House VA chairman denies retaliation over Speaker vote

The head of the House Veterans Affairs Committee insisted Wednesday that a member of his panel was not stripped of a subcommittee chairmanship for voting against Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) for Speaker
 
“I make the appointments, and that appointment was never made,” Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) told reporters following a meeting of GOP House members.
 
{mosads}Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) on Tuesday told reporters that he had expected to lead a VA subpanel, but learned he was not going to get a gavel shortly after he tweeted that he’d be opposing Boehner.
 
He wouldn’t say which subcommittee chairmanship he’d been promised or who called to inform him that he would no longer get the promotion.
 
When pressed if he had told Huelskamp he would head a subpanel, Miller replied: “No, no.”
 
He called reports of the retaliation “false,” adding “it would be nice if people, before the print stories, would ask me.”
 
Miller stood by Boehner’s decision to remove GOP Reps. Richard Nugent (Fla.) and Randy Weber (Texas), another Republican who ran for Speaker, from the influential Rules Committee.
 
“It’s the Speaker’s decision. That is 100 percent the Speaker’s committee,” he said. “The Speaker can put you on, he can take you off, he can put you back on.”
 
Miller said that Boehner told members during the conference that he was going to talk with the pair.
 
He described the caucus-wide conference that took place a day after the tense vote as a “discussion of unity” and that members had an “opportunity to vent frustrations, talk about successes and where we’re going from here.”