Georgia Tipsheet

Five Georgia Republican congressmen said Thursday it appears the recent decision by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to release upwards of 2,000 undocumented immigrants from federal detention was “politically motivated” and not a necessary consequence of sequestration budget cuts.

“The agency’s decision to mass release illegal aliens detained in federal custody under the guise of budget cuts is both puzzling and alarming,” reads a new letter signed by GOP Reps. Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, Doug Collins, Lynn Westmoreland and Tom Graves.

Sec. Napolitano announced earlier this month that budget cuts had forced the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release hundreds of low-risk detainees from custody, but the conservative quintet say in a new letter that the release violates the agency’s “mission of ensuring the safety and security of the American people.”

The Associated Press reported last week the agency had designs on the release of an additional 3,000 low-risk undocumented immigrants to offset budget cuts that might otherwise affect investigative and protective units.

The White House said the decision was made by career civil servants and not political appointees, but the Peach Staters say the timing of the release–Napolitano delivered congressional testimony on the impact of sequestration on DHS the day before the ICE release but made no mention of the pending discharge–gives reason to believe politics infected the decision.

“We fail to see how releasing 2,000 illegal aliens before sequestration went into effect on march 1 nor plans to release 3,000 more during March … ‘minimize[d] the impact of sequester,’” the bunch wrote. “In fact, your repeated failure to be forthcoming about the releases gives the impress that the decision was politically motivated.”

The group have asked Napolitano to respond to a series of questions probing the release’s provenance and want an accounting of the number and offenses of detainees released in Georgia.

One of the letter’s signatories, Rep. Broun, has already announced a campaign for the Republican Senate nomination and a second, Rep. Gingrey, is also expected to pursue the nod.

- James Richardson

U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland said Monday he would not seek the Republican Senate nomination from Georgia, opting instead to run for reelection to his suburban Atlanta district.

“After discussing it with family and friends, and after much deliberation and prayer, I have made the decision to not pursue a statewide office at this time,” Westmoreland said in a statement. “I am honored to be serving as the U.S. Congressman for Georgia’s Third District.”

It was widely expected that Westmoreland, a close friend and political ally of Gov. Nathan Deal, would have entered the race with the overt support and political infrastructure of the governor, but Monday’s news of abstention leaves the state’s top Republican without a candidate to support.

Now, senior Republicans believe, Deal will remain neutral until a runoff–Georgia election law requires candidates clear the 50 percent threshold or default to a runoff with the second-highest vote-getter–when his endorsement would bear more influence. (By enduring the volatility of a crowded primary field, in which a quartet of GOP congressional lawmakers are expected to enter, Deal also avoids the potential his endorsement might miscarry.)

- James Richardson

U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland declined to say Wednesday whether he would run for Senate, but said that “all options” were on the table as he weighs a possible campaign to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

Westmoreland was in Atlanta yesterday for a meeting with Gov. Nathan Deal–a recess pilgrimage all would-be congressional contenders save for only Rep. Jack Kingston, still leading a bipartisan delegation in Israel, have made–when he told reporters in the capitol that more deliberation and prayer was needed before a decision could be reached.

“We’re looking at all the options,” he said. “There’s some good guys that’s already announced that they’re going to get in, but I’ve just been a big believer that if someone else rushes you into making a decision, then it’s probably not going to be a good decision.”

Few senior Republicans now believe Westmoreland will enter the contest, though he would do so with the support and political network of the governor. Still, the Grantville Republican is in no scramble to end the speculation.

“And so we have said all along that we are going to talk to people, we’re going to pray, think about it,” he said.

- James Richardson

In Georgia, it’s open season. 

The decision Friday by Sen. Saxby Chambliss not to seek reelection has necessarily nudged every member of the Republican congressional delegation and most statewide elected officers to weigh the prospect of a primary campaign.

Reps. Tom Price, Lynn Westmoreland and Paul Broun are rumored to be seriously considering the race. Party sources also believe banker and philanthropist Frank Hanna III is contemplating a self-financed campaign.

But even as the field remains tremendously muddled and the frontrunner long from established, the political fortunes of one Georgia Republican did improve.

The state’s Republican governor, Nathan Deal, is also up for reelection next year. Despite his majority approval–he was most recently clocked at a 55% approval this week–some considered him vulnerable to a primary challenge from Rep. Price.

Now, back benchers anxious for a promotion will invest that energy and venom into an open, it still crowded, primary.

Jay Morgan, a one-time Georgia Republican Party executive director and Deal confidant, said party resources would be consumed by a Senate primary, leaving the governor to coast to reelection barring serious, unexpected Democratic opposition.

“The big winner today is Gov. Nathan Deal,” Morgan told Tipsheet in an email. “The set of chain events that will now transpire will adversely affect anyone’s plans to mount and finance a statewide race for Governor.  The interest and the money will be focused on who succeeds Senator Chambliss and all those who give up their safe seats in the process.”

- James Richardson

One Georgia Republican House leader said the decision to strip four conservatives from influential committee posts was not informed by ideology. Instead, he said, their removal was calculated by the “asshole factor.”

The reshuffling has become a minor controversy in recent days in conservative quarters of the caucus and culminated Wednesday in a heated discussion at a meeting of the Republican Study Committee, where members sought detailed explanations from leadership and top aides for the move.

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, who was party to the decision to reshuffle committee assignments, defended the decision in the sharpest terms yet both at the meeting and later in an interview with Capitol Hill newspaper CQ Roll Call.

“I couldn’t help but kind of speak up for the steering committee and the leadership,” Westmoreland, a Republican from Grantville, told the paper.

“What I tried to explain to them was, it didn’t have anything to do with your voting record, a scorecard, your work across the street or anything else,” he said. “It had to do with your ability to work within the system and to try to work. And to be, I guess, constructive in things. And I said, ‘I guess you could say it was an asshole factor.’”

Westmoreland cautioned that he “wasn’t calling any member in particular an asshole,” but that obstinate temperaments had affected a legislative stalemate.

- James Richardson

The third time’s the charm.

After a pair of unsuccessful leadership bids by Georgia congressional Republicans, U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland was on Tuesday named deputy chairman of the national Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House GOP caucus.

“Lynn Westmoreland is a well-respected leader in the House, and I’m pleased that he will serve as deputy chairman at the NRCC,” the group’s new chairman, Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, said in a statement. “Lynn is a savvy, thoughtful and a hard worker. He knows what it takes to win.”

Westmoreland, who recently signaled to state party leaders he had no interest in primarying Sen. Saxby Chambliss, was an instrumental figure in the recent reapportionment process that gave his Republican colleagues an edge in an otherwise-underwhelming cycle.

The NRCC’s new chairman, Walden, previously held the post to which Westmoreland is now ascending.

- James Richardson

Four of Georgia’s most conservative congressional lawmakers warned the president in a stern letter Monday that they consider U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice an unfit candidate to lead the State Department.

The letter, orchestrated by Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan from neighboring South Carolina, attracted the signatures of some 97 GOP lawmakers. Among them: Georgians Paul Broun, Tom Price, Tom Graves and Lynn Westmoreland.

“Ambassador Rice is widely viewed to have either willfully or incompetently misled the American public on the Benghazi matter,” the letter reads. “Her actions plausibly give U.S. allies (and rivals) abroad the reason to question U.S. commitment and credibility when needed. Thus, we believe that making her the face of U.S. foreign policy in your second term would greatly undermine your desire to improve U.S. relations with the world and continue to build trust with the American people.”

Ambassador Rice has weathered intense Republican criticism, most notably from Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, in the months since on the attack on the diplomatic mission in Libya that claimed the lives of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

She said in interviews in the days that followed the attack that it was a “spontaneous” reaction to a previously-unknown internet film. Blame and explanations have since shifted, though the White House’s official response later affirmed that it was, in fact, an orchestrated terror attack.

President Barack Obama has vigorously defended Rice, calling the criticisms of her “outrageous,” even as he has said he remains undecided on who to tap for the Foggy Bottom post.

Of course, the letter will have little bearing on that decision: because the responsibility of confirming presidential nominations falls to the Senate, not the House, it was little more than a symbolic admonishment.

- James Richardson

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was in Georgia Thursday to cut the seams of deep-pocketed Atlanta donors on behalf of Republican congressional hopeful Lee Anderson.

Cantor, the number-two Republican in the House, was the primary draw at a $2,500 roundtable and $500-a-head reception at a private Atlanta residence yesterday. But much of the state’s Republican high command, including GOP Phil Gingrey, Tom Graves, Jack Kingston, Tom Price and Lynn Westmoreland, was also on hand for the candidate’s fete.

Cantor boosted Anderson, already a state lawmaker, as candidate whose politics, personality and temperament reflected the twelfth district. The message was simple: the paunchy farmer might not be a rhetorical whiz but registers in the clique of rural white voters that will decide the November contest.

“This is an extremely important race for the House of Representatives and the Republicans there, and we’ve got a candidate who is in touch with the people of the district and reflects the common-sense, conservative vein that runs throughout this state,” Cantor said, according to the Augusta Chronicle. “Lee is a farmer. He’s someone who’s been in that community throughout his career, and he represents a stark contrast, really, to Mr. Barrow.”

Anderson, whose campaign has set preconditions on any possible debates, defended his decision to not spar on camera with Barrow.

“Why give him free media?” Anderson asked, insisting that Barrow must first disclose on television the presidential candidate for whom he will be vote before he would agree to a debate. “Why give him free time to lie to our people more?”

That sentiment, if in harsher tones, was echoed by Rep. Westmoreland.

“Do you really want to get into a debate with a trial lawyer on TV when he’s got a voting record that he’s going to be very much ashamed of,” Westmoreland asked, “and allow him to get in there and do what trial lawyers do, and that’s just circle around and confuse people?”

Cantor’s trip was the first of several waves of prominent national Republicans who will campaign for Anderson.

Speaker John Boehner will drop anchor in the district on October 15, an appearance chased days later by an October 17 showing by Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.

- James Richardson

A conservative battery of former national security officials sent on Thursday a letter to Speaker John Boehner urging a federal probe into a top State Department aide that five House Republican lawmakers, including one Georgian, worried earlier this year might have ties to a radical Islamist group.

U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland joined four other conservative lawmakers in a June letter airing concerns that Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had aligned U.S. foreign policy with the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group to which her later father has been connected.

“We are writing to express our strong support for congressional efforts to illuminate and address the danger posed by influence operations mounted by the Muslim Brotherhood against government agencies,” the group, which includes former directors of the Central Intelligence and Defense Intelligence agencies, wrote.

A 2008 Justice Department investigation into an American Islamic charitable foundation revealed the intentions of some radical groups to upend national security through a process of subversion, known colloquially as “civilization jihad.”

An investigation into Abedin’s alleged ties by the inspector general and parallel probes by congressional committees, the letter said, is a wholly appropriate response if the government is to “establish the nature, extent and impact of any such influence operations aimed – to borrow the Brotherhood’s own words – at destroying us from within, by our own hands.”

“We urge you to acquaint yourself with the background and status of the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization jihad in America,” the group writes. “Should you do so, we are confident you will agree with us that the requests for roman inspector general investigations into this matter by Reps. Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Trent Franks, Lynn Westmoreland and Tom Rooney are both warranted and needed.”

In the two month since the five GOP lawmakers first floated their concern the bunch have endured a spate of stinging criticisms from party elders, including a one-two punch from Arizona Senator John McCain and Boehner last month.

Westmoreland, unlike Bachmann, has largely resigned from the matter, but the new letter might offer enough political interference for the Georgia GOPer to reengage.

The letter’s signatories include: Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy, former Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Intelligence Lt. General William Boykin, former CIA Director James Woolsey and former DIA Director Lt. General Harry Soyster.

- James Richardson

Coming on the too big to not be news heels of the Supreme Court’s “ObamaCare” ruling, and a first-ever vote to hold the Attorney General of the United States in contempt, the House of Representatives capped off a historic week with an overwhelming vote to maintain current interest rates on student loans, among other things.

The bill, which included infrastructure measures, passed the House with an overwhelming 373-52 margin, and cleared the Senate 74-19.

Notably, Georgia Republicans came near an even split on the matter. Just 2 of Georgia’s 6 Republican Congressmen voted “yea”, with those members being Tom Price and Jack Kingston. Westmoreland, Scott, Gingrey, Graves, Woodall and Broun all veered to the right, joining 46 other Republicans in voting against the omnibus package. Meanwhile, in the Senate, both Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson cast ballots with the majority.

The vote comes in the wake of speculation that Congressman Westmoreland may potentially seek to lead the NRCC in 2013, as well as a push for Graves to chair the RSC (Republican Study Committee), not to mention mild VP speculation. Scott is President of the freshman class and, meanwhile, Price may have a looming opportunity to move to the fourth-ranking spot overall, Republican Conference chair.

-Brandon Howell