Collapse of the omnibus spending bill: rise of the 'tea party Congress'?
Some see ideals of tea party movement at play in Senate, after a huge spending bill loaded with earmarks is scuttled after GOP lawmakers thought twice about it.
By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer
posted December 17, 2010 at 5:34 pm EST
Atlanta
On the anniversary of the actual Boston tea party some 237 years ago – when pesky colonists dressed up as Indians and threw the King's tea into Boston Harbor – the modern invocation of that revolutionary spirit tossed another expensive package overboard Thursday: a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill.
After leading a Republican charge into the House in the Nov. 2 midterm elections, the anti-debt, anti-federalist tea party movement notched its first major legislative victory Thursday by
standing up to big-spending Democrats and Republicans and forcing Republican leadership to revoke its support of a bill laden with $8.3 billion worth of legislative earmarks – lawmakers' pet projects known as pork-barrel spending.
Among other spending priorities, the bill included a total of $1 billion to kickstart the first phase of the federal health-care reform law passed in April, meaning that its defeat likely lays the groundwork for Republicans to follow through on their promise to gut funding for the landmark legislation – per the tea party's wishes, by the way...
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"The Republicans recognized the lesson from the election: that the grass roots, the tea party, does not want unnecessary federal spending, and they realized that they ignore that sentiment at their own peril," adds Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The Democrats, meanwhile, "miscalculated the internal pressure that fiscal conservatives are putting on Republicans – they didn't think that some of these Republicans ... would be willing to walk away from these earmarks," she says.
Earlier this week, Reid apparently believed he had locked in nine key Republican votes that would have ensured passage of a bipartisan spending package before the government officially runs out of money on Saturday.
But grassroots concern about the debt-inducing $858 billion tax-cut extension (which passed with bipartisan support Thursday)
prompted Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who had himself inserted 48 earmarks into the bill, to change his tune as a vote on the spending bill approached.
Spurred on by Republican Sens. McCain, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma – as well as by vows of Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and John Cornyn of Texas to drop their earmark requests – Senator McConnell, in a flurry of 11th-hour phone calls, pulled the nine Republican votes out of Reid's hand, dooming the bill...
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