By Kerry Young

Senate appropriators have only just begun to mark up their fiscal 2013 spending bills, but Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson has made it clear he’s not buying into the clubby traditions of the Appropriations Committee.

Johnson, a plastics company owner who had not held elective office before winning his Senate seat in 2010, is sticking with the tea party-backed ideology that helped him win. That now includes demanding roll call committee votes instead of the voice votes that have expedited work in years past. The tactic forces colleagues to take positions on spending details they might just as soon not have on the record.

“We should actually be voting on these things,” Johnson said at one point.

That means there probably will be at least four roll call votes at the subcommittee level this year, compared with only three such votes in the eight years before Johnson joined the panel.

Johnson also wants appropriations to adopt some practices from its House counterpart, such as publicly releasing the text of spending bills 24 hours before a markup.

Some conservative groups have praised Johnson’s approach, but GOP colleagues, including Susan Collins of Maine, have taken exception to it. “I do not want people to have the impression that somehow this has been business as usual,” she said at a markup a week ago. “Every one of our subcommittees has had to make deep painful cuts, set priorities and make difficult choices.”

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