Posted on Mon, Oct. 13, 2008
In federal trials, congressional campaigns and the presidential race, pork is overflowing its barrel. Perhaps the mess will finally require cleaning up.
It's encouraging, at least, that much of the public is appropriately angry about pork-barrel spending, and that politicians are responding.
John McCain has largely eschewed earmarks and loudly criticized them - including nearly a billion dollars' worth requested by his opponent.
Barack Obama, to his credit, has been unusually transparent about his earmark requests, or else McCain would not be able to price them. Both candidates support reforms.
Sarah Palin, lacking her running mate's sterling record on the issue, has seen fit to make one up. She has famously insisted that she said, "Thanks, but no thanks, to that bridge to nowhere," the $400-million poster project for the earmark problem. Looked at one way, the statement is accurate: Palin's initial position was "thanks," followed by a "no, thanks" after the bridge became politically radioactive.
Back in the Lower 48, New Jersey's answer to the "bridge to nowhere" is the off-ramp to nowhere. Last week, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dick Zimmer was one of the very few users of New Jersey Turnpike Exit 15X in Secaucus, which leads to the notoriously palatial and empty train station named for his opponent, Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg.
Zimmer charged that the $1.4-billion station, which lacks parking and therefore much call for a turnpike exit, is an egregious example of Lautenberg-brand pork.
The octogenarian senator, however, is no slave to fashion. Earlier this year, he boldly bucked the anti-pork trend by boasting about his high ranking in an annual report known as the Congressional Pig Book, compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste.
Under Zimmer's assault last week, Lautenberg stood up for the eponymous train station and bragged about a few more of his earmarks, including new cars for the PATCO High-Speed Line and a Camden County 911 system. "I don't understand Zimmer's position," he said. "Is he saying don't bring money to Cooper Hospital, to the hospital in Atlantic City, to East Orange?"
McCain prompted a similar question recently, when he attacked Obama for trying to fund a $3 million "overhead projector." In fact, the money was for a planetarium sky-projection system - not, as McCain's words suggested, a simple device found in high school classrooms.
So what's wrong with funding planetariums and PATCO? Nothing, of course. The problem is the process. Its logical conclusion is currently on display in the federal corruption trial of Wayne Bryant, a former New Jersey state senator from Lawnside.
A senior legislative aide testified last week that Bryant, who chaired the Senate Budget Committee, was one of two powerful legislators who were effectively awarded $4 million from the state budget to distribute as they saw fit. "Individual legislators were the deciders," the aide said.
This is rule by lawmakers rather than laws. With governments facing growing demands and shrinking resources, the public and political reaction to such reckless spending certainly should be "No, thanks."
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