The budget-cutters who couldn't stop spending: the Republican Study Committee, one of the biggest groups in Congress, was created to rein in big spenders. So why can't it deliver?

• Author: Pfeiffer, Eric

ON SEPTEMBER 15, 2005, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast, President Bush delivered a live television address from Jackson Square in New Orleans. As the power generators' eerie light washed over his patch of an otherwise darkened section of the city, Bush pledged to add billions of dollars to an already bloated federal budget--to rebuild the region and, though he didn't mention it, to deflect the political embarrassment of the government's inept response to the storm.

Six days later, as dead bodies were still being pulled from the flooded city's stagnant waters, members of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a collection of House Republicans who push for lower government spending, announced Operation Offset, a 25-page proposal outlining $800 billion in budget cuts over a 10-year period. The RSC argued that any spending to help Katrina's victims should be balanced by cuts elsewhere in the budget.

To some, the timing seemed particularly cold-hearted. House Leader Dennis Hastert, already accused of reacting insensitively to the devastation, rejected the proposal. When asked if Congress had any room for the RSC's proposed budget cutting, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told Fox News Sunday, "after 11 years of Republican majority, we've pared it down pretty good."

The result of that paring: a Republican majority that celebrates this year's $296 billion budget deficit because it is 30 percent less than originally forecast. It's smaller than the 2005 deficit of $316 billion, but only because people are paying more taxes, not because anyone has reduced spending.

A brutal year for the GOP finds the Democrats poised for a possible takeover of Congress. Last winter Republican leaders promised to cut spending and end corruption, but as spring turned into summer those same leaders opted instead for crass efforts to write bans on gay marriage and flag burning into the U.S. Constitution. The bulk of the RSC's fiscally conservative agenda isn't likely to see the light of day, even with a GOP-controlled Congress, unless one of its deficit hawks takes a place in the Republican leadership. As it stands, party leaders are happy to use the committee when the group's activities advance their agenda and quick to ignore it, or worse, when pursuing costly legislation.

Here's the strange thing: The RSC has more than 100 members, making it the largest coalition within the House Republican Conference. It has an ambitious and respected leader in Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.). And when Republicans recently selected a new majority leader to replace Tom DeLay, RSC stalwart John Shadegg made it a competitive three-way race, with his strongest support coming from the Internet activist community. So how does a group holding a majority of the majority, a group claiming to stand for restrained spending, coexist with record-breaking deficits and a 45 percent increase in federal spending since 2001?

Part of the answer lies in the Republican leadership, for whom federal spending has become a central political tactic. Part lies in the Republican base, where social conservatives have more pull than supporters of fiscal restraint. But part lies within the RSC itself. The committee's charismatic leaders talk a good game, but at the end of the day even the group's own members support pork projects and block reform. The RSC includes some genuine believers in fiscal restraint, but they are regularly outmaneuvered when they try to eliminate other members' pork. It's like joining a book club dedicated to reading the classics, then spending all your time sipping mojitos and watching Entourage.

Not Afraid to Make Enemies

The original RSC was founded in 1973 by Rep. Philip Crane (R-Ill.), with organizational support from Paul Weyrich, the founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation. For the next 24 years, it existed as a small watchdog funded by the Republican caucus as a legislative service organization--that is, a group supported by money collected from individual Republican congressmen. The group was originally created to counter the Democratic Study Group, which had pushed the House Democratic caucus to the left. It has consistently endorsed lower taxes and lower spending.

Shortly after Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House in early 1995, he disbanded the RSC. On the surface, his decision reflected an effort to curb the occasionally profligate system of legislative service organizations, though many insiders argue it was really about personality and ambition conflicts between Gingrich and DeLay, who was then running the RSC. Either way, the RSC returned the very next year to help organize the party's fiscal reform agenda. It had a new name (the Conservative Action Team) and fewer members (just 40 as recently as 2000), but it struggled on as a small but dedicated group. In 2000 then-chairman John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) restored the committee's original name. And then Mike Pence was elected to Congress.

Pence, who describes himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order," had a fairly substantive history in state politics before coming to Washington. He hosted the Indiana-based Mike Pence Show, which he describes as "Rush Limbaugh on decal," through most of the 1990s, and he ran a conservative state think tank, the Indiana Policy Review, from 1990 to 1994. After two losses running for Congress in the late '80s, his radio and think tank experience helped him gain his party's nomination again in 2000; he won 51 percent of the vote in a three-way race, with a 20 percent Libertarian showing. Pence is generally a strong supporter of free market economic policies, but his libertarian sympathies are weaker in the social sphere: He opposes abortion and gay marriage, and he calls for stronger controls on illegal immigration.

Although Pence came to Washington at the same time as President Bush, he sees himself at heart as a soldier in the 1994 Republican Revolution. "I'm like the minuteman," he told U.S. News last year, "who showed up 10 years late for the Revolution." He has made up for lost time. In addition to his bitter fights with the White House and House Republican leaders over the No Child Left Behind Act and the massive Medicare expansion bill, he has led the campaign to eradicate budget earmarks, which anonymously tack federal spending for pet projects onto larger bills. Pence has also gone after the secretive practice...