January 05, 2011 08:29 PM UTC

Another "Tea Party" Campaign Promise Bites The Dust

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the New York Times reports–As the 112th Congress gets underway today, a key promise made by the incoming GOP majority to the “Tea Party” is proving inconvenient:

Many people knowledgeable about the federal budget said House Republicans could not keep their campaign promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending in a single year. Now it appears that Republicans agree.

As they prepare to take power on Wednesday, Republican leaders are scaling back that number by as much as half, aides say, because the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, will be nearly half over before spending cuts could become law.

While House Republicans were never expected to succeed in enacting cuts of that scale, given opposition in the Senate from the Democratic majority and some Republicans, and from President Obama, a House vote would put potentially vulnerable Republican lawmakers on record supporting deep reductions of up to 30 percent in education, research, law enforcement, transportation and more.

Now aides say that the $100 billion figure was hypothetical…

But as Jackie Calmes at the Times explains, it wasn’t represented as “hypothetical” on the campaign trail last year, over and over by dozens of GOP candidates as part of the “Pledge to America”–and there’s no way that the Democratic-controlled Congress was going to cut the budget for them, this excuse is ludicrous and debunked in today’s story. We’ve talked about the Colorado GOP’s swift abandonment of major planks in their platform post-election, from repealing the new oil and gas drilling rules to the FASTER registration fee hikes for bridge repair: both issues that Republicans campaigned on with Thomas Paine zeal in many close races.

Well, as Bob Beauprez so eloquently put it, “there’s that smell again.”