What is wrong with club-for-growth?
They’re awful because they point out Duncan Hunter’s flaws. It was all a conspiracy, really. The CFG was actually started just to derail the presidential ambitions of Duncan Hunter.
You didn’t know that? :p
For the most part, not much. I agree with them on most things. However, in this case, they touted a set of gimmicky House amendments to the five major appropriations bills introduced by Jeff Flake. Those amendments were then used as the sole basis by NTU in developing a rating of congressmembers and labeling anyone with a low rating a "pork barrel spender." Any "nay" vote, or absence of a vote, was a strike against a representative. In the case of Duncan Hunter, he was chairing the House Armed Services Committee at the time, working day and night to get the Defense Appropriations bill passed and he missed about half the votes of Flake's amendments introduced on a single day -- those counted against him. As to the amendments themselves, IMO they were stupid stunts, addressing relatively minor dollars ($34 million for all 17 amendments) out of more than $600 billion that was being debated. Flake had done no homework on any of the items, unable to make a case as to what the items were other than the one-line title of the item. He wasted hours of time introducing the bills while the full congress was in session, then demanding a recorded vote when his bills were shot down by a vast majority by voice vote. When debating the bills, Flake was an embarrassment. He had no idea what it was he was objecting to, while it was pointed out in bill after bill that many of the items already had been debated and passed during the accompanying authorization bills. I have no objection to Flake trying to fight pork or earmarks but these were juvenile stunts used to grab headlines and put his name in the news, not sound legislation about which he or his staff had done any research. I have a real problem with the results of his efforts being used to conclude that someone is, or is not, a pork-barrel spender.