Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), tapped by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) as chief deputy whip, said he is confident Republicans can get key pieces of legislation passed despite operating with a razor-thin majority.
As the highest appointed role in the House Republican Conference, the chief deputy whip frequently acts as a launching pad for future positions in the House leadership. Past chief deputy whips in Republican majorities include, among others, former Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), who went on to become House majority leader, and retired Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO).
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Reschenthaler was first elected to the House in 2018 in Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District, covering the southern and eastern Pittsburgh exurbs. As chief deputy whip, he’s now part of a leadership team tasked with helping to push through winning votes in a 222-213 House with a GOP majority that is split by intraparty factions — the same House in which Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) needed 15 ballots and three-and-a-half days to win the chamber’s top job amid dissension from a group of conservative lawmakers with whom he has clashed over the years.
The whip team was put to the test during its first week on the job amid that historically chaotic speaker’s race. The standoff forced Emmer and Reschenthaler to move quickly in assembling and putting their team to work, with the lawmakers playing a key role in helping with negotiations and getting McCarthy over the finish line.
Reschenthaler, a former state senator who served in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps in Iraq, said the recent speaker’s fight will actually help House Republicans move forward as the party looks to legislate with a slim majority.
“I think there’s a silver lining for the whip team in that we got to know how our team operates and what worked and what didn’t right away,” Reschenthaler, 39, told the Washington Examiner.
“We were baptized by fire in those four or five days. And so it taught us a lot. It taught us where maybe some fault lines are in the conference,” Reschenthaler said. “But it also taught us what different groups in the Republican Conference want and what their objectives are.”
Reschenthaler said he believes the conference has proven it can negotiate and find common ground.
“We certainly have a very large tent of ideology, but we can craft legislation together in committee, and once they hit the floor, they can get passed,” Reschenthaler said. He added that “extreme” positions by House Democrats would help ensure the passage of GOP-favored legislation. That includes, the congressman said, House Democratic support for “basically open borders,” “radical policy in schools,” “weakness abroad,” and “shutting down our natural gas and oil production in the United States.”
Reschenthaler has been in leadership since the start of his House career, first as freshman class representative and then as sophomore class representative. His experience as a lawyer and his relationships within the conference will be beneficial in helping him succeed in his new position.
“It’s very important as a lawyer that you hold confidences, and I think that goes a long way. Both Tom Emmer and I have already stated that we want to have that mentality of a small-town law firm, and you’re not going to get clients if you’re spreading people’s business all over town,” Reschenthaler said. “So I think that’s really important for folks in the conference to know that you can talk to us in confidence and we’re not going to share unless they want their point of views to be shared — that’s going to be incredibly important.”
Emmer selected the Pennsylvania Republican after Reschenthaler played a key role in helping him garner support for him during a heated three-way majority whip race while Emmer was the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. And the Minnesota Republican said he is confident he made the right choice, with Reschenthaler having already proven himself in the role.
“Guy kind of picked himself. There are so many people, and Guy would tell you this too, that have the skills to do that job in our conference because we’re just loaded with talent, but Guy was the right person at the right time,” Emmer told the Washington Examiner. “He is the Energizer Bunny — he does not stop. I mean, I used to tell kids that I coached probably, maybe not appropriate for this arena, but I used to tell them you’ve got to go after that puck like it’s a dog getting out on a bloody bone.”
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That tenacity will be important as House Republicans try to hold on to their slim majority in the 2024 elections, which overlap with the next presidential race.
Reschenthaler, Emmer said, is “always looking for the positive, and he’s always looking for, ‘How do we get there? How do we get to where we’re going from here?’ He just worked his tail off when we were doing the whip’s race.”
