By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 3, 2006; A01
Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who ran an insurgent campaign calling for change in the face of a widening corruption scandal, was elected yesterday to succeed Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) as House majority leader in an upset over the acting majority leader.
Boehner's victory over Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a longtime DeLay ally, stunned even the Ohioan, said House members attending the closed-door election. It sent a clear signal that most House Republicans were eager for a relatively fresh face to lead the party in an election year when the GOP's decade-long control of the House is under threat.
Boehner, 56, was part of the 1994 "Republican Revolution" and held a high-ranking leadership post under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), but he operated on the edges throughout the reign of DeLay and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).
Boehner's election portends a change of direction for the House this year. In campaigning for the job, he said that the current leadership has been too top-down in its control of the legislative agenda and he signaled that he would give committee chairmen more power. The 15-year congressman also has been more willing than the DeLay-dominated leadership to cooperate with Democrats. He helped craft the bipartisan No Child Left Behind education law in President Bush's first term and worked with Democrats on a major restructuring of the private pension system passed in December.
"We must act swiftly to restore the trust between Congress and the American people," Boehner said in a written statement. "We must take the necessary steps to get the federal budget under control -- to cut wasteful spending, reform our entitlement programs and craft a budget process that encourages fiscal discipline. And we must recommit ourselves to reducing the influence of government in our lives."
Rep. Melissa Hart (R-Pa.) said: "We need someone who can move difficult legislation, who can work with Republicans and Democrats."
Blunt, who as majority whip will still be the third-ranking Republican in the House, came within six votes of victory, as the winner needs more than half the votes cast. He picked up 110 supporters in the first round of the secret balloting, compared with Boehner's 79. Forty votes went to Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), while two lawmakers wrote in Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.). With just a handful more needed in a second round of voting, members began sending e-mails saying that Blunt appeared to have won.
But in a second, head-to-head tally pitting the first- and second-place finishers, Boehner scored a decisive 122 to 109 win. Freed from their promises, several Blunt supporters also switched their support to Boehner, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
"The members wanted to make a big decision, and they did," Boehner said.
Yesterday's vote marked the final big step in Boehner's political rehabilitation since he was ousted as the chairman of the House Republican Conference in 1998, after his party lost five congressional seats. He gradually worked his way back into the limelight by pushing through important education and pension legislation as chairman of the education panel.
But it was mounting concern about a political corruption scandal -- not Boehner's or Blunt's legislative skills -- that colored the leadership contest until the end. DeLay had stepped down in September after his indictment in Texas on campaign finance charges. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) pleaded guilty in November to conspiring to accept $2.4 million in bribes. Then, last month, GOP lobbyist and DeLay ally Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials and promised to cooperate with a sprawling federal corruption investigation. Under mounting pressure, DeLay relinquished his claims to the majority leader's post, officially beginning a scramble for new leadership.
From the start, Blunt presented himself as the candidate of continuity and proven leadership, while first Boehner and then Shadegg called for change to prove to voters that the Republican Party is taking the corruption scandal seriously. Blunt's list of public supporters was always comfortably longer than Boehner's. But it was not until this week that House members returned to Washington from a long recess and the candidates could campaign in person. Boehner said even members who committed to Blunt began realizing this vote had far more significance than the typical leadership contests that are decided on personality, personal contacts and promises.
"It's pretty clear the problems with Duke Cunningham, the problems with Jack Abramoff, those shoes are going to continue to drop all year long," Boehner said Tuesday, "and if we're not on offense, all the American people are going to know about is that."
Still, with the support of most committee chairmen and the back-bench Republicans from safe districts, Blunt entered the spacious caucus room in the Cannon House Office Building yesterday confident he would win by a comfortable margin in the first round.
But he was immediately thrown on the defensive, lawmakers said after the vote. Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), who nominated Shadegg, recited dismal polling numbers as he laid out just how politically perilous the Republicans' position was. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), in seconding Shadegg's nomination, took a direct swipe at Blunt, saying it was not enough to vote for the candidate who asked for the members' support first or was nice to them.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) nominated Boehner and said the Ohioan could provide Republicans a bridge back to the purity and zeal of the 1994 revolution, when the GOP swept to power on a promise to shrink the federal government and change the way Washington works. But Thomas said that, unlike Shadegg, Boehner would bring with him the legislative experience of a seasoned committee chairman and the broader vision of a party leader.
Although he campaigned as a reformer, Boehner (pronounced BAY-ner) is no stranger to Washington. In the early 1990s, he was one of the zealous "Gang of Seven" that pushed to expose a check-kiting scandal in the House bank. But once in the leadership, he avidly cultivated ties to the K Street lobbying community. He made headlines for handing out checks from tobacco interests to colleagues on the House floor.
But his early years, as the Roman Catholic son of a bar owner in a family of 14, proved compelling, said John Czwartacki, a Boehner aide in the 1990s who is now with Verizon. Boehner got through college working nights as a janitor. He went on to become a wealthy small-business owner and once explained that he entered politics after becoming "bored out of my mind."
When Boehner's victory was announced yesterday, he looked visibly shaken and appeared to choke up as he moved to address the conference, several members said. But he delivered an impassioned speech for unity, effectively quelling what could have been significantly more upheaval. Four House members had been campaigning to succeed Blunt as majority whip, and with 122 members on record against him, one of those candidates or a supporter could have moved to toss Blunt completely out of the leadership.
Instead, Boehner went before the cameras to present Blunt as "our whip and my friend." Blunt joked that he did not end a phone call to members without saying something nice about Boehner. "I may have overdone that a bit," he said.
