Porkbusting the Gulf Coast?
Posted by Moonage on 21 Sep 2005 | Tagged as: Conspiracy Theories, Katrina, Political Correctness
Every now and then, a cause gets going that sounds so simple it has to work. With the disaster in The Gulf Coast, a cause has taken root to take all the pork in the federal budget and spend it on rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Sounds simple. Sounds politically correct. The Truth Laid Bear has taken that cause and run with it. They start their page off with this statement:
The list below shows the amount of pork Representatives and Senators have committed to cutting as reported by bloggers and blog-readers who have contacted them. The goal is to get every Representative and every Senator to commit to cutting significant pork projects in their district or state. So if your representatives show as ‘NO CUTS COMMITTED’, contact them and ask what they would cut — then report back here and let the world know what they say!
They then list every single US Representative and Senator and their response to date.
This is wrong folks. For several reasons. Primarily because when you make blanket attacks on people, they react negatively. Secondly, and most importantly, most representatives have little to no impact on budgets. Let me start by giving porkbusters a primer in federal finance procedure:
The federal budget cycle begins each year with the preparation and submission to Congress of the President’s budget. The President’s budget is only a request to Congress; Congress is not required to adopt his recommendations. Nevertheless, the President’s budgetary proposals often guide congressional revenue and spending decisions, though the extent of the influence varies from year to year and depends more on political and fiscal conditions than on the legal status of the budget.
The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, as amended, establishes the congressional budget process as the means by which Congress coordinates its various budget-related actions. The process is centered around an annual concurrent resolution on the budget that sets aggregate budget policies and functional priorities for a multiyear period. Because a concurrent resolution is not a law — it cannot be signed or vetoed by the President — the budget resolution does not have statutory effect; no money can be raised or spent pursuant to it. The main purpose of the budget resolution is to establish the framework within which Congress considers separate revenue, spending, and other budget-related legislation. Revenue and spending amounts set in the budget resolution establish the basis for the enforcement of congressional budget policies through points of order. The budget resolution also initiates the reconciliation process for conforming existing revenue and spending laws to congressional budget policies.
Budget resolution policies are implemented by Congress through the enactment of annual appropriation and other spending measures, revenue measures, debt-limit legislation, and reconciliation bills. Each class of budgetary legislation is considered under its own set of rules and procedures.
The President may avail himself of special authority to impound appropriated funds. Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the President may propose the cancellation of spending; special procedures are included in the act to provide for House and Senate action on these proposals. Beginning in January of 1997, the President may use special line-item veto procedures to propose the cancellation not only of annual appropriations, but new entitlement spending and targeted tax benefits as well. The line-item veto procedures provide that the President’s recommendations go into effect unless disapproved by Congress within a relatively short period of time.
Now, what that basically says is all budgets come from appropriations committees. The President can veto the entire budget, and in special circumstances, items within a budget. The President can not, under any circumstances, add to a budget. Following me so far? If you are, then you’d know the key people to be contacted in the Senate would be:
| Richard Shelby | Ted Stevens | Wayne Allard |
| Sam Brownback | Mitch McConnell | Thad Cochran |
| Christopher Bond | Conrad Burns | Judd Gregg |
| Pete Domenici | Arlen Specter | Kay Bailey Hutchison |
| Robert Bennett | Robert Byrd |
These are the people that control the agenda of their respective appropriations. Unless they want to do something radical, nothing gets done.
However, you’re doing more harm than good if you harass:
- Jeff Sessions
- Lisa Murkowski
- John McCain
- Jon Kyl
- Blanche Lincoln
- Mark Pryor
- Dianne Feinstein
- Barbara Boxer
- Ken Salazar
- Chris Dodd
- Joe Lieberman
- Joe Biden
- Thomas Carper
- Bill Nelson
- Mel Martinez
- Saxby Chambliss
- Johnny Isakson
- Daniel Inouye
- Daniel Akaka
- Larry Craig
- Mike Crapo
- Richard Durbin
- Barack Obama
- Richard Lugar
- Evan Bayh
- Chuck Grassley
- Tom Harkin
- Pat Roberts
- Jim Bunning
- Mary Landrieu
- David Vitter
- Olympia Snowe
- Susan Collins
- Paul Sarbanes
- Barbara Mikulski
- Ted Kennedy
- John Kerry
- Cark Levin
- Debbie Stabenow
- Mark Dayton
- Norm Coleman
- Trent Lott
- Jim Talent
- Max Baucus
- Chuck Hagel
- Ben Nelson
- Harry Reid
- John Ensign
- John Sununu
- Jon Corzine
- Frank Lautenburg
- Jeff Bingaman
- Charles Schumer
- Hillary Clinton
- Elizabeth Dole
- Richard Burr
- Kent Conrad
- Byron Dorgan
- Michael Dewine
- George Voinovich
- James Inhofe
- Tom Coburn
- Ron Wyden
- Gordon Smith
- Rick Santorum
- Jack Reed
- Lincoln Chafee
- Lindsey Graham
- Jim DeMint
- Tim Johnson
- John Thune
- Bill Frist
- Lamar Alexander
- John Cornyne
- Orrin Hatch
- Patrick Leahy
- James Jeffords
- John Warner
- George Allen
- Patty Murray
- Maria Cantwell
- Jay Rockefeller
- Herbert Kohl
- Russ Feingold
- Craig Thomas
- Michael Enzi
These are the people that have very little to no control over one red cent. However, they do vote to approve appropriations put before them. Now, "outing" 86 people that have no control while accurately targeting the 14 that do is just going to give the 86 a bad taste about the entire effort. That’s not a good thing. Those 14 don’t do what they know there is no support for. You want those 86 pushing the 14.
On the House side, these are the people in charge:
| Henry Bonilla | C. W. Bill Young | David L. Hobson |
| Jim Kolbe | Harold Rogers | Charles H. Taylor |
| Ralph Regula | James Walsh | Frank R. Wolf |
| Joe Knollenberg | Jerry Lewis |
Those 11 are the ones that need to be on the list. The other 424 are the ones you want supporting the cause, not being annoyed by it.
What porkbusters needs to do is lay off the heavy handed targeting until they understand the process. Then, they need to accurately target those in control and educate and lobby those who are not.
Either way, what they are doing right now is bad wrong and isn’t accomplishing anything. I mean, look at it. The only person who’s committed to dealing with any of the pork is Nancy Pelosi. Is she the chairman of anything? How’s she gonna change an existing budget? Quick answer here folks, she can’t. She’s taking you guys for a ride.
Identify the pork. That’s good. But, put the responsibility where it’s due and you might get some results. Otherwise, you won’t.
The second point is that budgets are a catch-all situation. They cover huge arrays of services and projects. Money within the subcommittees can be moved without any special legislation or groundswell of public pressure. If agency A is way over budget and agency B is way under, money can be moved with nothing more than a stroke of the pen after the fact. Given the massive economic cost of Katrina, it will happen regardless of public pressure. No one in Washington has suggested borrowing one penny to deal with Katrina. They know there’s no need to. New roads not needed will be pushed back a year. Bridges going nowhere will wait a year. Etc.. They don’t have to be outed or identified or targeted by special interest groups ( or which Truth Laid Bear is now ). It just will happen. When the federal government allocates X number of dollars for a project, that does not compel them to spend it. They are only compelled to spend it AFTER contracts have been let. If there’s no money in the budget, no contract is let. What it all boils down to is in order to appropriate funds to rebuild The Gulf Coast, Congress has to do NOTHING. They don’t need to borrow money, they don’t need special legislation, they don’t need to raise taxes. All that will happen is Bush will spend the money on recovery and those pork items that are not urgent will go unspent for another year.
So, sure, this sounds like a neat idea, slaying bad to help good. But, I really don’t think these people have spent five minutes really thinking about what they are trying to accomplish. It didn’t take me five minutes to come to the conclusion it won’t work, and, what’s even worse, it wouldn’t matter if it did or not.
And, people will start slamming members of Congress because they didn’t do what it was that they didn’t need to do but people thought they did. And that just gets tiresome to me.
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