W atching Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ramrod through Congress this week the “Honest Leadership and Open Government” reform bill they negotiated in secret makes it difficult to believe the GOP will regain a majority in Congress anytime soon.
This is not because Reid and Pelosi are particularly gifted operators. They got lucky last November by being the only alternative game in town as GOPers blinded by a dozen years in power got their just desserts from voters fed up with tax-paid corruption and con games.
Now, the Democrats’ luck continues in having for their Loyal Opposition the surviving members of a gang with too many career hacks who long ago made pork and political hypocrisy their stock in trade.
Pity the few House GOPers like Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Rep. John Campbell of California and Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas who have courageously fought a lonely fight to expose or kill earmarks that allow politicians to hand out tax dollars to whomever they please, anonymously and without accountability for the results. Over and over since January, this trio has offered amendments on the House floor to strike wasteful earmarks from legislation. They’ve lost every vote by huge margins. A quick look at The Examiner Newspapers/Porkbusters.org Earmark Reform Index shows why: Two-thirds of their House GOP colleagues voted with them less than half the time.
House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio talks a good case for more openness and transparency in government, but what’s he been doing to corral more support for Flake, Campbell and Hensarling among the GOP ranks he is supposedly leading?
After hearing Boehner’s answer to a question I asked him earlier this week during a bloggers luncheon at The Heritage Foundation, I don’t expect much of anything but talk from House GOPers.
Boehner excoriated Democrats and extolled the virtues of transparency and open government, but then I asked him whether he would support extending coverage of the Freedom of Information Act to Congress.
“Well, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know why it doesn’t apply to Congress,” he responded. Does Boehner truly not know that Congress exempted itself from the FOIA?
Then there’s Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Roll Call last month reported that McConnell and Deputy Minority Leader Trent “Railroad to Nowhere” Lott of Mississippi had warned Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina that they were tired of his “repeated efforts to hijack the Senate floor and the public spotlight.”
DeMint, along with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and a hardy few of their Senate colleagues have since January effectively used aggressive floor and media tactics to keep the earmark and ethics reform issues in the public eye.
A clear majority of Americans support DeMint and Coburn on the corruption issues, so why wouldn’t McConnell and Lott thank them for grabbing the Senate floor and public attention?
Did I hear somebody suggest it might be because when legislative push comes to shove, McConnell and Lott, like most of their Senate GOP colleagues, love earmarks just as much as Democrats?
Columnist Robert Novak spoke in person atthe same Heritage luncheon where I quizzed Boehner, who was present via a conference hookup. After Boehner signed off, the “Prince of Darkness” author talked of the lessons he’s learned in 50 years of covering state and federal legislators.
“Before I came here to cover Congress, I covered the Nebraska legislature, which is unicameral by the way, and then the Indiana legislature. The main difference between the two was Indiana was corrupt. But it’s the same here, nothing much changes,” Novak said.
Asked why conservatives should stay with the Republicans, Novak captured the dilemma precisely, asking, “Where you gonna go, over there with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi?”
And that’s exactly the point — America needs a real two-party system because neither wing of the Government Party works for anybody but itself.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog.
