Blunt, like Hastert, was hand-picked for leadership by Tom DeLay, the dominant Republican in Congress until his politically inspired indictment in Texas last year. When DeLay resigned as majority leader, the party's lobbyist-connected establishment decision was to promote Blunt from whip to leader and make Cantor the whip. But with the feeling that some change was needed, Boehner defeated Blunt for the top job, and Blunt kept the second-ranking post. In fact, Boehner's ties to K Street are even stronger than Blunt's, and he seemed to lose interest in reform once he became majority leader.
Rep. Mike Pence, the current chairman of the RSC and a leader of reform, is an underdog candidate opposing Boehner. Rep. John Shadegg, Pence's predecessor at the RSC who finished third in the race for leader last February, is running uphill against Blunt for whip on a reform platform. The conventional wisdom on the Hill is that, at best, only one of them can win because the Republicans would not dare elect two conservatives to the two top House leadership positions.
In fact, the voting records of Boehner and Blunt are nearly identical to Pence's and Shadegg's. The difference between them was demonstrated last Thursday when Blunt went to the Heritage Foundation to campaign for his retention as whip. He delivered a defense of earmarking, echoing the House appropriators' claim that the elimination of earmarks would do "nothing but shift funding decisions from one side of Pennsylvania Ave. to the other."
That is the view that led Republicans to earmark a "bridge to nowhere" and hundreds of other projects in competitive districts, hoping it would save them on Election Day. The House has been a place where Rep. Don Young (a notorious Alaska porker) was setting national transportation policy, where the "Cardinals" on the Appropriations Committee established earmarking records, where the pharmaceutical industry had a pipeline to party policy and where even Speaker Hastert was making personal profits on an earmark. Maybe that's what Republicans want to retain, even in the minority.