The past week’s defeat of Harry Reid’s $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill was, in itself, only a temporary victory for fiscal sanity. Remember that Democrats never passed a fiscal year 2011 federal budget because they didn’t want to pay the political price for the irresponsible pile of crap it surely would have represented.

Imagine them doing even worse at the polls than they did in November. That’s what they hoped to avoid by saying, “Budget? We don’t really need one of those, do we?”

So with 12 days remaining in the year, and FY 2011 already underway, Congress needs to pass some sort of spending authorization to keep the government running. It won’t be the earmark-larded abomination Reid tried to sneak through, but that’s no guarantee the new Republican majority will pass something that puts the nation on the road to fiscal health. They can prove themselves there when they get the chance in January.

But the fact that Reid’s bill was defeated at all, especially during the lame-duck session while Democrats still control both houses of Congress, suggests that something very dramatic has happened in the country. This sort of bill is never defeated. Ronald Reagan never found a way to stop one. Neither did Newt Gingrich. Some believe George W. Bush never tried, but he would have had to go to war with a Congress of his own party in order to do so.

No matter how much the public may believe in the abstract that spending is out of control, Congress spends – especially on earmarks targeted specifically for goodies back in their districts. And when Reid unveiled a bill that included a pile of previously unfunded earmark requests from wavering GOP senators, he surely thought he could cobble together enough Republican votes to pass the Democrats’ last spending hurrah before January.

Many are giving Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell credit for holding his caucus together, and even convincing notorious earmarkers like Thad Cochrane of Mississippi (who had 230 earmarks in the bill!) and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to vote the bill down.

Yeah, McConnell did good work, but is this the same Mitch McConnell who was opposed until recently to the banning of earmarks? Was this the same Thad Cochrane and Lisa Murkowski who never saw a slice of federal pork they didn’t want to bring home to their constituents?

It is, only in one important respect: They put their political survival above all else, and they have always been earmarking pigs precisely because they saw that as their best re-election insurance. Up until now, nothing has ever happened to call that strategy into question.

But the public has changed this year, and the GOP isn’t sure the change is only temporary. The public no longer turns a blind eye to the long-term fiscal consequences of profligate federal spending. The public no longer objects to out-of-control spending in the abstract while continuing to demand federal goodies back home. It recognizes that nothing will change unless everyone is on board with the change.

The current political atmosphere in the country does not reward those who talk a good game about spending discipline, but keep bringing the federal bacon to the folks back home as if it isn’t real money. Not only that, but the political atmosphere no longer means instant death to those who entertain the need for entitlement reform, since people are coming to understand that’s where the real spending challenge needs to be met.

Perhaps the GOP has learned the lessons of history as well. Its 12-year run in control of Congress from 1995-2006 was not a particularly long reign, and an honest assessment of those years will reveal that they really didn’t help themselves by merely shifting the big spending from Democratic constituencies to their own. How can you make the case for limited government and fiscal restraint when, given the chance, you don’t practice it? If all we’re going to do is having a spending contest, we might as well elect the real spending pros – Democrats – to do that.

If Mitch McConnell in the Senate and John Boehner in the House are resolved to really hold the line on federal spending, it’s not because they don’t want to spend. It’s because they now believe you don’t want them to.

The defeat of the Reid spending bonanza won’t mean anything until we see what Congress actually does decide to spend. But the defeat of such a bill never would have happened in the past, and the fact that it did this year at least goes to show that the public has got the GOP’s attention.

Perhaps serious new Republicans like Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson (and OK, Rand Paul too) will make it impossible for the leadership to revert back to their old ways. In the past, folks like this more often than not tended to be co-opted by the system. But the system is ultimately about the political survival of those who comprise it. If the public has changed its measure of who will survive – and why – even the most self-serving spenders of the past will have no choice but to change with it.

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