Rep. Mike Pence, a 46-year-old former radio talk show host from eastern Indiana serving his third term in Congress, is currently chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC). He has tried hard to cooperate with the regular House Republican leadership rather than confront it. So, he could not have been happy last Tuesday when he found himself in a closed-door autodafe, with GOP leaders as the inquisitors and Pence as the heretic. Pence and the RSC's heresy was to propose that massive federal outlays resulting from Hurricane Katrina be offset by reduced spending elsewhere. Specifically, they requested offsets to...