Immaturity is what they stand for, dude.
Nah, you’re thinking of Occupy Wall Street.
No matter what happens with Christie, nothing will happen with the GOP because they aren’t interested in standing for anything else except hypocrisy. They know they can’t win by trying to be the adults in the room, so the only way they have a chance is to double down on the crazy. That is a short term solution that won’t serve them well in the long run, and the long run’s already creeping up on them in this year’s midterms. These are the same people who continues to hold a 150 year grudge over losing the Civil War because they liked slavery, I don’t see them admitting wrongness anytime soon
What specific legislation do you have in mind? Because I have been struck by the utter absence of constructive proposals from those rousers of rabble. The Watergate babies had a far better track record.
For starters, earmark reform. Makes it harder to reward your campaign contributors.
Earmarks are way too popular, in both parties, to ever get rid of. People only oppose other people’s earmarks, not their own.
No one wants to get rid of earmarks. We just needed to reform the process to reduce logrolling and paying back campaign contributors. If earmarks are transparent, that’s fine.
Not sure what transparency you want, there. Everyone can see what earmarks are in a bill, and everyone who’s curious knows who put them there (mostly because the people who did it will brag about it).
For public purpose earmarks, yes. For rewards to campaign contributors, not usually. And a lot of earmarks weren’t even legally binding, they were inserted after the bill was passed in Joint Committee. But a President isn’t about to get into deciding which to regard as legal and which to ignore, you only make enemies that way. So Congress had to police itself.
This isn’t really a partisan issue. Claire McCaskill and Russ Feingold were big supporters of earmark reform. And no one abused the process more than the Delay Congress. But for some reason moderate Republicans have never been on board. I think that’s because moderate Republicans are more dependent on K Street funding than conservatives.
Setting aside the extinction of moderate Republicans in the US Congress…
The rant that kicked off the Tea Party was in 2009 IIRC. The two Tea Party Congresses were in 2008-2010. Earmarks were reformed in the 110th Congress (January 3, 2007, and January 3, 2009). That reform pre-dated the Tea Party. Here’s what the reform did (wiki): The process of earmarking has been substantially reformed since the beginning of the 110th United States Congress.** Members of Congress must post all their requests on their websites** and they must sign a certification letter (then put online) indicating that neither they nor their spouse has financial interest in the earmark request.[14] And many members have instituted an applications process that their constituents must undergo for earmark requests.[15] Emphasis added.
So to review, earmarks became transparent before the Tea Party phrase was ever uttered on Fox. While there have been other reforms proposed since then, they are small-ball. I do not know whether the Tea Party has played a big role in such proposals: that should not be assumed.
I’ll note that earmarks do not directly increase federal spending: they redirect it. Logrolling certainly has its virtues, as it permits the enforcement of party discipline when individual members are inclined to demagogue. See: artificial debt crisis of 2013 et al. That said, earmark reform is a Good Government proposal, though its merits are strongly dependent upon the particulars IMO. It’s just that it has little to do with the Tea Party.
So I remain surprised by the utter absence of constructive proposals from the Tea Party.
Earmarks do indirectly increase federal spending, because they buy votes for more spending. And the transparency did happen before the Tea PArty, but the earmark “ban” happened in the wake of the 2010 election and was never meant by party leadership to be permanent. But the Tea Party has forced it to continue up till now. Which has caused the defeat of some bills that in the past might have passed, like the Toomey-Manchin gun control bill.
Personally, I don’t think bribery to get politicians to vote for bills they would otherwise not vote for is healthy for our democracy.
So the most relevant reforms happened in 2007, before the Santelli rant of Feb 2009. Are you backing away from your position that if earmarks are transparent, that’s fine? Are you doing so because you discovered that this reform was a pre- Tea Party development?
In general logrolling isn’t a bad thing: it’s a method of political compromise. If one state has one thing that it cares a lot about and another state has another thing that it cares a lot about, I don’t see why moving around about 1.1% of governmental spending (the total affected in 2006, the year of peak-earmark) is a bad thing.
I’m all for transparency though and believe that earmarks nonetheless deserved to be scaled back in 2006.
Furthermore:
Cite? I haven’t been able to find anything on the politics behind Boehner’s extension of the ban. ISTM that this is a branding issue more than anything else.