NR has an excellent article in the lastest issue on what went wrong with the Republicans in Congress regarding the pathetic lack of fiscal restraint.
I'm not sure why pork spending bothers me so much. Perhaps the brazenness of it, but it's really small change in the big picture. It's not that high a percentage of the budget. I guess it's more what it symbolizes. I recall back in the '80s there was a lot of grumbling about foreign aid. And I thought, "what's the big deal? It's a tiny portion of the budget." But foreign aid, whether boondoggle or not, seemed more appealing than these "bridges to nowhere" we're currently building.
Social security. Health care. Medicare. Alternatives to oil. Rebuilding from Katrina. AIDS in Africa. The war in Iraq. Those are the issues to think about. And yet I'm disproportionately interested in, and annoyed by, the coming election of Roy "Earmarks R Us" Blunt as House leader. From Rich Lowry:
Who would have predicted that ten years after taking Congress and promising to clean it up, Republicans would be rocked by their own set of scandals, including the abuse of earmarks for contributors? Actually, it was predictable, given the typical course of revolutions — a burst of energy, followed by a period of consolidation — and the inevitable temptations of power. “I always thought that we would lose the majority in 2002,” says an architect of the 1994 takeover. “I thought we would have an eight-year run. The fact is it’s not good for either party to control the place for too long. You do get an institutional mindset.”...No one who knows him thinks Tom DeLay is venal. But that can’t be said for now-notorious members of his team. One of them is going to jail (Michael Scanlon), and two others could yet be implicated in criminal activity (Tony Rudy and Ed Buckham).
It is often remarked that there is no committed constituency for limited government. Certainly, government programs like farm subsidies have more intense and organized supporters than detractors. But there is at least a diffuse constituency for limited government — they are called conservatives. If they realize that wholesale cuts in government won’t be forthcoming, that doesn’t mean they have to sit still for discretionary spending growing at 10 percent a year, for thousands of special-interest earmarks, and for a new entitlement being hoisted on top of an already out-of-control entitlement state. If all this is combined with gross insider self-dealing, conservatives have cause to recoil in disgust, and they have done so.
...But among conservatives in Washington there is a sense that the House GOP needs a broad renewal, and no one seems to know how it will happen. Elections to replace DeLay seem likely to promote whip Roy Blunt up one slot, so the leadership will be, as Stephen Moore has put it in the Wall Street Journal, the DeLay team without DeLay. Whatever is the next new thing in national conservative politics probably won’t emanate from the House. For veterans of the 1994 revolution one word comes up again and again as they survey this scene: “sad.”
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