Coyote Blog

The separation of powers concept, so fundamental in our Constitution to checking government power grabs, seems to be on life support.  The reason I say this is that for separation of powers to work, each branch of the government has to, you know, actually monitor and try to check power grabs in other branches.   What I see today are three branches that have kind of reached some sort of peace treaty, agreeing to let the others run amok as long as it is allowed to do so itself.  To support this hypothesis, I make the following observations:

• The executive branch continues to try to accumulate power, adding "indefinite detentions without trial" and "warrantless searches" to its arsenal, justifying nearly anything with the blanket argument that "the world is different post 9/11."  The Supreme Court has generally proved itself unwilling to do anything about it, which should be all the more the case in the future since both Bush appointees seem very comfortable with accretions of executive power.  Even the opposition party, though willing to make verbal assaults, seems unwilling to take any real measures.

• Congress seems perfectly willing to spend their time wallowing in pork and dreaming up new earmarks to satisfy prominent donors.  The current budgeting process is a fiasco, and the executive branch seems unwilling to exercise any adult supervision, including an incredible record of zero vetos is nearly 6 years.  Congress has shied away from working on any issues of any seriousness (e.g. Social Security) which is perhaps good for us, since their only attempt to fix runaway spending in Medicare resulted in them adding an expensive and ridiculously complex drug benefit.  Congress and the President conspired to pass the egregious McCain-Feingold speech limit bill, which effectively helps protect the job of Congressional incumbents and protects them from 3rd party criticism when approaching an election.

• With Congress unwilling to address any legislative issues of substance, the judiciary seems perfectly happy to take their place, creating new law in hundreds of areas.  And Congress seems willing to let them.  It can only be dangerous for a Congressperson to deal with hot-button issues like gay marriage and abortion - its much better to let the judiciary do it for you.  Often Congressman can get the outcomes they want, without actually having to create a legislative record on the issue that might come up in a campaign.

The whole situation depresses me just writing about it.

Senator Coburn, now with John McCain in partnership, are going to challenge every single earmark in the Senate:

In short, Senators McCain and Coburn announced their
commitment to challenge each and every earmark on the floor of the
Senate. In addition to challenging each and every pork project,
Senators Coburn and McCain will also oppose the inclusion in conference
reports of any earmarks that did not pass either the House or Senate.

As
stated in the letter, the practice of inserting earmarks into
conference reports at the last minute "stifles debate and empowers
well-heeled lobbyists at the expense of those who cannot afford access
to power. Decisions about how taxpayer dollars are spent should not be
made in the dark, behind closed doors."

Good.  And with McCain's backing, it may work.  I say this because, for a variety of reasons, McCain has somehow become the "instant moral authority" of the Senate, bringing instant legitimacy and media attention to any issue he jumps on.  I am not sure, for example, that the egregious Campaign Finance Reform Act would have passed without his imprimatur.

Apparently, the defense de jour by pork-loving Senators is to make the claim that "well, earmarks are trivial compared to non-discretionary spending so let's focus on those larger buckets of cost." 

A couple of thoughts.  First, if the Senate can't control spending on bridges serving 50 people, they are never going to do it on Social Security.  Second, this is very disingenuous, since Congress has had years to address these other issues, and all they have done is increase (via the disastrous drug benefit) the costs of these programmed expenses rather than reduce them.  They gave up mid-stream, for example, on doing anything with Social Security.  Third, now is the time to strike while public attention is focused on these practices.  In particular, the current lobbying scandals put special focus on earmarking, since discretionary spending is order of magnitudes more susceptible to political corruption than are the programmed expenses.

This came to me via email a few minutes ago from Tom Coburn's office:

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) today called on Senate and House leaders from
both parties to make the elimination of earmarking, or pork politics, the
centerpiece of any reforms considered in the wake of the Jack Abramoff
scandal.  Abramoff has described the appropriations committees, and, by
extension, the appropriations process, as an "earmark favor
factory" in which influence and votes are bought and sold.   

"Congress does not need to reform the lobbying industry as much
as it needs to reform itself.  The willingness of politicians to abuse the
appropriations process through earmarking has caused the explosive growth in
the lobbying industry and encouraged the excesses illustrated by the Jack
Abramoff scandal.   It is not enough for our leaders to propose
reforms that might promote the appearance, but not necessarily the practice, of
ethical behavior," Dr. Coburn said. 

"For the American people, the Abramoff scandal is only beginning to
connect the dots between politicians, individual earmarks, lobbyists and
campaign contributions.  Behind each of the 14,000 earmarks Congress
approved last year is a story that many politicians will not want their
constituents to hear.  If Congress fails to enact meaningful reforms that
attack this climate of corruption at its source the public will, and should,
take reform into its own hands in November.

Keep up the good work.  I hope he doesn't find a horse's head in his bed.

Last week, the Senate got its temperature taken, with a vote that very effectively checked the health of the putative "World's Greatest Deliberative Body".  This was not a very invasive test, more like using an oral thermometer than having a colonoscopy.  Never-the-less, the results were stark:  The Senate is very sick.

The test was called the Coburn Amendment, and was a test to see how attached the Congress is to pork barrel spending.  The reason that the test was fairly non-invasive was that it it sought to move the spending from only a few of the most egregious pork projects in the highway bill, and shift the money to infrastructure replacement in New Orleans, a use that garners substantial public support.  The bill was voted down resoundingly, 86-13  (though both of our Arizona Senators voted for it, more credit to them).

This post from Mark Tapscott is a pretty good summary.

The charade [is] of endlessly mouthing the cliches of fiscal responsibility
while taking to record levels the shameful practice of log-rolling - "I'll vote
for your pet spending project no matter how bad it is if you vote for my pet
spending project, no matter how bad it is."

Members of Congress call it
"congressional courtesy." Weary taxpayers don't.

Closely related to
log-rolling is the congressional maxim that "to get along, you have to go
along," especially if you are a freshman or from a small state. Coburn is both a
freshman and from a state with only a handful of electoral
votes.

Senators and Representatives have been log-rolling since the First
Congress, of course, but never before with the intensity of the current GOP-led
Congress. Appropriations bills now routinely gain approval with hundreds or
thousands of "earmarks," which is Hill-talk for pork barrel projects inserted by
individual members to benefit their district or state.

Patty Murray, of Washington, freaked at the prospect of losing her poetry shelter or whatever it is they proposed cutting from the highway bill, and threatened Senator Coburn with excommunication from the go-along-Senators-club.  Coburn's response to the legendarily dimwitted Murray is here.

Murray (recorded):  You know, as the old saying goes, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and I tell my colleagues, if we start funding for individual projects, your project may be next.  And so, Mr. President, when members come down to the floor and
vote on this amendment, they need to know if they start stripping out this project, Senator Bond and I are likely to be taking a long, serious look at their projects, to determine whether they should be preserved during our upcoming conference negotiations.
               
             

Jed Babbin: Well, does that bother you,  Senator? I mean, are you worried so much about Oklahoma projects?
             

Tom Coburn: No. I don't ask for any projects.  I ran on a platform of saying the biggest problem we face in our country is financial and economic, and cultural in Washington, that if we don't change that, I promised you I will not earmark
a thing until the budget is in surplus.
             

JB: Wow.
             

TC: So I don't have any earmarks.
So I don't have any...you know, there's no power over me to withhold
earmarks, because I have none.
             

JB: Well, how tough is it going to be, though, to undo this culture of pork? I mean, the porksters are all around you. I mean, we're not naming names, but you're
                outnumbered there pretty solidly, so...
             

TC: Look, when the American people want things to change, they will change. Just as like in 1994, they changed? It's this year's time. Make them change. You know, hold them accountable. There's Democrats and Republicans up here, but we're all Americans, and we ought to be thinking about the
heritage that has come before us, and the legacy that's going 
to follow us. And the legacy that's going to follow us today is  a millstone around the neck of our grandchildren, because we're going to leave them so far in debt, and we haven't even begun
to talk about how do we fix Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.

Ahh, but saving best for last, there is Alaska.  Many months ago, I took some shots at the famous bridge to nowhere, and called Don Young the New Huey Long.  Now, even some Alaska residents are willing to give it up to help New Orleans:

The amendment became a cause celebre on the left and the
right, with watchdog and conservative groups reporting updates on their
Web sites throughout the day. The Club for Growth alerted readers early
yesterday on its Web log, or blog: "As of last night, the opposition is
putting up a big fight. They sense this amendment, if successful, as
establishing a precedent. A precedent where all pork is vulnerable and
no lawmaker is safe."

Later in the day, the Heritage
Foundation circulated a paper, "The Bridge to Nowhere: A National
Embarrassment," and noted, "fiscally responsible members of Congress
should be eager to zero out its funding." Even the Sierra Club backed
the amendment, noting, "We must fix the nation's existing
infrastructure first."

And, there is a curious twist
to the story: Many residents of Alaska appear to support forfeiting the
bridge money for hurricane relief. "This money, a gift from the people
of Alaska, will represent more than just material aid; it will be a
symbol for our beleaguered democracy," reads a typical letter to the
Anchorage Daily News.

Young, who made sure his state
was one of the top recipients in the highway bill, was asked by an
Alaska reporter what he made of the public support for redirecting the
bridge money. "They can kiss my ear! That is the dumbest thing I've
ever heard," he replied.

Anyone want to be that a large portion of Mr. Young's campaign donations come from local construction contractors?

Via Glenn Reynolds:

Rep. Mark Udall has joined Republican budget hawks on legislation
that would give the White House new authority to pare congressional
spending bills. . . .

It would authorize the president to pull specific items out of
massive appropriations bills and then force Congress to hold up-or-down
votes on the proposed cuts. It would apply to fiscal year 2006 spending
bills, plus the huge, multiyear transportation plan that critics have
said is loaded with wasteful, pork barrel projects.

Doesn't mean a thing.  A)  Congress will never pass it.  B)  There is no evidence that Bush cares one whit about spending control and C)  There is absolutely no evidence that Bush is willing to veto anything out of Congress, since he already holds the veto pen rust award.

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to my representative John Shadegg as part of the PorkBusters campaign:

Representative
John Shadegg
Arizona
3^rd District

306
Cannon H. O. B.

Washington,
DC  20515

Congressman
Shadegg:

I
am a blogger who lives and runs a business in your district.  I know
that you were one of only 8 people in Congress to vote against the
recent pork-laden highway bill, something I congratulated you for on
my blog.  I now want to encourage you to continue fighting to reign
in government spending.  I am frankly flabbergasted to see the
current Republican leadership in Congress working so hard to resist
fiscal sanity, and am amazed that the Republican Party could have
drifted so far from its philosophical roots.

I
know that there are tremendous pressures on you to play the game with
everyone else in Congress, and bring home your share of pork to your
district.  Often those in your district will root for you to cut
other people's pork but not their own.  Let me say that I am totally
supportive of your cutting our 3^rd district pork first, as
a message that everyone needs to contribute to the spending cuts the
President has called for to pay for Katrina-related expenses.  You
are probably aware that many of us in the blogging world have banded
together in the "Porkbusters" effort to signal our desire to cut
pork by identifying our own local earmarks for cuts first.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

President Bush's call for Katrina spending to be offset by budget cuts has spurred a blogosphere effort to identify local pork urge Congress to cut the pork.  I am 98% behind this effort (the missing 2% being that the effort is spurred by a desire to spend the money somewhere else, rather than sending it back to taxpayers where it belongs).  Glenn Reynolds post that got the ball rolling is here.  His followup posts are here and here.  I will note the irony that I recently compared Don Young (of Alaska bridge to nowhere fame) to Huey Long (of multiple bridges to nowhere fame), given that we are looking to cut Don Young's pork to help Huey Long's old stomping ground.

Edward at Zonitics has already identified one of the most visible chunks of AZ pork, that is our earmarks in the recent highway bill.  These include nearly five million for a couple of pedestrian bridges, plus hundreds of millions for a rail system to run empty trains to compete with our empty buses.  Why does the rest of the country need to pay for Phoenix's growth?  Heck, we just took the money the feds saved us on this junk and spent it subsidizing a stadium for the Cardinals, for god's sakes.   I will note that of the mere 8 people who voted against the highway bill, 2 were from Arizona, including my 3rd district Congressman John Shadegg and libertarian Jeff Flake.  Flake, consistent with his libertarian principles (or in retribution for them?) represents the only district in the country without an earmark in the highway bill.

So, to push the ball forward, I will add another bit of Arizona pork.  I wanted to include some items form the energy bill, but I can't find a state by state impact.  But I can find, thanks to the environmental working group, a nice summary of farm subsidies to Arizona.  Here is a summary for the most recent year they have data:

And here is the same data but cut by recipient, with just the top 20 included:

I don't know all these folks, but I can say that all of the first three have extremely profitable casinos they operate.

I am writing my letter now to the my Congressman and Senators, and will post a copy as an update when I am done.  The ubiquitous NZ Bear has a data base he is building of pork identified.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

I trash the Congress a lot, but a brief thanks to our local Congressman John Shadegg who was one of only 8 folks who managed a "no" vote against the pork-laden highway bill.  Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake was also one of the eight.

Update:  Flake also wins an award as the only Congressman who did not slip a special appropriation for his own district into the bill.

Its never surprising to see Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake or Texas Congressman Ron Paul voting against pork, they are pretty consistent libertarians in their vote.  However, I have only just begun to follow my own Phoenix-area Congressman John Shadegg.  I was pleased to see that he stood up to considerable pressure and opposed the recent pork-filled Highway bill.

Of late, I have felt used by the Republican party, who put on small-government clothes to entice libertarians like me but who have generally abandoned all spending restraint now that they are in the majority.

Arizona has a history of producing some fairly libertarian politicians, and our Congressman Jeff Flake fits that mold.  Via the Club for Growth, Flake points out some more egregious pork:

Washington, D.C. - Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents the state's Sixth District, today highlighted another pork project contained in the massive omnibus spending bill that Congress passed late last year.  This week's egregious earmark: $1.5 million for a demonstration project to transport naturally chilled water from Lake Ontario to Lake Onondaga.

I just got back from about 10 days on vacation.  My bookkeeper takes care of all the mail that is vendor related, and I get what is left.  Unsurprisingly, I had about 60 pieces of mail, which is actually pretty low since we are in our off season.

However, when I started going through it, I was struck by how much was government related.  Out of those 60 pieces of mail, 5 were small checks (pay phone commissions, that type of thing), about 5 were from private parties and the rest was all government -- department of labor, department of revenue and taxation, vehicle registrations and issues, etc.  Have we really come to the point that 80% of my correspondence is with government regulatory and taxation authorities?  Part of this is because we are in 10 states, as I have discussed here, but it still seems excessive.

The one dominant piece of mail was a survey from the Department of Labor in every state we operate in.  The first thing I do with these surveys, as discussed here, is check to see if they are voluntary.  If so, they immediately get circular filed.  I don't want to spend the time, and I don't think the government needs the information.  In large part data is just the job security of the bureaucracy - more data means more people collecting and analyzing and reporting, and, the worst, proposing new regulations and taxes based on the data.

Two states, California and Florida, required the survey get done, so I did it.  Actually completing these surveys really got me irritated,  There is very little on this thing that we don't already report to the government.  Already, we have to report every individual person's wages each month or quarter.  Why is this not enough?  Mostly, this survey just asks me to aggregate the data the government already has in different ways.  Why can't they do that?  What are computers for, anyway?

UPDATE #1

I got the following comment:

And you'd like them to propose regulations based on incomplete data?

It is not the accuracy of data that is objectionable - it is the ridiculous detail.  For example, does the government really need to know monthly employment levels by detailed SIC code by county?  This just leads to some government staffer saying - hay, the employment in the tourism business in Maricopa county fell by 1% in August - we need a taxpayer funded initiative to promote tourism there, yada yada.  And whala, pork is born.  See examples here.