Jewish Republicans gird for a fight

Rise of Paul, loss of Cantor worry pro-Israel donors.

POLITICO

The Republican Jewish Coalition — facing the loss of its leading champion and tensions within the GOP — is planning an aggressive push in 2015 to enforce the hawkish pro-Israel consensus it helped build within the party over the past two decades.

The RJC will gather Tuesday evening for a reception at a Washington steakhouse where some of the party’s most generous Jewish donors — including Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson — will celebrate the incoming Senate majority and fete their most influential allies. Expected attendees include Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, John McCain of Arizona and Rob Portman of Ohio, as well as former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The reception, to be held at the Capital Grille, also will commemorate the swearing-in of freshman Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, who carries the heavy burden of replacing the powerful former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as the only Republican Jew in Congress.

The convening of the 114th Congress — and the unofficial start of the 2016 presidential race — comes as the GOP grapples with a host of issues causing anxiety among the small, but influential, ranks of Jewish Republicans, at a time when they suddenly lack a representative in their party’s congressional leadership. In addition to concerns about the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, Republicans face a persistent strain of non-interventionism within their own party — personified by prospective 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Thus, Jewish Republican operatives and donors say they are redoubling their efforts to reinforce with party leadership the importance of maintaining the unified, unyielding policy of support for Israel that they built with an unlikely coalition of national-security hawks and evangelical Christians.

The RJC “has a well-developed strategy which was executed during former Majority Leader Cantor’s tenure and will continue with the new leadership team in the House and new Senate majority, thus ensuring strong, virtually unanimous Republican support for Israel at this dangerous time,” asserted Florida mall developer Mel Sembler, who contributes to the RJC and sits on its board.

The group also is in talks with multiple prospective 2016 presidential candidates about arranging trips to Israel for them — much as it did for Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas, both of whom are preparing for possible presidential bids.

And the group is planning to invite all the party’s top-tier presidential candidates to a forum late this year or in early 2016 at which they’ll be pressed on their foreign policy stances.

“Every candidate is going to want to appear before the RJC and to win support among different people within the RJC because they understand the depth of contributions that individuals in the RJC can and will make,” said former George W. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who is on the group’s board of directors but is not attending Tuesday’s reception. He predicted the RJC’s membership “will have feet in all the different camps, and then, once we know who the nominee is, we’ll unify like we always do and it will be a powerful unity. Now, one exception to that would be Rand Paul.”

While Paul did, in fact, appear before the RJC board in 2013 to answer questions, a representative did not respond to an email asking if he planned to attend the Capital Grille reception.

Several top Republican Jewish donors — including Sembler — are lining up behind Jeb Bush’s potential presidential campaign, as is Charlie Spies, a top GOP election lawyer who helped Mitt Romney’s super PAC raise millions from Jewish donors. Though Bush, a former Florida governor, has little foreign policy experience in his own right, he’s expressed support for a muscular interventionism that seems to echo that of his brother, former President George W. Bush.

“It’s very important that whoever emerges to be the Republican Party nominee for 2016 is someone who recognizes the consequences of America being weak and inconsistent with our foreign policy,” said Zeldin, a former state senator and Iraq War veteran. He asserted that concerns about President Barack Obama’s sometimes frosty relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had created “a growing opportunity to expand our reach to voters who have voted Democrat in the past.”

American Jews’ stances on litmus test issues like economic inequality, abortion rights, gay marriage and immigration tend to align more closely with those of the Democratic Party, which has had something of a stranglehold on the Jewish vote for decades. But Republicans have made gains in recent elections, as they’ve emphasized a more hawkish approach to supporting Israel’s defense and security. In 2014, they captured 33 percent of Jewish votes, up from 12 percent in 2006, according to an analysis of exit polls by the Pew Research Center.

Any Republican inroads with Jews could be threatened by perceived erosion of the party’s consensus on Israel, asserted Benjamin Ginsberg, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University who has written about the role of Jews in American politics. But he pointed to Paul’s moves late last year toward a more engaged foreign policy — including a push to authorize military force against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — asserting they should be seen as a “barometer of where the Republican Party is. The non-interventionist rhetoric in the Republican Party peaked in 2012 and 2013, and now is more likely to be found among progressive Democrats.”

Republicans should be more worried about losing Jewish support over the lingering controversy about House Majority Whip Steve Scalise’s 2002 speech to a white supremacist group than about creeping isolationism, asserted Ginsberg. “There is this lingering concern among Jews and among African-Americans that southern Republicanism is the product of racism,” he said.

Efforts to appeal to Jews may seem disproportionate to the size of the Jewish population, which constitutes about 2 percent of the American electorate (albeit a greater percentage in key swing states including Florida and Ohio). But their influence transcends their numbers, Ginsberg said. “Jews are important in the electoral process both because of activism and because of money,” he said. “In fundraising and in bundling they have influence beyond their numbers and even beyond their money.”

Adelson, in particular, was the top disclosed donor of 2012, spending upwards of $100 million boosting various Republicans. He was the third biggest donor of 2014, at $13.2 million. He has been assiduously courted by most of the GOP’s leading would-be presidential candidates. Sources close to the mogul, whose top issue is Israel’s defense, say he’s likely to support a candidate from the ranks of the nation’s governors. Jeb Bush, along with Christie and Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, all flew out to Las Vegas in March to meet privately with Adelson and speak to the RJC’s annual spring meeting, which was held at Adelson’s Venetian casino and resort hotel.

Adelson is among the biggest donors to the RJC, which in 2014 assisted Zeldin, along with the successful GOP Senate campaigns of Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Mike Rounds of South Dakota. All are expected to attend Tuesday’s reception at Capital Grille.

Zeldin said he was looking forward to the reception “to say thank you to the many people who were there who helped assist our effort,” presumably including Fleischer and the group’s executive director, Matt Brooks. The pair traveled to Zeldin’s Long Island district to do an outreach event in the campaign’s closing days, and while Fleischer praised him as a “great guy,” he said it would be unwise for him to try to fill Cantor’s shoes.

“He needs to take care of home first and not seek a national profile,” said Fleischer.

Yet House Republican leaders seem intent on highlighting Zeldin’s Judaism. He is slated to sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee and co-chair the House Republican Israel Caucus. And while he deflected a question about whether he planned to vouch for the party’s candidates with Jewish audiences — explaining “my immediate focus is on doing everything I can to represent the constituents who I was just elected to represent” — he said he won’t hesitate to take a leadership role on issues related to Israel or American Jews more broadly.

“Through those positions and just generally serving as a member of the House, there will be many times where I will feel compelled to speak out on how our nation approaches its relationship with its strongest ally,” he said. “Fortunately, the issues that come with the turf of being the only Jewish Republican in Congress also happen to be exactly where I stand on all these issues. So I see an opportunity to have a platform to fight for causes I deeply believe in, and that by no means would I ever consider a burden,” he said, adding that he planned “to pick up on” Cantor’s work with Jewish groups “wherever they left off.”

Cantor, who did not respond to an email seeking comment, was first elected in 2000 to represent a Richmond, Virginia-based district and quickly became a star among Jewish Republican donors and activists, who harbored high hopes that he would become the first Jewish speaker of the House — or even, some privately hoped, president. As recently as January 2014, he was being touted as Speaker John Boehner’s “heir apparent.” His upset loss to a virtually unknown college professor in a June Republican primary shocked the political establishment and sent Jewish Republicans reeling, with Brooks telling POLITICO at the time that it “one of those incredible, evil twists of fate that just changed the potential course of history.”

Days after losing his own congressional primary in the upset of the year, Cantor traveled to Quiogue, New York, to make good on a promise to headline a fundraiser for Zeldin.

Zeldin does not come close to replacing Cantor, asserted Greg Rosenbaum, chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

“When Eric Cantor walked into the AIPAC policy conference, he was swarmed by Jewish voters, whether they were Republicans or Democrats, because he represented a very high level of accomplishment,” said Rosenbaum. “I don’t think it will be the same for Congressman Zeldin. He’s not going to have the star power that Cantor had, and that could hurt Republicans a little.”

In contrast, Rosenbaum pointed out, there are roughly 30 Jewish Democrats in Congress, including some in high-ranking congressional and party positions. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Senate Democrat, chaired the Rules Committee, while Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz chairs the Democratic National Committee. Plus, the party’s leading 2016 prospect, Hillary Clinton, is regarded as a stalwart supporter of Israel, Rosenbaum pointed out.

Still, he acknowledged the RJC has become a force because of its gaudy budget (it raised $10 million in 2012, compared to $1 million for the NJDC, which is not holding a welcome event for the new Congress) and effective messaging on Israel. Democrats need “to be vigilant” in combating the narrative that the GOP is stronger on Israel, Rosenbaum said. “We need to keep reminding Jewish voters that Israel requires bipartisan support and it is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. And we think that, once we neutralize that, we can win Jewish voters overall by showing that on the bulk of the issues, Democrats comport more closely with Jewish values.”