Outrageous Arrogance

Democracy and Power 107: Counting votes

In a democracy the politician must favorably influence the majority of their voting constituents. In all political decisions the politician calculates how many votes are gained by voting money spent on an interest group versus how many votes are lost.

In the regular session, Congress failed to establish 11 spending bills. Then in a lame duck session they concocted a $1.2 spending extravaganza that would normally seduce the votes of power-lusting politicians. This arrogance exemplifies total contempt for every American taxpayer. Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal describes:

This week Democrats unveiled a $1.2 trillion omnibus, legislation as pure an insult to the electorate as it gets. It was a 1,924-page monstrosity that nobody had time to read. It took 11 spending bills that Democrats couldn’t be bothered to pass individually and crammed them into one oozing ball of pork and bad policy, going beyond even the obscene budget of 2010.

Yet to this legislative Frankenstein Democrats carefully attached the spenders’ equivalent of crack cocaine. To wit, omnibus author and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye dug up earmark requests that Senate Republicans had made in the past year (prior to their self-imposed ban) and, unasked, included them in the bill. He lavished special, generous attention—$1 billion worth of it—on some reliable GOP earmark junkies: Mississippi’s Thad Cochran got $512 million; Utah’s Bob Bennett, $226 million; Maine’s Susan Collins, $114 million; Missouri’s Kit Bond, $102 million; Ohio’s George Voinovich, $98 million; and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, $80 million.

Larry Kudlow appreciates the gigantic transformation of philosophy and governance:

On a historic night this past Thursday, a new tea party Republican Congress completely transformed U.S. economic policy. Elections matter, and so do their ideas. Smaller government, low taxes and less spending were key election themes in the Republican landslide. And those themes triumphed this week as a large tax-cut bill finally passed the House and a monstrosity of a spending bill was defeated in the Senate.

Kudlow correctly analyzes the shift to smaller government, low taxes and less spending. However, this gigantic shift only resulted because the America voters forced the politicians to stop spending. Politicians love their positions of power and when their voting constituents strongly object politicians fear them.

This is what FreedomWorks did to cause Senators’ to fear losing their positions of powers:

Democratic leadership deliberately submitted the 2,000-page Omnibus bill at the last minute, tried to cast the legislation as “must pass” and hoped all the pork could be slipped in without prolonged scrutiny.

We quickly launched our attack against the bill from all fronts, targeting key Senate Republicans and Democrats. We sent action alert emails to our entire grassroots network of more than 700,000 activists and updates through our half-a-million strong Facebook page. We set up a “Stop the $1 Trillion Pork Bill” action page, where activists could type in their zip code to make calls to their senators and urge them to oppose the bill. We distributed a Key Vote Notice to every senator, released “Ten Reasons to Oppose the Omnibus” and taped a podcast describing all the pork barrel spending in the bill. We also launched a phone mobilization campaign, directly connecting key activists to their members of Congress. In the 12 hours before Reid pulled the bill, we logged over 1,000 calls to Senators Collins, Nelson (NE), McCaskill, Casey, Webb, Nelson (FL), Brown and Manchin.

Remember all politicians count votes. FreedomWorks and thousands of Americans stopped a horrific $1.2trillion spending disaster because Republican and Democratic Senators know America wants smaller government and more freedom. Now knowing Americans are aware of the politicians’ votes, they fear losing their positions of power. Recently, these Senators saw many politicians defeated for over spending. They didn’t change their philosophy. Angry Americans made them change their misuse of Americans’ money.