Fighting Pork: What Can Be Done?
By ChargingRINO Posted in User Blogs — Comments (53) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Cross-posted at Charging RINO.
Promoted from the diaries by Adam C
I have been railing about the state of overspending and fiscal indiscipline from Congress and the White House for months. I am ashamed to say that aside from urging the president to get serious and follow through on his threats to veto spending bills that represent budgetary irresponsibility, I have not offered enough in the way of concrete solutions. That is not because there aren't any reasonable solutions, so I want to outline some of those here. Obviously the best solution would be for American voters to hold drunken-sailor-spending legislators and presidents accountable at the voting booth, but so far we haven't seen any evidence that's going to happen anytime soon. So what can be done?
I offer five steps, below the fold. And invite your suggestions for others.
- Increasing Threshold for Legislative Riders and Earmarks. Several times in the last few years, most notably in mid-2003, Senator McCain and others (then Kyl, Sessions and Feingold) have introduced amendments to the Senate's rules which would have done much to tighten spending discipline in that chamber (similar efforts have been made in the House). Their proposal called for a change to Senate Rule 16, which governs amendments to appropriations bills. Currently, a senator may make a point of order against any legislative rider or unauthorized appropriation contained in a spending bill or a conference report - but it only takes a simple majority of senators to kill that procedural move and allow the rider or earmark to proceed unchecked (so often I suspect such points are not even bothered with since their fruitlessness is recognized: no senator, not even McCain, is willing to be "that guy" all the time by holding up every bill on multiple points of order). McCain's plan (which he outlines in a speech here in much greater depth), would raise that threshold to 60 votes, a three-fifths majority. Unanimous consent might be a more effective approach but I'd take 60 over the status quo.
- Ending Conference Committee Shenanigans. Another portion of several versions of McCain's plan would have amended Senate Rule 28, which covers the Senate's handling of conference committee reports. At present, the Rule states that no provision may be inserted into a conference report which was not passed by either the Senate or the House during the original appropriations process. As before, however, only 51 votes are needed to overturn a point of order against extraneous insertions (and again, usually the points of order aren't even made). Conferees regularly insert huge numbers of provisions into their reports, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with the underlying legislation (see the partial list in McCain's recent floor statement on the highway bill). I'm sorry to be linking almost solely to McCain items here, but since he's one of the very few in Congress actually concerned with such things I don't really have any other options. As with Rule 16, McCain has proposed raising the threshold for this point of order to 60 votes, which would certainly do something to improve things.
- Allow Time for Scrutiny of Conference Reports. Currently a provision of Rule 28 allows the Senate leadership to bring a conference report up for debate as soon as the report is made available at the desk of all senators. That means that if the conference committee finishes debate and copies are made and distributed, a report can be debated and voted on literally within hours. Senators and representatives (i.e. their staffs) can (and often do) have very little time to read and absorb the provisions of the conference reports (many of which, as stated above, have been slipped in by the conferees unbeknownst to all those outside the conference) before they are asked to vote. Many of these reports amount to thousands of pages, and while it is too much to expect that our representatives would <span style="font-style: italic;">actually</span> examine what they're voting on, I think we deserve at the very least the security in knowing that they were given the option. I would propose an amendment to Rule 28 mandating a two or three day 'waiting period' between the completion of any conference report and when senators and reps are asked to vote on it. Violating that waiting period should require a two-thirds majority vote. The House already has a three-day rule, but it does not apply during the last six days of a Congressional session and it is regularly waived at all other times. It too should be strengthened.
In all cases of Senate rule changes, it would be necessary to require a roll call vote on the points of order, so that all senators would have to go on the record as voting to allow extra material in the spending bills rather than just sliding it through.
Changes to the Senate rules can be filibustered (and usually are), which means reform proponents would have to garner 67 votes for these amendments. Pragmatically speaking, the likelihood of that happening is probably pretty close to nil right now ... but that's where we come in. We should urge our representatives and senators to propose these rules changes during the 109th Congress and move the debate forward. I read somewhere a few weeks ago that Senators McCain and Durbin were planning to propose a waiting period but have been unable to find anything concrete. All senators should be encouraged not only to propose but also to support these rules changes, and similar efforts to beef up the rules should be undertaken in the House.
- Impose term limits for appropriators. Not surprisingly, large percentages of the pork spending in appropriations bills goes to those writing the bills - the members who sit on the House and Senate committees of jurisdiction. Members of those committees should be rotated through every six years or so (as the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste has suggested) so that they don't become entrenched and addicted to the spending power that the appropriations committees offer.
- Enact a constitutional line-item veto power. With all the legal and political acumen around this country, there has got to be a way to come up with a line-item veto law that would pass Supreme Court muster. A line-item veto would allow a president (though probably not this one, since he's shown little inclination to rein in spending in any way) to strike out extraneous material from spending bills without vetoing entire bills and possibly wreaking havoc on many good and necessary programs. [Update: We've been having a great discussion about this specific step down in the comments at Charging RINO; make sure to check that out. Basically the concern, which I have been persuaded by, is that while theoretically a line-item veto power would be an effective way for a president to cut pork out of spending bills, today's presidents - acting as they are in a generally partisan way - would not be even-handed enough with their slicing. A serious concern, to be sure, and one that probably undercuts the practical usefulness of a line-item veto, even if one could be construced and approved by a future Supreme Court.]
These are just a few possibilities for fighting the battle against pork-barrel spending. None of them, not one, will be easy to implement; acceptance of any of these would require a serious shift in perception by our current political leaders, which will only be brought about through a wide-ranging effort by us to make them understand that we don't want our government to operate this way.
Ending wasteful government spending doesn't begin or end with either Congress, the executive, or the public alone. It will require the commitment of all, which makes any immediate change quite unlikely. It's not going to happen in a day, or even in a year, but sooner or later, these steps or some others like them will have to be taken in order to right our fiscal ship of state.
I'd invite you to offer your own suggestions for decreasing excessive spending in the comments, and I'll provide updates if we see any movement on any of these.
was the first thing I thought of.
I am not keen on term limits though-I figure if a jurisdiction wants to keep sending a guy to DC that is and should be their perogative.
Your other ideas I think are good.
The only problem is that they all depend on congress to do something to police itself, and I don't see them doing that. Right now the members of congress are like little pigs feeding at the taxpayer trough, and they aren't going to put themselves on a diet anytime soon.
I would love to vote against the GOP piggies, the problem is that almost all the democrats are even fatter and looking to get fatter still. I have voted against my RINO congressman, although I didn't in the general (his oponenet actually made him look more like a conservative), and in '06 I am likely going to vote libertarian or some other party that is fiscally conservative in protest, since he is unlikely to lose (we keep sending him back by huge percentages, he get better than a super majority vote).
I misread your term limit idea-I thought you meant term limits on being elected, but you actually meant on the committee itself-I think that would probably be a good idea-that way the guy in charge of the purse doesn't get to addicted to his power.
Re: term limits, I totally agree that reps/senators should be able to elected as many times as their voters will elect them ... all I'm saying is, any individual rep/senator should only be able to spend a certain number of terms on the appropriations committees. Cycle them on and off, stop the "cardinalization" of that process.
Agreed, most of these do depend on Congress policing itself. Which we have to demand. Nobody's perfect on pork (obviously) - Republicans have become (sad to say) just as bad as Democrats right now ... but yes, if Dems were in power, they might be just as bad.
That brings up another element, I guess - if we had a divided government, we'd probably see a little less pork. Might be a good thing.
Not with the current Court, that's true. But Breyer and Scalia's opinions (joined by O'Connor) in Clinton v. City of NY offer the basic constitutional underpinning that a line-item veto for expenditure items is permissible, with some historical precedents. Scalia: "Insofar as the degree of political, 'law-making' power conferred upon the Executive is concerned, there is not a dime's worth of difference between Congress's authorizing the President to cancel a spending item, and Congress's authorizing money to be spent on a particular item at the President's discretion.
That's for another discussion I suppose, since it's not going to happen anytime soon.
I'm generally leery of amending the Constitution, but that would certainly be another option that could be taken here.
And I don't see that happening.
And I really don't see a line item for any Court being constitutional. That's not to say one might not find it so; but they'd be wrong. I don't believe the Constitution contemplates having the President excise items at his discretion that the other Branch's members may have felt necessary to pass the bill as a whole.
First, excellent article. Great recommendations and background. Recommended with a thumbs up.
Second, I think we should really consider starting a debate about a national TABOR. If it catches on in a few more states than just CO, it could gain steam over the next 2-5 years. By the 2012 election at the latest, we could have a TABOR Governor running for President on that platform. It is that kind of structural change to spending that is necessary.
Finally, we need to push Fiscal Conservative back to the forefront by 2008. That's why I'm pushing Sanford as one of the best hopes for true Fiscal Conservatives. There are others, but his record is unambiguous.
although I agree with Thomas about the line-item veto. While I can see it's appeal and I very desperately want spending reined in; to me a line item veto seems to undercut the overall Constitutional scheme for division of powers. Of course, to emasculate the existing veto power (i.e. to be afraid to use it) is in my opinion an abdication of responsibility and also undercuts the Constitution.
The real question is not what can be done, because you've certainly outline some great ideas and it's clear such ideas are and have been out there.
The real question is how do the American people FORCE Congress to make these changes? These are changes that average Americans, Republicans and Democrat alike, would support if someone would champion them. It seems to me the effort is going to need bi-partisan public support, because the powers that be, both Republican and Democrat, are going to hate it and will fight it with everything they've got.
A FLAT TAX
Let's hold accountable the people who are supposed to hold legislators accountable.
What incentive do people who pay nothing to a little in taxes have to keep spending down? NONE
A TABOR is a ceiling on government spending. In CO which has a TABOR, the ceiling grows each year by a rate equal to population growth + inflation.
So if you spent $500 million last year. And the population grew 5% and inflation was 5%, then this year you can spend $550 million. To override that amount, you must get approval on a statewide ballot.
Thus instead of focusing on cutting funding (taxes), this directly attacks the runaway spending problem that politicians seem to have.
is that the federal government has responsibilities (liek national defense) which are completely unrelated to either the size of our population or the inflation rate.
Thanks Adam for the comments and the recommendation. I agree in principle on TABOR as well, I just worry that it could end up causing problems (like we're seeing in CO right now) in some cases. With a minimal amount of flexibility though, I think it could be extremely useful. It's another potentially good step, for sure.
I used to think a line-item veto would be a good idea. But it would be only marginally helpful, especially in light of the way highway- and energy-bill pork was traded for CAFTA votes. This year we should call these spending projects carnitas.
But beyond that, the problem starts with the White House. President Bush submitted a $2.568 trillion budget for FY 2006, and anticipated a $390 billion deficit. I just don't think you can line-item-veto your way back to balance -- much less back to a proper level of government spending.
Just once I'd like to see a president submit a budget stripped of non-essential spending. It would be an ideological, political document, because someone would have to decide what's non-essential.
Maybe the Heritage Foundation could take a whack at it. I just think we an idea of what government spending should be. Maybe it's really $2.5 trillion, but it's probably a lot less.
The scary thing is that I was alive when the federal budget crossed the $100 billion threshold. That was just 45 years ago...
You've hit the nail on the head. How do we force this change? Having a national champion for it is almost crucial - proponents need someone to rally around who people of all ideological persuasions can accept and trust.
Who's that? No idea. I'm not sure such a person exists right now (McCain might be the closest we've got at the moment).
It's going to take a serious deep, broad and strong all-partisan effort to make any of these steps (or others) into reality. Even though we all may disagree on practically everything else, we've got to find a way to unite around this issue - there's no justification for outright wasteful spending.
And we can adjust it to work. In CO (IIRC) it takes a statewide referendum to break the ceiling. We probably wouldn't do that in a national TABOR. But we could allow it to be broken with a 3/4th vote of both Houses and/or during a Congressionally declared war. But any lifting of the ceiling should be temporary (renewed each year) and the actual ceiling should continue to exist and spending should have to come back down to that level after the calamity.
That is why we should see it in more states first. Test it out. Find the kinks. Fix it. Go national!
I agree that a properly constructed line item veto would not be unconstitutional with a conservative Court.
Also, what some bills are doing now is to increase the President's current rescission authority (whereby he lists what he doesn't like and sends it to Congress) so that it is given fast-track, up-or-down consideration. Congress then approves or disapproves but the dynamics are shifted from funding important government programs to funding pork. That would be a huge addition to current procedures.
when the House Budget Committee members has term limited member!
...and not to mention the fact that necessary increases in certain spending priorities created by a national emergency could, in theory, be balanced out by cuts elsewhere. It's not physically impossible, in other words, to find the extra $50 billion you might need to repair a SoCal earthquake with farm subsidy cuts and some means-testing of Medicare and Social Security.
veto if it wasn't for the fact that so much pork gets added on to bills-often bills that have nothing to do with the pork project attached.
The president may want to approve a bill, but is opposed to the pork attached.
I think you can overcome some of this, by allowing for a 2/3'ds majority over ride of the items vetoes out-basically make that issue stand on its own.
I don't know how many riders were put onto bills historically, but they seem to be pretty common and pretty abundant now.
You asked for ideas. Got a couple. And BTW, I especially dig the term limits on approp committees. And let's add conference committees to it to, although those may be ad hoc for all I know. But I know alot of pork is injected by the conference committees.
(1)This one's pretty raw, I don't really have the answer, just the question. I think before spending caps can be enacted in an enforceable way, there have to be new definitions for these spending categories -- I don't know all the names, but one, called 'discretionary', is anything but. And the category 'emergency' spending is routinely used for, well, 'routine' spending and pork.
In recent years the Bush Administration has bragged about keeping the growth of 'discretionary' (or non-defense, or whatever) spending at 3% (or whatever), and how , boy, we're REALLY practicing fiscal restraint. But we see the actual overall budget increasing at alarming rates, like 11%, 15%, 18%, etc (I don't have numbers here, but I know my heart skips a beat when I hear the latest year's numbers).
(2) While we're on the subject, have hard spending caps, set at the rate of inflation (or at 3% per annum, or some such). No exceptions. If we have an emergency need like a hurricane, or $82bil for Iraq, that's all well and good. But guess what, girls, $2.6 trillion of your taxpayers' hard-earned money per year is plenty. If we need $82bil for the war, take it out of some of that pork, take it from NEA, NPR, or maybe cancel funding for 7 or 8 of those Bob Byrd Memorial bridges, libraries, and statues. Or ditch the Big Dig. Or start ditching some of those cabinet-level bureaus. Might even repeal that vile Medicare Presciption Steal (I can DREAM, can't I?).
(3) While we're at it, don't put FICA '(don't)trust fund' in a lock box -- loan it out. If the Congress wants to borrow from it, sell it to them as U.S. Bonds or T-bills at 4% (or whatever the going rate is). No more IOU's. Make them borrow it if they must, and report it as deficit spending.
I like the ideas that you've come up with, the Senate rule changes make sense, but there are a few problems with the other two.
Line item veto: The way the earmarks are typically enacted, they are largely free from the impact of a line item because they are tucked in to a much larger account that no POTUS could ever veto. Pork projects are typically hidden in a big program and the details are usually in the conference reports. The Line Item Veto only effects the actual legislative language.
Term limits for Approps Committee I like this one the best. It has appeal to the rank and file members who are otherwise never going to get on that king of Committees. But you have a problem if the Dems don't follow that rule (and there is no reason to think that they would) they have the ability to, over time, build a phenomenal expertise and could find ways to trump our guys on the procedural stuff. Just worth thinking about. We'd have to spend time making sure new members are well briefed. Probably a good idea would to stagger in, say 1/3 of the committee gets renewed every 2 years, so a member could serve for up to 6 years if they behave in accordance with the Conference. (Of course you then have to figure out how the Chairman is picked. You want someone with experience and knowledge, so maybe that person gets an additional 6 years when he/she is picked by the speaker to be the chair?)
One idea to try to deal with the line item veto issue is a Republican Conference rule in the House. There is a current rule that a bill that authorizes more than $100 million over 5 years can not go to the floor unless the leadership waive a Conference rule to let it go to the floor. Authorizing committees take it mostly seriously especially since stalwarts like the Republican Study Committee pay a lot of attention to that rule and make the authorizers change their bills to a more conservative bent in exchange for telling leadership that the bill is okay to go to the floor without a fuss. We should impose a similar GOP rule that no approps bill, or Energy or Transportation bill, can have more than 1% or .5% reserved for projects. Leadership would have to waive any bill that exceeds that, and they would, in turn, be answerable to fiscally conservative folks. It's not perfect, but it would be a good start.
about a national TABOR: I suspect it could only be instituted by constititional amendment (rather like the old balanced budget amendment, another attractive idea with serious pitfalls) and that opens the door to something we absolutely should avoid: inviting the Supreme Court into fiscal policy. Several states have done this with amendments that sounded good on paper but ended up with their courts demanding that their legislatures adopt specific tax and spending policies.
When all is said done I see these sorts of things as gimmicks. In the end there's no subtititute for politics when it comes to holding the politicians responsible for their fiscal follies.
haha we may agree on fiscal discipline, we may not agree on all that much else. But that's what this supposed "big tent" of ours is all about, right?
On your "discretionary"/"emergency" designation idea, I think it's an excellent one. Things have been termed emergencies lately that hardly fit that bill within any non-politician's definition of the term. Some of the things in the "emergency" spending bill passed in May:
- $2,000,000 for Drew University to renovate chemical labs.
- $500,000 for the Oral History of the Negotiated Settlement project at the University of Nevada-Reno.
- $2,000,000 for the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences in Michigan. (from McCain's speech on the bill).
Some of the places you'd cut from in your second suggestion I wouldn't cut, but some of the pork projects, exactly. And it's less Bob Byrd naming bridges for himself today than it is Don Young and some other Republicans. The GOP really has to get back to its roots on this, and soon - we're starting to resemble those we came into office in '94 railing against and sooner or later somebody's gonna notice.
As things stand, there is no incentive whatsoever to limit pork, because it costs us nothing. It just gets put on the credit-card tab that a future generation will have to pay off, too far down the horizon for anyone to care about. I'm convinced "starve the beast" is a complete failure - there's just nothing to stop Congress from spending money it doesn't have.
What would happen if there was a balanced-budget amendment that said, whatever Congress may decide to spend money on, marginal tax rates automatically adjust to provide that level of revenue? The result would be that government spending has an actual, measurable effect on every voter's bottom line, and they have to judge whether it's really worth it.
If you favor lower taxes and smaller government, the current system tends to favor the former, but it never will get you the latter unless you find a way to formally link the two together.
Yes, it would have to be an amendment as it was in CO. The problem with the Balanced Budget Amendment is that sometimes running a deficit is good for the country. And defining when and how is hard to do.
However total spending could be capped and we could still run a deficit or a surplus (based on how high taxes are). Thus allowing us more flexibility on fiscal policy but still limiting the growth of government.
I worry that we'd see a lot of hidden tax hikes every few years with that strategy. Because they would always argue that 'it's for the children and the elderly' and Congress is obviously not disciplined enough to stop spending on all sorts of garbage.
Instead of requiring that taxes have to go up to meet spending, I'd rather see the amendment require an across the board cut, outside of defense spending, to stay within balance. Then they'd have to make decisions or force every program to go down. Either way, spending would slow down dramatically.
and when push comes to shove, one hopes they will cut the fat and leave the meat.
I'm sure we disagree on some of the fine points, but that's part of what makes America great - the fact that we'll each pursue our purposes by debating each other, writing editors, voting, and lobbying our Sens and Reps, rather than grabbing for the AK-47's. The 'real' conservatives are the only ones who will pull this off if it ever happens -- the class of '94 (some of them), Coburn, DeMint, and the Flake-Pence-Hensarling cabal in the House. In short, those in the GOP who voted against the Medicare Prescription thing. Those are the only ones in either party who are serious about fiscal discipline.
And right you are, all of us 'real' conservatives are pretty disgusted with the spend-happy ways of the GOP once we got the purse strings. Hypocrisy in epic proportions. Ted Stevens, to name another.
The problem isn't the lack of good ideas about how to restrict pork spending. It's resistance to change. As can be seen with the energy bill, congresspeople love to give away money to their supporters, regardless of fiscal discipline.
This interacts with electoral politics. Today's campaigns often focus on "wedge" issues designed to split the electorate and fire up the base on hot-button issues like gay marriage, rather than on topics that might have majority support, like fiscal discipline.
Is the GOP willing to give up the winning strategy of running on social issues, and instead run campaigns attracting the majority for fiscal responsibility?
Actually a line item veto would be great provided you had a president with the guts to really use it.
I hate to say it, but I doubt if Bush would se it much even if he had it.
Sadly, Coburn and DeMint voted for both the highway pork bill and the energy pork bill.
OTOH, Kyl, Gregg, and McCain voted against both. And they are all a notch higher on my '08 list now.
I was chastised yesterday when I posted on Lawrence Kudlows blog that I also saw no way to end the bipartisan pork parade short of armed revolution. But I simply see no way out of this mess.
What about FairTax? I'm a fan of it as well.
http://www.fairtax.org
ChargingRINO's diary earned us a coveted Club For Growth link.
Of all people, I thought Coburn would be alot tougher than he's proven so far (starting with, I had hoped he'd at least vote against Specter's ascension to the Judiciary chair). I still hold out some hope for him.
Kyl and Gregg are real Marlboro Men, the kind I hoped Santorum would be.
McVain is forever dead to me -- if not before, then for the 14. I know you're not holding him up as anything, this is not a rebuke. To me, he has, for personal glory, thwarted the good-for-America originalist overhaul of the judiciary, and sponsored the Anti-Free-Speech Incumbency Protection Bill that bears his name).
I don't care if he kisses the Pope on the lips, flips off Hillary in public, slaps Pat Leahy, and leads the charge to repeal the Medicare Presciption Steal.
McCain = not_in_my_universe;
but at least take a read of this take on McCain.
And in case my credentials weren't already shot, then here is my "day after" take on "The Deal."
It concludes:
The bottom line: For a filibuster to happen, 3 of the "moderate" Democrats must choose on their own that a nominee creates an "extraordinary circumstance." Then Sens. Graham and DeWine must agree with those Democrats on their assessment. To be honest, if Sens. DeWine, Graham and 3 of the Democratic moderates agree on a candidate, then they probably wouldn't get voted up by the whole Senate. Thus, the filibuster is dead for this Congress but perserved for the future.
but it's an old battle and I think you and I are entrenched in our positions -- but hey, some more of that Big Tent thing. I think all our internecine debates /wars are refreshing in the liberty of it all. Heh, heh, just calculate the life-expectancy of a card-carrying pro-union, big-government Democrat who walks into the Democratic Convention wearing a 'Choose Life' shirt. Or a 'Promise Keepers' hat.
Adam, I'd say you were among the first to discern that 'the Deal' was not an unmitigated disaster. Good call, we have not been steamrolled thus far by that -- shocking me and the other alarmists around here. I don't disagree that it's survivable. I'm just very cynical about the motivations of several of the players, chief among them McCain.
I got no problem with that. As long as one keeps an open mind that even a media hog can be a conservative at heart. And there were conservative reasons for "The Deal" as the filibuster is generally a conservative mechanism. I can't really buy the CFR as a conservative measure, but some of his other less Republican ideas do have at their root conservatism.
is not to eliminate the entire deficit. It is to begin to deal with a spending culture in DC in which members become literally addicted to pork and develop the mindset that their yea vote on the overall level depends on their securing "their" $10 million, $20 million, or much higher allotment. Quite frankly, I think efforts to reform entitlement spending are far more important than smaller attempts to reign in pork, but as you wean Congress off the pork, you make it easier for them to vote for tough budgets and against bad bills like the Medicare and transportation bills.
I would go easy on Coburn on this one. There may be more than meets the eye. Keep in mind that Phil Gramm voted for the last transpo bill in 1998 which was also a disaster because he was fighting hard over the principle of transportation taxes being used solely on transportation spending with hard firewalls. It was probably worth fighting for, but he had to swallow a lot of pork in that one vote. Let's see how Coburn does. In the Senate, many of the biggest wins come behind the scenes with holds and the obstruction of bad bills that are not yet on our radar.
Less fidelity to party...more fidelity to results.
The only way to make them behave is to vote them out when they don't. But each side is too afraid of the other side to do it. So here we sit in a two-party snare of our making.
Frankly, I think we (the taxpayers) need to arm ourselves with a navigable river and clean house.
Absolutely right. Armed revolution? Not necessary. Voting booth revolution? Way past due.
I'm perfectly ready and willing to vote other than Republican, but since 9/11/2001 there isn't a party out there I CAN vote for.
Fortunately, we have the Club for Growth. Perhaps it's time to take primaries more seriously, to the point of being more willing to openly and aggressively attack bad Republican incumbents
to give Coburn some time. I think alot of us had expectations that he would immediately become a giant-slayer, due to his record in the House (BOY, did he give Newt & the gang some fits). It's probably much heavier sledding in the Sen, and you have to take some time to build alliances, save the fight for a bigger day, etc. I do think the raw material is there with this guy.
And how delicious that Pat Toomey is now the Pres of CFG -- he who was torpedoed by the same cronyism BS that we so despise -- I was a big Santorum fan, right up to the moment he endorsed (along with W) Arlen Sphincter in the primary. Now Toomey is in a position to attack the problem on a large scale. CFG will occasionally hold their nose and back somebody who is fiscally iffy in the general elections , but they are utterly fearless about taking down an incumbent in the primary who should go down. Love them.
I really think we should be focused on sending Coburn and Flake some back up in the 2006 elections. Thats why I was really excited to hear Joe Scarborough is thinking about running for Senate in Flordia. Scarborough would be a much needed boost to Coburn's agenda. (The ideas he lays out in his book Breach of Trust are very similar to those of Joe's book Rome Wasn't Burnt In a day.)
except I'm kinda sweet on Katherine Harris for the Senate spot. But I do like Joe, and he, as you say, is a Coburn-style fiscon. I honestly don't know how KH's bona fides are on that. But she looks good on horseback, and that's gotta count for something.
Well, if we hang close to Club for Growth, we can't go too far wrong. Their whole agenda is pro-economy expressed thru lower taxes and lower spending -- my 2 favorite songs in the juke box.
And agree with the substance and thrust, but I have to be honest, though it irritates me: I do not see how any line item veto could pass constitutional muster, unless that power came from an amendment itself.
Essentially, what Congress approves, it approves for a myriad reasons. Allowing the President to pick and choose what makes it past his pen fundamentally devalues and alters what Article I sent him. That's not the intent or ordinary understanding of the veto power, and can produce all sorts of unfortunate side effects that the Founders would never have countenanced.