Know Your Congress: Meet incoming House Appropriations Committee chair Hal Rogers, prince of the new GOP, uh . . . revolution???

"When it comes to the issues of cutting spending, creating jobs, dealing with Obamacare, reforming Congress -- this unites all of our members, including all eighty-five brand-new ones. There's no daylight between the freshmen and any of our members or the leadership.”

-- Speaker-to-be John Boehner,
to The New Yorker's Peter J. Boyer

by Ken

In the above Countdown clip, after profiling Hal Rogers of Kentucky, the "Prince of Pork," as the incoming chair of the mighty House Appropriations Committee, Keith is joined by Dave Weigel for a segment on the staffing-up of the new House, studded with lobbyists snatched straight from K Street and retreads from the staffs of the very old-line GOP-ers whom the Teabagger Class of '10 claims to be in revolt against.

It's shaping up as a curious revolution. Oh, I don't doubt that it will be as horrible, and as bloody, as feared. But the new House majority is looking rather, well, curious.

On Tuesday Howie wrote a post called, "Are House Republican Freshmen Cleaning Up The Mess-- Or Embracing The Corruption?," inspired in part by Washington Post political reporter Dan Eggen's Monday report "Incoming GOP freshmen rapidly embracing big-money fundraisers," suggesting that before they've even found out where to hang up their coats, the Teabagging revolutionaries of the GOP House Class of '10 are acculturing to the Beltway of doing things. Eggen followed up on Wednesday with another report, "New Republican lawmakers are hiring lobbyists, despite campaign rhetoric."

And yesterday Politico's Chris Frates reported that the man who's charged with overseeing the revolution, Speaker-to-be "Sunny John" Boehner, has hired, as his policy director," Brett Loper, "senior executive vice president at the Advanced Medical Technology Association, was deeply involved in the health care debate and fought against the fees Democrats ultimately assessed the industry to help pay for reform." Frates:

“I'm very pleased Brett will be joining our team,” Boehner said in a statement. “There are few people who are better equipped to help our new majority change the way the House works and advance a new governing agenda that reflects the will of the people we serve.”

But Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency group, called the move “business as usual,” noting that Loper’s now “in a much better position to help his old employer.”

“The public thinks that they’re electing a radically new Congress. And the freshmen may change but the people with power in Washington are always the same,” Allison said.

Is there enough room inside that tiny Republican tent?

In a related development, taxophobic Teabaggers who were whipped up for a couple of days by ideological bellwethers Sen. Jim DeMoron and the Club for Growth were left fist-pumping in the wind when, apparently, Mr. No-Tax himself, Grover Norquist, passed along the word that, on the contrary, people who really hate taxes support the "compromise" package. (Brian Beutler's got a nifty piece on his new blog-within-a-blog at TPM.)

Of course for those of us who are more or less equally -- however differently -- appalled by all the factions thrown together inside the New Republican Majority's still-not-very-big tent, it's pretty much impossible to take sides. Oh sure, we can breathe the gentlest sigh of relief at the selection of Michigan's Fred Upton to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but that's not because there's anything good to say about Upton. It's because, as Noah pointed out in his "Freakshow Politics" piece yesterday, the front-running contenders for the job were John Shimkus and Joe Barton, genuine lunatics and unapologetic total corporate whores. (Noah took a closer look at the Bible-thumping, science-defying Shimkus today.)

The thing about Upton, though, is that the Teabaggers hate him. For goodness' sake, they supported a primary challenge by death-to-taxes nutjob former State Rep. Jack Hoogendyk. And for more sensible reasons they can't be thrilled with the House GOP caucus's choice of Hal Rogers to chair the Appropriations Committee. In that Tuesday post I mentioned above, Howie described Rogers and his chief rival for the Appropriations job, longtime DWT Republicrook fave Jerry Lewis, as "two of the worst and most corrupt earmarkers in the history of the Congress."

In the Dec. 13 New Yorker "Political Scene" piece on "Sunny John" Boehner from which I quoted at the top of this post, a decently reported piece that nevertheless stays safely within the confines that would easily pass muster with the Village Media Review Board, Peter J. Boyer, devotes much attention to the lengths to which Sunny John has gone to accommodate the ideological fire-breathers among his 85 freshmen. And much has been made -- by infotainment newsers attempting to project the Orange Man's, um, vision of leadership -- of the fact that alone among recent House Republican leaders he has no historic ties to the Appropriations Committee, by recent tradition the breeding ground for House GOP masters.

However, it's hard not to read turning the committee over to Hal Rogers as the political equivalent of hanging out a sign that says --

"OPEN FOR BUSINESS AS USUAL DURING REVOLUTION"

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