George Rector Nethercutt Jr. (October 7, 1944 – June 14, 2024) was an American lawyer, author, and politician.

Nethercutt served five terms and left the House in 2004, when he mounted an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate.

[2] The district had been growing more conservative since the early 1980s, but Foley had held on mainly by running up his totals in Democratic-leaning Spokane.

[5] In the 1996 elections, the Democrats mounted a serious bid to regain the seat, but Nethercutt won by an unexpectedly large 12-point margin even as Bill Clinton narrowly carried the district.

In 2000, when his self-imposed three-term limit would have kicked in, Nethercutt changed his mind and announced his intention to run again, infuriating term-limits supporters.

[2] Term limits again became an issue in the campaign, as Democrats quickly seized on Nethercutt's broken term-limits pledge.

[citation needed] Nethercutt was a heavy underdog, and his campaign never gained much traction.

[citation needed] Nethercutt left the House of Representatives at the end of his term in January 2005, but said that he would probably not completely retire from politics.

In 2005, he and two other political veterans (former Interior Department deputy secretary J. Steven Griles and former White House national energy policy director Andrew Lundquist) formed the political lobbying firm Lundquist, Nethercutt & Griles, LLC.

[7] Griles resigned in 2007, after he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with the Abramoff scandal, the top Bush administration official to do so.

The Nethercutt Fellowship involves, among other things, a trip to Washington, D.C. where fellows have the opportunity to see the inner-workings of the United States government.