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GOP Fumbles By Overriding Water Bill Vetoby
Peter J. Sepp Nov 19, 2007 Just as the hapless Washington Redskins football team has squandered
gridiron victories in the final minutes of several games this season,
Republican lawmakers in Washington recently fumbled another major
opportunity to score points with taxpayers. GOP members of Congress
largely sided with logrolling Democrats in overriding President Bush's
veto of the wasteful Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), ending the
White House's winning streak of fiscal-policy vetoes at a pitiful two.
Few areas of public works can match federal flood control and navigation
initiatives for politically motivated policymaking. Over the last several
years, numerous independent entities such as the U.S. Army Inspector
General, the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of
Sciences have found that the Army Corps of Engineers has manipulated data
to justify economically dubious projects-projects often championed by
politically powerful members of Congress.
The WRDA legislation that cleared Congress does nothing to prioritize the
Corps' existing $58 billion backlog of projects nor does it significantly
strengthen cost-sharing provisions with local entities or peer-review
processes. As a result, WRDA perpetuates funding for items such as
deepening the Port of Iberia, La., a project with near-zero net economic
potential, rebuilding a lock and dam system on the Upper Mississippi
region where barge traffic has been declining for decades and
"renourishing" beaches with sand in New Jersey, Virginia, Florida and
other areas known primarily for wealthy vacation homes and tourist
destinations.
WRDA's House and Senate proponents also displayed a curious form of
arithmetic while settling on a final version of the bill. As an August
"notice of veto" message from the White House to Congress sardonically put
it, "It seems a $14 billion Senate bill went into a conference with the
House's $15 billion and somehow emerged costing approximately $20
billion." Ultimately, however, WRDA weighed in at more than $23 billion,
in part because $750 million in special-interest earmarks were "air
dropped" when the two chambers met to hammer out a common bill. This
practice of piling on earmarks during the conference process was
supposedly banned under Senate rules.
Despite all this evidence against WRDA, the House overrode President
Bush's veto by a vote of 361 to 54. Just 54 Republicans-mostly members of
the conservative Republican Study Committee-stood on principle and
supported the President. On the Senate side, the story was largely the
same. The upper chamber nixed Bush's WRDA veto by a 79-to-14 vote, with
only 12 Republicans holding the line. Two lone Democrats-Russell Feingold
(Wis.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.)-joined that courageous dozen. [See
HumanEvents.com for the full rollcall.]
Not only did Republicans huddle with the near-unanimity of tax-eating
Democrats who supported WRDA, many of them actively sought its passage,
despite the fact that earlier in 2007 nearly 150 GOP House members signed
a written pledge to sustain the President's veto decision on any spending
bill. Such a large number of lawmakers agreeing to back President Bush
should have been enough to muster the one-third of either house necessary
to block any attempt to override a veto.
So what happened? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) told the
Washington Post that there were "differences of opinion among" members of
his caucus over whether their promise to uphold a White House veto applied
to WRDA. Unlike appropriations bills that directly spend tax dollars, WRDA
is an authorization bill, which more closely resembles a binding
commitment to undertake projects that will require separate funding
legislation in the future.
To most taxpayers, however, this is a distinction without a difference.
After all, the mammoth highway legislation passed in 2005, replete with
$24 billion in parochial "earmarks," was an authorization bill, too.
Contained within its entrails was the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" in
Alaska that became political fodder for campaign-trail Democrats promising
to change the culture of corrupt pork-barrel spending that had gripped the
Capitol.
Fast forward to last week, when none other than Alaska GOP Rep. Don Young
shamelessly told his colleagues, "Let's override the President. Let's do
something right for America." Earlier this year, media reports revealed
that Young was among several officials subjected to an ongoing Alaska
federal corruption investigation.
Like a long-slumbering giant suddenly awakened amongst tiny tormenters,
President Bush recently opened his eyes to the power his veto pen can have
against anti-taxpayer impulses from hundreds of lawmakers. If only the
President's epiphany could have happened earlier in his term, when
taxpayer travesties such as the GOP-backed farm bill and highway bill
landed on his desk.
Bush issued the first fiscal-policy veto of his tenure last spring over
legislation to provide funding for the Iraq War that had been swelled with
billions in congressional pork. Last month, Bush vetoed an incredibly
irresponsible bill to inflate the State Children's Health Insurance
Program (SCHIP) into a middle-class entitlement. The legislation was
underwritten by a punitive tobacco tax increase. This problematic source,
according to a Heritage Foundation estimate, could have required more than
20 million new smokers to pay sufficient taxes to keep SCHIP chugging
along. Both these vetoes (along with two others having to do with
stem-cell research) survived congressional attempts to override them,
leading to last week's anticlimactic showdown.
With the WRDA veto, Republicans had the chance to set themselves apart
from the unseemly deal-making with tax dollars that Americans despise.
Instead, three out of four of them chose business as usual. With more
blunders like these, the GOP will have as much chance of recapturing
Congress as the Washington Redskins have in getting to the Super Bowl this
season. If the President continues to play defense for taxpayers on
spending, the rest of his Republican team should put more effort into
backing up his plays. Their next opportunity will come with the Labor-HHS
appropriations bill.
Mr. Sepp is vice president for communications with NTU. This article appeared at HumanEvents.com.
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