‘Prince of Pork’ to Chair Appropriations
House Republican leaders went with Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) – a.k.a. “The Prince of Pork” – to chair the House Appropriations Committee. As I wrote last week, the prospect of Rogers chairing Appropriations is about as inspiring as re-heated meatloaf when it comes to his potential for pushing serious spending reforms.
Republican leaders in the House chose to ignore the concerns of tea party activists and other proponents of limited government, who were more supportive of Rep. Jack Kingston’s (R-GA) dark-horse push for the chairmanship. Kingston’s plan to “change the culture” on Appropriations offered a lot of positive ideas suggesting that he was more in tune with the voters that gave Republicans the majority.
Politico reported that Kingston received “the cold shoulder” from the House leadership in his bid to chair appropriations. Instead, presumptive Speaker of the House John Boehner supported spending-hawk Jeff Flake’s (R-AZ) bid for a seat on the committee. That’s nice, but Flake himself appears to recognize that his appointment could amount to a token gesture if old bull spenders end up ruling the roost:
“If it’s just putting a few conservatives on the committee, and leaving the current structure pretty much in place, that’s not enough.”
Some congressional Republicans have defended Rogers’ chairmanship, saying that he’ll be fine if he sticks to what he says he’s going to do. A long-time champion of earmarking, Rogers did agree to go along with a ban on the tawdry practice a few weeks ago, which was convenient timing.
Will the leopard change his spots?
The left-wing Think Progress blog recently used a FOIA request to obtain a letter Rogers sent to the Department of Health and Human Services requesting ObamaCare money for a community service center in his district. No earmarks? No problem for Hal Rogers. He can just go the time-honored route of policymakers heckling federal agencies for pork. Earmarks represent just one of many ways that parochial-minded members steer benefits to their districts at the expense of taxpayers and the general public good.
According to Bloomberg, Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader called Rogers “the very model of an old-fashioned pork-barrel politician who builds an empire out of government spending.” Roger’s website contains numerous pictures of him attending local photo-ops for projects he helped fund with federal taxpayers’ money. (I suppose one argument in his favor is that lifting all those ceremonial spades means he’s probably in good shape to handle the rigors of chairmanship.)
The support for Rogers from House Republican leaders is a slap in the face of voters who demanded change in Washington—change from the big-spending ways of both Democrats and Republicans.
Boehner to Protect the Fed?
With Republicans taking control of the House in January, long-time Federal Reserve critic Rep. Ron Paul is in line to take over chairmanship of the House Financial Service Committee’s Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology. This is the subcommittee with direct oversight of the Federal Reserve.
The thought of having some actual oversight of the Fed is apparently making Wall Street and the rest of the banking industry nervous. Recent disclosures of Fed lending to foreign banks and Wall Street did not help the public image of either Wall Street or the Fed. With Congressman Paul pushing for a full audit of the Fed, it is likely even dirtier secrets of the Fed may come to light.
So where have the Fed and Wall Street turned for protection? According to Bloomberg, the Fed’s new protector might be incoming House Speaker John Boehner. Next week, House Republicans meet to select their committee and subcommittee chairs. Bloomberg sources report that, at the request of the major banks, Boehner is looking for avenues to either deny Paul that subcommittee chair or to restrict his ability to oversee the Fed.
While I always expected the House Republicans to eventually revert back to their old ways, I did think they’d at least wait until 2011. I believe this will be a real test of Boehner: Does he choose to rein in Ron Paul or rein in the Federal Reserve?
Rep. Kingston’s Spending Cut Plan
An indicator of the incoming House Republican majority’s seriousness about cutting spending will be which members the party selects to head the various committees.
Many of the members in line to chair committees leave a lot to be desired from a limited government perspective (see here and here). In particular, the top candidates in line to chair the critical House Appropriations Committee, Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) and Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), are about as inspiring as re-heated meatloaf when it comes to their potential for pushing serious spending reforms.
According to the Wall Street Journal, appropriator Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), is eyeing the chairman’s gavel even though he’s only fifth in line in terms of seniority. Kingston has put together a spending restraint plan in PowerPoint for consideration by the 26 member Republican Steering Committee, which will decide on committee chairs.
Although the Journal notes that Kingston is “no spending virgin,” there is a lot to like about his plan, which is promisingly entitled “Changing the Culture: A New Vision for the House Appropriations Committee.”
Here are my thoughts on the plan’s contents:
- One slide shows a list of “Big Stuff” and places at the top “State Addiction to the Federal Government.” The language is perfect and indicates that Kingston recognizes that federal aid to the states is a significant issue that needs to be addressed. Reinstituting “fiscal federalism” is one of the chief principles of reform addressed on the Downsizing Government website.
- The same slide acknowledges the trillion dollar cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This inclusion perhaps signals that Kingston is prepared to get serious about reining in defense spending, unlike many Republicans.
- Kingston proposes new spending caps that would work to eventually reduce total federal spending to 18 percent of GDP. He notes that “This approach would require Congress to focus on the actual problem of spending, as opposed to deficits, which are a symptom.” Only interest on the debt would be off limits from sequestration should Congress fail to adhere to the spending caps.
- Kingston calls federal grants “the new earmarks” and singles out the $7.2 billion broadband grant program for criticism, noting that it “pay[s] companies to do what they would do on their own.” As I recently explained, eliminating earmarks but keeping the federal grant programs that fund the same activities would amount to a Pyrrhic victory.
- Kingston calls for more “budget hawks” on the appropriations committee, and singles out spending reformer Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) for inclusion on the committee. He also calls for getting “members off subcommittees in which they are unable to take hard votes.” Amen. If Republicans want to cut spending, then they need to put members on the committees who will actually vote to do it.
The Journal explains that the GOP leadership, in particular incoming House Speaker John Boehner, had better take Kingston’s candidacy seriously:
Officially, committee chairs are selected by the 26 or so person GOP Steering Committee, but Mr. Boehner has five votes on the panel and he can block anyone from getting the nod. A Steering Committee decision can be overturned by a vote of the full GOP House conference, and the leadership should worry that selecting someone like Mr. Rogers could lead to a rank-and-file revolt.
Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal probity and that they’ve learned from their demise in 2006. Mr. Kingston’s proposals are the kind of creative thinking that Republicans are going to need to carry out the principles and agenda they say they believe in.
When tea party voters helped give the Republicans a second chance at reining in government spending, they didn’t have in mind re-heated meatloaf – they want steak. Boehner and the House GOP leadership would be wise to oblige, or else these voters might dine elsewhere in 2012.
What the 2010 Election Will Mean for Trade
One of the many implications of yesterday’s election is that the new Congress will likely be more friendly toward trade-expanding agreements and less inclined to raise trade barriers.
Trade was not a deciding factor in the election, despite efforts by a number of incumbent Democrats to make it so. Many House and Senate contests were peppered with ads accusing an opponent of favoring trade agreements that gave away U.S. jobs to China. It was a stock line in President Obama’s stump speeches that Republicans favored tax breaks for U.S. companies that ship jobs overseas (a charge I dismantled in an op-ed last week). Yet on Election Day the trade-skeptical rhetoric and ads did not save Democratic seats.
Republicans Pat Toomey, Rob Portman, and Mark Kirk all won Senate seats in the industrial heartland yesterday (Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, respectively) and all three voted in favor of major trade agreements during their time in the U.S. House. None of them ran away from their records on trade.
The key change for trade policy will be the switch of the House to Republican control in January. Democratic House leaders were generally hostile to trade agreements during their four-year tenure, refusing to allow a vote on the Colombia trade agreement in 2008 even after President Bush submitted it to Congress while allowing a vote this fall on a bill to raise tariffs against imports from China.
In contrast, the incoming GOP House leaders, presumptive Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, and Ways and Means Committee Chair David Camp of Michigan, have all voted more than two-thirds of the time for lower trade barriers, according to Cato’s trade vote data base. The trade-hostile influence of organized labor, so prominent the past four years, will be greatly diminished.
The new Congress will be more likely to consider and pass pending trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. The Obama administration has endorsed all three in the abstract, but has done little to actually push Congress to approve them. These three agreements offer an opportunity for the White House to work with the new Congress in a bipartisan way to promote exports and deepen ties with friendly nations.
The news is not all positive on the trade front. A more Republican-weighted Congress will probably not be much different when it comes to rewriting the farm bill in 2012. Republicans have shown themselves to be similar to Democrats in supporting subsidies and trade barriers to benefit certain farm sectors such as sugar, rice, cotton, and corn. And Republicans are far more inclined that Democrats to support the failed, 50-year-old trade and travel embargo against Cuba.
A Tale of Two Frauds
The President has announced a government crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. The effort appears to be an attempt to make it easier for Americans to swallow the health care “reform” he’s trying to shove down their throats. As House Republican leader John Boehner correctly asked, “Why can’t we crack down on fraud without a big-government takeover of health care?”
As I’ve noted before, improper payments made by Medicare and Medicaid is may well be $50 billion more than the already appalling $100 billion annual figure the president cited. Administrative efforts to rein in fraud and abuse are welcome, but they won’t solve the huge and fundamental inefficiencies of these programs. Because the law requires government health care programs to quickly get payments out the door, Uncle Sam will always be engaged in a costly game of “pay and chase.”
The broader problem is that government programs aren’t subject to market discipline. Policymakers and administrators have little incentive to be frugal because they face few or no negative consequences when playing with other people’s money.
Most of us have noticed how good private companies can be at reducing fraud. I recently received a call about questionable charges on my Discover credit card. After quizzing me on a list of purchases made with my card in the past 24 hours, it became clear that someone had gotten control of my account. Discover immediately closed the account, opened an investigation, and removed me from any liability for the fraudulent charges.
What amazed me is that I only had about $300 worth of charges on my card. It’s not a big account and thus not a big money maker for Discover. Yet, within 24 hours of a string of suspicious charges, the company was right on top of it before I even realized anything nefarious was going on. Private markets don’t always work this well, but government programs almost never do.
David Frum Analyzes Why ‘The Crazies’ Are Running the GOP
In a discussion on Bloggingheads, David Frum offers his thoughts on the sad state of the GOP these days:
He blames the predicament, in part, on the “conservative entertainment-industrial complex,” a term coined by Andrew Sullivan. In Frum’s telling, this complex has “distorted conservative dialogue to suit the wishes of the Fox audience.” He says that drawing on such a group, “you can get seriously rich out of that, but you can’t govern a country with that kind of voter base, it’s a tiny minority-within-a-minority.”
This is an interesting thesis. Frum was the coauthor of a seemingly successful, widely discussed foreign-policy book titled An End to Evil, which posited that terrorism posed a “threat to the survival of our nation,” and in foreign policy, “there is no middle way for Americans. It is victory or Holocaust.” Are these the sorts of carefully considered judgments on which the GOP is going to ride back into office?
It’s probably true that pushing the American nationalist button over and over from 2002 forward contributed to getting Bush reelected in 2004, but the results after then have been rather less encouraging. John Boehner colorfully remarked recently that the GOP “took it in the shorts with Bush-Cheney, the Iraq War, and by sacrificing fiscal responsibility to hold power.” I’m not sure that my preferred foreign policy is the key to political success, but I’m pretty sure that the zany world view that Frum has traded on isn’t the way forward either.
JEC/GOP Chart of House Democrats’ Health Plan
I was on the Glenn Beck Show yesterday…
…talking about this rendering of the House Democrats’ 1,018-page health care plan:
That’s you all the way on the left, and your doctor/hospital all the way on the right.
What could be simpler?
How to Encourage Terrorists
The news yesterday that a Guantanamo detainee has been moved to New York to stand trial struck me with bemusement.
The Obama administration has apparently determined that it can roll over opposition to bringing detainees into the country for trial and imprisonment. Arguments against doing so are fear-based pap, and political losers.
House Minority Leader John Boehner has not failed to provide. He said in a statement:
This is the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America. . . . . There are more than 200 of the world’s most dangerous men held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Does the Administration plan to transfer all of them into our nation in this way?
Boehner’s apparent aim was to make political gains by appealing to the fears of a domestic U.S. audience, suggesting that President Obama is not safeguarding the country. He – and most U.S. politicians today – are “on tilt” about terrorism, playing to a “base” of caterwauling Islamophobes while the bulk of the American public looks on bewildered and disappointed.
But put aside domestic audiences. Think of what Boehner’s comment signals to international audiences, particularly, say, disaffected men in the Middle East: Americans are scared to death of terrorists. Just sitting in Guantanamo can make you “one of the world’s most dangerous men” to U.S. political leaders. Swathe yourself with the Al Qaeda brand and you can become a global menace. Boehner’s fear of terrorists encourages opponents of the U.S. to adopt terrorism as a tool against us.
Over the long haul, exhibiting bravery in the face of terrorism will tend to discourage it. Being brave is desirable and politically popular. Minority Leader Boehner has Republicans looking weak and scared in the face of terrorism and – having been ignored by Obama – politically weak too.
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