Some Grease For The Squeaky Wheel

Demonstrating that conservative resistance to the GOP establishment is not necessarily futile, the uprising of right-wing House backbenchers against runaway federal spending under Republican auspices is now beginning to produce tangible results:

Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs. Only last month, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (TX) and other GOP leaders quashed demands within their party for budget cuts to pay for the soaring cost of hurricane relief.

You will, I hope, indulge me when I exclaim, "HOLY [BLEEP]!" as I did when my eyeballs rolled across the italicized passages. That's damn near astonishing, considering where the House GOP leadership was a scant month ago (and where, to be sure, its Senate counterpart still is, with Dems waiting behind them with filibusters at the ready, so it probably isn't as "tangible" as we would hope, but even this much repentance is tremendous progress).

And to think we may have Ronnie Earle to thank for it:

DeLay told a packed room of reporters on September 13 that 11 years of Republican rule had already pared down the federal budget "pretty good." If lawmakers had suggestions for cuts, DeLay said he would listen, but he was not offering anything up.

But faced with a revolt among many conservatives sharply critical of him for resisting spending cuts, DeLay three weeks later told a closed meeting of the House Republican Conference, "I failed you," according to a number of House members and GOP aides. Then, in a nod to the most hard-core conservatives, DeLay volunteered, "You guys filled a void in the leadership."

The abrupt shift reflects a changed political dynamic in the House in which a faction of fiscal conservatives - known as the Republican Study Committee, or RSC - has gained the upper hand because of DeLay's criminal indictment in Texas, widespread criticism of the Republicans' handling of Hurricane Katrina, and uncertainty over the future of the leadership, according to lawmakers and aides.

"Uncertain over the future of the leadership" had nothing to do with DeLay's fate, which is in no trouble at all, and everything to do with a GOP majority that had, plainly and simply, lost its way on its one-time profession of small government/fiscal conservatism. A GOP majority that had succumbed yet again to the poison of left-wing media propaganda that the "handling of Hurricane Katrina" was a federal, as opposed to state/local, debacle, and panicked itself into believing that the way out of trouble that never truly existed was to ape the Democrat Congresses Hastert, DeLay & Co. replaced a decade ago and put the federal check-writing apparatus on maximum overdrive.

Some House conservatives, in the form of Mike Pence's Republican Study Conference, balked and came up with spending offsets elsewhere in the budget (Operation, um, Offset). And they were subjected to withering hostility from their own leadership for their principled stand.

But now here it is, only a few weeks later, and look who has come to whom.

There's a lesson in that for the White House and its obtuse, querulous Harriet Miers SCOTUS crusade, if they're willing to heed it.

Hopefully that won't take an indictment of Bush to shove into the light of day.

[HT: CQ]