A New Era of Iowa House Leadership
Today Republicans in the Iowa House of Representatives have begun the long process of rebuilding. Today House Republicans have decided to replace House Minority Leader Christopher Rants with Kraig Paulsen. This is the first step of what is shaping up to be a long and painful process of rebuilding the Republican Party of Iowa.
Outgoing House Minority Leader Christopher Rants has presided over three straight election cycles of Republican losses. Rants has been in the House of Representatives since he first won election to the office in 1992. At one time Rants may have been an effective leader, but lately his leadership has brought some hard times to the Iowa GOP.
His replacement, Representative Kraig Paulsen, first entered into the House in 2002. When one looks at Paulsen’s voting record it quickly becomes evident that he is a strong no nonsense conservative. He has fought for the conservative ideals of smaller government, lower taxes, and personal responsibility. This summer he fought against new taxes on tobacco, he has fought for more restrictions on illegal immigrants and those that hire illegal immigrants, and he also supported the Voter Identification Act; just to name a few. Paulsen has shown that he holds the party platform in high regard. Now time will tell if he has the leadership skills to back that up.
In my humble opinion, RPI has suffered through these losses because of a lack of effective leadership. It remains to be seen if Paulsen will be able to remedy the situation. However I think that the ouster of Rants will go a long way toward showing Republicans that we RPI and our elected officials recognize that there is a problem and that they want to fix it. Never underestimate the power of change.
Posted on November 10, 2008, in Politics and tagged Christopher Rants, Kraig Paulsen, Republican Party of Iowa. Bookmark the permalink. 8 Comments.
Christopher Rants really came off as a cry baby. His vote were in the right place, but he really wasnt able to say “We are the Republican Party, and this is what we offer”.
Rants more often talked about how the democrats do this and the democrats do that.
The people of Iowa want to see action. Paulsen brings the promise of this action, we will have to wait and see how this pans out, however.
Hopefully he can generate some publicity and make some noise to educate people on what is going on in the House.
People ignore far too much their state politics.
Rants had no spine. He was a follower and not a leader. Let’s see what Paulsen has to offer.
Hopefully we will begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I heard that Wieck is being challenged by McKinley in the Senate for the leadership position.
I hope the new leadership focuses on SOLUTIONS instead of being on the attack.
hi
This is Parker i want to say some thing about this the article is about leadership it was so interesting i don’t know that much about leadership but i will say one thing leadership is not a position it is a action.
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Parker
iowa drug rehab
NOVEMBER 18–Claiming that he has been unfairly branded a
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