Tea Party should target old bulls in House GOP

President Obama and the Democrats who run the Senate are primarily responsible for out-of-control federal spending, but there are 13 old bull House Republicans who share the blame. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., and his panel's dozen subcommittee chairmen - aka the "cardinals" - just don't get it. Their party won a historic victory that brought a GOP majority to the House in 2010, largely on the strength of the Tea Party organizing skills and principled fervor. Huge majorities of the American people have had it with business as usual in the nation's capital. That's the key underlying reason why they put Republicans back in charge of the House. Yet little has changed on Capitol Hill, which goes a long way toward explaining the single-digit public approval rating of Congress.

Nobody ever said rooting out the corrupt culture of spending in Congress would be easy. But surely voter anger is so obvious that a conscious choice to ignore that anger is needed to make spending decisions like those made recently by the cardinals. Consider the bitter complaints of anonymous cardinals reported earlier this week by the Hill newspaper. After the House approved an agriculture appropriations bill that was within the limits set by the August budget deal, the Senate slapped on billions in new spending, including huge increases for food stamps and disaster relief. Then in a House-Senate conference, the cardinals crafted a "compromise" that kept the Senate changes and even added a provision widening the lending limits of the bankrupt Fannie and Freddie. ...

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