Someone said it this weekend on national TV — “World War III.” Plus, the war in Iraq continues and we’ve always known the war on terror would be a decades-long struggle.
And yet, a bunch of pesky bloggers and a handful of rascally lawmakers insist on talking about pork, of all things. Don’t they know there are more important things going on? There’s a war on terror and they’re worrying about a war on pork? What happened to priorities? Why pork?
A couple of folks have made this argument to me when talking about Porkbusters or the cantankerous Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s battle against Congress’ greasy excesses. It’s easy for the “Why Pork?-ers” to minimize a federally funded man-made rainforest in Iowa or a teapot museum. The absurdity sword is a double-edged one.
On one hand, Porkbusters can highlight the ridiculousness of spending federal money on municipal pool maintenance. On the other, the pork-passive can ask, “Why are we talking about municipal pool maintenance when there are so many more important things going on?”
The quick answer is, “No, why are we funding municipal pool maintenance when there are so many more important things going on?”
But there are several problems with this argument. One is that it assumes that the American public and Congress can properly talk about the war on terror and other important issues only at the exclusion of all others.
This is not the case and can never be the case. In large part because Congress’ power has extended to cover municipal swimming pool maintenance, Capitol Hill is always juggling a thousand issues at a time, debating 67 amendments on the floor, pushing a handful of bills through committee in any given week.
This is the reason citizen advocacy groups coalesce around the Capitol Hill and latch onto every bill, every debate, every word of legislation in their given sphere. In the case of the pork issue, concerned citizens have Citizens Against Government Waste, Americans for Tax Reform, National Taxpayers Union, and Porkbusters working on their behalf.
And, thank goodness. The average taxpayer who is concerned about his tax money doesn’t have the time, between raising a family and earning said tax money, to monitor and comb through 67 amendments and half a dozen bills for misuse. But he does have time to delegate certain groups he trusts to do it for him.
Granted, I think it would be more productive if we had a federal government sufficiently limited in scope that we could talk about just one important issue at a time. If we were dealing with a government that citizens could more easily watchdog without the help of a million D.C.-dwelling activists, I’d be more than pleased.
But such a federal government would have to be much, much smaller than the one we’re dealing with now, and the way to get there is certainly not to ignore pork. In fact, perhaps the quickest way to increase citizen watch-dogging is with Coburn’s very own idea of an Internet database of federal spending. Many citizens would love to learn more about what the federal government spends on; it’s the “Why-Pork?-ers” who want to keep them in the dark.
The second implication of the “Why Pork?-ers’” argument is that no one should bother keeping an eye on the federal government’s waste and fraud unless it is the most pressing issue in the public discourse.
Why are there times or issues — no matter how important and pressing — that would make us want to willfully ignore federal waste and fraud? Everyone knows that to ignore a problem in Congress is the quickest way to encourage it. That’s why the Porkbusting crusade has focused, not necessarily on defeating every earmark on every bill, but on forcing lawmakers to at least justify them on C-SPAN. Sunlight is not kindto pork.
Last, we can’t pretend that the pork issue can be left alone with no effect on issues like the war on terror. Money is what makes everything move on the Hill. The more we know about the special ways it discourages inertia, the better off we are. Ignoring the pork problem is the surest road to more freezer-burned bribes, bigger government, and less efficiency. None of those things helps the U.S. fight Islamofascism.
Just yesterday, word came that Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia wants the House to consider an amendment that would allocate $1.5 billion to Metro, subsidizing the commutes of Northern Virginian and Maryland civil servants — some of the best-paid workers in the nation.
Now, whose priorities are misplaced? The folks who want Davis to stand up and justify that spending when we may be soon facing a new attack in the war on terror and a new international crisis? Or, the folks who’d like to use the smoke billowing over the Middle East as a screen for irresponsible spending habits at home? In this case, smoke most certainly does not cure pork.
Mary Katharine Ham is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at Townhall.com.
