A hunger to be more aggressive and authoritative in the biggest policy fights in Congress is defining the race to lead the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest conservative caucus in the House.
Reps. Ben Cline (R-Va.), 52, and August Pfluger (R-Texas), 46, are seeking the chairmanship for the group in the next Congress — a position that has historically served as a launching pad for Republicans into higher positions.
In interviews with The Hill, and in pitches to RSC members at a candidate forum last week, each expressed a desire to increase the caucus’s influence.
“We’re a majority of the majority, so we should be able to achieve more conservative victories by leveraging those numbers,” Cline said.
The caucus itself is more than 50 years old, and its membership of more than 170 members accounts for a majority of the House GOP. It is primarily policy-focused with the aim of a conservative limited government agenda. Its dominant activities include providing backgrounders on policy to staff and focusing on select issues through task forces.
“RSC can and should be an organization that helps move the needle – that we’re a conservative conscience for our conference, that we are the conservative thought leader on legislation,” Pfluger said.
Each of the candidates head up an RSC policy task force. Pfluger, a second-term congressman and decorated fighter pilot who is still an Air Force Reserves colonel, heads up the RSC’s House Energy Action Team (HEAT), an energy policy-focused task force in the caucus.
And Cline, an attorney and third-term congressman, is the current chair of RSC’s budget task force, which every year releases a model federal budget that slashes spending with the intention of balancing the budget – a document that has been used by Democrats to attack Republicans more broadly.
“I’m a policy geek, and have been ever since I was a staffer for [former Rep.] Bob Goodlatte,” Cline said, adding that he likes much of what the group does now.
“But I also want to try and take RSC to the next step forward, being more influential in the conversation about policy and helping leadership to achieve conservative policy goals … knowing that we need to lean in and use our numbers to our advantage,” he added.
He suggested that RSC take more official positions on “strategic key issues,” with the goal of having the press, interest groups in downtown Washington, D.C., and the grassroots looking to see what RSC’s stance is on a given issue.
One idea from Cline is to create and sunset temporary RSC task forces to deal with immediate, temporary legislative issues – such as a Farm Bill task force, or a budget reconciliation task force – that can also take official positions.
“We also need a parliamentary kind of rapid response task force so that on the floor we can react to any efforts to take us off message or off our game when it comes to the rules,” Cline said.
That mindset echoes a major focus of another influential group in the House GOP: The House Freedom Caucus. Cline is a member of that hardline conservative group, which has plenty of overlap in membership with the RSC. Cline said he hopes to be a “bridge” to help address any differences between RSC and the Freedom Caucus on legislation.
Pfluger, meanwhile, categorizes the RSC’s major activities in three major “lines of effort”: Policy, communications, and political.
A large part of Pfluger’s vision for the caucus involves the political line of effort, “reimagining” the focus on the House Conservatives Fund – the political action committee that is affiliated with the RSC. A handout from Pfluger calls for taking fundraising for the group “to new heights,” hiring a full-time political director for the PAC, and providing financial support to vulnerable incumbents.
“An organization that does help unite our conference, that does help move conservative policy across the finish line should have that political aspect to it,” Pfluger said.
He also suggests creating a rapid response task force to react to news of the day.
“We should pick the issues that are key to everybody, that are cross-cutting, and use those to move policy in the direction we’d like to see it go in a more conservative way, and hold leadership accountable for the things that we say we’re going to do,” Pfluger said.
The outcome of the November election will greatly affect RSC.
Pfluger said his “planning assumption” is that Republicans will have unified control of government, and that he has the “energy to adapt to the environment that we’re going to be in, whatever that may be.”
Former President Trump’s return to the White House, if he wins, would mean greater opportunity for advancement of conservative policies – but also greater risk of inter-GOP clashes. Trump, for instance, fought with conservatives when they declined to back his push to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Pfluger said he believes a second Trump presidency would complement his goal of having RSC focus on Article 1 authority in the constitution – reasserting the power of Congress – in wake of the Supreme Court rolling back the power of executive agencies when it overruled the Chevron deference standard.
“I think when President Trump says he’s going to drain the swamp, he’s talking about the same thing – that agencies have too much power, and that there are people inside those executive branch agencies that have too much power,” Pfluger said.
Cline said he envisions an “open line of communication” with a potential Trump White House.
“We would hope that we could communicate to him our positions on conservative issues and why we feel the way we do,” Cline said, which would “reduce the number of surprises that are happening between the administration and the Congress when we’re of the same party.”
Predictably, neither Pfluger nor Cline said that they have higher future ambitions than the RSC chairmanship.
But past RSC chairs include former Vice President Mike Pence (R-Ind.); Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.); House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.); House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio); and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the GOP nominee for Senate in Indiana who is expected to win the seat. Current chair Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) made a bid for Speaker after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was ousted from the role in October.
The race for the chairmanship has been cordial, and each candidate praised the other. And there does not appear to be a runaway frontrunner yet, with RSC members who spoke to The Hill after last week’s candidate forum having varying opinions about which candidate has more of an edge.
The internal election for the group’s chairmanship will occur after the November election.