Posted on 08/15/2002 9:27:05 PM PDT by j271
By Terence P. Jeffrey
A rare event occurred in Washington, D.C., last week. Good triumphed over evil in the House appropriations process.
A gang of conservatives caught the College of Cardinals—the ever-arrogant chairmen of the 13 House Appropriations subcommittees—in the act of pick-pocketing taxpayers. They promptly made a citizens’ arrest. Here’s how they did it:
The Cardinals are a pork-barrel cartel that conspires each year to rip-off taxpayers with unnecessary spending. They have tried-and-true tactics for doing so. First among these is setting up a schedule for appropriations bills that facilitates lying and cheating.
Specifically, they always save the biggest, potentially most-pork-laden bill for last. That is the bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. These are agencies that both Democrats and "moderate" Republicans always want to massively increase.
All of Washington knows that as fall approaches—especially in an election year—the political pressure to dump pork into this bill can become overwhelming.
With this bill last, appropriators pass out bills for smaller departments first. They heap these high with spending the President has not requested and that was not approved in the House budget resolution. They are not really busting that budget, they claim, because they intend to pay for this early pork by carving money later out of Labor-HHS-Education or other big bills at the end of the session.
Appropriators are like Wimpy in the Popeye cartoon. They are always saying, "I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."
It is a transparent lie. Rep. David Obey (D.-Wis.), a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, admitted as much last Tuesday. "[I]n essence," he said, "we have a charade."
And the Cardinals have ways of dealing with members who won’t participate in the charade. They can cut funding for projects in a congressman’s district, or increase it when he has a change of heart. But this year the appropriators ran into something new: a band of conservatives who did not cower.
They started as a Gang of Four from among the members of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC). Pat Toomey (Pa.) was the prime mover, joined by Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Mike Pence (Ohio) and John Shadegg (Ariz.), chairman of the RSC. They devised a strategy to counter the Cardinals.
If the Cardinals sent budget-busting bills to the floor early, the gang would launch what amounted to a filibuster. Under House rules for spending bills, members can offer amendments for each line item in the bill. Every member is entitled to speak for five minutes on every amendment. The gang recruited about 25 RSC members willing to sponsor and speak for amendments. They would stall pork-laden bills until they were cut down to size, or the Cardinals capitulated.
The Cardinals prepared a counter-assault.
Many RSC members are from the West. Some—notably Shadegg, Flake and J. D. Hayworth—are from Arizona, which was hit recently by forest fires. So the Cardinals sent out the Interior Department bill first (after the war-driven, relatively pork-free Defense and Military Construction bills, which faced little opposition.) The Interior bill called for $1.47 billion more spending than the House budget resolution to which the Cardinals themselves had agreed.
Appropriators figured Western conservatives would have a hard time opposing the bill because most Interior lands are in the West. To make it doubly difficult, they topped the bill off with $700 million in emergency funding for fighting forest fires. (To add insult to injury, this money would not be available to firefighters until after October 1—when the fire season is over.)
To make sure the Westerners got the point, Appropriations ranking member Obey sent a press release to Arizona newspapers headlined: "Reps. Shadegg, Flake and Hayworth Work to Slash Firefighting Funds."
The conservatives did not cave. When the bill hit the floor, they came armed with 100 amendments. When the first line-item was read—spending for the Bureau of Land Management—Toomey offered an amendment to cut the agency’s funding to its inflation-adjusted 1996 level. Conservatives held the floor for two hours making sequential five-minute speeches. Finally, the amendment was voted down.
Then Flake offered an amendment to cut the agency’s budget to last year’s level. The appropriators were apoplectic—and successfully moved to limit debate. But the conservatives began using five-minute speeches to debate the overall bill.
"The intelligence we heard is that the appropriators just didn’t believe that we would do it," said Flake, "and they weren’t ready for it." By midnight the Cardinals wanted to negotiate.
The next day, at the urging of House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill.), the Cardinals agreed to bring up the Labor-HHS-Education bill as the first business in September, and to push most of the remaining small appropriations until after that. More importantly, they agreed to report the Labor-HHS-Education bill at the level the President’s budget request and not a penny more.
This could save taxpayers many billions of dollars.
What should that teach conservatives? "When we stick together and stick to our convictions and use the strategies and tactics that are available to us," said Toomey, "we are able to have an impact." In other words, you can’t win a war until you decide to fight it.
The only thing that concerns me is that the deal they struck with the "Cardinals" (I've never heard this expression before) may ultimately be ignored by the liberal Dems and Repubs. Liberals have a way of ignoring deals they have previously made, as we found out during the 8 years of the Clinton Admin. I hope the conservatives have a backup plan in case they get jobbed.
Samuel Adams
I've read about these guys before in National Review.
[profound quote.]
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