Oh, So It’s Like That, Is It?

Seems another Congressman thinks we out here in VoterLand are getting a bit uppity.

Appropriations members have already vowed to fight any move to strip spending from the bill. “I’m not going to take their crap,” Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said last week. The Illinois appropriator said he included several projects for his district and would fight to keep them all.

“They think they’ve gotten a little steam building, and we’re going to have to shoot them down,” LaHood said. He ripped RSC members this year on the House floor for successfully stripping $507 million in construction projects from a military spending bill.

Here’s the “crap” to which the indignant Congressman is referring. I’ll sum up my understanding of the process and won’t hit the gory details. I welcome anyone who wants to come along and refine my description or correct it if I’m in error.

When a government agency doesn’t spend all the money it’s allocated for a given year, that money gets sent back to Congress. Congress is not obliged, under the current rules, to list that money as a savings. In fact, they’re not obliged to do anything with it at all. In the past, the Appropriations Committee has used that unspent money to pad out its bills, without reporting it.

So let’s say that there was 500 million dollars unspent last year. The committee could send out an appropriations bill that called for 3 billion dollars in new spending, plus that 500 million from the year before and they only have to say it’s a 3 billion dollar spending bill instead of a 3.5 billion dollar one. Traditionally, the commitee uses that off the books slush fund as a way to pad out earmarks.

What the mavericks in the Republican Study Committee want to do is to make that hidden money public in some way, to make Congress more accountable for how it spends out money.

That is what Congressman LaHood says is “crap” and what he’s fighting tooth and nail because he wants to keep his pet projects. He’s miffed because the young bucks of the RSC have already cost him and his fellow spendaholics $507 million and he doesn’t want them to cost him any more vote-buying cash.

And make no mistake – that’s exactly what earmarks are. They are the very best way an incumbent member of Congress has of buying votes from his constituents. If he can demontrate that he’s brought the bacon back to his district, he has a powerful campaign tool, regardless of whether or not that money was well-spent or not. Note some of the earmarkes the RSC is targeting right now.

The complete list of those projects was not yet available by press time, but it included $500,000 to the city of Yucaipa, Calif., “for the design and construction of a multipurpose athletic facility at Crafton Hills College” and $1.5 million for construction of a William Faulkner Museum at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., where the author attended college.

Does anyone really believe that the Federal government ought to be buying an athletic facility or a museum for a local municipality? If Oxford wants a William Faulkner Museum, it can build one just fine on its own, providing that Congress takes less money from the citizens of Oxford so the town is free to raise taxes to do so. That, of course, supposes the town really wants the museum funded entirely out of its own pocket instead of partially out of yours and mine.

It seems like Congressman LaHood just lined up against our best interests. I sincerely hope that whoever runs against him uses this quote early and often to run him out of office.

(h/t: Captain Ed)

UPDATE: Want another reason to take LaHoodand his cohorts to the woodshed? How about this?

Aided by surging tax receipts, President Bush may make good on his pledge to cut the deficit in half in 2006 — three years early.

Tax revenues are running $176 billion, or 12.9%, over last year, the Treasury Department said Monday. The Congressional Budget Office said receipts have risen faster over the first eight months of fiscal ’06 than in any other such period over the past 25 years — except for last year’s 15.5% jump.

The 2006 deficit through May was $227 billion, down from $273 billion at this time last year. Spending is up $130 billion, or 7.9%.

The CBO forecast in May that the 2006 deficit could fall as low as $300 billion. Michael Englund, chief economist of Action Economics, has long expected a deficit of about $270 billion this year. Now he thinks there’s a chance the “remarkable strength in receipts” will push the deficit even lower.

If the RSC can prevail, even just a little bit, in holding back their party’s yearly reenactment of Supermarket Sweep, we could be talking surpluses.

Think about that. Surpluses. While we’re fighting a global war. Just a couple years out of a recession and the economy-crippling day of 9/11/2001. With George W. Bush’s tax cuts.

I imagine that more than a few Republicans would give up their precious earmarks in return for a Republican landslide in 2008, which is exactly what would happen if we started running surpluses on top of the red-hot economy we have right now. Campaign Message Number One from anyone running for office right now ought to be “Elect Me and We Can Run a Surplus in Two Years”. Right now, any candidate that will fight the war we’re in vigorously and help reign in the spend-crazy Congress would get my vote, regardless of party.

Well, okay. Maybe most of them wouldn’t give up their vote-buying power, but a few would and a few is all we need to stop Congress from treating you and me like a bottomless ATM.

(h/t: Instapundit, via Ace)

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Category: Political Pontifications