Reid Wilson:

Tea Party Caucus Takes $1 Billion In Earmarks Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget. According to a Hotline review of records compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, the 52 members of the caucus, which pledges to cut spending and reduce the size of government, requested a total of 764 earmarks valued at $1,049,783,150 during Fiscal Year 2010, the last year for which records are available. "It's disturbing to see the Tea Party Caucus requested that much in earmarks. This is their time to put up or shut up, to be blunt," said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste. "There's going to be a huge backlash if they continue to request earmarks."

$1 billion is chump change, but the hypocrisy is pretty revealing here. Banning earmarks is just about the only specific idea to cut spending that tea partiers have identified, yet of the 52 members of the caucus, only 16 took no earmarks. The remaining 36 members -- 69% of the caucus -- took an average of 21 earmarks apiece.

The hypocrisy here helps illustrate the substantive shallowness of the GOP's newfound opposition to earmarks. Demagogues like John McCain may say earmarks are symbolic of government waste, but to the extent that there is a problem with earmarks, it has more to do with influence peddling than fiscal policy. In theory, the idea behind earmarks is that members of Congress should have influence over how federal money is spent instead of ceding the authority entirely to the executive branch. That makes complete sense, given that members of Congress should have a better idea of what their districts and states need than members of the executive branch.

The problem comes when members of Congress use the earmarks to reward financial contributors. Earmark transparency, which Democrats helped put in place (thanks in part to legislation authored by then-Senator Obama), exposes any potential corruption to the light of day, but the only thing the GOP's outright ban accomplishes is that Congress has less influence over how money is spent.

And as far as rewarding financial contributors goes, Speaker Boehner hasn't even been sworn in yet and on issue after issue, we're already seeing the GOP fight tooth and nail to pay back the people who paid to put them in office.