable challenge, Mr. Pearce said he supported granting work permits to the 11 million or so immigrants now in the U.S. illegally. But if they want to become citizens, he said, they will have to leave the U.S. and "get in line like everyone else."

After he spoke, Ms. Garcia pointed out that Mr. Pearce holds many positions that differ from her own view, including on immigration reform. He also opposes abortion rights, gay marriage and the federal health-care law. At the same time, she said, his message of self-reliance appeals to her.

"In some ways, I am a true conservative, particularly in my view that people should look after themselves and raise themselves up," said the 69-year-old Ms. Garcia, who has worked in the Las Cruces community since the early 1970s.

Also important in earning her support, she said, was how closely the congressman watched over the state's Second Congressional District. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, she recalled, Mr. Pearce showed up unexpectedly as eight Latino families were moving into new homes they had bought with the help of Ms. Garcia's nonprofit housing organization, Tierra del Sol.

When he saw a woman unloading furniture from a truck, "he took off his jacket and tie and jumped into the truck to help," Ms. Garcia said. "And it wasn't just a photo op. He kept at it for more than an hour."

Mr. Pearce's appearance at Roberto's restaurant was one of nearly 20 sit-down talks with constituents that he held during a two-day swing that took the congressman to seven towns across 500 miles, a pace he continued for another week.

He met with farmers and other residents in the Pancho Villa Dance Hall in the border town of Columbus. He drove for hours, much of it on rutted dirt roads, to have lunch with ranchers and talk about border security in the remote Boot Heel region of the state, where Geronimo made his last stand.

On one stop during his trip, Mr. Pearce sat down with a youth group he helped organize in the almost-entirely Hispanic town of Anthony, tucked among pecan groves, not far from El Paso, Texas. He mussed the hair of some of the children and remembered their first names.

Community organizer Ana Artalejo, who had come with her two daughters, said she was amazed by the attention Mr. Pearce has shown her town of 9,700 residents, which he has visited roughly 10 times in the past year.

When the town decided to clear a garbage-clogged ravine, he arranged a backhoe. When the youth group organized a cleanup day, he sent gloves and rakes and got the local trash company to donate refuse containers.

In return, Ms. Artalejo campaigned for the congressman last fall, sending teams to knock on doors. "I am a hard-core Democrat and disagree with him on many things," she said. "But he is the only Republican I have ever voted for."

Ms. Artalejo and others say part of Mr. Pearce's appeal is his down-to-earth manner. He grew up poor just miles from the Texas border in the far eastern New Mexico oil town of Hobbs, where his dad worked as roustabout. He speaks with the broad twang of West Texas. "I grew up in a place," he joked at one stop, "where we talk like Texans and walk bowlegged like Texans."

Democrats here say Mr. Pearce's record puts him at odds with the majority of his district, and that the only thing that has saved him has been low turnout among Democrats and independents.

Mr. Pearce favors drug tests for welfare recipients. He opposed the Dream Act, which would have helped the children of illegal immigrants gain legal status. He voted against the fiscal-cliff budget deal and was one of just nine House Republicans to oppose the re-election of John Boehner as House speaker.

The Boehner vote is one of several maverick positions that have made Mr. Pearce persona non grata among the GOP House leadership. As a result, Mr. Pearce complained, he has been kept out of GOP discussions about overhauling the immigration system, despite being the sole House Republican serving a district on the U.S.-Mexico border. Speaker Boehner's office declined to comment.

The job for Democrats is finding someone to challenge Mr. Pearce locally. Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington has urged him to run next year.

But Mr. Miyagishima, whose father is Japanese and his mother Mexican-American, is skeptical. "I'd have to see the polling first," he said, adding that Mr. Pearce "is a guy who has no fear. He goes everywhere and says whatever he wants."

Mr. Pearce has taken some of his cues from the former Texas governor, George W. Bush, who made a special push to win Hispanic votes by campaigning and advertising in predominantly Latino regions. In 1998, Mr. Bush got nearly half the Latino vote in Texas.

During last year's presidential campaign, Mr. Pearce lured Mr. Romney to Hobbs, where the GOP presidential nominee rolled out his energy plan last fall. But Mr. Pearce said he failed to persuade Mr. Romney "to get out and really mix it up in the Hispanic community."

Mr. Pearce said he kept telling Mr. Romney and his staff, "'C'mon, man, get out there. Talk about it. Do it.' But they never did."

###

# Deep in the Red of Texas, Republicans Fight the Blues

##  Deep in the Red of Texas, Republicans Fight the Blues

_By Neil King Jr._

_April 4, 2013_

AUSTIN, Texas—Soon after Texas Republicans notched another round of lopsided wins last November, the state GOP sent notice to its local chapters: Please stop holding party meetings in country clubs.

Other advice followed. Please consider hosting Republican recruiting tables at naturalization ceremonies. Word spread among state GOP lawmakers to back off on bills targeting illegal immigrants in the legislative session.

In no state is the Republican grip at once so firm, and under such challenge from Democrats, as it is in Texas. And nowhere is that grip of more consequence to the fortunes of the national GOP.

Republicans have won all of Texas' 29 statewide offices since 1994, the longest streak of single-party dominance in the country. Republican Rick Perry is the state's longest-serving governor. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney took Texas in a walk last year, beating Barack Obama by a margin four percentage points wider than Sen. John McCain did in 2008.

But Republicans here are suddenly looking over their shoulder, worried that demographic shifts and a big push by Democrats to capitalize could soon turn the state into the ultimate battleground between the two parties. One of the most important backroom players in President Obama's 2012 campaign has launched a broad effort to pull the state into the Democratic column.

No one questions the enormity of the stakes. If the country's second-largest state turns blue—a possibility Democrats say is at most a decade away—Republicans could find their most viable path to the White House blocked.

Some Republicans scoff at the thought of Texas ever tipping back to the Democrats. Gov. Perry, in a recent interview, dismissed the idea as "a pipe dream" more far-fetched than the University of Texas adopting the colors of archrival Texas A&M.

"We are not despairing. Far from it," said Steve Munisteri, the feisty chairman of the Texas GOP, who is girding for the fight ahead. "But nor are we taking anything for granted." Among other things, Republicans say that many Hispanics are drawn to the party's more-conservative social stands.

Other party leaders are more cautious. "To call the last national election anything but a wake-up call would be remiss," said Carolyn Hodges, president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, which has 163 chapters and more than 11,000 members. "If we Republicans don't find a way to remake and repackage ourselves, this state could go from being bright red to blue really fast."

As both parties dig in, neither side disputes the basic facts.

Texas is one of just four states—California, New Mexico and Hawaii are the others—where non-Hispanic whites, at 45%, are in the minority. Hispanics, who went heavily Democratic in the 2012 national vote, now represent 38% of the Texas population. By 2016, nearly a million more Hispanics will be eligible to vote in Texas, more than quadruple the number of eligible new Anglo voters, according to several forecasts. Other new residents continue to pour in from an array of traditionally Democratic states, particularly California.

Meanwhile, Texas has some of the country's lowest voter-participation rates, especially among groups that typically skew Democratic, That leads some Democrats to compare the state to a vast oil field that has yet to be tapped. The state has 13.6 million registered voters. But Democrats say there are nearly three million eligible but unregistered Hispanics and African Americans, and at least half that many who are registered but don't vote.

Mr. Romney won Texas by a margin of 1.2 million votes in November.

Republicans' desire to shore up their standing with this growing Hispanic bloc has some in the party scrambling to change their immigration stance.

The state party dramatically changed its official platform last year, eliminating references to mass deportations and calling for a guest-worker program. In January, the Texas Federation of Republican Women went further, voting to support a federal path to citizenship for millions of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

But both of the state's Republican senators, including the party's own top Hispanic lawmaker, Sen. Ted Cruz, oppose opening a route to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally.

Sensing opportunity, a band of former top Obama campaign operatives have just launched the most ambitious effort to date to loosen the GOP grip. Their goal: Make Texas competitive by the second half of the decade and eventually tip it for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since Jimmy Carter won here in 1976.

Led by former Obama field director Jeremy Bird, the Battleground Texas project plans to marshal much the same manpower and data-mining the Obama campaign used to swing states such as Colorado and Virginia in the past two elections.

Wiry and bespectacled, Mr. Bird likes to describe how the past two Obama campaigns were littered with foot soldiers from Texas laboring in other states. Texas volunteers made more than 400,000 calls into Florida in the final weeks of the 2012 campaign, he said.

"For years you have been giving to the national campaign," he told a packed ballroom of 300 or so Texas Democratic volunteers in San Antonio recently on his first public swing through the state. "Now it's time the national campaign gave back to you."

Mr. Bird and other Democrats say Texas, because its vote has been so one-sided in national elections, has been all but untouched by the precinct-by-precinct arts of modern voter mobilization. "Texans haven't seen a presidential TV ad on anything but cable since Jimmy Carter," said Mr. Bird. "That should tell you something."

Democrats point to a little-noted mobilization drive called the 21 Precinct Project that the Travis County Democratic Party ran in the largely Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods of East Austin.

In the fall of 2010, the party combed through data to identify 23,452 households where residents were registered, and likely to be Democrats, but rarely voted. A team of 41 volunteers and paid staff then spent five weeks calling and visiting those homes, urging them to vote. The project cost a little over $40,000.

The results were startling: a 54% jump in straight-ticket Democratic voting, and a turnout rate nearly 20% higher than the rest of Travis County.

The conclusion, according to county Democratic chairman Andy Brown, who ran the drive: "People respond if you ask for their vote. And in Texas, millions of people have never been asked."

Austin resident Santos Martinez is one recent convert to the voting process. Born in Laredo, Texas, 46 years ago, Mr. Martinez says he "never really paid attention to voting, never really cared about it." A community activist group convinced him to register and cast his first vote last year, which he did, for President Obama and every other Democrat on the ticket.

"Now I tell my son, 'Don't wait like me,' " said Mr. Martinez, who works as a maintenance man. "'When you get the chance, vote.'"

Over lunch at a packed restaurant south of downtown San Antonio, Mayor Julián Castro beams at the Democrats' chances in the years ahead. After giving the keynote address at the Democratic Party convention in September, Mr. Castro dropped into Virginia, Florida and Nevada as a campaign surrogate for President Obama. What he saw stunned him.

"The sheer intensity of the campaigning there, the all-out effort to find and mobilize votes, was unlike anything I have ever seen in Texas," he said.

Mr. Castro contends the Republican room for growth in Texas is minimal. "But we Democrats," he said, "we haven't even begun to pick the low-hanging fruit."

He and his twin brother, Joaquin, now a freshman member of Congress, are themselves barometers of the shift under way in Texas. Few expect Texas to become truly competitive for Democrats by 2014 or even 2016. The dream among liberals is that both Castro brothers would run in 2018: one for governor and the other for the Senate seat now held by Sen. Cruz.

Mayor Castro, at 38, says he has no plans for now to seek higher office, but he agrees with the time frame. "Texas," he said, "will be competitive in six to eight years."

Republican Gov. Perry's pollster, Mike Baselice, has a different view. Hispanic support for Republican statewide candidates, he says, has hovered around 35% for years—higher than the 27% Mr. Romney got nationally last year. If the GOP can sustain that, he argues, its hold on the state should remain firm until early in the next decade.

Still, the party establishment isn't taking things for granted. At Republican headquarters two blocks from the state Capitol, Mr. Munisteri, the Republican chairman, keeps an 8-inch-thick binder on his desk stuffed with polling data on Hispanic attitudes toward his party. The poll, conducted in December, was the first of its kind ever commissioned by the state GOP.

Some of the poll's findings—that Hispanics largely see the GOP as the party of the rich bent on eliminating the social safety net—underscore the Republican challenge.

But Mr. Munisteri hammers on the positive: how 40% of Texas Hispanics call themselves conservatives, and how Mr. Romney in November got more than 35% of the state Hispanic vote last year, in contrast to Mr. Romney's tepid performance nationally.

Other statewide Republican candidates, the poll found, outpaced Mr. Romney by claiming closer to 40% of the Hispanic vote. "If we can maintain levels like that, we can win elections here until I die," Mr. Munisteri said.

Joe Gomez, a 49-year-old businessman and lifelong Republican in San Antonio, is eager to see his party change and diversify, both in its candidates and its voter base. "We need to change the entire image of who a Republican voter is," he said. "If we don't, the party is heading for disaster and will eventually die."

Several groups have sprung up to recruit and fund conservative Hispanic candidates, including one founded in 2010 by George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and nephew of former President George W. Bush. The younger Bush, whose mother was born in Mexico, recently announced plans to run for Texas land commissioner next year, his first foray into elected office.

His group, Hispanic Republicans of Texas, spent around $300,000 on training and supporting local Latino candidates last year, a sum the group expects will more than double going into the 2014 election.

At the same time, the state party began a drive last year to recruit hundreds of new Hispanic GOP party delegates to the party by calling all Hispanic-surnamed residents who voted in the last Republican primary.

David Zapata, the 30-year-old son of Mexican immigrants who runs the party's Latino outreach, said it isn't enough to win voters.

"Voters are great, but we need active participants," he said. "We need new people, new faces, who will be a permanent part of the party."

The GOP's most palpable shift has come on the immigration front. Republican lawmakers introduced over 100 immigration-related bills in the past legislative session, including measures to deny cheaper in-state college tuition to the children of illegal immigrants and to overturn laws in several Texas cities that offered refuge to undocumented workers.

This session, with the filing deadline now past, fewer than five such bills have been put forward.

"Let's just say we are taking a different tone this year," said Republican state Rep. Larry Gonzalez, who represents a district just north of Austin. "We're focusing on things we can control, like jobs, education and water."

Both parties are now rolling out the full martial lexicon as they brace for the fight ahead. Mr. Bird says his Battleground Texas project will spend tens of millions of dollars to wage a statewide Democratic voter mobilization drive that will focus first on the most promising counties and work out from there.

Speaking of the Republicans, Mr. Bird said with a grin: "If I were them, I would be scared."

From GOP headquarters, Mr. Munisteri said he has heard big talk from the Democrats before. "But if they do roll out the big guns, we won't stand by," he said, "All artillery fire will be responded to in kind."

###

# As Prisons Squeeze Budgets, GOP Rethinks Crime Focus

##  As Prisons Squeeze Budgets, GOP Rethinks Crime Focus

_By Neil King Jr._

_June 21, 2013_

_Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has led the drive to reduce prison populations in his state. Marcus Ingram_

GAINESVILLE, Ga.—Weeks after his election as Georgia governor in 2010, Nathan Deal was pulled aside by a conservative state lawmaker with urgent business to discuss.

Rep. Jay Neal, a small-town pastor, said he had the seeds of a plan to cut Georgia's swelling prison population, which was costing taxpayers over $1 billion a year. The governor-elect didn't let Mr. Neal get far.

"The minute I mentioned what I wanted to do, he jumped in with what he wanted to do," Mr. Neal recalled. "And it turns out we were talking about the same thing."

That pairing of a pastor with a former prosecutor, both Republicans, helped pave the way for dramatic revamping of Georgia's criminal code. New rules enacted over the past two legislative sessions are steering nonviolent offenders away from prison, emphasizing rehabilitation over jail time, and lessening the penalties for many drug and property crimes.

Georgia is the latest example of a Republican-led state drive to replace tough-on-crime dictums of the 1990s with a more forgiving and nuanced set of laws. Leading the charge in states such as Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and South Dakota are GOP lawmakers—and in most cases Republican governors—who once favored stiff prison terms aimed at driving down crime.

Motivations for the push are many. Budget pressures and burgeoning prison costs have spurred new thinking. Some advocates point to data showing that harsh prison sentences often engender more crime. Among the key backers are conservative Christians talking of redemption and libertarians who have come to see the prison system as the embodiment of a heavy-handed state. And crime rates are falling nationally, a trend that has continued in most of the states putting fewer people in jail.

The movement also dovetails with the quest of some Republicans to soften the party's edges and to plunge into new policy areas that affect the poor and the disadvantaged. The initiatives have drawn praise from groups that aren't often allied with the GOP, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. The result is some unlikely bedfellows, with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council working alongside the ACLU.

"Criminal justice is the area where conservative thinking has most changed with the times," said Eli Lehrer, a former GOP Senate staffer and conservative activist in Washington, who has written extensively on the push for new sentencing rules. He describes the push as "the most important social reform effort on the right since the rise of the pro-life movement in the 1970s."

Just over half of the states have embarked on criminal-justice overhauls of varying scope over the past five years, with 19 of those efforts led by Republican governors or GOP legislatures and nine by Democratic governors or legislatures. Some of the most aggressive moves have come in states, many in the South, with incarceration rates well above the national average.

The number of inmates in state prisons nationally peaked at just over 1.4 million around 2009 after rising for decades, and by 2011 had fallen by about 25,000, according to Justice Department statistics.

The downturn has been particularly welcome in states that had projected a continued surge in prison numbers. Ohio, which was bracing for an inmate population of over 57,000 by the end of the decade, has seen its number fall by nearly 1% a year since 2009.

Changes to sentencing laws haven't sailed everywhere. In Indiana, an aggressive push in 2011 by then Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels got watered down—and eventually abandoned—after it ran into opposition from prosecutors. GOP Gov. Rick Scott in Florida cited public safety last year when he vetoed a bill to cut the sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

The conservative quest to rethink criminal sentencing and rewrite state penal codes got its start in Texas, when GOP lawmakers in 2007 balked at the need to build three new prisons to house an anticipated 17,000 more prisoners by 2012. They decided instead to revamp the state's probation system and boost funding for addiction treatment and rehabilitation by $241 million.

The state prison population has declined by nearly 6,000 inmates since 2008 after decades of rapid growth and during a time when the state's own population has continued to swell. In 2011, Texas shut a prison for the first time in state history.

Behind the Texas efforts stood a conservative local think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and one of its top donors, a wealthy oil man from Odessa named Tim Dunn. Mr. Dunn paid to establish a center within the foundation in 2005 to focus on overhauling the state's criminal code.

An evangelical Christian with a strong libertarian bent, Mr. Dunn said he watched for years as Texas' crime rate continued to climb even while its prison population swelled. "I had come to see our justice system as imperial, as intent on maintaining the authority of the king. It was no longer communal or restorative," he said.

Under the directorship of Texas lawyer Marc Levin, the policy foundation became the hub of a national movement as requests for legislative help poured in from other states. The center adopted a formal platform in early 2010 and took its campaign national under the name Right on Crime.

It soon had the backing of a long list of conservative supporters, among them former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, former drug czar Bill Bennett and David Keene, until recently president of the National Rifle Association.

The group and its Republican followers are sensitive to charges that they are going soft on crime, "that we want to hug a thug," as Mr. Dunn puts it.

But they insist they are moving to correct a system that tilted too far toward punishment, without any gauge for success or failure. State prison populations swelled 700% between 1970 and 2009, from 174,000 inmates to 1.4 million.

Legislatures across the country have rewritten their criminal-justice codes. A few Democratic governors have jumped in, including Arkansas's Mike Beebe and Hawaii's Neil Ambercrombie. New York and Connecticut made changes even before Texas did.

But "on balance, it has been conservatives who have been out front," said Adam Gelb, who directs a national criminal-justice initiative at the Pew Charitable Trusts, which has worked on initiatives across the country.

In many states, former law-and-order prosecutors and judges have led the effort. In others, pastors-turned-lawmakers have jumped in. Many describe eureka moments that altered their views.

In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, a former prosecutor, helped pass many of the state's toughest sentencing laws in the 1980s. The Republican lawmaker then watched as both the crime rate and the prison population continued to soar. He is now the leading force in the state to promote alternatives to prison, boost rehabilitation programs and soften the rules on probation violations—all of which have been put into effect.

For Ohio Republican state Sen. Bill Seitz, a turning point came in the late 2000s, when he watched the voters in his county, which includes Cincinnati, twice vote down levies to build a new jail. "It became all the clearer to me how we pass tough sentencing laws with a blind eye to the fiscal impacts," he said.

He has since successfully championed legislation in Ohio to steer new nonviolent felons away from prison, to speed the release of some who are already locked up and to make it easier for them to erase their criminal record and find work when they get out.

As a result, Ohio's prison population dropped to 49,700 inmates at the end of last year from a peak of 51,278 in 2008.

In Georgia, Gov. Deal and Rep. Neal arrived at their partnership via similar and very personal paths.

Mr. Deal says his evolution came about largely on the streets of his hometown of Gainesville, an hour's drive north of Atlanta. For nearly a decade, his son Jason has presided over a drug court designed to rehabilitate addicts charged with felonies and to keep them out of prison.

The future governor often went to graduation ceremonies where recovering addicts would tell their stories. "They all have their own stories, but a common thread runs through all of them," Gov. Deal said. "They had lied. They had stolen. They had alienated their spouses, their parents, their siblings. But they were given a second chance, and they had been rehabilitated."

As a pastor, Mr. Neal came to know recovering addicts in his church. In 2005, he guided into law a measure to crack down on methamphetamine labs, which were plaguing his corner of northeastern Georgia. At the urging of the Georgia Council on Substance Abuse, he later went to a seminar in Philadelphia on the science of drug addiction.

"That was my real ah-ha moment," he said. "I realized there are so many factors in people's lives we can't simply punish away."

The governor never mentioned a sentencing overhaul during his 2010 campaign. But he had mulled the issue privately, and he agreed to join forces with Rep. Neal and other lawmakers to make a major push in his first term.

He announced his intentions in his first speech before the state legislature in January 2011. "We cannot afford to have so many of our citizens waste their lives because of addictions," he said. "It is draining our state treasury and depleting our workforce."

Georgia at the time had the country's highest rate of people caught up in the criminal justice system, according to Pew, with one in 13 of its residents behind bars, on probation or on parole. The tab to the state: $3 million a day.

The state passed laws to steer nonviolent criminals away from prison, to give judges wider discretion in sentencing and to make it easier for defendants to seek rehabilitation services. The governor also put $10 million a year into expanding so-called accountability courts, such as the drug court his son, Jason Deal, presides over in Hall and Dawson counties. The number of such courts has nearly tripled in Georgia under Gov. Deal, to 247, compared with 87 in December 2010.

In Gainesville, 427 would-be felons have graduated from Judge Deal's drug court since it began nearly a decade ago. Each went through a two-year program of mandatory employment or schooling, frequent drug tests and group counseling. The program costs around $13 a day per person, compared with $50 a day to feed and house a state prisoner. After their release, nearly a third of state prisoners end up committing another crime. The recidivism rate among drug-court graduates is just 8%, a recent state audit found.

Jennie Mercado is on course to graduate soon from Judge Deal's drug court. Arrested two years ago on multiple felony drug counts, the 27-year-old Texas native said she went to church the day before her arrest to pray that some force would step in to alter her life.

"I was a total full-time junkie and thief for 10 years," she said. Once facing a year in prison, she is now training to be a nurse. She gave birth to a daughter three months ago.

She now speaks of her arrest and trip through drug court as a stroke of luck. "Nothing but great stuff has come out of this," she said.

Supporters of the changes in Georgia and other states note that elected officials such as Gov. Deal have done little to publicize their efforts, much less campaign on them.

Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, sees that as a missed opportunity. "This is an area where Republicans can really connect with black voters," he said.

Gov. Deal acknowledges there are risks in championing prison changes. "You always worry about being accused of being soft on crime," he said. But through a spokesman he said he now "very much wants to be seen as the face of prison reform in this state."

###

# An Ohio Prescription for GOP: Lower Taxes, More Aid for Poor

##  An Ohio Prescription for GOP: Lower Taxes, More Aid for Poor

_By Neil King Jr._

_Aug. 14, 2013_

_Ohio Gov. John Kasich spoke at a Medicaid rally in July. He is pushing to expand Medicaid coverage to nearly 300,000 additional Ohioans. Mike Elicson/State of Ohio_

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Digging into a bowl of chicken soup at a Bob Evans restaurant, John Kasich does what comes naturally to governors: He boasts about his state's financial outlook.

Job growth is up. The Republican governor just signed what he calls "the biggest tax cut in the country" after converting a looming $7.7 billion budget deficit into a $2.5 billion surplus. Such success, he says, "would probably get a global CEO a giant bonus."

Then comes the part that sets Mr. Kasich apart.

All this is just prelude, he says, to a larger mission, one his Christian faith has called him to shoulder: "helping the poor, the beleaguered and the downtrodden, and trying to heal them and lift them up."

More so than any other leading Republican, Gov. Kasich is using his perch to promote a blend of conservative orthodoxy leavened with liberal policies meant to help the poor, the mentally ill and the uninsured.

To hear him tell it, the 61-year-old onetime Lehman Brothers executive wants to rebrand the Republican Party by refashioning what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century.

On the one hand, he tamed a deficit by slashing funding to local governments and overhauling the state's Medicaid rules, among things. He has eliminated the state's estate tax and wants to phase out all state income taxes, a step aimed at stimulating growth. A budget he signed in June included a range of new abortion restrictions that drew sharp criticism from Democrats.

At the same time, Mr. Kasich has stirred strong opposition from tea-party leaders—and won surprised approval from liberals—by pushing to expand Medicaid coverage to nearly 300,000 additional Ohioans, adopting a provision of the Obama health-care overhaul that he has taken to defending with an openly religious fervor.

The former congressional spending hawk has steered millions more dollars into local food banks, forced insurance companies to provide coverage for children with autism and signed legislation to make it easier for recently released felons to clear their names and find jobs.

Since the return of the death penalty in the 1970s after a moratorium, Mr. Kasich has commuted more death sentences—four—than any other Republican governor except George Ryan of Illinois, who granted a mass clemency a decade ago.

Mr. Kasich also has promised union leaders he will oppose efforts to turn Ohio into a "right to work" state that bars labor contracts requiring all workers to be union members or pay dues. He struck a populist chord with a proposal, later turned down by the GOP-controlled legislature, to raise taxes on out-of-state oil companies so he could cut Ohioans' income-tax rates.

As his party continues to seek a new footing after its national election losses last year, Mr. Kasich is blunt about his own aims for the GOP as he eyes a re-election fight next year and—some speculate—a possible run for the White House in 2016. Asked about that, his office said he is focused on improving the state.

"I have a chance to shape what it means to be a Republican," Mr. Kasich said in an interview wedged between a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new factory and a rally supporting an expansion of Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor and disabled. "I have a chance to show what it means to be successful economically but also to have a compassionate side, a caring side, to help lift people up," he said.

Mr. Kasich's efforts, which his critics dismiss as an opportunistic bid to boost his once-abysmal poll numbers, come as many fellow Republican governors are pursuing sharply conservative agendas, empowered by GOP control of legislatures. Of the 30 Republican governors, just five so far have embraced and put in motion the Medicaid expansion envisioned by the health-care overhaul.

Nor are many Republicans in Congress taking Mr. Kasich's cue to balance pro-growth economic policies with greater help for the poor. House Republicans have pushed this year to cut spending on Medicaid and on social programs such as food stamps.

Mr. Kasich isn't alone in prodding his party to pay more attention to the disadvantaged. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan have made recent pitches to broaden the GOP's message to the poor, as did the Republican National Committee in its postelection assessment early this year. Mr. Ryan held a "war on poverty" hearing at the budget committee last month.

But their differences in approach are large. Mr. Kasich sees government as a proper tool to aid and protect the poor, and spending on many social programs has grown during his tenure. Messrs. Cantor and Ryan talk about doing more with less and finding ways to rely more heavily on churches and civic groups.

If Mr. Kasich wins re-election next year, supporters say, he could provide his party with its most extensive model for a softer brand of conservatism. "John is showing, perhaps more visibly than anyone, that conservatives can care deeply about those who are overlooked and are at risk of being left behind," said Ed Gillespie, a former national Republican Party chairman. "This is a very important thing for our party to demonstrate."

There are risks: Charlie Crist, the former Florida governor, is among a string of Republicans who have suffered politically after straying from the party's base. Outgunned in a 2010 GOP primary by now-Sen. Marco Rubio, Mr. Crist became an independent and later a Democrat.

Evidence so far shows Mr. Kasich benefiting from his strategy. A June Quinnipiac poll showed his approval notching a new high at 54%, versus 36% in the fall of 2011. A third of Ohio Democrats said they approved of his performance, nearly triple the share from 2011.

Mr. Kasich has lost little of the brusqueness that characterized his years as the U.S. House Budget Committee chairman in the late 1990s. When a conservative Ohio lawmaker questioned his quest to expand Medicaid, Mr. Kasich cut him off with a line he has used often since then.

When you die and go to heaven, Mr. Kasich said in recounting the conversation, St. Peter is "probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor."

Mr. Kasich created a stir at a closed-door conference in California hosted by the conservative Koch brothers when he told Republican donors and activists he wouldn't apologize for his Medicaid policy.

"I know this is going to upset a lot of you guys, but we have to use government to reach out to people living in the shadows," Mr. Kasich said, according to one participant, who noted that Mr. Kasich's defense "sparked an audible rumbling of disapproval in the room."

Asked about it, Mr. Kasich called the reaction to his remarks "unforgettable" but said: "I really shouldn't speak about it, other than to say, 'God bless people who go to those events.' "

At a packed Medicaid rally in the Ohio statehouse after the Bob Evans lunch, Mr. Kasich ripped into those who question the motivations of the poor.

"As Americans, we need to beat back this notion that when somebody's poor, somehow they are lazy," he said to loud applause from a heavily Democratic crowd. It is "unbelievable," he said, "that we live in America and there are people who don't have health insurance."

When he ran for governor in 2010, after being out of politics for a decade, Mr. Kasich leaned heavily on the legions of new conservative activists who rose up to reject President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul and the surge of stimulus spending.

"I love the tea party!" he cried at a Cincinnati rally on the eve of his narrow win over the Democratic incumbent, Ted Strickland.

He began his governorship in early 2011 by supporting an existing bill to limit the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector unions. The move drew praise in conservative circles but also provoked a backlash, including from many working-class Republicans. A voter rebellion resoundingly overturned the law a few months later, and Mr. Kasich became one of the least-popular governors in the country.

Mr. Kasich says he has put the issue behind him. "We lost, and you have to listen to what people want," he said.

Since then, he has worked to reach out to groups well beyond his conservative base.

He fought alongside Cleveland's Democratic mayor for an overhaul of the city education system, supporting an increased local tax levy to pay for it. He worked with black pastors and legislators to revamp some of the state's sentencing rules.

Some of his decisions have sent his onetime tea-party supporters into revolt.

"Kasich is so far off the reservation, it's incredible," said Tom Zawistowski, a prominent conservative leader from the Akron area who campaigned for Mr. Kasich in 2010 but promises "to work to un-elect him" next year.

Conservative critics, including many in the Ohio House, assail the governor for supporting a plank of the health-care law that will add billions to federal spending and eventually swell the state's Medicaid costs.

This is the provision that would expand Medicaid—traditionally focused on children, pregnant women and the elderly and disabled—to all adults under a set income line. The Supreme Court ruled last year that states could decide whether to participate in this expansion. In Ohio, doing so would add 26,000 veterans and thousands of mentally ill people to the benefit rolls, according to the state's own estimates.

Federal funds cover the expansion for three years but phase down to 90% by 2020, requiring Ohio to spend around $2.6 billion on the Medicaid expansion by 2022, state estimates show.

Republicans in the legislature refused to include the expansion in the state's new budget. Mr. Kasich continues to fight for it.

Ohio GOP chairman Matt Borges, a Kasich protégé, says he hears angst over the Medicaid issue among conservatives "pretty much everywhere I go in the state."

Some conservatives have been particularly annoyed by Mr. Kasich's use of religious arguments to defend his policies. "I don't recall Jesus Christ taking money from one person's pocket to give it to someone else," said state Rep. John Becker, a Republican from Cincinnati.

Democrats are expressing effusive surprise over Mr. Kasich's leftward swerve on several issues, particularly after his comeuppance on the public-union issue. "He is becoming the people's governor," said state Rep. Bill Patmon of Cleveland, who has worked with the governor on criminal-justice and education issues.

Rev. Tim Aherns, a liberal Columbus pastor who fought Mr. Kasich during the 2011 union battle, now calls the governor "a pre-eminently practical politician" who "sees it as his calling to help the poor."

Mr. Kasich's Republican allies say what voters are seeing is simply a compassionate streak that has been part of his personality all along. "People are finally waking up to what John Kasich is: a blunt, hard-nosed but very contemplative problem solver," said Doug Preisse, GOP chairman for the county surrounding Columbus.

The son of a mailman, Mr. Kasich often cites his own upbringing in the industrial town of McKees Rocks, Pa., outside Pittsburgh. Raised Catholic, he says he drifted from the faith in adulthood. He became an evangelical Protestant in the years after a car crash caused by a drunken driver killed his parents in 1987, when he was 35.

Since then, Mr. Kasich said, "it has been 25-plus years of pretty hard work" to define his faith and put it into practice. For years he has met twice a month with a group of friends to discuss religion and dig into Bible passages. His mission now, he said, is to "be someone who can repair the part of the world that I am a part of."

Driving back to Ohio last month from a Cape Cod vacation with his family, Mr. Kasich stopped to eat in Buffalo, N.Y. He asked a few people at random if they had ever met Jack Kemp, the late Buffalo Bills quarterback who became a congressman and 1996 vice-presidential nominee.

Mr. Kemp, who once described himself as a "bleeding-heart conservative," built a reputation as a Republican who focused on urban minorities and the poor.

"It was Jack, over and over again, who talked about lifting people, about hopes and dreams," Mr. Kasich said. "Jack had a profound impact on the conservative moment. Maybe I have a chance to do that, too."

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# Republicans Shy Away From Their Own Health Plan

##  Republicans Shy Away From Their Own Health Plan

_By Laura Meckler_

_Dec. 9, 2013_

_Rep. Tom Price proposed legislation modifying, but not fully changing, the tax treatment of health insurance. Getty Images_

Democrats' politically bruising experience over the Obama health law has prompted leading Republican policy experts to rethink one of the party's own long-standing ideas about remaking the health-care system.

President Barack Obama and his party have suffered in public-opinion polls amid the health site's troubled rollout and as some five million people lost existing coverage that didn't meet new standards, even as the law seeks to expand coverage to many more Americans. Some Republicans are now worried that a GOP proposal to begin taxing health-care benefits offered through employers—which would affect some 160 million Americans—would cause market disruptions far more severe and expose the party to its own political peril.

The proposed tax change was proposed by President George W. Bush in 2007 and by Sen. John McCain as presidential nominee in 2008. A similar GOP plan in the House has 117 co-sponsors.

Now, some Republican policy specialists have started to advocate that the GOP instead adopt a more modest approach.

"There's an acknowledgment that massive overturning of the employer-sponsored system is something people just aren't ready for," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a leading Republican economist and chief policy adviser to Mr. McCain's campaign.

"Republicans will walk into the same buzz saw if they aren't savvier and more thoughtful," said Dean Clancy, vice president for public policy at FreedomWorks, a tea party-aligned activist group that backs conservative candidates. He said his group typically favors bold strokes, but that "in health care, incrementalism is the way forward."

Republicans have promised to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, but the GOP House has staged votes only on repeal, in part to avoid the sort of scrutiny that inevitably comes with specific proposals. Some Republicans say that needs to change.

"You can't beat something with nothing," said Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.), who has proposed legislation to modify—but not fully rewrite—the tax treatment of health insurance. "More and more members [of Congress] are discussing the imperative for us to have a positive alternative."

Mr. Obama would surely veto any effort to repeal the health law or replace it with a GOP approach, but the new thinking could represent a change to the party's core message on the issue going forward.

For decades, employers have been allowed to buy their workers health insurance without either the company or the employees owing taxes on the value of the coverage. Republicans have long proposed replacing that break with a new tax credit for all Americans with insurance—part of a broader plan to sever the link between employment and health care that the party believes would induce consumers to demand lower and more transparent prices, thus trimming health costs.

The change also would remove incentives in the tax code for employers to offer their workers very expensive health plans.

Employers would still be able to offer health coverage. But if enough younger, healthier workers sought coverage on their own, it could leave older, sicker people in the workplace pools, making them too expensive to operate.

Leading Republican health-policy experts say there are ways to mitigate the risks but warn it would be a political mistake to push a plan like that now.

"I've come to the conclusion that it would be much better to try and thread the needle and not disrupt the vast number—millions and millions of Americans—who are in more or less stable employer insurance today," said James Capretta, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.

He and others recommend capping the tax break available for health insurance through work and finding other ways to pay for additional tax breaks to those who buy insurance on their own.

Mr. Price's plan is an example of this more modest approach. The congressman said in an interview that interest in this idea has grown among his colleagues in the aftermath of the health-law rollout.

Neera Tanden, president of the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress and an expert on health care, said even the modified Republican plans would encourage some employers to drop coverage, meaning many workers would have to find new arrangements.

"It is a great irony that there's been such stark criticism of the president for a small percentage of people facing lost coverage," she said, "when the traditional plans of the Republican Party on health care dwarfed anything that's happening from the Affordable Care Act."

—Siobhan Hughes contributed to this article.

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# Governors, GOP Allies Clash Over Tax Cuts

##  Governors, GOP Allies Clash Over Tax Cuts

_By Mark Peters and Neil King Jr._

_May 2, 2013_

Republican lawmakers in several states are blunting plans by GOP governors to reduce or eliminate income taxes, putting the legislators at odds with figures many in the party see as leading voices on reshaping government.

Friction over tax policy within the GOP has flared in states such as Louisiana, Nebraska, Kansas and Ohio, as Republican lawmakers raise concerns over projected revenue losses from income-tax cuts. Three of those states shelved big income-tax cuts that would be paid for by broadening the sales tax, and in Kansas, legislators will return next week to a continuing debate over the size and speed of proposed cuts.

Last week, the Indiana legislature passed a plan giving Gov. Mike Pence an income-tax cut that was smaller and phased in over a longer period than his original proposal. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin agreed to an income-tax-cut deal with Republican lawmakers, but they postponed it until 2015 over revenue concerns. North Carolina lawmakers have been discussing a tax overhaul for months but haven't come up with a plan.

What is playing out is a collision of long-held Republican Party ideals as lawmakers want to cut taxes to spur economic growth without running up deep budget deficits. Most of the governors promoting cuts are first-termers who say the income tax damps consumer spending and business creation. The boldest plans, however, can't be done without expanding the sales tax and eliminating certain exemptions, a shift many legislators aren't willing to embrace.

Proponents counter that sales-tax increases can be fairly structured to limit the impact on consumers.

"At the end of the day, you're going to have to make tough decisions," Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman said in a recent interview.

The tax debate in Republican-dominated capitols comes as national party leaders see the states as a source of policy innovations and fresh faces following Republican election defeats on the federal level last November. The Republican National Committee recently heralded its 30 GOP governors as "America's reformers in chief."

"You can't just have a reaction and say, 'Yep, we're going to cut a tax,'" said Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma of the deal reached with Mr. Pence, the governor. "You have to look in the long haul--over a decade--to be sure it's sustainable." Mr. Bosma said Indiana's final legislation lowers income taxes for individuals and ends the state's inheritance tax, while protecting budget reserves and spending more on infrastructure, education and other programs.

Republican governors are achieving some success with income-tax cuts alone, more so than bolder overhauls. But even those are being trimmed or delayed by GOP lawmakers.

Antitax activists still see a chance to build on a movement that has expanded since Kansas passed a sizable income-tax cut last year.

"In red states, the fact is that almost everyone is moving in the right direction, with many governors saying their goal is outright abolition of the income tax," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a prominent cheerleader of the tax-cut movement. "Some states are now going more slowly, but the goal is still out there: To get to zero."

The most dramatic retreat to date may be in Louisiana, where GOP lawmakers recently shelved plans, first floated by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, to eliminate the state income tax while broadening the sales tax to cover a new array of services.

Republican legislative leaders in Ohio have significantly scaled back a proposal by Republican Gov. John Kasich to reduce income taxes by 20% amid concerns over his plan to offset the lost revenue by broadening the sales tax to more services, as well as raising taxes on oil and natural-gas production. Mr. Heineman's proposal in Nebraska to eliminate the corporate and individual income taxes and replace the money by repealing a set of tax exemptions was pushed to next year.

In Indiana, Mr. Pence pushed for months for a cut in the state's income-tax rate by 10% over two years, citing the state government's large reserves and a continued economic recovery that portended strong tax revenue.

In the end, he agreed to a 5% reduction over 3½ years coupled with cuts in other taxes, as legislators were less convinced the state had an income-tax problem.

When Louisiana's Mr. Jindal broached his plan to eliminate the state income tax, in January, he billed it as a way to compete with neighboring Texas, which is one of seven states without an income tax.

The plan drew praise from national antitax advocates but stirred apprehension among GOP lawmakers and local business groups. Many of them worried that it would leave the state's finances in shambles, and that a higher and broader state sales tax would hurt businesses. Democrats blasted the proposed increase in sales taxes as unfair to the poor. Louisiana lawmakers are already trying to fill a $1.3 billion hole in the 2014 budget.

"The whole idea was driven more by Jindal's national ambitions and quest for headlines than anything local," said Cameron Henry, a Republican state legislator who opposed the Jindal plan. "How can you possibly revamp a tax code when your current budget is already a total nightmare?"

The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry opposed the plan after Mr. Jindal's staff estimated it would result in $500 million in new taxes annually on business. The group also criticized the governor for proposing a sweeping tax overhaul with little preparation. Jindal political adviser Curt Anderson blamed the defeat on "defenders of the status quo" and promised that the governor "will never stop advocating for the elimination of the income tax."

In Kansas, which undertook the tax-cutting debate earlier than some other states, Gov. Sam Brownback and the legislature last year cut the top income-tax rate to 4.9% from 6.45% starting in January, among other tax changes, while deciding against eliminating various exemptions to offset lost revenue. Now, after having unleashed the tax-cutting drive, Mr. Brownback is fighting conservative lawmakers who want to go still further by cutting the state sales tax, a move the governor says would imperil education funding.

Neighboring Missouri, where Republicans dominate the legislature but don't hold the governorship, is looking at cuts to its income tax in response to those in Kansas. But Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones says many lawmakers aren't ready to make the same size bets.

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# Evangelical Leader Preaches A Pullback From Politics, Culture Wars

##  Evangelical Leader Preaches A Pullback From Politics, Culture Wars

_By Neil King Jr._

_Oct. 22, 2013_

For years, as the principal public voice for the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's biggest evangelical group, Richard Land warned of a "radical homosexual agenda" and pushed for a federal ban on same-sex marriage.

His successor, Russell Moore, sounded a different note when the Supreme Court in June struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. "Love your gay and lesbian neighbors," Mr. Moore wrote in a flier, "How Should Your Church Respond," sent to the convention's estimated 45,000 churches. "They aren't part of an evil conspiracy." Marriage, he added, was a bond between a man and a woman, but shouldn't be seen as a "'culture war' political issue."

Since the birth of the Christian-conservative political movement in the late 1970s, no evangelical group has delivered more punch in America's culture wars than the Southern Baptist Convention and its nearly 16 million members. The country's largest Protestant denomination pushed to end abortion, open up prayer in public schools and boycott Walt Disney Co. over films deemed antifamily. Its ranks included many of the biggest names on the Christian right, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Today, after more than three decades of activism, many in the religious right are stepping back from the front lines. Mr. Moore, a 42-year-old political independent and theologian who heads the convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, says it is time to tone down the rhetoric and pull back from the political fray, given what he calls a "visceral recoil" among younger evangelicals to the culture wars.

"We are involved in the political process, but we must always be wary of being co-opted by it," Mr. Moore said in an interview in his Washington office, a short walk from Congress. "Christianity thrives when it is clearest about what distinguishes it from the outside culture."

Along with much of the religious right, Southern Baptists are undergoing a generational shift as Mr. Moore and his allies recalibrate their methods and aims. The moment is significant not only for America's religious life but for its politics, given the three-decade engagement by evangelical leaders that kept social issues on the front burner and helped Republicans win national elections.

Self-described evangelicals still vote heavily Republican. Exit polls show that nearly eight in 10 sided with Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election, a larger share of that group than either of the previous two Republican nominees received.

But Republican operatives with ties to the evangelical movement say much is changing. Every year tens of thousands of evangelicals, particularly the young, leave the Southern Baptist and other big denominational churches for more loosely organized assemblies that oppose abortion but are less likely to hew to other Republican causes.

"Republicans are finding it increasingly hard to collar evangelicals for political purposes, simply because the movement is so fragmented now, so decentralized, and a growing number of evangelicals simply find politics distasteful," says Mark DeMoss, a former chief of staff to Mr. Falwell and an adviser last year to Mr. Romney's campaign.

Mr. Moore is responding to this drift. He warns evangelicals to avoid becoming "mascots for any political faction." He focuses on how to keep millennials engaged in the church. His advice to church leaders: Be "winsome, kind and empathetic."

His advice meshes with those in the Republican Party who want the GOP to back off hot-button cultural issues to stress themes such as job creation and education. Party leaders earlier this year released a manifesto calling for the GOP to become more tolerant, welcoming and inclusive. The shift also comes as Republicans face a growing rift in the party between its activist tea-party flank and its more traditional business wing.

Mr. Moore and other prominent Christian conservatives are blunt in conceding that their long quest to roll back the sexual revolution has failed. The fight, they say, sowed divisions within the movement and alienated young believers.

"I would characterize the movement as having experienced a very tough defeat that now requires a shift of tactics," says Ralph Reed, who ran the once-powerful Christian Coalition through the 1990s. Religious conservatives once promised imminent victories, he says, "but we are now looking at 50- and 75-year horizons."

Some evangelical leaders compare the moment today to the retreat that followed the 1925 Scopes "Monkey trial" over Tennessee's effort to limit the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial led to a public backlash against evangelicals.

"Evangelicals felt a sting from the culture after the Scopes trial that they weren't used to feeling," says Mark Dever, an ally of Mr. Moore and pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church. "What is happening now with evangelicals is a disabusing of any idea of a simple victory of the right in a fallen world. They realize that is not going to happen."

The change in approach, which not all evangelical groups or churches share, isn't without risk. Albert Mohler, a top voice in the church as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and a Moore mentor, says the transition to a less confrontational approach, which he supports, could alienate church members from its leaders.

"When Richard Land spoke to most issues, he was certain that Southern Baptists were behind him and he was their mouthpiece," Mr. Mohler says. "Russ will need a deft touch to make sure that Southern Baptists stay behind him."

Mr. Moore is in no way a liberal. He equates abortion with the evils of slavery, considers homosexuality a sin, and insists the Southern Baptist Convention will never support gay marriage. At the same time, he emphasizes reconciliation and draws a traditional doctrinal distinction between the sinner and the sin.

Southern Baptists still make up more than a third of all the country's Protestant evangelicals, by far the largest single denomination under that umbrella, which itself comprises more than a quarter of the U.S. population. But their primacy is on the wane.

Baptists are departing from the religious traditions of their childhood faster than any other Protestant group, according to statistics gathered by Pew Research, an independent polling organization. Adult baptisms within Southern Baptist churches, meanwhile, have slid 20% over the past decade, according to LifeWay Research, a polling firm tied to the Southern Baptist Convention. The firm projects the church's membership will fall by half to 8.5 million by 2050, returning to the level of the mid-1950s.

Recent polls have found younger evangelicals drifting away from some of the conservative views of their parents and grandparents. A March survey of nearly 1,000 white evangelicals by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, found half of those under 35 favored same-sex marriage, compared with just 15% of those over 65. The younger evangelicals were more likely to be independents over Republicans, while the opposite was true of their elders.

The religious right was born on the theology of numerical expansion: the belief that conservative churches grow while liberal ones die. That conceit is gone now," says David Key, director of Baptist Studies at Emory University's Candler School of Theology.

Mr. Moore would like the Southern Baptists to be able to hold on to people such as Sarah Parr. The 31-year-old social worker grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist family in southern Virginia. She graduated from Liberty University, founded in 1971 by the Falwell family. But she says she found herself increasingly less at home in the church, and left it altogether in her 20s.

She now attends a nondenominational church that meets in an old theater on Washington's Capitol Hill. Politically, she describes herself "as a moderate at best, if I'm anything. But I don't find myself in either party."

When Mr. Moore took over in June as the Southern Baptists' top public-policy advocate, he startled some in the church by declaring as dead and gone the entire concept of the Bible Belt as a potent mix of Jesus and American boosterism. "Good riddance," he told thousands of the faithful at the group's annual convention in Houston in June. "Let's not seek to resuscitate it."

In an essay for the conservative Christian magazine "First Things," titled "Why Evangelicals Retreat," he dinged the movement for "triumphalism and hucksterism" and lampooned a time when its leaders dispatched voter guides for the Christian position on "a line-item veto, the Balanced Budget Amendment, and the proper funding levels for the Department of Education."

Mr. Moore says there is no doctrinal daylight between him and his church, and he insists he isn't seeking to return the Southern Baptists to a past in which it shunned politics entirely.

He travels almost weekly from his home in Nashville to Washington to meet with members of the Obama administration and with congressional leaders. He has allied with the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups to make the case that overhauling the U.S. immigration system is a Christian goal. He is pushing the Pentagon to give religious chaplains in the military freer rein to preach, and has helped build a new coalition to fight a federal requirement that insurers provide contraception coverage.

His approach, however, is strikingly different from that of his predecessor Mr. Land, who for a quarter century served as the leading voice of the Southern Baptists. Like many evangelical leaders of his generation, Mr. Land, a Princeton-educated Texan, openly aligned himself with the Republican Party and popped up frequently in the Oval Office during the George W. Bush years.

Long before their divergent approaches on the gay-marriage issue, Messrs. Moore and Land split over the huge rally held by conservative talk-radio host Glenn Beck in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 2010. Mr. Land attended the rally as Mr. Beck's guest, and later compared Mr. Beck to Billy Graham, calling him "a person in spiritual motion."

Mr. Moore, in an essay posted after the rally, said the event illustrated how far astray many conservative Christians had wandered in pursuit of "populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads."

In an interview, Mr. Land said the Southern Baptist leadership is divided into those who think the culture war is lost; those who are weary and want it over; and those who think they are losing the war but feel victory is still possible. He declined to say where he puts Mr. Moore, but said he counts himself among the latter. "We are like where Britain was in 1940, under heavy attack but still not defeated," he said.

Asked to respond, Mr. Beck in a written statement applauded Mr. Land and said, "In times like these, we need to find common ground."

Mr. Moore grew up with a Catholic mother and a Baptist father in a working-class, heavily Democratic neighborhood in Biloxi, Miss. His paternal grandfather was a Baptist pastor. He went every summer on Baptist Bible outings, and gave his first youth sermon when he was 12. ("It was dreadful," he recalls. "I vomited before and after.")

Through college he worked for Rep. Gene Taylor, a Democratic freshman congressman from Mississippi who later gave him a Bible signed by President Bill Clinton, which he now keeps in his home. He calls his vote for Mr. Clinton in 1992 "a great mistake," and says he "loved" George W. Bush. He remains a registered independent.

Mr. Moore has pushed to patch up rifts within the Baptist movement between the conservative Southern Baptist Convention and a growing number of more liberal breakaway groups. While still living in Louisville, he met repeatedly for coffee with Rev. Joe Phelps, the liberal pastor of the city's Highland Baptist Church, which welcomes openly gay and lesbian members. The church broke from the convention in 2002.

"He respects me and acknowledges that I am living out my Christian convictions," Rev. Phelps says, "while others in the movement might not even recognize that I am a Christian."

Speaking at his inauguration in mid-September, Mr. Moore told the gathering of congressmen, pastors and church leaders to look beyond trying to save American culture. One day, he said, "the monuments to American power" that dot the Washington landscape will be in ruins. While continuing to fight for justice, he said to a rumble of agreement, "we must also remember that we are not Americans first. We belong to another kingdom."

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# GOP Sees a New Path for Senate Through Iowa

##  GOP Sees a New Path for Senate Through Iowa

_By Ben Kesling and Beth Reinhard_

_March 30, 2014_

_U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, a Democratic Senate candidate from Iowa. CQ Roll Call_

OSCEOLA, Iowa—Until last week, Democrats surveying an increasingly challenging bid to retain control of the Senate took some comfort in Iowa, a state won twice by President Barack Obama.

That was before U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, the Democratic candidate in Iowa's first wide-open Senate race in 30 years, was caught appearing to scoff at—of all things—farmers.

Mr. Braley's gaffe may dissipate, as Democrats predict, but for now, it has injected a greater sense of competition into a race that the party had hoped to simply bank in the win column. Republicans said party activists are bumping the state up on their priority lists, and the party faithful are reveling in the attention.

"GOP donors are quickly realizing that the race in Iowa is worth their time and attention," said local Republican strategist Dave Kochel.

A weekend pie auction here for Clark County Republicans "doubled and possibly even tripled" its usual fundraising total, in part because of excitement over the Senate contest, said Scott McLin, a former county party chairman who helped organize the event. He coughed up $50 for a homemade cherry-cheesecake pie.

Not since 1984, when Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin was first elected, has a Senate ballot in Iowa been printed without his name or that of Chuck Grassley, the Republican elected in 1980.

At a private fundraiser with fellow trial lawyers in Texas, Mr. Braley managed to take a swipe at farmers while also badmouthing Mr. Grassley—who has held elected office since 1959 and won his latest election by 31 percentage points. Mr. Braley called him "a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school."

Republicans gleefully used the video to charge that Mr. Braley's allegiance was more to the plaintiffs bar than to Iowa institutions. The party's national Senate campaign arm produced bumper stickers saying: "Sorry Bruce Braley, I'm proud to be a farmer."

"Iowa was not on a lot of Republican minds as a pickup, but...this will make Republicans take a second look at the race," said Tim Miller, executive director of America Rising, the super PAC that released the Braley video.

The tighter the race in Iowa, the harder the Democratic task becomes in holding the party's Senate majority, which is now in jeopardy as more Democratic seats come under threat. The party already is trying to hold seats in 10 other states, including seven that voted for Republican Mitt Romney in the latest presidential election. Four states that backed Mr. Obama in 2012 are nonetheless problematic for Democrats this year, including Iowa, thanks in part to the president's falling job-approval ratings and the unpopularity of the health-insurance law he championed.

Republicans need to pick up six seats to claim a Senate majority and capture control of both chambers of Congress.

Independent analysts have long said that Democrats hold a slight advantage in the Iowa race, noting Mr. Obama's two wins here, and Democrats said the Braley incident would diminish in the seven months until the election. A Quinnipiac University poll in March found him sitting on double-digit leads over the Republican candidates. As of December, Mr. Braley had $2.6 million on hand, while none of the Republicans had more than $300,000.

Mr. Braley apologized personally to Mr. Grassley, his office said, and has responded to the video by emphasizing his support for the farm bill earlier this year and other efforts he said would benefit rural communities. Asked about the matter, his campaign took aim at the Republican field, saying the party's candidates "support policies that are bad for Iowa and good for big-oil billionaires."

Mr. Harkin, the Democratic senator, said, "This is one of those bumps in the road we all go through when running for elective office, and I am confident people will look past it."

Among the five GOP Senate candidates, one appeared to be best positioned to take advantage of Mr. Braley's gaffe. Joni Ernst, a state senator, had posted an Internet ad trumpeting her hog-farming background around the same time as Mr. Braley's video surfaced. "I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm," says Ms. Ernst in the ad. "So, when I get to Washington, I'll know how to cut pork."

The ad, titled "Make 'Em Squeal," started airing in Des Moines, has drawn more than 400,000 views on YouTube and was featured on two late-night talk shows. Just after it was released, Ms. Ernst won an endorsement from Sarah Palin.

Ms. Ernst showed up at the Osceola pie auction, held just blocks from towering grain silos. She brought her own pie in a white box, complete with plastic pig perched on top.

"It's been phenomenal," she said of the boost her campaign has received since Mr. Braley's comments went public. "A lot of people have taken offense."

The race here is still in its early stages, but Republicans have already focused on the Affordable Care Act, which Mr. Braley voted for. The criticism resonates with some voters. "My costs are going up....I'm struggling," says Josh Galliart, a 27-year-old sales representative, who blames the health law for raising the cost of his employer-provided insurance.

At the Osceola pie auction, which saw some pies fetch $200 or more, Joyce Neal, treasurer of the county party, said Republicans would rally behind whoever wins the nomination. "I'm not worried," she said, dding that the GOP, for now, needs to focus on raising money. She happily paid $60 for an apple pie.

Sitting in a Des Moines restaurant, Clare Smith-Larson, an education consultant and Democrat, said Mr. Braley was merely trying to say that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee—a post Mr. Grassley may hold if the GOP takes control of the Senate—"needs to have a very good grasp of the law."

But she also said that Mr. Braley needs to avoid another such gaffe. "If he says another stupid thing, I'll stand him up against the wall myself," she said.

###

# President's Approval Rating Hits New Low

##  President's Approval Rating Hits New Low

_By Patrick O 'Connor_

_March 12, 2014_

President Barack Obama is struggling to overcome widespread pessimism about the economy and deep frustration with Washington, notching the lowest job-approval ratings of his presidency in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The results suggest Mr. Obama could weigh on fellow Democrats in midterm elections this fall, particularly in the conservative states that will play a large role in deciding whether his party retains its Senate majority.

Mr. Obama's job approval ticked down to 41% in March from 43% in January, marking a new low. Some 54% disapproved of the job he is doing, matching a previous high from December, when the botched rollout of his signature health law played prominently in the news. The latest survey also showed the lowest-ever approval in Journal/NBC polling for Mr. Obama's handling of foreign policy.

The findings come amid dissatisfaction with all elected leaders in Washington and low regard for the Republican Party. Roughly a quarter of those polled view the GOP positively, with 45% harboring negative views, weaker numbers than for the Democratic Party.

Still, the GOP leads slightly when the public is asked which party should control Congress.

While fortunes could change before November, Mr. Obama's power to help his party's candidates appear limited, said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who directs the Journal/NBC poll with Democrat Fred Yang.

"The president is being taken off the field as a Democratic positive," Mr. McInturff said. "These numbers would suggest that, beyond his behind-the-scenes fundraising, it's hard to imagine the president on the road and hard to imagine where he would campaign."

For Democrats, agreed Mr. Yang, "the wind is in our faces."

Americans surveyed in the poll said they were less inclined to support a candidate if the person had been endorsed by Mr. Obama or was a "solid supporter" of his administration. Approval of Mr. Obama is particularly weak in the South and Midwest, regions where Democrats could have a tough time defending Senate seats.

Dissatisfaction with all incumbents remains high. Only 34% in the poll of 1,000 adults, conducted March 5-9, said their member of Congress deserved another term, compared with 55% who said they would rather give someone else a chance. Fifty-four percent said they would vote to replace every member of Congress if ballots included that option.

Unease over the economy continues to drive these concerns. Sixty-five percent of those polled said the country is on the wrong track, compared with the 26% who said it was on the right one, a wider spread than in the midterm-election years of 2006 and 2010. Roughly one-quarter of the respondents think the economy will improve during the next year, while 57% believe the U.S. is still in a recession, despite years of modest economic growth and robust stock-market gains.

Mr. Obama's weakening position is due in part to slippage within his own party. The poll tallied his highest-ever disapproval rating from fellow Democrats, at 20%, a cause for concern for the party heading into midterm elections that often are defined by which side turns out its base. In particular, Mr. Obama's support is softening among blacks, Hispanics and women.

Despite those signs of erosion for the president, Mr. Obama still doesn't engender the same levels of disapproval that his predecessor, George W. Bush, garnered at this point in his presidency. And Mr. Obama's support among women, particularly white women, is strong enough to create a bulwark against GOP gains in the midterms.

Despite the headwinds, Democrats have a potentially winning issue in pushing to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25. That was one of the most popular suggested attributes of a candidate tested in the poll, with 58% saying they were more likely to support someone who backs the increase and 29% saying they would oppose that person.

Respondents in the poll also said they were likely to favor candidates who say they are committed to cutting federal spending, a potential aid to Republicans. But with equal force, respondents said they would be less likely to support a candidate who backs reductions in Social Security and Medicare to address the budget deficit, a position most often identified with Republicans.

One area of agreement among respondents was on whether the U.S. should reassert itself on the world stage. Adults surveyed were less likely to support a candidate who wants to see the U.S. assume an expanded role in policing foreign conflicts and more likely to support one who doesn't. Republicans, Democrats and independents showed more agreement on those questions than many others.

--Rebecca Ballhaus contributed to this article.

###

# Republicans Widen Push to Pick Up Senate Seats

##  Republicans Widen Push to Pick Up Senate Seats

_By Patrick O'Connor_

_Jan. 20, 2014_

_In Virginia, Ed Gillespie plans to challenge Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. Getty Images_

President Barack Obama's sagging approval ratings and the rocky health-law rollout are expanding the map of competitive Senate races this year, giving Republicans new hope of capturing seats in states that the president carried in 2012.

The GOP already had a strong opportunity to pick up a net six seats to win a Senate majority. Democrats have to defend many more seats than Republicans, including in seven states that Mr. Obama lost in 2012. Now, polls show tighter-than-expected races for Democratic-held seats in Colorado, Iowa and Michigan, while a formidable Republican is challenging the Democratic incumbent in Virginia and another is weighing a bid in New Hampshire. In 2012, Mr. Obama won all five of those states.

With Election Day more than nine months away, the question is whether this marks a low ebb for Mr. Obama and his party, or a lasting trend.

"I'd be more worried if I were a Democrat than if I was a Republican," said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report, which tracks congressional elections. "The Republicans' prospects in the existing targets are improving because of the president's approval ratings, and they are continuing to put other races on the board."

A Democratic lead of better than six percentage points in which party voters think should control Congress has collapsed since the glitch-plagued health-law rollout in October, leaving the parties at parity, according to an aggregate of polls by Real Clear Politics.

Adding weight to the Democratic burden: Midterm elections are historically unkind to the parties of sitting presidents, particularly in their second terms. And voter demographics should favor Republicans because the electorate in midterms tends to be older and whiter than in presidential-election years.

Last week, Americans for Prosperity, the well-funded conservative group, kicked off a $2 million advertising blitz that, in part, targets Democratic Senate candidates in Iowa and Michigan for supporting the Affordable Care Act.

Of course, Republicans still need a lot to break in their favor to recapture the Senate. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ended November with more than $12 million in the bank, according to Federal Election Commission data, nearly twice as much as Senate Republicans. Individual Democratic candidates claim a similarly wide fundraising edge in many top battlegrounds.

In addition, Democratic candidates are largely free of the contentious Republican primaries that have potential to inflame tensions and that some in the GOP fear will produce nominees less appealing to the general-election voting pool. This could play out in Kentucky and Georgia, where Republicans are having to defend seats against top-tier Democrats. The GOP has squandered previous attempts to reclaim the Senate majority by fielding nominees who lost winnable contests.

Democrats say their position remains strong. "Democrats continue to lead in all of the competitive races in the country, and Republicans are still hampered by divisive tea-party primaries that are pushing their candidates even further out of the mainstream," said Matt Canter, a spokesman for the Democrats' Senate campaign arm.

Republicans' best pickup chances still are in GOP-leaning states such as North Carolina, Arkansas and Louisiana. But other states appear to be coming into play. One of those is Michigan, where the retirement of Democratic Sen. Carl Levin will leave an open seat.

Public-opinion surveys show that the expected Republican nominee, Terri Lynn Land, a former Michigan secretary of state, is better-known in state than her likely Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Gary Peters, who represents a suburban Detroit district.

"The assumption in Washington is that somehow Michigan is a blue state," said Bill Ballenger, the editor of Inside Michigan Politics, who served in the state Legislature as a Republican. "The fact of the matter is that all of state government in Michigan is run by Republicans."

Mr. Peters ended September with $500,000 more in the bank than his likely GOP opponent, even after Ms. Land donated $1 million to her own campaign.

In New Hampshire, few expected Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to face a tough re-election fight. But former Sen. Scott Brown, who lost his Massachusetts seat in 2012, has fueled speculation he will challenge the incumbent by recently moving to New Hampshire.

A recent poll has Ms. Shaheen with a three-percentage-point lead over Mr. Brown should he run, and political-interest groups on either side already are running TV ads attacking either candidate.

Mr. Brown didn't respond to requests for comment.

In Virginia, Ed Gillespie, a former Republican Party chairman, said last week he is challenging popular Democratic Sen. Mark Warner this fall. Mr. Gillespie is regarded as one of the party's top operatives, and his vast network of contacts, including top party donors, could make him a serious challenger.

Democrats argue Mr. Gillespie's history as an operative and lobbyist will prove to be a vulnerability.

"Virginians don't want a D.C. shadow lobbyist like Ed Gillespie who epitomizes the reckless and irresponsible Republican economic agenda," DSCC executive director Guy Cecil said in a preview of Democratic attacks to come.

Republicans have begun casting Mr. Warner, a former governor, as a proxy for the president, criticizing his support for much of Mr. Obama's legislative agenda.

"Mark Warner's not turned out to be the senator so many Virginians hoped he would be," Mr. Gillespie said in a recent email. "After promising he'd never vote for a bill that would mean people losing the insurance they like, he cast the deciding vote for Obamacare."

Republicans have failed to convince their top recruits to run in both Colorado and Iowa, two states where Mr. Obama won by strong margins in 2012. As a result, both states looked safe for Democrats until a series of polls late last year showed Republicans running stronger than expected, concurrent with the president's slipping poll numbers and trouble with the health law.

###

# Ted Cruz, Invoking Reagan, Angers GOP Colleagues but Wins Fans Elsewhere

##  Ted Cruz, Invoking Reagan, Angers GOP Colleagues but Wins Fans Elsewhere

_By Monica Langley_

_April 21, 2014_

_Texas Sen. Ted Cruz poses in his office before the oil painting he commissioned of former President Ronald Reagan. Melissa Golden for The Wall Street Journal_

WASHINGTON—Rushing to an afternoon vote last month, Sen. Ted Cruz hopped the underground tram to the U.S. Capitol from his office across the street.

The Texan planted his black ostrich cowboy boots in the middle of the small subway car without getting so much as a nod from the other senators—Republican or Democrat—amiably chatting or huddled in their seats.

Mr. Cruz finds himself standing alone a lot these days. His response to the cold shoulders: "The establishment despised Ronald Reagan" before he became president, "but the people loved him."

For the 43-year-old Republican, the Reagan name illuminates his political life's fundamental dichotomy: Many senators from his own party mistrust and dislike him, but many conservatives elsewhere worship him.

He lives that contrast daily. Moving into the vast congressional hallway that afternoon, he attracted a burst of adulation from tourists. "Ted Cruz, I love you!" shouted a Massachusetts father, William Harvey, there with his young daughter. "President Cruz in 2016!"

Mr. Cruz's quest to position himself as a latter-day Reagan has led him to defy his party's elders on handling issues such as debt and health care, and to become the national face of last fall's government shutdown. His methods have led political rivals to brand him as an extremist and made him the target of talk-show lampoonings.

His quest also has put him in the center of national political debate, a status validated when Vice President Joe Biden singled him out as a threat in a recent fundraising appeal.

"No one has vaulted onto the national political stage faster and caused more of a sensation than Ted Cruz," says Vin Weber, a former congressional leader with strong ties to today's GOP heads. "But his style and tactics in accomplishing that create questions about his ability to broaden his appeal."

Despite Mr. Cruz's high profile, even many Republican colleagues don't know much about the man, what drives him or where he's headed. Mr. Cruz, in a series of interviews over several weeks in the Capitol, in his Washington home and during trips to public and private meetings in Texas and Iowa, spoke of how his childhood devotion to Mr. Reagan drove his education and informs his politics.

In a nutshell, he positions himself as one who can lead the GOP back to majority status by sticking with conservative positions rather than by moderating them, as he says losing Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole did.

That is a position designed to contrast him with party-establishment favorites such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who are less wedded to conservative social positions, and with Sen. Rand Paul, a fellow tea-party favorite whose reticence about foreign commitments contrasts with the more muscular global role—including in the Ukraine crisis—that Mr. Cruz and other Reagan disciples advocate.

He deflects questions about the 2016 race but shows signs of toying with presidential plans: His itinerary this month included trips to early presidential-primary states New Hampshire and South Carolina.

"The best thing I can do is to stand up and lead now" rather than get involved in 2016 speculation, Mr. Cruz says.

In his Senate office, Mr. Cruz sits under a giant oil painting of Mr. Reagan at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, where the president declared: "Tear down this wall." Mr. Cruz commissioned the painting after his surprise 2012 Senate victory.

To understand him, Mr. Cruz says, look back to the 9-year-old Rafael "Rafelito" Edward Cruz alongside his father, cheering Mr. Reagan during televised presidential debates. His Princeton University roommate, David Panton, recalls Mr. Cruz saying his life's goal was to "become like Ronald Reagan—a principled conservative and great communicator."

Some in the GOP take exception to his claim to the Reagan mantle. Mr. Paul appeared to be doing exactly that when he said on a news show recently: "Sometimes people want to stand up and say, 'Hey, look at me, I'm the next Ronald Reagan.' Well, almost all of us in the party are big fans of Ronald Reagan." Sen. Paul's office didn't respond to inquiries.

Critics say Mr. Cruz's rapid rise has shown a drive to propel himself to stardom rather than to solve his party's or country's problems. Until he teamed up with a Democrat this month to pass a resolution opposing a visa for an Iranian ambassador, he hadn't logged a significant legislative win. "I try to stop bad things from happening," he says.

Some Republicans worry that Mr. Cruz might prove too conservative for a general-election audience, much as some other tea-party favorites have proven incapable of winning Senate elections in the last two election cycles.

And Mr. Cruz needs to demonstrate more of Mr. Reagan's ability to "find common ground," says Roger Porter, a Harvard government professor who served in the Reagan White House. Republicans will be "looking for a standard-bearer who can win and work with others to govern effectively."

Polls this early in a presidential cycle are notoriously unreliable, but the data so far suggest Mr. Cruz would start a quest for the Republican nomination in the middle of the pack. A McClatchy-Marist poll this week showed him sixth among 10 potential Republican candidates tested.

Mr. Cruz's rabble-rousing style has paid off with a $1.5 million book deal and $4 million in political donations last year.

That style clearly resonates in some voter blocs. "I just came from Washington, D.C., and it's great to be back in America," he said to cheering crowds at an Iowa convention of home-schoolers in March, where his attendance fueled speculation about his presidential ambitions. An audience member yelled that the Washington establishment doesn't listen to "the people." Mr. Cruz shot back: "They're not listening to me, either."

Yet despite cultivating an outsider image, Mr. Cruz carries impeccable establishment credentials: degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School and a Supreme Court clerkship. His wife, Heidi, whom he met when both worked on the 2000 Bush campaign, is a vegetarian with a Harvard M.B.A. and is a Goldman Sachs managing director. The couple lives in a Houston high-rise with a live-in nanny for their daughters, 3 and 6.

Mr. Cruz's admiration for Mr. Reagan began with his father, Rafael Cruz, who often told his story of fleeing Cuba with $100 sewn into his underwear. The elder Mr. Cruz started a Houston seismic-data company, briefly moving with his wife, Eleanor, to Canada, where Mr. Cruz was born in 1970 before the family returned to Houston.

When Sen. Cruz's Canadian birthplace came up last year as a presidential-bid issue, he said his American-born mother—she is of Irish-Italian descent—made him a "natural-born citizen," as the Constitution requires.

"Before Ted was 10," his father says, "he was jumping into our dinner-table conversation about replacing the leftist government of Jimmy Carter with a constitutional conservative like Ronald Reagan."

The father sent his son to a Baptist school with strict standards and conservative values. In home and school, Sen. Cruz says, he learned the socially conservative values he pushes today: opposition to abortion and to gay marriage, for example.

To improve himself in the style and substance he idolized in Mr. Reagan, Sen. Cruz says, in high school he joined the Constitutional Corroborators, a traveling troupe on the Texas Rotary Club circuit, where he recited by memory the Constitution and words of the Founding Fathers.

At Princeton, he showed up as "much the same person he is today," says Mr. Panton, his former roommate, now an Atlanta investor. "Surrounded by liberals, Ted was resolute with his conservative principles," he says. "Even in the dorm room, he talked about Ronald Reagan all the time."

Mr. Cruz admits to some youthful indiscretions. At Princeton, he built up a $2,000 debt playing poker and had to borrow from his aunt to pay it off. At Harvard, he acted in "The Crucible" but was once so hung over he had to leave the stage.

His Reagan obsession permeated his personal life. Before his marriage ceremony, he took the wedding party for a picnic at the Reagan ranch.

"I grew up in a nonpolitical, Patagonia-wearing, mountain-climbing, vegetarian family in California," Mrs. Cruz says of her courtship. "And then I fall in love with a Hispanic man from Texas who loves the game of politics, is a policy wonk, and...lives and breathes the values of Ronald Reagan."

In 2003, he returned to Texas to become solicitor general responsible for the state's appellate cases, winning cases such as one that allowed a Ten Commandments monument to stand on the state Capitol grounds.

While working in private practice, he visited Washington in 2010 and hit it off with newly elected Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), who encouraged him to run for Senate.

The day Mr. Cruz launched his Senate bid, he polled 2%. Challenging an establishment candidate, he modeled his campaign after Barack Obama's 2008 grass-roots push for the presidency, garnered strong tea-party enthusiasm—and won.

When Mr. Cruz arrived at the U.S. Capitol, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell sought to bring him in the fold by taking him on new-senator trips to Afghanistan and Israel and as his guest to a glitzy Washington gala.

But Mr. Cruz says that warmth dissipated when he quickly dispensed with the unwritten rules of Senate etiquette, particularly the one that said a new senator should be seen but not heard, because "I didn't think representing my constituents was optional."

After he opposed the nomination of Senate Republican alumnus Chuck Hagel as defense secretary—grilling Mr. Hagel sharply in hearings about positions he worried were anti-Israel and weak on Iran—Mr. Cruz says some GOP senators told him that he crossed the line in his strident challenge of the nomination.

He enhanced his notoriety as a rhetorical bully in a Senate Judiciary hearing on gun control after the Sandy Hook school shootings. His questioning of veteran Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who was pushing to reinstate the assault-weapons ban, came across as a lecture, prompting her to lash out, "Senator, I'm not a sixth-grader."

The measure failed. Soon after, Sen. Feinstein, when encountering him in the Senate elevator, would greet him: "Hello, tough guy."

When a bipartisan group unveiled a comprehensive immigration plan, Mr. Cruz criticized its border-security provisions and path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Later, he infuriated House Republican leaders by denouncing their immigration plan as "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.

His next gambit: an all-out effort to defund Obamacare. Despite resistance from Senate Republicans and Democrats, he stood up before an empty Senate on Sept. 24 to argue Congress shouldn't renew government funding while the health law remained on the books. "I rise today in opposition to Obamacare," he said, launching a 21-hour monologue that included a reading of "Green Eggs and Ham."

Mr. Cruz was roundly pilloried. "Technically, this was just a tantrum," said Jimmy Kimmel on his talk show. "And while the speech was not a record for the longest ever given on the Senate floor, it did tie the record for the dumbest."

While he lost his defunding attempt, he says he finds victory in the low approval ratings of Mr. Obama and his health-care law.

Relations with GOP colleagues chilled noticeably, he says. At weekly Senate GOP lunches, some colleagues went out of their way to avoid sitting beside him, several attendees say. "Some aspects of the Senate are like the junior-high lunchroom or 'Mean Girls' cliques," Mr. Cruz says.

He doubled down on his approach this year, angering Republicans by insisting on a procedural vote on raising the federal debt ceiling rather than letting it slide through the Senate—thus forcing the GOP leader and 11 other Republicans to vote with Democrats. "Why are you throwing Republicans under the bus?" he recalls a colleague asking at a lunch. "I'm not," he responded. "I'm urging us to quit bankrupting the country."

Faced with Mr. Cruz's defiance, the Republican Senate leadership has frequently acted as if he were invisible, he says. Mr. McConnell maintains severely limited contact with Mr. Cruz, occasionally refusing to even say hello when they pass. Mr. McConnell has disagreed strongly with Mr. Cruz's tactics, a McConnell spokesman says.

Mr. Cruz says he won't temper his approach. Despite being named vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee last year, he says he now refuses to raise money for the group because it has chosen to back incumbents in GOP primaries, sometimes against tea-party candidates.

In a meeting in his office last month, he reviewed the draft speech for the following day's appearance at Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering where most GOP presidential hopefuls would appear. "I want to tell them they don't need to be scared," he told his staff, "that we can win again by following Reagan's example of standing on principle and campaigning against Washington."

At the CPAC conference, he took that point further by criticizing by name Messrs. Romney, McCain and Dole for losing by moderating their positions. He promptly earned a rebuke from Mr. McCain, who demanded an apology for the ailing Mr. Dole. Mr. Cruz later praised Mr. Dole as a war hero, but never apologized.

Some CPAC attendees didn't seem to mind. "Sometimes having the right enemies is as important as having the right friends," says one, Sarasota, Fla., investor George Templeton.

Mr. Cruz vaulted to second place in the CPAC straw poll after Sen. Paul, from seventh a year earlier.

Later that day, at a conference hosted by the Center for Security Policy, Mr. Cruz said his foreign policy is between Mr. Paul's nonintervention leanings and Mr. McCain's more activist world approach. "My views are very much the views of Ronald Reagan," he said, "which I would suggest is a third point on the triangle."

Mr. Cruz's positions endear him to the grass-roots conservative movement. Back in Texas, he is casting a bigger shadow now that Gov. Rick Perry isn't seeking re-election. In last month's Texas primaries, Mr. Cruz endorsed five candidates, four of whom won. Some office seekers now identify themselves as "Cruz Republicans."

A poll this week by Public Policy Polling showed 47% of Texas voters surveyed approved of Mr. Cruz, more than approved of Gov. Perry or Texas' other GOP Senator, John Cornyn.

Washington has begun to acknowledge he has arrived. He returned from Texas to speak at the Gridiron Dinner, an exclusive political-journalistic annual event. He got a $15 haircut from the Capitol barber and reviewed his remarks, prepared with the help of professional joke writers.

Before the dinner, he played George Strait's country music in his apartment above a museum overlooking the Capitol. He disappeared into the bedroom in bluejeans, emerging in a white tie and coattails. Mrs. Cruz, 41, had arrived in town and unhappily spied his favorite bachelor meal, cans of Campbell's Chunky soup; she is trying to get him to eat less processed food.

At the dinner, he played off his reputation as an egotist disliked by Democrats and Republicans alike, and he got a big laugh by saying his 21-hour speech included "nothing but my favorite sound"—his own voice.

The next day, Mr. Cruz was back on the road to slam the establishment.

All signs point to a presidential bid. Mr. Cruz says he's traveling to "fire up the grass roots." Yet a new video on his website filled with fiery stump lines is more of a presidential commercial than a voter update. A new super PAC, Draft Ted Cruz for President, launched last month. On his fourth Iowa swing in just a few months, he visited the crop-and-cattle farm of Bruce Rastetter, an influential Republican whose support is sought by GOP presidential hopefuls. Mr. Rastetter was noncommittal.

At a Cerro Gordo County GOP dinner, local Republican activist Paul Pate described Mr. Cruz's venture into Iowa, home of the first presidential caucuses: "This is the senator's off-Broadway performance to give him a chance to work on his message."

Mr. Cruz is also making some progress working across the aisle. He joined Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) as a co-sponsor on her military-sexual-assault bill that narrowly failed last month. His bill demanding the Obama administration bar a visa for Iran's new United Nations ambassador—because of his affiliation with the 1979 American embassy seizure—passed unanimously because of an unlikely partnership with Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and was signed by Mr. Obama Friday.

"I'll work with Democrats, Republicans, independents, libertarians," Mr. Cruz says. "Heck I'll even work with Martians to get this country back on track."

Some fellow Senators still apparently aren't ready. After a recent floor vote, Mr. Cruz entered an elevator occupied by three lawmakers; none greeted him. After a silent ride to the basement for the subway, Mr. Cruz said: "Have a great day."

The others rushed out, saying nothing.

###

# About This Book

##  About This Book

"The Right Way? Republicans Rethink, Reload for 2014" was published April 28, 2014, by The Wall Street Journal.

The foreword was written by Gerald F. Seib. The editors were Gerald F. Seib, Aaron Zitner and David Marino-Nachison. The art director was Manuel Velez.

The photographs of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Sen. Mitch McConnell on the first two chapter heading pages are from Getty Images. The photograph of Sen. Ted Cruz on the third chapter heading page is from Bloomberg.

For more political and elections coverage, visit wsj.com/capitaljournal. For questions about this or other e-books from The Wall Street Journal, e-mail ebooks@wsj.com. For more news, information and subscriptions, visit wsj.com.

Copyright (C)2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
