It is not often that conservatives like Brian Baker appear on publicly funded radio stations like National Public Radio (NPR). Baker is the president of the Ending Spending Action Fund, a non-partisan super PAC founded by Joe Ricketts to support fiscally conservative politicians.
On Monday, Baker appeared on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” with Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and John Farrell of the National Journal.
When the guests tried to paint Republicans as being responsible for much of Congress’s ills, Baker noted that the House passed a budget and the “Senate refuses to debate it and won’t pass it for over a 1000 days.”
Baker defended the Tea Party and Sarah Palin against liberal callers who tried to demonize them. Baker said people are voting for candidates backed by Palin, noting races in Indiana, Texas, and Nebraska in which Palin-backed candidates won Republican primaries.
“If you ask me, I would think Sarah Palin represents an important voice,” Baker said in an instance of rare agreement with Mann, who noticed Palin “represents the energy of the party that Romney needs.”
In response to accusations that the Tea Party was radical, Baker said “simply standing up and saying we can’t be borrowing 40 cents” of every dollar spent “from China is not radical, doing it is radical”
Baker then made the important point that Americans do not send politicians to Washington to pass bipartisan legislation full of earmarks and instead send “them to do the right things.”
“Earmarks are internal bribery,” Baker said, noting that major bills that increased government spending like George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion and Obamacare would not have passed without the extensive use of earmarks.
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