While the first item on the state republican agenda is to limit access to the polls for Wisconsinites, the national republicans do not have it so easy. the “tea party” crowd has let it be known they want a ban on all earmarks. The republicans have long talked of an earmark ban, it was even one of John McCains main issues in his run for president.
Now that they have control again, they were going to try and skip over the issue so they could continue to use it. Senator Jim Inhofe was even on record as saying \"earmarks are great\"! While making it an election issue, they also understand it is what makes incumbents so hard to beat. Bringing in hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars to their state and district is what gives them job security.
Even Rand Paul who made the ban on earmakrs the core of his campaign, immediately switched his position to to being for earmarks upone being elected. Now he is against them again(I think). He was against them before he was for them before he was against them before he was(you get the point). He was just following the lead of the senior Senator from Kentucky Mitch McConnell. McConnell was for them before he was against the, before he was for them(trying to pin down a republican position is very confusing).
OK back to solid ground, earmarks are like crack to politicians, so I can not see them giving them up. Mitch McConnell himself has received almost a billion dollars in earmarks for Kentucky. Well known earmark enemies, have also been feeding off the earmark trough, from occasional maverick John McCain to the faux conservative Paul Ryan.
We will see who gives in first, the “tea party” nationalists, or the entrenched Washington insider party members.
I can see how an anti-pork crusade is superficially appealing, but it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how government and politics work. Budgetwise, eliminating them won’t solve a damn thing. And policywise, as Madison and Hamilton understood, patronage is far more palatable than the alternatives.
And little do Tom Coburn’s teabagger fans realize, if not for pork Oklahoma would be 106 times more unbearable than it already is.