Beauprez toes the Republican line

Congressman has stayed conservative, voted pro-business

M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 12, 2006 at midnight

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WASHINGTON - Some people on Capitol Hill are as predictable as the sunrise - and Rep. Bob Beauprez is one of them.

Each morning in Congress, politicians make big speeches, lobbyists prowl the hallways and reporters scurry after the latest new scandals. And each day, many times more often than not, Beauprez casts a few more votes in lockstep with his Republican Party leadership.

In 3 1/2 years leading up to his run for Colorado governor, Beauprez has rarely strayed from the mainstream party line as he has racked up a clear pro-business, socially conservative voting record, an analysis by the Rocky Mountain News finds.

The second-term congressman has joined fiscal conservatives on a series of mostly symbolic protest votes when he thought his party's leadership was spending too much money.

Still, in a delegation known for renegades like Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Littleton, and others who take pride in crossing the party aisle, it's hard to find occasions when Beauprez has broken ranks on a major piece of legislation or close votes that came down to the wire.

For that, Beauprez makes no apologies.

"Frankly, Bob supports the Republican agenda," chief of staff Sean Murphy said Monday. "Bob supports a conservative approach to governing. It's not surprising you're going to find he has voted with a fairly conservative Republican Congress most of the time - except on issues of out-of-control spending."

One way to analyze Beauprez's voting record is by comparing it with those of three fellow Colorado Republicans: the retiring dean of the delegation, Rep. Joel Hefley; Tancredo; and Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, who entered Congress with Beauprez in 2003.

Hefley and Tancredo are known for casting more frequent maverick votes - Hefley on budget spending and ethics reforms, and Tancredo on spending, immigration, trade issues and others.

Statistics compiled by the newsletter CQ Weekly showed that through the end of 2005, Musgrave had voted with the majority Republican position more often than Beauprez, 99 percent of the time compared with 96 percent for Beauprez.

However, Musgrave can point to some key votes where she broke ranks on tough issues.

The clearest example happened in November 2003, when there was an epic, all-night showdown over a White House-backed plan to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

Many conservatives, including Musgrave and Tancredo, said they had serious concerns about the massive price tag of the so-called Medicare Modernization Act. At the time, the Bush administration estimated it would cost $400 billion over 10 years. That projection later ballooned to between $720 billion and $1.2 trillion.

The Medicare roll call vote is considered one of the most contentious in the history of the House of Representatives.

With the "yes" side trailing after the initial ballot, House leaders froze the clock that was supposed to limit voting and engaged in all-night arm-twisting so intense that it launched an ethics committee investigation into the tactics of "The Hammer," former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Musgrave and Tancredo were pressured to change their votes, but they stuck to their guns and voted "no," as did two Colorado Democrats, Reps. Mark Udall and Diana DeGette. Beauprez voted yes, along with Hefley and then-Congressman Scott McInnis. The bill passed 220-215, just before sunrise.

Murphy said Beauprez stands behind his vote because supporting the prescription drug benefit was one of the promises he made during his 2002 campaign against Democrat Mike Feeley.

"Bob believes if you say you're going to do something, you're going to do it," Murphy said.

Chamber grants perfect score

As a congressman, Beauprez has been most consistent in supporting issues important to the business community, like supporting lower taxes and free-trade agreements.

In his first two years in Congress, a statistical analysis by the National Journal ranked Beauprez as one of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives on economic issues.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which scores lawmakers based on a few dozen key votes each year, gave Beauprez perfect scores in 2003, 2004 and most of 2005. He was marked down only when he joined Tancredo and a majority of other Republicans and supported a hard-line immigration reform bill, which the chamber opposed in favor of a proposed guest-worker plan.

On immigration, Beauprez's position has evolved - and toughened - during his time in Congress.

Over the years, Tancredo repeatedly has pushed amendments to other legislation to threaten to take away funding for cities and states if they do not actively enforce immigration laws.

Twice in 2003, Beauprez voted against those amendments. He later changed course, voting for similar amendments in 2004 and 2005. He joined Tancredo's Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus and won Tancredo's endorsement for governor.

"When Bob got elected to Congress the first time, Congressman Tancredo was a pretty lonely voice in the wilderness," Murphy said. "I think the country's thinking on illegal immigration has evolved over the last four years," and so has Beauprez's position, Murphy said.

Immigration is hardly the only area where Tancredo sometimes has clashed with Republican leadership, and so he and Beauprez often have been on the opposite sides of key votes.

It has happened on a series of free-trade pacts, including the hard-fought Dominican Republic- Central American Free Trade Agreement, better known as CAFTA.

Beauprez and most Republicans backed CAFTA on a 217-215 vote in 2005, when Tancredo was one of only 27 Republicans on the "no" side.

A similar split happened when the House approved trade pacts covering Oman, Singapore and Chile.

Voting against big spending

Protesting against big government spending is one area where Beauprez has tried to show his independence from House Republican leadership.

In 2003, he joined Hefley, Musgrave and Tancredo in an attempt to rein in spending on a supplemental spending bill that provided emergency funds for homeland security and disaster relief. They voted for an amendment that would have forced Congress to find $984 million worth of cuts to offset spending in the bill. After the amendment failed, they - joined by fellow Coloradans DeGette, Udall and McInnis - voted against the overall bill.

Over the years, Beauprez and the others often have supported Hefley's repeated amendments seeking to impose an across-the-board, 1 percent cut on spending contained in various appropriations or budget bills. The amendments are considered mostly symbolic and routinely fail with only around 80 votes.

Similarly, Beauprez and the others sometimes have gone against the GOP majority and supported amendments (by Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.) seeking to nix objectionable spending on projects buried within massive appropriations bills.

Most of the amendments fail, often by wide margins. Beauprez often has gone ahead and voted for final passage of the overall bill.

Among Colorado Republicans, Hefley and Tancredo more regularly oppose final passage of the final appropriations bills, including recent legislation to pay for foreign operations, energy and water projects, and a host of federal government agencies.

This summer, Musgrave joined Tancredo and voted against emergency supplemental spending for the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina relief.

Tancredo said he didn't trust New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to spend the money, while Musgrave was upset that funds to help struggling farmers were nixed from the bill.

Beauprez stuck with the Republican majority and voted for the bill.

"Bob does not take the approach . . . that he won't vote for something if it's not perfect," Murphy said. If amendments fail, Murphy said, "Bob is not an 'I'm-taking-my-ball- and-going-home' kind of guy."

Conservative on values

He has supported the Republican majority on its conservative values agenda.

He opposed expanded federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. He supported a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. And he played an outspoken role advocating for Congress to get involved in the fight over whether to remove a feeding tube from Florida hospice patient Terri Schiavo.

Overall, Beauprez built a conservative, solidly Republican voting record even though he was fighting to hold the closely divided 7th District, where the equal split among Democrats, Republicans and independents would suggest that an aisle-crossing centrist might do well.

"I don't think his very conservative and establishment voting record was nearly as important in those campaigns as his ability to position himself correctly on local issues and local projects," said political analyst Floyd Ciruli.

What astounds Ciruli is that despite Beauprez's pro-business voting record, he still managed to alienate some Colorado business leaders during the hotly contested Republican gubernatorial primary. It happened when Beauprez took a position opposing Referendum C, the state spending measure that many business leaders considered important for the state's economy.

"He had a tremendous amount of early business support," Ciruli said, "but (Referendum) C separated him from the business consensus."

sprengelmeyerm@SHNS

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