Time to Sort out the Promises From the Rhetoric

Just a week after the Republican party took a massive win on the issue of "fiscal responsibility", they were being pressured to "Put up or shut up" by the Tea Party that catapulted them into office.

The leader of the pack, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, was pushing to ban earmarks. He received much support from House Minority leader, John Boehner and opposition from then, party Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.

One of the biggest hypocrites of the earmark banning bunch was John Ensign of Nevada . While talking out one side of his mouth to appease the Tea Party voter, he increased the national debt by $1 million dollars by securing an earmark for health care that was a part of the "Obama Care" plan he had been vowing to repeal, saying that it would help alleviate the growing challenges Nevada continued to face with providing access to much needed health care.

Earmark spending is a minimal component of the federal deficit....

at least that is what Mitch McConnell thought. The Tea Party Republicans were claiming the sum to be around $16 Billion .

What did Mitch McConnell have going for him. The fact that John Boehner and Jim DeMint were full of hot air. Called for a moratorium is nothing more than grand-standing. It cannot be enforced and is non-binding. It's just an "I agree to play nicely, but then don't" and there's nothing you can do about it.

Jim DeMint also asked for a "two year" moratorium in the Senate. He saw it as a way to attack "pork barrel spending." Two years of Americans struggling to get through the tough economic times could hurt the Republicans come 2012, unless they could turn it around and blame it on the Democrats and hope to have a Republican president in 2012, then re-instate pork barrel spending.

What they didn't tell you about these earmarks.

We have many, many corn growers that have been getting subsidies or "earmarks" for years. No earmarks, means no money for these farmers. Funding for farmers who lose their crops due to weather could say goodbye to any financial aid. Making it even more expensive for you the consumer, at the grocery store or worse, shortages of food.

Republican, Tea Party deficit hawks, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, avoided that subject during their campaigning, but then faced the "put up or shut up" challenge because all three came from farming communities who relied on the earmarks.

Republicans were not new to this, in 1994 when they took control, they created the Freedom to Farm Act, trying to get the farming sector to return to the "free market". This ended up costing Congress to approve billions of dollars in emergency spending for the farmers.

The long and short of it, pork barrel spending is alive and well in the United States of America and the voter has once again been let down by campaign promises.