Rep. Scott Rigell: Maverick GOP freshman in the eye of a political storm

“Eighteen thousand jobs are being held up by President Obama because he has a full moratorium on coastal Virginia energy,” Rigell says, referring to drilling off the coast of his district, which runs from the Maryland to North Carolina borders. “I don’t question that [Obama] desires to create jobs, but I do strongly object to and wish he would pivot off of this.”

Removing the rhetorical brass knuckles has political costs, however. Among the most conservative partisans, “If you start speaking this way, their antennas go up and they’re, like, ‘Wait, are you really conservative? Because you’re not using the term Obamacare.’ I say, look, civility is not weakness,” Rigell says. “My voting record reflects this.”

Two votes highlight the tight line Rigell is trying to walk in the current Congress. The first is his approval of the House budget championed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan – a budget Democrats lambast as slashing spending for the neediest with no corresponding hit to the wealthy or the Pentagon.

The second is his vote for a budget offered by the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), featuring more draconian spending cuts than Ryan’s plan.

How can someone espousing civility and fixing Congress vote for something so divisive? America's financial situation, Rigell says, requires it.

“I would submit as an entrepreneur that the very act of reconciling revenues and expenses is in and of itself an act of job creation,” Rigell says. He's proud that his party had "the courage to grab the third rail of politics," Rigell says, referring to the Ryan budget’s bid to reform entitlement programs like Medicare. It irks him that Democrats opted to use Medicare as an election issue rather than trying to shore up its long-term finances.

He voted against a bipartisan debt-reduction plan, based on the recommendations of president’s debt commission, because it lacked entitlement reform.

But there’s yet another layer to the budget story. Rigell is the only member of Congress to have taken billionaire business magnate Warren Buffett up on his offer to match any donation to reduce the federal debt (He gave 15 percent of his salary in both 2011 and 2012 to the cause.)

When the legendary investor invited Rigell to his Omaha, Neb., offices for a talk in January, the two agreed that the federal government could balance its finances at spending and revenues of about 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Mr. Buffett was a bit higher; Rigell, a little lower, but “as a businessman, I thought, wait a minute, we’ve got common ground there,” Rigell says.

The problem is that the government currently collects under 17 percent of GDP in taxes, he says. And getting from there to 20 percent puts Rigell under the wheels of another big man in the politics of taxing and spending: Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist.

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