Published January 02, 2011
| FoxNews.com
Shown here are Sen.-elect Mike Lee, left, and Sen.-elect Pat Toomey.
Republicans elected to Congress with the help of Tea Party support pledged Sunday to devote
themselves to balancing the budget over all else when they start their new jobs on Wednesday.
In the lead-up to the next session, Tea Party freshmen and activists have expressed
disappointment at the legislation passed by Congress in the waning days of the post-election
lame-duck session. The bipartisan package to extend the Bush-era tax cuts was seen by some
conservatives as a flawed deal that failed to bury the estate tax and make permanent the
income tax rates of the past decade. At the same time, critics assailed the package for
containing billions in new deficit spending.
Tea Party candidates said Sunday they hope to change the culture of spending in Washington
as they prepare to get sworn in this week. They said Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
earmarks and other items will all be on the table for serious reform. They warned their more
experienced colleagues to hold back on the deficit spending once they come into office.
"It's time to once and for all ... stop perpetually spending money we don't have and sending the
bill to unborn generations of Americans," Sen.-elect Mike Lee of Utah told "Fox News Sunday."
Lee said the $858 billion package passed by Congress at the end of 2010 demonstrated the
need for a balanced-budget amendment, which he said he will propose.
"It certainly is disturbing that we have to add an additional trillion dollars to our debt in order to
preserve tax cuts without which our economy couldn't survive right now," he said. "Congress has
long abused the authority to incur debt in the name of the United States. And we need to restrict
that."
Allen West, an incoming GOP congressman from Florida, said the problems facing Washington
are big, but not "insurmountable."
Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," he said more needs to be done to set the stage for private-
sector job growth and scale back government intervention. West suggested the latest vote to
extend long-term unemployment benefits for another 13 months was just "creating more victims
and making people dependent on the government."
He said the federal government needs spending caps and needs to address the long-term
imbalance in the nation's entitlement programs -- a common refrain in Washington.
It remains to be seen whether Tea Partiers can muster the kind of bipartisan majority needed to
address that imbalance. But Sen.-elect Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania echoed the point on
entitlement reform in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"Nobody is talking about making it go away. We're talking about changing the structure," he
said in reference to Social Security.
Toomey was one of the Tea Party movement's early stars, effectively forcing incumbent
Sen. Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party during the GOP primary race. After Toomey
cruised to victory in the primary and Rep. Joe Sestak beat Specter on the Democratic side,
Toomey defeated Sestak by a narrow margin in November.
Toomey and Lee will join several other Tea Party-backed senators, including Kentucky's Rand
Paul and Florida's Marco Rubio, when they take the oath this week. That's along with dozens of
new GOP House members.
Republican leaders can probably count on most incoming Tea Partiers to back early priorities
like voting to repeal the health care law -- though that effort will almost certainly be stymied by a
presidential veto in the off-chance that it clears both chambers. But on some other tricky
subjects, they could be a bit of a wild card.
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who is not a freshman but still commanded Tea Party
enthusiasm over the past two years, said Sunday that she does not support raising the debt
ceiling.
She said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that she's gathering signatures on a petition to urge
Congress to vote against raising the $14.3 trillion cap.
The White House warned Sunday that failing to raise the ceiling could drag the country into
default and trigger an economic crisis worse than that of 2008. Acknowledging the dilemma,
other Tea Party-backed lawmakers, like West, said they could vote for a debt ceiling increase
provided certain conditions are met.
West said he would not write a "blank check," and that if Congress wants to raise the cap, they
need to talk about "budgetary controls" and spending caps.
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