Stearns's fundraising efforts reflect a keen interest in the top Energy and Commerce spot. Stearns aims to head Energy panel

Rep. Cliff Stearns hopes his conservative credentials can help guide him straight to the top of the House Energy and Commerce Committee next year.

The Florida Republican says support from top right-leaning groups is a key reason he should lead one of the chamber’s most powerful panels.


“I have an American Conservative Union rating of 96 percent, and you can’t get much better than that," Stearns said in an interview, adding his ratings have increased over time.

“That’s an important understanding: I’m willing to be a conservative consistently over my lifetime, not just over the last two years, or a particular period of time,” he said.

The congressman’s plan for the committee draws heavy influence from the general goals of his party: He hopes to scale back government regulation, question federal energy leaders, begin the repeal of Democrats’ health care law and watch the Federal Communications Commission with a skeptical eye.

It’s all part of Stearns’s strategy in the brewing fight over who will lead the Energy and Commerce panel. Rep. Joe Barton, the current ranking member and former chairman, needs a waiver party leaders are unlikely to grant in order to maintain his position atop the committee.

Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan is widely regarded as the front-runner to become chairman in the event of a Republican takeover of the House, in part because of his history and financial support for GOP candidates this cycle. Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois is another candidate, who, like Stearns, has toed the party line.

Still, Stearns sees the deal as anything but closed.

That means the Florida congressman is now playing offense – touting his favorability ratings among such groups as the American Conservative Union and the National Taxpayers Union as evidence of his conservative credentials.

Both are important positives for Stearns, and they originate from groups that have awarded slightly less favorable rankings to Upton, who has taken some heat in GOP circles for playing too much of a moderate line.

"I believe that the leader of the Energy and Commerce Committee should have a proven conservative record on the issues across the board," Stearns told POLTICO.

"Also, the new majority will have to make very difficult decisions to change the direction of this country and my fiscally conservative record shows I can do that,” he added.

Stearns's fundraising efforts reflect a keen interest in the top Energy and Commerce spot. He has contributed more than $66,000 to GOP campaigns this election season through his political action committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Upton has spent roughly $160,000 in the 2010 cycle.

Heading up the full committee would force Stearns, first elected in 1988, to depart his current role as the leading Republican on the House's top panel on tech and telecom issues. Stearns has held that position on the Communications, Technology, and the Internet subpanel since turning over the gavel for the consumer protection subcommittee, which he led from 2001 to 2007.

Two tech industry sources tell POLITICO that Stearns could remain at the subcommittee level, rather than lead the full committee, or may head elsewhere – particularly to the Veterans Affairs Committee.

Veterans Affairs may appeal to the congressman, in particular, given his constituency and previous work in the Air Force. Stearns is currently the vice ranking member on that panel, and the top Republican, Rep. Steve Buyer, is retiring.

But GOP rules prevent lawmakers from running both a full committee as well as a subcommittee, meaning Stearns would have to give up his current leadership role for a more plum assignment. It is not immediately clear whether Stearns is weighing such a move.

But if Stearns did stay and take over Energy and Commerce, health care repeal would be a top priority, he said.

Stearns promised a series of hearings and a new bill that would keep some elements of Democrats’ health care package while adding in many of the ideas GOP leaders supported earlier this year.

That new effort would retain rules that would allow young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, while stipulating “some understanding that people with preexisting conditions should be taken care of,” he said. It would also substitute in more robust provisions on preventative care and medical liability reform, as well as some of the other healthcare items that Stearns and others first pitched as part of a 1994 health care bill.

A full committee under Stearns’s stewardship could also play aggressively with the Environmental Protection Agency, which the congressman lambasted for new regulations that amounted to a de facto “energy tax” on businesses. “For the most part, they have not come up here, so we need vigorous oversight of the EPA,” he said.

But it isn’t clear the kind of relationship Stearns might have with congressional Democrats and the White House on energy; he declined to note any energy proposals over which the two sides might find common ground.

“I don’t see anything in the Senate, and I don’t think anything in the administration,” he said of possible areas of compromise, while hammering House Democrats for passing their cap-and-trade bill in 2009.

Stearns has already etched out his positions on top tech and telecom issues as ranking member on the Communications, Technology and the Internet subcommittee.

Unlike Upton, Stearns has not already commit to voting against a compromise bill on net neutrality – or, rules that would ensure Internet providers treat all Web traffic equally. Instead, Stearns repeated his call from September: that the compromise, drafted by Democrats with even some support by top telecom companies, needed more time and a few hearings before he could make a decision.

Stearns did, however, stress that he would use the full committee to prevent the FCC from reclassifying broadband in the interim, blocking the agency from using its own rule-making powers to begin regulating net neutrality.

Stearns promised to sanction the FCC and stop it in its tracks if it reclassified under his watch. “The FCC does not have the jurisdiction to do it,” he said.