Tenure
Following the 2006 election cycle, the members of the House Republican Conference elected Cole to the post of NRCC chairman, placing him in charge of national efforts to assist Republican candidates for Congress.
Cole has established a conservative voting record in the House. He has consistently voted anti-abortion and for gun rights. He holds pro-business views and supports free trade, the military, and veterans. Another one of his priorities is educating other members of Congress on American Indian issues. He favors loosening immigration restrictions and imposing stricter limits on campaign funds. In 2012, he sponsored H.R. 5912, which would prohibit public funds from being used for political party conventions. This legislation passed the House in September, but died in the Senate. During his tenure, Cole has been a leading voice for strengthening protections for Native American women under the Violence Against Women Act.
In June 2013, after another failure of the United States farm bill in Congress, Cole called the failure inexcusable. His district in Oklahoma includes some of the state's farming communities, and if the Farm Bill passed, it would have saved $40 billion over a ten-year period.
As chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, Cole was responsible for introducing the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2015 (H.R. 4487; 113th Congress). The bill would appropriate $3.3 billion to the legislative branch for FY 2015, about the same amount it received in FY 2014. According to Cole, the bill meets its goals "in both an effective and efficient manner, and has done so in a genuinely bipartisan, inclusive and deliberative fashion."
In 2013, Cole introduced the Home School Equity Act for Tax Relief. The bill would allow some homeschool parents to take tax credits for purchasing classroom materials.
Cole expressed his intention in 2018 to push his Tribal Labor Sovereignty Act into the spending bill as an omnibus. The bill would "make clear that the National Labor Relations Board has no jurisdiction over businesses owned and operated by an Indian tribe and located on tribal land."
On April 10, 2024, Cole was elected chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
The Center for Effective Lawmaking at Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia ranked him as the third-most effective House Republican in the 119th Congress (2023–25).
