House freshman throws a party – and GOP cringes
With Republican leaders anxious to set an austere tone for their ascendance into the House majority this week, the lavish fundraiser scheduled for Tuesday night at a trendy Washington hotel to benefit a dozen GOP freshmen is not exactly the populist image leaders are anxious to project.
House Speaker-elect John Boehner, whose name was featured on the invitation, is nonetheless skipping the event at the W Hotel, where lobbyists, political action committee managers and others paying the $2,500 ticket price will be treated to a performance by country music star LeAnn Rimes (a $50,000 package includes a block of eight tickets and a “VIP suite” at the W). The office of incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor, another featured invitee, was noncommittal Monday night when asked whether he’d attend.
“If incoming GOP freshmen were hoping to bring fiscal responsibility and ‘family values’ to Washington, they may have gotten off to an interesting start,” conservative blogger Matt Lewis noted, citing the event’s steep ticket prices, as well as Rimes’s confessed extramarital affair and her recent appearance in a “Sexy Santa” outfit at a gay men’s chorus Christmas performance.
But the grumbling doesn’t seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of the man behind the event — incoming Rep. Jeff Denham of California — for becoming a rainmaker for the 87-member GOP freshman class.
“Helping the freshmen get reelected is a project that (Denham) is very interested in and, of course, his own reelection is part of that,” Dave Gilliard, a consultant for Denham, said last week. “It’s such a huge freshman class, and that first reelection is the time that you end up losing people, so he really wants to help keep the majority.”
Denham, a two-term California state senator whose congressional campaign billed him as “one of the best fundraisers in the California Legislature," could not be reached for comment. (See: Safe republicans work to get leg up)
But even before he won a landslide victory in November to fill the safe Republican seat being vacated by retiring GOP Rep. George Radanovich, Denham had established a secondary fundraising vehicle known as a leadership political action committee (the only other incoming House freshman with a leadership PAC is California Democrat Karen Bass) and was being credited with raising and contributing a total of $100,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
And Gilliard said Denham has been working closely with the NRCC to help raise cash for the GOP’s massive freshman class.
According to Federal Election Commission filings and interviews with fundraisers, Denham in November formed a joint fundraising committee called America’s New Majority, which is sponsoring Tuesday’s party, and tried to recruit a large group of freshmen to join it.
While at least 11 incoming Republican House members had signed up for the committee by Dec. 10, other freshmen were discouraged from joining, said a pair of GOP fundraising consultants.
“We strongly recommended to our clients that they not take part in this,” said one consultant, who did not want to be identified discussing advice offered to members of Congress.
“It’s causing a buzz because it’s in direct contradiction to the image that leadership is trying to portray as a conference that wants to get down to business,” said the consultant, comparing the Rimes fundraiser to one thrown by incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi when Democrats assumed the House majority in 2007.
That fundraiser — organized by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and featuring $1,000 ticket prices and performances by Tony Bennett and the remnants of The Grateful Dead — got some bad press and also sparked ill will among some of the lobbyists and political action committee managers who typically make up the target demographic for high-dollar Washington fundraisers.
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