WASHINGTON (TNS) — Come January, Guy Reschenthaler will be playing for keeps.
When the 119th Congress convenes in January, Republicans will hold a trifecta — the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate and presidency — bringing on the pressure to fulfill the promises they made on the campaign trail.
And a lot of the pressure will fall on the Peters Republican, chief deputy whip for the House GOP conference.
“He’s in a great place in a great time in history,” said fellow Western Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Glenn Thompson of Centre.
Reschenthaler’s job: To wrangle, cajole and assemble the 218 House Republican votes needed to pass legislation that President-elect Donald Trump has promised to enact: new tax cuts, stronger border security measures, and expanded energy production, among others.
“A failure is going to hurt even more when we have this opportunity,” Reschenthaler said in an interview. “A lot of this work falls upon the whip team.”
Reschenthaler, first elected to Congress in 2018, represents Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District, which includes Fayette, Greene, Washington and parts of Indiana, Somerset and Westmoreland counties.
He has held his leadership post since the GOP won control of the House in the 2022 midterms. He helped Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer win the intraparty election for House majority whip. Emmer said thanks by naming Reschenthaler as his chief deputy.
“Not only is Guy a beloved member across our entire House Republican conference — his experience as a U.S. Navy veteran, lawyer, small business owner and son of former teachers make him an indispensable force in our whip operation,” Emmer said.
During his first two years as a leader of the efforts to round up enough Republican votes to pass legislation, almost everything that got through the House never became law due to opposition by both Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden.
Not any more. Republicans will control the Senate and Trump will be the president beginning in January. That makes Reschenthaler’s role much more important.
Voters’ expectations
“The Trump administration and Republican voters are going to expect Republican members of Congress to produce and pass Trump’s legislation, and a failure to do that could have consequences,” said Paul Herrnson, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and author of several books on Congress.
But voters haven’t made it easy for Reschenthaler. While the Republicans will have control of Congress, their majority in the House is so narrow that just a handful of recalcitrant Republicans could gum up the works.
With one district yet to be called, Republicans likely will wind up with a 220 to 215 majority, meaning that only three dissenters could kill a bill.
Making things even more difficult is that Trump has tapped two House Republicans for his administration, and a third, former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., has said he wouldn’t serve in the new Congress.
Furthermore, that majority runs the gamut from far-right Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to moderate Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents the Philadelphia suburbs and is the GOP lawmaker most likely to break with his party.
“We tend to see the House Republican Conference as a monolith and it’s not,” said congressional expert Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University. “The heat’s on for the whip to get those bills over to the Senate. It’s by no means a given that they’ll have the votes to get out of the House.”
For example, there will be some Republicans unable to support legislation that could hurt their states, like those from New Jersey and Florida who don’t want to see oil drilling off their coasts lest a spill damage their beaches and cripple their tourism industry.
Or efforts to cut Medicaid could disproportionately hurt those states that expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
“The member has a very, very finely attuned sense of political survival,” Baker said. “If they feel there is something that’s over the top, they’re not going to touch it with a barge pole.”
Reschenthaler was elected to the House in 2018, when Republicans lost their majority after several GOP lawmakers from high-tax states went along with their leadership and approved the Trump tax bill that curbed the federal deduction for state and local taxes. Outraged constituents voted them out of office.
“That’s why it’s really difficult,” Herrson said. “The bottom line always used to be for party members is we want you to support us but we want you to survive or else we will lose our majority in the election.”
Before being elected majority whip, Emmer ran the House Republicans’ political arm and has what Reschenthaler described as “almost an encyclopediac recall” of each congressional district.
“He doesn’t want to put anybody in a position to draw a primary in a deep red district or have a general election issue in a swing district,” Reschenthaler said of Emmer. “We can’t do anything that has a negative electoral impact on our members. Politics is local. That parochial issue could affect Western Pennsylvania if we lose those members and go into the minority.”
‘It is going to be harder’
With just a small GOP majority, even a handful of defectors could sound the death knell for some pieces of legislation.
“It is going to be harder with a thinner majority,” Reschenthaler said. “I can’t even begin to sugarcoat this.”
And that’s even before the Senate tackles any House-passed bill. Most of that legislation will need 60 votes for passage while Republicans will hold only 53 seats.
“If we’re really doing good legislation that the American people are embracing, it will not be that hard for the Senate to secure 60 votes, to get closure so that we can get things to President Trump’s desk,” Thompson said.
Reschenthaler already is starting to pave the way for approval of legislation through his chamber next year, talking to House Republicans as they begin writing the bills to try to remove points of contention even before the measures come up for votes.
“He listens more than he talks,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. “That’s the key for being a whip. It’s understanding who your members are, where they’re coming from and letting them explain how they can get to yes. He’s an impossible guy not to like in the personal sense and I think he knows the fine art of listening.”
That’s a contrast to earlier House leaders, who demanded fealty or else.
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., lost his Veterans Affairs Committee chair when he wouldn’t budge on his demand for more money to help veterans and House GOP leaders wouldn’t go along.
“Guy is very, very effective and he tries to persuade,” Smith said. “If he finds you have a problem with a bill, he’ll ask you what it is, he’ll try to get answers. He’s got a very nice touch. It’s always a respectful approach. Whips aren’t always known for that.”
Reschenthaler oversees a team of 90 members who talk to lawmakers well in advance of votes to see where they stand on upcoming legislation. Then he or other House GOP leaders call or text members who aren’t on board to find out why they’re undecided or considering voting no, setting up face-to-face meetings when necessary.
In the current Congress, plenty of House Republicans felt free to oppose their leadership. As a result, both House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., — who later would be deposed by a rump group of GOP lawmakers — and his successor, Mike Johnson, R-La., needed House Democratic support to keep the federal government open because their moderate members wouldn’t support legislation with massive spending cuts and more conservative members wouldn’t vote yes without the reductions.
And even if they had passed the cuts, the Senate and Biden wouldn’t have gone along.
“Some people were viewing the bills we were passing as messaging bills and some people didn’t want to put their careers on the line for messaging bills,” Reschenthaler said.
GOP lawmakers also defied Trump and Johnson and defeated a proposed spending bill that also included a provision to curb noncitizen voting, which already is extremely rare and which could prevent legitimate voters from casting ballots.
But Reschenthaler helped assemble a unified GOP conference in May 2023 to vote to raise the debt ceiling only if it was combined with spending cuts.
That allowed McCarthy, the speaker at the time, to successfully demand some spending reductions in final legislation that raised the debt ceiling and avoided a federal default.
“We had our own internal issues in this Congress and we struggled at times but thanks to Guy and Tom Emmer, they were able to negotiate things rather well,” Thompson said.
New tools
In the new Congress, Reschenthaler will have tools to persuade lawmakers that he doesn’t have now.
The biggest one will be the support of the president.
“That makes an enormous difference because it’s a president who wants to get things done,” Cole said. “I think that brings some pressure on people that we didn’t have the ability to bring before.”
Even before taking control of the House, Reschenthaler and his team are meeting with lawmakers to try to iron out differences in advance.
They’re bringing members of the far-right Freedom Caucus into the same room as more moderate members of the conference in the hope that these “listening sessions” will end with a compromise that can get a majority vote on the House floor.
“It’s much more real now than it was in the last Congress,” Reschenthaler said, “It was hard to get some of these guys to get to the middle when we knew what we passed would die in the Senate. The pressure is higher, the stakes are higher. …This time we can say this will likely go to the president’s desk. A failure is going to hurt even more when we have this opportunity.”
