Four names have emerged as front-runners in the leadership contest that would be most competitive should Republicans gain control.
Four names have emerged as front-runners in the leadership contest that would be most competitive should Republicans gain control.
A s Republicans aim to retake the House majority this fall, jockeying for leadership positions in the 118th Congress has already begun. One of the most consequential contests is that for majority whip, the third-highest-ranking position in the caucus behind speaker — a spot that Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) would be favored to win — and majority leader should the GOP gain control. Steve Scalise (R., La.), who serves as minority whip, would likely move up to majority leader if McCarthy trades his current leader post for speaker — making the job of whip the obvious prize up for grabs.
And it’s getting competitive, early.
Four names have emerged as the main front-runners for the post, which is voted on by members of the Republican conference at the outset of every Congress. Of them, Republican-conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) is the only one who has yet to go public. (A source close to Stefanik told National Review that the congresswoman is “seriously considering a run for leadership,” but “her focus remains on retaking the majority, and she doesn’t plan to make an announcement about the specific position until after the November election.”) Three top Republicans, however, aren’t waiting until November: Jim Banks (R., Ind.), Drew Ferguson (R., Ga.), and Tom Emmer (R., Minn.) have all reportedly begun to campaign for the spot.
Banks, the chairman of the 156-member Republican Study Committee (RSC) — the largest ideological caucus in Congress — went public with his campaign this summer, traveling to Iowa as “part of a cross-country tour to support GOP efforts to win the House majority in the midterm elections and build support for his majority whip bid,” according to a report from the Washington Examiner. (Scalise himself previously chaired the RSC from 2013 to 2014.) Ferguson, the GOP’s chief deputy whip — a position personally selected by Scalise, a close Ferguson ally — was reported to be “openly seeking backers” for his whip campaign as early as June. And in early August, the Hill broke the news that Emmer, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), was also seeking the position. All three have been actively making calls to other House Republicans in an effort to gauge and build support for their whip campaigns, multiple sources confirm to NR.
The House majority whip — a position that dates back to 1897, when Speaker Thomas Reed (R., Maine) appointed Representative James Tawney (R., Minn.), the inaugural holder of the title — derives its name from “whipper-in,” a British term for “for the person responsible for keeping the foxhounds from leaving the pack” during a hunt. In Congress, whips play an analogous role, serving as chief enforcers of internal party discipline. Charged with “whipping” the votes for legislation, the occupant of the position exercises enormous influence over the direction of his or her party’s agenda. As a result, if Republicans take the House majority in 2023, the next majority whip will have significant sway over the direction of the party over the next two years.
Though the three members above are generally viewed as mainstream Republicans, there are important differences between them on a number of consequential issues. Banks is often associated with the populist or nationalist-leaning wing of the party but strikes a much more muted and less controversy-prone profile than many of his Trumpist counterparts — a relatively cerebral and policy-focused approach that has won him plaudits from many nationalist conservative intellectuals. In 2021, he received a score of 97 percent from the American Conservative Union (ACU), making him the 29th-most conservative Republican in Congress. Ferguson, who served as mayor of West Point, Ga., for eight years before running for Congress in 2016, tends to sit at the rightward edge of the center of gravity in the congressional GOP. In 2021, he received an ACU score of 87 percent, making him the 83rd-most conservative Republican in Congress. Emmer, who has served as the NRCC chair since 2019, has generally aligned with the middle of the GOP establishment — his 2021 ACU score was 74 percent, making him the 202nd-most conservative Republican in Congress according to that scale. Aspects of his record on immigration and cultural issues have invited criticism from some conservatives.
Banks has developed a pedigree as a thought leader in the populist wing of the GOP: The congressman’s March 2021 memo, “Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party” — which called for Republicans to “to embrace our new coalition . . . by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class” via an agenda centered on immigration restriction, China hawkishness, anti-wokeness, cracking down on Big Tech, and an alignment with “Main Street” over “Wall Street” — was widely circulated in nationalist-friendly circles.
But the Indiana Republican has also developed a strong record on high-profile traditional conservative issues over the course of his three terms in Congress. On crime and policing, Banks has pushed for a comprehensive policy framework that includes a “Concerned Citizens Bill of Rights” — “conditioning a state’s receipt of relevant DOJ grant funding on the adoption of certain pro-law enforcement measures” such as ending federal grants to anti-police programs and organizations, mandating transparency on “policing policies that result in not enforcing certain crimes,” and withholding funding from states whose “district attorneys’ offices systematically decline to prosecute types of cases or charge certain crimes” — as well as a codification of qualified immunity, bolstering “penalties against violent, repeat offenders,” “enhancing federal punishments for crimes against police,” and a number of other initiatives. On abortion, Banks has introduced a number of pro-life bills, including the Taxpayer Conscience Protection Act (requiring “public reporting on Medicaid funds given to abortion providers”), the Patients First Act (banning “the use of fetal stem cells or the creation of a human embryo for research purposes”), and a bill barring the use of Title X funds for the provision of abortions.
Additionally, the RSC’s fiscal-year 2023 budget, led by Banks and Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), earned praise from fiscal and social conservatives alike. The Tax Foundation lauded the model budget’s “pro-growth tax reforms that would simplify the tax code and encourage business investment,” including “permanence for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s (TCJA) individual and expensing provisions, reforming depreciation for large investments, and simplifying saving for individuals.” The “Protecting Conservative Values” section of the budget contains 23 different pro-life legislative provisions, including defunding Planned Parenthood; sweeping anti-critical-race-theory (CRT) measures, prohibiting federal funding of schools and universities that promote CRT and banning the ideology in federal agencies and the military; numerous Second Amendment and religious-liberty protections; and bans on “the use of Title IX funds to support programs in which biological male athletes are allowed to participate against biological female athletes” and “gender reassignment treatment on minors.”
The budget also includes a comprehensive immigration and border-security framework — with provisions aimed at ending incentives for hiring illegal labor, “ending the diversity lottery visa program and limiting chain migration to the spouses and children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents,” and hiring more immigration judges — that is viewed favorably by immigration-hawk groups. In a statement, RJ Hauman, the director of government relations for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), told National Review that “Congressman Jim Banks has effectively reshaped the Republican Study Committee” to focus on “what needs to be done, which problems need fixing — like immigration — and how to fix them. He’ll be a great asset for House Republicans once they receive a mandate to legislate unflinchingly.”
In a statement, Banks’s communications director, Buckley Carlson, told NR: “Chairman Banks has spent the past two years developing a conservative agenda with broad appeal that he’s now focused on using to help Republicans win a generational majority and mandate.”
Ferguson’s record has also been reliably conservative. Although he’s played a less prominent policy-based leadership role than Banks in his capacity as the GOP’s chief deputy whip, he has sponsored eight bills and co-sponsored 201 in the 117th Congress, whereas Banks has sponsored five and co-sponsored 81. (Emmer has sponsored 34 and co-sponsored 314.) In terms of his voting record, Ferguson currently enjoys an A+ rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America — as do both Banks and Emmer — and a lifetime pro-business rating of 88 percent on the Chamber of Commerce scorecard, compared with Banks’s 83 percent and Emmer’s 84. (Although some on the right have argued that the Chamber of Commerce scorecard is a less reliable metric for conservative priorities than it once was.) He also has a 92 percent rating from the National Rifle Association, as does Banks — Emmer enjoys a full 100 percent from the gun-rights group — and a 92 percent rating from the Family Research Council, the same rating that the social-conservative group awarded to Banks and Emmer.
One move that was criticized by immigration hawks was Ferguson’s vote for the H.J. Res. 31 conference report, a 2019 omnibus bill that, among other things, allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to increase the number of low-skilled guest workers through the H-2B visa program, and reduced the number of detention beds in facilities used to house illegal immigrants. Emmer and 85 other Republicans also backed the measure, but 109 — including Banks — voted against it. Ferguson — and, among others, Stefanik — also signed onto a letter earlier this year calling for cheaper fees for immigrant guest agricultural workers.
In an interview with NR, Ferguson emphasized his experience in leadership in the context of the majority-whip race. “We have been doing this job for four years now,” he said. “And we’ve built up really good relationships in the conference. We have built a reputation of being an honest broker within the different factions of the caucus House conference, and . . . we’ve got a comprehensive plan to help our conference be successful going into this new majority.” The priorities for a potential GOP House majority, Ferguson said, would be to “do the things that the voters have asked us to do — to be fiscally conservative, to make sure that our country is safe and secure, to really go after this inflation and this war on American energy, make sure that the border is secure, [and] make sure that our individual freedoms are protected.”
Emmer’s overall record reflects a more moderate streak: His Heritage Action scorecard rating for the 117th Congress was 89 percent — 60 members away from the lowest-scoring Republican, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick — and behind both Ferguson and Banks, who were both awarded 95 percent ratings from the conservative advocacy group. In an emailed statement, NRCC communications director Michael Adams told NR that “Chairman Emmer is focused on the most important issue right now: firing Nancy Pelosi and electing a conservative Republican House majority.” But aspects of the NRCC’s chair record have also invited criticism from both social conservatives and some Trump-aligned activists and commentators.
In the clashes between pro- and anti-Trump forces in the GOP caucus, Emmer has occasionally aligned with the latter. In early 2021, the Minnesota congressman suggested that the former president should avoid getting involved in primary challenges to Republicans who voted to impeach him, arguing that Trump’s efforts were “not gonna be helpful.” Such stances have not won him friends with Trump-aligned Republicans. Jon Schweppe, policy director of the American Principles Project, a populist-friendly social-conservative group, told NR that “it’s important for House Republicans to pick a leadership team that reflects the America First priorities of the party’s own voters,” and that “choosing a liberal Republican like Tom Emmer for majority whip would . . . not be a good idea.”
On social issues, the top Republican raised eyebrows by voting to codify the right to same-sex marriage earlier this year, and was one of just nine Republicans to join House Democrats in voting to block the Trump administration’s ban on transgender soldiers in the military in 2019. (Banks and Ferguson were both among the 182 Republicans who voted against the measure.) Emmer has also backed efforts to mandate sexual-orientation and gender-identity (SOGI) protections for government contractors on four different occasions, including in a 2016 vote for the ratification of a 2014 Obama executive order. All of these initiatives were the subject of fierce criticism from social conservatives. Heritage Action, which opposed the measure — known as the Maloney Amendment — argued that “in practice, it would have required federal contractors to grant biologically male employees who identify as women unfettered access to women’s lockers, showers, and bathrooms.”
As chair of the NRCC, Emmer has stressed border security and immigration as key issues, publishing more than 300 press releases on the border crisis. Earlier this month, he told Fox News that “security” — including border security — was the defining issue in the midterm elections. While House Republican leadership has been praised by border-security and immigration-hawk groups for embracing a “border security framework for day one of [a] Republican majority,” some of those groups have raised concerns that Republican congressional candidates — whose campaigns are overseen by Emmer’s NRCC — have neglected to champion that policy framework on the campaign trail. Emmer previously has appeared to suggest that excessive focus on immigration hurts Republicans on the campaign trail, arguing in 2018 that the GOP’s emphasis on the issue hurt the party with moderates in the midterms.
Aspects of Emmer’s voting record on immigration also sit to the left of Ferguson’s and Banks’s. In 2021, Emmer co-sponsored the Eagle Act, a Democratic bill that would likely increase rates of legal immigration by lifting per-country caps for employer-based green cards. (In 2018, Emmer also told a town hall that the U.S. needs more immigrant labor.) In 2017, he co-sponsored legislation aimed at weakening the Real ID Act — a 2005 law requiring proof of lawful presence in the United States for applicants for government-issued IDs — by removing key provisions “requiring each State to provide all other States with electronic access to information contained in the motor vehicle database of the State.”
Despite these policy differences, Banks, Ferguson, and Emmer all have experience in congressional leadership positions, which will be crucially important for the next majority whip. While the three candidates’ contrasting records on conservative issues are important, their ability to keep a potential House Republican majority together — an endeavor that requires a capacity for pragmatism as well as ideological consistency — is arguably even more consequential. If Republicans do succeed in taking back the House majority — a result that is still projected by pollsters, despite dampening GOP momentum over the course of the last two months — the whip’s race will be one of the most significant leadership decisions, affecting the execution of their congressional agenda. House Republicans should choose wisely.