I must admit, I take a certain delight in watching the Tea Party contingent realize that even they can’t quite stand 100 percent behind their extremist anti-government rhetoric.
Here is Michele Bachmann, backtracking in Politico on the great Republican idea of banning all earmarks: “But we have to address the issue of how are we going to fund transportation projects across the country?” Bachmann, it turns out, wants to make sure that the federal government pays for the Stillwater Bridge, which connects her Minnesota district to Wisconsin over the St. Croix River. Such is the theme of the entire Politico story: Even hard-core Republicans decide they want “member-directed spending” after all, and they are now figuring out how to get around their bold decision to kill earmarks.
The earmark ban was always more political theater than anything else. As I’ve written for Miller-McCune, earmarks only account for about two percent of all discretionary spending, and the money would wind up being spent anyway by normal funding mechanisms, just without the local intelligence of needs that Representatives tend to bring.
But the fun thing to watch now is how, despite all the impassioned railing against wasteful government spending, the Tea Partiers are realizing that their constituents actually like federal involvement in the local economy. And that in order to get re-elected, they are actually going to have to make sure that federal money keeps flowing in.
This should hardly come as a surprise. As I recently noted here at ProgressiveFix, polling shows that while Republican voters bash government in the abstract, they tend to approve of actual government programs in the specific, including spending on transportation. Political scientists have labeled this the symbolic conservatism/operational liberalism divide, since many voters like to say that they are conservative, but when it comes down to actual programs, they actually want government to do stuff.
Presumably, this will not be the last time that the Tea Party brigands find themselves caught up in the paradox of realizing the voting public is not so extreme is the cathartic Washington-bashing of campaign season made them out to be. I look forward to watching the twists and turns.
