The Kansas GOP sent "a new generation of Republicans committed to smaller government, freer markets and less corporate welfare" to Congress. Did they really mean it?

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A Crony Capitalism Showdown

A congressional primary in Kansas' Fourth District will signal the direction of the GOP.

By Kimberley A. Strassel, July 31, 2014

GOP voters overhauled their party in 2010, sending to the House a new generation of Republicans committed to smaller government, freer markets and less corporate welfare. We're about to find out if those voters really meant it.

A big decision comes Tuesday in the Kansas GOP primary. The Sunflower State is in the throes of political upheaval, with most of the attention on the fortunes of Gov. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts. But the race that may say far more about the direction of the GOP is taking place in Wichita, the state's Fourth District, in the standoff between Rep. Mike Pompeo and challenger Todd Tiahrt.

The 50-year-old Mr. Pompeo—an Army veteran, Harvard Law grad and businessman—was elected in the 2010 tea party surge, with a particular focus on liberating private enterprise. He's made a name for himself as a leader in the fight to end corporate welfare and pork, and to cut back on strangling regulations.

He ran against earmarks in his 2010 campaign and then pushed for the GOP's earmark ban. He's annually led a charge to power down the federal wind subsidy, and he's the author of a bill to eliminate all energy rent-seeking. "Companies should have customers, not political patrons," he likes to quip. He opposes the renewable fuel standard, and he voted in February against Congress's farm bill—which was a return to government subsidies and more food stamps.

He's also been a critic of the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration, a Great Society-era slush fund that shovels grants to politically connected communities. (See its 2008 grant for the Harry Reid Research and Technology Park in Las Vegas.) Mr. Pompeo calls it the Earmark Distribution Agency. As recently as May he got a vote on an amendment to eliminate EDA's $250 million in funding, rightly noting that the agency uses taxpayer dollars to "pick winners and losers," and that such unprioritized porking has helped create a spending culture that built $17 trillion in debt. (The vote unfortunately failed.)

Such principles are precisely what conservative voters claim to demand from their representatives. Yet the antisubsidy line has hardly been an easy one, even in conservative Kansas—which collects its share of federal largess. And Mr. Tiahrt knows it. The longtime politician held the district for eight terms, until 2010, when he made an unsuccessful bid for the Senate. He endorsed Mr. Pompeo for Congress, twice, but now wants his old job back.

His opening has been Kansas' overall sluggish business climate, and more specifically Wichita's struggling aviation sector. While jobs have been steady in the Fourth District, a number of its mainstay aviation companies have closed or moved out—unnerving locals. Plenty of this happened when Mr. Tiahrt was in Congress, but he's now centering his campaign (announced, without subtlety, at the Kansas Aviation Museum) on the claim that Mr. Pompeo is robbing his district and corporate constituents of federal handouts, and thereby hurting local jobs.

He certainly knows this game. In his 13 years as an appropriator, Mr. Tiahrt never saw an earmark he didn't love—mule museums, aquariums, wine initiatives. He directed endless earmarks to companies; the Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway notes, in "His last two years in office, [he] doled out $33 million in earmarks to aviation companies alone." Mr. Tiahrt is not defensive about this. He brags about pork that he sent to companies operating in his district (Boeing, Beechcraft, Cessna), claiming he created local aviation jobs and rapping Mr. Pompeo for failing to join him at the trough.

Mr. Tiahrt similarly whacked the incumbent on the EDA, noting that the day before the Pompeo amendment vote, the agency had declared Wichita and south Kansas a "manufacturing community" eligible for a portion of $1.3 billion in federal funds. "Considering the size of the federal budget," Mr. Tiahrt complained in June, "it is odd that Mr. Pompeo would strike funding for a program so vital to Kansas' Fourth District." He's also in favor of wind subsidies, which has earned him financial backing from the American Wind Energy Association.

Mr. Pompeo's supporters note that their candidate—who once ran an aviation company—has focused on reducing government's role overall in the private sector, rather than benefiting one company over another. In 2013 he got both Houses of Congress to pass—and President Obama to sign—an aviation reform modernizing regulations and cutting costs for light-aircraft makers. It was a boon to that entire industry, but a particular bonus to South-Central Kansas, home to many such companies. That's a model Mr. Pompeo has sought to replicate with bills to reform pipeline permitting or to kill, equally, all energy subsidies (oil, gas and renewables).

The choice voters fundamentally face on Tuesday is whether they want a congressman who works to get government smaller for everyone and to end corporate welfare, or a congressman who grabs what he can of big government to funnel to his district, and embraces crony capitalism. The latter is a return to the unreformed GOP, a groove plenty of Republicans would happily slide back into—if only voters gave the nod. We'll see if Kansas conservatives do.
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