CQ Roll Call: Tom Cole: A Leadership Ally Scans the Budget Horizon

CQ Roll Call - John Bennett

For months, House Republicans lacked a voice on a measure to authorize military operations against the Islamic State. As he had on other issues, Tom Cole sensed his party was adrift. So earlier this year he did what came naturally--he reached across the aisle.

The deputy GOP whip in April joined House Intelligence ranking member Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., on a letter pressing House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, to take up an authorization of the use of military force. While the attempt didn't succeed, the Cole/Schiff duo forced Boehner to address in more depth his reasons for not doing so.

Expect Cole in the coming budget battles this fall to resume a role he has played in past high-stakes Washington crises: telling just about everyone things they don't want to hear, this time as a top appropriator and frequent ally of leadership.

“Most of the things we get involved in are the result of me shooting my mouth off,” Cole, of Oklahoma, said with a hearty laugh during an interview with CQ, a bag of cigars perched nearby.

He can sometimes be spotted before votes enjoying a stogie on the sun-drenched balcony outside the Speaker’s Lobby.

His involvement in the AUMF debate came about that way: “It was just something we decided was important,” Cole said, insisting there was no request from Boehner that he take up the mantle.

His worries had as much to do with America’s next armed conflict as with the ongoing one against the Islamic State. “We have surrendered too much authority to the executive branch,” Cole said. “I find it unconscionable to have troops in harm’s way and not have an authorization.”

That outlook aligns with a description of Cole from James Lankford, a Republican senator who until late last year also was a member of Oklahoma’s House delegation.

“He was always one who was working very hard to figure out long ball. He’s looking on the horizon all the time,” Lankford said. “He’s thinking, ‘These are the three steps because this is the horizon we’re trying to get to.’ While people are looking at things one at a time, he’s looking at things 10 at a time.”

‘Jack of All Trades’

From war-authorization advocate to Appropriations subcommittee chairman to House floor whip to straight-talking leadership ally, Cole’s role within the House Republican conference is as unique as his standing as one of the two registered Native Americans in Congress. (Fellow Oklahoma GOP Rep. Markwayne Mullin is the other.)

Cole, a Chickasaw Nation member whose Rayburn office is chock full of Native American items, describes his legislative self as a “jack of all trades, master of none.”

“I like to do a lot of different things,” he said. “I think you go where the team thinks they need to put you.”

Cole also talked repeatedly about a need for Republican members to be realistic in understanding they sometimes must work with Democrats to pass legislation, as he teamed up with Schiff.

He noted Senate Republican leaders need a handful of Democratic votes to end debate on bills, and even offered a sketch for a possible late-year bipartisan budget plan to raise the defense and domestic caps.

“I think it’ll have to be a one-for-one increase, defense versus domestic, kind of deal,” he said, adding it likely would have to pass the House with an ample number of Democratic votes.

Cole called politics “the ultimate team sport, saying he is “happy to play” whatever positions Boehner and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., deem necessary.

In that sense, Cole’s role resembles that of a baseball player whose name is on the lineup card every day -- but often at different positions. One day he’s the first baseman, the next the left fielder, a week later the designated hitter.

Take his appointment in January as Appropriations Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee chairman as an example. For GOP members, it’s not a plush assignment. But it’s what leadership needed.

A seat on that subcommittee, because of the billions it controls for domestic programs, essentially is “catnip for Democrats,” he says, noting it has no freshmen Democratic members.

Consultant’s Eye

In his role as deputy whip, as Cole describes it, his job is to hear out his colleagues rather than twist arms.

“You’re always talking to folks who have influence, and there are obviously folks who are close to different members of the leadership team or chairmen,” said the seven-term congressman. “There’s a lot of this that is interaction on the floor like, ‘What do you think about fill in the blank?’ or, ‘How do you look at that?’”

“It tells you what’s possible with that individual -- will they move, or are they open to a discussion,”

Cole said. “And it tells you who ain’t going to move.”

He credits his background as a political consultant as helping him in his whip role. Perhaps it was that experience that led Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., the House majority whip in the early 2000s, to bring Cole onto the whip team early during Cole's second term.

In a brief interview, Blunt said “whether you want to talk about history or politics or Oklahoma Indian tribal issues,Tom Cole is the guy to be with.” And Blunt says the qualities that led him to recruit the Oklahoman make him an effective leadership ally.

“His role over there has increasingly become the role of someone who really does have, again, an early sense of how things are going to wind up,” Blunt said. “And then perceiving both the opportunities and the pitfalls in that in a way that other members . . . listen to Tom Cole earlier and earlier than they listen to other people because of that capacity.”

Cole says that “you have to understand political reality.” And that is something he says “a lot of people around here don’t [understand].” Within the House GOP conference, Cole says there are “a lot of members -- senior members -- who act like this is the House of Commons.”

“We don’t live in a world where all executive authority is concentrated in a single body. The speaker’s the speaker, he’s not the prime minister," he said, sounding as much like a consultant as an elected official. “So when you look at this body, we can do anything so long as we’re unified.

“But the reality is that on the Senate side, McConnell’s got to have a few Democrats to get anything to the floor,” he told CQ, referring to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “The game’s not over just because it passed the House.”

'Just Carrying Water'?

Cole’s inclination to favor pragmatism over ideology on crisis-averting bills has made him an ally of Boehner and other leaders. But not every member of the GOP caucus sees his role as fostering the best possible outcomes.

“I think he’s very much tied into the leadership,” Walter B. Jones, R-N.C., a member of the conservative House Liberty Caucus, said in a brief interview. “He carries a lot of water for the leadership. That’s his role.”

Jones called Cole “part of ... what I think is the problem.”

“Back home, [in] my 3rd District of North Carolina, people are very disenchanted with John Boehner as the speaker,” Jones said. “So anybody that’s on the speaker’s team, then they’re seen as part of the problem.”

Still, for the GOP whip team, led by Rep.Steve Scalise of Louisiana, it will be all hands on deck this fall. That’s because leadership must find a way to avoid a government shutdown, prevent a federal debt default, and replenish the Highway Trust Fund, even as the party’s right-wing faction demands to tie the defunding of Planned Parenthood and other ideological riders to those measures.

With his signature chuckle, Cole has a pretty good idea of his role.

“Probably, I’ll be saying a lot of the things that everyone knows is true,” Cole said, “but nobody wants to hear.”