Freshman Rep. Alan West (R-FL) stood in the Speaker’s Lobby after John Boehner took over this afternoon and reflected on an election season that saw the tea party — of which West is one of the most colorful elected members — ascend to the halls of power in Washington. It’s been a long road for conservatives like West, and he told me that to sit in the room and watch Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reign come to an end was pretty darn great.
“We’ve crossed the Rubicon,” he said, flashing a huge grin. But he acknowledged that today’s pomp and circumstance on Capitol Hill are just the first steps on what is likely to be a tough road ahead for the divided Congress, and even the House GOP caucus, of which West is an ultra-conservative part.
“My biggest concern is that in the 90 to 120 days we start showing the positive trends so that the American people know that we are working toward a limited government that is effective and efficient, that we are working toward the spending and the debt and deficit and we are working toward getting people back to work,” West said.
That’s a goal West likely shares with most if not all of his Republican colleagues (and his Democratic colleagues too). But going about doing that is not as easy as, say, handing the gavel to Boehner, as the House Republicans unanimously voted to do today.
Take, for example, the debt ceiling. Congress will have to vote on raising it, and tea partiers like West have said they’re willing to vote no (thus sending the federal government into default) unless an increase in the amount of debt the government is allowed to hold comes with huge cuts in the amount of money the government spends.
“If we don’t talk about capping the government spending, if we don’t talk about a balanced budget amendment, if we don’t talk about how we get the big three entitlement programs off of autopilot, then they end up subsuming our entire GDP in 2040 or whatever,” West said. “We’ve got to have those hard decisions and we’ve got to make them.”
Republicans basking in the afterglow of the Boehner ascendancy this afternoon weren’t very interested in discussing the intramural fight that could kick up over the debt ceiling.
“I’m not talking about that stuff today,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the House GOP’s budget guru — told reporters.
West said the issue hasn’t been discussed much in private either.
“We haven’t gone there yet,” West told me when I asked him about the internal GOP caucus discussions over the debt question. “Right now we’re talking about the job-killing health care law.”
The debt isn’t the only issue where West may be on the outside of his caucus’ mainstream views. This morning, he stood with 42 other African American members as the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus during the CBC’s ceremonial swearing in ceremony. West sat passively as new CBC chair Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) gave a barnburner of a speech in which he swore to fight the GOP majority on behalf of black voters at every given opportunity.
West told me that he hopes to prove to the CBC that Republicans are not their enemies.
“At the end of the day, we want to see the black community thrive economically, we want to see those very dire socio-economic statistics like the incarceration rates, the teen pregnancy rates, things of that nature go away,” West said. “We want to see small businesses grow.”
He suggested that the GOP’s new tea party-fueled focus on the Constitution could help bridge the gap with wary African Americans. At the CBC ceremony this morning, many of the speakers said their goal was to see the Constitution’s guarantees for all Americans regardless of race become a focus of government efforts.
West suggested the tea party’s focus on the nation’s founding documents could help see that happen.
“I think that we can do the right things [for the black community],” West said. “When you talk about the Constitutional principles…we have commonality and we need to find those common threads and build upon that.”
But as different as West may be from many of his colleagues, on one topic he is right in the mainstream: the awe he feels being a freshman Representative. Packed on the floor today while Boehner was sworn in were dozens of members’ children and other family members (freshman GOP Rep. Ben Quayle from Arizona brought his dad, Dan, for example.) It was clearly a moving moment for most in the room, regardless of party.
That’s certainly true for West, a former military man who still gets up at 5 a.m. to jog.
“As I came up here and ran around the mall I thought about my 22 years in the military, you know serving to protect the institutions that make this such a great constitutional republic,” he told me. “Now I’m part of one of those institutions.”
“I’m living the American dream,” he said.
