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american.swan
11-05-2010, 04:12 AM
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/GOPs-K-Street-wing-ready-for-insurgent-challenge-1436766-106633968.html

GOP's K Street wing ready for insurgent challenge

By: Timothy P. Carney
Senior Examiner Columnist
November 3, 2010


(AP)
The insurgent conservative Republicans and Tea Party candidates elected Tuesday are obviously a pugnacious and determined bunch, but they're not the only ones fixing for a battle over the direction of the party. The Republican Beltway establishment and the K Street wing of the GOP are ready to fight any effort to end pork-barrel spending and kill corporate welfare.

The first fight will come mid-November, when the newly elected senators join returning senators to set party rules for the next two years. Sen. Jim DeMint will propose to ban earmarks by GOP senators. The appropriators will fight him, probably backed by the party leadership. Senior Republicans will also oppose other reforms DeMint might push -- such as term limits for all members of the appropriations committee. Among the old guard of the GOP caucus, there's no notion that Republicans need to abandon their standard operating procedure.

After the 2008 election, the GOP Senate caucus killed all of DeMint's proposed reforms. This was an early spark in the conservative insurgency of 2009 and 2010. DeMint fired up his Senate Conservatives Fund, and immediately took sides against the party leadership -- supporting Pat Toomey against incumbent Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Marco Rubio over GOP-anointed Charlie Crist in Florida. It was open warfare, with DeMint, the Club for Growth, and Tea Party groups on one side, against the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the GOP's K Street kingpins, such as former Majority Leaders Bob Dole and Trent Lott.

Conservative, anti-establishment Sen.-elect Rand Paul, R-Ky., knows what he's up against. During his primary race against McConnell's hand-picked candidate Trey Grayson, Paul received a check from only one sitting senator -- the retiring and widely disliked Jim Bunning. Meanwhile, 19 GOP senators -- and plenty of former senators now on K Street -- funded Grayson in the primary.

DeMint articulated this all clearly in a Wednesday morning op-ed. "Many of the people who will be welcoming the new class of Senate conservatives to Washington never wanted you here in the first place," DeMint wrote. "The establishment is much more likely to try to buy off your votes than to buy into your limited-government philosophy."

Paul gets this. When conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough asked Paul on Wednesday morning if he would "talk to old Republican bulls in the Senate and tell them, 'We're not going to make the same mistakes we made during the Bush era?' " Paul responded despondently, "You think they're going to listen to me, Joe?"

The appropriators and the K Street wing will battle the staunch conservative reformers -- DeMint, Paul, and Utah's Mike Lee. As Lott promised, they'll also try to "co-opt" the others, like Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, and Pat Toomey.

When National Review's Rich Lowry asked Mitch McConnell on Monday if some new GOP senators would cause him headaches, McConnell sarcastically responded, "You mean people like Portman and Blunt and Boozman and Ayotte and Coats and Rubio?"

This was the roster of Team Establishment (with Rubio perhaps as wishful thinking). It's an interesting lineup.

Rob Portman, Roy Blunt and John Boozman all backed Bush's expansion of Medicare. Blunt and Boozman also voted aye on the Wall Street bailout -- Portman by then was budget director for President George W. Bush, whose reputation for fiscal restraint is not exactly stellar.

Blunt also backs ethanol subsidies, married a tobacco lobbyist, and was cozy with Jack Abramoff. Dan Coats had a fine Senate career, which he then monetized as a K Street lobbyist representing clients such as Bank of America, the drug lobby, and a hedge fund manager pushing for cap-and-trade energy regulations.

None of McConnell's Team Establishment is liberal, but none is a boat rocker. Or, as Portman put it when I caught up with him on the campaign trail, McConnell's new allies are "serious legislators."

Portman didn't name those senators and candidates he considered "not serious legislators," but presumably he included DeMint and Paul.

There are plenty of signs the establishment is ready to fight: Lott's plan to "co-opt" the Tea Partiers, House appropriator Jerry Lewis' dismissal of earmark reform, and the absence of serious reforms in the party's "Pledge to America."

McConnell and DeMint will clash again this month. Popular anti-spending fervor will help DeMint. GOP old-dog clout will help McConnell. Perhaps tipping the scales are the losses of insurgent Republicans Ken Buck, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller -- and the survival of McConnell consigliere and appropriator Lisa Murkowski.

There may be plenty of new faces, but it's the same old party.

Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.