More can kicking; further acts of legislative cowardice

Cowardly Governance Series Introduction
Kicking the can; the art of cowardly governance
More can kicking; further acts of legislative cowardice
Why all the handwringing over government worker layoffs?
Cowardly governance suffers a rare setback – Senate vote on war funding bill

Here are two more examples of classic legislative cowardice in action.

The fearless leaders of the majority party in the House, being unable to muster votes for a $60B funding bill for the war in Afghanistan, solve their leadership problem by wrapping it in pork and turning it into an $80B piece of legislation. According to an AP article posted at Real Clear Politics the new and improved piece of legislation comes complete with funding for such war related things as:

$10B – grants to school districts to avoid teacher layoffs

$5B – Pell Grants to low-income college students

$1B – youth summer jobs initiative and money to pay discrimination claims by black farmers against the Agriculture Department (this part was described in the AP article as add-ons for “black lawmakers”).

Now I have no idea what the Agriculture Department did to black farmers but it’s probably not worth researching. I’ll just take a guess that it has something to do with someone’s perception that some group of farmers, the majority of which were of some other ethnic persuasion, received a disproportionate share of a PORK allocation somewhere along the line. My money is on those crafty Amish devils. Perhaps that would explain why it seemed like an awful lot of them were tooling around in late model buggies when I drove through Lancaster a couple of weeks ago.

Here’s a radical idea. Why not put each of these things up for a vote as stand alone spending measure. Could it be that these things have so little merit that they couldn’t muster a majority vote?

To be fair there was a $700 million crumb tossed in for border security. Although border security certainly comes closer to a defense related expenditure than an another $10B payoff to the teacher’s union, I’m OK with that one being voted on as a stand alone measure as well.

Legislative cowardice example #2

Since budgets are so restrictive, Congress has had to work soooo hard this year, and there is just soooo many other important things to be done the House passed the ever popular “budget enforcement resolution” by on 215-200 vote tally on 7-1-10. As reported in an article in The Hill this courageous piece of legislative tom foolery

…sets discretionary spending for 2011 at $1.12 trillion, about $7 billion less than Obama’s proposal and $3 billion less than a Senate Democratic plan. It also sets a goal of cutting deficits to the point where revenues equal all spending except for interest payments on the debt.

Tales of budgetary courage like this, or enforcement resolve if you prefer, give me that old tingling feeling up the leg. On second thought maybe I had better make sure I have all of the zeroes in the right place. Let’s see $3,000,000,000 divided by $1,120,000,000,000 is 0.27%. Hmmm, maybe not so courageous after all but, hey, how about the way they stood up to that spendthrift President? I mean $7B, that’s some serious budgetary resolve. That’s looking him in the eye and saying not so fast Mr. President! Let’s run the numbers on that scenario; $7,000,000,000 divided by $1,120,000,000,000 is… drum roll please… ta da… 0.63%. Now that’s what I’m talking about…COURAGE. Oops one other small matter. This is only the discretionary spending part, better run the numbers one more time on the entire President’s 2011 budget proposal. Here we go; $3,000,000,000 divided by $3,834,000,000,000 is only 0.08% but $7,000,000,000 divided by $3,834,000,000,000 is, is, is 0.18%. On second thought maybe that wasn’t a tingle after all… now that I think about it perhaps it was a cramp.

I don’t want to put too much of a damper on the celebration but there is also this small matter of can kicking as reported in The Hill article.

But unlike traditional budget resolutions, this year’s version doesn’t detail how Congress should reach that goal, leaving those tough decisions to Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission.

Well at least the President and Congress are kicking the can down the road to a bi-partisan commission. I’m feeing better about this already. Even the scary budget projection chart in the Foundry post that pointed to the article in The Hill doesn’t seem quite so scary now that I know there’s a bipartisan commission on the case.

Source: Heritage Foundation, The Budget Chart Book posted in The Foundry, House “Budget Enforcement Resolution” Dodges Accountability, 7-2-10

Holy crap!!! Eject!!! Eject!!! Crap, Maverick do some of that pilot sh_t, we’re going down!!!!

Time to take a serious look at our Founder’s compass… it’s time to steer the ship of state back toward the calmer waters of the enumerated powers in the U.S. Constitution.