Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is responding sternly to Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), who blamed Southerners for dragging the Republican Party's fortunes down.

"I'm on the side of conservatives getting back to core conservative values," Vitter told the Washington Times. "There are a lot of us from the South who hold those value, which I think the party is supposed to be about. We strayed from them in the past few years, and that's why we performed so badly in the national elections."