It’s Not Arbitrary Pettiness, Guys.
From PJStar.com:
What do child predators, wildfires, crops and shrimp have to do with U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Sorry, there’s no punchline to that setup. The answer is, of course, nothing. Which is why we’re not laughing at an attempt last week by certain congressional Democrats to tie a supplemental military funding bill to a bunch of unrelated matters.
In the Senate’s version of the war legislation these “domestic add-ons,” as they’re being called, included $50 million to track kiddie predators, $350 million to fight Western fires, $400 million in rural school assistance and $75 million to prop up commercial fisheries. Another add-on was a provision awarding extended work permits for hundreds of thousands of immigrant farm laborers.
The House’s version, meanwhile, had $5.8 billion for New Orleans’ levees. It also tacked on a measure to extend unemployment for Americans whose benefits have run out, and another to block the Bush administration’s attempt to cut Medicaid.
Look, our objection is not to these domestic priorities in and of themselves. Each one is an important issue worthy of due congressional consideration.
But they absolutely do not belong next to the $165 billion necessary to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the rest of President Bush’s term.
Indeed, riddling the war legislation with add-ons was a purely political move. For some Democrats, it was a dare to Bush — if he wants his war bucks, he’ll have to choke down a spoonful of unrelated spending, as he did last year to the tune of $17 billion. For some Republicans, it was an opportunity to support the war and bring home the bacon to constituents. GOP Sen. Richard Shelby, for instance, eagerly sent out a press release to Alabamans bragging about fishery assistance.
Tomfoolery like this is why Americans can’t stand politics. And it’s a disservice to the thousands of Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the fate of their funding gets hung up on Capitol Hill.
So bizarre are the political motivations involved and so entangled are the defense/domestic add-on measures that some fiscally conservative House Republicans actually helped anti-war House Democrats defeat the military funding.
Congress should let war spending — and child predator spending, and Medicaid spending, and school spending, etc. — stand or sink on their own merits.
The entire premise of this article is wrong, and if this is the depth of his or her understanding of rather common methods and processes, the author of this opinion piece should probably never write about Washington politics again. Ever.
Really, I wish every budget problem could be analyzed by devaluing it as a cheap political game. First off, if you think Congress never gets anything done now, could you imagine if they had to make a separate bill for each individual funding request, then debate and vote on each? No thanks. That’s what the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are for.
The fact of the matter is, if Congress tried passing any of these on their own (or even attached to another, less important bill), there’s a chance Bush would veto them but a better chance they’d never get called to the floor. Since this particular bill is one that needs to pass no matter what, it’s their best chance of getting the requested funding. What Congressional Democrats (and even a healthy number of Republicans) have finally realized is that the only way to pass much-needed spending is to attach it to something the president wants.
The hypocrisy of this article struck me as well. Bush is the one who started playing hardball by vetoing everything that came to his desk. Now that Congress is playing hardball, it’s suddenly unfair? The article even states that these attachments are important. What, then, does it tell us when both parties feel it is necessary to add them to a war spending bill to get the funding they need? It tells me that the president can’t be reasoned with and needs to be led by the proverbial carrot to make any progress. You may have noticed similar problems Illinois lawmakers are having with the governor.
Unfortunately, the Journal Star’s new website doesn’t have a category titled “Abject Filler and Other Banalities,” so this article ended up in the Opinion section. That’s the unfortunate drawback of opinions; you don’t have to be informed to have one.
May 29th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
That’s exactly right.
The only way to get important bills passed is to attach them innocuously to something that the Pres is positively going to ok.
It’s a little underhanded, but I can see Bush saying screw commercial fishermen, I have a war to fight!