Jubilant revelers at President Andrew Jackson’s first inauguration in 1828 broke White House china, stood with muddy boots on furniture, and crowded so densely in the executive mansion that organizers had to offer free liquor on the lawn to get them out of the building. Today’s Tea Partiers aren’t quite so rustic, but they do seem determined to break political dishes here in the nation’s capital. Utah’s Republican Senator-elect Mike Lee — the first of the Tea Party insurgents to upset incumbent Sen. Robert Bennett ?– dropped one last week by asking for a recorded vote on the earmark moratorium being considered in today’s Senate Republican Caucus luncheon.
Votes within the two major parties’ congressional caucuses are traditionally by secret ballot when choosing their respective legislative leaders. The earmarks moratorium proposed by Sen. Jim DeMint, Sen. Tom Coburn and a host of other conservatives, however, is a leadership issue of a different kind. It’s not about an individual senator but rather the credibility of the GOP caucus. As Lee said, the earmarks moratorium “is a critical policy question, not a leadership election, and it is important that people know how their senators vote.”
Recommended Stories
The significance of the earmarks moratorium goes even beyond critical policy issues: It is the threshold question for determining who in Washington understands that business-as-usual does not work anymore — and who doesn’t. Ever since the Bridge to Nowhere entered the national political lexicon, no other issue has so crystallized public disgust with Washington spending excesses as have earmarks. Last month, Rasmussen Reports found that 60 percent of its respondents in a national survey preferred a congressional candidate who promised to cut federal spending to one who promised to “bring home the bacon” via earmarks.
Now along comes Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma — urged on by such old school pork barrel stalwarts as Trent Lott and Robert Livingston — touting a straw-man argument that earmarks must be protected to save the Constitution from President Obama and the federal bureaucracy. But nobody disputes that Congress controls spending and thus can earmark appropriations as it wishes. The issue posed by the proposed earmark moratorium is whether it should use its authority for earmarks. This is not a new issue — earmarks circa 2010 is the same debate that began with adoption of the Constitution concerning “internal improvements.” The same voters who restored the GOP majority in the House and elected six aggressively conservative new Republican senators know that spending won’t be cut on the big issues if Congress won’t control itself on the “little” spending issues like earmarking. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell deserves kudos for seeing the light on this issue Monday. Inhofe and any other recalcitrant members of the Senate GOP would be wise to follow his lead today.
