While we have won the House we need to keep pressure on Pelosi, Rahm, and others when it comes the the re-organization of the House and its committees.
While much of the GOP's ability to raise money was from their having a majority it also came from the committees on which these members sat. Some members of Congress have been able to easily raise millions of dollars for their re-elections just from PACs who have had business that needs their attention.
The good news is many of these members had to spend most of this money this time around just to barely squeak by and hence in order to have these funds available next time we have to start from scratch.
An example of this is Vito Fossella in Staten Island who spent (at last count) over a million dollars in both 2004 and this year and was able to raise over $650K of this from PACs including $245,500 from Finance/Insurance related companies, $63,500 from Communications/Electronic related concerns, and more than 30K from energy companies. What committees did he serve on?? Well...House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the House Committee on Financial Services.
Another one that got tons of PAC money and hence has been able to spend millions of dollars per campaign is Tom Reynolds who spent about 2.5 million dollars in 2004 and 3.5 million dollars this year with more than half of what he raised from PACs and a lot of this was from companies that he serves on the committees that review their business.
While I do understand that this is how Congress works perhaps one of the things that our new leadership needs to look at is House races where the GOP candidate won by a much smaller margin than expected and try to get committee memberships for these members that are not one that are as flush with money or at least new committees so the relationships are not as close.
We also need to have the new leadership look into these trips that are funded by companies with business before the committees and members who take these trips.