I'm proud of the Kansas City Tea Parties and their weekly gatherings to protest the fiscal insanity coming out of Washington, but their claim to have influenced Claire McCaskill's vote on the Omnibus bill, echoed here at Instapundit, is not helping.
Let's not fool ourselves. Claire McCaskill is a reliable liberal vote for anything that Obama wants. Her self-identified "brand" is earmarks, and when her vote isn't needed, she spends her days talking to Missouri media about how brave she is for standing up against the present system of earmark reform. Her latest vote against the omnibus only happened because Missouri's lame duck Senator, Kit Bond, is a huge porker who voted for the bill. This was the perfect opening for Senator McCaskill, who got to rail against the earmarks by Missouri Republicans without having to actually be a deciding vote.
Why should you believe me? Why take a look at the stimulus bill, where her vote would have allowed the Republicans to filibuster. Were there earmarks in the stimulus? Sure there were. They weren't called earmarks, but the only difference was the cover of stimulus spending, and Senator McCaskill was out front defending the bill without ever reading it. Her office laughed at the idea of reading it when it was 600 pages, and yet she was pushing for it's vote that afternoon.
Don't worry citizens of Missouri - the good Senator kept her staff up all night reading the thousand or so pages, or so she claimed on Twitter.
Maybe she was tired when she wrote that, but 15 hours to read the bill seems, a little tight. Man I wouldn't want to work in that office!
So by all means, please keep up the tea party protests. Let's hold the feet of both Republicans and Democrats and even Challengers to the fire, but let's not declare victory just because one of Missouri's senators saw a chance to burnish her "brand" with a faux-principled stand against earmarks.
If so many Republicans hadn't voted pro, she never would have had the courage to vote yes.
And while we're at it, let's go ahead and blow up a couple other things about McCaskill's stances.
1) EFCA and FOCA. When confronted about possible support for the radically pro-abortion FOCA or the card check EFCA, McCaskill is constantly trying to defend herself by saying the bills haven't been brought up yet. This is the same tack she used for the stimulus. She claimed it hadn't been released yet, and thus she didn't have a clear understanding of the bill. When the bill is shoved through the Congress with limited opportunity to debate, she suddenly is out in front defending whatever the White House asks her to defend. A Senator who has no opinion on highly controversial pieces of legislation is one you have to watch. Don't let her slide away from this when the votes do come up. (my prediction is she'll wait to see if they have over 60 votes before siding one way or another (remember Immigration?).
2) Senator McCaskill, on the Allman in the Morning radio show, defended FOCA by saying Republicans only hated big government when it was convenient. Her example was the D.C. school board, which just voted to stop bright young District children from keeping their vouchers. Senator McCaskill wanted to know why Republicans wanted to interfere with local control.
Senator, it's because Congress is required by the Constitution to set the laws for the District of Columbia. I can send you a copy of the document, or you can add it to your iPhone, if you've misplaced yours.
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