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The Water Cooler Title: Jim Inhofe Courts Tea Party On Earmarks 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. 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.” Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Inhofe, said the senator has been making calls to several different leaders of tea party groups in advance of next week’s vote. “These are friends,” Dempsey said. “And he’s not shy about making his case.” 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.” “My response is that’s what they told me eight years ago on global warming, when I was all alone exposing that hoax,” he writes in a letter he's providing to tea party activists and right-wing radio commentators. 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. The activists’ stepped-up efforts have made a number of GOP senators nervous about the upcoming vote, when some will have to decide whether siding with their leader on the first politically symbolic vote since last week’s elections is worth the wrath of the tea party movement. Inhofe seems to recognize that dilemma, and he's tried to reach his conservative allies to help change their minds and give his colleagues political cover. Continue Reading Text Size * - * + * reset Dempsey, the Inhofe spokesman, said the senator had yet to speak to reach Armey, who couldn’t be reached Thursday afternoon. But Inhofe — who in the past has backed an earmark moratorium — appears to be too late, since Armey’s group put out a message Thursday to its members calling on them to urge GOP senators to approve the ban. “To you and me, last week's elections were a clear message that the culture of bloated federal spending and business-as-usual Washington politics will no longer stand,” the missive said. It’s far from clear whether the anti-earmark effort, which is being led by DeMint and junior Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, will succeed. The vote will take place by secret ballot, meaning senators can vote however they see fit without the public ever knowing for sure what happened. Tea party groups are demanding that senators make their positions public, but so far most in the 47-member GOP conference have declined to comment on their intentions. Also, the moratorium would be nonbinding, meaning that GOP senators could still earmark even if the ban were adopted by the conference. At the same time, a number of GOP senators who backed a two-year moratorium in the spring are having second thoughts now, since the last ban applied to all senators, whereas DeMint’s proposal would affect only Republicans. Some argue that halting earmarks on the Republican side would give Senate Democrats enormous new power to set spending priorities. McConnell and other GOP leaders are agitated at being forced to take the vote on the first full day back since their triumphant day in last week’s elections and are trying to show that they are committed to making a major effort at reducing the national debt. Indeed, Inhofe told POLITICO that he planned to go to the Senate floor to offer a new bill Monday that would propose an ambitious series of cuts to discretionary spending. “I’m going to be very specific,” he said.
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