Senior House Republican Rep. Joe Barton, thinking that Democrats are going to be reaching out to the GOP this year for help in legislation. He anticipates Republicans will be able to rally dozens of centrist Democrats behind GOP initiatives this year — a trend that would lend GOP leaders a stark advantage over the outgoing Democrats, whose most prominent legislative victories came without a single GOP vote, according to
The Hill.
"The new House Republican majority is going to be an action majority, and we're going to try to do it on a bipartisan basis," Barton told the Fox Business Network on Friday. "I think one of the mistakes that [Senate] Majority Leader Reid made, and Speaker Pelosi, is they had such huge partisan majorities that they tried to do it just within their own party. And I don't think that will work."
A large bulk of the 63 House seats lost by Democrats were occupied by conservative-leaning lawmakers with a history of bucking their party on fiscal measures, among other issues. Indeed, there were 54 members of the conservative Blue Dog Caucus in the 111th Congress; that number will fall to 26 in the 112th, creating a decidedly more liberal Democratic Caucus this year.