Posted by
Always To The Right on Monday, March 09, 2009 3:50:11 PM
Democrats have engaged in a strange new political campaign on behalf of pork-barrel spending. The Washington Times
reports on the new public-relations battle to make Capitol Hill pork as
hip as Twitter and as American as … well, pork pie, apparently. In
doing so, they not only skip over their entire 2006-8 rhetoric about
the “culture of corruption,” they also dishonestly avoid mentioning one
important difference between earmarks and agency procurement
Durbin speaks dishonestly in a number of different ways. Congress
can mandate projects without mandating the actual line items for that
project, so the argument that certain projects wouldn’t get funded is
entirely specious. Also, Durbin says this with a straight face while
Congress mandates million-dollar bikepaths in transportation bills
while complaining about the infrastructure of roads and bridges. An
assertion that Congress has better judgment is easily disproven by each
session it meets and produces these kinds of pork items.
Durbin also lies about “public scrutiny”. What public scrutiny
could he possibly mean? Most earmarks don’t get released until either
just before a final vote on passage, especially on “airdropped”
earmarks inserted into conference reports. Instead of a public vote on
each earmark, Congress attaches them in bills without a vote on them at
all. It takes an amendment to attempt to get public debate and a
separate vote on any earmark, which are routinely defeated by both
parties. Until 2007, Congress didn’t even require its members to take
ownership of their earmarks. Only then do we see PMA’s success in
getting earmarks for its clients in return for prodigious amounts of
political contributions, which Congress won’t even investigate.
Public scrutiny? Does Durbin think we’re that stupid?
Finally, the idea that earmarks spend money more effectively is
blatant and hypocritical hogwash. Congress rightly mandates a
competitive bidding process for agencies in their procurement, but
earmarks allow Congress to bypass those requirements for itself.
Earmarks do not have RFPs and competitive bids. Representatives and
Senators effectively write checks to favored constituents, checks drawn
on taxpayer dollars, with no idea whether the product or service is the
most cost-efficient or even acceptable. And agencies have to accept
the contracts without challenging such vendors with competing bids.
Competitive bidding would make political contributions irrelevant to
the success of a business, and therefore would eliminate a big chunk of
incumbency’s advantage over challengers.
And that’s what pork is: an incumbency-protection racket that
hijacks representative democracy in favor of patronage systems and
lifelong sinecures at the government teat.