Huelskamp said his constituents are angry he was removed from two committees.
Q: Amash said that Speaker Boehner is no longer welcome in his district. Is the speaker welcome in your district?
A: Well, he has driven through the district. I don’t believe he’s ever stopped in the district. He’s done fundraising in Kansas and that’s fine, I guess. But I did poll my constituents that were on telephone town hall. A non-scientific poll, but it was resounding. Folks were furious at the speaker. I asked, who believes I should vote for John Boehner as speaker again? It was 12 percent.
Q: Do you think this is about the presidential race?
A: The numbers I’m going to remember for 2012 as a Republican are 8, 2 and 1. And we lost eight House seats, lost two Senate seats and lost the presidency. And that’s a pretty poor track record to suggest, hey, trust me; I’m going to go in and negotiate one-on-one with the president.
And, you know, I’m a big believer in transparency. Tell us what happened behind closed doors, why you kick people off the committee. But also tell us what you’re negotiating with the president.
Q: How are you going to keep the channels of communication open, especially now that you don’t have these two integral posts?
A: Well, nothing is permanent in politics. But it’s 2012. This is not 1995, when nobody knew what was going on in Washington. Since then we’ve got Fox News. We’ve got Twitter. We’ve got Facebook. I can post all that and people can respond.
One thing I think led to this: I actually posted a video, an innocent video, I thought, as a Republican member of the U.S. House, where I reaffirmed my pledge not to raise taxes. In less than one business day later I received the call, said I’d been kicked off [the committees]. Is it related? Is it connected?
Clearly, there are members of leadership — Tom Cole from Oklahoma has been running around, saying, ‘Hey, we should raise taxes now and might as well just get ’er done.’ But the Republican base, conservatives and myself especially, are saying we’re not going to go there.
And so I reaffirmed the pledge and I think I got punished, perhaps as a result of that.
Q: Scorecard or no scorecard, your power has diminished greatly. This suggests that there’s some implosion among the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
A: It’s reminded conservatives that hitching to the Republican wagon doesn’t always work. You Republicans, you claim you want to reduce spending and shrink government. But you don’t do that in your budgets. And you know, you claim you’re for family values, but you won’t say a word about marriage and you hide behind the issue of life and don’t say anything about that as well. I mean, that’s pretty obvious the last couple of weeks.
So I think conservatives are starting to realize, again. Wait a minute. Republicans, they’re sometimes just to the left of the Democrats, and that’s not good enough.
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