Photo: abc30.com

Photo: abc30.com

By rank, U.S. Reps. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., and Leonard Lance, R-N.J., are among the lowliest members of the House Financial Services Committee, which this morning holds an AIG-related hearing. Yet some politically astute casting Tuesday elevated the freshmen to point men in the House Republicans’ response to the AIG bonus scandal. The pair are among the rarest of species in Congress: newly elected Republicans from districts that favored Barack Obama for president.

Of the 34 Republicans House members — three freshmen and the rest veterans — from districts in which Obama beat Sen. John McCain last November, Paulsen is one of only seven who received a lower percentage of district votes (48 percent) than did Obama in his race (52 percent). (Lance, for example, polled evenly with Obama at 50 percent.)

But it happens that both Paulsen and Lance serve on the House finance committee, where they hold down the bottom of the seniority list. But perhaps no other Republicans in Congress could make better electoral use of some high-profile surfing on what their committee colleague Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., today called the nation’s “tidal wave of rage” over AIG.

At House GOP leaders’ direction, Paulsen’s and Lance’s will be the leading names on a bill that demands Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recover the AIG bonuses — a “rehash of what President Obama is already doing to address the issue,” in ThinkProgress’ estimation.

Indeed, Paulsen professed to be all about working with Obama in comments last month after the president spoke before Congress: “The President issued a bipartisan call for cooperation,” Paulsen said, “and I stand ready to work with him on solutions to solve the big problems facing our Country.”

But with the country in an uproar, House Minority Leader Rep.  Boehner said:

I applaud the legislation unveiled today by Reps. Erik Paulsen, Leonard Lance, and all of our House Republican freshmen to increase accountability in bailout funds and to recover the AIG executive bonuses. … It is time for the Administration to provide Congress and American taxpayers an exit strategy that will get the federal government out of the private sector and out of the bailout business.

Paulsen followed suit at the press conference he and Lance held Tuesday: ”This is clearly another example of not only how Congress is broken, but how the administration has dropped the ball.“