Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) woke up thoroughly depressed one late June morning this year. His best friend in Congress had lost his primary race to a MAGA Republican, leaving Joyce to think about both losing not only his wingman but also the direction of his party.
“What am I doing here?” the five-term Midwestern moderate recalled thinking. If he hadn’t already won his own primary weeks earlier, Joyce acknowledged, he might have just given up and retired.
Instead, after winning another two-year term by more than 20 percentage points last month, Joyce has thrown himself into the deep end of the House Republican Conference’s ideological swimming pool. He’s the new chairman of the Republican Governance Group, a collection of just under 50 GOP lawmakers who quietly like to see Congress function.
They often end up under siege from what he calls “the exotics” from the far-right flank, the loudest, most media-seeking Republicans who pine for former president Donald Trump’s attention on conservative media by disparaging the likes of Joyce as RINOs — Republicans in name only.
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This means Joyce has to be the lead moderate at meetings with GOP leaders, as he did on Tuesday, around a table with representatives from the most Trumpian wings of the conference who issued many demands about how to do things.
Joyce sat painstakingly through the meeting about internal party rules and tried to explain their origins and the rationale behind them, however obscure, trying to shift the...
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