When I was on Senate staff in the final years of the Bush administration, a faction of die-hard ideological conservatives — soon to be known as the “Tea Party” — had coalesced around Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. I called them the “Alamo faction,” because they would rather go down in glorious defeat than compromise on any of their principles. Among the main targets of their ire were “earmarks”: the specific appropriation of different pots of money for a mind-boggling array of special interests.
Earmarks are one of the ways in which Congress sells out to special interests, though unfortunately they are not the main way, about which more presently. I hated earmarks as much as anybody, but I didn’t share the Alamo faction’s diagnosis of the underlying malady. Where they saw a problem of personalities — and stoked a lot of conflict within the Republican conference in the Senate — I saw a much larger institutional dysfunction with deep historical roots and an almost inescapable gravitational pull, like that of a black hole.
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