Recently in Profiles in Fiscal Courage Category

By Clare Venegas

Pork-lovers beware: Rep. Jeff Flake is watching.

Should a fellow Congressman decide to slip an earmark into a spending bill, Rep. Flake might call them to the floor to publicly defend it during "The Flake Hour," the time after every spending bill that Flake calls on earmark sponsors to justify the waste of taxpayer dollars.

Or they might find their pet project the subject of Flake's Friday email blast for the "egregious earmark of the week," which always concludes with a humorous quotation. Case in point: Flake said, of a $13.4 million earmark compensating Suffolk County, Massachusetts fishermen for "economic losses" from "fishing limitations": "Give a man an earmark and you have fed him for today."

He and Rep. John Campbell (CA-48) have led the way speaking out against Democrat Charlie Rangel's nearly $3 million earmark to build his "Monument to Me" on the City College of New York campus.

Flake's courageously public fight against earmarks apparently angered his colleagues so much that he was pulled from the Judiciary Committee in 2007 for "bad behavior." One source said the decision was influenced by Appropriations Committee members who resented Flake's outspoken opposition to earmarks. If speaking out against earmarks is "bad behavior," then Republicans everywhere should call their congressmen to behave even worse.

In January, Flake wrote a letter to House Republican Leader Rep. John Boehner requesting to be assigned to one of 29 Republican seats on the Appropriations Committee. Flake asks the simple question, "Wouldn't it make sense to have at least one Republican member of the Appropriations committee who doesn't earmark?"

Boehner should answer with a resounding YES. But if he and other Republican leaders ignore reform-minded members like Flake, then it's time to change leadership and Flake's name should be on the short list.

In the halls of the House, where business-as-usual means placing politics over common sense, Rep. Jeb Hensarling  is a no-nonsense budget hawk who believes in a "radical" idea about federal spending - don't spend more than you take in.

Such clear-sightedness seems to be lost on many Republican members of Congress who seem content to play the Washington game of "spend and spend more." Thankfully, there are conservatives like Hensarling who still believe in practicing the basic Republican principle of fiscal responsibility. As chair of the Republican Study Committee, a group of 100 conservative House Republicans, Hernsarling has proven his fiscal courage time and again. For example:

• He proposed a Constitutional amendment that would prohibit federal spending from growing faster than the economy. In a letter co-signed by Rep. John Campbell and sent earlier this year to his House colleagues, Hensarling warned: "The projected growth of federal spending is simply unsustainable ... By 2040, taxes would have to double in order to pay for all of the spending that will compound if the federal budget is simply left on automatic pilot--and that's if no more additional spending is created."
  
  
• He's been a staunch opponent of earmarks, taking the pledge to "swear off pork" (that sadly only 39 of the 201 Republican members of Congress have taken) and has supported the one-year moratorium on all Congressional earmarks.  In 2006, Henserling actively opposed a $1.5 billion earmark to Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, stuck in a federal transportation bill, which was seven times larger than Alaska's infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" and, according to the Heritage Foundation, one  of the largest earmarks in American history.
  
  
• He is a staunch tax fighter. Last year, he introduced the "Taxpayer Bill of Rights," a bill that would limit the growth of government spending, and co-authored the "Taxpayer Choice Act," which would simplify the tax code and make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Influential groups like the Club for Growth, American Conservative Union, and the National Taxpayer Union  have all given Hensarling high marks for his anti-tax voting record.

Hensarling has done a yeoman's job of trying to get Congress, and his Republican colleagues, to own up to the glaringly obvious fact that government is obese and needs to be put on a diet. In a 2006 interview just after Republicans lost control of Congress with the Pittsburg Tribune-Review, Hensarling admitted something that the Lincoln Club of Orange County and others are now publicly vocalizing:

"Fiscal responsibility is one of our core values. Nobody expects the Democrats to be fiscally responsible. But if we're not fiscally responsible, I don't know how we ever get back into the majority."