With all eyes on the new Congress and a deflated Obama administration, we’ve listed a select group of elected officials who either rode or survived the wave in November. We will be watching to see if their votes in 2011 match their campaign rhetoric from last year. Heath Shuler (D-NC) Shuler is one of the few blue dogs who survived reelection.  He ran away from Pelosi during his campaign and challenged her for the minority leader position. “We have to be more of a centrist caucus,” he told the Associated Press. “We can’t just have a platform that’s to the left.” Shuler voted against the health care reform bill, saying “This bill fails to address the way that we provide health care in this country; it merely adds more people to a broken, inefficient, and wasteful system.” Shuler has yet to sign onto any pledge for its repeal. Hal Rogers (R-KY) Called the “Prince of Pork,” Rogers will now chair the House Appropriations Committee. In the past two years, Rogers requested $246 million in earmarks, including money for the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Africa (his daughter works for the nonprofit organization). Rogers has now pledged “No more earmarks. I’ll be the enforcer of the moratorium.” President Barack Obama Although Obama was not up for reelection last November, he conceded his party took a “shellacking.” A large part of the backlash against Washington was out of control spending. During a presidential debate in 2008, Obama said “We need earmark reform. And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.” The very first spending bill Obama signed contained 9,000 earmarks. More than 9,400 earmarks totaling $15.9 billion were included in annual appropriation bills for fiscal year 2010. Lisa Murkowski (R-AL) Winner of a successful write-in campaign after being defeated in the Republican primary by Tea Party favorite Joe Miller, Murkowski told the AP that she would not be a “reliable vote” for the Obama administration. Murkowski voted for four of Obama’s major items in the lame duck Congress: cloture for the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors), repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Bush tax cut compromise and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). John Boehner (R-OH) The new Speaker of the House has promised to post every bill online for at least three days before a floor vote, televise House Rules Committee sessions and target spending cut measures each week. Boehner acknowledged a less-than-stellar record under a Republican watch: “I think Republicans learned their lesson. They understood that we were spending too much, government was growing too much.” — Brent Regan is the inventor and developer of  “VoxVerus,”  http://voxv erus.com/, a social networking system designed to promote communication between voters and elected officials.