In the aftermath of the midterm elections, pundits have varying analyses of the “message” voters sent to Republicans. Explanations vary between the war in Iraq, the Mark Foley page scandal, Jack Abramoff’s conviction for corruption in his dealings with Congress, and others. All of these contributed to the loss of Republican control in both chambers.

However, one theme that runs through all of these explanations seems clear: Republicans forgot why they won their majority in the first place.

In 1994, Democrats had controlled the House for almost two generations. Republican control of the Senate had been fleeting for the same period of time. That led to an attitude of entitlement from Democrats, and resulted in a series of petty corruptions and a belief that the laws they passed for us didn’t apply to them. Fed up, voters wrested control away from Democrats and gave it to the reform-minded Republicans.

Twelve years later, they took it back. And like the Democrats in 1994, Republicans in 2006 appear hard of hearing on the message from voters over their disenchantment with GOP failures on reform.

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The newly-minted minority party conducted leadership elections last week. Rather than digest the message and the data from the election, the GOP ran pell-mell to re-elect the same leadership that lost the midterms. John Boehner and Roy Blunt are capable representatives, but they provided the leadership that continued to abuse earmarks for political gain, and ran the Republican House caucus during the period when Abramoff and other lobbyists corrupted the legislative process.

However, that pales in comparison to the action that the Senate GOP caucus took when it elected Trent Lott as minority whip. Lott’s attitude towards pork, and especially his attitude about the people who oppose pork spending, perfectly encapsulates why voters have grown disgusted with Congress and the Republican majority.

One of the major legislative reforms that came out of the last session of Congress was the Coburn-Obama spending database. Bill Frist managed to expertly get that through in the last days of the legislative calendar.

However, that dexterous performance only became necessary because Lott used an arcane Senate rule to kill the database back in March. Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., offered the database in an amendment to a lobbying reform bill under consideration, and he invoked Rule 22, which stripped the amendment from the bill for its supposed irrelevance to lobbying reform.

This naturally inspired a lot of criticism from the Blogosphere, which has focused on earmarks (especially secret earmarks) as a point of entry for corruption in Congress. In response to this criticism, Lott told an AP reporter that “I’ll just say this about the so-called Porkbusters. I’m getting damn tired of hearing from them.”

Porkbusters are taxpayers, and we have every right to question how our money gets spent. The fact that the question came in response to a $700 million project to relocate rail tracks in Mississippi that we had just spent $300 million repairing makes the point even more clear.

Lott belongs to a generation of politicians that believe that they are above the criticism of their constituents, and that we should just shut up and let our betters decide what to do with us.

Voters sent a variety of messages at the midterms, but wanting to be treated like interlopers in the handling of their taxes certainly wasn’t one of them. Yet the Republicans put this old-school politician in their second most powerful Senate job for the next two years.

If they want Lott to represent what the GOP learned from being stripped of their majority, then Republicans should prepare to spend more than a few years in the wilderness.

Ed Morrissey is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at Captainsquartersblog.com.