Rep. Tim Huelskamp is back in the saddle. Three years after being stripped of his committee seats for disobeying House leadership, the Kansas Republican has a seat on his party’s influential conference steering committee.
An outsider now inside, Huelskamp’s appointment Thursday is just the latest shakeup rocking Congress as the House moves slowly back to regular order. Now he’ll help determine who gets what committee assignments.
Huelskamp says the appointment is “quite the turnaround” from years past.
In 2012, Huelskamp was booted from both the Agriculture and Budget Committees after bickering with GOP leadership. At the time, Rep Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., blamed the actions on Huelskamp’s “inability to work with other members.”
His constituents back in Kansas didn’t care, Huelskamp, 47, recalled in an interview with The Daily Signal.
“The message from home has always been the same,” Huelskamp said, summing it up as: “We don’t care if others don’t like you or if they kick you off your committee. Stand your ground.”
Huelskamp, previously a member of the Kansas Senate for 13 years, was elected to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District in 2010. He hails from a family of farmers in Fowler, Kan.
The chairman of the House’s conservative Tea Party Caucus, Huelskamp is also a member of the emerging House Freedom Caucus, the conservative group that helped push House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, out of the speaker’s office in late September.
House conservatives complain that under Boehner, the Republican steering committee was stacked with the speaker’s allies and establishment loyalists. Since its founding, the Freedom Caucus regularly has agitated for reform.
And now Huelskamp’s position is clearly evidence of a new era under Speaker Paul Ryan. Huelskamp told The Daily Signal that he “thanks” Ryan “for following up on his promises” to change the way Congress does business.
Since picking up the speaker’s gavel in late October, Ryan has taken several steps toward returning the House to what lawmakers call regular order. Huelskamp is just the latest beneficiary.
Huelskamp said popularity comes with his influential new position.
“What I found out very quickly was that I discovered a lot of new friends in the conference,” he quipped.
But Huelskamp said he is most interested in changing the steering committee into an efficient meritocracy that considers talent over party loyalty:
It has to be merit-based. I believe we have dozens of folks in the Republican conference that, just because they were conservative, they’re not on the higher-profile committees.
The steering committee will begin its heaviest lifting in the new year as the House begins sorting out and assigning new committee responsibilities. Huelskamp says he already has capable members in mind.
“I know a lot of conservatives with a lot of great talent areas,” he said. “I think I happen to be one of them, as a fifth-generation farmer with a Ph.D. in ag [agriculture] policy. Everybody understands I should be on that committee.”
