With Boehner’s Pick of ‘Prince of Pork’ to Chair Appropriations, GOP’s Tea Party Base Is Starting to Get It – They’ve Been Had

Speaker-Elect John Boehner and the incoming GOP House leadership (which, it should be noted, is the same as the leadership in the current Congress and practically the same as the old “borrow and spend, spend, spend” House leadership under Bush) announced its picks for committee chairmen this week — and one of these in particular — the choice of Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, the “Prince of Pork,” to lead the Appropriations committee — is not playing well within the party’s tea bagger base.

And rightly so. The general indictment of the tea parties — their political Achilles heel — is that the entire movement is predicated on rank hypocrisy about government spending.

From the elderly tea baggers who shouted “Get the government out of my Medicare!” at the town hall meetings in 2009 to the Republican pols who voted against the Stimulus but then rushed home to pose for photo ops handing out giant Stimulus checks to fund projects in their districts — and from the incoming tea bagger members of Congress who spewed spittle about the evils of “Obamacare” to get elected but who are now eagerly bellying up for their taxpayer-funded Cadillac health insurance plans to the tea parties’ current support for the GOP’s billionaires’ tax break even though it will blow a $700 billion hole in the deficit over the next ten years — tea baggers don’t have a lot of credibility left.

If they want to keep up the pretense that they really are for fiscal thrift, they should get up off their couches and work up some of their trademark poorly spelled signs to protest Boehner’s appointment of a guy like this to run the most influential House committee on spending:

Rep. Hal Rogers may have sworn off earmarks as he lobbied his way into the powerful House Appropriations Committee chairmanship, but there’s a reason he’s earned the nickname “Prince of Pork.”

Over the past two years, Rogers has requested $175,613,300 in earmarks, including funding for a cheetah protection nonprofit that his daughter works for.

That earmark figure, compiled by the LegiStorm database, counts only the 98 earmarks for which Rogers was the sole sponsor and not the 37 that he co-sponsored with other members. All told, the longtime appropriator has requested $246 million in earmarks over the past two years. On Wednesday, House Republicans formally granted Rogers the Appropriations chairmanship.

Throughout his 27 years on the committee, Rogers has left a trail of earmarks, including a sparkling airport terminal in Somerset, Ky., that gets very little traffic, as well as a homeland security research center.

The Hill sought reactions from the extreme right:

Richard Viguerie, a longtime conservative activist, said Rogers’s election as the next Appropriations Committee chairman (along with Michigan GOP Rep. Fred Upton’s selection as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) “should cause all conservatives and Tea Partiers to doubt how serious the Republican leadership is about cleaning up the culture of waste, seniority and corruption in Congress.”

…Conservatives had pushed for Rep. Jack Kingston’s (R-Ga.) election over Rogers in the race for the appropriations chairmanship.

“If you believe the GOP must change their ways, you must then fight against Hal Rogers’s appointment and support Jack Kingston instead,” wrote Erick Erickson, of the conservative blog RedState, on Wednesday. “This fight is too important. We must rebuke House Republican leaders and compel them to do the right thing.”

Probably as sop to the base, even the Wall St. Journal, an establishment GOP-owned-and-operated newspaper, published criticism of Boehner’s pick:

“We’ll find out if [Rogers] can change his spots or not,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group opposing earmarks and subsidies. “He was an aggressive defender of earmarks and of grabbing anything he could, by any means necessary, and stuffing it into the 5th Congressional District.”

Mark Meckler, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, added, “You couldn’t possibly choose to send a worse message to the people who just drove this election.”

Nick Gillespie at Reason Magazine, the leading libertarian outlet, is also unimpressed:

Given what they did the last time they ran the joint, Republicans have zero credibility with the American people, especially those folks who pay taxes (hint: all of us, one way or another).

So it’s not a good sign that GOP leaders passed over someone with great anti-pork bona fides such as Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and instead named Rep. Hal “Prince of Pork” Rogers (R-Ky.) to head up the House Appropriations Committee come the power switch in 2011…

Rogers is talking a good game, for sure:

“No more earmarks…I’ll be the enforcer of the moratorium. The electorate told us, I think, the number one thing they want is to cut spending…And that’s what we’ll do.”

…Jeebus H. Christ! How much hedging can be tucked into that “…I think”? You better cut spending GOP…

Believe it when you see it.

If tea baggers weren’t such an unpleasant lot, watching them being snookered during the midterms by Republican corporate-lobby lapdogs like Boehner, Sen. McConnell, former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey at Koch Industries-funded Freedomworks, GOP operative Sal Russo at Tea Party Express and the rest of the D.C. elite this year would have been sad.

On the other hand, watching as realization dawns on these extremists over the few months that they were merely tools in a massive power grab by the Republicans’ corporate sponsors could turn out to be quite a show.

Connect: