Mitch Perry
If you want to hear some good trash talking about how ineffective the Republican-led House conference has been since taking power back from the Democrats in 2010, you don’t need to listen to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid or Hillary Clinton.
Just listen to any Republican running to win office in Washington next year.
On Friday afternoon at the Tampa Tiger Bay Club monthly meeting, Polk County-based GOP U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross was the latest Republican member of Congress to blast the Republican House leadership.
“Congress right now, as you might have heard, has had some problems,” Ross told the crowd at the Chester H. Ferguson Law Center in downtown Tampa. “We’ve got a very strong group of right-wingers out there that are trying to hold the line and say, ‘We’re going to keep saying no, we don’t know when to say yes’. And then we’ve got moderates who are out there saying we’ve got to move along. We’ve got our leadership who says, ‘This is what you’re going to vote on and it doesn’t matter what you may think, this is what we’re going to do because we’re going to do crisis management,’ and for four-and-a-half years, we’ve had crisis management.”
After John Boehner stunned official Washington by announcing his resignation from the House Speakership three weeks ago, Ross, who has been senior deputy majority whip in GOP House leadership, announced he would run for House majority whip.
He explained on Friday that he did so because he was tired of trying to defend why Boehner and other parts of House leadership “do nothing” for the people who elected them.
“It’s one thing to vote 60 times to repeal the health care bill, but to never offer once as an alternative, is absurd,” Ross said with disdain. “It’s illogical, and it gets old.”
So the Lakeland congressman said he sat down that afternoon with his staff in Washington and realized that if he was ever going to have the opportunity to advance through leadership, this would be the time. The current majority whip, Steve Scalise, intends to run for the Majority Leader position held by Californian Kevin McCarthy, who was running for Speaker of the House. He said he then penned a letter and over the next few days called 244 House Republicans to tell them his plans.
That hasn’t exactly worked out as planned. McCarthy’s plans ended last week when he backed away from pursuing the speakership. Therefore, Scalise and Ross will also maintain their current positions.
Ross says though that in speaking with so many House Republicans, he’s learned directly of their discontent – for each other as Republicans.
“It made me realize that we have a serious problem,” which Ross attributed to a broken legislative process on Capitol Hill.
Some of Ross’ complaints echo other Florida GOP congressmen such as David Jolly and Ron DeSantis, competing to be the party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Marco Rubio. He evoked nostalgia for such days as when Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation passed by the GOP majority Congress in 1996: “My biggest frustration is that I don’t even have an opportunity to have my conservative values addressed in the process, because the process is broken.”
He it won’t matter who the next House Speaker is unless Republicans create a process to vet legislation, what he says is called “regular order.”
Later, Ross repeated that the party was elected to govern, but is falling short of that manageable request. “We were a “party of no” for the first four years,” he said, again alluding to the 2010 Tea Party-dominated election that put in Republicans like to change things in D.C.
In the Q&A portion of the meeting, Ross was asked separately about provocative statements made by GOP presidential candidates Ben Carson and Donald Trump. Initially he applauded both of them for “taking leadership,” adding, that while they might not be politically correct, “they’re at least getting the debate moving.”
He was later challenged by Alma Gonzalez, a member of the Democratic National Committee. She asked whether Trump’s remarks about Mexicans being “rapists” was what he called leadership?
“I said the Americans are craving leadership, which is why they’re listening to Donald Trump and Ben Carson,” he said. “I did not say that they are exercising leadership, because I would not exercise leadership by dividing.”
In the wake of the nation’s most recent mass slaying, in Oregon, Carson suggested on CNN that the “likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.” Ross agreed that if Jewish citizens had access to firearms, it would have prevented “part of the Holocaust.”
But he said that he disagreed with Carson’s suggestion that a Muslim couldn’t be president. “I have no problem with a Muslim serving in public office.”
Questions from the more liberally bent Tiger Bay audience posed challenges to the congressman, such as a query from Asher Edelson from the Hillsborough County Disability Caucus. Edelson, 21, told Ross that one reason why people his age are so apathetic about politics is because of “corporatist hacks” like himself.
Ross responded to say that beginning next January he’ll be teaching a course in political science at USF, and said he wasn’t sure if it was because of a dysfunctional Congress or the lack of education among young people that explains that apathy.
