Every time I turn on the news these days, I’m hearing Republicans complaining about earmarks and how they’re going to kill us all. CNN’s crawl yesterday said that the Republicans are declaring “The era of big spending is back!”
Unfortunately, CNN did not follow that crawl item with the other major, related story: “Republicans apparently spent last eight years in a coma.”
But as this story from the Houston Chronicle teaches us, complaints over budget earmarks are so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Rep. Ron Paul vehemently denounced the $410 billion catch-all spending bill approved last week by the House of Representatives.
But although the libertarian-leaning Republican from Lake Jackson cast a vote against the massive spending measure, his fingerprints were on some of the earmarks that helped inflate its cost.
Paul played a role in obtaining 22 earmarks worth $96.1 million, which led the Houston congressional delegation, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of more than 8,500 congressionally mandated projects inserted into the bill. His earmarks included repair projects to the Galveston Seawall damaged by Hurricane Ike and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.
I am not about to complain about money being appropriated to repair the Galveston Seawall and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Hell, I think they’re worthwhile. I think that if more budget earmarks had resembled those instead of bridges to nowhere (championed by Paul’s fellow Republican, Ted Stevens), then we wouldn’t be surrounded by crumbling infrastructure today.
But that’s just the point – earmarks are how the budget works. It ensures that while the big business of running a nation gets done, the smaller business of keeping states up and running is made easier, as well. Our horrible response to Katrina (which, as Bobby Jindal pointedly ignored, was a failure of a Republican administration) is nothing compared to the prior four years (also under a Republican administration) when the Army Corps of Engineers told the federal government they needed money to shore up and improve the levees, only to be ignored by Republicans who were complaining about all this goldurn unnecessary spending. All while they were building bridges to nowhere and funneling billions into a war that didn’t even appear in the budget.
The point is, it’s not about “no earmarks.” It’s about good earmarks. It’s about finding what actually puts people to work, builds our infrastructure, and provides for the common good, rather than what puts money directly into the pockets of the wealthy.
Bonus lesson: When you allow an unelected, loudmouthed ideologue to grow into the voice of your party, you’ll learn to regret it. And, also, if you’re going to say you’re here to defend the Constitution, you might want to stop illustrating how little you know about it in the same breath.