Roy Being Roy

Bill Hennessy, co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party, was shocked, shocked he tells you, to find out that Roy Blunt supports earmarks:

When you vote for a candidate for high office, sometimes you do so with fingers crossed. You just don’t know how they’ll handle the new responsibilities. Will they succumb to pressure and influence? Or will they remain true?

It's hard to even keep track of how many things are wrong with Hennessy's opening paragraph.

You have to cross your fingers? You just don't know how "they'll" handle new responsibilities? Actually, Roy Blunt has been in Congress since 1997 and was a member of the House leadership, so it was quite easy to know how he views earmarks. He views earmarks the same way he always has, and nothing about the campaign suggested otherwise.

"Will they succumb to pressure and influence?" Technically, it's impossible for Roy Blunt to succumb to pressure and influence, considering that he's been doing the bidding of the powerful and influential throughout his career. That's who he is: there's nothing to succumb to.

Will they remain true? Of course. He remains true to who he always was. Again, there was never any reason to suspect otherwise.

It's truly remarkable to see Hennessy write about Blunt as if he is some unknown entity just entering the national stage. However, I suppose that's the only position the St. Louis tea party can take to try to salvage their dignity after the elections. The reality is that they lost to Russ Carnahan, lost the Charlie Dooley, and lost in their opposition to Prop B. The only tangible effect they had on the election was the fact that they prevented Chuck Purgason, someone who actually exemplifies tea party values, from winning the Republican primary against Roy Blunt, a classic Republican insider. So, in order to simultanously claim that they are both (1) influential and (2) something other than an astroturf group that supports the same old establishment Republican Party, they have to thread the needle by pretending that they had reason to believe that Roy Blunt the Senator who somehow legislate fundamentally differently than the way Roy Blunt has always legislated. It, of course, defies credulity, but that's hardly anything new for the St. Louis tea party.