The War On Earmarks

One of the most interesting battles that will be fought between the establishment and Tea Party is over earmarks. Earmarks, aka "pork", aka "wasteful spending", aka "wasteful spending when a project is in someone elses district...if its in my district I love it and we are just getting our 'fair share'", only consume 1% of the US budget, yet to Tea Partiers, earmarks are the Greatest Threat To Our Liberty Ever (until the next greatest threat to our liberty ever arises).

Well, this battle has been brewing for some time now. The two main opponents are the anti-earmark and Tea Party favorite Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) and the pro-earmark, but equally batshit crazy Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). It seems that Sen. Inhofe loves his pork so much that he wrote a manifesto "The Secret About Earmarks" and distributed it to one of the main Tea Party groups for its approval. Can you guess what happened next?

Tea party activists are stepping up their involvement in an internal Senate GOP battle over whether to ban earmarks — and Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe is pushing back aggressively.

Inhofe has engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort aimed at convincing tea party groups of the value of earmarks, including circulating a 20-page document that makes the case that it’s Congress’s job to appropriate money and that a number of projects are rooted in the national and local interest.

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The 75-year-old, four-term lawmaker, who boasts of being the most conservative senator, has been relentless, according to several accounts.

Moments after the Tea Party Patriots issued a missive to 200,000 members backing the earmarks ban, Inhofe tried to reach one of the group’s leaders on her cell phone. When he couldn’t connect, he tried again. When that was unsuccessful, his staff sent text messages urging her to call him back.

Finally, one of the group’s co-founders, Mark Meckler, returned Inhofe’s phone call Wednesday. It was a brief conversation, in which Inhofe said he wanted to provide Meckler’s group with an essay titled “The Secret About Earmarks.” It argues that eliminating them “won’t save taxpayers a single dime.” And he urged Meckler to give the essay to former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, chairman of the tea-party-aligned FreedomWorks.

Meckler said in an interview that the phone call was “bizarre,” adding that “we normally don’t have a lot of direct contact with senators.”

Brillant. Now THAT is the way to treat a sitting Senator. Make him call you. And leave a voicemail. And a text message. Then he wrote on his Facebook wall. And MySpace. Friendster too. Keep it up. 

And it appears that Inhofe feels the same way about his brethren as they feel about him:

With voters angry over Washington spending, proponents of earmarks have an uphill climb to convince skeptics of their value for projects ranging from military installations to medical research that are constantly derided as pork. But Inhofe said he can change the minds of people who have been “brainwashed.”

But that wasn't even the most revealing part:

With a vote coming Tuesday on the ban on earmarks, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition was seen as enough to defeat the plan — especially since it was proposed by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who is deeply unpopular with many of his colleagues.

But one thing McConnell can’t control: the sway of tea party activists, who are beginning to mount an aggressive lobbying push to demand that wobbly Republican senators take a firm line and publicly announce their support for the two-year earmark moratorium.

Politico article here. Inhofe's letter here.