Politico...
GOP suffers from pledge fatigue
By Scott Wong
6/28/11 

Republicans aren’t racing to sign on the dotted line of a new anti-spending pledge, even as dozens of conservative grass-roots groups and tea party kingmaker Sen. Jim DeMint demand it. 

Of the leading Republican presidential candidates, only former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has signed the so-called Cut, Cap, Balance pledge; 12 of 47 Republicans in the Senate are on board; and in the House, only 22 out of 242 party members have come forward to support it. 

By contrast, nearly every Republican serving in Congress — 41 in the Senate and 235 in the House — has signed Grover Norquist’s influential pledge to oppose all efforts to raise taxes. 

The cool reception toward the week-old campaign is a sign of the GOP’s fatigue with oaths on taxes, spending and other issues — litmus tests of political purity that often fracture the party and threaten to undermine its messaging. 

GOP leaders and rank-and-file members alike have voiced support for the underlying principles of the new pledge, which would require them to oppose hiking the debt limit without first adopting a balanced-budget amendment and other major spending reforms. 

But lawmakers are wary of how drafters of the pledge will interpret its meaning and whether the oath will hamstring Republicans amid a crucial round of debt and deficit negotiations with the White House that kicked off this week. 

“I think I’ve kind of supported enough pledges,” freshman Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told POLITICO. “I’ve restricted myself too much this Congress.” 

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), one of Sarah Palin’s conservative “Mama Grizzlies” who signed Norquist’s anti-tax pledge while running for election last year, said she wouldn’t ink her name to the new pledge. And she’s not certain she’ll sign any others in the future. 

“I support the concepts in their pledge, but what matters most is my pledge to uphold the United States Constitution,” Ayotte told POLITICO. “I’m looking very carefully at all pledges because I want to make sure I support the underlying concepts. People who draft pledges tend to define what they mean differently.” 

Read the rest of the story at Politico