Tax, Spend, and Make Way for Speaker Pelosi
If serving up a platter of pork is how Republicans expect to win back their voters in the weeks ahead, they might as well hand over the gavel to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid right now. The half-trillion dollar budget bloat of the last five years is precisely what has placed the GOP majorities in the House and Senate in mortal danger. Tom Feeney, the second-term Republican House member from Florida, recently told us: "Sometimes I think we’d be better off with those old headlines reading ‘Republicans Attempt to Cut Federal Programs for Widows, Orphans and Grandmothers.’"
He was only half joking. Republicans are at risk of losing the House and Senate in no small part because of the untrammeled spending spree. Since 2001 the federal budget has risen by $750 billion. The increase over the past five years is bigger than the entire federal budget 30 years ago.
Unfortunately, House appropriators don’t see that as a problem. The biggest current spending bill, the so-called HHS-Education bill with its $146 billion bottom line, contains 1,700 earmarks with a price tag of nearly $500 million. There’s a pecking order for pork that shows up in this bill with the biggest bucks going to the committee bigwigs. Ralph Regula, chairman of the committee, takes home $10 million. Number 2 on the list is none other than Nancy Pelosi, with a take of $7.9 million. David Obey, the ranking Democrat on the committee, got his fair slice, coming in third place with $6.8 million to buy votes.
These earmarks are on top of the nearly 10,000 that have already been identified in this Congress. The increase over the past ten years, before this bill came to the floor, was 1,100%, according to Citizens Against Government Waste.
Meanwhile, the House Republican leadership continues to insist that earmarking reform is a top priority. House Speaker Denny Hastert wrote on August 31 to the entire House GOP caucus: "If the House and Senate have not produced a final lobbying and ethics reform conference report by the time we return from our August district work period in September, the House will move to immediately adopt and implement a comprehensive earmark reform… to ensure these new rules apply to all spending and tax measures that will go to the President’s desk this fall."
Speaker Hastert seems to understand that if Republicans lose the House, it will be in no small part because of the proliferation of pork spending. His challenge is to get that through the heads of the Republican appropriators.
— Stephen Moore