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Friday, October 21, 2005

On The Coburn Amendment

In Congress, pork is an institution, and that’s a problem. Special and not-so-urgent local projects being funded by the federal government: those are inevitable. And not all bad. The ability to fund pork barrel projects does to some extent benefit certain communities, does incentivize congressmen to work hard, and does create a signaling and quantification system between constituents and representatives. The problem occurs when pork becomes an institution, and the fact that in Congress the ability to spend recklessly on budget-rending projects is held as a general tenet has been made terribly plain in the reaction to the spending amendment of Tom Coburn (R-OK), which would line item veto Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) infamous $220M bridge.

The amendment failed 15-82. Daily Kos has a list of the honorable senators who voted for it. Before it went up for roll call, Ted Stevens marched to the well of the Senate, climbed up nine flights of scaffold, hopped on top of the World’s Largest Soapbox, and proclaimed to his fellow loose spenders that if the Coburn amendment passes, he’d resign from the Senate.

And Patty Murray (D-WA) got on the floor and announced to any Senators who vote for the amendment: ‘we on the Appropriations Committee will take a long, hard look at any projects in your state.’

Suffice it to say, Stevens is still there and Murray hasn’t broken out the red pen. That’s not because everyone else is sold on the Bridge to Nowhere, or because most senators are blue-hearted about rebuilding New Orleans. It is because pork is seen as an institution not subject to line item veto. If Coburn’s bridge gets dashed, what will become of my animal facility in Westerly, Rhode Island or my sculpture park in Seattle or my parking facility for a private museum in Omaha, Nebraska? [Google those.]

That is why senators weren’t arguing against the facts of the situation—the notion that money to rebuild a bridge for millions of people might take priority over a brand-new bridge for 70 people. Instead, people like Ted Stevens said it was about some vague notion of state equality: “This is the first time I have seen any attempt of any senator to treat my state in a way different from any other state.”

Stevens’ problem is with the fact that a specific, targetable, identifiable, quantifiable pork barrel project was to be cut. He calls it discrimination. But it isn’t discrimination against your state, Senator, it is discrimination against your spending.

I suspect he (and the other 87 who voted against Coburn’s bill) would have been fine with vainglorious and eminently circumventable “reform bills”. But when you actually try to stop the green bleeding, no gauze allowed.

The silver lining is that Tom Coburn has made precedent. I hope and expect to see more bills this session that will either cede special projects to help pay for relief or will attack other projects in order to do the same.

There are times and places for pork; I outlined some at the top of this post. And the general rule in the Senate is that you just don’t attack a colleague’s chops. In general, all-out warfare on every special project would bog the Senate down to absolute stasis. But this isn’t a normal situation: there are deficits and horrors in one corner of America. Will our representatives sacrifice one of their electioneering mechanisms in order to help struggling Americans?

Thanks to Tom Coburn, we will all be very sure how our elected officials answer that question.

Posted on October 21, 2005 06:24 AM. Permalink