President Bush has never met a spending bill – or any bill, for that matter – he hasn’t liked. In five years, he’s never wielded his veto pen. Not once.
Yet, a bloated “emergency” spending bill that Congress has larded up with pork projects and unnecessary spending has finally caught his attention. It must be bad if even Bush has threatened to veto it.
The president originally proposed about $92 billion in emergency funds for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to help rebuild Gulf Coast states devastated by Hurricane Katrina (and the government’s inept response to that disaster).
The bill since has ballooned to $106.5 billion. And while conservatives are lambasting it, some of them, such as Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., have contributed to the bloat.
The bill needs to be pared back when House and Senate negotiators comb through it next month. It’s considered a “must-pass” bill because it contains the $67.6 billion the Pentagon says it needs for Iraq and Afghanistan. It also has an extra $27 billion for post-hurricane reconstruction.
But more than $12 billion has been earmarked for additional projects, including farm aid (after a successful 2005 crop year) and $700 million to move a Mississippi railroad line. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., called it the “railroad to nowhere,” a spin on the now infamous $223 million “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska that gave even pork a bad name.
And the rail line’s relocation – at three times the cost of Alaska Sen. Don Young’s ridiculous bridge – would only serve to line the pockets of Mississippi developers and casinos. In fact, the line already was rebuilt, for $250 million, after Katrina hit.
Really, where’s the “emergency” here?
We have two problems with this emergency spending bill: Not only does it contain unnecessary spending, it also seems completely unnecessary to, year after year, pay the ongoing costs of war through these emergency supplemental measures.
It’s been more than three years since fighting began in Iraq and more than four years since the war in Afghanistan started. It’s time those costs found their way into the nation’s overall budget, and aren’t masked through supplementals.
With unbridled tax cuts and massive spending increases, Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress have saddled future generations with trillions in debt. Congress should at least trim a bit of runaway spending in this bill.
