Many of the newly-elected Democrats in the House of Representatives campaigned as fiscally conservative independents, but the Wall Street Journal reveals that these so-called blue-dog Democrats generally have been supporters of higher taxes and bigger government. Too bad these fiscal frauds aren’t more like the “Boll Weevil” Democrats, members of Congress who provided the margin of victory for many reforms to limit the burden of government during the Reagan years:

So far this year the blue dogs have been almost all bark when it comes to fiscal restraint and debt reduction. Thirty of the 48 have voted for every one of the non-defense spending bills their committee chairman have sent them. …28 of the 48 blue dogs voted “no” on each of the 27 amendments that Republicans proposed to cut the costs of these bills. …Voting records from recent years confirm that the blue dogs are less than consistent spending hawks. The National Taxpayers Union did some checking and found that the blue dogs had an average fiscal score of 24 out of 100, earning them a grade of D as a group. It also found that last year the blue dogs sponsored $145 of new spending for every dollar of budget reductions, for a net spending increase per member of more than $140 billion. The blue dogs are consistent on one fiscal issue: stopping tax cuts. As a group they opposed the Bush tax cuts and the extension of those tax cuts, and a super-majority vote requirement to raise taxes–all in the name of easing the debt burden on future generations. But those concerns evaporated when all but nine in the blue dog coalition voted to expand the Schip health-care program to include many middle-class families, at a cost of $132.6 billion over the 2008–2017 period.