Blog gathers support to oust Calvert from Approps panel

A popular conservative blog has intensified its call to pull Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) from the powerful House Appropriations Committee, launching a coordinated effort to target members of the GOP Steering Committee who voted to appoint him.

Erick Erickson, the editor in chief of www.Redstate.com, said yesterday that he had received encouragement from Hill staffers and some lawmakers who believe GOP leadership needs a wake-up call. At press time, several conservative websites and blogs, including the Club for Growth’s site, had linked to Erickson’s proposal to remove Calvert from the Appropriations panel.

{mosads}“This party of ours must be pruned, and it must be pruned by those of us who care about it before meeting the butchers’ sheers [sic] in the hands of the voters again in 2008,” Erickson wrote to The Hill. “If they refuse to hear that change is needed, we will wipe them out and replace them with new blood that recognizes that a corrupt party rejected by the voters will not be embraced again by the voters until the corruption is purged.”

As part of the “battle plan” outlined on his blog, Erickson encouraged Redstate.com readers to flood lawmakers’ local and Washington offices with phone calls. The blogger’s plan included contacting lawmakers’ key campaign contributors and members of the press to push for change.    

“We will call each member, one a day, flooding lines in [his or her] district and in D.C.,” Erickson wrote in an e-mail. “We will compile a list of every member who either admits to voting for Calvert or refuses to answer.”

Erickson said the group will zero in on the 29 members of the Republican Steering Committee, who on May 9 chose Calvert as a temporary replacement for Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) before he was ratified by the full Republican Conference on May 10. Votes held in the Steering Committee are considered confidential.

“We will target the Steering Committee members in order of most vulnerable to defeat to least vulnerable to defeat,” Erickson said. “We will provide one way out for each member of the Steering Committee: Publicly announce a desire to have
Ken Calvert step down before we get to [a] particular member of the Steering Committee.

“Once we’ve started, we won’t stop.”

Yesterday, Steering Committee member Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.) was targeted. A spokesman did not return a call for comment.

Calvert defended his congressional record and again denied allegations of ethical impropriety.

“This week my colleagues gave me a welcome opportunity to refute the allegations made against me in a scurrilous 2006 Los Angeles Times story,” Calvert said in his own entry on the Redstate.com blog. “I’m proud to have done so in an open and thorough fashion, and I write today to do the same for Red State readers.”

Calvert described the deal that raised the ethical questions as “a transportation project I supported for the betterment of my district.”

“The project is part of a larger, regional plan, was requested by local transportation officials and is currently three years away from construction,” Calvert wrote on the blog. “But rather than reporting the facts and the benefits this project would deliver for Californians, the Los Angeles Times ran a sensational story that falsely created an appearance of impropriety.”

In an interview last week, Calvert denied any wrongdoing.

“The property I owned is 16 miles away from where an earmark was planned,” Calvert said.

“I never personally directed an earmark,” he said. “At the time this came out, people were looking for [questionable earmarks]; I guess that was the best they could find.”

Calvert cited an editorial printed in the Riverside, Calif.-based Press Enterprise, which called the allegations against the lawmaker “flimsy” and said the original report “poorly serves the search for real Congressional malfeasance.”

Erickson indicated in his posts that the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) would also be contacted.

A spokesman for the NRCC, Ken Spain, said, “We have always greatly appreciated the contribution [blogs] have made to the conservative movement; however, we plan to remain focused and work with the conservative bloggers to shed light on the Democrats’ already abysmal record on taxes, spending and funding for our troops.”

A GOP leadership aide said, “There is a difference between the ‘clear likelihood of a serious transgression’ and the possibility that a law enforcement agency is simply doing its due diligence based on possibly erroneous media reports.”

The aide said allegations that the Steering Committee replaced one ethically embattled politician with another were false.

“The two cases are not comparable … The Doolittle case is known to be under formal investigation by the FBI,” the aide said.

Erickson was unconvinced by the explanation.

“The House GOP Steering Committee will either embrace reform or reject it,” he wrote. “And we will encourage them to embrace it.”