By Michael D. Capaldi
Orange County is now the epicenter of agitation against asinine federal spending.
Two local players, Rep. John Campbell and The Lincoln Club of Orange County, are pushing Congress to go reverse-Atkins and start a pork-free diet.
Campbell has staked his future to a principled stand against earmarking. Earmarking is a funny little joke by which legislators shunt money into darling deals for their friends, supporters and voters (usually in that order), while just about no one else is watching. If you crusade against earmarks, however, be prepared. Your colleagues get frosted fast. Worse, your own leaders can drop-kick you from the glam committee assignments that every lawmaker craves all the way down to the House Parking Lot and Career Disaster Committee. Just ask Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, who got waxed from his Judiciary Committee assignment after he lashed out at earmarks.
The Lincoln Club, perpetually peeved about the grandiose reaches of federal spending anyway, made a stand against earmarks last month.
It opened a grievous wound when its president, Rich Wagner, and a board member, Chip Hanlon, published an article that insisted Republican legislators push for a one-year moratorium on earmarks or change its leadership.
The club threatened to cut off contributions to House Republicans if they don’t. When newly retired syndicated columnist Bob Novak, CNN and other news outlets picked up the story, they sent a flare nationwide.
Republican leaders were indignant. Some of the blowback, however, came from a little nearer to home.
The Orange County Register quoted Huntington Beach Congressman Dana Rohrabacher as saying, “The problem is not earmarks, which shows a bit of na & #271;vet & #233; on the part of the Lincoln Club.”
Congress vs. Bureaucrats
Rohrabacher makes the interesting point that if Congress doesn’t earmark, it will be left to federal bureaucrats to do so. He said in an Oakland Tribune interview earlier this year, “I think the whole earmark debate has to be looked at with a skeptical eye. If all we’re doing is shifting the power to spread a certain amount of money from elected officials to unelected officials … that’s no great benefit to the taxpayers. The idea that the bureaucrats don’t have their own favorites and that they, unlike Congress, are going to be totally objective is as na & #271;ve as it gets.”
Yet, don’t the congressional abuses scream out for a solution?
Unofficial estimates show that earmarks metastasized from a modest 3,000 in 1996 to 13,000 in 2006. That was on the Republican watch. But, when Democrats took over in the House, they promised to halve them. And they haven’t. “We’re back to where we were before,” said a spokeswoman for the non-partisan Citizens Against Government Waste.
So, demanding a moratorium on earmarking for just one year, making legislators take a time-out to come up with something better, that’s na & #271;ve? Not when earmarking has crept out of the graveyard of Democratic reform and is wandering zombie-like, past $20 billion this year. Read just a few pages from the 2008 Pig Book, an epic compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, at cagw.org. The mind-numbing repetition does the mathematically impossible: It makes billions seem trivial.
n $7.5 million for grape and wine research, to help the $29 billion a year wine industry.
n $2.5 million to Wisconsin’s Dairy Forage Agricultural Research Center, brought to you by the generosity of Sen. Herb Kohl.
n $7.5 million for the Center for Marine Aquaculture, via Sen. Thad Cochran, to “meet America’s demand for warm-water marine seafood.”
n $1.6 million to support the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, from Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama, just because they can.
n $390,000 for the musician residency program at the Cedar Rapids Symphony Orchestra, thanks to Sen. Tom Harkin, along with another $146,000 for the Italian-American Cultural Center of Iowa.
Why Me?
Frankly, if Iowa’s Italian-Americans are not fired-up enough about their cultural center to foot the whole bill themselves, why bother me with taxes for it?
Campbell takes serious guff from Newport Beach city officials for not earmarking for the $46 million dredging project in Newport Bay and Harbor.
Some city officials fear that, without federal funds, these waterways will silt up. Forgive me, but does Newport Harbor serve some vital national security interest? Does silt contribute to global warming? As a Newport resident, I have to ask why the federal government ought to be sucking mud out of a pleasure harbor.
They say time is money, but that’s wrong. Money is time. Your time. Sift money finely, and you’ll see the sands of your life, time spent at work, time away from your family earning a living, time not doing what you love to do. Money is hours taken from your finite years, time and life and blood, distilled into coin, check, and credit.
So, when it taxes your time, doesn’t government have every moral obligation to spend not one penny more than absolutely necessary?
Capaldi is a partner in the business law firm of Spach, Capaldi & Waggaman LLP in Newport Beach and Chairman Emeritus of The Lincoln Club of Orange County.
