With Republican scandals quickly emerging in the media these days, Roll Call's Ben Pershing reports that House GOPers are desperately trying to get their voices out to their key supporters.

With their post-recess agenda scrambled and fissures exposed within their own conference, House Republican leaders will seek to shore up their conservative base this week with a multi-pronged message blitz.

Hoping to reverse their defensive stance of recent weeks, GOP leaders and key committee chairmen will make a series of appearances on talk radio, op-ed pages and in the blogosphere designed to reassure voters that they are staying true to their principles in a time of crisis.

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[The debate over how to pay for reconstruction funding] has lent a powerful megaphone to the conservative Republican Study Committee, which has agitated for years in favor of reducing federal spending without receiving even a fraction of the attention it got last week.

That heavy dose of publicity has caused friction between the conservative group and the GOP leadership. After the RSC held a heavily publicized press conference Wednesday to tout a variety of potential spending offsets to pay for Katrina, the communications directors for the top four Republican leaders and a handful of key committees called in several RSC press aides to excoriate them.

Sources on both sides of the divide described the meeting as extremely heated.

"While completely agreeing with the need to find offsets, we felt that they weren't [giving the party] enough credit for reducing spending and we were afraid that they were setting up Republicans to look like we were not stewards of fiscal responsibility," said a leadership aide.

The leadership staffers also expressed worries that the entire party would be accused of endorsing all of the RSC's proposals, which included delaying the implementation of the Medicare prescription drug bill and other controversial suggestions.

The difficulty for House Republicans at this juncture is that they must pursue two completely opposite media strategies at the same time.

Republicans are fearful of losing the base by overspending and creating a massive deficit, so they must turn to talk radio and the blogs. At the same time, however, the party leadership is cognizant of the fact that if they let all Americans know of their desire to make massive spending cuts -- most notably to student loans, Medicaid and Medicare -- they run the risk of alienating a massive portion of the electorate.

The stakes could not be higher for the Republicans either, as President Bush's approval ratings dip to an all-time low just at the beginning of the campaign season. If the GOP is unable to balance these two message strategies, the next 14 could prove to be very difficult.

[Update 11:30 AM Pacific]: Apparently, the threatened cuts aren't just fodder for the base. CQ Today's Midday Update (free email service) has the story.

Congressional leaders this week plan to ask their committee chairmen to “dig deeper” to find new spending cuts that could be used to defray some of the costs of recovery from Hurricane Katrina, according to a top Senate GOP aide.

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Speaking at an industry conference, G. William Hoagland, senior budget adviser for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said “nobody knows” the final cost of the hurricanes.

But he said GOP leaders will send a letter this week asking committees to find additional savings through the budget reconciliation process above the $35 billion already targeted. A new target will not be provided, however, he said.

Several committees, especially in the Senate, already are finding it next to impossible to meet their existing spending-cut targets. How can they go further? “Gonna be tough,” Hoagland said. “Gonna be tough.”