'Show me the last time a conservative has lost the presidency,' Steve Scalise says. congress Scalise: Conservatives are the GOP's future

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise has a solution for the GOP’s presidential election woes — double-down on conservatism.

The Louisiana Republican is hoping the party avoids nominating a moderate in 2016, noting that candidates from the GOP’s center have failed to win the White House during the last two elections. Scalise thinks this is a mistake, and he wants to avoid picking a standard bearer who isn’t a true conservative.


“People are like, ‘Oh, should it be a moderate? Somebody who can get elected?’” Scalise said during a wide-ranging interview in his Capitol office.

“You know, I’d argue we’ve had moderates nominated the last few times and they haven’t won,” he said. “Show me the last time a conservative has lost the presidency. I think if we have a strong conservative with a proven record, we’ll win the White House.”

Asked if Jeb Bush — who Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has encouraged to run for the White House — was too moderate, Scalise signaled he’s not enamored with the former Florida governor. “Jeb’s got some good things in his record, there are some things with his record that I disagree with,” Scalise said.

Scalise’s sit-down with POLITICO is a kind a reemergence after several trying months for the Louisiana Republican. He’s kept a low profile for the early part of 2015, after it was revealed that he once attended a meeting organized by a white supremacist in Louisiana. There were also questions about how effective the whip operation was, which came as part of broader criticism of the entire House Republican leadership.

Now, with a handful of legislative victories under his belt, Scalise is increasing his visibility in D.C.

Scalise and his chief deputy, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, helped notch two big wins last week for Republicans, passing the 2016 House GOP budget resolution and a fix to Medicare physician reimbursements. It was an important moment for the pair, who had some rocky moments in their first quarter in leadership — most notably when they were unable to break conservative opposition to pass a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

Reflecting on the first few months of the 114th Congress, Scalise said he has succeeded in making Boehner’s leadership more conservative.

“There was this mischaracterization that I ran for leadership to be the guy to get conservatives to vote for leadership,” Scalise insisted. “I said I would be a conservative voice at the leadership table. My goal is to get leadership to bring more conservative policies to the floor, it’s not the other way around to get conservatives to vote for something they don’t like. It’s to get a more conservative product, and we’ve actually delivered on a number of occasions there.”

Scalise also brushed away some of the criticism that he’s been a subpar whip since taking over the post last year.

“Any time you’re working on big things, you’re going to get criticized along the way,” Scalise said, in a defense of his tenure. “I think at the end of the day, you’re judged on results. The budget is the biggest thing we do. It’s not just our vision document, it’s a document that’s supposed to unify our conference and it did that.”

But he acknowledged that legislating won’t always be a smooth process with House Republicans. “It didn’t just happen on its own, it took a lot of work,” Scalise said of the leadership’s wins on the budget and “doc fix.” “You gotta get into some confrontations sometimes to get the right result on the floor, but I think the bulk of our member ship wants us to work out problems before a bill comes to the floor.”

As the whip looks back over the beginning of 2015 — when he faced allegations that he was a racist — the lawmaker said he’s “forever grateful” that Democratic Rep. Cedric Richmond had his back.

“It was offensive, and it hurt me because it wasn’t true,” Scalise said of accusations he was a racist. “There were people that were trying to associate me with something that I reject.”

Yet the controversy did have a big impact on how Scalise operated during the first few months of this year. A normally confident public speaker who sticks close to his talking points, Scalise had avoided most on-the-record interactions with the press since a liberal blogger revealed in December that he made a 2002 appearance before the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), an extremist group founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

After initially trying to downplay the incident, Scalise called his speech a “mistake I regret” and added that he rejected the organization’s racist ideology.