97 Pages

Can Senators and Congressmen/women get reelected without generating some special (and often completely unneeded or at least profoundly wasteful) local benefits? Is it possible for an elected official to support nationally-beneficial legislation that may hurt his or her local district? Can earmarks ever be contained? Would you believe that under our system of government, the answer appears to be “never, not ever, no way, not, no!”?

We can take a recent but pretty egregious example, Democratic Senator Ben Nelson’s exempting his home state, Nebraska, from ever (forever!) contributing the state share of Medicaid, in exchange for his support of the healthcare legislation. In the first decade alone, if this bill passes, federal taxpayers will contribute an estimated $45+ billion of national money to pay for the only state in the union that is now exempt from making its state contribution to the Medicaid fund. If every state did that, fine, and we’d have a national policy, but a couple of states… one state… and the unfairness is obvious. But Nelson’s constituency is not the United States; he is only accountable to Nebraska voters, and he may have saved them a ton! Does that make him a Nebraskan above being an American?

The December 29^th Washington Post tracks the current flow of pork through the federal legislative stockyard: “[P]ause for a moment and consider that there are 97 pages listing nearly 1,000 congressional earmarks in the 543-page report by the House-Senate conferees on the $626 billion defense appropriations bill signed by President Obama this month… They cover every category from procurement to operations and maintenance to research and development, with the last group alone spanning more than 77 of those pages. Who is to say what kind of impact these separate transfers of what may be $5 billion will have on our defense posture -- and on our intelligence operations, since that money is also in the bill?”

Instead of reflecting the shame of embracing waste and unnecessary spending in a time of national economic desperation, our elected representatives are even proud of their local efforts, making sure that the local press picks up on their porky machinations. Some examples from the Post:

· Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Michael A. Arcuri, both New York Democrats, got $2.4 million earmarked in the final [defense appropriations] bill to upgrade 3,000 M-24 sniper rifles. Although a contract will be up for bidding, the two legislators issued a news release on Dec. 17 saying they expect that Remington Arms, the original manufacturer, would be successful and that all work would be done at the company's Ilion, N.Y., factory… [Although the M-4 has some very limited value in Afghanistan, the] bolt-action rifle, which first came into service in 1988, fell out of use when semi-automatics became popular.

· In a statement released the day the appropriations bill passed Congress, Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.) [a self-proclaimed fiscally conservative “Blue Dog Democrat”] heralded his earmark for $1.5 million to continue development work on a non-gasoline-burning outboard engine for the Navy Special Operation Forces' underwater systems… What's interesting about this earmark is that the U.S. Special Operations Command began its search for such an engine in 1995 and halted funding for research on it in 2008… The sixth highest-ranking member of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, Boyd was not shy about telling his constituents of his other earmarks in the Pentagon spending bill… When the bill passed the committee, he said, he obtained $18 million worth of projects for the Panama City Navy base and Tyndall Air Force Base, another facility in Boyd's district that is facing a reduction in operational activity. When the bill passed the House in October, Boyd claimed $17 million for the Navy and Air Force facilities.

We’ve had proposals that a commission be established to filter Congressional bills that favor local constituencies to measure waste, but needless to say, these proposals go down in flames. The Obama administration pledged to fight porky earmarks, but in the horse-trading world of Congress, that pledge is impossible to keep. America is government “of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests”… fractionalized along party lines, dominated by those with enough money to have generated special access to our “deciders,” and polarized to what I see as the greatest split in the American body politic since the Civil War.

We may not be able to stop this pattern of waste and self-interest at the expense of what is best for the nation as a whole… but we can keep shining a light on this dysfunction in the hopes that we can moderate its abusive and destructive force on the entirety of what we still call the United States of America.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.