Pence: GOP Will Keep Blocking Obama's Agenda

At the Values Voter Summit, Rep. Mike Pence praised the GOP caucus for opposing Obama's agenda, but offered few hints about what the GOP would do in power.

Rep. Mike Pence knows how to get the crowd in the Values Voter Summit room standing on their feet. “America Stands With Israel” gets a standing ovation. “Repeal Obamacare” gets a larger ovation. In case you had any doubts that this was a social values summit, the largest applause (and with dog whistles) came when Pence called for the end to federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Pence also gets credit for having a speech with a bit of humor in it, noting that MSNBC predicts that the GOP will win two House seats while Fox News predicts that they will win all 435.

The early reviews from twitter suggest that Mitt Romney did not connect with the audience in his speech, and part of it has to be because his speech followed Mike Pence. Pence’s rhetoric was right on the mark for the audience of this conference: talk about Christine O’Donnell as if she can be the next senator from Delaware, a demand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be tried in Guantánamo Bay, and calls for federal funding for abortion to be cut.

Pence made a few remarks in the direction of the Republican leadership and its establishment. He praised the current unified block of the Republican caucus, and its opposition to many of the major House bills.

With Boehner already saying that a Republican Congress will not push for a government shutdown, it will be interesting to see how voters and activists from conferences such as the Values Voter Summit start reacting once their leaders start acting in a way that seems less hard-line then the speeches they are hearing.

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