Congress Fattens Up Emergency Supplemental

If there is any case for presidential line-item veto power it would be this bill--U.S. Readiness, Veterans’ Health and Iraq Accountability Act. This bill is supposed to be about funding the brave soldiers fighting the war on terror but it has become more than that with all the riders that Congress has added to it. I would list all the riders it has but it contains eighteen riders on it! Not including the minimum wage law. None of which has anything to do about the Iraq war or the war on terror. Can you say got pork? The drive-by-cloned-media will do little reporting on this bill. All the media cares about is why President Bush fired eight attorneys (President Clinton fired a lot more than that--not a word from the press)--one of which was quitting anyway to return to the private sector. But I digress. Here are some of the pork that the Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) lists (my comments are in parenthesis):

• $500 million for emergency wildfires suppression; the Forest Service currently has $831 million for this purpose.
• $400 million for rural schools. (Why just rural schools? Throwing money at schools does not solve their problems if the schools spend the money foolishly. Besides, shouldn't this be local school districts and state responsibility?)
• $283 million for the Milk Income Loss Contract program. (I did not know there was a milk crises. Don't you just love that title!)
• $100 million for citrus assistance.
• $74 million for peanut storage costs.
• $25 million for spinach growers.

Add it up. Just what I listed adds up to $2,213. The total pork sum is (drum roll please): $9.9 billion! President Bush only asked for $103 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. The reader can go to the CAGW web site to read the complete list if you want.

Here is the catch-22. Imagine you are a fiscally responsibility Congress-person (yea I know that sounds like an oxymoron) that does not like pork but wants to monetarly support the military in the battlefield. What do you do? If you are that Congress-person and vote against the bill then it will appear you don't support the troops. You know that your opponents will use that against you. The end result--you vote for the bill. As Glenn Beck says (hat tip to him for bringing this issue to my attention on his TV show) the troops are for sale. That is really sad.

If people are really concerned with deficit spending and fiscal responsibility in government then you either need line-item veto for the president or law that says you cannot add riders to bills if you are against the line-item veto. Those are the two solutions. If you do the latter solution then the bill should be easily stated in one sentence. For example this bill could state: Funding for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan only. I got this idea from my college years. When you write a procedure for a program it should have only one function. That way it is easier to debug and test. I think line-item veto is the easier solution to implement though.

Basically, pork happens for two reasons. Politicians offer money to their constituents. The constituents take the money. Supply and demand. The politicians have no self-control to stop the supply and the constituents enable the politicians by demanding more money. If constituents did not take the money then the vicious cycle would diminish eventually.