He began immediately after the 1994 election by convening a meeting
of the next House Republican Conference--all returning members, plus the
incoming freshmen. Numerous newbies, having heard about the RSC, were
devastated when Gingrich's staff announced it was going away. Two of
them, John Shadegg of Arizona and Steve Largent of Oklahoma, spoke up.
"The entire freshman class was there, and we were taking over the
majority," Shadegg recalls. "Largent and I got up and argued it ought to
be saved."
When the meeting adjourned, Majority Leader Dick Armey yanked Shadegg
and Largent into an adjacent room. "Nice try, but it's gone," Armey
told them. By abolishing the RSC, the new speaker neutralized a
potential menace. But in doing so, he also provoked some GOP members who
were incredulous that their self-styled conservative leader would
attack a bastion of conservative activism. One of them was Ernest
Istook, an outspoken sophomore from Oklahoma, who whispered to a
colleague during that meeting, "It can't be healthy for all the
resources to be concentrated in the hands of party leadership." Istook
wanted to know where rank-and-file members would turn for objective
analyses on leadership-endorsed legislation.
He wasn't alone. Having arrived in Washington together in 1990, GOP
Reps. John Doolittle of California and Sam Johnson of Texas shared a
friendship and political philosophy. RSC members both, they were stunned
by the power play. Almost immediately, they began plotting to revive
the organization. To circumvent Gingrich's restrictive language, they
needed someone with intricate knowledge of both the old RSC
infrastructure and the House itself. No one was better qualified than
Dan Burton of Indiana, who was RSC chairman at the time of its
dissolution. Burton, too, had been scheming to resurrect the committee.
As these three began strategizing around the new House rules, they
recruited Istook. He suggested that rather than spend House resources on
RSC employees, lawmakers should instead hire part-time staffers who
could roam between offices working for different members on RSC
projects. "We set up a structure of rotating the payroll for these
employees from one office to the next, so that everyone was, in effect,
sharing the cost but working within the new rules," Istook explains.
Now the four members could reboot the RSC, but they wanted a fresh
start and a new name to emphasize aggressive ideology over passive
partisanship. Istook suggested CAT, for Conservative Action Team. The
others approved, and soon Istook was printing lapel pins featuring a
roaring mountain lion and distributing them to conservative members
curious about rumors of the RSC's resurrection. The rechristened group
had returned--with a new generation of leaders.
This foursome, known since as the "founders," nurtured the group with
weekly meetings to discuss policy and strategy. (Today, the weekly RSC
meeting, which is still part debate forum and part strategy session, is
considered the cornerstone of conservatism on Capitol Hill.) Each of the
four founders served as chairman on a rotating basis for four to six
months. But that proved too chaotic. "It got to the point where we felt
it had become an organizational weakness that we didn't have a single
chairman," Doolittle recalls. Their unanimous choice as CAT's first
chairman was Rep. David McIntosh of Indiana, who had earned a reputation
since arriving in 1995 as unafraid to challenge party leadership. But
when Republicans lost seats in 1998 and Gingrich stepped down, McIntosh
retired to run for Indiana governor and passed the chairman's job to his
class of '94 colleague, Rep. John Shadegg, a combative conservative
with a talent for taking the temperature of his colleagues.